The Hungarian Revolution [antikvár]

Editor's Note 1. "White Book," according to the Oxford Dictionary, is a translation from the medieval Latin (liber albus), and is defined there as "a hook of official records or reports bound in white." Being neither bound in white nor official in any way, this volume is thus tedi-nically not quite that. But in a more general and widely-accepted sense the "whiteness" (or whatever the color, for the historical archives know also of blue, brown, yellow, and black books) has come to refer to certain qualities of authenticity and completeness in documentary presentation. It is to be hoped, therefore, that this "white book" on the Hungarian Revolution will be accepted as a fairly objective and comprehensive record of one of the great events of contemporary history. The documentation is based on Hungarian sources, leaflets, broadcasts, as well as dis-patdies of foreign correspondents and eyewitness accounts; the material has been gathered from many languages and parts of the world. Some of the original, previously unpublished documents will, we trust, throw some new light on the course of the Buda-pest uprising, and perhaps it is not too muS. to hope that many readers will get, possibly for the first time, a full, clear, and many-sided view of events. Soviet and Communist points of view (orthodox and unorthodox) have been included along with Western accounts. If they have not come off better in the relative proportions, the fault lies not in our editorial bias but in their repetitiousness and their single-minded reluctance to depart from one familiar note in reportage and commentary. It is obvious that our intention has not been to make a dry-as-dust collection of documents for file, but to tell a story. The editor admits that he has made the effort not merely to "edit" these pages but to "compose" them. The attempt has been made here to catdi history on the wing, to observe a revolution and a war with a thousand eyes. From the beginnings of the uprising on Oct-ober 23rd in Budapest till the brutal Soviet counter-attadc at daybreak on Sunday, November 4th, we have wanted to plunge the reader into an almost minute-by-minute un-folding of demonstrations, meetings, political crises, street-fighting, personal adventure and human tragedy. It has been our hope not only to compile the facts, but to find a form and a way to catch the color and the sound as well as the deeper meanings of the Hun* garian Revolution. 2, As the reader will note, a substantial amount of Hungarian radio broadcasting from official Governmental (Gero, Nagy, Kadar) programs as well as from independent revolutionary stations, temporarily in command of a wave-length in the provinces, has been included. These have been monitored and recorded in translation by the British Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Free Europe (Munich and New York); some newspaper bureaus and foreign correspondents have also collected such messages. All of them have been generous with their material, and their assistance is gratefully acknowledged. (The complete BBC Summaries are only available in mimeographed form; R.F.E. has published in New York a paper-bound selection from its monitoring.) No translations, we regret, are completely or consistently adequate, and we have tried, to some extent, to improve on their readability and accuracy. But there is, sad to say, no Univac for rendering shades of meaning in felicitous phrasing. On the eve of the Soviet military intervention of November 4th, Pravda expounded angrily on the relations between Premier Zmre Nagy and the so-called "counter-revolution;" the New York Times referred to his "tolerance" and BBC to his "direct connivance." This obviously important word in Russian emerged, on Aeck, as "popustitelstwo," whidi is rather closer to "non-intervention," and this is how we have excerpied the Pravda document. Here, as in other more basic matters involving the larger interpretation of events, we have made the effort, within the limits of human bias, not to impose any theses of our own. Scholars, statesmen, and political analysts have already offered personal views on the relationship between "Budapest and Suez," on Hungarian "extremism," on "basic Soviet sfrafe-gy," on the varying historic responsibilities of Tito, Mindszenty, Mikoyan, Gomulka, Eden, and Dag Hammarskjold. A sampling