The Istituto Luce, Italy visual memory through the 1900s,was stimulated to produce this documentary by the up-coming 50th anniversary of this drammatic event,as well as by discovery of considerable documentary footage from the time,material believed never shown in italian cinemas or neews reels.The draft of the next and scientific consultancy was entrusted to Professor Giuseppe Parlato,a contemporary history lecturer and student of Renzo De Felice,president of Ugo Spirito Foundation and a leading scholar of Eastern European history.The documentary takes as its starting point the 1945 Yalta pact,where the future shape of Europe was laid out.Describing hov the Soviet Union created communist regimes in the eight states designated as within its orbit,it takes us up to the Yougoslav schism,the death of Stalin and the early months of 1956 when,at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union Communist Party,Khrushchevdenounced the atrocities of the Regime.This lead peoples of the East to demand a review of the premises on which the whole Soviet-controlled system was based ,and workers’ revolts broke out in many satellite states,incouding Eastern Germany,Poland and, in october 1956,Hungary. In that difficult situation,italian communist were entirely aligned with Moscow,to the extent that the Unigtà newspaper described the Budapest patriot as “counter-revolutionary insurgents”. Intellectual Piero Melograni, and cinema critic Callisto Cosulich, both of them Italian Communist Party members at the time,describe how the Left-wing in our country was shocked by those events.Perhaps most significant was the collapse of the myth of the Red Army which, instead of liberating peoples oppressed by the Capitalism, used tanks to massacre students and workers.It was all over in 20 days.Budapest was destroyed. Thousands were arrested and tried and 30.000 people died accross the country. The leader of the rebellion, Imre Nogy, a Leninist Communist who believed the moment had arrived for a shift to democratic and pluralistic government, was arrested , tried and hung. His body was hidden for years and only buried in 1999, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the return of democracy to Hungary.