JHU SAIS Professor Charles Gati Publishes New Book on 1956 Hungarian Revolution SAIS to Host Discussion With Gati on 09/19
Washington, D.C.-09/14/2006 - Charles Gati, a senior adjunct professor in the European Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), has published Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press released the book this week.
On Tuesday, 09/19 at 5 p.m., SAIS will host a forum with Gati where he will discuss his new book and address the question: "Did the U.S. Abandon Hungary in 1956?" Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War Studies Project at Harvard University, also will participate in the forum. The event will take place in the first floor auditorium located in the school's Rome Building, 1619 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.
As the 50th anniversary of the revolt approaches in October, Gati examines the 1956 Hungarian revolution and its suppression by the Soviet Union as a key event in the Cold War. He goes beyond the simplicity of this "David and Goliath" story in his new history of the revolt. The Hungarian uprising began on 10/23, 1956. However by 11/4, Soviet tanks and troops had moved into the city, defeating the revolutionaries, who had hoped that the United States would come to their assistance.
Denying neither Hungarian heroism nor Soviet brutality, Failed Illusions fundamentally modifies our picture of what happened during this 13-day period. Gati, who was a 22-year-old reporter in Budapest during the uprising, analyzes the brave, idealistic yet unrealistic revolutionaries and their reform communist leader, Imre Nagy. He suggests that had the Hungarians coupled their valor with pragmatism, some of the revolutions goals could have been achieved.
According to Gati, the United States was all talk, no action, and offered mixed signals at best. It encouraged the revolutionaries with promises of "liberation" and the "rollback" of Soviet power from Eastern Europe, while American-run Radio Free Europe simultaneously backed the insurgents' excessive demands and opposed Nagy.
Failed Illusions poses the question as to why the U.S. and its allies did not encourage the Hungarian revolutionaries to pursue more constructive options that were available, such as the more limited goal of Titoism as a first step toward freedom. NATO could have pressed the issue with the United Nations before, and not after, the Soviet crackdown.
There are valuable lessons here for the United States' efforts to "democratize" or reshape distant lands. As Gati remarked in a recent op-ed, "The Hungarians need to hear what happened 50 years ago-and Americans need to hear that in the future, we will not say we seek clearly unattainable goals abroad for political ends at home."
The book is based on extensive archival research, including the CIA's operational files and transcripts of Radio Free Europe's broadcasts, as well as interviews with participants in Budapest, Moscow and Washington.
"Failed Illusions casts incisively a new perspective on three key dimensions of the historic drama that was the Hungarian revolution: the unsavory background and the heroic epiphany of Imre Nagy, the revolution's tragic leader; the confused, disruptive and ultimately devious Soviet efforts to manipulate the Hungarian communists; and the impotent futility of U.S. posturing which masqueraded as 'the policy of liberation.' Riveting as a story, significant as a history," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Adviser and a professor of international relations at SAIS.
Having fled his native Hungary during the 1956 revolt, Gati has written several other publications, including The Bloc That Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition (1990), and Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (1986). His previous positions have included teaching Central and Eastern European as well as Russian politics and foreign policy at Union College and Columbia University. He served as a senior adviser on the Department of State's Policy Planning Staff in the early 1990s.
SAIS is one of the country's leading graduate schools devoted to the study of international relations. Located along Embassy Row in Washington's Dupont Circle area, the school enrolls more than 450 full-time graduate students and mid-career professionals and has trained more than 13,000 alumni in all aspects of international affairs.