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Victor Sebestyen (born 1956) is a historian of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Communism.
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Victor Sebestyen (born 1956) is a historian of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Communism.
Victor was born in Budapest. He was a child when his family left Hungary as refugees. As a journalist, he has worked for numerous British newspapers, including The London Evening Standard, The Times and The Daily Mail. He has contributed to many American publications, including The New York Times. He reported widely from Eastern Europe when Communism collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. He covered the wars in former Yugoslavia and the breakup of the Soviet Union. At The London Evening Standard he was foreign editor, media editor and chief leader writer. He was an associate editor at Newsweek.
His first book, Twelve Days (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006, Pantheon 2006), was an acclaimed history of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. It was translated into 12 languages. His second, Revolution 1989 (W&N 2009, Pantheon 2009) was a highly praised account of the fall of the Soviet empire. In 2017 he published Lenin the Dictator, a full-scale biography of the founder of the first Communist state, which was shortlisted for the Longford Prize in the UK, the Plutarch Award and the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography in the US.
He has been a speaker at universities, literary festivals and conferences throughout Europe and the United States. He sat on The Advisory Council of The UK based in Wilton Park, the think tank and discussion forum for international affairs.
His latest book, The Russian Revolution, was published in June 2023.
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In his quest for power, he promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label 'enemies of the people'. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything: the ends justified the means. ... Lenin was the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call 'post-truth politics'.
— Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, The Dictator, and the Master of Terror [1]
He built a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater end. It was perfected by Stalin, but the ideas were Lenin's. He had not always been a bad man, but he did terrible things. Angelica Balabanova, one of his old comrades who admired him for many years but grew to fear and loathe him, said perceptively that 'Lenin's tragedy was, in Goethe's phrase, he desired the good ... but created evil'.
— Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, The Dictator, and the Master of Terror [1]
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Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party as the political prelude to the establishment of communism. Lenin's ideological contributions to the Marxist ideology relate to his theories on the party, imperialism, the state, and revolution. The function of the Leninist vanguard party is to provide the working classes with the political consciousness and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism.
Stalinism is the totalitarian means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by dictator Joseph Stalin. Stalin had previously made a career as a gangster and robber, working to fund revolutionary activities, before eventually becoming General Secretary of the Soviet Union. Stalinism included the creation of a one man totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, forced collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalinism deemed the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.
Béla Kun was a Hungarian communist revolutionary and politician who governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. After attending Franz Joseph University at Kolozsvár, Kun worked as a journalist up until the First World War. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army and was captured by the Imperial Russian Army in 1916, after which he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Urals. Kun embraced communist ideas during his time in Russia, and in 1918 he co-founded a Hungarian arm of the Russian Communist Party in Moscow. He befriended Vladimir Lenin and fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was an attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the policies caused by the government's subordination to the Soviet Union (USSR). The uprising lasted 12 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on 4 November 1956. Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country.
The Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party was the ruling Marxist–Leninist party of the Hungarian People's Republic between 1956 and 1989. It was organised from elements of the Hungarian Working People's Party during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, with János Kádár as general secretary. The party also controlled its armed forces, the Hungarian People's Army.
János József Kádár, born János József Czermanik, was a Hungarian Communist leader and the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, a position he held for 32 years. Declining health led to his retirement in 1988, and he died in 1989 after being hospitalized for pneumonia.
The Red Terror was a campaign of political repression and executions in Soviet Russia carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. It officially started in early September 1918 and lasted until 1922. Arising after assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin along with the successful assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky in alleged retaliation for Bolshevik mass repressions, the Red Terror was modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, and sought to eliminate political dissent, opposition, and any other threat to Bolshevik power.
Pál Maléter was the military leader of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
Károly Grósz was a Hungarian communist politician, who served as the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party from 1988 to 1989.
Walter Ze'ev Laqueur was a German-born American historian, journalist and political commentator. He was an influential scholar on the subjects of terrorism and political violence.
András Hegedüs was a Hungarian Communist politician who served as Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1955 to 1956. He fled to the Soviet Union on 28 October, the fifth day of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but returned in 1958 and taught sociology.
József Pogány, known in English as John Pepper or Joseph Pogany, was a Hungarian Communist politician. He later served as a functionary in the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, before being cashiered in 1929. Later as an official in the Soviet government, Pepper ran afoul of the secret police and was executed during the Great Terror of 1937–38.
The city of Budapest was officially created on 17 November 1873 from a merger of the three neighboring cities of Pest, Buda and Óbuda. Smaller towns on the outskirts of the original city were amalgamated into Greater Budapest in 1950. The origins of Budapest can be traced to Celts who occupied the plains of Hungary in the 4th century BC. The area was later conquered by the Roman Empire, which established the fortress and town of Aquincum on the site of today's Budapest around AD 100. The Romans were expelled in the 5th century by the Huns, who were challenged by various tribes during the next several centuries. The Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin started at the end of the 9th century, and the Kingdom of Hungary was established at the end of the 11th century.
László Rudas was a Hungarian communist newspaper editor, philosopher, professor and politician who become director of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of Hungary.
The Socialist Federative Republic of Councils in Hungary was a short-lived communist state that existed from 21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919, succeeding the First Hungarian Republic. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was a small communist rump state which, at its time of establishment, controlled approximately only 23% of Hungary's historic territory. The head of government was Sándor Garbai, but the influence of the foreign minister Béla Kun of the Party of Communists in Hungary was much stronger. Unable to reach an agreement with the Triple Entente, which maintained an economic blockade of Hungary, in dispute with neighboring countries over territorial disputes, and beset by profound internal social changes, the soviet republic failed in its objectives and was abolished a few months after its existence. Its main figure was the Communist Béla Kun, despite the fact that in the first days the majority of the new government consisted of radical Social Democrats. The new system effectively concentrated power in the governing councils, which exercised it in the name of the working class.
Democracy and Totalitarianism (1968) is a book by French philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron. It compares the political systems of the socialist Soviet Union and the liberal countries of the West.
The anti-Stalinist left is a term that refers to various kinds of Marxist political movements that oppose Joseph Stalin, Stalinism, Neo-Stalinism and the system of governance that Stalin implemented as leader of the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1953. This term also refers to the high ranking political figures and governmental programs that opposed Joseph Stalin and his form of communism, such as Leon Trotsky and other traditional Marxists within the Left Opposition. In Western historiography, Stalin is considered one of the worst and most notorious figures in modern history.
The Red Terror in Hungary was a period of repressive violence and suppression carried out by the Hungarian Communist Party in 1919 during the four-month period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, primarily towards anti-communist forces, and others deemed "enemies of the state".
Anarchism in Hungary emerged from the social democratic movement in the late 19th century, coming to play a prominent role in the anti-militarist movement during World War I and in the subsequent revolution that culminated in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The anarchist movement was then repressed by the Horthy regime, before re-emerging as part of the anti-fascist resistance movement during World War II. This second wave of anarchism was also repressed, this time by the newly established communist regime. Anarchist ideas were briefly expressed during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 but remained largely suppressed until the fall of socialism, which gave way to a third wave of anarchism in Hungary.
De-Leninization is political reform aimed at refuting Leninist and Marxist–Leninist ideology and ending the personality cult of Vladimir Lenin. Examples include removing images and toppling statues of Lenin, renaming places and buildings, dismantling Lenin's Mausoleum currently in Red Square, Moscow, and burying his mummified corpse.
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