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Four decades ago, the first major anti-Soviet uprising in Eastern Europe - the 1956 revolution in Hungary - took place. Many scholars writing about this event during the Cold War have operated more or less on the implicit assumption that the Soviet leaders were the key aggressors and all the East European leaders the reluctant and passivist allies.2 To use a trite metaphor: the dog (USSR) wagged the tail (East Europe).The end of the Cold War and opening of Soviet bloc archives now permit scholars to gain a better understanding, not simply of Soviet behavior, but also of the behavior and motivation of the other communist states, and of the deeper nuances of intrabloc relations. We can see that, although the Soviet leaders were the prime movers in 1956, they were not the only ones who feared the possible unraveling of the Warsaw Pact and "spillover" of anti-communist ideas across their own borders. Leaders in Czechoslovakia and Romania, for example, reported popular unrest in their own countries during the Hungarian conflict. Even Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia ended up supporting the Soviet use of military force against Hungary. Yugoslavia was the only independent communist state since the 1948 Moscow-Belgrade rift, aloof from the Warsaw Pact or Soviet bloc, courted in the 1950s both by the United States and Soviet Union, admired by the increasingly independent Asian and African countries, and vehemently critical of Soviet great power chauvinism. This article seeks to illuminate the unique, zigzagging behavior of Josip Broz Tito3 and his subordinates in the 1956 events, drawing on newly released documents from four of Moscow's major archives, including the secret notes of key CPSU Presidium meetings taken by Vladimir Malin.4 It will also explain the hitherto murky circumstances surrounding Tito's decision to grant Imre Nagy political refuge in his Budapest embassy on the day of the invasion (November 4,1956). Tito's reluctance to surrender Nagy - and the later Soviet abduction of him - chilled SovietYugoslav relations once again.
Despite the Soviet-Yugoslav rapprochement in July, 1955, when Tito was lavishly feted in Moscow, Tito's relations with Khrushchev, his colleagues, and the East European leaders had remained tense beneath the surface in the months preceding the Hungarian conflict. Normalization of ties with Rakosi's Hungary, in particular, dragged....