Introduction: Hungary—Geography, History, and Society to 1945

Abstract

This study will attempt to recount and in part reconstruct the lived experience of Hungarian enterprises (plus managers, workers, and farmers), moving forward in two volumes from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, thereby reconstructing what “worked, more or less” in building socialism. These organizations and individuals could not envision the system’s eventual demise, but instead worked to manage life and labor within it. At the time, Western writers and visitors often flattened descriptions of everyday socialism into the monochrome routines of a totalitarian society. By contrast, what may be most memorable about the tales related below is the pervasive diversity of the initiatives, improvisations, evasions, and compromises Hungarians enacted, despite material, organizational, and political constraints flowing from the perennial disarray that top-down central planning spawned.