Gyorgy Litvan is history in the flesh. Jailed for his activities during the 1956 uprising, he is about to retire as director of the institute devoted to that turbulent time. Huw Richards spoke to him on a lecture trip to London
Gyorgy Litvan is already assured of his place in the history of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Then a teacher in a technical high school in Budapest, he was the first person to call publicly for the resignation of Hungary's Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi.
And what's more he did it to the dictator's face, rising in a district meeting called in the spring of 1956 to tell party members of the contents of Nikita Khrushchev's epochal denunciation of Stalin at that year's Soviet party congress.
"I said that the leadership had lost credibility. One third of the audience applauded, one third was silent and the rest were against me. At the end of the meeting Rakosi made a one hour speech. He said 'While the young comrade may be a honest man, he speaks with the voice of America'."
He says that he spoke without fear. It was an internal party meeting, and events were already moving fast. And within four months Rakosi was gone as Hungary spiralled towards the rising of October 23 and the brutal Soviet repression of November and after. It was nevertheless undeniably an act of great moral courage, and helped earn him four years in prison from 1958 to 1962.
Forty years on from the events which transfixed Europe and still stand as one of the decisive moments of postwar history, Professor Litvan has moved from the role of participant to that of chronicler as director of the Hungarian National Institute for the History of 1956 and author of a newly-published study of the revolution.
His institution's title betrays the continuing central importance of those events to modern Hungarian and European history. Just "1956". No Hungarian requires further explanation. But if the outside world saw a small nation heroically defying an imperial bully - completely transforming an international image previously informed by an earlier incarnation as the reactionary half of the Austro-Hungarian empire - the internal reality was a lot more complicated. "1956 was never part of a common national tradition and has created more schism than unity", he says.
Those schisms are personified by Gyula Horn, prime minister of Hungary for the past two years. As a young Communist Horn sided with the Soviet repressors of 1956, as opposing parties have constantly and vociferously reminded him.
"When he came to power he had to deal with this. He did so by going with Imre Nagy's widow to his grave and placing a wreath on it."
Professor Litvan argues that this acknowledgement of Nagy, executed in 1958 for his leadership of the revolution, was insufficient. "Horn has said nothing. He might, as Boris Yeltsin did when he spoke to the Hungarian parliament in 1992, have said sorry". He is similarly unimpressed by the government's passing of a law acknowledging Nagy's role in Hungarian history - a bizarre Hungarian tradition developed as a retrospective recompense for national heroes like Lajos Kossuth and Mihaly Karolyi who spent long periods in exile or regarded as traitors.
"The other parties did not support this. They felt it was not the role of the socialists to say what Nagy's part is in Hungarian history," he explains.
Continuing interest spares him one of the crosses of most historians' lives - the periodic necessity of having to justify what one does to those who question whether interest in the past has any value.
"Whenever we publish new findings or new documents, there is always interest in the press and from academics in other countries", he says. The most recent discovery, the revelation of China's role in Soviet decision-making over whether or not to intervene in Hungary, was covered widely in the western press after Chen Jian of South Illinois University delivered his findings to a conference held by the institute.
But there is a downside to being, as he puts it, "on the boundary between politics and history". In the immediate post-communist period, different analyses of 1956 underpinned the various political factions to the extent that one leading historian was heard to complain that his colleagues had swapped the thought control of communism for that of attempting to justify at all costs particular party lines and discredit others.
Litvan argues that there are three broad views of the 1956 revolution: as a continuation of reforms begun in 1953; as the culmination of underground resistance dating back to 1944; or as a popular rising eventually captured by reactionaries. He says: "Politicians can acknowledge only one of these versions. As historians we can recognise that there are elements of truth in all of them".
He hopes to see the historical predominate over the political in the future, as people with no direct memory of 1956 come to positions of prominence in both spheres. He will shortly be handing his directorship over to a younger colleague. Apart from himself and two other veterans who helped found the institute in 1989, its 30-strong staff is dominated by young researchers. "They were not there, but they know as much as we do."
Looking back, he acknowledges that the Soviet Union would probably not have been prepared to let Hungary go, as seemed possible in the brief euphoria between the rising of October 23 and the repression starting on November 4. "We hoped that the Russians might not come back. But we did not really believe it". The Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, diverting western attention from Hungary at a decisive moment, was widely seen as "a harmful and cynical act".
He attributes the divisions in the Russian leadership to the fact that Hungary was not as strategically crucial to their control of Eastern Europe as either Poland or the German Democratic Republic, and also to a broader uncertainty as they groped towards a new approach to power in the wake of Stalinism.
The events of 1956, he argues, have an importance which spread beyond Hungary.
"1956 showed up the reality of the Soviet system, leading to splits in leftwing parties in the west. It provided an example from which the Czechs could learn in 1968 and the Poles in 1980. And it showed how limited the power of the democracies to intervene really was".
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, edited by Gyorgy Litvan, Longman Pounds 12.99