Legitimizing Socialism? Hard-Currency Stores and Western Goods in Hungary, 1956–1989
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Throughout the Socialist Bloc, governments established hard-currency stores in an attempt to increase Western currency revenues. The Hungarian state launched IBUSZ Külföldi Kereskedelmi Akció [Foreign Commercial Enterprise, or IKKA] in 1949 and later replaced this enterprise with Intertourist stores in 1968. As in other socialist states, the purchase of Western and certain hard-to-get Eastern European goods was restricted and could only be acquired with hard currency. As a consequence, informal and black-market activities began to spread. Drawing on archival documents, Radio Free Europe research reports, local court cases, newspaper articles, and photographic material, this article examines how hard currency was perceived by ordinary citizens and explores whether the lesser buying power of the Hungarian forint in comparison to hard currencies contributed to the delegitimization of the Kádár regime. The study also explores the distinctiveness of socialist consumption culture to shed new light on the relative openness of Hungary’s “goulash communism” within the Eastern Bloc.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it