Liberation: What Next?

1. The Seven Year Stalemate

Just as we are enabled to define our youth only when an adult shock—marriage or a death or the need to make a living—marks the fact that it has ended, so in history we come to understand the nature of one period only when unexpected events show that another has begun. The events of the last four months of 1956 were of this pedagogic kind. It is not yet clear what they mean, but through them we may learn more clearly the meaning of what went before.