Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

by Michael Korda Narrated by Julian Elfer

Overview

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was perhaps the most dramatic single event of the Cold War and a major turning point in history. Though it ended unsuccessfully, the spontaneous uprising of Hungarians against their country's Communist party and the Soviet occupation forces in the wake of Stalin's death demonstrated to the world at large the failure of Communism. In full view of the Western media—and therefore the world—the Russians were obliged to use force on a vast scale to subdue armed students, factory workers, and intellectuals in the streets of a major European capital.

In October 1956, Michael Korda and three fellow Oxford undergraduates traveled to Budapest in a beat-up Volkswagen to bring badly needed medicine to the hospitals—and to participate, at street level, in one of the great battles of the postwar era. Journey to a Revolution is at once history and a compelling memoir—the author's riveting account of the course of the revolution, from its heroic beginnings to the sad martyrdom of its end.

Editorial Reviews

MAY 2020 - AudioFile

Narrator Julian Elfer’s pronounced British accent is at best extraneous to Michael Korda’s personal memoir of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. This audiobook compresses the whole history of Hungary and the geopolitics of Central Europe into just five hours. Elfer does a serviceable job, and as the narrative picks up in its second half, he is quite effective. But at times he seems simply to be reading. Korda is a rewarding author, and this is an absorbing memoir, regardless. But one thinks of what a more seasoned performer might have done with this same material and can only sigh at the opportunity that was missed. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

The New Yorker

Korda, the former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, marries history and memoir in this vivid account of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After sketching Hungary’s unhappy past, he recalls how he and three fellow Oxford students drove from London to Budapest in a rusty VW packed with much needed medical supplies. The son of a Hungarian émigré, Korda had never visited his father’s homeland, but, having been raised on stories of Spanish Civil War heroics, he was “determined not to miss out” on the adventure offered by a similarly stirring cause. Korda and his companions fell in with the students manning the barricades, and he describes what they witnessed with unflinching precision: the collapse of a building riddled by shelling (the “unacknowledged spectator sport of the twentieth century”) and tank turrets scattered “like huge crushed beetles.

Publishers Weekly

In October 1956 the Hungarian people spontaneously rose up against an oppressive Soviet-imposed Communist regime and basked briefly in the light of freedom. In this history lesson-cum- memoir, Korda (Another Life) stitches an appealing retelling of his journey of discovery into the larger context of the desperate, short-lived Hungarian revolt. Part hard-nosed history lesson, part affectionate celebration of Hungary and Hungarian culture, and part sepia-tinged memoir, the book attempts to pull back the veil on the post-WWII machinations of the victorious Allies and expose how such diplomatic wheeling and dealing can devastate an entire nation. The first two-thirds are strong, with both a comprehensive overview of the postwar geopolitical scene and a finely tuned take on the specifics of the Hungarian situation. Korda's account of his own journey there during the revolution at age 24 is strangely flat. Along the way from the pastoral comfort of his native England to the rubble and corpse-strewn streets of Budapest, he has some near misses with life-threatening danger. At the border between Austria and Hungary, Korda and his mates encounter a machine gun-toting guard who offers them barack, homemade peach brandy, and a warning about the invading Russians: "there are some very bad guys in Gy r." While the tale at times has difficulty rising from the page, Korda's story is a worthy read. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Korda's lively personal account is complemented by Gati's more academic title. Born and raised in Hungary, Gati (European studies, Johns Hopkins Univ.; The Bloc That Failed) was a young journalist in Budapest at the time. Using hundreds of documents in the archives in Budapest, Moscow, and Washington, he has written a thorough and scholarly analysis of the revolution. An expert in Soviet and Eastern European politics, Gati seeks answers to such questions as why the Soviets changed course and decided to intervene in Hungary after initially pulling out, what effect the attitude of the United States had on the outcome of the revolution, and what role other world events played in forcing Hungary to be a lower priority to the West. Both authors have written honest, unromanticized accounts of those tragic days. They both agree that it was a sort of "David and Goliath" struggle and that although the revolution failed, it ultimately contributed to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. Gati's book is clearly the more scholarly, but both works are accessible and engaging. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [Victor Sebestyen's Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution is forthcoming from Pantheon. Ed.] Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A veteran writer and editor recalls his youthful, quixotic car trip to Budapest to deliver medical relief supplies during the brief Hungarian uprising against the Soviets in the fall of 1956. A novelist, historian and memoirist who has written gracefully about a range of subjects (Ulysses S. Grant, 2004; Man to Man: Surviving Prostate Cancer, 1996; etc.), Korda turns his focus on the events of October and November 1956, when, in his view, the first cracks appeared in the Iron Curtain. Korda takes an unusual approach here: Some of his story is simply a swift summary of the Hungarian Revolution (admittedly adapted from more comprehensive histories); and some of it is his memoir of a sort of loopy, larkish car trip he and some similarly idealistic and foolish friends from England took into Hungary at the very moment tens of thousands of Soviet tanks were rolling into the country to squash the tiny (and unlikely) flower of freedom that was beginning to bloom amid Communist oppression. Korda makes a couple of key points. First, the brutality of the Soviet response cured many European and American leftists of their Communist sympathies. Second, the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, which was occurring at the same time, snuffed out the small flame of Hungarian hope that the United States would intervene in their country to oppose the Soviets. The author's understandable anti-USSR attitude is evident throughout, even in his descriptions of Soviet diplomats with their bullet heads, gold teeth and shapeless, colorless suits. The most gripping parts of his story are, unsurprisingly, the personal ones. He sees corpses in the street, hears artillery shells land nearby, watches buildings implode, faces unsmilingSoviet tank officers who point their weapons at him. Chastened and frightened, he and his friends eventually depart the country in a British convoy. A harrowing and horrifying tale told in spare and poignant prose-sometimes bitter, sometimes ironic, always powerful.

MAY 2020 - AudioFile

Narrator Julian Elfer’s pronounced British accent is at best extraneous to Michael Korda’s personal memoir of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. This audiobook compresses the whole history of Hungary and the geopolitics of Central Europe into just five hours. Elfer does a serviceable job, and as the narrative picks up in its second half, he is quite effective. But at times he seems simply to be reading. Korda is a rewarding author, and this is an absorbing memoir, regardless. But one thinks of what a more seasoned performer might have done with this same material and can only sigh at the opportunity that was missed. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177748696
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Journey to a Revolution
A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Chapter One

The Idol with Feet of Clay

Few things stand out less clearly at the time than a turning point in history, at any rate when one is living through it. As a rule it is only in retrospect that an event can be seen clearly as a turning point. Historians write as if they were looking at the past in the rearview mirror of a moving car; and, of course, picking the "turning points" of history is something of a specialty for many historians—in some cases, the more obscure, the better. Turning points, however, are much harder to recognize as they occur, when one is looking ahead through the windshield.

To take an example, we now recognize that the Battle of Britain was a turning point in World War II—fewer than 2,000 young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force handed Hitler his first defeat, and ensured that whatever else was going to happen in 1940, Great Britain would not be invaded—but those who lived through the Battle of Britain day by day did not perceive it as a decisive, clear-cut event. The fighter pilots were too exhausted and battle-weary to care; and the public, while buoyed by the victories of the R.A.F. in the sky over southern England, was still struggling to come to grips with the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and the collapse of France, and would soon be plunged into the first stages of what later came to be known as the blitz. Those who—as children—saw the white contrails of the aircraft swirling overhead in the blue summer sky, or watched the shiny brass cartridge cases cometumbling down by the thousands, had no sense of being witnesses to a "turning point"; nor did their elders. It was only much later that this turning point began to be perceived as one, and that Battle of Britain Day was added to the list of annual British patriotic celebrations.

In much the same way, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, while it was clearly a major event, was not perceived as a turning point in history until much later, when the unexpected disintegration of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe, followed very shortly by the total collapse of the Soviet Union itself, could be traced back to the consequences of the uprising in the streets of Budapest.

The three weeks of the Hungarian Revolution ended, of course, in a victory for the Soviet Union, as everybody knows, but not since Pyrrhus himself has there been so Pyrrhic a victory. The Hungarians had chipped the first crack in the imposing facade of Stalinist communism and had exposed the Soviet Union's domination of eastern Europe for the brutal sham it was. For the first time, people in the West—even those on the left—had seen the true face of Soviet power, and it shocked them.

The Hungarians lost, but in the long run the Russians lost more. Communism became much harder to sell as a humane alternative to capitalism (or to western European democratic socialism); and the Russians themselves, badly shaken by the size and the ferocity of the uprising they had put down with such overwhelming force, and dismayed by the attention it received in the world's media, never attempted to repeat the experience in Europe. From time to time, the tanks might be sent rumbling into the streets again, as they were in Prague in 1968, but they would not henceforth open fire on civilians. Without apparently having given the matter much thought, the Russians discarded the trump card in their hand: the belief on the part of eastern Europeans that the Red Army would shoot them down mercilessly if they rose against the puppet governments the Soviet Union had imposed on them at the end of World War II.

More dangerous still, those governments themselves, whose ultimate legitimacy rested on the threat of armed intervention by the Soviet Union, ceased to believe that it would ever intervene again to support them with force the way it did in Hungary in 1956—and if the Russians would not, then how, when push came to shove, were the "people's governments" of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania to remain in power over the long haul?

This is always a serious problem of empire, by no means limited to the Soviet Union. In 1919, the United Kingdom used violence, albeit on a considerably smaller scale, against the congress party in India when General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on demonstrators in Amritsar, killing 379 of them at Jallianwallah Bagh, and wounding perhaps three times as many. The massacre horrified the British—except for the impenitent General Dyer and his supporters—and the result was an increasing reluctance on the part of the British government to use force against the congress party at all. In consequence, the threat of armed violence—one of the pillars on which the raj stood—gradually became more and more remote and unlikely. The Indians ceased to fear it, the British grew increasingly unwilling to use it on a large scale, and independence for India thus became only a matter of time.

In much the same way, the Hungarians' uprising against their own unpopular government and the government's Soviet masters, while it failed, fatally shook the confidence of the Soviet government in its ability to control the countries of eastern Europe—a confidence that had already been weakened by Stalin's death, by the increasingly (and defiantly) independent attitude of Tito's Yugoslavia, and by the widening ideological rift between the Russian and the Chinese communist parties.

After 1956, the Soviet Union found itself in an increasingly uncomfortable and ambivalent position vis-à-vis the eastern European "people's democracies," since the Soviet leadership was desperately trying to dismantle the remnants of Stalinism at home and bring about a "thaw" in Russian life, while at the same time continuing to prop up unrepentantly Stalinist leaders in the Soviet Union's client states . . . .

Journey to a Revolution
A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Copyright © by Michael Korda. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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