In July 1997, at their special summit meeting in Madrid, leaders from North America and Europe invited Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to become the Atlantic alliance's first recruits from what was once Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. From times immemorial the Eastern and Western centres in Europe have challenged each other for domination. Gusztáv Molnár argues that the geopolitical meaning of NATO enlargement is to mark out once again the boundary dividing the Eastern part of Europe from the West, pushing it, as it were, towards the East and establishing thereby strategic areas for containment towards the East. Molnár explains the theory of the British geographer Harold Mackinder and goes on to examine various strategic plans for Nato enlargement including the problem of Russia facing a split into large region-states, a fate post-Deng Xiaoping China might not be able to avoid either.
Throughout the centuries Subcarpathia, the eastern part of pre-Trianon Upper Hungary, has been a crossroad of peoples and a multi-ethnic region. In 1920, it was incorporated by the young Czechoslovakia to become a battling ground of Germans, Hungarians and the Soviets during the Second World War. In the post-war peace treaties, the Soviet Union acquired it as part of the Ukraine. Always poor, but proud of its traditions, Subcarpathia is now an extremely impoverished region within independent but bankrupt Ukraine, where people, after the long decades of Soviet mismanagement and oppression, try to provide subsistence mainly on the black market. Today, 194,000 inhabitants declare a Hungarian ethnic allegiance, one sixth of the population.
Since its inception, the party-state's most feared instruments of power in Hungary had been the secret services. Their organization chart displays a paranoia which was omnipresent. The network of secret agents and informers - as documented by the Data Sheet printed here in full as Appendix I - infiltrated society with the meanest of methods. In 1954, at the height of the terror in Hungary, about one and a half million people out of a population of ten million had files, i. e., were "watched"; by 1960, when the reprisals following the 1956 Revolution were over, the number fell to 600,000, with "only" 165,900 people informed on at the time of the 1989 changeover. Most of the documents are to this day inaccessible even to researchers and their publication is hampered by legislation protecting the right to privacy. J. K. 's voluminous collection of documents is the first to breach the wall of silence. J. V's review article is much more than a detailed and thorough account of the book, which contains three fully documented case studies, spanning the more than three decades of János Kádár's "soft dictatorship": it is an in-depth study discussing the workings of the secret services as well as the legal problems surrounding the "Lustration Act" in Hungary.
Several hundred holographs of Liszt's letters to his three children, Blandine, Cosima and Daniel, and theirs to him, are preserved in various libraries and archives, but very few of them had been published until Klára Hamburger's major collection. As Liszt and Countess Marie d'Agoult never married, under French law the children were illegitimate, and Liszt, by openly acknowledging paternity, had become their legal guardian. The children were brought up in Paris, in the home of Liszt's mother, Anna Liszt, and subsequently in fashionable boarding schools, but Liszt was constantly preoccupied by their welfare and, as the long letters testify, followed their development closely. The letters to Cosima and to her oldest child, Daniela von Bülow, are of outstanding interest. Cosima married the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, Liszt's disciple and one of his closest friends, later to divorce him and marry Richard Wagner, whose music found its most ardent champion in Liszt. The letters shed light on the complexities of these tangled relationships and include innumerable new and fascinating details about the compositional history of Liszt's works.
