The International Campaign for Real History

Uprising

David Irving's famous bestseller:

Uprising! The Hungarian Revolution of 1956

is now available as a Free Download on this Website in Adobe Acrobat Reader .pdf format download (1.9MB)

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The Introduction
is also available as a text document

Reviews | More reviews | The inside Budapest story on David Irving's Book Hungarian edition, publ. 2003: free download (1.9 MB)
Mr Irving's book-launch tour Oct 2003 | Draft dustjacket text (1979)

Paul Grubach points out that Jewish academics confirm the role of Hungary's Jews in their Communist regime and secret police
 
We are indebted to Linda Nelson of Chicago for preparing the PDF editions of the English, Magyar, and German versions.

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 See too: Miklos Vasarhelyi obituary | A Radical's Diary | draft dustjacket (1979)


 

Burning Rakosi portraitTHE Hungarian uprising of 1956 was a spontaneous rebellion by a nation against the rule from Moscow - against the faceless, indifferent, incompetent functionaries (the 'funkies' David Irving calls them, adapting the Hungarian word funkcionáriusók) who in little more than a decade had turned their country into a pit of Marxist misery. But this fluttering of a national spirit was brief: the Soviet Union crushed the uprising with a brutality that shocked the western world.

The full story has never before been told. David Irving's search for material and documents took him to the great cities of the northern hemisphere. He questioned survivors in Moscow, Munich, Geneva, Paris, London, New York, Verona, Rome and Madrid - he obtained clearance of previously un-obtainable records in Washington relating to the role of the CIA, Radio Free Europe, and United States diplomacy. In Kansas he worked through the records of Eisenhower, American president at the time. In Toronto he found and interviewed Budapest's police chief, who had been recently amnestied from life imprisonment by the Hungarians.

Irving was officially permitted to visit Budapest several times. He traced and talked with eye-witnesses and survivors there and obtained new documents and photographs from them. He questioned the men who had been kidnapped, exiled, imprisoned and put on trial with the Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, who was sentenced to death, as well as members of Nagy's family.

It is Irving's assessment of Imre Nagy that will, perhaps, raise eyebrows, as well as his discovery among official records of evidence that anti-Semitism was one of the motors of the popular discontent. He has made use of hundreds of interrogation reports prepared at the time by American agencies, and supports this material with the diaries of diplomats and western journalists who went into Hungary.

The result is a compelling autopsy of a failed rebellion. Irving offers views from inside the council chambers of the powerful as well as from street level. The rebels are given names, personalities and profiles thanks to the detailed records of the American psychiatrists who saw them. It is a book with a cast of ten million, a study that counterpoints concrete examples with humour as David Irving shows just how a rebellious urge could erupt from within a nation.

 

 

WHAT THE PAPERS SAID --

 

. . . a forthright journalistic profile of the 1956 anti-Russian Hungarian revolt. . . A vivid but lurid, exclamatory book that will further enrage professional historians. -- The Sunday Express

The book's ... achievement: the piecing together of an astoundingly detailed account, almost shot-by-shot, of the street fighting in central Budapest from the first phase on 23 October to the final Soviet counter-offensive in the early hours of 4 November. . . A work which must have taken years to write and research. -- The Observer

The result is a narrative which is extraordinarily powerful, indeed compelling. Its first merit is that it makes the street fighting clear . . . the radio station, the headquarters of the secret police, the Kilián barracks . . . . The great merit of Irving's book is that it has a sense of perspective. --- New Society

David Irving . . . is a marvellous example of that new breed of right-wing propagandist-cum-historian . . . Respectable historians such as A.J.P. Taylor have praised Irving as a 'patient researcher of unrivalled industry and success.' Irving is obviously envied by his colleagues for his ability to win the confidence of retired Nazi officials who provided him with the diaries and other Hitler memorabilia necessary for his revisionist scoops. Irving is, after all, the first Western historian chosen by the Budapest regime to be given access to material on the 1956 revolution. -- New Statesman

 

 
above: Toronto, March 1979: David Irving (left) interviews Sándor Kopácsi, police chief of Budapest at the time of the uprising

below: Moscow, April 1978: David Irving with General Batov, commander of the Russian troops who crushed the uprising in Budapest

 

© website: Focal Point 2001; book: Parforce UK Ltd