A Reluctant and Fearful West - 1989 and Its International Context
A Reluctant and Fearful West - 1989 and Its International Context

Summary/Abstract: From 1945 to 1990, Hungary was part of the Soviet Union’s buffer zone that extended from the Baltic states to the Balkans, a zone in which Moscow had imposed clones of the Stalinist political system after 1945. It was a zone of political, military and economic interest, containing Marxist-Leninist client states whose leadership equated national interest with that of the world Communist movement and the Soviet Union. They performed imperial services—economic and military—for the Soviet Union. Hungary’s sovereignty was usurped by the Soviet Union, which possessed unconstrained control of its foreign policy and its territory for military purposes. Initially Hungary, like other countries in the zone, constituted Soviet economic space and supplied the imperial centre with financial resources and raw materials. In later years the Soviet Union loosened its economic stranglehold but still kept Hungary in its commercial and economic orbit. The first ten years of Soviet rule in Hungary can be described as the most flagrant form of foreign control and dominance. From the 1960s, economic relations became somewhat more equal and Soviet control of Hungarian bilateral relations with the Western world was relaxed. However, the country remained under Soviet hegemony and was firmly embedded in the Sovietimposed military and economic alliances, the Warsaw Pact and Comecon.[...]

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