Professor Berend presents a comprehensive inside account of Hungary's economic reforms since the 1950s. Working from Communist Party archives, which have hitherto partially remained closed to scholars, Berend situates the history of these economic reforms within their political context, looking in particular at the role of the Soviet Union. He examines the theoretical background to reform, the obstacles that arose during implementation and the gradual realisation that minor reforms of the old system could no longer work. The Hungarian Economic Reforms 1953-1988 comes at a time when many centrally planned economies are examining their performance and structure and seeking suitable forms of change. The Hungarian reforms have attracted those countries wishing to rid themselves of their Stalinist command economies. Thus the book indirectly sheds light upon Chinese economic reforms and on Gorbachev's Soviet perestroika. It will be of interest to specialists and students of East European studies, with special reference to the EMEA, planned economies and economic reform.

In this book, first published in 1996, Rudolf Tökés offers a comprehensive overview of the rise and fall of the Kadar regime in Hungary between 1957 and 1990. The approach is interdisciplinary, reviewing the regime's record with emphasis on politics, macroeconomic policies, social change and the ideas and personalities of political dissidents and the regime's 'successor generation'. The study provides a fully documented reconstruction of the several phases of the ancien régime's road from economic reform to political collapse, based on interviews with former top party leaders and transcripts of the Party Central Committee. Tökés gives an in-depth account of the personalities and issues involved in Hungary's peaceful transformation from one-party state to parliamentary democracy, and a comprehensive assessment of Hungary's post-Communist politics, economy and society.

The ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries’ informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale.

In the confrontation between the two main economic systems that has marked the twentieth century, capitalism has been declared the winner–by default– over its adversary, socialism. Today, establishing a market economy has become the primary goal of the formerly socialist countries. The history of economic reform helps explain this remarkable turning point. Attempts to improve the old centralized system by expanding enterprise autonomy (in Poland, the Soviet Union, and East Germany) and more radical reforms that limited the role of central planning (in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and China) encountered social and political obstacles or had unexpected and undesired effects. During the 1980s, the idea of a socialist market economy, which had been seen as a "third way" between capitalism and centralized socialism, was abandoned as economists gradually came to support a free market rather than the dogma of planning. Through a comparative and historical analysis of change in socialist and post-socialist systems, this timely and original book clarifies the policies and pitfalls in this extraordinary transition. Bernard Chavance provides a succinct introduction and analysis of the politics and economics of Eastern Europe from the creation of the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union through what he argues have been three major waves of reform since the 1950s to the dismantling of most socialist governments in the 1990s. Exploring the link between the one-party regime and the growing rigidity of socialist economic systems, the author analyzes the failure of both incremental and radical reforms to adapt to new economic challenges, thus leading to the ultimate collapse of communist regimes in Europe.

With a foreword by Seymour Lipset, Hoover Institution and George Mason University, USAThe Fall examines one of the twentieth century's great historical puzzles: why did the communist-led regimes in Eastern Europe collapse so quickly and why was the process of collapse so different from country to country? This major study explains why the impetus for change in Poland and Hungary came from the regimes themselves, while in Czechoslovakia and East Germany it was mass movements which led to the downfall of the regimes.

This book explains how and why the state-socialist regime in Hungary used technology and propaganda to foster industrialization and the conservation of natural resources simultaneously. Further, this book explains why this process was ultimately a failure. By exploring the environmental pre-history of communist Hungary before analyzing the economic development of the Kádár regime, Pál investigates how economic and environmental policies and technology transfer were negotiated between the official communist ideology and the global economic reality of capitalist markets. Pál argues that the modernization project of the Kádár regime (1956–1990) facilitated ecological consciousness – at both an individual and societal level – which provoked great social unrest when positive environmental impact was not achieved. Today, global issues of climate change, urban pollution, resource depletion, and overpopulation transcend political systems, but economic and environmental discourses varied greatly in the twentieth century. This volume is important reading for all those interested in economic and environmental history, as well as political science.