1956: Mao's China and the Hungarian Crisis by Zhu Dandan (review)

In terms of Cold War great-power relations, certain events such as the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis loom large in the history books. While scholars have no trouble agreeing that these moments are important, academic opinion diverges on the questions of why these events occurred and why they are significant. This difference is mostly a matter of perspective, as each event had important international and domestic implications. Indeed, the existence of these multiple angles, as well as the ongoing availability of new source materials, ensures that Cold War Studies remains an exciting and energetic field.

One of the major incidents of the early Cold War period was the 1956 Hungarian Crisis. After the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began to lead the Soviet Union away from aspects of Stalin's policy agenda, style of governance, and ideological outlook. This process of de-Stalinization reached its crescendo in February 1956 with Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The contents of the speech reverberated across the communist and capitalist world, including Communist-controlled Eastern Europe where it fanned the flames of growing discontent with the Soviet Union. By October 1956, large-scale uprisings in Hungary precipitated a sense of crisis in Moscow, with Soviet leaders scrambling to respond to a rapidly changing situation and wavering between different forms of response. Soviet troops (first sent to Hungary on October 23 to deal with the troubles) initially pulled out of Budapest on October 29 in an attempt to alleviate the situation. The worsening uprising, however, threatened Hungary's very future in the Soviet sphere of influence. Eventually, on November 4, Soviet troops re-entered the Hungarian capital and crushed resistance. The "Hungarian Crisis" Crisis was over, but not before some 2,500 Hungarians lay dead.

Zhu Dandan's 1956: Mao's China and the Hungarian Crisis is a recent contribution to the historiography of the Hungarian Crisis and Maoist China's policy-making. The first monograph on the subject, 1956 joins the dots between the domestic situation in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the goals of Mao's government, and the Hungarian Crisis, to give a new account of the PRC's policies vis-à-vis the communist bloc. Zhu argues that China was prepared to manipulate tension within the bloc to further its own goal of redefining its relationship with the Soviet Union. At the same time, Beijing remained unwavering in its belief that "communist camp integrity had to be guaranteed by relations of dominance, with the strongest state framing definitions of communism and providing a general pattern of development" (p. 11). Beijing also viewed a hierarchically organized bloc as an essential barrier to the spread of American-led imperialism. What Zhu shows us is that although relations with the Soviet Union were not always smooth in the 1950s, there is no sense that the PRC's national interest overrode its overall sense of solidarity with the wider Soviet-led communist movement. Beijing was still a long way away from adopting the pragmatic, ideologically flexible position that would rationalize rapprochement with the United States in the 1970s.

As Zhu suggests, Stalin's death cleared the way for the PRC to become an important player on the international communist stage. Therefore, when the Hungarian Crisis broke out a few years later, both Moscow and Eastern European bloc states looked to Beijing for input on how to respond. Nonetheless, Mao and his colleagues remained wary of any moves by Khrushchev to clip China's wings, and thus behind-the-scenes adopted a critical position toward Moscow's domineering "big-power approach" to relations in the communist camp. Moreover, Beijing pushed the Soviets for a rethink of the "taken-for-granted seniority and...