Anastasia Felcher • September 27, 2023

Protesting at Babyn Yar

On view at the Blinken OSA Archivum, the exhibition Commissioned Memory - Hungarian Exhibitions in Auschwitz, 1960/1965 debates whether to what extent was the memory of the Holocaust silenced in Socialist Hungary.

Anastasia Felcher • September 13, 2023

Khrushchev in Hungary: How Isolated Eastern Leaders Reinforced Each Other

What do we primarily remember Nikita Khrushchev for?

Anastasia Felcher • August 29, 2023

“Toward a World Without Weapons and Violence” – Mikhail Gorbachev Died 1 Year Ago

A year ago today, on August 30, 2022, Mikhail Gorbachev, final leader of the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1991, died in a Moscow hospital at the age of 91.

Gwen Jones • August 18, 2023

“Do Friends Come to Visit with Tanks?” – Reactions to the 1968 Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 55 Years Later

Fifty-five years ago today, five Soviet-led Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Prague Spring reform attempts led by Alexander Dubček. Operation Danube, the largest military maneuver ever undertaken by the Warsaw Pact, was also the first major foreign “intervention” by the Soviet Union since its tanks had crushed the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Documents in the Blinken OSA Archivum’s archival series on Non-Ruling Communist Parties reveal that in the intervening 12 years, a number of key lessons had been learned, both East and West.

Anastasia Felcher • April 28, 2023

Toward a Nuclear Archive: from Peaceful Atom to the Long Shadow of Chernobyl

On April 26, 1986, 37 years ago, an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant caused a radioactive cloud that spread over a large area in Europe, with the western parts of the Soviet Union—today’s Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia—receiving the strongest portion of it. More than eight million people were exposed to radiation leading to death, diseases, and despair.

Márton Németh • April 14, 2023

Lost Memory: Archiving an Online Auschwitz Exhibit

April 16 is the Memorial Day of Hungarian Victims of the Holocaust. The Blinken OSA Archivum opened its Auschwitz 1945–1989. Reconstruction exhibit in 2004 on this day; the exhibition was on display for two months, but was quickly followed by an open-access virtual version (only in Hungarian) the same year. However, this online exhibit became unavailable in 2021 for technical reasons.

Katerina Belenkina, Miklós Zsámboki • March 03, 2023

Nuclear Disarmament and the Budapest Memorandum: “the Arrival of a Safer Era for the World”?

On December 5, 1994, an event took place in Budapest, Hungary, which became the final and defining step in a series of decisions toward the third-largest nuclear state abandoning its nuclear arsenal and becoming a non-nuclear-weapon state. That country was Ukraine. With the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine took third place in the list of nuclear states, behind the United States and the Russian Federation.

István Rév • January 12, 2023

From Coal Cellar to Domed Hall (and Beyond): 45 Years Since the Return of the Holy Crown

Matthew Nimetz, a Trustee of Central European University, told the following story on a cold winter’s day in Nádor Street: “In the late fall of 1977, when US President Jimmy Carter decided to return the crown of St. Stephen to Hungary, he instructed me, as his chief advisor to the Secretary of State, to travel to Fort Knox, Arizona, where the Hungarian crown jewels were stored along with the gold holdings of the US Federal Reserve Bank, and see the condition of the crown jewels.

Katerina Belenkina • December 13, 2022

Remembering Andrei Sakharov: The Truth of One Man

”Westerners ask how Soviet citizens feel about their government's actions in Afghanistan; this question is difficult to answer in the absence of a free press and without public opinion polling on sensitive issues.

Katerina Belenkina • December 09, 2022

Nobel Peace Prize 2022: Against Terror Past and Present

“Whose terror was it? . . . The mass consciousness views mass terror the same way it viewed the Plague during the Middle Ages. We were living our lives, and then suddenly—the Plague! It came and it killed many, many people. And then it left, and we continued on living. But this is not right. Memorial’s response is a fairly simple one.