Research News
Remembering 1956
Dr Toby Abse, lecturer in Modern European History, recently organised a successful seminar at Goldsmiths, entitled Remembering 1956: Khrushchev’s Secret Speech , Hungary , Suez and their Impact on the Western Left.
Attracting more than 30 participants, including both Goldsmiths staff and students as well as a wider public, both from the local community and from elsewhere in London. The round table discussion group included a number of outside speakers, including Alison Macleod, the author of The Death of Uncle Joe, who gave an extremely eloquent tribute to Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker correspondent in Budapest, who left the CPGB when they refused to print his truthful articles about the Hungarian events, and later wrote Staying Power, the first major historical study of Black people in Britain, who had sadly died a few days before the event to which he had been invited.
Other speakers included Bob Archer, the translator of a participant’s account of the Hungarian revolution, and Keith Flett, probably the most famous letter-writer of his generation, who spoke as editor of the forthcoming book 1956 And All That, to which Abse has contributed a chapter about Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist Leader, in 1956. A lively discussion ensued, in which a very wide range of opinions was expressed, including that of a solitary defender of the Russian invasion of Hungary.