Interpreting the Hungarian Events of 1956 in Russian Society

The author analyses the development of the national social thought and highlights the main trends in determining the nature and significance of the Hungarian political crisis of 1956 in the Soviet period and the present. The author developed his own approach to the modern understanding of the essence and meaning of the "Hungarian Events" of 1956. He aims to analyse the genesis of opinions on the nature and significance of the Hungarian political crisis in Russian public life. The study is based on the theoretical material of the works by E. Hollos, M. Szabo, L.N. Nezhinsky, B.I. Zhelitsky, V.L. Musatov, A.S. Stykalin, G. Szvak, T.Yu. Pynina, P.N. Laschenko, V.V. Leonidov, Ch. Gati, and other prominent scholars, as well as materials of the national press. The author comes to the conclusion that experts of the Soviet period adhered to the official position of the CPSU on the nature and significance of the described events, which justified the Soviet intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state under the auspices of the suppression of counter-revolution provoked by internal and external factors. A revaluation of the events became possible only at the turn of the 1990s on the basis of the political changes that occurred in Russia and Eastern Europe. A significant role in the revaluation belonged to the discovery of a whole complex of previously inaccessible sources, which contributed to a fundamental revision of the events in question in the context of recognizing the short-sightedness and illegality of the Soviet military intervention in the internal political conflict in Hungary. However, up to the present, the Russian press and literature show a tendency for a biased assessment of the "Hungarian Events" of 1956 regarding their essence and consequences both for Hungary itself, and for the USSR and modern Russia. The authors of the above-mentioned sources deliberately hypertrophy the activities of the special services of some Western states, bypassing the historical data and the current historical research on this topic. Thus, the essence of the above-mentioned events is determined in the context of the subjective positions of the authors: the revolution, the planned coup. At the same time, attention is not drawn to the objective reasons and prerequisites for the Hungarian crisis of 1956, which were indicated by Soviet sources.

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