“Mutually Beneficial” Business: Inter-Party Hungarian-Italian Economic Relations during the Cold War.

The study attempts to answer three questions regarding Italian-Hungarian economic relations during the Cold War era. First, how was it possible to harmonize different ideologies for the sake of business? Secondly, how did the political crises of the Cold War era influence the intensity of East-West trade relations – that is, to what extent was the “protected trade” conducted through party-operated companies dependent on international political trends? Thirdly, what kind of illegal party-financing techniques enabled Hungarian-Italian trade to circumvent Cold War restrictions? I will seek answers to the questions above through the examination of commercial relations between Terimpex Foreign Trade Company (Terimpex Külkereskedelmi Vállalat), a company based in Budapest, and Soresco, an intermediary company based in Milan and directed by the Italian Communist Party. The abundant documentation of economic relations outlined above confirms that from the beginning of the 1950’s, Italy played a unique role in EastWest relations, in which the PCI, the largest and most influential communist party in the West, served as an especially important intermediary. The activities of business enterprises specializing in East-West trade during the Cold War were not particularly invested in secrecy, as they constituted a parallel economic system, which political and state security officials were familiar with, and largely accepted. Behind the persistent political and diplomatic conflict between the countries of Western Europe and Eastern Europe, there existed a formal and, to an even greater degree, informal sphere of cooperation, and investigations of the transnational economic contacts that took place within these formal and informal spheres of cooperation produced surprising and valuable results. The examination of these connections reveals a complex structure of economic necessity, the clash of political strategies and ideology, state administrative and accounting practices, personal relations, corruption, and espionage activities, which prevailed during the Cold War period as an integral part of everyday life.