Books on the history of the Warsaw Pact states

[bailey_187]

Does anyone kniow of any good books on the politics, everday life and economies of the Eastern bloc states during Communist rule

I'm not interested in works that set out specificaly to defend these states with lists of production rates, schools built etc (nor that set out to slander them, although i wouldnt expect recomendations like that here), but rather just non-polemical histories

So far i read A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change and RJ Crampton's Eastern Europe in th Twentieth Century

Both of these IMO were very good. They gave both information regarding the social acheivments of these regimes and their modernizing effect, while pointing out the political repression people faced and the economic problems faced. I know im talking about the Eastern Bloc states in a monolithic way, but i really liked as well how these books did not treat Eastern Bloc as all the same, and showed me the great diversity that existed between different states, even between ones that stayed loyal to the Soviets.

So yeah, any other recomendations of books?

[bailey_187]

for a forum with such a large Marxist-Leninist group, why is there no recomendations of the histories of the states created along their ideological lines?

[Ismail]

for a forum with such a large Marxist-Leninist group, why is there no recomendations of the histories of the states created along their ideological lines?It depends on what you mean by "Marxist-Leninist." I wouldn't call Hungary under "Goulash Socialism" or Poland with 80%+ of its agriculture in private hands to have been Marxist-Leninist states, nor Romania with its "independent" and "defiant" policies making it friends with the West and the IMF.

One read on 1946 Poland is I Saw the New Poland by Anna Louise Strong: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/polblurb.htm

There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism by Constantine Pleshakov is a fairly good book about Eastern Europe (despite the sensationalistic title.)

The problem with Eastern Europe is that the CPs were all small (mostly owing to repression) and most engaged in very little fighting or miscellaneous activities until the Red Army came into their respective countries to get rid of the pro-fascist or outright fascistic governments. Only Albania (and to some extent Yugoslavia) was able to escape this problem, because the Albanian Communists came to power independently of the Soviets. Communist Parties declaring themselves vanguards without much root in their respective populations was bound to cause some problems, and only Albania stood firm in its support of Marxism-Leninism while the other Eastern Bloc states (including Yugoslavia after 1956) followed Khrushchev's (and later Brezhnev's) course.

[bailey_187]

thanks, that Pleshavok book seems to be the sort of thing im looking for

[RedTrackWorker]

Chris Harman-- Class Struggles in Eastern Europe

[Feodor Augustus]

Look up two historians, brothers I presume, called Nigel and Geoffrey Swain - they've written on Eastern Europe, one of them (Nigel I think) quite extensively. The book I've read some of is called Eastern Europe Since 1945. It's a quite good synoptic overview, with a focus on comparison between the Eastern bloc states, that in turn highlights their key differences/similarities. I'd also recommend Mary (?) Fulbrook's book on East Germany; while you should also look at some edited collections on the subject, which often contain English-language translations of work by historians that have lived in these countries both before and after 1991. (For example, there's a gentleman named Dagmar Kusa, - with a lot of accents that I've missed, - who writes very informatively on Hungrary.)

As a rule of thumb, anything written before 1991 (when the archives were opened to outside historians) is likely to be full of conjecture; while in all fairness, western liberals seem to be able to write about the Eastern bloc with far more balance and fairness than western Marxists - who either dogmatically defend it or repudiate it. Indeed I go as far as to suggest there has been something of a revival of the 'actually existing socialism' carried out by liberal historians over the last decade or so. (Norman Naimark on the crimes of the Red Army is a good example of this: harsh but fair.)