by Emily Morry, April 2003
This essay was written for an undergraduate Russian history seminar that Emily Morry took at McGill University. There, she graduated with an honours degree in 2003, majoring in American history and minoring in Eastern European history. The following year, she pursued her Master’s in history at McGill, producing a thesis entitled, “Brothers Gonna Work it Out?: Rap Music as a Reflection of the Complex Status of African Americans in the 1980s.” In 2005, Emily began her PhD degree in American history at the University of Rochester. She intends to write her dissertation on conceptualizations of geographic places and living spaces in African-American music from blues to hip hop.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was one of the most shocking jolts to the Soviet system in the post-Stalin era. Although the revolution was spontaneous, the massive discontent that resulted in the uprising had been brewing for some time. Hungarians were stifled under the repressive regime of Matyas Rakosi of 1947-1953 and were disappointed when the more enlightened leadership of his successor Imre Nagy, was brought to a halt in 1955. The internal affairs of the Soviet Union in 1956 also had an impact on the satellite states and further fueled the intra-party strife, intellectual protest and massive social unrest that set the wheels of revolutionary action in motion. Thus, an understanding of the event itself is not complete without an analysis of its preconditions and causes. A true understanding of the revolution is also incomplete if one simply analyzes the chronology of the events themselves without obtaining insight into the psychology of both those who were involved in the uprising and those whom such events affected. Eyewitness memoirs of both revolutionaries and ordinary Hungarians alike are thus invaluable. This paper seeks to create a balanced description of the causes, events and aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution by utilizing both factual sources and eyewitness accounts. It is hoped that by focussing on the personal experiences of average Hungarians, a fuller understanding of the event is reached.