Children of Communism

Sándor Horváth is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Department for Contemporary History at the Institute of History in the Research Centre for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is author of Stalinism Reloaded: Everyday Life in Stalin-City and Hungary and founding editor of the Hungarian Historical Review.

• Introduction1. The Hippie Stroll2. The Trial: Casting3. How Hooligans Are Made4. Youth Protection5. The Police and Uses of the Urban Space6. The Socialist Tabloid Press7. Protest in a Diary8. Girl in the Gang9. MemoryConclusionBibliographyIndex

Relying on oral histories and other primary sources, Horváth explores how the Communist regime manipulated state-sponsored tabloid media during the trial to legitimize its own role as guardians of public safety and to portray the youth as social deviants who were instruments of Western-style decadence. . . . Highly recommended.- C. P. Vesei (Choice) A very timely book, demonstrating why the Soviet political police were worried so much by the "criminal Americanization" that was reaching Soviet youth from socialist Hungary as well. Horváth's book is an original explanation of the role of "youth revolt" during the 1960s, which became the pattern for social and cultural developments in countries of the Warsaw Pact.- Sergei I. Zhuk (Hungarian Studies Review) Horváth shows how the state and youth actors were involved in social discourse that, on the one hand, formulated state socialist norms of behavior for young people or marked deviant behavior, and on the other hand, served to continuously justify existing power relations. (translated from German)- Maren Francke (H-SOZ-KULT)