Recipient of an "outstanding" qualification from the Bolyai Fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a Bolyai Certificate “Bartha’s book is a splendid achievement. Despite the disparate nature of the East German and Hungarian sources, which makes comparison difficult, her analysis is fully comparative. She manages to weave events at the local, regional, and national level into a seamless narrative.Her insights are so perceptive that, even if they do not always persuade, they will certainly enrich the ongoing discussion about the demise of Communism in East-Central Europe.” · English Historical Review “This is an important and path-breaking book… it is thoroughly comparative, and is very well balanced… The research and indeed the text as such are well designed and rest on a methodology, which is sophisticated, theoretically-informed and well-sustained. The balance between the rich detail of the enterprise-based case studies and the overall contexts in which they were situated is very well done indeed.” · Mark Pittaway, The Open University, UK “[A] well researched comparative study of the relationship between the Hungarian and East German Communist parties, on the one hand, and workers in Hungary and the GDR, on the other. The decision to focus on party/state relations with workers in a major factory in each country is convincingly motivated. [The] archival research is extremely thorough.” · Donna Harsch, Carnegie Mellon University