Imagining postcommunism: Visual narratives of hungary's 1956 revolution
Imagining postcommunism: Visual narratives of hungary's 1956 revolution Scornful vengeance is vented by woman who spits at the mangled corpse of a secret police colonel hung head down in Budapest Square of the Republic. Viewing former tormentors' corpses, Hungarians said, "They shot our children." Although the 1956 Hungarian uprising failed to liberate the country from Soviet domination, it became a symbol of freedom for people throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. Labeling the events a counterrevolution, communist authorities exacted revenge in two years of terror and intimidation. Then, for the next thirty years, they pursued a policy of forced forgetting, attempting to obliterate public memory of the events. As communism unraveled in the late 1980s, the 1956 revolution was resurrected as inspiration for a new political order. In Imagining Postcommunism, Beverly James demonstrates how 1956 became a foundational myth according to which the bloody events of that fall ...