Simon Attila et al.: Revolúcia v susedstve. Maďaraská revolúcia v roku 1956 a Slovensko (Somorja-Pozsony, 2017)
XII. Summary
174 Summary Slovakia. A further study by Slavomír Michálek examines 1956 from another perspective, from the point of view of the contemporary international politics, and, at the same time, it determines the place of the Hungarian Revolution among the conflicts of the bipolar world that emerged after World War II. Réka Földváryné Kiss in her study specifically addresses issues such as place of the 1956 Revolution in modern history of Hungary, causes of the fight for freedom, and its impacts on posterity. Her paper is of a synthesis nature, and, at the same time, it raises many new and inspirational ideas which can advance discussions of historians and public debate on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. From abroad, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution seems more likely to be a Budapest revolution only. But, in reality, the rural areas rose up equally as the capital. The study of Zsuzsa Varga summarizes the main features of the rural segment of the revolution. Today we have no doubt that the contemporary Czechoslovak party-state leadership treated the Hungarian events from the very beginning as counter-revolution, and—if the Soviets would have claimed so—they would not have hesitated a minute to use weapons against it. This has been confirmed both by Slovak and Czech historians, as well as by the research of Árpád Popély, who, in this book too, provides a detailed picture of the revolution-related behaviour of the party centres in Prague and Bratislava. Prague carried on an efficient propaganda against the revolution in the press and the radio, and it even helped to escape and provided accommodation for the Hungarian Stalinists fleeing from the country, and later it also helped with various tools to consolidate the power of János Kádár's worker-peasant government. At the same time, it launched a thorough inspection—unprecedented in size and intensity—of the Czechoslovak population, especially that of South Slovakia, under which it came down hard on all manifestations it believed to have an anti-Soviet or anti-socialist content. In this respect, the research work of László Bukovszky is especially important, who, as one of the best experts on the rich collection of documentation files of the Security Services Archives in Prague (Archiv bezpečnostních složek), has already revealed many aspects of the contemporary activities of the Czechoslovak State Security Service (StB). His current study broadens the scope of the topic with a new perspective. As regards the Czechoslovak reaction on the Hungarian Revolution, perhaps its military historical dimensions are disclosed most of all. Regarding concerns of Slovakia in 1956, research conducted to date has mainly relied on sources of the national archives and the central press. In this volume, however, we have included two regional issues as well. In the study by István Gaucsik we can find some concrete examples of how the contemporary Czechoslovak state security operated, and of what sacrifices this machinery imposed on the particular regions, in this case on Tekov and Hont. The paper by Ildikó Bajcsi gives an interesting summary of the reactions to the revolution in Komárno.
