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Will to Freedom is an eyewitness account of the social and political upheaval that shook Eastern Europe from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. As an underground resistance fighter, political prisoner, fugitive, and Communist Party official, Egon Balas charts his journey from idealistic young Communist to disenchanted dissident. Attracted by its anti-Nazi stance, Balas joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1942, after Hungary had entered the war on Hitler’s side. He helped organize work stoppages and distributed antiwar leaflets. In his memoir, he offers a compelling account first of his eventual imprisonment and ordeal under torture and then of his escape and life in hiding. Later, Balas rose to high positions in postwar Romania. Arrested again, this time by the Communist authorities, he spent two years in solitary confinement. Unbroken, he was released after Stalin's death but was never forgiven for his refusal co cooperate in the staging of a show trial. Disenchanted with the regime, Balas started a new life as a self-educated applied mathematician and, after several unsuccessful attempts, was finally able to leave Romania as a Jewish emigrant in the mid-sixties.
In this detailed survey of European communist systems. Dr. Hazan examines the formal structure of East European politics and the functions of party organizations as the true centers of power. Drawing on extensive primary sources and illustrations from the most recent period of Eastern Europe’s history, he analyzes the role of the entire government infrastructure in consolidating the strength of the Communist party. He also focuses on party congresses, internal elections, organizational and personnel changes, and foreign visits against the background of the all-encompassing network of ritual that governs the political process.
Classical images of state-socialism developed in contemporary social sciences were founded on simple presuppositions. State-socialist regimes were considered to be politically stable due to their pervasive institutional and ideological control over the everyday lives of their citizens, impervious to reform and change, and representative of extreme political and economic dependency. Despite their contrasting historical experiences, they have been treated as basically identical in their institutional design, social and economic structures, and policies. Grzegorz Ekiert challenges this notion in a comparative analysis of the major political crises in post-1945 East Central Europe: Hungary (1956...
This study explores the little-known history of the Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-style territorial autonomy that was granted in Romania on Stalin’s personal advice to the Hungarian Székely community in the summer of 1952. Since 1945, a complex mechanism of ethnic balance and power-sharing helped the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) to strengthen—with Soviet assistance—its political legitimacy among different national and social groups. The communist national policy followed an integrative approach toward most minority communities, with the relevant exception of Germans, who were declared collectively responsible for the German occupation and were denied political and even...
The book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2013, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in September 2013. The 78 papers included in the proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 128 submissions. The focus of the papers is on following topics: neurofinance graphical network models, brain machine interfaces, evolutionary neural networks, neurodynamics, complex systems, neuroinformatics, neuroengineering, hybrid systems, computational biology, neural hardware, bioinspired embedded systems, and collective intelligence.