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When I was in high school or college, I can’t recall which, I read James Michener’s book The Bridge at Andau, a dramatic account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.  It made an impression on me.  In days gone by, when Foley, Hoag & Eliot was situated on the other side of Boston’s Fort Point Channel, you could (and still can) find, just behind 10 Post Office Square, a public space known as Liberty Square, where the City has erected a monument to that Revolution.  I never paid too much attention to the monument, though I knew it was there, and sometimes I gave it a look and tried to understand the symbols and references in the statute, without much success.

In August I was in Budapest, Hungary, on vacation.  On the way to the hotel the taxi driver pointed out some of the buildings in Pest (Buda and Pest were politically distinct until the mid-19th century; the Danube still separates them geographically) where bullet holes from Russian guns had deliberately been left unrepaired.  A day or so later, I found myself in Heroes’ Square, where, our Hungarian guide told us, a giant statue of Stalin had been cut down and beheaded in the Revolution.  I asked her if she was aware of the monument to the Revolution in Liberty Square, Boston, and she said she was not, but she wanted to know all about it.  I wasn’t as much help to her as I would have liked to have been, I’m afraid.  The next day I found myself outside the Parliament building in Pest, the site of extraordinary, spontaneous and violent political rallies in October 1956.

To make amends, when I came back home I re-read Michener’s account, and then read Slavenka Drakulic’s book of essays, How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed – not a very good title, but an arresting book – and concluded with Victor Sabestven’s Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which was written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the event.  These are all worthwhile books.

Michener is known for overlong books of historical fiction, but The Bridge at Andau, published in 1957, is short and not fiction.  Rather, it is a “you are there” account of the Revolution, assembled from Michener’s at-the-scene interviews with Hungarian refugees crossing into Austria near the bridge in the book’s title, an area of frozen swampland near a part of the border at first lightly guarded by the Russians.  Michener is not a stylist, but a straightforward reporter.  The book is dramatic, blunt, and frequently horrifying.  It suffers somewhat from the fact that numerous characters in it are composites of real people, both good and evil.  The author explains that he had to use composites to avoid reprisals to the families of those who had escaped and told him their stories, and I believe that.  Andau is long on narrative and drama, and a little short on the kind of facts and analysis one might find in a formal history of the event.

Drakulic’s book, How We Survived Communism, is a series of essays, written from a woman’s point of view, of what it was like for an ordinary citizen to live in a Communist state during the 1970s and 1980s.  Some reviewers call this a feminist book, but I don’t think I agree.  However, it is an insightful book about the pervasiveness of political theory and paranoia and their impact on food, makeup, bicycles, apartments, journalism, marriage, cooking, and other elements of daily life that are seldom discussed in books about Communism.

With some grasp of what transpired in Eastern Europe after the Revolution, I turned to Victor Sabestven’s Twelve Days, a detailed historical and political discussion of what happened in Hungary leading up to the Revolution, and what happened later.  On the international stage, the Hungarian Revolution was stunning, but, quite catastrophically for the Hungarians, it took place just as the British and French were invading Suez, as well as during the last few weeks of Eisenhower’s re-election campaign.  The United Nations focused almost exclusively on Suez.  American leaders did nothing about Hungary but symbolically wring their hands and imply strongly to the Russians that the West would not intervene in Budapest.  When the Russians put down the insurrection, Russian tanks and planes indiscriminately leveled large parts of Budapest.  On top of that, many Hungarians felt misled by Radio Free Europe, which had long encouraged revolution but did nothing to support the freedom fighters, as they had by then become known, when they acted.  Twelve Days does a good job describing the surprisingly complex interplay that took place between the Hungarian government (which at times was quasi-independent, and at times a puppet government) and the Russian leadership, an impressively indecisive group of men.  Yuri Andropov, who was later to become for fifteen forgettable months after Brezhnev’s death the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, was particularly deceitful in his dealings with Hungarians.  Twelve Days and Bridge at Andau complement each other nicely.  The one is a little bloodless but well-researched (with great photos); the other is deeply passionate but largely anecdotal.  So I recommend both.

Needless to say, I did go back to the monument in Liberty Square.  There is a hole in the flag and a dead infant in a woman’s arms.  I see where they came from.