In Hungary, which fell under Soviet influence at the end of World War II, those who had participated in the wartime atrocities were tried by so called people’s courts. This book analyses this process in an objective, quantitative way, contributing to the present timely discussion on the Hungarian war guilt. The authors apply a special focus on the gender aspect of the trials. Political justice had a specific nature in Hungary. War criminals began to be brought to trial while fighting was still underway in the western part of the country, well before the Nuremberg trials. Not only crimes committed during the war were tried in the same frame but also post-war ones. As far as the post-war period is concerned, legal proceedings regarding these crimes were most often launched on the basis of Act VII of 1946. This act of law concerned "the criminal law protection of the democratic constitutional order and the republic" and its basic aim was to facilitate the creation of a communist dictatorship and to deal with perceived or real enemies of the regime.

This bibliography is an exhaustive, objective and unique list of sources in the study of an event the historical significance of which becomes continually more apparent. The list consists of over two thousand entries from books and pamphlets, periodical articles, motion pictures and monitored broadcasts. The articles are arranged by language, and the Hungarian and Slavic book entries are provided with English translations.

This volume presents the story of the Hungarian Revolution in 120 original documents, ranging from the minutes of Khrushchev's first meeting with Hungarian leaders after Stalin's death in 1953, to Yeltsin's declaration on Hungary in 1992. The great majority of the material comes from archives that were inaccessible until the 1990s, and appears here in English for the first time. Book jacket.

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.

This volume provides an important and exciting contribution to the knowledge on punishment across Europe. Over the past decade, punitiveness has been studied through analyses of ‘increased’ or ‘new’ forms of punishment in western countries. Comparative studies on the other hand have illustrated important differences in levels of punitiveness between these countries and have tried to explain these differences by looking at risk and protective factors. Covering both quantitative and qualitative dimensions, this book focuses on mechanisms interacting with levels of punitiveness that seem to allow room for less punitive (political) choices, especially within a European context: social policies, human rights and a balanced approach to victim rights and public opinion in constitutional democracies. The book is split into three sections: Punishment and Welfare. Chapters look into possible lessons to be learned from characteristics and developments in Scandinavian and some Continental European countries. Punishment and Human Rights. Contributions analyze how human rights in Europe can and do act as a shield against – but sometimes also as a possible motor for – criminalization and penalization. Punishment and Democracy. The increased political attention to victims’ rights and interests and to public opinion surveys in European democracies is discussed as a possible risk for enhanced levels of punitiveness in penal policies and evaluated against the background of research evidence about the wishes and expectations of victims of crime and the ambivalence and ‘polycentric consistency’ of public opinion formations about crime and punishments. This book will be a valuable addition to the literature in this field and will be of interest to students, scholars and policy officials across Europe and elsewhere.