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Uprising! One Nation's Nightmare: Hungary 1956
THE Hungarian uprising of 1956 was a spontaneous rebellion by a nation against the rule from Moscow - against the faceless, indifferent, incompetent functionaries (the 'funkies' David Irving calls them, adapting the Hungarian word funkcionáriusók) who in little more than a decade had turned their country into a pit of Marxist misery. But this fluttering of a national spirit was the Soviet Union crushed the uprising with a brutality that shocked the western world. The full story has never before been told. David Irving's search for material and documents took him to the great cities of the northern hemisphere. He questioned survivors in Moscow, Munich, Geneva, Paris, London, New York, Verona, Rome and Madrid - he obtained clearance of previously un-obtainable records in Washington relating to the role of the CIA, Radio Free Europe, and United States diplomacy. In Kansas he worked through the records of Eisenhower, American president at the time. In Toronto he found and interviewed Budapest's police chief, who had been recently amnestied from life imprisonment by the Hungarians.
- GenresHistoryNonfictionHungary
628 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1981
8 people are currently reading
205 people want to read
About the author
David Irving
50 books422 followersDavid John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Irving's works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it. Though Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes in World War II (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were never taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents, which he held closely but stated were fully supportive of his conclusions. His 1964 book The Mare's Nest about Germany's V-weapons campaign of 1944-45 was praised for its deep research but criticised for minimising Nazi slave labour programmes.
By the late 1980s, Irving had placed himself outside the mainstream of the study of history, and had begun to turn from "'soft-core' to 'hard-core' Holocaust denial", possibly influenced by the 1988 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, led him to openly espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Irving's reputation as a historian was further discredited in 2000, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray determined in his ruling that Irving willfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.
Irving's works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it. Though Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes in World War II (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were never taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents, which he held closely but stated were fully supportive of his conclusions. His 1964 book The Mare's Nest about Germany's V-weapons campaign of 1944-45 was praised for its deep research but criticised for minimising Nazi slave labour programmes.
By the late 1980s, Irving had placed himself outside the mainstream of the study of history, and had begun to turn from "'soft-core' to 'hard-core' Holocaust denial", possibly influenced by the 1988 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, led him to openly espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Irving's reputation as a historian was further discredited in 2000, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray determined in his ruling that Irving willfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 4, 2022
This is an absorbing read written by a real historian and copiously referenced. At the time of writing, David Irving is still alive, aged 84. He wrote this book, he said half-jokingly, to show that he wasn't completely obsessed with the Third Reich. This book is more relevant than ever as the suffering of the Hungarian people under the yoke of Communism is now being mirrored by the suffering of the entire world under the yoke of Globalism. The two ideologies are chillingly similar.
July 14, 2018
David Irving, author of many well known dissident histories including The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, the Destruction of Dresden, and Hitler's War, began to re-examine another piece of the world's tragic history: the spontaneous national uprising of the Hungarians against against rule from Moscow against the faceless, indifferent, incompetent functionaries who had turned their country into a pit of Marxist misery in one short decade: the funkies, Irving calls them, adapting the Hungarian word funkcionariusok, and there is no doubt that after this book the word funky will have a new meaning in the English language. He could hardly have found a more topical year to publish his results: the year in which the Russians invaded Afghanistan, in which Rhodesia has chosen a Marxist government, in which Yugoslavia faces a new Soviet presence. Irving was officially permitted to visit Budapest several times, he talked with eye witnesses and survivors there and obtained new documents and photographs from them. He traced and questioned the men who had been kidnapped, exiled, imprisoned and put on trial with the prime minister Imre Nagy, who was sentenced to death, and members of Nagy's family. It is Irving's assessment of Imre Nagy that will raise eyebrows, together with his discovery among official records of evidence that anti-Semitism was one of the motors of the popular uprising. He has made use of hundreds of interrogation reports prepared at the time by American agencies, and supports this material by diplomats' diaries and the recollections of western newspapermen who went into Hungary.
July 4, 2024
Good explanation of the Stalinist period and the uprising.
November 19, 2014
David Irving's writing is always engaging and interesting. This book provides an excellent history of the uprising in Hungary, and brings out the duplicity of some of the so-called leaders, who ended up being more interested in protecting themselves than caring about the Hungarian people.
January 26, 2017
David Irving, at his best, is able to write well-researched historical page-turners which are eminently more readable, revelatory and resonant than most of his competitors...while retaining the controversial approach that eventually led to his exile from the ranks of the world's premier historians. In "Uprising!" Irving fires on nearly all of those cylinders, delivering a meticulously documented yet fast-paced account of the 1956 revolt by Hungary against Soviet domination. It is a sad and often horrifying tale of a country which rose up spontaneously against an oppressive Communist government that employed secret police, torture cellars, barbed wire, guard dogs and informants to keep its population enslaved, yet in the end had to resort to calling in the Red Army to save itself. On the one hand the story is a testament of the desire of all humans to live in freedom; on the other a grisly lesson in how freedom, once obtained, can be lost through that combination of false promises, treachery and brute force that we call "politics."
No Irving book would be complete without controversy, and the controversy here lies in Irving's uncomfortable analysis of the fact that the Hungarian Communist Party was top-heavy with Jews, so much so that he claims the actual revolt "began as a pogrom." Of course there is no doubt that communism was very popular with European Jewry, especially after the rise of Hitler and most especially after his fall, and I've no doubt that the preponderance of Jews in senior positions of the Communist Party of Hungary caused much resentment among the populace -- it could scarcely be any other way, in a country where only 2% of the population was Jewish. However, I very much doubt, and Irving does not claim, that the revolt would not have taken place if the government had more accurately reflected the actual ethnic demographics of Hungary -- it was Communism itself, in the form of a cruel, corrupt and clumsy system, that goaded the people into taking up arms against it. While I can see why he fell afoul of some Jewish groups for writing this book, I can't remember anyone criticizing Christopher Hitchens for making similar conclusions many years later in one of his essays. I suppose it all comes down to one's reputation, tact and perceived intent. The truth is, when it comes to scoring interviews with key historical figures or gathering and analyzing hitherto un-examined documents, Irving has no equal in the profession of history; his motives I leave for others to scrutinize.
"Uprising!", despite its intimidating length, is a pretty fast read. The Hungarian names, with their vowels and umlauts and double accents, are a bit dizzying to deal with, and sometimes Irving would have benefited from tighter editing, but the story told here is one that needed to be told, and possibly only could have been told, by a man like Irving, whose combination of stubborn persistence, fearlessness, and Quixotic need to antagonize even as he enlightens, so often makes his books worth reading.
No Irving book would be complete without controversy, and the controversy here lies in Irving's uncomfortable analysis of the fact that the Hungarian Communist Party was top-heavy with Jews, so much so that he claims the actual revolt "began as a pogrom." Of course there is no doubt that communism was very popular with European Jewry, especially after the rise of Hitler and most especially after his fall, and I've no doubt that the preponderance of Jews in senior positions of the Communist Party of Hungary caused much resentment among the populace -- it could scarcely be any other way, in a country where only 2% of the population was Jewish. However, I very much doubt, and Irving does not claim, that the revolt would not have taken place if the government had more accurately reflected the actual ethnic demographics of Hungary -- it was Communism itself, in the form of a cruel, corrupt and clumsy system, that goaded the people into taking up arms against it. While I can see why he fell afoul of some Jewish groups for writing this book, I can't remember anyone criticizing Christopher Hitchens for making similar conclusions many years later in one of his essays. I suppose it all comes down to one's reputation, tact and perceived intent. The truth is, when it comes to scoring interviews with key historical figures or gathering and analyzing hitherto un-examined documents, Irving has no equal in the profession of history; his motives I leave for others to scrutinize.
"Uprising!", despite its intimidating length, is a pretty fast read. The Hungarian names, with their vowels and umlauts and double accents, are a bit dizzying to deal with, and sometimes Irving would have benefited from tighter editing, but the story told here is one that needed to be told, and possibly only could have been told, by a man like Irving, whose combination of stubborn persistence, fearlessness, and Quixotic need to antagonize even as he enlightens, so often makes his books worth reading.
December 4, 2024
Books in English about the Revolution fall into three general categories. One is personal memoirs by men who had managed to flee to the West. A second is popular histories (there are very few, if any, strictly academic works, in English) written before the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991. These tend to closely resemble each other, but vary in their focus, often spending much time, too much time, on America’s relationship to the Revolution. A third is histories written after the fall of Soviet Communism; these benefit from the opening of both Hungarian and Soviet archives, though much is now lost and a good deal that is not lost has not been released, and from the willingness of participants living in Hungary to now speak openly.
I read about twenty of these books. (At the end of this article is a listing.) I did not read any books in Hungarian, though I have several of those; I can only read Hungarian extremely slowly and with a dictionary in hand, and I do not have the latest scholarship, rather mostly older Hungarian books. This may create gaps; it is possible that recent books in Hungarian shed light on events that English-language books do not (there are many books and papers, and there is an Institute for History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, established in Budapest in 1991). But I do not think that any such light is crucial to understanding and interpreting the Revolution. Unlike with other historical events with a political overlay, there is relatively little variation in the facts presented. Sometimes there is a variation in emphasis, or different views of minor facts, or disagreement about the interpretation of events—for example, was József Dudás, one of the rebel leaders, a notably charismatic and blustering man, actually helpful to the Revolution, or not? To what degree was Imre Nagy a hero, and to what degree merely a figurehead or pawn? But these are sidelights to a generally very coherent narrative.
This is a refreshing change from the examination of most historical events better known in the West. When I examined the Spanish Civil War, for example, I noted the existence there of “standard candles”—events, such as the bombing of Guernica, which receive very different factual presentations depending on the politics of the presenter. No such standard candles exist for 1956, and really, the politics of the authors is, for the most part, either not apparent, left, or center-left, because the authors were refugees from actual Communism but unwilling to abandon the Left entirely. No right-wing book, in English at least, has been written about the Revolution, perhaps because, for better or for worse, organized right-wing forces had no presence at all in the Revolution (despite the shrill claims by the restored Communist regime, which for decades made the silly claim that “Horthyite fascists” were behind it all).
Of the memoirs, all are interesting, but by far the most interesting to me was Sándor Kopácsi’s In the Name of the Working Class, published in 1986. Kopácsi, who died in 2001, was head of the Budapest police force at the time of the Revolution (the regular police, not the secret police; they wore blue uniforms and were therefore easy to distinguish from the ÁVO—though the ÁVO kept blue uniforms in storage against the day of judgment, which ultimately helped many of them escape justice). He was a devoted Communist, but that is not why the book is interesting—as I say, most of the memoirs are written by Communists or former Communists. It is because it is the only English-language memoir of which I am aware in which the memoirist himself participated directly as a man of high authority in a period of Stalinist terror. Kopácsi tries to distance himself, and his betrayal of the regime during the Revolution certainly is to his credit. But he was Director of Internment Affairs for two years, starting in 1949, in which capacity he reported directly to the minister of the interior, and signed off on innumerable internment decrees of men he knew to be totally innocent. His descriptions of this are fascinating, and invaluable for understanding the mindset of a Left functionary in such a period. Kopácsi was sentenced to death after the Revolution for his betrayal of the regime, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in an amnesty in 1963, and his book also narrates the difficulties a man such as he subsequently experienced in Hungary, which are similarly of great interest.
Of the histories, the best post-Communist one is historian Paul Lendvai’s 1956: One Day that Shook the Communist World, published in 2008. He was in Budapest during the Revolution, as well. Others I list at the end are also very worthwhile.
One important book, however, does not fit neatly into any of these categories. It is a book of which I had not before heard, but which at the time published, 1981, was by far the most complete history of the Revolution. This is David Irving’s exhaustively researched and nearly-unbelievably detailed Uprising!. The book is almost totally ignored by other writers, however, because Irving is today a controversial figure, though he wrote many well-regarded books about the Third Reich, including The Mare’s Nest, about the German rocket program. I haven’t yet read any of those (I do own several), but he is controversial because he argues that Jews were not as badly treated, nor as deliberately badly treated, by the National Socialists as the postwar consensus insists. However, his book about the Revolution was a disappointment, even though he was able to interview many key figures who spoke for the first time since 1956, including several important Russians. (He claimed he wrote the book because people said he was obsessed with the Germans, and he wanted to write about something new.)
The book is quite odd. Irving is obsessed with psychiatric analysis, and lengthy chunks of the book are taken up with Freudian analysis of revolutionaries, conducted at Cornell University after the revolution, including such gems as identifying “castration anxiety” in refugee intellectuals. It is also odd because he is indeed obsessed with the Jews. For example, he insists on exclusively using the out-of-place word “pogrom” to refer to payback received by the ÁVO. He repeatedly implies that the Revolution was largely driven by anti-Jewish animus (often invisible, but recoverable with psychoanalysis), but never provides a single piece of hard evidence, not even a quotation or a shouted slur, to support either that theory or that the ÁVO was attacked because it was full of Jews, rather than because it was full of torturers. This gives his work a slippery feel.
There is a connection between Jews and Communism, to be sure—Irving emphasizes the undisputed fact that the majority of important Hungarian Communists were Jews, along with much or most of the ÁVO, and that many Hungarians resented this. But his conclusion, that the Revolution was, in effect, a rebellion against the Jews is not supportable in any meaningful way. Examining the matter more closely, including third-party analysis of Irving’s work (also oddly, some of it appearing in Irving’s own recent republication of his book as an appendix), it appears that Irving received official cooperation from the Communist Hungarian government for the book—and the official propaganda line of that government was that the Revolution was designed to re-impose the rule of the Arrow Cross. Thus, it was in the interests of that government for Irving to weave fictions about anti-Semitism during the Revolution, which suggests a quid pro quo, no doubt one Irving was happy to honor, given his general views on Jews. However, we will return at the end to the Jews and the Revolution.
[This is part of my very long discussion of the Revolution; you can find the entire piece at theworthyhouse.com]
I read about twenty of these books. (At the end of this article is a listing.) I did not read any books in Hungarian, though I have several of those; I can only read Hungarian extremely slowly and with a dictionary in hand, and I do not have the latest scholarship, rather mostly older Hungarian books. This may create gaps; it is possible that recent books in Hungarian shed light on events that English-language books do not (there are many books and papers, and there is an Institute for History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, established in Budapest in 1991). But I do not think that any such light is crucial to understanding and interpreting the Revolution. Unlike with other historical events with a political overlay, there is relatively little variation in the facts presented. Sometimes there is a variation in emphasis, or different views of minor facts, or disagreement about the interpretation of events—for example, was József Dudás, one of the rebel leaders, a notably charismatic and blustering man, actually helpful to the Revolution, or not? To what degree was Imre Nagy a hero, and to what degree merely a figurehead or pawn? But these are sidelights to a generally very coherent narrative.
This is a refreshing change from the examination of most historical events better known in the West. When I examined the Spanish Civil War, for example, I noted the existence there of “standard candles”—events, such as the bombing of Guernica, which receive very different factual presentations depending on the politics of the presenter. No such standard candles exist for 1956, and really, the politics of the authors is, for the most part, either not apparent, left, or center-left, because the authors were refugees from actual Communism but unwilling to abandon the Left entirely. No right-wing book, in English at least, has been written about the Revolution, perhaps because, for better or for worse, organized right-wing forces had no presence at all in the Revolution (despite the shrill claims by the restored Communist regime, which for decades made the silly claim that “Horthyite fascists” were behind it all).
Of the memoirs, all are interesting, but by far the most interesting to me was Sándor Kopácsi’s In the Name of the Working Class, published in 1986. Kopácsi, who died in 2001, was head of the Budapest police force at the time of the Revolution (the regular police, not the secret police; they wore blue uniforms and were therefore easy to distinguish from the ÁVO—though the ÁVO kept blue uniforms in storage against the day of judgment, which ultimately helped many of them escape justice). He was a devoted Communist, but that is not why the book is interesting—as I say, most of the memoirs are written by Communists or former Communists. It is because it is the only English-language memoir of which I am aware in which the memoirist himself participated directly as a man of high authority in a period of Stalinist terror. Kopácsi tries to distance himself, and his betrayal of the regime during the Revolution certainly is to his credit. But he was Director of Internment Affairs for two years, starting in 1949, in which capacity he reported directly to the minister of the interior, and signed off on innumerable internment decrees of men he knew to be totally innocent. His descriptions of this are fascinating, and invaluable for understanding the mindset of a Left functionary in such a period. Kopácsi was sentenced to death after the Revolution for his betrayal of the regime, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in an amnesty in 1963, and his book also narrates the difficulties a man such as he subsequently experienced in Hungary, which are similarly of great interest.
Of the histories, the best post-Communist one is historian Paul Lendvai’s 1956: One Day that Shook the Communist World, published in 2008. He was in Budapest during the Revolution, as well. Others I list at the end are also very worthwhile.
One important book, however, does not fit neatly into any of these categories. It is a book of which I had not before heard, but which at the time published, 1981, was by far the most complete history of the Revolution. This is David Irving’s exhaustively researched and nearly-unbelievably detailed Uprising!. The book is almost totally ignored by other writers, however, because Irving is today a controversial figure, though he wrote many well-regarded books about the Third Reich, including The Mare’s Nest, about the German rocket program. I haven’t yet read any of those (I do own several), but he is controversial because he argues that Jews were not as badly treated, nor as deliberately badly treated, by the National Socialists as the postwar consensus insists. However, his book about the Revolution was a disappointment, even though he was able to interview many key figures who spoke for the first time since 1956, including several important Russians. (He claimed he wrote the book because people said he was obsessed with the Germans, and he wanted to write about something new.)
The book is quite odd. Irving is obsessed with psychiatric analysis, and lengthy chunks of the book are taken up with Freudian analysis of revolutionaries, conducted at Cornell University after the revolution, including such gems as identifying “castration anxiety” in refugee intellectuals. It is also odd because he is indeed obsessed with the Jews. For example, he insists on exclusively using the out-of-place word “pogrom” to refer to payback received by the ÁVO. He repeatedly implies that the Revolution was largely driven by anti-Jewish animus (often invisible, but recoverable with psychoanalysis), but never provides a single piece of hard evidence, not even a quotation or a shouted slur, to support either that theory or that the ÁVO was attacked because it was full of Jews, rather than because it was full of torturers. This gives his work a slippery feel.
There is a connection between Jews and Communism, to be sure—Irving emphasizes the undisputed fact that the majority of important Hungarian Communists were Jews, along with much or most of the ÁVO, and that many Hungarians resented this. But his conclusion, that the Revolution was, in effect, a rebellion against the Jews is not supportable in any meaningful way. Examining the matter more closely, including third-party analysis of Irving’s work (also oddly, some of it appearing in Irving’s own recent republication of his book as an appendix), it appears that Irving received official cooperation from the Communist Hungarian government for the book—and the official propaganda line of that government was that the Revolution was designed to re-impose the rule of the Arrow Cross. Thus, it was in the interests of that government for Irving to weave fictions about anti-Semitism during the Revolution, which suggests a quid pro quo, no doubt one Irving was happy to honor, given his general views on Jews. However, we will return at the end to the Jews and the Revolution.
[This is part of my very long discussion of the Revolution; you can find the entire piece at theworthyhouse.com]
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