Voice in the Wilderness. Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution by Peter UnwinReview by: Martyn RadyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Oct., 1994), pp. 765-766Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211688 .

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REVIEWS 765

Buschfort's research is thorough, his account clear and unpretentious. He does not attempt to evaluate the impact the Ostbiiro may or may not have had, although there are passing comments to the effect that much of the effort and personal sacrifices may in the end have been to little avail. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing story of the quest to keep alive a distinctive spirit and tradition under adverse circumstances, and an important strand in the recent history of Germany, East and West. Department of German MARY FULBROOK University College London

Unwin, Peter. Voice in the Wilderness. Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution. With a foreword by Arpa'd G6ncz. Macdonald, London and Sydney, I99I. Viii + 262 Pp. Photographs. Index. ?I6.95.

PETER Unwin was a junior diplomat at the British legation in Budapest between I 958 and I 96 I. During the mid- I 98os he served again in Hungary, on that occasion as ambassador. As Unwin explains in the prologue to the present work, Voice in the Wilderness is the result both of the author's long personal interest in the career of Imre Nagy and of his own close acquaintance with Hungarian politics. Although the bulk of the text is devoted to Nagy's biography, the book also traces political developments in Hungary from 1958, the year of Nagy's execution, up to the elections of I990. The author supplements his account, which is based largely upon secondary texts, with material derived from interviews and with his own illuminating recollections and reflections.

Although President G6ncz's foreword testifies to the continued strength of the Imre Nagy myth in Hungary today ('A good Communist and a good Hungarian ... destroyed by the tyranny ... he gave Hungary hope and unity ... In his death he preserved the pride of a broken nation' [p. viii]), Unwin aims at a more balanced assessment. Nagy's activity as a possible NKVD informer in Moscow is discussed, as is his readiness to trim even within his specialist field of agricultural economics. His failure to stand firm against collectivization, the dissolution of parliamentary life and the brutalities of the Rakosi period is not glossed over. Nor, as Unwin explains, can Nagy's failure to take decisive action in the first days of the Revolution be excused by claiming that he was a prisoner in the Party headquarters. Indeed, in several places (pp. I 99, 240) Unwin is bold enough to suggest that Nagy's ideological heir may actually have been his successor, Janos Ka'dar.

Unwin, however, fails satisfactorily to resolve what he considers to be the central dilemma in Nagy's career. Why did this previously obliging Stalinist abandon his faith in Moscow and put himself at the head of a national and democratic revolution? Unwin asks, 'Was Nagy, when he declared his coun- try's neutrality and condemned the Soviet invasion, and later, when he went to the gallows, the convinced Muscovite Communist he had been all his adult life, or a disillusioned man who was left at the last with only his Hungarian patriotism?' (p. 4). Unwin tentatively proposes several explanations: that Nagy had always sought a more humane Communism and faced with the

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766 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

competing demands of dogma and humanity, he ultimately chose the latter; or that in the course of the Revolution itself, Nagy experienced a sudden maturation of his political ideas.

It may well be, however, that the presumed contradiction between Nagy the Communist and Nagy the patriot is falsely conceived. Interwoven in the ideology of Hungarian Communism was a variety of populism which found its most obvious expression in the inter-war March Front and in the doctrine of a specifically Hungarian road of social reform. A significant number of those 'reform Communists' who gathered round Nagy both as Prime Minister and during the Revolution had been closely associated with the March Front through their involvement in the Debrecen Tovabb circle: Geza Losonczy; Ferenc Donath; Szilard Ujhelyi; and Jozsef Szilagyi (see thus, Gyula Bor- bandi, Der ungarische Populismus, Mainz, I976, p. i6i). Imre Nagy's abiding concern for the plight of the Hungarian peasantry, his interest in co-operative farming, and the emphasis he laid upon national history and social develop- ment as determining the path to Communism (On Communism, New York, 1957, PP. 3-Io), all suggest that he may also have been influenced by the ideas of the Hungarian populist left. Nevertheless, even though this consideration may resolve some of the contradictions implicit in Nagy's career as a politi- cian, it cannot explain the sudden courage he displayed in I 956 after decades of prevarication and compliance. By illuminating Nagy the man as much as Nagy the politician, Unwin's biography contributes to our understanding of the ambiguities in Nagy's own personality. School of Slavonic and East European Studies MARTYN RADY University ofLondon

Sugar, Peter F. (ed.). A History ofHungary. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, I990. xiv + 432 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. ?24.95.

OLDER English-language histories of Hungary usually assumed a High Tory character as a sort of literary equivalent to Heroes' Square. Those published after the Second World War were conventionally written from a Marxist perspective. The discrediting of both nationalist and Marxist historiography has left most contemporary Hungarian historical writing rudderless and at the pull of every fashionable eddy. As with Catholic apostates, the danger for historians who dispense with conviction is that instead of believing in nothing they will believe in anything.

The present work, a collaborative endeavour involving fourteen Hungarian and six American-Hungarian historians, suggests that Hungarian histori- ography is dominated today by a weak Californian Whiggery which interprets historical development by reference to backwardness and modernization. This approach, which is probably only half-comprehended by the individual contributors, is compounded by problems of explanation. La'szl6 Makkai, therefore, having dispensed with the determinism of Marxism but not its vocabulary, seeks to explain the passage of events by reference to the great men of the Hungarian Middle Ages. The result is extraordinary: 'It was Taksony who introduced an economic system ... that thoroughly transformed Hun- gary's social structure' (p. I5); Stephen I 'accomplished the unification of

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