Time, we think, lends perspective to the way in which we consider historical events. The passing of years helps us to understand what it was that happened long ago — as we could not when we were caught up in all its immediacy. Much as an artist is able to do when he

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) distances himself from the familiar, so time enables us to look back at what once confused us, until all becomes clear.

Well, maybe. There are episodes whose meaning, no matter how many times you turn them over, just won't be pinned down. Whatever it was that happened in Hungary 50 years ago is one of them. Did the short-lived government of Imre Nagy, a Communist reformer, mark the moment when it became clear that Soviet domination of Eastern and Central Europe could not last? Did it give people hope, however deep they buried it? Or did Nagy's fumbling inexperience — coupled with an insecurity in Moscow, still coming to terms with Stalin's death and the revelation by Nikita Khrushchev of his crimes — play into the hands of hard-liners, encourage them to crush dissent, and hence plunge half of a continent into a gloom that would last for another 33 years? Did the U.S., which had appeared to encourage resistance to Soviet rule — but did nothing to help those who resisted — betray Hungary? What about France and Britain, whose harebrained Suez adventure provided Moscow with a convenient diversion once Khrushchev had decided to restore the old order? What should we call Hungary, '56? Was it an uprising or merely a change of government; a rejection of communism, or an attempt to give it a human face?

Erich Lessing, whose remarkable photographs taken for Life magazine laid bare the drama, daring and horror of those autumn days 50 years ago, has no doubt what he saw. "This was not just a little uprising, like in Poland or in East Germany in 1953," he said last week, "this was a real revolution. There was no consultation; it just jumped up here and there." Despairing at the brutality of a particularly nasty communist regime, ordinary citizens in Budapest — students, office workers — turned themselves into guerrilla fighters almost literally overnight, learning on the job, as it were, how to lure a Soviet tank down a narrow alley and bomb it with Molotov cocktails. "There was a tremendous euphoria, especially after the Russians agreed to a cease-fire and withdrew to their barracks," says Lessing. "People thought, 'This is going to be it. It's going to work.'"

It didn't. A few days after the cease-fire, Soviet forces ostensibly leaving Hungary turned around and crushed the resistance. Some sort of light had been snuffed out. I can remember as if it were yesterday — it is my very first political memory — a morning assembly at my British elementary school at which we were all asked to pray ("Hands together, eyes closed ... ") for the little boys and girls in Hungary. "I went back to Hungary three weeks later," says Lessing. "The euphoria, that tremendous hope, that belief that people's lives were going to change had gone. A tremendous sadness set in." A Europe in which the memory of the horrors of war was still fresh felt, as it were, a collective shudder. The lessons seemed to be clear: a yearning for freedom would not always be consummated; tanks were more powerful than words; the good guys did not always win; Europe would remain divided.

Indeed, at a time when cheap flights make weekends in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic no big deal for kids from Manchester to Malmö, it is hard to remember how permanent the division of Europe once felt. It wasn't just Budapest, '56 that taught us that — so did Prague '68, when the Soviet army once again reminded those who lived behind the Iron Curtain who was in charge. In the West, the visible costs of division were essentially trivial — a sort of regret that the jumbled spires and steeples of Prague and Krakow would remain the stuff of prints and woodcuts rather than things one saw for oneself — but in the East they were not. Two generations grew up in a climate where their life chances were stunted, where feelings had to be kept private, language stripped of the sort of inflection that would cause trouble. Some gave up more than the ability to think and speak freely; hundreds of Hungarians were executed after 1956, Nagy among them.

What we thought was fixed and immutable, of course, was nothing of the sort. The lines of division that had once seemed hard and fast withered away in 1989, and the old links and shared experiences that bind Europe together were revealed once more. That process, to be sure, was not always painless — the long war of the Yugoslav succession saw to that — but in comparison to the sadness and division after World War II, Europe is now in a state of grace, peaceful and united. It is a lucky continent, a place in which horrors such as those that took place in Budapest 50 years ago now seem scarcely conceivable. But they happened — and in parts of the world less happy than Europe, they happen still. And so if there is one true lesson that modern Europeans might take from the confused story of the Hungarian revolution 50 years ago it is this: happiness and prosperity, liberty and peace do not just happen. They are blessings that have devolved to us because brave men and women argued for them, fought for them, died for them. We do well to honor their memory.

• MICHAEL ELLIOTT
• In 1956, photographer Erich Lessing captured the desperate nobility of Hungarians rebelling against Soviet rule. Today, his pictures remain a testament to Europe's struggle for unity and freedom