Luxury And The Ruling Elite In Socialist Hungary

Download or read book Luxury and the Ruling Elite in Socialist Hungary written by György Majtényi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, a new community of elite emerged in Hungary, in spite of the communist principles espoused by the government. In Luxury and the Ruling Elite in Socialist Hungary, György Majtényi allows us a peek inside their affluence. Majtényi exposes the lavish standard of living that the higher echelon enjoyed, complete with pools, Persian rugs, extravagant furniture, servants, and groundskeepers. They shopped in private stores stocked with expensive meats and tropical fruits just for them. They benefited from access to everything from books, telephone lines, and international travel to hunting grounds, soccer games, and even the choicest cemetery plots. But Majtényi also reveals the underbelly of such society, particularly how these privileges were used as a way of maintaining power, initiating or denying entry to party members, and strengthening the very hierarchies that communism promised to abolish. Taking readers on a fascinating and often surprising look inside the manor homes and vacation villas of wealthy post–World War II Hungarians, Majtényi offers fresh insight into the realities of patriarchy, loyalty, gender, and class within the communist regime.

Download or read book Everyday Life under Communism and After written by Tibor Valuch and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism. Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.

Download or read book Survival under Dictatorships written by László Borhi and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. Through the prism of survival, László Borhi explores the relationship between the individual and power, attempting to understand the mechanism of oppression and terror produced by arbitrary, unbridled power through the experience of normal people. Despite the obvious peculiarities of time and place, the Hungarian cases convey universal lessons about the Holocaust, Nazism, and Stalinism. In the author's conception, the National Socialist and Stalinist experiences are linked on several levels. Both regimes defended their visions of the future against social groups whom they saw as implacable enemies of those visions, and who therefore had to be destroyed for sake of social perfection. Furthermore, the social practices of National Socialism were passed on. And although Stalinism was imposed by a foreign power, some of the survival skills for coping with it were rehearsed under the previous hellish experience.

Download or read book The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class written by György Péteri and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023-11-13 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the decisive role of this class in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in its everyday. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.

Download or read book Alienating Labour written by Eszter Bartha and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Communist Party dictatorships in Hungary and East Germany sought to win over the “masses” with promises of providing for ever-increasing levels of consumption. This policy—successful at the outset—in the long-term proved to be detrimental for the regimes because it shifted working class political consciousness to the right while it effectively excluded leftist alternatives from the public sphere. This book argues that this policy can provide the key to understanding of the collapse of the regimes. It examines the case studies of two large factories, Carl Zeiss Jena (East Germany) and Rába in Győr (Hungary), and demonstrates how the study of the formation of the relationship between the workers’ state and the industrial working class can offer illuminating insights into the important issue of the legitimacy (and its eventual loss) of Communist regimes.

Download or read book Go East! written by Balázs Ablonczy and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two centuries, Hungarians believed they shared an ethnic link with people of Japanese, Bulgarian, Estonian, Finnish, and Turkic descent. Known as "Turanism," this ideology impacts Hungarian politics, science, and cultural and ethnic identity even today. In Go East!: A History of Hungarian Turanism, Balázs Ablonczy examines the rise of Hungarian Turanism and its lasting effect on the country's history. Turanism arose from the collapse of the Kingdom of Hungary, when the nation's intellectuals began to question Hungary's place in the Western world. The influence of this ideology reached its peak during World War I, when Turanian societies funded research, economic missions, and geographical expeditions. Ablonczy traces Turanism from its foundations through its radicalization in the interwar period, its survival in emigrant circles, and its resurgence during the economic crisis of 2008. Turanian notions can be seen today in the rise of the extreme right-wing party Jobbik and in Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's party Fidesz. Go East! provides fresh insight into Turanism's key political and artistic influences in Hungary and illuminates the mark it has left on history.

Download or read book Austerities and Aspirations written by Béla Tomka and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph provides an analysis of the economic performance and living standard in Czechoslovakia and its successor states, Hungary, and Poland since 1945. The novelty of the book lies in its broad comparative perspective: it places East Central Europe in a wider European framework that underlines the themes of regional disparities and European commonalities. Going beyond the traditional growth paradigm, the author systematically studies the historical patterns of consumption, leisure, and quality of life—aspects that Tomka argues can best be considered in relation to one other. By adopting this “triple approach,” he undertakes a truly interdisciplinary research drawing from history, economics, sociology, and demography. As a result of Tomka’s three-pillar comparative analysis, the book makes a major contribution to the debates on the dynamics of economic growth in communist and postcommunist East Central Europe, on the socialist consumer culture along with its transformation after 1990, and on how the accounts on East Central Europe can be integrated into the emerging field of historical quality of life research.