Canadian Slavonic Papers

Forgotten Minorities: The Hungarians of East Central Europe. Hungarian Studies Review(Toronto) by N.F. Dreisziger; A. LudanyiReview by: Paul Robert MagocsiCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 33, No. 1 (March 1991), pp. 77-78Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40869273 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 77

Dniprobud. Rassweiler also used the archives of the family of Colonel Hugo Cooper, the American consultant to Dniprobud. And, in addition, she interviewed some of the veterans of the construction project. This impressive research has served as the basis of her analysis of the Dniprobud experience.

Rassweiler concentrates on the stages of Dniprohes's development, and shows the real roles of Trotsky, Stalin, Kuibyshev, Chubar and other political leaders in the realization of this vainglorious project. Her analysis shows that I.H. Alexandrov's idea was realized at the expense of the peasantry.

The history of the construction of Dniprokombinat (the hydroelectric station and the large enterprises that consumed its energy) is examined within the context of Stalin's "great leap" of 1929, the aim of which was to "build the foundations of a socialist economy." Rassweiler portrays the naive enthusiasm of the young labourers participating in the celebrated project and, at the same time, shows that their working conditions, like those on other construction projects of the first five-year plan, were extremely difficult. Stalin's "great leap" was made possible by manual labour, not technology. For each of its gigantic projects, unskilled workers were recruited in the tens of thousands from the countryside. The construction of the Dniprokombinat alone required the labour of 60,000 workers, most of whom were peasants escaping the misery of collectivization.

Rassweiler's book is an important contribution to the study of industrialization. It deepens our understanding of the nature and character of the destructive forces which gave rise to the command type of economy. Although incapable of self-generating development, this system survived to the end of the 1980s.

S.V. Kul'chyns'kyi, Institute of History, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev

N.F. Dreisziger and A. Ludanyi, eds. Forgotten Minorities: The Hungarians of East Central Europe. Hungarian Studies Review (Toronto) 16.1-2 (1989). 151 pp.

Virtually all books dealing with East Central Europe which appeared in the late 1980s are already dated. The editors of this volume on the Hungarian minorities recognized that a similar fate awaited their book. Therefore, they indicated in the introduction that their volume might, at best, be only "a guide to understanding [the] background" (p. 16) to the enormous sociopolitical changes that have occurred throughout the region in the last few years.

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78 BOOK REVIEWS

The subject is the status of Hungarian minorities living in countries

adjacent to present day Hungary - Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Most of the six essays represent revisions of papers first given in 1985 at Oberlin College, where the 1 10th anniversary of the birth of Oscar Jaszi (1875-1957) was celebrated. Jaszi, a distinguished scholar of the Austro-

Hungarian monarchy, played an active role in trying to accommodate Hungary's minorities when the boundaries of East Central Europe were being redrawn after World War I. His efforts ultimately failed; in that period two-thirds of Hungarian territory was lost to neighbouring successor states, thus giving birth to the

Hungarian minority question. By the 1980s, over three million Hungarians were still living as minorities in Romania (over 2 million), Czechoslovakia (circa 660,000), Yugoslavia (circa 500,000), and the Soviet Union (circa 200,000).

The essays in this volume concentrate on the fate of these minorities

primarily during the forty years of Communist rule following World War II.

Quite appropriately, the collection opens with a general essay by Walker Conner on Leninist nationality policy, which is in effect a summary of the main theses in his excellent monograph, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton University Press, 1984). The subsequent five essays deal with the Hungarian minority experience in specific countries. Their quality, as

may be expected in a collection of this type, is not consistent. The coverage on Czechoslovakia (two essays by Magda Adam and Karoly Nagy) and Romania

(Louis J. Elteto) are the least satisfactory. Adam's contribution is a loosely- structured string of excerpts from a larger work that tries to view the fate of

Hungarians in Czechoslovakia through their press. Nagy and Elteto do little more than single out the fate of individuals or of publicistic essays, and condemn what they consider the anti-Hungarian policies of the Czechoslovak (in particular Slovak) and Romanian Communist governments. While their assessment might have merit, the manner in which they approach the subject hardly convinces the

impartial reader. More traditional in approach are the essays by Steven Bela Vardy on

Hungarians in Ruthenia (the Transcarpathian oblast of Soviet Ukraine) and by Andrew Ludanyi on Hungarians in Yugoslavia. Both of these offer the kind of

background material promised by the editors; they inform the reader on the status of Hungarians before the political changes of the 1980s.

For those interested in the fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central

Europe, this volume may serve at best as a supplement to a much better balanced collection of essays edited by Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation (1988).

Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto

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