The Secret Trial Of Imre Nagy

Among the various secret or staged processes in court that are all to some degree the focus of public attention, the process against Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy of the 1956 Revolution is especially noteworthy. This volume contains the most important documents of this process: the indictment, the death sentence, the prosecutor's motion 31 years later concerning the repeal of the death sentence, and the acquittal. The separate research papers analyze the historical background of the process and the unlawful practices followed in the administration of justice of the communist party-state, best exemplified by the most serious infringements in the process against Imre Nagy. This book may be read with interest not only by lawyers and historians, but by all interested in the struggle of human will against political terror.

Among the various secret or staged processes in court that are all to some degree the focus of public attention, the process against Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy of the 1956 Revolution is especially noteworthy. This volume contains the most important documents of this process: the indictment, the death sentence, the prosecutor's motion 31 years later concerning the repeal of the death sentence, and the acquittal. The separate research papers analyze the historical background of the process and the unlawful practices followed in the administration of justice of the communist party-state, best exemplified by the most serious infringements in the process against Imre Nagy. This book may be read with interest not only by lawyers and historians, but by all interested in the struggle of human will against political terror.

Comparison of official records and historical fact, compiled by Nagy's friends, condemns state action in the secret trial and execution. Worldwide reaction is portrayed through quotes.

Imre Nagy, Martyr of the Nation is a study of the ways in which the memory of the martyred Prime Minister and the story of the 1956 Revolution influenced political socialization in Hungary. The study begins with Nagy's 1989 funeral and the role memorialization played in the politics of transition, continuing with a review of the important personages and events that informed Nagy's life and afterlife, and concludes in the tumultuous politics following the establishment of the Republic in 1989.

The book offers a vast panorama of Communism from the perspective of its collapse, and inspects the world beyond the fall in the distorting mirror of its imagined prehistory—providing in the process a perceptive analysis of a number of the fundamental issues of history writing.

After nearly three decades of dutiful service to the Communist Party, Imre Nagy led the popular uprising against the Soviet authorities during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Two years later he was disgraced and executed. How did the formerly loyal Party servant become one of its most ardent critics? How did he reconcile his own beliefs with the demands of the Party for so long - and what finally drove him to take a stand? And how should we understand his legacy for the modern democracy of Hungary? This definitive biography of the Communist leader traces his life from his conventional, petty bourgeois childhood in south-west Hungary, through his tremendous political achievements and ultimate dramatic failure. The first complete portrait of this complex and contradictory figure, Imre Nagy is vividly brought to life as an enigmatic figure whose actions shaped Hungary's destiny in 1956 and ever since.

On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now, fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future liberation of Eastern Europe. Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary government smashed by the Red Army. In this riveting, deeply personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials, survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed. He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about its demise. One Day That Shook the Communist World is the best account of these unprecedented events.

This book presents a comprehensive re-examination of the cinemas of the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe during the communist era. It argues that, since the end of communism in these countries, film scholars are able to view these cinemas in a different way, no longer bound by an outlook relying on binary Cold War terms. With the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, much more is known about these states and societies; at the same time, the field has been reinvigorated by its opening up to more contemporary concepts, themes and approaches in film studies and adjacent disciplines. Taking stock of these developments, this book presents a rich, varied tapestry, relating specific films to specific national and transnational circumstances, rather than viewing them as a single, monolithic "Cold War Communist" cinema.

People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and apes do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too.”—from the book King of the Mountain presents the startling findings of Arnold M. Ludwig’s eighteen-year investigation into why people want to rule. The answer may seem obvious—power, privilege, and perks—but any adequate answer also needs to explain why so many rulers cling to power even when they are miserable, trust nobody, feel besieged, and face almost certain death. Ludwig’s results suggest that leaders of nations tend to act remarkably like monkeys and apes in the way they come to power, govern, and rule. Profiling every ruler of a recognized country in the twentieth century—over 1,900 people in all­­, Ludwig establishes how rulers came to power, how they lost power, the dangers they faced, and the odds of their being assassinated, committing suicide, or dying a natural death. Then, concentrating on a smaller sub-set of 377 rulers for whom more extensive personal information was available, he compares six different kinds of leaders, examining their characteristics, their childhoods, and their mental stability or instability to identify the main predictors of later political success. Ludwig’s penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace.

The idea of non-alignment and peaceful coexistence was not new when Yugoslavia hosted the Belgrade Summit of the Non-Aligned in September 1961. Freedom activists from the colonies in Asia, Africa, and South America had been discussing such issues for decades already, but this long-lasting context is usually forgotten in political and historical assessments of the Non-Aligned Movement. This book puts the Non-Aligned Movement into its wider historical context and sheds light on the long-term connections and entanglements of the Afro-Asian world. It assembles scholars from differing fields of research, such as Asian Studies, Eastern European and Southeast European History, Cold War Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations. In doing so, this volume looks back to the ideological beginnings of the concept of peaceful coexistence at the time of the anticolonial movements, and at the multi-faceted challenges of foreign policy the former freedom fighters faced when they established their own decolonized states. It analyses the crucial role Yugoslav president Tito played in his determination to keep his country out of the blocs, and finally examines the main achievement of the Non-Aligned Movement: to give subordinate states of formerly subaltern peoples a voice in the international system. An innovative look at the Non-Aligned Movement with a strong historical component, the book will be of great interest to academics working in the field of International Affairs, international history of the 20th century, the Cold War, Race Relations as well as scholars interested in Asian, African and Eastern European history.