Charles Gati's Failed Illusions has a special place among the great number of books published for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, both in Hungary and in the rest of the world. Summarizing the results of his fifteen years of research on the topic, Gati wrote a book that is truly and deliberately provocative in several ways. Consequently, Failed Illusions has become a great success. It was simultaneously published in five languages, and it is now an academic bestseller. It has unquestionably become the most written about and talked about recent work on 1956.

Gati's most provocative thesis—and in fact the message of his book—is that less could have been more. That is, with more wisdom and moderation on the side of the four main players in the events of 1956—the Imre Nagy government, the insurgents in Budapest, the Kremlin, and the Eisenhower administration—the revolt did not have to fail. While he admits that the revolution as it happened was unacceptable to the Soviet leaders, Gati argues that with a different approach from the main players, there would have been a chance to deescalate the situation through reforms similar to those introduced in Poland at the same time. Since the Soviet leadership eventually accepted the reforms in Poland, this could have been the case for Hungary too. To support his main thesis, Gati gives a detailed and very sophisticated analysis of the policies that the main players pursued, but more importantly he also tells us what they could and should have done differently to avoid the violent crushing of the revolt.

One of the several novelties of the book is the unusually harsh criticism of Imre Nagy. Not only is Nagy's cooperation with the secret police in Moscow in the 1930s presented at length and in detail—a still rather inconvenient topic in Hungary—but his activity during the revolution is also viewed in a much more critical way than in other accounts of 1956. Gati completely breaks with the still largely prevailing approach, which regards Nagy a martyr of the revolution and treats him as historical figure in the light of this martyrdom. While emphasizing his great respect for Nagy as a man, Gati concludes by his bold approach that as a political leader Nagy failed during the revolution. At the beginning, Nagy was unable to understand the real character of the revolutionary events; and in siding with the revolution, he embraced its radical demands, which he must have known were in no way acceptable to the Kremlin. Instead, Gati argues, Nagy should have convinced the hotheaded insurgents to acknowledge the limits of Moscow's tolerance and settle for the limited freedom available within the framework of a Polish model.

One might argue, however, that in Hungary, unlike in Poland, there was a truly spontaneous revolution and freedom fight, with all the irrational and unrealistic hopes and demands that make a revolution a revolution. There was, therefore, hardly any chance that the genie of freedom, democracy, and independence could have been forced back into the bottle by any rational arguments.

We can basically agree with Gati's unusually harsh criticism of the Eisenhower Administration's irresponsible and cynical rhetoric about the “liberation of the captive nations” (20, 112) that had no foundation whatsoever, as well as with his condemnation of the destabilizing role of Radio Free Europe during the revolt. As far as Soviet policy is concerned, however, Gati joins a school of mainly Western scholars, emerging since the late 1990s, arguing on the basis of the Malin notes, that Moscow was in fact more flexible and more open to options than previously assumed. This theory is based mainly on the Soviet leadership's decision on 30 October to withdraw troops from Hungary if necessary. However, we must see that this was in no way a decision to “give up on Hungary.” Just the opposite: this would have been the maximum political concession they were willing to make, provided that the Nagy government succeeded in consolidating the situation while maintaining the Communist system and preserving membership in the Soviet Bloc.

It can also be argued that in reality the Soviet leadership had the main responsibility for the crisis in Hungary. That leadership committed a series of grave political mistakes. They dismissed the Hungarian dictator Rákosi too late; and when Rákosi was replaced by Gerő, another leading Stalinist, in July 1956, they added insult to injury, for the Hungarians had high expectations for a more flexible, reformed Communist system after the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU. When the Soviet Union ultimately decided to send troops into Budapest on 23 October, the Soviets achieved quite the opposite of what they had intended. Instead of rapidly pacifying the situation, the presence of Soviet troops helped turn the originally sporadic armed incidents into an extensive anti-Soviet freedom fight.

Failed Illusions is not a traditional historical account of 1956. It is an exciting and inspiring intellectual experiment, a well-written and very sophisticated analysis of what happened and what could have happened differently during the revolution of 1956 in Hungary. It is truly stimulating reading for anyone interested in the history of Communism and revolutions in general.

Victor Sebestyen's Twelve Days is a strictly chronological history of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, written by a Hungarian-born British journalist, focusing on the events unfolding in Hungary, Moscow, and Washington. The book is divided into three main parts: “Prelude,” “Revolution,” and “Aftermath.” One-third of the book (about one hundred pages) is dedicated to the description of the evolution, the functioning, and the effects of the system of oppression and terror that the Hungarian Communists established after World War II. This very detailed, colorful, and realistic account can be considered a classical case study of victimology—a narrative predominantly based on the viewpoint of the victims of an oppressive regime—that is aimed at answering the basic question: why Hungary? Sebestyen concludes that in the Soviet Bloc the level of oppression and terror was the highest in Rákosi's Hungary, and eventually this led to social explosion in 1956 (xxv–xxvi). It may be argued, however, that comparative research has not thus far proven this thesis, and it seems likely that state-sponsored terror was in fact greater in Romania. Therefore, it seems that it was rather the Soviet leaders' mismanagement of the crisis, as mentioned above, that was the principal cause of the revolution.

The second part of the book is a day-to-day account of the events beginning with the student demonstration on 23 October and leading up to the second Soviet military intervention crushing the revolution on 4 November. The story is based on a combination of older literature (books published in the 1960s and 1970s), eyewitness accounts, and interviews and works published after 1989. The author relies mostly on the former two types of sources, while the new works, based on archival research, are used only rather selectively, although dozens of books and hundreds of articles of this more reliable type are now available on every aspect of the revolution.

The author gives a well-constructed, vivid, and dramatic account of the events of the revolution following the dominant trend in the mainstream scholarship on the topic, although this is rarely traceable in the references. It is also true that his story is perhaps the most detailed, chronologically based presentation of the political, military, and foreign policy aspects of the events of 1956 published to date in a single volume. Thus both the policies of the Nagy government and the role of the insurgents are presented in a balanced way, showing the complexity of the situation as Nagy was hopelessly trying to maneuver between the irrational demands of the revolutionaries and the obvious limits of the Kremlin's tolerance. Similarly, Moscow decision making and American inaction are analyzed thoroughly and in line with the mainstream scholarship, although readers unfamiliar with this scholarship might believe by reading the notes that this story is being presented for the first time.

The third part of this work is about the aftermath of the revolution. Sebestyen rightly points out that despite previous assumptions, the main responsibility for the execution of Nagy and his companions rested with János Kádár—installed by the Soviets as the leader of the countergovernment—and not with Moscow.

While there are surprisingly many factual errors in the book, the good news is that few of them are really significant. Nevertheless, two of the more serious errors must be mentioned. First, it is highly unjustified today to call the authoritarian rule of Admiral Horthy in the interwar period a fascist regime (23). Second, the number of refugees from Hungary was around two hundred thousand, not the one hundred eighty thousand Sebestyen cites (280), although some ten thousand later returned. Furthermore, the number of Hungarian refugees that Sebestyen claims was in France and in Great Britain—thirty thousand in each country—is far from correct (281): the former is accepted at thirteen thousand, the latter, at twenty-one thousand. And the figure for those who settled in the United States, one hundred fifty thousand (281), is hopefully a misprint, the real number being some forty thousand.

Twelve Days is a well-written, basically reliable history of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution that can almost be read as an exciting historical novel. One can identify with the just cause of the revolutionaries, hope for a compromise between them and the government to avoid a gloomy outcome, and finally feel sorry for the defeat of a brave but small nation in its unequal fight with a brutal superpower. But then all this is not historical fiction but history itself.