Lexington Books
Pages: 328
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-1-4985-0906-0 • Hardback • February 2015 • $143.00 • (£110.00)
978-1-4985-0907-7 • eBook • February 2015 • $135.50 • (£105.00)
Pál Germuska is researcher of contemporary military history at the Military History Institute and Museum, Hungarian Ministry of National Defense, and teaches economic history at Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Social Sciences.
Chapter 1: The Roots of International Military Industrial Cooperation
Chapter 2: Establishment of the Framework for Cooperation
Chapter 3: Transformation of COMECON and the Warsaw Pact
Chapter 4: Common Interests, National Interests
Chapter 5: Crumbling Cooperation: Primary Developments of the 1980s
Chapter 6: Integrated Military Industries
A skillful study of the relationship between economic and military developments, and a study that is of significance for the history not only of Hungary but also of the Warsaw Pact as a whole. . . .This is a skillful book that links specifics to a general thesis. Deserves wider attention.
— European Review Of History
Germuska’s well-written monograph documents the ways in which the Soviets incorporated Hungarian input specifically into military cooperation, in the process revealing the many tensions and contradictions that characterized the Kremlin’s relationship with Budapest. . . .Germuska has provided a valuable work that elucidates the ways in which COMECON became the main structure for integrating the military industries of the communist bloc. Readers interested in military integration, Cold War history, Soviet-Hungarian relations, and Moscow’s power globally will benefit from the immense treasures in the book.
— Journal of Military History
[T]he book by Pal Germuska fills an important gap in the literature on socialist cooperation. His is a detailed history of an entire industrial field, but it can also be read as a case study on how the bloc’s military and economic organisations, the CMEA and the Warsaw Pact interacted, and consequently fought over jurisdiction. Their failures to define their respective authority, as depicted by Germuska in his book, testify to the reasons why the socialist bloc was not able to stand up to its vision to challenge the Western bloc.
— Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines
This in-depth study on the Hungarian case illuminates the synergies and tensions inherent to the international military-industry cooperation within the Socialist bloc. By looking at the complex institutional dynamics of the COMECON, and relating them to a small economy’s goals and constrains, it unveils the mechanisms of a hegemonic type of cooperation.
— Federico Romero, European University Institute
Pál Germuska provides a rich, in-depth and long overdue history of the military industrial cooperation in the postwar Soviet Bloc using a wide array of fresh archival sources. This leads to a nuanced and picture of the process of Sovietization which shows that countries in East-Central Europe such as Hungary had agency yet in a context clearly dominated by the Soviet Union up until 1990.
— Johan Schot, University of Sussex