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In Twelve Days and nights: THE STORYPLOT of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, Victor Sebestyen vividly recreates not only the times of the uprising but the events, meetings and days that led up to it. He goes back to provide us snapshots of seminal moments in history that would decide Hungary's destiny, including the Oct 9, 1944, get together in the Kremlin with Churchill, or Oct 15, 1949, every day that proclaimed the execution of Laszlo Rajk, a brutal Stalinist and one of the chief architect's of Hungary's law enforcement state and the start of the Bolsheviks starting "to devour [their] own children". With recently released and never-before-translated material from the Parliamentary library in Budapest, the Kremlin library, and his own family's diaries and eyewitness testimonies, Sebestyen can shed new light on what really happened. And he does indeed so in a fast-paced, journalistic style that makes you feel you are right there witnessing everything. This is a story of enormous courage in a deal with for liberty and of ruthless cruelty in suppressing that wish. It was an uprising that had taken the entire world by wonder despite all the intellect in Hungary at that time - from the CIA to the M16 and many others. Thousands had taken to the streets armed with few rifles, gas bombs, even kitchen items - and for some time it appeared as if the revolutionaries might do well. It was an uprising that captured the imagination of people throughout the world, and the Hungarians, Sebestyen creates, even thought that Eisenhower and the Western world were going to come to their save. But, at 4:14 in the morning of November 4, 1956, the Soviets launched a significant assault to crush the uprising and been successful. Thousands were killed and wounded, and nearly a quarter of an million refugees still left the country. This uprising was the defining second of the Freezing Warfare and would signal the start of the finish of the Soviet empire. Sebestyen has written a exclusively compelling and energetic account of this important historical second.
