Tinderbox: East-Central Europe in the Spring, Summer, and Early Fall of 1956 (review)

This book is a useful addition to the literature on Eastern Europe in the fateful year of 1956. As the title suggests, the book covers the period from the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress in February to the eve of the Hungarian Revolution in October. Matthews focuses on key events in three countries—the abortive student revolt in Czechoslovakia in April–May; the uprising in the Polish city of Poznań in June, followed by the trial of the Poznań demonstrators in September and the return of Władysław Gomułka to power in Warsaw in October; and the revolutionary ferment in Hungary that began in June with the Petőfi Circle discussions and led to the rehabilitation and reburial of former Communist leader László Rajk in early October.

Matthews approaches his subject (as he notes on pp. 3 and 287) more as a journalist than as a scholar, and he writes for the general reader. This is not a scholarly book for professional historians. Nonetheless, Matthews draws on a wealth of sources—published books and articles, documents from the U.S. National Archives, recollections of his own experience and files from his years in Munich at the Free Europe Press (which, like Radio Free Europe, was part of the Free Europe Committee), original interviews with participants and their relatives, and photographs acquired from private sources. The photographs of the Poznań uprising, obtained from a German businessman who attended the Poznań International Trade Fair at the time, and of the Prague student demonstration are especially revealing. Chapter 3 on the Prague student revolt contains unpublished materials and is the book's greatest contribution to a better understanding of the ferment of 1956.

The key chapters are written in a "you are there" style that sometimes raises the usual questions about the veracity of quotations not directly attributable to participants. On balance Matthews provides detailed, credible, useful accounts of these dramatic events, and the reader will get a sense of the atmosphere as well as the issues that arose at the Prague student discussions, on the streets of Poznań, and at the debates of the Petőfi Circle.

The Czechoslovak student unrest was easily suppressed by the regime through expulsions, arrests, and confiscation of petitions (which nonetheless continued to circulate clandestinely.) In the short run, the unrest had no consequences for the system. In Poland, by contrast, economic grievances immediately turned into political protest ("we want bread . . . we demand free elections," p. 100), and the violent suppression of mass demonstrations merely strengthened the reformist currents that led to the Polish "October." In Hungary the bold discussions organized by the Peófi Circle subsided after the regime launched a volley of angry criticism in June, but they were quickly overshadowed by the radical ferment that led to the reinterment of Rajk and ultimately sparked the revolution.

The book highlights the importance of external information provided by Western radio stations, especially Radio Free Europe, in the rigidly controlled information environments of the Communist states. It notes the significance of the on-the-spot reporting of Western journalists such as Sidney Gruson of The New York Times and Phillipe Ben of Le Monde, whose dispatches were immediately broadcast back into Eastern Europe. Matthews touches on the neglected subject of the leaflets (and later journals and books) shipped by the Free Europe Committee to Eastern Europe on balloons, by regular mail, and through private channels, as detailed by Matthews elsewhere in a seminal article, "The West's Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Fall 2003), pp. 409–427. Chapter 9 notes the responsible role of Radio Free Europe, like that of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński after his release, in urging moderation on Poles during the ferment of October 1956 and in effect supporting Gomułka at that time as the "lesser evil" to Soviet military intervention.

The book...