The Price of Illusion and the Power of Meaning: Helsinki, Hungary, and the Holy Crown

Abstract

Whereas the Hel­sinki Final Act’s im­pact in the So­viet bloc is usu­ally defined by the res­ist­ance and pres­sure in­spired by ‘bas­ket three’ human rights clauses, the part of the ac­cord that the So­viet Union de­sired was at least as sig­ni­fic­ant, es­pe­cially for Hun­gary. The So­vi­ets pre­sumed that formal West­ern ac­know­ledge­ment of the post-war set­tle­ment – a long-term for­eign policy – would en­sure its per­man­ence. But the ac­cept­ance of post-war bor­ders ac­tu­ally im­per­illed So­viet con­trol in Cent­ral and East­ern Europe be­cause it ac­cen­tu­ated the con­tra­dic­tion between the de facto sub­jug­a­tion of in­de­pend­ent states in the re­gion and their de jure in­de­pend­ence, while en­shrin­ing the lat­ter, thereby strength­en­ing the hands of those within these states who wished to ex­tend and ex­pand their in­de­pend­ence from Mo­scow, eco­nom­ic­ally and cul­tur­ally. A key ex­ample and test case of this pro­cess was the fate of Hun­gary’s Holy Crown, which had been in Amer­ican cus­tody. Em­ploy­ing both primary sources and sec­ond­ary texts, this new ana­lysis con­tends that it was pre­cisely what the So­vi­ets had hoped for in a European Se­cur­ity Con­fer­ence that proved most dam­aging to con­trol of its sphere of in­flu­ence, and that, in Hun­gary, the re­turn of the Holy Crown rep­res­en­ted ex­actly the goal of re­stored sov­er­eignty that Hel­sinki en­dorsed, des­pite So­viet in­ten­tions to the con­trary.