A Public Lecture will take place in Cambridge this evening to mark the 50th anniversary of one of the pivotal moments in the Cold War.

Fifty years ago this weekend, at 4.15 on the morning of November 4 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to crush an extraordinary revolution – one which had succeeded in toppling the Communist government, but which itself barely survived a fortnight.

The Soviet military response to the Hungarian Revolution and the formation of a new Hungarian government under Imre Nagy was one of the key events in Cold War history. Though Stalin had been dead for three years, and despite the beginnings of Khruschev’s “thaw” in domestic policy, the Soviet Union here brutally reaffirmed its dominance over the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe.

To mark the anniversary, the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies, together with the Department of Slavonic Studies, are holding a public lecture this evening at 5pm in Keynes Hall, King’s College.

Dr Attila Szakolszai (pictured) of the Budapest Institute for the Study of the Revolution of 1956 will speak on Interpreting the 1956 Hungarian Revolution: a 50th anniversary retrospect.

The lecture will be followed by a wine reception.

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