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Post by dodger on Oct 1, 2013 20:31:29 GMT
Useful history of Bulgaria, 1 Oct 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: Bulgaria (Oxford History of Modern Europe) (Paperback)
This is a very useful and comprehensive history of Bulgaria.
A few notes on Bulgaria's history since 1945. The percentage of the net material product originating in the industrial sector rose from 23 in 1948 to 55 in 1970.
Crampton points out: "energy. This the Soviet Union supplied on the most generous of terms until the second half of the 1980s." This refutes the slur that the Soviet Union was an empire, exploiting its East European `colonies'.
But, in 1986 Gorbachev ruled that market forces would govern the relations between the Soviet Union and the other Comecon states. He then charged world prices for Soviet oil and gas.
After the restoration of capitalism, "the profits were privatized and the losses nationalized." GDP fell by a quarter between 1989 and 1994. The country suffered mass unemployment, pensioner poverty, and falling living standards; corruption, crime, the judiciary's links to criminals, and traffic in human beings and in drugs, all rose.
High emigration (750,000 people left between 1989 and 2007), a rising death rate and a falling birth rate, all led to population decline: the population was 8.67 million in 1990, 7.76 million in 2004.
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Post by dodger on Oct 8, 2013 13:42:30 GMT
Interesting study of Eastern Europe's efforts to rebuild after WW2, 8 Oct 2013
This William Podmore review is from: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 (Hardcover)
This is a fine account of the huge difficulties faced by the working classes of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. After centuries of exploitation by the empires to their east and west, then the dire effects of Hitler's genocidal war, they had to rebuild their ruined countries in the most unfavourable conditions.
They were under attack from the West, constantly threatened with invasion and/or nuclear assault. They were stifled by the USA's comprehensive sanctions. They were supported only by a Soviet Union itself grievously wounded by the war.
They were attacked by the CIA, MI6 and the West German secret service, using terrorist groups, especially in the Ukraine and Poland. In Poland, after the war, the terrorist `National Armed Forces' had the goal of `the liquidation of the workers of the Department of Public Security' using either `quiet disappearances (drowning, kidnapping, torture) or open shooting'. The peoples of Eastern Europe were riven by the anti-communist prejudices and ethnic hatreds fostered by Hitler and his allies, in particular by the vicious anti-Semitism of the old ruling classes.
As she points out, "the proximity of West Germany and the relative openness of Berlin in the 1940s and 1950s meant that the new East German state really was surrounded, and infiltrated, by large numbers of Westerners." But she tells us all too little about the West's programmes of sanctions, assassination and sabotage against the GDR. She explains that the GDR built the Berlin Wall to keep the East German people trapped. But, as the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of Washington, DC, stated, "The open border in Berlin exposed the GDR to massive espionage and subversion and ... its closure gave the Communist state greater security."
She comments, "any discussion of the expulsions of Germans from western Poland, the Sudetenland, Hungary and Romania after 1945 has to begin by recalling what had happened in the previous five years." 12 million Germans left Eastern Europe's countries and resettled in Germany. As Churchill told the House of Commons, "expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting."
Applebaum gives due credit to these countries' astonishing achievements in rebuilding their shattered cities and in educating their peoples. Unfortunately, she barely mentions their outstanding achievements in industrial development, health care and welfare.
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Post by dodger on Nov 19, 2013 16:12:25 GMT
Interesting account of the 1956 rising in Hungary, 19 Nov 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt (Cold War International History Project) (Hardcover)
Reaction, both domestic and international, fomented counter-revolution in Hungary in 1956. Charles Gati, a passionate supporter of the counter-revolution, and now Senior Adjunct Professor of European Studies at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledges that, "the movement for the reform of the system was being pursued simultaneously with a revolt against it."
Gati writes of the 1945-46 expulsion to Germany of all 450,000 Hungarians of German origin, "The decision was not his [Imre Nagy's] or his government's. The victorious allies had made that decision at the 1945 Potsdam summit ..."
In June 1953, the new Soviet leadership - Khrushchev, Malenkov, Molotov and Beria - invited the Hungarian leadership to Moscow. Unusually, they chose who came and they excluded Josef Revai and Mihaly Farkas, Prime Minister Matyas Rakosi's two closest colleagues.
In a coup against Rakosi, the Soviet leadership appointed Imre Nagy Prime Minister. At the same time, "Malenkov and Khrushchev were launching a massive conspiracy to remove, arrest, and eventually execute Beria." On 13 July 1956, Khrushchev's ally Mikoyan told Rakosi to resign.
International reaction used Titoism as a weapon against socialism. As US diplomat George Kennan wrote, "Tito in being is perhaps our most precious asset in the struggle to contain and weaken Russian expansion."
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