This book strives to make a deeper analysis of the causes and driving forces that led to the October 1956 events in Poland, and to assess them in terms of foreign and domestic policy, from the perspective of half a century later. The articles collected here provide a considerable amount of new information about the reactions and attitudes of political leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain, about how they viewed the events in Poland, and about what motives guided them in their decisions. This publication presents, for the first time in detailed fashion, the Chinese leaders' position on the October 1956 events. At the same time, this publication reveals how much remains to be discovered, how many important questions remain to be answered, and the degree of complexity with which scholars investigating these questions sometimes have to grapple. The articles in this book offer a real image of how the most important capitals in the opposing Cold War blocs reacted to the Polish October 1956. It was yet another lesson in Realpolitik not the first, after all, in Polish history.--

"Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956 relates the social history of the protests and mass movements that ultimately changed Polish politics and Polish-Soviet relations in 1956, yet avoided an armed Soviet response. Pawel Machcewicz focuses on people's expression of grievances, and even riots, rather than on "top-level" activities such as internal Communist Part struggles, as he carefully depicts the protests that took place in Poznan in June 1956 and across Poland the following October and November." "Based largely on newly available Party and security apparatus documents, which were originally prepared to inform Poland's Party leadership about what was happening on the ground, the book also includes an illuminating selection of photographs from Poznari in June 1956 taken secretly by the police."--Jacket.

This book makes sense of the inner connection between China's political and diplomatic involvement in the Hungarian crisis and the influence this crisis had on a series of mysterious policy shifts.

This volume presents the story of the Hungarian Revolution in 120 original documents, ranging from the minutes of Khrushchev's first meeting with Hungarian leaders after Stalin's death in 1953, to Yeltsin's declaration on Hungary in 1992. The great majority of the material comes from archives that were inaccessible until the 1990s, and appears here in English for the first time. Book jacket.

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.