One Day That Shook the Communist World

The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and Its Legacy

Paul Lendvai, Ann Major

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780691132822
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400837649
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now, fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future liberation of Eastern Europe.


Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary government smashed by the Red Army. In this riveting, deeply personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials, survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed. He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about its demise.



One Day That Shook the Communist World is the best account of these unprecedented events.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 A Day That Shook the Communist World
• 2 The Road to Revolution
• 3 A Night of Cataclysmic Decisions
• 4 The Legend of the Corvinists
• 5 Wrestling for the Soul of Imre Nagy
• 6 Deadlocked
• 7 A Turnaround with a Question Mark
• 8 The General, the Colonel, and the Adjutant
• 9 The Dams Are Breaking
• 10 The Condottiere, the “Uncle,” and the Romantics
• 11 Decision in the Kremlin: The End of Patience
• 12 Double Dive into Darkness
• 13 The Puppeteers and the Kádár Enigma
• 14 Operation Whirlwind and Kádár’s Phantom Government
• 15 The Yugoslav-Soviet Conspiracy
• 16 The Second Revolution
• 17 The Moral Bankruptcy of the U.S. Liberation Theory
• 18 Worldwide Reactions
• 19 The Barbarous Vendetta of the Victors
• 20 1956–1989: Victory in Defeat?
• Epilogue: Whose 1956?
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index