2022 was rich in terms of growth of our archival holdings. This signals to us that Blinken OSA is a trusted repository for documents of historical value, and that the work we do is important.

Many years before his death, Géza Benes, a Hungarian engineer, wrote on the cover of a file he believed was important for posterity: “Don’t throw it out; hand it over in [a few] decades to a researcher of the 1970s.” Not knowing any researchers of the 1970s, Benes’s widow contacted us with the request to make the file widely accessible: it was the documentation of a party disciplinary procedure against her late husband from the 1970s. The file is now cataloged and available for research at Blinken OSA.

Ágnes Geréb, the doctor and midwife who dedicated much of her career to have home birthing legalized in Hungary, and who was silenced all too often by the medical establishment, a hostile press, and the courts, donated, too, her papers to Blinken OSA. (Her cause won eventually: home birthing is now legal in Hungary.) So did the executor of the late Eva S. Balogh, author of the widely read Hungarian Spectrum blog, which for many years was the only daily source of critical news on Hungary in English, with Ms. Balogh’s papers. Where else could these have gone? What better place is there for these, anywhere?

We did a lot of rescue work this year. Blinken OSA literally saved the archive of a European umbrella organization of associations of people with disabilities, which over the decades had a profound impact on national and European policies—and thinking—about persons with disabilities. This is, of course, a story about human rights. Think about standards for doors and ramps, or about much of what we call accessibility today. Our researchers will now know how it all began, right after the Second World War, here, in Europe. György Moldova’s manuscripts should, perhaps, be part of other archival collections, but his heirs wanted them to come to us, fearing that his papers would be “buried” elsewhere. And the list goes on.

Most, if not all, of our donors this year handed over documents which are, in one way or another, tied to the idea of open society. Some of these fonds will be small, while others will be many linear meters in volume. But they are all very important, for our researchers, for us, and—for the record. We will do our best to process them quickly and hand them over to our researchers soon.

Below is a list of our 2022 accessions:

New archival fonds already cataloged

Géza Benes Personal Papers

Géza Benes (1942–2020) was a thermal engineer involved in the construction of Hungary’s most important industrial sites, including the Leninváros (today: Tiszaújváros) chemical combine, the Százhalombatta oil refinery, and the Paks nuclear power plant. The single file that makes up this fonds—a meticulously compiled documentation of a party disciplinary procedure conducted against Benes between 1976 and 1978—offers the researcher an invaluable peek into the workings of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party inside one of the powerhouses of Hungary’s Socialist economy, the Erőmű Beruházási Vállalat. The path of the file from Benes’s hands into Blinken OSA’s collections is a story in itself. Two decades before his passing in 2020, he buried the file in his wardrobe with the above quoted handwritten inscription on it. To make sure that the story of her husband’s party disciplinary procedure would be accessible to a wide researcher audience, Benes’s widow donated the file to Blinken OSA.

László Cséry Collection

While László Cséry’s collection on the Csepel Automobile Factory is a somewhat unusual addition to our holdings, its significance and uniqueness should not be underestimated. László Cséry (1930–2001) was an engineer at Csepel Autógyár between 1952 and 1970, that is, during the golden years of the factory that, in line with the “division of labor” within the COMECON, played a crucial role in fulfilling Hungary’s task to produce trucks and buses (rather than, for instance, personal cars) for the Eastern Bloc. Cséry’s photo albums, along with a handful of neatly bound foreign study travel reports, are wonderful documentations of the Cold War transfer of industrial innovation and technology from West to East; researchers of Socialist industrial design, work management, and industrial production in general, will find this collection a gem. Cséry’s professional path, as it is reflected in this collection, is, too, a rare example of personal growth from a mechanical engineer to employment at the Hungarian Office for Standardization, to representing Hungary at the reunions of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in Geneva. At the height of his career, Cséry was President of the Technical Board of the ISO.

Archival fonds under processing as of January 2023

Eva S. Balogh Personal Papers

Readers of news about Hungary in English will likely have read or heard about Hungarian Spectrum, the daily blog of Hungarian-born historian and 1956-refugee Eva S. Balogh (1935–2021). The blog launched in 2007 was so widely read (more than 7,000 subscribers and several thousand daily online visitors as of November 2021), and Ms. Balogh’s dedication to seeking and disseminating the truth about Hungarian affairs was so highly regarded, that in 2019 George Soros donated his Ridenhour Courage Prize money to Eva S. Balogh (Ron Ridenhour was a U.S. soldier whose whistleblowing uncovered the infamous My Lai Massacre committed by American troops in the Vietnam War). In addition to archiving the more than 5,000 daily blog entries, Blinken OSA has accessioned Eva Balogh’s personal papers, including her vast correspondence, original copies of her MA and PhD theses on Hungarian history defended at Yale, important documents attesting her role in the writing of the clandestine newspaper Október Huszonharmadika (October Twenty-Third) during the 1956 Revolution, and documentation of her lifepath from Budapest into exile in Austria, Canada, and eventually, in the United States.

Zoltán Lévai Personal Papers Related to the National Association of People’s Colleges (Népi Kollégiumok Országos Szövetsége – NÉKOSZ)

Zoltán “Lézo” Lévai (b. 1929) is a mechanical engineer and Professor Emeritus, former Dean, and Deputy Rector of Budapest University of Technology and Economics. His collection of photographs on the colleges for engineers working under the umbrella of the short-lived National Association of People’s Colleges (NÉKOSZ, 1946–1949) focuses on the life of engineer students at the University of Technology in Budapest (BME). At the height of the NÉKOSZ-movement, there were 148 such colleges across the country. People’s Colleges were residential (vocational) colleges established after the Second World War to help youths of mostly peasant origins break out of the poverty reigning in the countryside and smooth their way into the new intelligentsia. A number of Zoltán Lévai’s photographs have been exhibited during a Blinken OSA research and exhibition project on Gaudiopolis back in 2017. They now constitute an archival fonds soon to be cataloged and open for research.

Further accessions during 2022

Ildikó Boga Personal Papers

Ildikó Boga (b. 1938) is a retired librarian and teacher of Hungarian literature, who joined the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) in the spring of 1989 to become one of the party’s experts and advisers on public education. Her papers include her handwritten notes and memos, drafts, and submissions to the SZDSZ leadership, including Budapest mayor Gábor Demszky, and to members of the Józsefváros (8th District) Subcommittee on Public Education, of which Ildikó Boga was President in the early 1990s. A detailed political diary recorded during her term as 8th District councilor on behalf of SZDSZ, election campaign documents including strategies and district-level to-do-lists, as well as various party ephemera from the 1990s, make this collection an important and rich source for researchers of the early years of Hungarian democracy, as seen from within one of the most popular parties of the era.

Márta Elbert Personal Papers

More than a decade ago, the Black Box Foundation, successor of the first independent Hungarian media group founded in 1988, deposited thousands of hours of video documentation of public life between 1988 and 1996 with Blinken OSA. In 2022, Black Box founder Márta Elbert (b. 1950) transferred to Blinken OSA much of her own papers, including documentation of her work as a sociologist, filmmaker, university lecturer, educator, editor, and publisher. In addition to personal documents like diplomas and awards, Elbert’s papers cover less widely-known aspects of her work, like her close cooperation with sociologist István Kemény, her teaching at the Roma Media School (Roma Média Iskola) founded by the Black Box Foundation, and her research into the Holocaust history of 49 Frankel Leó Street, the house in which Elbert grew up and lived much of her lifetime. The collection of Márta Elbert’s personal papers neatly complements Blinken OSA’s holdings on the Black Box Foundation, István Kemény, the recent history of Hungarian Roma, and, more generally, on the political, social, and cultural aspects of the transition from Socialism to democracy.

György Moldova Personal Papers

György Moldova (1934–2022) was probably the most popular—and without doubt one of the most prolific—fiction writers of late-Socialist Hungary. A lifelong backer of Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party Secretary General János Kádár, Moldova has published over 70 books, numerous short stories, “reports” at the intersection of journalism and fiction, as well as scripts for radio and television. The first transfer of Moldova’s papers to Blinken OSA arrived in 2022 from Moldova’s widow, and includes original manuscripts, photographs, personal documents, and a small number of newspapers and press clippings. Accruals are expected in 2023.

Péter Hanák Personal Papers

The papers of historian and CEU History Department co-founder Péter Hanák (1921–1997) arrived to Blinken OSA in late 2022. Hanák taught history at Eötvös Loránd University, at Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences (today: Corvinus University), and, starting in 1993, at Central European University in Budapest, as well as at higher education institutions abroad, including Columbia, Yale, and Rutgers Universities in the United States. For several decades, Hanák was a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The Péter Hanák papers donated to Blinken OSA by his sons include a large number of manuscripts, publications, reviews of his own work, reviews written by Hanák about the work of others, and much more. Various correspondence, archival research documentation, a small number of photographs, newspaper clippings, and a documentation of awards and distinctions received by Hanák complete this new archival fonds at Blinken OSA.

Michael Pugh Collection on Peacebuilding in the former Yugoslavia

Michael Pugh is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, and member or former member of numerous institutes and advisory boards. A researcher of war economies, humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, he has worked and published widely on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their aftermath, with special focus on postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The collection donated to Blinken OSA in 2022 includes documents on political economy in Bosnia, NGOs and humanitarianism, refugee returns, war crimes, the Dayton Agreement and its implementation, and much more. This compilation by one of the region’s foremost researchers is an important addition to Blinken OSA’s Yugoslavia Archive Project, and a much-anticipated new resource to its researchers.

Records of the International Federation of Persons with Disabilities (FIMITIC)

In 1953, representatives of the national associations of persons with disabilities from Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland founded the Fédération Internationale des Mutilés, des Invalides du Travail et des Invalides Civiles (FIMITIC). Over the next decades, FIMITIC grew into a transcontinental NGO that successfully lobbied decision makers in Brussels and in Strasbourg, also reaching as far as the United Nations Organization in Geneva and in New York. In 2008, when the founder of the Hungarian Federation of Associations of Persons with Disabilities, Csaba Chikán, was also Vice President of FIMITIC, the Secretariat of FIMITIC was moved from Bonn to Vác, Hungary. It is from here that Blinken OSA rescued the quasi-abandoned archive of FIMITIC in late 2022, following consultations and the signing of a donation agreement with the current FIMITIC leadership. The FIMITIC archive consists of 274 neatly ordered binders of textual documents covering the period 1962–2011, with most documents created when the General Secretariat was headquartered in Germany (therefore, the vast majority of documents is in German). These include board meeting minutes; conference, event, and other project-related documentation; correspondence; country files; legal texts, resolutions, policy proposals and submissions to the European Communities/European Union and to the UN and its specialized agencies; declarations, statements, and press releases; and publications.

Personal Papers of Ágnes Geréb

Ágnes Geréb (b. 1952) is a Hungarian medical doctor, midwife and psychologist, and a fervent advocate of expectant women’s rights and home birthing. She was the founder of the Budapest Napvilág birthing center, and she was instrumental in the adoption of Government Decree No. 35/2011. (III.21) on the rules, conditions and exclusions that govern birthing outside health care establishments. Ágnes Geréb’s papers transferred thus far to Blinken OSA include documentation of her advocacy work started in the early 1990s with the organization of conferences on “free birthing,” correspondence with professional contacts within Hungary and abroad, audiovisual information and education materials on home birthing published by the Alternatal Foundation, also established by Geréb, and much more. Copies of police records, court documents, and documentation on Geréb’s arrest, detention, house arrest, and eventual presidential pardon in connection with a small number of home births (Ágnes Geréb helped deliver over 3,500 babies throughout her career), complete—thus far—the archival fonds dedicated to her and to the movement for the legalization and social acceptance of home birthing in Hungary. Accruals are expected in 2023.

Accruals

Digital Archive of Cultural Heritage

In 2022, we have received accruals to our Digital Archive of Cultural Heritage, a joint archival project between CEU’s Cultural Heritage Studies Program and Blinken OSA, from former CEU student Maryam Shah from Pakistan (CHSP 2020–2022). Maryam’s beautiful research project, which was part of her MA thesis titled Expanding Heritage Consciousness: The Endangered Rock Carvings and Inscriptions in the Upper Indus Valley, Pakistan, is now saved for posterity at Blinken OSA in a format that is similar to the one published on a paying platform on the Internet, to which Maryam and the wider public will soon have no longer access. Further accruals to this fonds are expected.

Collection and Personal Documents of Péter Farkas

Following several transfers of electronic documents in 2020 and 2021, this year we also received a shipment of papers from former dissident and writer Péter Farkas (1955-). Péter Farkas, who left Hungary in 1982 to become an antiquarian and radio journalist in Cologne, Germany, kept intensive correspondence with the most prominent members of the Hungarian democratic opposition during the 1980s. His rather eclectic collection of documents includes, among others, manuscripts by György Petri, unpublished typescripts by Béla Szász, rare books, and, perhaps most importantly, vast private correspondence with then members of the opposition Zsolt Csalog, Ottilia Solt, Zoltán Zsille, and many more, as well as with Hungarian emigrés around the world. It neatly fits into – and complements – Blinken OSA’s collections on Socialism in Hungary, including our Hungarian samizdat collection, the recordings of the Black Box Foundation, and the Media Monitoring files produced by the Hungarian desk of Radio Free Europe. Further accruals are expected.

Éva Kapitány Collection of Textual Documents on Political Opposition in Hungary during the 1980s

Éva Kapitány is a non-professional documentary photographer whose collection of black and white photographs is already an invaluable source to our researchers. Kapitány took some of the best shots of street protests in the Hungarian capital during the 1980s and 1990s, including pictures taken at a rally held on the 30th anniversary of Imre Nagy’s execution in June 1988, where she caught on camera the arrest of Gáspár Miklós Tamás and Viktor Orbán. Her recent donation to Blinken OSA are not photographs, however. An active member of the opposition, she took part in the production and dissemination of samizdat literature during the 1980s. Thus, her papers include a collection of rare and original manuscripts, typescripts, samizdat periodicals, “illegal” books produced using the stencil technique, as well as a variety of documents on the Foundation for Supporting the Poor and the Alliance of Free Democrats.

After two pandemic years, the encouraging trends from the second part of 2021 continued in 2022, creating favorable conditions for a good start. Colleagues of the Reference Service were eager to continue to provide free access to Blinken OSA’s holdings and assist on-site and online researchers in exploring the collections. The greatest challenge of the year for the Reference Services was the temporary relocation of the Research Room to the CEU Library on Nádor Street. Preparation for the move started at the end of April and lasted until May 20.

The Research Room opened on Monday, May 23, in a dedicated space inside the CEU Library, as a result of the cooperation between Blinken OSA, the Library staff, and CEU Facilities Management. Adjusting to the new environment and the logistical requirements of regularly transporting archival materials safely from the Goldberger House on Arany János Street, was a great challenge.

Two-way transports were organized twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, according to the researchers’ needs, with the help of the CEU driver and several Blinken OSA colleagues. Since physical access to the Goldberger House was also hampered due to the parallel reconstruction of Arany János Street itself, selecting, packing, and transporting archival boxes necessitated careful planning and implementing.

The number of newly registered researchers continued to grow, in line with the trend of the pre-COVID period. The growth between 2021 and 2022 was over 150 percent, and this included those researchers who wanted to use the opportunity to compensate the lost research opportunities in the previous two years. This group included those who were awarded Visegrad Fellowship at OSA grants in 2019 and 2020 but could not visit Blinken OSA because of COVID-19 restrictions; they were allowed to use their grants in 2022.

We have also witnessed a trend of short research visits, up to two weeks, supported mainly by students' university departments. In addition, Blinken OSA was pleased to continue the cooperation with Professor Victoria Phillips, who, after a two-year break, again brought a cohort of international students to the Archives, this time as a joint project of the London School of Economics and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. The fellows spent an intensive week researching in consultation with the Blinken OSA staff. After the research period, they presented their findings at the annual Cold War conference organized by the Corvinus University in Budapest.

The busiest period started in March, culminated in May/June, and there was another rise in the number of newly registered researchers in the period of September to November. The last busy month was November, when students had to select their research themes or complete term papers.

Blinken OSA’s important source of new researchers is the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA: in this scholarship scheme, researchers receive a grant to spend a maximum of two months in Budapest and do research in Blinken OSA. Last year, we also hosted several OSUN fellows who presented their findings after the research period.

One-third of newly registered researchers were from Hungary, the second most populous group was US researchers, followed by Italy and Poland (eight researchers each). The United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada were represented by five researchers each, while Austria by three researchers. Compared to previous years, it is conspicuous that Central and Eastern European countries are missing or underrepresented, except Poland. We do not know whether this is a temporal trend or a consequence of CEU’s move to Vienna.

The table above contains information relating to the period while Blinken OSA was operating in the CEU Library. It shows that we organized 54 two-way transports. In addition, to accommodate our researchers’ needs, we took them to the Arany János Street storage in person to check archival boxes so they could narrow down their requests and Blinken OSA colleagues could bring over only the necessary boxes.

In this way, we wanted to prevent the overcrowding of the limited space available at the CEU Library, and allow other researchers to get their archival materials in a more democratic procedure. As the space in the transport car was limited to around 54–56 standard archival boxes, we also planned carefully that each researcher would get her requested material on time and in sufficient quantity until the subsequent transport arrived. Individual requests, sometimes of several dozens of boxes, had to be negotiated with the researchers and successively brought to the CEU premises, so that every researcher could be treated in a fair way. We are grateful for researchers who mostly showed sympathy and understanding of the situation.

Research Topics

Research topics were dominated by those relating to the framework of the Cold War and its aftermath. One group of these themes covered Hungary and Hungarian history before, during, and after the Kádár regime, and included personal papers of prominent scholars and members of the democratic opposition. Another group targeted the bilateral relationship between two or more countries, such as Hungary and Poland, or Hungary and Romania, the latter concerning the living conditions of ethnic Hungarians in the Romanian region of Transylvania. Several other research topics emerged on a wider geographic scale, including South-East Asia, countries of the Non-Alignment Movement, the Philippines, Afghanistan, North Korea, Panama, Cuba, etc.

Due to the current war in Ukraine, there were research topics covering recent Ukrainian history and the political and economic relationship with the Soviet Union. Due to our extensive collection on Soviet samizdat, there were interesting topics about the Soviet Union, propaganda, and dissent, Cold War politics, political dissidents, religion, biopolitics, Soviet film and culture. Researchers also had novel topics on the Human Rights movement, the Helsinki Federation, and the Holocaust, as well as broader ecological and religious subjects.

Outreaching the CEU Community and the Wider Public

At the beginning of September, Reference Services took advantage of the CEU Orientation week and visited CEU at the Quellenstrasse Campus. A team of three Blinken OSA colleagues gave a public presentation to the students and were available for their questions and inquiries. The group promoted our services, including Digitization on Demand, individual research-related consultations, and the use of the OSA Research Cloud, as well as the possibilities for internships or applying for a Visegrad grant.

Besides reaching out to the CEU community, we also gave professional online presentations for international students and staff from Columbia University and the University of London. We participated in workshops, such as the IIAS (International Institute for Archival Science) Autumn Archival School organized by Alma Mater Europaea in Maribor, promoting Blinken OSA’s digital collections.

OSA Research Cloud, Digitization on Demand, and Online Requests

In 2022, we continuously encouraged the CEU community, particularly history students, to make use of Blinken OSA’s online Research Cloud. During the year, registration of 26 CEU students were approved. The Research Cloud includes a section that is freely browsable by members of the CEU community, and a section of request-based folders, which are created upon requests by both internal and external researchers. These latter folders contain digitized materials of restricted availability, documents from the Digitization on Demand service, and videos from the Film Library. Currently, there are 93 request-based folders on OSA Research Cloud, containing a total of 842 uploaded items.

Summary

After two devastating pandemic years, 2022 was a year of steady recovery and growth. Although challenging, the temporary move from Arany János Street to the CEU Library showed remarkable flexibility of the institution and its Reference Service, which operated continuously and without major stoppages throughout this period.

The Reference Services is awaiting to working with the new Reference Module soon, which will enable us to better collect and process information about researchers and research topics. Let us hope that in 2023 good trends will continue with many new researchers and new and exciting research topics.

Publications by Blinken OSA Staff

Felcher, Anastasia. “The 1990–92 Armed Conflict at the Dniester River: Continuous Memory Confrontation.” In Cultures of History Forum – Debating 20th-century History, Negotiating History and Memory in the Public Sphere, Section Politics of History: Laws, Policies and Government Programs Shape Historical Narratives, September 19, 2022.

Felcher, Anastasia. “Alexander Pushkin as Foreign Heritage: Transformation and Cultural Disintegration in post-Soviet Societies.” CAS Sofia Working Paper Series, no. 12, 1–24.

Felcher, Anastasia. “New Sites of Worship: Sovietization and Literary Museums in Western Borderlands, 1940-79.” In Transforming Author Museums, edited by Johan Schimanski, Ulrike Spring, and Thea Aarbakke, 199–228. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books.

Friedewald, Michael, Ivan Szekely, Murat Karaboga, Greta Runge, Frank Ebbers. Access to Archives: Implementation Report on Recommendation No. R(2000)13 on a European Policy on Access to Archives. Study for the Council of Europe, draft version, Karlsruhe: Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research.

Macrea-Toma, Ioana. “More than ‘Soul Catchers’: Understanding Eastern Europe through Audience and Opinion Surveys at Radio Free Europe during the Cold War.” Paper submitted to and accepted by the Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming in 2023)

Parnica, Robert. “Digital Curated Collections, Invisible Users and Archival Disintermediation.” ATLANTI International Review for Modern Archival Theory and Practice 31, no. 1 (2021): 139–154, https://journal.almamater.si/index.php/Atlanti/issue/view/36/PDF3101

Parnica, Robert. “Can Archives Feel? The Ethics of Storytelling in Archives: Some Ethical Considerations Concerning Description of the Emotional Archival Sources.” ATLANTI International Review for Modern Archival Theory and Practice, forthcoming.

Rév, István. “Maya Nadkarni, Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary.” Austrian History Yearbook 53, (May 2022): 274–275, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/austrian-history-yearbook/article/maya-nadkarni-remains-of-socialism-memory-and-the-futures-of-the-past-in-postsocialist-hungary-ithaca-ny-cornell-university-press-2020-pp-234/9580F527AF0DCA06205B8647A2ADD9A3

Sarkisova, Oksana, and Olga Shevchenko. “Travel, Space, and Belonging in Soviet Domestic Photo Collections of the Cold War Era.” In Cold War Camera, edited by Thy Phu, Erina Duganne, and Andrea Noble, 297–325. Duke University Press.

Sarkisova, Oksana, and Olga Shevchenko. “Seeing in Focus: Snapshots of the Visual Turn.” Russian Review 81, no. 4 (2022): 617–620.

Sarkisova, Oksana. “À travers l’URSS avec une caméra : la construction de l’espace dans les premiers travelogues soviétiques.” In Ciné-expéditions: une zone de contact cinématographique, edited by Caroline Damiens, 73–93. Paris: AFRHC, 2022.

Sarkisova, Oksana. “Interview with Roman Bondarchuk,” KinoKultura, no. 75 (2022). https://www.kinokultura.com/2022/77UA_INT_bondarchuk.shtml

Sarkisova, Oksana. “Interview with Kateryna Gornostai,” KinoKultura no. 75 (2022). https://www.kinokultura.com/2022/77UA_INT_gornostai.shtml

Sarkisova, Oksana, and Olga Shevchenko. In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos, MIT Press, forthcoming.

Szilágyi, Csaba, and Perica Jovchevski. "Critical Re-Archiving for Social Justice and Inclusive Memories of the Yugoslav Wars." In Memories of conflict and peace in Southeastern Europe, edited by Naum Trajanovski. Skopje: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, forthcoming.

Tóka, Gábor. "A 2022-es országgyűlési választások: adatok és meglepetések (The 2022 Parliamentary Elections: Data and Surprises)." in Társadalmi Riport 2022 (Social Report 2022), edited by Tamás Kolosi, Iván Szelényi, and István György Tóth. Budapest: TÁRKI, pp. 371-388.

Ungár, Nóra. “Etikai és módszertani kérdések a jelnyelvi tolmácsolás kutatásához (Research Ethics and Methodology in the Research of Sign Language Interpreting).” Fordítástudomány (Translation Studies) 24, no. 1 (2022), pp. 32-41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.35924/fordtud.24.1.3

Blog Posts

Belenkina, Katerina. “Nobel Peace Prize 2022: Against Terror Past and Present,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, December 9, 2022. https://osaarchivum.org/blog/nobel-peace-prize-2022-against-terror-past-and-present

Belenkina, Katerina. “Remembering Andrei Sakharov: The Truth of One Man,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, December 14, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/remembering-andrei-sakharov-the-truth-of-one-man

Felcher, Anastasia. “Soviet Dead End: Solving the Wallenberg Mystery in the Cold War,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, January 17, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/soviet-dead-end-solving-the-wallenberg-mystery-in-the-cold-war

Felcher, Anastasia. “A ‘Sudden Transition’: Images of Sovereign Ukraine,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, April 19, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/a-%E2%80%9Csudden-transition%E2%80%9C-images-of-sovereign-ukraine

Felcher, Anastasia. "A ‘Sudden Transition’: Images of Independent Ukraine,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, May 2, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/a-%E2%80%9Csudden-transition%E2%80%9C-images-of-independent-ukraine

Felcher, Anastasia, Adrian-George Matus. “’The Sakharov Case’” and Western Communist Parties,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, June 13, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/%E2%80%9Cthe-sakharov-case%E2%80%9D-and-western-communist-parties

Felcher, Anastasia. “Afterlives of the Murdered Poets – Radio Liberty on the Fate of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, August 12, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/afterlives-of-the-murdered-poets-%E2%80%93-radio-liberty-on-the-fate-of-the-jewish-anti-fascist-committ

Mink, András. “The Forgotten Prime Minister – András Hegedüs Born 100 Years Ago,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, November 3, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/the-forgotten-prime-minister-%E2%80%93-andr%C3%A1s-heged%C3%BCs-born-100-years-ago

Szilágyi, Csaba. “Sarajevo, the biggest concentration camp in the world,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, April 7, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/%E2%80%9Csarajevo-the-biggest-concentration-camp-in-the-world

Tóka, Gábor. “Választási meglepetés készül. 1. rész (An Election Night Surprise in the Making, Part One).” Vox Populi blog on 444.hu, February 20, 2022. https://voxpopuli.444.hu/2022/02/20/valasztasi-meglepetes-keszul-1-resz

Zsámboki, Miklós. “’We Do Not Want to Make that Mistake Again’ – When the West Did Not Trust the Soviet Union,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, March 30, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/%E2%80%9Cwe-do-not-want-to-make-that-mistake-again%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-when-the-west-did-not-trust-the-soviet-union

Zsámboki, Miklós. “June 20 Is World Refugee Day,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, June 20, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/june-20-is-world-refugee-day

Zsámboki, Miklós. “’Millions in Europe Speak Out for Peace. What Do You Do?’ The Dialogue Peace Group Was Established 40 Years Ago,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, June 24, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/%E2%80%9Cmillions-in-europe-speak-out-for-peace-what-do-you-do%E2%80%9D-the-dialogue-peace-group-was-establishe

Zsámboki, Miklós. “Governor of Unfulfillable Hopes? Miklós Horthy’s Death in the Foreign Press,” Forrás. (blog), Blinken OSA, February 9, 2022. https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/governor-of-unfulfillable-hopes-mikl%C3%B3s-horthy%E2%80%99s-death-in-the-foreign-press

Conference presentations

Bóné, József Gábor. “Parallel Archive - Trust and Decentralization". Lightning Talk at the ICA Roma 2022 Conference (September 21, 2022)

Felcher, Anastasia. “Pushkin Museums Outside Russia from the Romanov Empire to Politics of Russkii Mir.” Invited talk at the internal colloquium at the Institute of History, Department of Eastern European History, University of Bonn (April 28, 2022).

Felcher, Anastasia. “The Survival of Post-Soviet de facto Regimes.” Paper presented at the ASN (Association for the Study of Nationalities) 26th annual world convention (online) (May 4-7, 2022).

Felcher, Anastasia. “A Quest for Identity and Trauma Narratives in a de facto Regime. Do Academic Experts and Policy-Makers Cooperate in Defining Local Loyalty and Commemorative Strategies in Transnistria?” Paper presented at the international seminar Memory Studies and Politics of History: Do They Meet Each Other? at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (Poland), Institute of Political Sciences And Administration, Laboratory for International Memory Studies (October 21, 2022).

Felcher, Anastasia. “Archiving Transition and Transformation: RFE/RL on the Collapse of the USSR.” Paper presented at the ASEEES 54th annual convention, Chicago, USA (November 10–13, 2022).

László-Herbert, Márk. “The Guiding Principles for Safe Havens for Archives at Risk (2018) Put into Practice in a Hungarian Private Archive: Rescuing Public Collections and Collections of Wide Public Relevance at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives.” Presentation at the ICARUS Convention #28: Private and public archives in the 21st century / Archives privées et archives publiques au XXIe siècle, International Centre for Archival Research – ICARUS, Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers, France (May 23–25, 2022).

Macrea-Toma, Ioana. Participation in the panel discussion From the Inside of a Communist Archive to the Outside: Historiography and the Ideal of Value-Free Social Sciences, at the Society for Romanian Studies Conference, Timișoara, Romania (June 15–17, 2022).

Macrea-Toma, Ioana. "How to write about reform communism in Romania? The Story of a Short-Lived Institutional experiment." Presentation at the conference Transforming State Socialism in East-Central Europe. Historical Sociology of the Long Change, University of Warsaw, October 2022.

Parnica, Robert. “Can Archives Feel? The Ethics of Storytelling in Archives: Some Ethical Considerations Concerning Description of the Emotional Archival Sources.” Paper presented at the 7th Scientific Research, Study and Educational Symposium (7th Archival Symposium) Archives in the Service of People – People in the Service of Archives, organized online by the International Institute for the archival science Trieste/Italy – Maribor/Slovenia, the Alma Mater Europaea – Archival studies - Maribor/Slovenia, State Archives of Trieste/Italy, and the Historical Archives of the European Union (March 15–16, 2022).

Parnica, Robert. “Digitization as the Long-Term Preservation and an Important Outreach Strategy in Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives.” Presentation at the 16th International Autumn Archival School, Maribor, Slovenia (November 29, 2022).

Parnica, Robert. “The Emergence and the Importance of Digital Curation. Processing and Decision-Making during the Creation of the Digital Curated Collection of the Cold War Internal Encrypted Telex Communication Between Free Europe Committee and Radio Free Europe.” Presentation at the 16th International Autumn Archival School, Maribor, Slovenia (November 30, 2022).

Parnica, Robert. “Crowdsourcing in Theory and Recent Archival Practice. The Introduction of the ‘Parallel Archives’ as a new and innovative digital tool for Sharing Digital Objects among the Users as the New Strategy of Digitization in Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives.” Presentation at the 16th International Autumn Archival School, Maribor, Slovenia (November 30, 2022).

Popescu, Marina, Gábor Tóka, and Raluca Toma. “Programmatic Linkages and Democratic Erosion in Postcommunist Countries.” Paper presented at the annual conference of the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP) specialist group of the Political Studies Association at Newcastle University, UK, 1-3 September 2022.

Székely, Iván. “Data Protection Authorities in the COVID-19 pandemic.” Presentation and panel discussion at the annual Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conference, Brussels, Belgium (May 23, 2022). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WDpPriKpN8

Szilágyi, Csaba, and Perica Jovcheski. “Taming the ghosts: Uncovering ‘tacit narratives’ by rethinking power relations in archives of violent past(s).” Paper presented on the panel Memory Work and Violence (online) at the Annual Hybrid Conference UnSettled: Redefining Archival Power of the Association of Canadian Archivists, June 15-18, 2022.

Szilágyi, Csaba. Co-organizer, evaluator and moderator of the panel Roles, responsibilities and limitations of archives in transitional justice processes and beyond, at the International Expert Meeting, organized by the Srebrenica Memorial Center, PAX and Blinken OSA Archivum, Potocari, December 8-9, 2022.

In the life of Blinken OSA’s IT department, 2022 was the year of many “invisible” developments. These actions are often hidden from the public eye, yet they are essential for establishing a stable and professional service level.

The year was divided by the temporary relocation to CEU’s Nádor Street buildings, which necessitated the meticulous planning and execution of relocating a significant portion of our IT equipment to the university’s facilities. With the aid and coordination of the CEU IT Department, the network infrastructure of our Goldberger building was overhauled, including the centralization of network switches and patch panels in our server room, the replacement of obsolete equipment with newer models, the elimination of unnecessary patch panels dispersed throughout the building, and the installation of 14 new Wi-Fi access points for improved wireless coverage. The existing network endpoints were thoroughly evaluated, tested, and replaced as needed. By the end of 2022, data have been transmitted through approximately 11,743 meters of cables in the Arany János Street building.

This year, three major redevelopment projects were initiated. One of these involves a significant redesign of the software infrastructure of our in-house developed Archival Management System (AMS). In recent years, a trend toward the development of decoupled applications has emerged, leading to the decision to transition from a monolithic approach to a frontend-backend model for our AMS. The upcoming version of the AMS, set for release in January 2023, will utilize the Django REST Framework and MySQL for the backend, and a combination of ReactJS, NextJS, and the AntD Library for the frontend. The redesigned user interface aims to simplify the various phases of the archival lifecycle management, including accession, finding aids creation, processing, and digitization, for our staff members.

In addition to the development of our AMS, our institutional online catalog will also get a facelift. The redesign will not only involve an architectural change, utilizing the same toolset as the AMS, but also a revamp of its visual aesthetic. The early months of 2022 were dedicated to working with a graphic designer to shape the new look and feel of the catalog. We hope that this new, fully mobile-friendly interface will be more effective in meeting the needs of our researchers and visitors. The new catalog will include several new features, such as IIIF-based image viewers, HLS stream-based video viewers, and an integrated PDF viewer. Importantly, the full researcher registration and archival material request lifecycle will be integrated into the new catalog and AMS, moving toward a paperless operation. The new catalog is planned to be released around February 2023.

The third major development project was the comprehensive redesign of our highly utilized but outdated Parallel Archive system by a third-party development agency. The system was rebuilt from the ground up and reimagined with a mobile-first approach, utilizing new and emerging technologies to provide a secure and trusted storage solution for various research papers and source materials from around the world. The use of Interplanetary File System (IPFS) helps to ensure the safety of the stored material. With the Parallel Archive system, users can upload photographs, scans of various documents obtained during their research, merge them into a single document, apply an optical character recognition (OCR) service, add basic metadata, and permanently publish them, ensuring that the document cannot be altered. This document, along with its permanent link, can then be used as a reference in the research paper, serving as a trusted source. The potential future use of the IPFS network was presented at the ICA 2022 conference in Rome. The system is currently in beta, with adjustments being made to the user interface.

This year, the technical development of the Yugoslavia Archive Project website was completed. This curated catalog presents a subset of archival materials, consisting of approximately 30,000 records that document the historical changes in the socio-political, economic, and cultural landscape of the Yugoslav region from WWII to 2010. The website will feature an interactive map with layers that reflect the changes in borders of the Balkans during this period.

In line with previous years, the IT Department was also responsible for creating the website and managing the web services for the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. This was the second year in which the festival offered not only theater screenings but also an online rental platform for the films.

The Archives’s closed platform exclusively available to registered CEU students and researchers, OSA Research Cloud, stores and provides access to digital (digitized and born-digital) content. The service is operating as a virtual research room with special regard to the needs of the CEU community located in Vienna or elsewhere. It enables audiences to access materials remotely for which copyright restrictions do not permit online publication .

This year, the number of items available on the OSA Research Cloud continued to expand.

• 5,466 titles were added to the Film Library collection.
• Approximately 185,000 pages of textual material were added.
• The ongoing results of the AV Digitization Project, consisting of digitized audiovisual materials, were also transferred to the Research Cloud.
• The Research Cloud currently holds approximately 15 terabytes of materials.

In addition to the aforementioned major developments, some other, less noteworthy but also important tasks were accomplished in 2022. These include:

• The ongoing migration of our core software infrastructure to the cloud, with an increasing number of systems running remotely. By 2023, our goal is to host only our storage server locally.
• Management and hosting of websites related to our exhibitions.
• The acquisition of dedicated streaming equipment at the end of the year.
• The proper transfer and disposal of obsolete IT and electronic equipment through the use of trusted waste management partners.

What does 2023 hold in store for us? As previously mentioned, a number of new releases and developments are planned, which are always both challenging and exciting. We will continue to strive for improved discoverability of our archival materials. In the field of IT, we are witnessing a rapid growth in the use of AI technologies. We will be exploring the potential use of these technologies in development and archival processing tasks. Our goal is to use these new technologies to enhance our existing archival descriptions by finding ways to automatically add more context, utilizing automated OCR, automated translation, and using language tools to analyze content and extract relevant data to provide deeper insight and easier access to researchers. We will also be keeping abreast of emerging new archival and library standards, such as semantic web, BibFrame, and Records in Contexts.

Some may think that not much happens in an archive, but it's worth taking a closer look to see the exciting developments that are taking place.

The Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival took place for the 19th time in November 2022. During the year, we continued to organize various screenings, discussions, and educational programs onsite and online.

In the frame of Re:Verzió, twelve of the films screened at the 18th Verzió were available online from February 14 until March 27. The selection featured the winners of the 18th edition of the festival, and the most popular works that premiered last year. The Re:Verzió films were also shown at live screenings at the Apolló Cinema in Pécs and at the Megálló Community Center in Szeged. In March 2021, following Russia's attack on Ukraine, Verzió joined the fundraising efforts of Docudays UA, our partner festival in Ukraine. We put together a selection of Ukrainian documentaries and made them available on our streaming platform, festival.verzio.org, to collect donations for Ukrainian documentary filmmakers recording the events of the war.

During the spring and summer months, we were working on the preparations for the online film library Verziótheque. We launched Verziótheque in May 2022, with 40 creative documentaries from around the world. The films can be rented by the general audience for a low price, and free of charge for educational purposes. Simultaneously, we worked on further developing our education programs. In May, a one-day workshop was organized for university lecturers teaching or interested in teaching documentary films. Teachers from the Faculty of Humanities at ELTE, from the Faculty of Psychology and Education at ELTE, from the Metropolitan University (METU), from the University of Pécs, and from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics took part in the workshop and exchanged ideas about including documentaries into their methodologies.

The 19th Verzió: Burning Issues

The 19th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival was organized in November 8–20, 2022, its slogan was Burning Issues. Once again, the Verzió team carried out a hybrid event. The theatrical screenings ended on November 16, however, the festival continued until November 20 with films to rent online on festival.verzio.org, available across Hungary—some of them worldwide. It was the first time in the history of the festival that the theatrical screenings lasted nine days, from Tuesday until Wednesday. Simultaneously with the festival in Budapest, screenings and accompanying programs were organized in Pécs, Szeged, Kecskemét, Debrecen, and Szombathely, in cooperation with Szabad Terek, a country-wide network of independent organizations and community spaces The festival had ca. 20,000 viewers and visitors, including the online and offline audience.

The Trafó House of Contemporary Arts has hosted the festival’s Opening Night for several years. The Opening Film was Away (2022, 28 min), by Ruslan Fedotow; a short documentary about two Ukrainian teenagers fleeing the war in Ukraine and arriving in Budapest. Following a welcome speech by Dr. Anett Bősz, Deputy Mayor of Budapest for Human Services, Nóra L. Ritók, educator, and founder of the Real Pearl Foundation, opened the festival.

Ukrainian films were in the spotlight during this edition: the Solidarity UA section consisted of the Postcards from Ukraine section prepared in cooperation with the DocuDays UA Film Festival, and the late Mantas Kvedaravičius' two documentaries about the city of Mariupol were screened as well. Altogether 75 films were screened across 10 competition and thematic categories. The accompanying programs included 40 Q&As and discussions, 9 open industry events, Student Verzió screenings for 1,200 high schoolers, 9 music events, 2 exhibitions, and several online discussions (that are available on Verzió’s YouTube channel).

Verzió also looked into new forms of documentary approaches, works that stretch the boundaries of different cinematic genres. The Vector VR Section exhibited recent international Virtual Reality works that offered new perspectives on various human rights issues. AniDoc, a joint animation documentary film section of Verzió and Primanima, debuted this year. The Young Critics film critic workshop was held for the first time with the participation of six critics under the mentorship of Pamela Cohn (critic, writer, curator, USA) and Zsolt Gyenge (critic, university lecturer, HU). Industry programs were organized in cooperation with MADOKE, the Hungarian Documentary Association, and took place at the Central European University on Nádor Street. The industry program featured nine events over four days, for film professionals, for students, and teachers, as well as for those interested in the practical and theoretical aspects of documentary film education and filmmaking.

Over the four days, renowned experts of documentary cinema from Hungary and abroad discussed higher education opportunities for young talents, the distribution of creative documentaries in Europe, burnout, and the importance of mental health in filmmaking, as well as the cooperation between film festivals and educational institutions. Masterclasses were offered on documentary storytelling, editing as creative development, and feminist filmmaking. On Saturday, eight projects from the 7th Verzió DocLab workshop on editing and story development were presented to potential producers, festival representatives, and funders. Two projects received awards, one award from MADOKE and one from the Biografilm festival in Bologna.

Verzió’s cooperation with universities, called Univerzió, has continued successfully for the fifth year in 2022 with Media and Communication Studies and Film Studies students at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE BTK), and Graphic Design students at the Budapest Metropolitan University. Due to the fact that Blinken OSA was closed for reconstruction works, METU students’ alternative film poster exhibition was hosted by the Eötvös10 cultural center. Eötvös10 also hosted the Vektor VR documentary film exhibition, where visitors could watch virtual reality works and immersive documentaries.

The Visegrad Scholarship Program – An Academic and Intellectual Forum

The Visegrad Scholarship at OSA program brings scholars and artists to Blinken OSA since 2010 from all over the world, besides the regular inflow of CEU students. The program works in two ways: it supports research based on Blinken OSA’s collections on a competitive basis, and, due to the specificities of the sources, builds a scholarly community interested not only in particular themes related to the Cold War and its aftermath, but in the very trustworthiness of Cold War-era texts and discourses as reflected in the selected media and political protagonists’ documents preserved at Blinken OSA. The research conducted at Blinken OSA was therefore organized in such a way as to be conducive to bigger collective reflections on the issues of knowledge-production and truth regimes in contested times. The thematic calls and the one-to-one academic and archival consultancy sessions organized for each fellow had gradually fostered an academic and intellectual forum where associated questions about truth and evidence were being constantly raised.

The academic coordinators of the program gave a new twist by organizing in October 2021 a conference where former fellows and other researchers were invited to reflect together on conceptualizing and solving the methodological issues of working with Cold War era-related sources. The call was also framed to connect past contentious ideological issues to current “post-truth”-era problems and the growing skeptical relativism. Instead of a volume of conference proceedings, a more unitary and focused journal issue was deemed to be the proper result of the conference. The authors of selected papers were invited in 2022 to re-work their paper and re-submit them to a journal issue. The project is ongoing.

New Call in 2022: Lessons of the Cold War?

After the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, a new call has been launched, the objective of which is twofold: it is humanitarianly open to Ukrainian scholars and Russian refugees of conscience and, at the same time, it is meant to re-evaluate past Cold War themes and sources in the light of the present war. In such tragic circumstances, it is not just Blinken OSA as a welcoming community that is open to people in need. Soviet-era sources inaccessible otherwise in the current context can be found at Blinken OSA: samizdat documents as well as regional newspapers that were published both in Russian and in local languages (Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz). Central Asia has uncannily become the focus in applications to the Visegrad and other scholarship programs at Blinken OSA.

Some remarkably interesting projects and presentations followed:

Blinken OSA as a Growing Research Hub

The integrated Visegrad program offering full-funded grants, systematic consultancy, professional feedback, prospects for academic publishing and artistic research, and possibilities for collective original work, has attracted an increased attention to the program in 2022. The number of applications has grown during the last five years, and therefore the Visegrad Fund has agreed to increase the number of grants at Blinken OSA from 15 to 20 per year. In 2022, after the war started, Blinken OSA received 52 applications from 25 countries, and 15 full grants were awarded (in addition to four smaller grants). In a single application round from November 2022, we received almost as many applications as we received throughout a single year five years ago (when we had three rounds of applications). The spectrum of applicants got also diversified, with new applications coming in from Peru, Argentine, Iraq (in addition to the regular inflow of applications from Europe and Central and Eastern Europe). In their motivation letters addressed to Blinken OSA, applicants mention that they are familiar with the Archives due to their former status as CEU students, social media outreach (30%), recommendations by their academic supervisor (especially mentioned by US applicants) and other Blinken OSA teaching and public programs. Blinken OSA’s grant visibility grows and builds not only on the enriched research program, but also on the multifold activities that contextualize and make the archival sources known and relevant.

Publications that made extensive use of Blinken OSA materials or that were written by former Visegrad fellows are listed on the Archives’s website, including articles and books recently published by:

Marco Gabbas. “The Birth of Soviet-workers dissidents.” Labor History, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 353-371, DOI: 10.1080/0023656X.2022.2104827. (In the words of the author: “the pleasant and insightful conversations I had with my academic advisors at OSA helped me shape the project.”)

Armen Grigoryan. “The war in Ukraine and historical revisionism.” New Eastern Europe, May 23, 2022. Online publication.

Irina Gordeeva. “Solidarity in Search of Human Agency: ‘Détente from Below’ and Independent Peace Activists in the Soviet Union.” Labour History Review, 86 (3), pp. 339–368.

Lovro Kralj. “Populism, Memory Politics and the Ustaša Movement 1945–2020.” In Memory Politics and Populism in Southeastern Europe, edited by J. Jensen, London: Routledge, 2021.

Piotr Wcislik. Dissident Legacies of Samizdat Social Media Activism: Unlicensed Print Culture in Poland 1976–1990, London: Routledge, 2021.

Academic Coordination of the Visegrad Program

Since 2020, Ioana Macrea-Toma has been the academic coordinator of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. She moderates the sessions where Visegrad fellows present their end-of-the-fellowship work, and conceptualizes the program’s outreach and thematic calls . After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 2022’s call was changed to Lessons of the Cold War?, inviting scholars and researchers to re-evaluate past Cold War themes and sources in the light of present war.

In the summer of 2022 Ioana was conducting archival research for completing an article on science based epistemology, meaning the interplay between mathematics and dissident political radicalization in communist Romania, and for editing a journal issue on Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives.

Access to Archives: Study for the Council of Europe

Ivan Szekely, in cooperation with colleagues from the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, such as Dr. Michael Friedewald, Murat Karaboga, Greta Runge, and others, conducted a large-scale, pan-European research on the current state of access to archives. When in 2003–2004 the first such investigation took place with the participation of the (then) Open Society Archives, the main research question was whether archives in the Member States of the Council of Europe (CoE) comply with the newly adopted Recommendation No. R(2000)13 on a European policy on access to archives, the first international legal document in this area, with special regard to newly democratic countries of Europe. The results of the first research was published in the Handbook of Access to Archives, written by Charles Kecskemeti and Ivan Szekely, and published by the CoE in English and French. The main question of the current research was whether the compliance with the Recommendation, and the practice of access to archives in general, have changed during the last two decades. A further purpose of the research was to explore the use of new information technologies in the archival institutions, as well as to identify the challenges and possible solutions in this area.

In order to make the two investigations comparable and to measure the changes that took place during the past years, the structure of the new study followed that of the original, with necessary minor changes, but also included a new chapter reflecting the use of new technologies in archives and the changed expectations of the users of archives. Data collection was conducted in October 2022. The three target groups: archival institutions, professional users, and NGOs, may have, as they had 20 years ago, different opinions and experience in the subject of the study, and the overall situation can only be evaluated on the basis of these positions and experiences. The first analysis of the data was included in the report written for the competent bodies of CoE. The subsequent analyses will prospectively be completed and published in professional journals from 2023 on.

Our study may assist archival institutions to improve their services, legislators and regulators to remove legal and regulatory obstacles from access to archives, and professional and lay users of archives to demand better conditions for access to paper-based, audiovisual, and electronic documents alike. In a broader sense, our study may assist the competent bodies of the CoE to revise and update the Recommendation itself, and include new provisions reflecting the practices of contemporary archives.

Research on Sovietization in Hungarian Theaters

As Archivist at Blinken OSA and a theater historian, Balázs Leposa obtained his PhD degree from the University of Theatre and Film Arts in November 2022. His thesis interprets the early experiments of theatrical Sovietization in Budapest, 1948–1955. The thesis includes five reconstructions and analyses of Hungarian theater plays as case studies to exemplify various aspects of the theatrical Sovietization and at the same time typify the performances of the era. First, in connection with The Miser by Molière, he examined the role of the performance as an electoral campaign, i.e. the Sovietization of the spectators. Secondly, he examined the Socialist Realist reading and interpretation of Shakespeare in the production of Othello and its directives on its theatrical realizations, i.e. the Sovietization of interpretation. Thirdly, in the analysis of The Heroes of Everyday Life by Éva Mándi, he explored the peculiarities of the new Hungarian schematic drama, i.e. the Sovietization of the drama. Fourthly, in the case of The Breakup by Boris Lavrenyov, he presented the results of par excellence Sovietization, the results of the Soviet director's cooperation with the Budapest-based company for the first time, i.e. the Sovietization of the company. And finally, analyzing the performance of The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách, he explored the possibility of synthesizing Sovietized and Hungarian bourgeois theater traditions. The thesis includes an important chapter related to the materials at Blinken OSA, which were researched, digitized, and published as an online curated collection of Blinken OSA, titled Cold War Theater Collection.

The Cold War Theater Collection was published in 2021, the launch was supported by a public discussion with theater historian Magdolna Jákfalvi and researcher at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Tamás Szőnyei. The collection itself generates a quite impressive traffic (50+ users per month), articles appeared in the Hungarian press and lectures were held related to the collection. PhD and undergraduate students of (the former) University of Theater and Film Arts were contacted, who then started archival research at our institution.

Merging the knowledge and experience of a historian with the knowledge and infrastructure of an archive could and have to be a unique possibility to show not only the paradigmatic ways of using primary sources but should be the core of the verifiability of any research. In a theoretical way, the presentability of sources makes the historian’s work trustworthy and transparent. In the near future, Cold War Theater Collection 2.0 will be published; predictably, the values listed here will play a more prominent role.

Research on Voting Behavior

Gábor Tóka’s research activities in 2022 focused on the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election on the one hand, and on data collection, processing, and analysis for a book manuscript on the other. This book is meant to synthesize the scholarly literature on voting behavior regarding the emergence and persistence of programmatic linkages between voters and parties, with an original and unusually broad cross-national and longitudinal analysis providing empirical illustrations and tests of key propositions.

The book project has important synergies with Gábor’s work on developing an archive of post-1989 public opinion research data about political attitudes and behavior in Eastern and Central Europe, and permits showcasing the value of such a collection. The empirical and theoretical motivation of the book project stems from a glaring gap in the political behavior literature. At the micro-level, it has been extensively explored when and how issue voting occurs and to what extent it can contribute to democratic linkages of responsiveness and accountability between citizens and their elected representatives. However, the macro picture about cross-country and over-time differences, and consequently about the dynamic determinants of such linkage, remains quite confusing.

The forthcoming book involves co-authors for the various chapters, and aims to explore causal sequences from political institutions, party behavior, political communication routines, news media reporting on politics to voting behavior and back. A key chapter that highlights links between how changes in the quality of democracy over time correlate with the waning and strengthening of programmatic linkages in different issue domains was presented at an international conference in August. A subsequent presentation at the American Political Science Association conference in September 2022 was canceled due to an unexpected visa problem and will be remedied in 2023.

Sabbatical and Book Manuscript

In January 2022, Csaba Szilágyi completed his sabbatical at the University of Amsterdam, where he spent five months doing archival and desktop research on custodial practices related to, and art projects and artistic performances based on, archival sources on the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. This was part of a larger research project on the roles, responsibilities, and limitations of archives/archiving in creating knowledge about and transforming memory politics relating to the 1991–1995 wars in Bosnia, which continued throughout 2022. A chapter from his PhD dissertation and a co-authored chapter (submitted November 2022) in an edited volume on post-conflict remembrance in Southeastern Europe contain the preliminary results of his research.

This year, Oksana Sarkisova completed the book manuscript based on her long-term collaborative research project on family photography and the aftermath of the Soviet century in multi-generational families in Russia. The manuscript, authored together with Olga Shevchenko under the title In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos, explores the photographic images’ singular power to capture a fleeting moment, by approaching them as points of contestation and possibility. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork and interviews, as well as internet ethnography, media analysis, and case studies, In Visible Presence offers a rich account of the role of family photography in creating communities of affect, enabling nostalgic longings, and processing memories of suffering, violence, and hardship. Together, these photos evoke youthful aspirations, dashed hopes, and moral compromises, as well as the long legacy of silence that was passed down from grandparents to parents to children.

The book is contracted by MIT Press and is scheduled to come out in 2023.

Research Connected to Curatorial Activities

Besides individual research work on a scholarly research topic, members of Blinken OSA staff, at times in collaboration with external contributors, do serious research in Blinken OSA’s holdings, as well as in various external sources, during the preparations of exhibitions and other public programs.

Anastasia Felcher contributed to exploring, reviewing, and selecting Blinken OSA materials related to LGBT themes in preparation for the exhibition Records Uncovered 2.0. She also explored, reviewed, and worked through Blinken OSA materials related to selected Soviet dissident personalia in preparation for the Fearless exhibition. Anastasia also did research for her conference presentations and publications, exploring Blinken OSA materials related to Moldova in 1980s and 1990s and the armed conflict in Transnistria, as well as on the collapse of the USSR and the period of transition and transformation.

István Rév, the initiator and conceptual leader of the Fearless series of events that started in the fall of 2021 and lasted until May 2022, selected and analyzed the last lectures of French philosopher Michel Foucault, which dealt with the problematics of truth, the fearless expression of truth, and the relationship between the individual and truth. He was the curator of the Fearless exhibition, organized in the Galeria Centralis at Blinken OSA.

Most of the documents in the exhibition came from the rich collections of Blinken OSA, trying to present as much original sound material as possible in the original language (with translations and summaries). The exhibition was divided into six chapters and an important interlude:

1. The problem, concept, and origin of fearless speech;
2. The courage to speak without fear;
3. (Intermezzo: What is truth?);
4. Censorship, self-censorship, and samizdat;
5. Fearless speech from the perspective of the secret police;
6. Freedom of speech, fearless speech, and the fragile relationship between democracy and freedom of expression;
7. The right to truth.

In addition to routine cooperation in the form of joint fellowships and projects with other research and teaching units of the Central European University (CEU), including the Democracy Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study, Blinken OSA carried out exchange programs and events with a variety of external partners. (These are described in more detail in other chapters of this annual report.) True to its openness towards professional, academic, and cultural progress and innovation, as well as its cooperative and hospitable spirit, the Archives teamed up with institutions and organizations ranging from research universities and centers to independent artistic collectives, LGBTQI+ organizations, and to Central Asian filmmakers and memorial centers.

As a research center of CEU, Blinken OSA, represented by Csaba Szilágyi, participated in Work Package Three of the CIVICA Research alliance’s project on surveying archival infrastructures and policies, and identifying complementarities in collections of leading European research universities, such as the European University Institute (represented by the Historical Archives of the European Union as WP leader), Science Po, Bocconi University, the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, and The London School of Economics. Beyond recording the status quo, the final report formulated based on the survey’s findings recommendations on enhancing cooperation between the partners in integrating archives in the core university curricula, archiving digital born records, and research data management.

Later in the year, Katalin Dobó continued to work in CIVICA Research by collaborating with the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). This program was aimed at exploring and promoting CESSDA infrastructure, resources, and services among scholars.

Supported by Erasmus Mobility travel, Oksana Sarkisova visited the Communication and Media Studies Department of Carlos III University of Madrid to explore possibilities of sharing best teaching practices and devising modes of professional cooperation with the Head of the Department, Concepción Cascajosa Virino, and Pr. Sonia Garcia Lopez.

Furthermore, Oksana participated in the First Central Asian Film Forum, and took part as mentor in the First Film Critics’ Workshop at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek. The cooperation designed for offering novel format of training for young film critics will continue within the framework of the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Budapest.

Fellows from the Cold War Archives Research Institute of the Wilson Center had their by now regular week-long study visit organized in the Archives’ research room in late spring. During their stay, the 15 BA, MA, and PhD students from prominent universities across the globe, such as the London School of Economics, Stony Brook University, George Washington University, MIT, University of the Philippines, Sapienza University Roma, or the Graduate Institute in Genevea, were assisted in their research and mentored by the Archives’s staff on daily basis.

In June 2022, Judit Hegedüs and Márk László-Herbert visited and had professional exchanges with archivists and curators from about a dozen archives in Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam, and Hilversum. The on-site collection viewings, discussions, and public presentations took place within the framework of a Visitors’ Program organized by DutchCulture on behalf of the government of The Netherlands, and supported by Creative Europe.

In October 2022, Katalin Dobó organized a professional visit for Emilia Karjalainen from the Slavonic Library at the National Library of Finland. The aim of the visit was to initiate a long-term professional cooperation between the libraries of the Archives and CEU, and the Slavonic Library.

During the Fearless series of programs, Blinken OSA cooperated with CEU’s Borderless Knowledge open lecture series in organizing a well-attended podium discussion on the reality, risks, and limitations of free speech.

Other events within the same project were implemented in collaboration with the Freeszfe Society, a state-independent artistic space aimed at preserving the 155-year-old tradition of the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest (SZFE). Among other contributions, they co-published a call for applications for theatrical performances, which were evaluated by a joint jury consisting of Kinga Szemessy, László Upor, Tibor Csizmadia, and Jakab Tarnóczi from Freeszfe, and Balázs Leposa from Blinken OSA. The awarded productions, Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle by the theater group of Orsolya Fodor, and The Tree of the Truth, a premiere by the Cipolla Collectiva were performed before full-house in the gallery space of the Archives. By means of continuing this fruitful cooperation, the latter will be performed again, followed by a new premiere in the Archives’s Arany János street building in 2023.

As a follow-up to previous joint work with the Háttér Society’s Archive and Library, Blinken OSA organized in its gallery the Records Uncovered 2.0 exhibition on LGBTQI+ histories in Central and Southeastern Europe (1945–1999), under the co-curatorship of Perica Jovchevski and Péter Hanzli. Together with Csaba Szilágyi, the team also visited QWien, a research center, library, and archives for queer studies, where they also met with the director of the Queer Museum Vienna, and discussed possibilities of cooperation, exchange of archival sources, and the prospects of showing the Records Uncovered 2.0 exhibition in Vienna.

Blinken OSA joined the Yerusha online platform of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, a network of over 690 prestigious archives and institutions of social memory on Jewish history and culture across Europe. To put its relevant collections on Jewish life under Socialism in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the focus of international research, the Archives, under the guidance of Anastasia Felcher, contributed 23 collection descriptions to Yerusha’s continually growing database.

In 2021–2022, Iván Székely lead a pan-European study on the state of access to archives in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research. The study was commissioned by the Council of Europe, similarly to the first such study conducted in 2003–2004 in cooperation between the International Council on Archives and Blinken OSA, represented by the late Charles Kecskeméti and Iván Székely. After discussing and adopting the final report on the results of the study in early 2023, it is expected that the Council of Europe will further use the expertise of the leaders of the study in the process of updating and amending the Council of Europe’s recommendations in the cultural sector.

Gábor Tóka continued his ongoing collaboration with the Policy-Based Political Representation: A Multi-Method Analysis of Legislative Work, News Content and Surveys (2021–2023) project of the Median Research Centre, Bucharest, in collecting and archiving surveys of political attitudes and Romania in 1990–2020. The project is supported by the (Romanian) Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development, and Innovation Funding (UEFISCD).

Throughout 2022, the archival consultancy work of the Archives for the Srebrenica Memorial Center Archive, represented in this three-year program by Csaba Szilágyi, continued with joint professional visits with the Bosnian colleagues in Budapest and memory institutions in Germany. It concluded with the International Expert Meeting co-organized with PAX and held in Potočari at the end of the year. (For a detailed description of this cooperation see the chapter Critical and inclusive archiving for social justice and solidarity.)

In 2022, Blinken OSA’s core budget, about 1.2% of the total operating budget of Central European University, comfortably covered the Archives’s basic professional operations. The slight overrun in the non-personal category was amply compensated by the savings in the personal category, where some posts remained vacant for shorter or longer periods.

For the past 16 years, this budget has been complemented with an annual grant from the Open Society Foundations (OSF), against appropriate application and on condition of regular reporting. These two financial pillars make it possible for Blinken OSA to implement all its records management and archival activities relating to both the Open Society Foundations network and the Central European University campuses in Budapest and Vienna, its extensive processing and digitization operations, and its mission-related public programs for students and researchers, as well for the general public.

The Visegrad Scholarship at OSA grant scheme started in 2010, bringing in €34,500 for Blinken OSA annually, out of which 15 full grants of €2,000 each are awarded every year. Grants for shorter periods are pro-rated. In 2022, the Director and the Deputy Director of the International Visegrad Fund paid a visit to Blinken OSA, and made an offer to increase both the number of scholarship holders and the amount of the scholarship, which had remained unchanged since 2010. From 2022 on, Blinken OSA offers 20 full grants of €2,700, bringing in €60,000.

In the years between 2010 and 2022, 228 Visegrad Scholarship at OSA grants have been awarded, with applications arriving from over 50 countries across all the five continents. The list of the most researched topics and the publications of Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Fellows between 2010 and 2022 based on their research in the Blinken OSA collections is available at Statistics Illustrated 2010-2021 | OSA Archivum.

Blinken OSA’s civic engagement project, which supported the teaching of English to students at the Ambedkar school, came to an end in 2022. The closing event was attended by students, teachers, and the Archives’s staff, as well as Visegrad Fellows.

2022 was marked by recovery after the pandemic, during which we had to decide whether there were elements of operating during a pandemic that we needed to preserve. The number of trips increased again, but the lectures, presentations typically took a hybrid form, increasing the need for state-of-the-art technical equipment and software.

The changing institutional and academic environment due to the move of the Central European University from Budapest to Vienna put additional strain emotionally as well as practically on the community of Blinken OSA. The relocation to Vienna siphoned off many of the students working in the Archives, reduced the number of on-site student and teacher researchers, and also disrupted the academic research atmosphere surrounding Blinken OSA. This constant uncertainty has had an impact throughout the year, both on the well-being of colleagues and on the physical and financial framework of the institution.

Nevertheless, in 2022, the number of interested students visiting Budapest from Vienna increased and a joint education program was launched with several units in Vienna. Blinken OSA, putting all its financial resources to good use, managed to cover all its archival and records management tasks and public programs activity, including the 19th edition of its Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.

In 2022, however, life at Blinken OSA was dominated by the temporary move from the Goldberger building, which was necessary due to renovation work. The expense relating to the renewal of the cooling-heating system of the building was entirely covered by the central budget of the Central European University, which also covered the costs of the Archives’s move to and stay at the CEU Budapest complex for 10 months.

In the new situation, Blinken OSA faced new challenges, especially in the area of online education and the online searchability of its collections, having devoted a significant part of its external funding to digitizing its collections and making digitized material available online. These objectives were implemented with the leadership of Blinken OSA’s newly appointed Chief Archivist, a position finally filled in after long periods of being vacant.

At the end of 2021, the staff of the Archives numbered 43, although this figure fluctuated over the months, as some new colleagues were only contracted for a definite term. Out of the 43 colleagues, 13 had short fixed-term contracts, 1 was on IT payroll; the core staff counted 29, out of which 18 worked on a full-time basis. The full staff came from 8 countries.

Tasks that the core staff could not pick up and that could not be handled by the technological developments, were covered by externally contracted service providers, externals, interns, and CEU students, on fixed-term employment contracts. Because of the temporary move from its “home,” in 2022, Blinken OSA concluded only four short-term external contracts and one Erasmus student exchange agreement.

In order to make all of the Archives’s operations transparent and easy to follow, Blinken OSA circulates the OSA Weekly listing the events of the week, the monthly Management Meeting Brief, a summary of the Management Meeting, and after the monthly Staff Meetings the Staff Meeting Minutes. The bi-annual Financial Reports, which are followed by the Open Finance Days, where reports and operational invoices are open for the inspection of the staff, also serve the purpose of transparency and open communication.

Fellowships

Blinken OSA has a long history in offering different types of fellowships, should these be research grants for current Masters and PhD students, individual researchers, exchange students, artists, journalist, or even groups of researchers dedicated to certain research agenda. To date, the Archives has awarded over 1,300 grants.

Currently, Blinken OSA offers only three support schemes, out of which the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA, awarded jointly with the International Visegrad Fund, supports 20 researchers a year for a two-month research period each, and the Aaron Swartz Fellowship supports one successful candidate a year (in 2022, the Aaron Swartz Fellowship was not awarded), and the Hoover Archives Research Assistance Scholarship, offered jointly with the Freedom Broadcasting Foundation (formerly the RFE/RL Fund), supporting distant-research in the Hoover Archives. The latter was dormant for a long period for reconstruction works running in the Hoover Archives, and is to reopen under a new name, which will commemorate one of its founders, Ross Johnson.

The Visegrad Scholarship at OSA saw many more researchers in 2022 than awards for the year, because sixteen candidates could not start their research in time due to the pandemic. In 2022, Blinken OSA saw 28 Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Fellows in total. The list of successful candidates and their research reports can be accessed here.

In 2022, the Archives was involved in two OSUN-driven incentive programs. In total, six research fellowships and two fellowships for threatened scholars were awarded, one to a Russian refugee researcher and one to a Ukrainian researcher who is not allowed to leave the country due to the war situation.