Note: Trên TLS số 5 Tháng Chín, 2008, có bài điểm cuốn Một Ngày Làm Rung Chuyển Thế Giới Cộng Sản.
Tin Văn scan, để tặng mấy anh VC nằm vùng Đào Hiếu, Lữ Phương, kèm câu này, trích trong bài điểm": "first we need to interrogate Nagy, then we will hang him by the tongue": “Trước tiên, chúng ta cần tra hỏi Nagy, sau đó treo hắn ta lên, bằng cái lưỡi của hắn"
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HISTORY
By the tongue
TLADIMIR TISMANEANU
Paul Lendvai
ONE DAY THAT SHOOK THE COMMUNIST WORLD:
The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and its legacy 320pp. Princeton University Press. £16.95 (US $27.95).
978 0 691 13282 2 

The Hungarian-born Austrian journalist and historian Paul Lendvai has written a refreshingly insightful analysis of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and its historical significance. He offers a fully updated critical discussion of one of the most exhilarating and hotly debated events in twentieth-century history. Drawing from recently released documents, Lendvai points out that the Hungarian Revolution was simultaneously an attempt to get rid of a decrepit Stalinist dictatorship, and a war for national liberation. Initially unwillingly, later more determinedly, Imre Nagy and his comrades engaged in a radical break not only with an obsolete system, but also with the Kremlin's imperialist ambitions.
Lendvai makes persuasive use of the treasure of information generated by the Budapest-based Institute for the History of the 1956 Revolution. He refers extensively to memoirs of revolutionaries, as well as to some seminal contributions by Nagy's biograapher Janos Rainer and the historian Gyorgy Litvan. Focusing on Nagy's convoluted political itinerary, including his decades-long unswerving commitment to the Bolshevik cause, as well as his brief yet disturbing collaboration with the NKVD during the Great Terror, Lendvai highlights Nagy's slow, but irreversible divorce from the criminal practices of Stalinism. Referring to Milovan Djilas's illuminating critique of national communism as a historically doomed effort to humanize Leninism, Lendvai also shows how the logic of historical developments forced Nagy to transcend his initially hesitant and self-limited reformist agenda.
For Lendvai, the Rakosi regime was by far the most atrocious in Eastern Europe both in its cynicism and its terrorist policies. Having chaired the Presidential Commission for the analysis of the Communist dictatorship in Romania, I beg to differ. I think that Bulgarian and Romanian repressive strategies were lly ruthless and destructive. Moreover, during the "New Course" between 1953 and , Nagy encouraged a political and economic relaxation unthinkable in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. At the same time, I agree that the Rakosi-Gero-Farkas-Revai gang resorted to uniquely sadistic and squalid patterns of persecution.
Blending political history and personal memoir, Lendvai helps us understand the  grandeur of the Hungarian Revolution. He places the upheaval within the international context of 1956: attempts by the West to engage in negotiation with the USSR as part of the "peaceful coexistence"; hollow Communist rhetoric followed by no actions; an American administration for whom Eastern Europe did not really matter; hot-headed Radio Free Europe journalists. It also the year of Khrushchev's iconoclastic “Secret Speech" which led to the end of the Stalin myth and ushered in an era of disillusion among Communists worldwide. It was precisely the split among Hungarian Communists and the rebellion of the disenchanted Marxist intellectuals that led to the extraordinary effervescence during the months that preceded the upheaval. The old regime had lost all support even among once fanatic Leninists. Many Communists who survived years of jail under Rakosi embraced the Revolution's ideals. Some did it wholeheartedly, others opportunistically. Lendvai examines the case of Janos Kadar, one of the most depressing in Eastern Europe's history. He documents beyond any doubt Kadar's Judas like role during those fateful days. At the same time, it appears that with or without Kadar, the Soviets had made up their-mind and were ready to crush the Revolution. Kadar's role was, however, decisive in having Nagy and his closest associates subjected to a frame-up and murdered. It was Kadar, not Khrushchev who engineered the judicial assassination in June 1958. Contrasting Kadar and Nagy means exploring two political visions within world Communism after Stalin: the astute opportunist versus the neo-Marxist idealist. By the end of his life, isolated and despised, Kadar lost not only his power, but also his mental sanity. He finished his days haunted by the spectre of Nagy, his political nemesis, the man whom he had pledged to support during the first days of the Revolution, whom he betrayed, and whose life he sacrificed to prevent the political resurrection of an embarrassing rival.
During his "political asylum" at Snagov, by the lake in Romania, Nagy wrote several essential political documents (reviewed in the TLS, May 6, 2005). It was clear for him that no compromise could be reached with the political thugs who had made a martyr out of Hungary. Gheorghiu-Dej, the Romanian ultra-Stalinist leader, told his fellow Politburo members that "first we need to interrogate Nagy, then we will hang him by the tongue". Among those who participated in the attempt to break Nagy's political will was Valter Roman, a Transylvanian, Hungarian Jewish former Spanish Civil War veteran. The Romanian "comrades" did their utmost to make Nagy confess that the Revolution was in fact a Western-backed "counter-revolution".
Lendvai insists on the extraordinary role of the workers' councils during the Revolution and its aftermath. He depicts the resistance mounted by these self-organized, spontaneous networks of civic initiative as a second revolution. In this respect, his position converges with Hannah Arendt's for whom the Hungarian Revolution's main legacy was precisely the emergence of the councils as a form of radical, direct democracy. At the same time, Lendvai is at his best in detailing some of the most fascinating biographies of revolutionaries: from desperate teenagers resisting the secret police and Soviet troops on the Corvin passage to the still enigmatic Jozsef Dudas, a former Hungarian-Romanian Communist, an anarchist of sorts, a romantic adventurer who finished hanged by Kadar's kangaroo justice. The uprising was inclusive, democratic and patriotic. Contrary to the Communist propaganda, the Hungarian Revolution not only did not engage in anti-Semitism, but, on the contrary, some of its most ardent participants were Jewish (including the journalist Miklos Gimes, executed together with Nagy in June 1958). With its heroic dreams and liberating passion, the Hungarian Revolution was the prelude to the citizens' upheaval of 1989.