Hungarian Revolution: A History from Beginning to End

The assassination of Austria-Hungary's Archduke Franz Ferdinand didn't just ignite the fuse to the tinderbox that was Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. When war was declared and the soldiers set off to fight the “war to end all wars,” World War I realigned nations, sent their economies reeling, and toppled thrones and classes. Hungary was a particularly vivid example of how quickly a nation's fate could plummet from empire to supplicant.

The war also set in motion the cataclysmic events that catapulted the globe into World War II. By that time, the empires of the nineteenth century had dissolved in a welter of brash new heavyweights on the world stage: the Soviet Union, the communist successor to autocratic Tsarist Russia, and the United States, the arsenal of democracy and heir apparent to liberal Western traditions. This realignment of nations, and the Treaty of Trianon, deprived Hungary of territory and population and, worst of all, of self-determination.

As long as Joseph Stalin was alive, the Soviet Union's satellite nations served at the pleasure of one of the twentieth century's most brutal dictators. But his death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev's pursuit of de-Stalinization brought about a hint of reforms that gave the subject countries a glimmer of hope. In October 1956, the Hungarians tested the Soviet Union with a series of demands and a revolution that, instead of reforms, brought in the Russian tanks.