Jó­zsef Kiss: The Fall of 1956 in Slo­va­kia

The study exam­ines the reac­tion of the press in South Slo­va­kia on the upris­ing and rev­o­lu­tion in Hun­ga­ry in con­text of Czechoslo­vak author­i­ties. It also deals with the nation­al and Slo­vak party lead­er­s, and par­tial­ly with the steps of party author­i­ties in vil­lages, and their steps in mil­i­tary field. The study tries to define the sit­u­a­tion pres­ent in the Hun­gar­i­an minor­i­ty, the offi­cial reac­tions of the press and the reports of agents as well. It also explains these fields of the events as parts of a process, lin­ked to each oth­er, try­ing to find their con­nec­tiv­i­ty. Con­sid­er­ing the method­ol­o­gy, the author used a dif­fer­ent method that had been used before. Since in these the sev­er­al fields are sep­a­rat­ed from each oth­er, time order fades, many events arise from the dynam­ics of events.
The author dis­cuss­es the events of the rev­o­lu­tion by divid­ing it into sev­er­al part­s. In this he par­tial­ly fol­lows the method of divid­ing Hun­gar­i­an events into etapes cre­at­ed by Charles Gá­ti, but with­in it – fol­low­ing the cre­ation of the Czechoslo­vak sit­u­a­tion – tries to cap­ture the deter­min­ing points and clas­si­fy the events in sev­er­al field­s.
As of the sources of the study, it obvi­ous­ly uses facts from other authors which are then put into new rela­tion­s, and com­plet­ed with the author’s own research results in cen­tral archives in Prague and Bratisla­va.
The study’s con­tri­bu­tion was to try to cre­ate an ove­rall pic­ture. This can prob­a­bly ini­ti­ate a reasearch of par­tial prob­lems and field­s, main­ly from the point of view of the miss­ing part of the local his­to­ry of South Slo­va­ki­a.