Half a century on, revolution still divides Hungary

THE diary of Gyula Csics for October 23, 1956, starts with a 12-year-old boy tending his grandfathers’ graves and ends with him listening to the sounds of a revolution which briefly freed Hungary from Soviet rule.

Mr Csics, now 62 and chief librarian in the county of Tatabanya, wrote in his diary that he went to bed to the sound of 200,000 people calling “let’s pull down the Stalin statue”.

The next day he woke “to the crackling and rattling of gunfire” as Hungarians rose against their oppressors.