Search results for ""Author Bryan Cartledge""

White aster flowers, on sale on the streets of Budapest on the eve of All Souls' Day, are made the symbol of a revolution which brings Mihaly Karolyi (1875-1955) to power at the head of a National Council. Karoly concludes an armistice which leaves large areas of Hungarian territory under occupation by French, Romanian and Serbian forces. Following the King-Emperor's abdication in November 1918, Hungary is declared an independent republic with Karolyi as its President. He sets about meeting Hungary's most pressing social need, for land reform. But Karolyi's liberal regime is soon beset by strong opposition from the right and from the left. The Allies seal Karolyi's fate by refusing to end the economic blockade of Hungary and by imposing, even in advance of a peace settlement (Hungary is denied an invitation until the Conference is virtually over), even harsher armistice terms. Karolyi flinches from opposing these measures by force. The small socialist element in his government of well-meaning aristocrats defects and forms an alliance with Hungary's fledgling Communist Party. Karolyi resigns and chooses exile. The Communists, led by Bela Kun, take power. Kun raises a Red Army, which defeats a Czech invasion but fails to stem the Romanian advance, which enters Budapest in defiance of orders from Paris and engages in an orgy of pillage and destruction. The Peace Conference despatches a British diplomat, Sir George Clerk, to Budapest to broker a Romanian withdrawal. Clerk succeeds in forming a coalition government of right-wing parties, with token representation for the centre-left, which he recognises in the name of the Peace Conference and invites to send a delegation to Paris. It includes Counts Istvan Bethlen (1874-1946) and Pal Teleki, both future prime ministers. The delegation is presented on arrival, on 6 January 1920, with the draft peace treaty for Hungary which the expert committees of the Conference have produced and which the Council has approved without amendment. The Hungarians are appalled to find that the treaty will deprive their country of two-thirds of her territory and over half of her population. The injustice of the Treaty will drive Hungary into the arms of Nazi Germany, a fatal alliance which will doom Hungary's Jews to annihilation and Hungary to defeat and destruction in the Second World War.

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The Will to Survive describes how a small country, for much of its existence squeezed between two empires, surrounded by hostile neighbours and subjected to invasion and occupation, survived the frequent tragedies of its eventful history to become a sovereign democratic republic within the European Union. The Mongol, Ottoman, Habsburg, Nazi and Soviet empires have all since vanished; but Hungary, a victim of all five and despite suffering the consequences of being on the losing side in every war she has fought, still occupies the territory the Magyar tribes claimed for themselves in the ninth century. The author, whose interest in Hungary stems from his service there as British Ambassador during the declining years of Kadar's Communist regime, traces Hungary's story from the arrival of the Magyars in Europe to the accession of Hungary to membership of NATO and the European Union. The eleven hundred years covered by this stirring account embrace medieval greatness, Turkish occupation, Habsburg domination, unsuccessful struggles for independence, massive deprivation of territory and population after the First World War, a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany motivated by the hope of redress, and forty years of Soviet-imposed Communism interrupted by a gallant but brutally suppressed revolution in 1956.

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