BiblioVault - Books about Europe, Eastern

History in My Life

A Memoir of Three Eras

Ivan T. Berend is Distinguished Research Professor at the History Department of the University of California Los Angeles.

Central European University Press, 2009

Ivan T. Berend is Distinguished Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Director of the European Studies Program. He was one of the masterminds of regime change in Hungary. He made a career in Hungary as a university professor, Rector of the University of Economics (1973–79), and President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1985–90). He was President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (1995–2000), and Vice-President of the International Economic History Association (1986–1994). His research interests are the complex economic, social, ideological, and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th–20th century; economic modernization; problems of European backwardness; transition from state socialism to capitalism. He published and 26 books and more than 120 studies.

Before he became a professor at UCLA, Ivan Berend had survived five regime changes and two revolutions in Hungary, had been in prison and German concentration camp in 1944–45.

His memoir offers an interesting case study, a subjective addition to the “objective” historical works on Central and Eastern European state socialism. It describes the hard choices of intellectuals in a dictatorial state: 1. remain in isolation, concentrate on scholarly works, and exclude politics in your personal life; 2. be in opposition, criticize and unveil the regime, accept discrimination and exclusion; 3. remain within the establishment and work for reforming the country using legal possibilities to criticize the regime and to achieve changes from within.

Berend’s book raises basic historical questions and debates, compares East European and American higher education systems, and presents an eyewitness’ insights on life in the United States.

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Hopes and Shadows

Eastern Europe After Communism

J. F. Brown

Duke University Press, 1994

After the exuberance that marked the revolutions of 1989, the countries of Eastern Europe have faced the breathtakingly ambitious task of remaking their societies. Simultaneously they have sought to build liberal democracies based on market economics, while confronting reassertions of claims for national independence long suppressed. Taking up where his previous book Surge to Freedom ended, J. F. Brown’s Hopes and Shadows analyzes the results of the first four years of Eastern Europe’s separation from communist rule and the prospects for the future.
The forces at work in the midst of this revolution are examined from a perspective that is necessarily both historical and contemporary as the complex relationship between the tasks that face these countries and the legacy of their communist and pre-communist past shape the difficult present. As the usefulness of the designation "Eastern Europe" is itself questioned, Brown provides both regional and country-by-country analysis of the political situation. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland are grouped together, as are Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania, to address questions such as the development of liberal democratic culture, the activation of democratic institutions and procedures, and the future of former communist bureaucracies. He considers the former Yugoslavia—now torn violently apart—largely as a separate case. The theoretical, political, social, financial, cultural, and psychological dimensions of the transition from socialism to a market economy are discussed in detail. The final aspect of this revolution, the failure of which most immediately threatens the entire process, is the attempt to build new and stable national statehoods. Brown explores the history and impact of the current reemergence of nationalism and the dangers it represents.
A comprehensive and authoritative survey, J. F. Brown’s analysis and presentation of the contemporary Eastern European political landscape will be essential reading for scholars and specialists and of great interest to general readers.

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Hot Books in the Cold War

The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain

Alfred A. Reisch

Central European University Press, 2013

This study reveals the hidden story of the secret book distribution program to Eastern Europe financed by the CIA during the Cold War. At its height between 1957 and 1970, the book program was one of the least known but most effective methods of penetrating the Iron Curtain, reaching thousands of intellectuals and professionals in the Soviet Bloc. Reisch conducted thorough research on the key personalities involved in the book program, especially the two key figures: S. S. Walker, who initiated the idea of a “mailing project,” and G. C. Minden, who developed it into one of the most effective political and psychological tools of the Cold War. The book includes excellent chapters on the vagaries of censorship and interception of books by communist authorities based on personal letters and accounts from recipients of Western material. It will stand as a testimony in honor of the handful of imaginative, determined, and hard-working individuals who helped to free half of Europe from mental bondage and planted many of the seeds that germinated when communism collapsed and the Soviet bloc disintegrated.

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