Dealing With Dictators ─ The United States, Hungary, and East Central Europe, 1942-1989

Dealing with Dictators explores America's efforts to make the dictatorships of Eastern Europe less tyrannical and more responsive to the international interests of the United States during the Cold War. In this complex history, US Cold War policies toward Eastern Europe were a mix of economic and psychological warfare, subversion, cultural and economic penetration, and coercive diplomacy. Through careful examination of American and Hungarian sources, Laszlo Borhi assesses US policies toward Hungary to determine why some policies achieved their goals while others were not successful. The day the Soviet Union collapsed, George H. W. Bush penned a personal note to his friend Mikhail Gorbachev in which he immodestly declared "Together we liberated Eastern Europe and unified Germany." This bold claim hardly did justice to the complicated history of the transition from the Cold War to the reunification of Europe, the restoration of multiparty democracy, and national independence in Eastern Europe. The story of the process by which this transition occurred in Hungary sheds light on the dynamics of systemic change in international politics at the end of the Cold War.

Laszlo Borhi is Scientific Counsellor of the Institute of History Center for Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and formerly the holder of the Ranki Gyorgy Hungarian Chair at Indiana University. He is the author of Hungary in the Cold War, 19451956: Between the United States and the Soviet Union (2004) and the co-author and co-editor of Soviet Occupation of Romania, Hungary and Austria, 1944-1948 (Forthcoming). He is the recipient of the Gold Cross of Merit of the Hungarian Republic (2006), the Zoltan Bezeredj Prize of the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage of Hungary (2006), and the Gyorgy Ranki Prize of the Hungarian Historical Association (1995).