The Workers’ State

A profoundly important contribution. The implications of Pittaway's work are far-reaching. His reconceptualization of legitimacy as a complex, contested state is the best explanation yet for how early communist regimes interacted with their subjects at the grassroots level.

Apart from making a strong argument thoroughly grounded in archival sources and full command of the secondary literature, Pittaway's work is a refreshing reinterpretation of a crucial period in the making of socialist Hungary.

Based upon an extraordinary amount of research, The Workers' State argues for the pivotal importance of industrial workers in the ultimate establishment of 'stable socialist rule in twentieth-century Hungary.

East European historians have been waiting eagerly for this book for a long time. . . .Appearing two years after Mark Pittaway's untimely death at just thirty-nine, 'The Workers' State' proves to have been worth the wait. . . . Pittaway has produced a definitive social history of Communist Hungary, one that takes politics and economics seriously. Nigel Swain, who shepherded the work of his former student over the last hurdles to publication, deserves our thanks. 'The Workers' State' will be required reading for all students of the establishment of Communism in Eastern Europe.

In this imaginatively conceived and meticulously researched book, the late Mark Pittaway masterfully reconstructs the history of Hungary's working class in the early years of Communist rule. Fiercely committed to a 'history from below' in all its messy complexity, Pittaway uncovers the strategies of negotiation, bargaining, and resistance with which Hungarian workers made a place for themselves in the newly created workers' state. This is social history at its finest, theoretically sophisticated, lucidly argued, and provocative in its claims. It will be essential reading for all historians of East-Central Europe.

Mark Pittaway makes a powerful argument for the necessity of studying industrial communities to understand the dynamics of early socialist state formation in Hungary. Pittaway takes full advantage of the rich archival materials he has carefully studied, giving us a nuanced sense of everyday life, as well as indicating how poor our conception of Hungarian industrial working class experience in the 1950s has been.

Occupies a place of distinction not only in the scholarship on the political engagement of the industrial workers in Hungary, but in the research on the history of the industrial workers in Europe. It situates the attempt to create Socialism in Hungary in an international context and thus provides a point of departure for further comparative study. Pittaway's research, work that spanned a decade and a half, has revitalized scholarship on the subject, which had been increasingly marginalized in the historiography. In all likelihood his monograph will influence research on the lives and experiences of industrial workers, who represented the largest social bloc and whose living coniditions should therefore be in the forefront of scholarship on the era, for decades.

Path-breaking . . . sheds new light on the social origins of 1956 by exploring the reasons for the workers' mounting discontent and the deeply seated disappointment with 'their' regime. A landmark in the writing of twentieth-century Hungarian history.