The Hungarian October

The revolution wrote history as soon as it started, Gábor Papp says in the preface of this book. “October 23, 1956, is a day that will live forever in the annals of free men and nations. It was a day of courage, conscience and triumph. No other day since history began has shown more clearly the eternal unquenchability of man's desire to be free, whatever the odds against success, whatever the sacrifice required” John F. Kennedy stated when the Hungarian question at the United Nations was on debate.
Nevertheless, for more than thirty years, a falsified image of the revolution remained not only in the majority of historical studies, but also in the way people looked at history. Luckily enough, during the nearly thirty years that followed, this image has gone through considerable changes due to the growing number of known facts, the change of the spirit of the age, and the diversification of interpretations.
Our publication, with a DVD supplement, is dedicated primarily to the antecedents, events and aftermath of the revolution of sixty years ago. It walks the reader through the famous scenes, draws the portraits of known and unknown participants, and enumerates the several forms of revolutionary action. In the background of the revolutionary Hungary, a wider panorama of world politics unfolds. More than one hundred contemporary photos by famous journalists and unknown witnesses evoke the landscapes of Budapest and the Hungarian countryside. The authors of the texts, with the only exception of a British diplomat working in Hungary in 1956, are historians at National Széchényi Library who mostly do not aim at evaluating the events this time, but rather to compile all the knowledge that makes our nation remember the Hungarian October as a memory of its own.