A History of Hungary [antikvár]

PREFACE When we first submitted a draft of this volume to Indiana University Press, Hungary was preparing for the 1985 Congress of its Communist Party. The deteriorating economic situation in the country demanded drastic reforms, and these were expected from the Congress. As it could not be predicted what these would be or how the country would change as a result, we ended the volume with a rather vague statement looking ahead to the future. During the last two years of the 1980s Eastern Europe was completely transformed. Poland and Hungary proved to be the countries moving fastest on the road of drastic change. By the end of 1989 János Kádár's People's Republic of Hungary, previously anchored firmly in CMEA and the Warsaw Pact, had become the Republic of Hungary, a multi-party state seeking membership in various West European organizations. The two-tier parliamentary elections of March-April 1990 gave none of the contending parties a clear majority. The Socialists, the party of the erstwhile reform Communists, and the hard-line Communists were practically eliminated from the political scene. Both the Democratic Forum, which received the largest number of votes and which would form the new coalition government, and the Free Democrats, emerging from the elections in second place, as the opposition party, ran on platforms promising a restructuring of the country on the western democratic model. The dramatic changes that occurred in Hungary in the last half of the 1980s are summarized in an epilogue, partly answering the questions with which the earlier draft of our volume had ended but also raising new ones. Let me now turn to the history of this volume's preparation. In April 1981 the newly established Hungarian Studies chair at Indiana University held an inaugural conference during which several Hungarian scholars and their American colleagues met informally to discuss possible further cooperative ventures. Those present agreed that what the profession needed most was a good, basic one-volume history of Hungary that would serve, first of all, classroom needs in English-speaking universities and colleges but that would also be suited as a reference book for nonspecialist historians and the general reading public. It was also agreed that such a volume had to be scholarly in the sense that it had to reflect the best recent scholarship, but readable in style and free of academic paraphernalia. Finally, it was stressed that the volume should not be a collection of essays, but a work written in accordance with specific uniform guidelines. These were the directives which those involved in the preparation of A History of Hungary have followed. At my colleagues' request, I assumed the task of planning this volume. 1 am also responsible for the cuts and editorial changes the various authors were asked to make, for the translation into English of the chapters originally written