Review

Reviewed Work(s): Economic Development in East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth and

Twentieth Centuries by Iván T. Berend and György Ránki
Review by: Hermann Freudenberger
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 749-750
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1877414
Accessed: 20-03-2023 19:30 UTC

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 Book Reviews 749

animosities he made in the Reichstag and among the parties then were to
dog his life and the remnant career he attempted to reconstruct in the
republic.
Killed in- midcareer in a railway accident during his fight to defeat the
Dawes Plan in 1924, Helfferich had turned his last years into a vendetta
against the republic. Yet he balked at going so far as to refuse all coopera-
tion on principle; with some like-minded Nationalists he hoped one day to
share power in order somehow to steer the misguided state back to accept-
able channels. In that spirit he was able to work with Chancellors Cuno and
Stresemann in finding some solution to restore a foundering currency. But
his legacy to the nation was the poisonous polemic that encouraged right
radicals of the Organisation Consul to murder first Matthias Erzberger, and
then the other bete noire of the ultras, Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.
Helfferich's character was calculated more to command respect than love,
even among his political associates. There have been few book-length
studies of the politician-economist; until the present work all of them were
written pre-World War II. Williamson has had to labor under the consider-
able handicap of the absence of a Helfferich Nachlass; those papers appar-
ently did not survive the war. He has however been able to consult
members of the Heliferich family, isolated Heliferich documents, a large body
of Helfferich's published work, and a full range of relevant archival mate-
rial. Integrating a considerable body of information from published and
unpublished sources Williamson has produced a convincing study, worthy of
joining company with such other major biographies as Klaus Epstein's
Erzberger and Lamar Cecil's Ballin. Without neglecting the technicalities of
the economist's thought, the author has managed to present a critical,
balanced account of an influential mandarin. Another e'minence grise is thus
brought out of the shadows and usefully related to the grosse and kleine
Politik of Wilhelmian and Weimar Germany.
LEWIS HERTZMAN
York University

Economic Development in East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twen-

tieth Centuries. By Iva'n T. Berend and Gybrgy Ra'nki.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Pp. xiii+402. $18.00.

Economic Development in East-Central Europe fills a definite void and is

therefore doubly welcome. Berend, rector of the Karl-Marx University in
Budapest, and Rainki, deputy director of the Historical Institute of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, have also recently published a book on the
economic history of Hungary in English. They have proved to be an
enduring team over the years and have provided important contributions to
the economic history of Hungary in the late nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries. In the present book they have spread their net more widely to
include not only east-central Europe in its narrow sense, that is, essentially
the area of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but also the countries
of the Balkan Peninsula with the exception of Greece, Albania, and Turkey.
From time to time they have also introduced the historical experience of
Russia in some detail and for the sake of comparison have provided a
number of very useful tables and comments on the rest of Europe as well.

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750 Book Reviews

With the exception of the Czech lands Bohemia and Moravia, and Austria
proper, they are dealing with an underdeveloped area. Even within that
framework, however, they had to make distinctions between more de-
veloped areas like Poland and Hungary as opposed to Bulgaria, Romania,
and most of Yugoslavia. They have taken a country-by-country approach
rather than to look at east-central Europe and the Balkans as one economic
region. Nevertheless, it would have been an exercise well worth attempting
to assess the historic complementarity of the entire economy. Inferentially,
this theme raises itself in the discussion of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy
where the increasingly sharp division between the so-called Cisleithanean
parts and the Hungarian kingdom frustrated the possible gains from a united
market as well as the possible gains from free trade. The question is also
apposite for the fate of the post-World War II era, during which the
imposition from the outside of a cooperative scheme under the heading of
COMECON has not proved to be especially successful. Since the study
stops with about 1950, this question remains moot.
A minor criticism of this important and very worthwhile book is the poor
proofreading concerning foreign titles and names. This does not only con-
cern the fact that Berend's first name, Iv'an, loses its diacritical mark when
it is translated from the title page to the dust cover, but includes the
omission of diacritical marks on German words. The authors are of course
not responsible for such errors nor should they be blamed for misspelling
Habsburg, a family name, with a p (i.e., Hapsburg) instead of the "weiches
b" that properly belongs in its place.
HERMANN FREUDENBERGER
Tulane University

The Spread of the Russian Revolution: Essays on 1917. By Roger Pethy-

bridge.
London: Macmillan Co.; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972. Pp. xiii+238.
$11.95.

Certainly one of the most important conditioning factors of revolutions in

modern times as opposed to earlier epochs is the almost instantaneous
relaying of news of events in the metropolis to all parts of the state territory
via radio, telegraph, and post, and, second, the rapid mobilization of
sociopolitical groups by means of the mass-circulation daily press. Railways
have also been an important part of the communications network, because if
censorship and official communiques regulate the flow of information for a
time, agents despatched by organized groups to their constituencies, eyewit-
nesses, and rumor bearers render such efforts fruitless. Though investigators
are frequently reminded of these truths, little has been done to systematize
the available facts and formulate their importance with specific reference to
the Russian Revolution, and a study which would accomplish this is greatly
to be desired. Likewise a work that would bring together and evaluate the
enormous amount of available data on the breakdown in transport and food
supply would considerably enhance our perception of the centrifugal forces
of the revolution. Furthermore, a comprehensive view of revolutions in
modern times requires a study of the socioeconomic groups that control and
maintain the communications and supply services since they have more

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