"A Testament of Revolution" by Béla Lipták

By Michael T. Kaufman, New York Times:

Lipták's A Testament of Revolution peels away more than four decades of
intervening history to give readers a vivid, firsthand look at the brief,
doomed struggle of Hungarian freedom fighters against Russian oppressors.

Written in 1956 in an Austrian refugee camp, where the author had fled to
escape reprisals for his role in the short-lived rebellion, Lipták's memoir
sketches the conflict between university students, factory workers, and
Hungarian nationalists on one side and the hated Hungarian secret police
and Russian army troops on the other.

With an engineer's eye for detail, Lipták draws the reader hour-by-hour
into events, relating verbatim dialogue still fresh in his mind. Strikes in
nearby Poland sparked the formation of an independent union of university
students in Hungary that October. Matters escalated as factory workers
joined Hungarian students to express solidarity with Poland.

What began as a bid for greater freedom of speech and more participation in
the national government quickly developed into insurrection and armed
repression. Hungarian secret police and Russian troops moved together to
suppress the students. Readers will bear witness as armed but untrained
citizens pledge to follow the lead of any student wearing a nationalist
tricolor armband–and they will recoil in horror as many of these
revolutionaries fall in undeclared street battles.

In a memoir that is both history and a saga of his coming of age, Lipták
relates his transformation from carefree university student to impromptu
revolutionary leader. His story unfolds with unsparing honesty as he lays
bare his conflicts, faults, failures of judgment and courage, and struggles
with the enemy and with himself.

A Testament of Revolution is the story of one man and Every Man caught up
in events beyond his control, as waves of individual integrity and
patriotism foundered on the rocky shoals of oppression and international
politics.

The spirit of that time, the growing crescendo of boldness, the solidarity
of struggle, the rapture of apparent triumph and the despair of defeat and
flight are all broughtmovingly to life.

Michael T. Kaufman, New York Times

When There Was Tyranny, And They Took It On
By MICHAEL KORDA

How we see — and more to the point — how we remember history is a hotly
debated issue just now. Does "Pearl Harbor" capture the event? Does it
parallel the memories of those who were there? For that matter, did "Saving
Private Ryan" present a believable version of D-Day?

Somehow both movies, at any rate to me, failed to deliver that combination
of grittiness, discomfort and fear that marks the personal participation in
great historical moments — let alone the mix of ideology, political belief
and rationalization taking place in the heads of those involved.

I have to admit that I wasn't present at Pearl Harbor. Nor was I at D-Day,
although having edited Cornelius Ryan's "The Longest Day" and accompanied
my father when he did the art direction for Darryl F. Zanuck's motion
picture of the book, I feel as if I was.

But I was present at the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, from first to last.
I drove to Budapest at its outset to deliver medical supplies and stayed to
do my bit in the David vs. Goliath struggle of the Hungarian Freedom
Fighters (as they soon came to be called) against the Soviet armed forces
and their Hungarian communist allies.

Winston Churchill once said that nothing is more exhilarating to a young
man than the sound of bullets whistling past his ears. If true — and I
fear it is — I cannot complain. I heard enough bullets whistling past my
ears in the streets of Budapest to last me a lifetime, and not a few larger
projectiles too. So, apparently, did Bela Liptak, who recounts his own
remarkable experience in "A Testament of Revolution" (Texas A&M, 206 pages,
$29.95).

Now that Budapest can once again be seen as Central Europe's attempt to
duplicate the glories of 19th-century Paris on the Danube, the Hungarian
Revolution feels truly distant. It is almost impossible to remember, even
for those who witnessed it, the combination of naked force, ideology and
twisted idealism that communism represented. Schoolroom instruction in
Marxism-Leninism, collective farms, Stakhanovism: All of it was once
intensely real. Then there was the notion — held not only by true
believers but by fearful Americans and Europeans — that communism would
eventually triumph over capitalism and democracy.

And, of course, it did triumph, in Eastern Europe at any rate, for nearly
45 years. And when the Eastern Europeans finally rose up against their
Soviet masters — exactly as Conservatives in Britain and Republicans in
the U.S. had predicted they would do one day — the Western world looked
the other way and let the Soviet Union reconquer a part of its empire that
almost slipped from its grasp.

The opportunity of disabling, even dismantling, Soviet power was there in
October and November of 1956. But the spectacle of schoolboys and factory
workers building barricades and blowing up Soviet tanks in the streets of
Budapest, far from encouraging the West to confront the Soviets, made
everybody run for cover, including John Foster Dulles, the bellicose U.S.
secretary of state. So the world had to wait three decades for the Soviet
Union to die peacefully of its own inefficiency and contradictions.

Mr. Liptak's book helps us to revisit that moment in 1956 when we missed
our chance. He describes the full dramatic arc: from the exhilarating
beginning, as the giant statue of Stalin was pulled down; through the
bitter and unequal street fighting and the grim succession of political
betrayals by which the Soviet Union eventually prevailed; to the escape
across the border into Austria that sent so many Hungarians — the lucky
ones, since a harsher fate awaited many of those who stayed — into a long
exile in Western Europe, Canada and the U.S.

"A Testament of Revolution" is fortunately not one of those journalistic
attempts to provide a complete "human" picture, nor is it an academic
history. Mr. Liptak wrote down his experience in a refugee camp in December
1956, while the events were still fresh in his mind, and what he describes
still has the ring of truth to it. For the reader unfamiliar with the
history of Hungary, he has added a brief and reasonably objective account
of his country's travails, which go back more than 1,000 years. Of course
he tends to see his country's history through rose-colored glasses — but
then, who does not?

Otherwise Mr. Liptak writes with marvelous precision, sticking to the
events as he witnessed them, without romantic gloss. Among the figures in
his story, most striking by far are the people who found the courage to
rise up against their oppressors and to confront tanks with homemade
Molotov cocktails. Mr. Liptak was one of them, and his account fills one
with admiration, not only for his courage but also for his calm
objectivity, achieved only a month or so after the revolution had been put
down with brutal, overwhelming force.

Unlike recent movies of historical events, Mr. Liptak's book is
painstakingly truthful, describing events as they were, not as one might
have wished them to be. "A Testament of Revolution" will leave no doubt in
any reader's mind that the communist puppet governments of Eastern Europe
were tyrannical and thuggish and that the Hungarians, whatever their other
defects and problems as a nation, deserve full credit for their courage in
taking on Goliath while the rest of the world stood by.

Perhaps more than anybody else, the Hungarian Freedom Fighters demonstrated
that Goliath had feet of clay. It was a lesson that came too late for them
but that set the stage for the long decline into confusion, self-doubt and
irrelevance that would eventually bring the hapless Mikhail Gorbachev to
abandon the Soviet Empire in Central Europe and with it any hope of
preserving communism in Russia itself.

Mr. Korda, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, is the author, most
recently, of "Country Matters."