1st Edition

The Little Dictators The History of Eastern Europe Since 1918

By Antony Polonsky Copyright 1975
224 Pages
by Routledge

Originally published in 1975, this book presents a lucid and comprehensive account of the political history of the different states of Eastern Europe, from the collapse of the Eastern monarchies of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary up to the Second World War. The author traces the history of six countries in the interwar period: Poland, Hungary, Austria, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia and... Read more

Introduction. 1. Poland 2. Hungary 3. Austria 4. Romania 5. Yugoslavia 6. The Czechoslovak Exception 7. Epilogue.

Biography

Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and Chief Historian of Global Education Outreach Project of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. He is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, author of Politics in Independent Poland (1972), The Little Dictators (1975), The Great Powers and the Polish Question (1976), co-author of A History of Modern Poland (1980) and The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (1981) and co-editor of Contemporary Jewish writing in Poland: an anthology (2001) and The neighbors respond: the controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (2004).

His most recent work is The Jews in Poland and Russia volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3, 1914 to 2008 (Liverpool University Press, 2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History (2014), which has been translated into French, Polish and Lithuanian.

Original Reviews of The Little Dictators:

‘[The author] …manages…to touch on most of the explosive problems that plagued East Central Europe during the inter-war years, so that his work is a useful introductory guide to the political and economic systems of that time…In all, an eminently readable work.’ International Affairs

‘Particularly neat is his stitching together of domestic failures in interwar East Central Europe with the collapse of the French alliance system and the erosion of the democratic ideological model…’ Joseph Rothschild, Slavic Review Volume 35, Issue 4(1976).