Victoria Harms’ The Making of Dissidents: Hungary's Democratic Opposition and Its Western Friends, 1973-1998 is the hitherto most detailed and immersive scholarly account of Hungary's Democratic Opposition and its emergence from what Harms calls the “East–West network.” From the late 1970s into the early 1980s, a network of intellectual exchange and publishing came into being as Hungarian intellectuals sought professional and political freedom abroad and were enthusiastically welcomed by critical liberal intellectuals in the United States and West Germany. Harms makes use of over 40 interviews with individuals active in or familiar with this network alongside personal correspondence between dissidents and other network actors, and programmatic documents from the archives of some of the key sponsors and coordinators of the network such as the International Helsinki Federation, the Soros-MTA Foundation, the Rotbuch and Suhrkamp publishing houses, and the Institute for the Humanities at New York University.

The structure of Harms’ book is chronological, following the early careers of key intellectuals in Hungary as far back as 1956, their development of the East–West network from the late 1970s in cooperation with Western counterparts, culminating in the “golden age” of the network in the mid-1980s. Finally, Harms tackles the evolution of the network and its Hungarian dissidents after the proclamation of the Third Republic on October 23, 1989 and the inauguration of democratic politics in Hungary. The Making of Dissidents is remarkable for the way Harms reconstructs and recapitulates the compelling intellectual journeys of dissidents like Miklós Haraszti, János Kis, György Konrád without romanticizing their dissident personae. This is a consequence of Harms’ focus on the East-West network and on the infrastructure of Hungarian dissidence as a transnational phenomenon. She introduces us to such consequential nodes of this network as publishers Robert Bernstein (Random House), Roger Straus (FSG), and Siegfried Unseld (Suhrkamp) and to enterprising human rights activists such as Annette Laborey of the Fondation pour une Entraide Intellectuelle Européenne (FEIE). Laborey in particular emerges as a crucial figure to the success not just of her own FEIE but to the nascent Soros Foundation.

The most important argument that Harms makes about Hungary's Democratic Opposition and its emergence from the East-West Network throughout the book is how liberal anti-communist intellectuals around the New York Review of Books especially, encouraged Konrád and others to embrace the role of intellectual dissident. Harms argues that this symbiotic dynamic had serious consequences for the trajectory of Hungarian politics. Many of these dissidents became politicians within the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz). Readers will read Harms's final chapter and conclusion with interest and urgency as she shows how the fragile cooperation between the East-West network's dissident intellectuals and Hungary's endemic milieu of népi or populist intellectuals transformed into a political contest between liberal cosmopolitans and Christian nationalists. The new SzDSz statesmen became partisan defenders of a secular, European Hungary against the nationalist Christian revanchism coming from népi writers like István Csurka. While the SzDSz contained a diversity of perspectives and philosophies, from the Thatcherite to the social-democratic, it presided over Hungary's chaotic economic transformation from 1994 to 1998 as a coalition partner of the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP).

This monograph’s focus on the generation of dissidents who formed the SzDSz throws into relief the absence of analagous studies of the conservative MDF, and the younger generation of liberal dissidents associated with Fidesz. In fact, both of these groups were also enmeshed in East–West networks involving some of the same organizations and figures. The former benefited from cooperation with Helmut Kohl's CDU, alongside Hungarian Christian Democrats, while the latter including Orbán himself were some of the largest beneficiaries of the Soros-MTA foundation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In The Making of Dissidents, the ascent and consolidation of Orbán's right-wing coalition come as a shocking conclusion, even as Harms shows us the difficulties which the dissidents of the East-West network faced in becoming properly parliamentary actors. How this impressive, internationally-engaged cohort of Hungarian liberal democrats that so inspired critical Cold War intellectuals across the West went from victory to ruin so rapidly is a story Harms and others will yet need to write. Part of the answer will come from assessing the formation of the Orbán network itself. Another part may come from examining some of Harms’ main intellectual characters later careers’ long after the dissolution of the SzDSz.