The Soviet Union and Cold War Neutrality and Nonalignment in Europe examines how the neutral European countries and the Soviet Union interacted after World War II. Amid the Cold War division of Europe into Western and Eastern blocs, several long-time neutral countries abandoned neutrality and joined NATO. Other countries remained neutral but were still perceived as a threat to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Based on extensive archival research, this volume offers state-of-the-art essays about relations between Europe’s neutral states and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and how these relations were perceived by other powers.

This book examines the Vogeler/Sanders espionage case that ruptured ties between the US and UK and Hungary in 1949, and analyses this as an example of Western covert operations in the early Cold War. The work focuses on the 1949 case of ITT in Hungary, where two of its executives, the American Robert A. Vogeler and the Briton Edgar Sanders, were arrested by the secret police, tortured, forced to confess, put on a public show trial, and found guilty of espionage. This happened at a time that the US and the UK were cooperating in numerous operations to undermine the credibility of the communist regime and to encourage local resistance by “all means short of war.” Using the case as a lens to examine the dynamics of the early Cold War, the book integrates business history, diplomatic history and intelligence history, and thereby traces the impact of the case on Anglo-Hungarian, American-Hungarian, and Anglo-American relations during the critical period of 1949-1956. Vogeler’s case had a strong impact on the growing criticism of the Truman Administration’s containment policies and contributed to the demand for a more activist policy of ‘liberation of captive peoples’. His experiences also rallied the business community, especially trade associations such as the National Foreign Trade Council, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers, to support the anti-communist crusade both abroad and at home. Vogeler’s wife also waged a personal campaign to secure her husband’s release and exemplifies the activism of conservative and Catholic women who waged their own anti-communist crusade. The book thus tells the “rest of the story” often omitted in traditional works. This book will be of much interest to students of Cold War history, intelligence studies and European political history.

Dealing with Dictators explores America's Cold War efforts to make the dictatorships of Eastern Europe less tyrannical and more responsive to the country's international interests. During this period, US policies were a mix of economic and psychological warfare, subversion, cultural and economic penetration, and coercive diplomacy. Through careful examination of American and Hungarian sources, László Borhi assesses why some policies toward Hungary achieved their goals while others were not successful. When George H. W. Bush exclaimed to Mikhail Gorbachev on the day the Soviet Union collapsed, "Together we liberated Eastern Europe and unified Germany," he was hardly doing justice to the complicated history of the era. The story of the process by which the transition from Soviet satellite to independent state occurred in Hungary sheds light on the dynamics of systemic change in international politics at the end of the Cold War.