Making the Hungarian Communist

Reviews / Votes

"Persuasively argued and meticulously researched, Making the Hungarian Communist restores human agency to what has often been described as state-imposed and formulaic propaganda campaigns. Through compelling stories of individual agitators and their diverse audiences during the Stalinist period in Hungary - including rural communities, middle-class urban residents, women, and Holocaust survivors - Helena Huhak reveals how central social relations, private spaces, and intimate conversations were to the construction of communism from the ground up."-Malgorzata Fidelis, author of Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland

"Helena Huhak's masterful analysis of everyday agitation offers fascinating insights into the functioning of the Stalinist propaganda machine in Hungary in the 1950s. Rather than focusing on how propaganda was constructed, the book investigates how the messages of the communist party were distributed by individual agitators. By focusing on the lower rungs of propaganda, the book shows the limits of dictatorship, highlights the agency of agitators, and sheds light on the significance of everyday interactions between propagandists and their audience in the micro-milieus of Hungarian Stalinism."-Balazs Apor, author of The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc

"Huhak's work gives us a new understanding what the Communist Party was, not by examining the characters, thoughts, and actions of the primary leaders . . . but by looking at the numerous functionaries."-Peter Kenez, author of Before the Uprising: Hungary under Communism, 1949-1956