The Multilateralisation of Soviet Bloc Security: The Hungarian Revolution from an Eastern European Perspective

The Hungarian Revolution is often analysed in a national context or from the angle of Hungarian-Soviet relations. From this perspective, the Eastern European satellites seem mere puppets and the Soviet bloc a monolith. Archival evidence nevertheless shows that the Kremlin actually attempted to build a new kind of international relations after Stalin’s death in 1953, in which the Eastern European leaders would gain more scope for manoeuvre. This attempt at liberalisation even facilitated the uprisings in Hungary in 1956. Avoiding a teleological approach to the Hungarian Revolution, this article argues that the Soviet invasion was neither inevitable, nor wholly unilateral. Khrushchev even sought to legitimise the invasion in bilateral and multilateral consultations. There was a mutual interest in sacrificing Hungary’s sovereignty to safeguard the communist monopoly on power. This multilateralisation of Soviet bloc security is an important explanatory factor in an analysis of the Revolution and its repercussions in Eastern Europe.

Sixty Years On: How the Superpowers Could Have Avoided the 1956 Hungarian Revolution

Following the political transition in Hungary and in East-Central Europe in 1989-90 an archival revolution unfolded in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, including Russia after 1991. Thanks to this process, the previously taboo topic of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution has become one of the best researched events of the history of the Soviet Bloc by the time of the sixtieth anniversary of the events. This includes the international context of the revolt as well, which has been covered by scholars in Hungary and abroad based on multiarchival evidence.

China's Involvement in the Hungarian Revolution, October-November 1956

The 1956 crises in the Soviet Bloc states, and the Hungarian October events in particular, had a profound impact on China's international and domestic policies. The Chinese Communist Party leadership – party chairman Mao Zedong in particular – had by the end of mid-1950s begun to conceive of "a great Chinese revolution," which would largely take the form of large-scale industrial modernization. At the same time, China's awareness that it could develop into a leading player in the international socialist camp led Mao and his colleagues to actively intervene on the East European scene, posing an implicit challenge to the Soviet dominance in the bloc. The apparent desire of the Hungarian and Polish people to break free from Stalinist socialism, and the real risk, as Mao saw it, of the bloc foundering, convinced the Chinese Party that only reforming institutional socialism and revising the Stalinist pattern of inter-state relations could keep the camp intact.