Revising History in Communist Europe

David A.J. Reynolds

Description

A study of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring

Those who define the past control the present. ‘Revising History in Communist Europe’ shows how the manipulation of history both empowered and weakened the communist regimes of post–World War Two Europe. It demonstrates how seismic events of the recent past reverberate in the understandings of the present, determining perceptions and decisions. With fresh analysis on the imposed communist definition of Hungary’s 1956 uprising and its effects on the definition of the Prague Spring, this study will give readers a timely and penetrating insight into both landmark events.

Introduction; The Export and Imposition of Stalinism; Hungarian De-Stalinization and Revising Recent History; A Revolution, a Counter-Revolution or a National Uprising?; Stalinist Purges and De-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia; The Meaning of 1956 in 1968: March to June; June: Turning Point and the Hardening of Positions; July and August: Constructing Counter-Revolution; The Intentions of Intervention and the Shadow of 1956; Conclusion; Epilogue; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Communism
• Modern history
• Ideology
• 20th century
• Communisme
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785272103
• Langue: English

Extrait

Revising History in Communist Europe
Revising History in Communist Europe
Constructing Counter-Revolution in 1956 and 1968
David A. J. Reynolds
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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Copyright © David A.J. Reynolds 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-208-0 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-208-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
For the students and teachers of Gymnázium Nad Alejí and (as it was known) Trefort Ágoston Kéttannyelvú Középiskola.
Even forgetting is not a simple and purely negative process: it entails a whole reconstruction
– Robert Hertz

Two half-truths do not make one full-truth
– Tibor Méray

That averted face of the trials revealed the cynical emptiness behind the scenes of our certainties
– Pavel Kohout
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Export and Imposition of Stalinism
2. Hungarian De-Stalinization and Revising Recent History
3. A Revolution, a Counter-Revolution, or a National Uprising?
4. Stalinist Purges and De-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia
5. The Meaning of 1956 in 1968: March to June
6. June: Turning Point and the Hardening of Positions
7. July and August: Constructing Counter-Revolution
8. The Intentions of Intervention and the Shadow of 1956: Delusion and Failure
Conclusion
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My gratitude is first of all due to Gyula Kodolányi, for his generous support of my history-writing in the pages of Hungarian Review , a publication I long admired before being fortunate enough to contribute to it. I am also thankful to Ildikó Geiger at Hungarian Review for her patient assistance and kindness, as well as to Éva Eszter Szabó, who extracted and edited some of this manuscript for that publication. In all, five extracts were published in the Hungarian Review .
For her careful, courteous, and considerate oversight of this project at Anthem Press, I am very grateful to Megan Greiving. My thanks also go to all the members of her team and of the wider staff at Anthem for all their excellent work on the essential tasks, hidden from view, which make this possible.
INTRODUCTION
There was no aspect of culture in which a communist regime’s monopoly was as important as historical memory. While this grip often meant the erasure of past events and people, it just as significantly entailed the manner in which an event was conceptualized and the loaded terms used to describe it. The way the past was interpreted and recalled was not a peripheral academic issue, but a deeply political matter that cut to the heart of revolutionary states’ legitimacy and authority.
As long as a communist regime controlled the past, its control of the present was secure. ‘To redefine the past is to display mastery in the present,’ EM Simmonds-Duke explains. And as an exercise of power, not research, this redefinition demands only subservience. 1
The centrality of enforced historical revisionism in communist states was a function both of Communists’ traditional self-understanding and their concept of history itself. Communism necessitates and guides the creation of a new world upon the wreckage of the old. In the event of its revolutionary devotees seizing power, Communism’s twin project of construction and destruction makes every contradictory survival of the old and failure of the new threatening.
It was the French Revolution that had, of course, provided a new concept of revolution as a phenomenon which completely upended and replaced what came before. But it did so within an equally novel idea of history as a force which itself propelled people and nations along. To study modern history, for numerous subsequent thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was to study the road on which events were inexorably travelling . For European Communists, as well as many of their contemporaries, history was something whose course had to be plotted in order to identify and join with it. Cause and effect were less important than the necessity of its trajectory. 2
‘The magic spell which historical necessity has cast over the minds of men since the beginning of the nineteenth century,’ in Hannah Arendt’s words, ‘gained in potency by the October Revolution.’ From 1917 through to Communism’s European demise seven decades later, therefore, Communists enforced an official view of history – using it to control the past, present, and future – as necessity and inevitability . Rightly understood, communist dogma insisted, history presents us with a path that has necessitated the present and that will inevitably draw us to a particular future.
It is, however, an immensely complicated task to impose this concept on an infinitely cluttered reality. The historical memory of the past must first be systematically reconstructed to represent a trajectory towards this dogmatically understood present and ideologically presumed future. ‘Revolutions, regime changes in general, and Communist takeovers in particular,’ István Rév concludes, ‘invite historical revision, past actions under new descriptions.’ 3 New masters must join new conceptions with new silences to create a new past.
Even before the communist takeovers of the late 1940s, the people of Central Europe were long familiar with the nexus of historical memory and politics as well as the often painful process of being forced to relearn the past. The national movements that began in the nineteenth century, challenging Habsburg allegiances, were pioneered by men who constructed new national histories out of a combination of ethnic, royal, linguistic, and religious pasts. For ardent nationalists, inculcating a new (Czech or Hungarian or Polish) national understanding of the past was (as Communists would also later understand their proletarian task) a matter of awakening a people’s consciousness of who they ‘really were’. And as with communist rhetoric, national narratives helped in the first half of the twentieth century to create and destroy states and identities, scrambling individuals’ understanding of both history and self.
As Rév poignantly puts it, ‘after each turn Hungarians found themselves in a new world, living with a new past’. 4 By 1950, a 50-year-old person in Kraków, Budapest, Vienna, Lvov, Kolozsvár, and Prague had each been through a related but different string of earth-shattering upheavals in which the past was as contested as the land itself. Residents of each city had begun the century alike within kaiserlich und königlich territory and had reached its midpoint in six separate states, four of which were now launching yet another new beginning.
So the communist states of Central Europe were by no means the first regimes in the region to revise the past in order to shape the present and future. But the scope of communist revisionism was both remarkable and vital. Communism was not just a governing ideology, but an all-absorbing ‘system of concepts’. 5 Every existing event, person, and idea required a political and conceptual place, including the figures and moments that are the warp and woof of history. Even if the assigned position was oblivion, such silence requires intentional effort and the reordering of the remaining story.
But what has been silenced has a habit of re-emerging, and all reconstructions can be deconstructed. In the communist states of Europe, the very ideological centrality of history – both as a concept and as interpretations of the past – made these same regimes unusually vulnerable to the consequences of subsequent re-interpretation. History was a petard on which Communism could be hoisted. If the story communist states told their people about the past was undermined, then so too was their raison d’être and governing legitimacy.
The attention that communist authorities gave to historical interpretation marked it as an ongoing pressure point. ‘The regimes’ attempted production of new “truths” keeps history alive and under contention for everyone,’ wrote Simmonds-Duke two years before history had partial but decisive revenge in 1989. ‘By arguing over history, they have strengthened “the past” as a field for conducting significant discourse about the contemporary world and one’s place in it.’ 6
If this was true for the distant past or the details of closer moments in previous eras, how much more was it the case for recent history that had occurred under communist rule? Here was the most critical vulnerability of all . There was no history more important for