Report on conversations with Egyptian Foreign Minister Fawzi on the recent failed Hungarian Revolution and pressure from Western governments ("the Hungarian Question"). Egypt promised to support Hungary in the United Nations.

Szobek reports on a meeting with Mao Zedong in which they discussed developments in Hungary.

Mao Zedong and Nógrádi discuss and compare the communist parties in China and Hungary.

Mao Zedong describes the current campaign in China against "rightist" elements. Kádár then provides a detailed analysis of the 1956 uprising in Hungary and its aftermath.

In their conversation, Dobi and Mao Zedong discussed politicial, economic, and agricultural development in Hungary and China, and compared opposition to the current Great Leap Forward in China to the 1956 uprising in Hungary.

President of People’s Republic of Hungary, Rezso Nyers, and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, Karoly Grosz, report on their talks with Gorbachev in Moscow, 24-25 July, 1989. The excerpts contains economic reformer Nyers’ assessment of the political situation in Hungary, and first among the factors that "can defeat the party," he lists "the past, if we let ourselves [be] smeared with it." The memory of the revolution of 1956 and its bloody repression by the Soviets was Banquo’s ghost, destroying the legitimacy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, just as 1968 in Prague and 1981’s martial law in Poland and all the other Communist "blank spots" of history came back in 1989 to crumble Communist ideology. For their part, the Communist reformers (including Gorbachev) did not quite know how to respond as events accelerated in 1989, except not to repeat 1956.

These conversations reveal Gorbachev’s contradictions, as the Soviet leader proclaims again that the Brezhnev doctrine is dead and military interventions should be "precluded in the future, yet at the same time, tries to set "boundaries" for the changes in Eastern Europe as "the safekeeping of socialism and assurance of stability."

In this speech, Khrushchev admits that the lack of Hungarian leaders is his own fault. He criticizes Rakosi and Gero for poor leadership and for excluding Imre Nagy from the party. Regret is expressed for not removing Rakosi earlier. Khrushchev states that the Soviet Union can not be on the sidelines, and remarks that unless forced into retirement Nagy will work with the enemy.

Minutes of the meeting of the HSWP CC Political Committee on the Historical Subcommittee of the Central Committee’s description of the events of 1956 as a people’s uprising rather than a counterrevolution.

Editor's note: On 23 June 1988, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party Central Committee established a committee to analyze Hungary’s political, economic and social development during the preceding thirty years. The panel, headed by Imre Pozsgay, 5 a politburo member and minister of state, included party officials and social scientists. After several months of examining pertinent archival documents, the Historical Subcommittee (one of four working groups) completed and discussed its final report at its meeting on 27 January 1989. Most sensationally, the report described what occurred in 1956 in Hungary as not a “counterrevolution” (as Moscow and the regime it installed in Budapest headed by János Kádár had long insisted) but a people’s uprising. This very point was announced by Imre Pozsgay in an interview on both the morning news program and the next day, on the most popular political journal of Hungarian Radio, “168 hours,” without any prior consultation with the political leadership. The issue triggered a serious crisis in the Party and eventually served as a very important catalyst in the transition process. The following excerpt reflects the first reaction of the Politburo members.
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