Remembering 1956: Destalinization and Suez after Fifty Years

This conference was organized by the St Antony's European Studies Centre and the Oxford European Humanities Research Institute. It had its origins in planning for the feature 'Remembering 1956' which was published in History Workshop Journal 62 (autumn 2006), although in the end only one of the HWJ authors, John Rettie, also spoke at the conference. Both projects aimed to give pride of place to the perspective of participants and witnesses on the ground, whether the ordinary people whose responses were analysed by panellists at the conference, or through the memories of on-the-spot observers.

Unlike many of the conferences and seminars planned to commemorate the various events of 1956, this conference was intended to bridge geographical and disciplinary divides, addressing both Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in his secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Suez crisis. The objectives were to present an 'in the round' perspective of a remarkable year, to draw on the new historiography that is emerging as archival sources become available, and to offer an opportunity to consider the relationship between eyewitness testimony and historians' accounts.

The conference opened with an exhilaratingly wide-ranging lecture by Arne Westad, 'The Global 1956: End of the Post-war Era?', which succeeded to a remarkable extent in its double ambition of analysing the global resonance of the year in question and finding its place in the broader historical context. The second day of the conference was organized as four themed sessions. The first was devoted to the resonance of Khrushchev's speech in Eastern Europe. Polly Jones addressed the rhetoric of the speech itself, and its initiation of a tradition of debate on Stalin's role that continues (in much the same terms) to the present day. Mark Pittaway talked about the Hungarian revolution of 1956, about popular views of the Nagy administration, and about the successful suppression of dissent in the ensuing years, beginning in 1958. Zbygniew Pelcynski addressed the case of Poland. The following session, with talks by Marie-Claire Lavabre, Michael Kenny and Holger Nehring, considered the impact of the secret speech in France, Britain and Germany respectively, with France representing a case of 'denial', Britain a case of varied responses ranging from intellectual and moral crisis to silence to confirmation of anti-Soviet feelings, and Germany the 'speech that didn't bark'. In the session on Suez, Laura James, Tony Shaw and Avi Shlaim discussed in turn the Egyptian perspective, the handling of Suez in the British press and the case of Sir Anthony Nutting, a principled British official thoroughly disillusioned by the behaviour of Eden and the upper echelons of the British, French and Israeli political elites (notably the crucial meeting at Sèvres, which was the subject of Michael Bar-On's contribution in HWJ 62). The fascinating final session was devoted to eyewitness testimony and its role in the writing of history. It brought together two eyewitnesses in the literal sense, the distinguished journalists John Rettie and Charles Wheeler, and ex-ambassador Bryan Cartledge, who has written a history of Hungary in 1956 drawing extensively on eyewitness accounts. The conference concluded with a lively exchange of memories and of debates about historical practice among the panellists and audience members.