Lexington Books
Pages: 422
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-4985-5121-2 • Hardback • May 2018 • $147.00 • (£113.00)
978-1-4985-5122-9 • eBook • May 2018 • $139.50 • (£108.00)
Stefano Bottoni is senior fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Introduction: Nationalism and Communism in a Stalinist Ecosystem
Chapter 1: Managing Ethnic Diversity: From Greater Romania to the Soviet Model
Chapter 2: Stalin’s Gift: The Creation of the Hungarian Autonomous Region
Chapter 3: Romanian Drivers in the Hungarian Car: Center and Periphery after Stalin
Chapter 4: The Stalinist Greenhouse: Everyday Life in a “Little Hungary”
Chapter 5: The Impact of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Romania
Chapter 6: Checkmate: The Launch of the Romanian National Communist Project
Conclusion: Overcoming Stalin’s Legacy?
Stefano Bottoni’s history of the short-lived Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-inspired experiment that circumscribed one-third of Romania’s Hungarian population inside a territorial administrative unit in the heart of pre-Ceaușescu communist Romania, joins a growing and important body of scholarship on east central Europe analyzing the entangled histories of peoples, places, and periods in a particular region... The real virtue of the author’s work is in the assemblage and skillful deployment of Hungarian and Romanian-language archival sources, oral histories, and an array of secondary sources within a compelling narrative and taut analytical framework. . . . It is now the definitive work, in any language, on this rather specialized topic, and stands out as a seminal case study in the building and dismantling of a Stalinist ecosystem in Europe’s eastern periphery.— Slavic Review
A particular merit of Stefano Bottoni’s unique study is his instructive analysis of the genesis of the Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR) and of what he terms its ‘Stalinist eco-system,’ one which confronted questions of political ideology, national and cultural identity, and economic backwardness. As the author points out, the creation of this region, along with the Yugoslav experiment, was the only example of integrative minority policy in postwar East-Central Europe, and represented an attempt to solve a deeply rooted national question by giving administrative ‘autonomy’ to a predominantly Hungarian region of Transylvania. The ideological underpinning of the region, dictated to the Romanian Party by the Soviet leadership in 1952, followed the Bolshevik pattern of territorial autonomy elaborated by Lenin and Stalin in the early 1920s. The Hungarians of the Region became a ‘titular nationality’ and were accorded significant cultural rights. However, the Romanian leadership also used the region as an instrument of political and social integration of the Hungarian minority into the communist state.— Dennis Deletant, Georgetown University
Stefano Bottoni’s book on the Hungarian Autonomous Region in socialist Romania is revelatory in its details of high politics, the history of communism, and everyday life. Bottoni has used Hungarian, Romanian, and Soviet sources meticulously to tell a lively, convincing, and important story of Stalin’s imposition of a territorial solution to Romania’s most bewildering national problem. He sets this in the broad context of longue durée Transylvanian history, postwar communism and nationalism, the purges, the thaw, intra-bloc conflict, and ethnic politics.— Irina Livezeanu, University of Pittsburgh