The other day before lending Thomas my copy of, "The Poverty of Theory, " by E.P. Thompson, I was re-reading the other brilliant long essay there (well, truth be told, I betcha his polemic against Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson mid way through s/b be great too...) on Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish marxist philosopher who unfortunately turned towards right-wing socdem positions after his leaving Poland in '68. (Sometime in the 80's he addressed a SDUSA convention...maybe the one where Radosh introduced Eden Pastora?) Anyway, Thompson and the others who were the nucleus of the British New Left that emerged out of the CPGB and other mileus, never gave up as he put it seeing that Stalinism and capitalism existed in a sick, symbiosis feeding off each others betrayed ideological representations with a load of cant and demogogy.
For those looking for good, lefty material on the Hungarian revolt, see a chapter in, "The Stalinist Legacy, "edited by Tariq Ali, originally in a Penguin pb. early 90's, re-issued a few yrs. ago by Lynne Riener publishers in Boulder, Co. in hb. John Saville, I think, in the Socialist Register 1976, if memory serves. The Peter Fryer book, I gave the URL for last week. Fryer was the correspondent of the CPGB in Budapest. Bill Lomax, another UK lefty has a book, as well. The novel by Clancy Sigal, Going Away, takes place in '56, and has roman a cleffish portraits of figures in the US left and their anguished reactions to the intervention and the de-Stalinization speech of Khruschev. Also, see a chapter on the CPUSA and '56 in Maurice Isserman's book on the transition from the Old to the New Left. Title escapes me right now. the one where the pb. has a photo of the anti-HUAC demo at S.F. City Hall where the cops hosed folks down the stairs. Finally, two other autobios before I drop some cites on Cazechoslovakia and '68. John Gates autobio. from the late 50's and Dorothy Healey's from the 90's. Both major figures in the CPUSA.
A few weeks ago perusing the indispensible National Secuarity Archives website, I read the transcipts of Comrade Dubcek and Brezhnev over the phone in '68. Chilling stuff, which corroberates the acct. of another Czech CP Central Committee member, Zdenek Mlynar, in his, Nightfrost in Prague, published by Karz-Cohl pubs. in NYC, early 80's. Telos published a chapter and ITN in the UK made a docudrama based on it which ABC broadcast here around 1980. Ooops, one more cite on Hungary but, from a later period. "A Worker in a Workers State, " by Miklos Haraszti. Preface by H. Boll or G. Grass. Miklos is now on the center-left, when he wrote the book was a neo-maoist (!) Michael Pugliese