Sixty Years After: Reassessing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956
Sixty Years After: Reassessing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Summary/Abstract: The present study examines the causes, unfolding and outcome of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 from a cultural-structural perspective and argues that this revolution can be explained on the basis of a theoretical model which focuses on structural, conjunctural and nation-specific factors. This study concludes that, although an incipient “snowballing effect” did occur in 1956, the aggregation of the factors mentioned above did not lead to a regime change in Hungary, but to a communist counter-revolution conducted by Moscow. The long-term effects of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 were undeniable:in 1989, the countries which opened the sequence of collapse of the communist regimes in ECE were Poland and Hungary, that is, those countries that had already experienced a revolutionary situation in 1980–81 and, respectively, in 1956.

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