The English publication in 2004 of his book The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat won Vienna-based journalist and editor Paul Lendvai well-deserved acclaim here for his witty and intelligent style and healthy dose of skepticism toward historical pathos. Lendvai is a well-known and respected interpreter of the history, politics, and culture of his native Hungary and within the German-speaking world, and wrote One Day That Shook the Communist World after writing about 1956 in other books and creating an ORF documentary on 1956 for the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising. Lendvai's approach and style make this book a particularly welcome addition to the scholarship on the Hungarian revolution.

Lendvai ends his book with William Faulkner's famous quote that “The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past” (245). This rejoinder informs Lendvai's approach to the history of the revolution throughout the book's three main sections: a dramatic account of the demonstrations and fighting (primarily in Budapest) in the last week of October 1956; a synthesis of the state of the field in historical research on the political decisions taken in Budapest, Moscow, Washington, and elsewhere; and a reflection on the changing historical meaning of the 1956 uprising.

Early in the book, Lendvai's account is shaped by his first-hand experiences of the 1956 revolution as a young journalist and participant. He grippingly describes the importance of ordinary people's perception in understanding the “impulsive and spontaneous” (8) nature of the first demonstrations, pointing out for example that although “there is no trace in the text [of the speech] of the assertion [ . . . ] that [Party Chief Ernő] Gerő had called the demonstrators a ‘rabble’ or even a ‘Fascist rabble’,” the actual words of Gerő's text tell us only one part of the historical truth. Lendvai points out that listeners heard these attacks in this “arrogant speech with his hackneyed phrases and threats,” leading to “catastrophic effect” (14).

In analysis of the decision making in the Hungarian Party hierarchy and Soviet leadership, Lendvai's perspective necessarily shifts to accommodate the evidence of archives opened after the end of the USSR and state socialism. He offers an excellent synthesis of the most up-to-date research based on historians' work in both Hungarian and Soviet archives, as well as his own interviews with important historical actors from Hungary and the USSR. Lendvai nimbly negotiates the complex historical debates over the roles of individual politicians and foreign governments, providing his reader with a confident assessment of the currently available evidence (much of which has not been published in English), as well as offering “by and large reliable conclusions about the fifty-year-old drama and its global consequences” (1).

In a chapter titled “1956–1989: Victory in Defeat?” (echoing his earlier book), Lendvai concludes that 1956 can be seen as a “victory in defeat” in several senses. Lendvai argues the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 was a warning to both reformers and hard-liners in the Soviet Bloc, citing the “Hungary syndrome” of the future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, for example (145). Within Hungary itself, Lendvai shows both the regime and the popular resisters chastened by the experience of defeat. He quotes a Communist official who once told him, “the party and the non-Communist population have become realists” (227). János Kádár, heading a government whose legitimacy had been fully undermined by the demands of the popular, even working-class uprising, laying bare the dependence on Soviet military force, did not return to the ideological campaigns and personality cult of the Stalinist era; and the compromise position of what came to be called Kádárism seemed summed up by his “he who is not against us is with us” motto (228). The defeat of the Revolution of 1956 was most obviously a defeat of hope and idealism for the young people who had risen up against dictatorship in October. Lendvai describes the creation (through the suppression of the memory of 1956) of a cynical population with an improving standard of living, the “homo kadaricus” described by political scientist László Lengyel (229).

Though the entire book has a great deal to offer the reader—the gripping early chapters about demonstrations and street fighting, and the authoritative synthesis of recent research about international and domestic politics—these final chapters, evaluating the legacy of the 1956 uprising, are the ones where Lendvai offers his most striking additions to the history of the revolution, warning not to try to see things as they “should have happened,” and quoting the German historian Thomas Nipperdey on the virtue of “compassionate, understanding, realistic skepticism.” “In Hungary too,” Lendvai writes, “there was and is an accrued need for skepticism in dealing with the past” (244). It is in his own application of this empathetic skepticism that Lendvai's book, in the best tradition of Central European feuilleton, offers the reader a new perspective on 1956.