Pál Germuska, Unified Military Industries of the Soviet Bloc: Hungary and the Division of Labor in Military Production. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. xxi + 304 pp.
Reviewed by Mark Harrison, University of Warwick (UK)
Pál Germuska is a historian of Communist-era Eastern Europe at the Hungarian Ministry of Defense and the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. His new book completes a major project of research into the coordination of the defense industries of the Soviet-bloc economies. This fascinating story adds substantially to our existing knowledge at the interface of two established literatures, one dealing with the history of the Soviet Union's defense industry, and the other with the structure and evolution of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the Soviet-led counterpart to the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. Unified Military Industries of the Soviet Bloc is the first attempt to bridge these topics and fill in the...