Title: 1956: One Day That Shook the Communist World

Author: Paul Lendvai

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Price: £16.95

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Hungarian Uprising

Category: Cold War

On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now, fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future liberation of Eastern Europe. Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary government smashed by the Red Army.In this riveting, deeply personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials, survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed. He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about its demise. "One Day That Shook the Communist World" is the best account of these unprecedented events.

Title: The Cold War and the New Imperialism

Author: Henry Heller

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Price: £17.95

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Cold War Index

Category: Cold War

"The Cold War and the New Imperialism" is an account of global history since 1945, which brings massive changes in global politics, economics, and society together in a single narrative, illuminating and clarifying the dilemmas of the present. Written for the general reader, it draws together scholarly research from a wide range of sources without losing sight of the larger pattern of events. In the sixty-year period since the end of World War II, the world has indeed been remade. The war itself mobilized the political and social aspirations of hundreds of millions of people. The contest between the United States and the Soviet Union for global dominance drew every country into its field of force. Struggles for national liberation in the Third World brought an end to colonial empires. Revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere shook the global order, as did failed uprisings in Paris and Prague. Since the end of the Cold War the forces of the capitalist market have overwhelmed social institutions that have given meaning to human existence for centuries. But the end of the Cold War has created as many problems for the world's remaining superpower, the United States, as it has solved. With its political, economic, and financial hegemony eroding, the United States has responded with military adventures abroad and increasing inequality and authoritarianism at home. "The Cold War and the New Imperialism" draws all these threads together and shows vividly that the end of history is not in sight.

Title: Remembering 1956

Author: Al Richardson

Publisher: Porcupine Press

Price: £9.50

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Hungarian Uprising

Category: Cold War

Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 sent shock-waves throughout the Soviet bloc and the official Communist movement. In their offices in London, Paris and Rome, Communist party leaders struggled to rescue what they could of their tattered public image, whilst their counterparts in Poland and Hungary were faced with mass working-class unrest in the streets of Poznan and Budapest. This book investigates reactions to the events of 1956.

Title: The Berlin Wall 1961-89

Author: Gordon Rottman

Publisher: Osprey

Price: £11.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Berlin Wall

Category: Cold War

The border between East and West Germany was closed on 26 May 1953. On 13 August 1961 crude fences and walls were erected around West Berlin: the Berlin Wall had been created. The Wall encircled West Berlin for a distance of 155km, and its barriers and surveillance systems evolved over the years into an advanced obstacle network. The Intra-German Border ran from the Baltic Sea to the Czechoslovak border for 1,381km, and was where NATO forces faced the Warsaw Pact for the 45 years of the Cold War. This book examines the international situation that led to the establishment of the Berlin Wall and the IGB, and discusses how these barrier systems were operated, and finally fell.

Title: The Foundations of Ostpolitik

Author: Julia Von Dannenberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Price: £55.00

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Willy Brandt

Category: Cold War

Based on recently released archival sources, this book is the first systematic analysis of the German-Soviet negotiations leading to the conclusion of the Moscow Treaty of August 1970. This treaty was the linchpin of the 'New Ostpolitik' launched by Chancellor Willy Brandt's government as a policy of reconciliation and an attempt to normalize relations with the countries of the Eastern bloc. Focusing on the decision-making processes, both within the German domestic political system as well as within the international context, this study offers a new interpretation of the shift from confrontational to detente politics at this time, arguing that the Moscow Treaty was the product of various interrelated domestic and external factors. As Dannenberg shows, the change of government to a Social-Liberal coalition was the first important precondition for Ostpolitik, while the speedy conclusion of the Moscow Treaty owed much to the high degree of secrecy and centralization that characterized Brandt's policy-making and that of his small coterie of advisors. However, Brandt's predominance in the decision-making process does not mean that he alone determined the direction of policy. His room for manoeuvre was, amongst other things, constrained by his coalition's narrow parliamentary majority as well as the Western Allies' special rights. On the other hand, German-Soviet trade expansion, public opinion, and the emerging international interest in detente in the mid-1960s were crucial factors favouring Ostpolitik. It was in this configuration of circumstances that Brandt placed himself at the forefront of the movement towards detente between East and West by introducing his bold diplomatic design - one that had the reunification of Germany as its ultimate goal.

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