The Hungarian Agricultural Miracle? Sovietization and Americanization in a Communist Country. By Zsuzsanna Varga.

Abstract

The present review focuses on how this book, analyzing “a unique case of how to pull success out of failure within the Soviet bloc” (p. ix), offers insights into topics rele-vant for an international audience of business, economic, and transnational history. The book offers overview of the development of Hungarian agriculture during the Socialist era, laying equal weight on the periods of forced collectivization and that of the development of a successful ‘Hungarian model’ by combining multidimen-sional historical comparison with transfer studies. Six chronological chapters take the reader through the transfer and implementation of the Soviet kolkhoz model and of the American ‘closed production system’ embedded into the development of Hungarian agricultural policy in the framework of the Cold War, stressing the impor-tance of local agency and the partial simultaneity of model transfers. Chapter 7 con-textualizes the ‘Hungarian agricultural miracle’ and presents the circumstances, such as the decreasing prices of agricultural products on the world market and Hungary’s growing indebtedness leading to a renewal of high extractions from agriculture, which meant that “Hungary’s hybrid agriculture reached its developmental limits” (p. 283). The conclusion reflects on how comparative and transfer studies can be combined in the field of transnational history. The book is based on extensive archi-val research, on the contemporary Hungarian and foreign press, and on an impres-sive collection of oral sources, in part thanks to the author’s decades-long research on the history of Hungarian agriculture in the Socialist era. The first chapter clarifies the