Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives
Press Room
Posted: 22/February/2021
Date: October 14-16, 2021
Place: Blinken Open Society Archives, Central European University (Budapest), Hungary
The workshop aims to contribute to the discussion on knowledge practices in times of reflexive disbelief by addressing the role of scholars with regards to different truth regimes. Michel Foucault once remarked that the analysis of “truth” should go beyond the evaluation of isolated statements: truth regimes are power systems which produce and sustain certain truths in a circular way, through political and economic institutions. William Davies of “The Guardian” traced back the current popular skepticism vis-à-vis professional expertise to a paradigm shift in truth regimes: the immediacy of self-revelatory data has been replacing, through a multitude of revelations, leaks and informational wars dating as far back as the Cold War, the interpretative work by experts and journalists. It is worth re-assessing, from this point of view, how historical knowledge about the past can be used to address and carefully interpret facts and events reported or produced by those very informational wars before 1989, when the East and West were systemically opposed. In an era when individuals and academic communities are increasingly divided over matters of common concern, we consider it the duty of both historians and archivists to engage in a more reflexive manner with the problematic nature of records of the past.
Posted: 21/February/2021
New Summer University Course organized by the Open Society University Network and Blinken OSA
Titled Confronting the Crisis of Expertise: Historical Roots and Current Challenges, the SUN course will take place in Budapest or online.
Offered to advanced-level undergraduate students, graduate students, junior faculty in humanities and social sciences, journalists, and artists, the research-intensive course is planned to be organized on-site in Budapest; if the pandemic is still posing health risks, the course will be held online. The course will comprise lectures, seminars, and practical workshops with archival documents and scientific datasets.
Co-funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN), in cooperation with the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives.
Course Director(s):
Ioana Macrea-Toma
Posted: 19/February/2021
The online exhibition, a joint project of Blinken OSA and the Háttér Archive will open on February 26, 2021.
“Records Uncovered” is an online exhibition by the Blinken OSA and the Háttér Archive, which presents the divergences and commonalities among gay and lesbian movements in Central and Southeastern Europe in the second half of the last century. Through legal documentation, media reports, private and institutional correspondence, artworks and ephemera, this exhibition evinces the understanding and treatment of homosexuals, in countries that commonly shared two different political goals at two different periods: the establishment of a new Communist society between the mid-1940s and the early 1990s, and the transition toward a democratic society in the following years.
Posted: 16/February/2021
Audience favorites from the most recent Verzió available for limited-time streaming.
Every spring, some of the best films from the Verzió Festival are rescreened at the Blinken OSA. This year, due to the pandemic, the films are made available online on the Verzió website. Audience favorites from the 17th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival will be available from February 15 through April 30, in the frame of Re:Verzió. The fifteen films cannot be found elsewhere in Hungary, and for most, it may be their last chance to be viewed.
Tickets for these films are free of charge, or can be purchased for a symbolic price. All ticket sale proceeds will be used to purchase the rights for I Am Greta, for educational purposes and film club screenings. These films are only available for streaming within Hungary. Hungarian subtitles will be provided for all non-Hungarian-speaking films. A limited number of tickets are available for each film. When fewer than 100 tickets are left for a given film, viewers will be notified via the Verzió's Facebook page.
More information can be found at https://www.verzio.org/
Posted: 12/February/2021
The prize is assigned by The PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies, a nonprofit organization based in the Republic of Moldova.
Anastasia Felcher, the Slavic Archives Specialist at the Blinken OSA, has been awarded the PLURAL Local Archives & Collections Research Prize. The prize is assigned by The PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies, a nonprofit organization based in the Republic of Moldova, which aims at initiating and carrying out analyses and discussions of phenomena and social issues neglected or distorted in the public space, such as inequality, oppression, identities, cultures, power, and ideologies.
Posted: 09/February/2021
It is with great sadness that we report on the passing of A. Ross Johnson. A scholar who specialized in East European and Soviet security issues, Johnson fulfilled senior positions at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL, Inc.) over several decades: he was senior executive from 1988 to 2002, director of the RFE/RL Research Institute, acting president and counselor of RFE/RL, and recently History and Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and Senior Adviser at RFE/RL.
Posted: 04/February/2021
A new fully digitized, fully processed collection was made available for researchers for the first time in Hungary.
Archival work never stops at Blinken OSA even amid a global pandemic. The AV Section of the Archives is happy to announce that a historically important visual collection is now fully digitized, fully processed, and available for the researchers and the wider public for the first time in Hungary.
The Collection is titled the „ Recordings of the Opposition Roundtable Negotiations” which was a widely-known phase during the Transition period of 1989. The events were documented by the Black Box Foundation, the first independent media group in Hungary (since 1988). Contrary to the state-controlled media, Black Box was a fresh and independent voice in Hungary during the Transition, they extensively documented and even participated in the events of the peaceful Transition.
The five-part documentary films about the negotiations can be found at HU OSA 305-0-2
The Collection is in Hungarian.
Posted: 26/January/2021
The Blinken OSA launched a blog series at 444.hu, one of the leading independent news websites in Hungary. The blog entitled Forrás. [meaning source and, with the dot pronounced, boiling point] consists of posts written by the Blinken OSA staff, revolved around archival sources and their archival, historical, and contemporary context. As 444.hu is in Hungarian, English translations will be published here, at the Blinken OSA website.
Posted: 25/January/2021
The Archives contributes to the program in the form of an internship and a course titled Memory in Public Spaces (Including Archives)
About the History in the Public Sphere (HIPS) program:
HIPS is a 120 ECTS English-language program awarding a Multiple Degree.
The program description says, “History in the Public Sphere is a two-year master program that focuses on the ways the past is represented, contested, and negotiated in the public sphere, exploring various contexts from the early modern period to the present in a comparative and transnational way.”
Posted: 20/January/2021
Blinken OSA offers the three-credit course Archives, Evidence, and Human Rights to CEU students.
Teaching has always been an essential part of the activities at Blinken OSA, and for many years, a variety of courses were launched to CEU students. We are happy to announce that despite the challenges and the CEU’s move to Vienna, the Archives continues its popular course Archives, Evidence, and Human Rights, offered to the Human Rights Program of the Legal Studies Department, cross-listed to the History Department.
About the course:
This course aims at looking at the roles and uses of human rights documentation in the context of preserving recorded memory and the history of human rights. Establishing facts by forensic methods, producing impeccable evidence to convict perpetrators, or understanding the roots of conflicts and working toward dialog and reconciliation are just a few areas where the availability of reliable records and archival activism can make a huge difference.
Course description and Syllabus
Posted: 15/January/2021
Cultures of Dissent in Eastern Europe (1945–1989): Research Approaches in the Digital Humanities – Online
Co-funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent (CA 16213), a COST Action funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union (nep4dissent.eu).
Hosted by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, Budapest, Hungary
About the Course:
The course is co-hosted by the Blinken Open Society Archives, CEU’s progressive hub for digital Cold War history and a natural home for scholarship conducted in this area. A previous course in 2019 already based its demo datasets on digitized content from the Blinken OSA collections: records of the Radio Free Europe Research Institute, and of RFE’s telex communication between New York and Munich in the 1960s. There are a lot of training schools in digital humanities methods around the world, but very few which are so focused on a particular subject area and dedicated to building collaborative digital history projects around a discrete set of topics. By basing the course and its follow-up activities at Blinken OSA, this program aims to seed a new wave of digital history projects that revolve around Cold War history and oppositional cultures.
Posted: 12/January/2021
Archives to the Rescue: Left-Wing Journals of Interwar Western Europe Arrive at the Archives
We are always delighted to share the news if our collection has been enriched with a special, new donation. Now, however, we have to report with a bitter taste that we had to transfer a part of the press collection of the Institute of Political History—recently cast out from its home—to the Archives, in order to avoid forced scrapping.
Posted: 08/January/2021
We are happy to announce that the evaluation of the last submitted Visegrad applications has finished and the final list of winners and reserves has been approved by the Council of Ambassadors.
For detailed information on the call, please check the official Blinken OSA Visegrad Scholarship website
The following candidates received full support:
• John/Jack Atmore (US) for his project Creating an Online Interactive Archival Documentary Platform with the Privát Fotó és Film Alapítvány Home Movie Collection
• Jelena Culibrk (Serbia) for her research Televising the Invisible Hand: The BBC and Postwar (Neo)Liberalism, 1968–1980.
• Svetlana Dimitrova (Bulgaria/France) for her research “Promoting Free Exchange Behind Closed Doors.” The Foundation for the Support of European Intellectuals in its Socio-Historical Context
• Samuel Finkelman (US) for his research How Soviet Jewish Intellectuals and Activists Mobilized the Past to Stimulate the Resurgence of Jewish National Consciousness
• Jira Janac (Czech Republic) for his research on Hydrosocialism
• Andrea Soós (Hungary) for her research on the oeuvre of László Rajk and his contribution to the social and political transformation of Hungary in the 1980s.
• Trinkle, Alice (Germany) for her research on “Understanding socialist economic reform as a global phenomenon.” Assessing exchanges between Europe and China and their influence on Chinese economic reform in the 1980s
The following candidates received partial support:
• Bewicz, Piotr (Poland) for his research Letters From The Inside. The Phenomenon of Experiencing Archive – The Open Society Archives Example
• Lilla Farkas (Hungary) for her research The Emergence of the Roma Rights Movement in the Last Years of Communism and its Immediate Aftermath
Posted: 04/January/2021
Blood/Witness
Szabolcs KissPál Documentary Radio Play
Radio Tilos FM 90,3 MHz
January 10, Sunday, 2021, 12.30–1.30 p.m.
The events that took place hundred years ago are still leading to sharp, heated debates: which events do we consider national tragedies from the turn of the 1910s and 1920s? Whom do we consider victims to be emphasized as mementos for the collective memory? Whose blood was spilling from, so to say, the wounds of the nation? The documentary radio play by Szabolcs KissPál explores this issue through, on the one hand, the microhistories of the everyman of the era—the Jewish victims of the Red and White Terror—, and, on the other, through the great national narrative—the history of the Monument of National Martyrs, inaugurated in 1934, toppled in 1945, and reconstructed in 2019.
Posted: 16/December/2020
We are happy to announce that the current exhibition at Blinken OSA, closed due to the pandemic, is now available online! The web version of the exhibition titled From Harvest to Harvest – Hungarian Calvary, 1918–1919, includes interior photos, as well as the several hundred documents and their curatorial commentary on display.
Visit the exhibition: https://fromharvesttoharvest.osaarchivum.org/?lang=en
Posted: 10/December/2020
On Human Rights Day, shortly before the Dayton Accords were officially signed in Paris 25 years ago, Blinken OSA remembers those for whom The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, although it put an end to the 1991-1995 wars, came too late: the over 100,000 victims. We remember human loss from the peculiar perspective of the forensic scientist in search of and identifying the missing.
Posted: 08/December/2020
Due to technical difficulties, we were unable to post on the official Facebook Page of the Archives. Although we have set up a new Page, we are happy to announce that the old Page is back! Therefore, we have returned to the original channel, also sharing content from the past three months and much more.
We are planning an informative campaign on the 25th anniversary of the Dayton Agreement, we will revisit the available panel discussions and recorded online events of the 17th Verzió Film Festival, and we will regularly post excerpts from the coming online version of the current exhibition closed due to the pandemic, titled From Harvest to Harvest – Hungarian Calvary 1918–1919.
Like us, follow us, and tune into the diverse world of the Archives!
Due to the pandemic, the Archives is closed, but you can browse our digital repository, and read our blog posts and archival news!
Posted: 02/December/2020
“Labor Research from Planned Economy to Savage Capitalism” is the title of a workshop conference organized by Voices of the 20th Century Archive and Research Group together with Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives.
The conference is in Hungarian.
Date: December 3–4, 2020
Hungarian sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s conducted an immense amount of interview research concerning workers and broader topics of the world of labor, which would be close to impossible today. These researches, by the 2000s, became the standard professional sources of social history. Archives hold several collections that were and could become relevant sources of research. Based on these collections, this conference explores a significant tradition of Hungarian sociology; the research on labor and workers’ everyday circumstances, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as its interpretations in social history and the history of sociology. The conference is inspired by the new collections acquired by the Voices of the 20th Century and the Centre for Social Sciences Research Documentation Centre.
Posted: 02/December/2020
To mark the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, when prosecutors used film as evidence for the first time in international criminal prosecutions, having set an evidentiary cornerstone in the foundation of justice, the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights launched the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations.
Posted: 01/December/2020
In November, 2020, Blinken OSA received the personal papers of Ádám Modor (1958–2009), publisher, the head of Katalizátor Office, further enriching the Archives’ collections presenting the activity of the Hungarian democratic opposition.
Ádám Modor worked primarily as samizdat editor and distributor, briefly contributed to Beszélő as a printer, and assisted the Áramlat Publisher as an editor.
Posted: 27/November/2020
Blinken OSA—the Archives and gallery at Central Europen University—participates in the CEU Virtual Open House. This is the first-ever virtual CEU Open house, taking place on November 27, 2020.
Anyone can join the program online! Live stream sessions on degree programs, students sharing their CEU experiences, departments showcasing their teaching programs, Q&As and roundtable discussions, and much more.
Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives - Schedule
Posted: 26/November/2020
Blinken OSA colleagues participated at the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Virtual Convention, 2020.
Oksana Sarkisova, Research Fellow at Blinken OSA, was the convener of the panel session “Socialism and the Human Face: The Present of the Past through the Prism of Private Photographic Archives” which included presentations by Maria Gourieva, Friedrich Tjetjen, Monica Ruthers, and Oksana Sarkisova and comments by Gil Pasternak and Galina Orlova. The panel explored multiple approaches to private photo collections as rich primary sources that can help reconstruct various facets of the recent past.
Posted: 23/November/2020
Verzió awarded six creators of outstanding documentary films at the annual awards ceremony on 20 November. This year, over 20,000 viewers attended the festival virtually, which exceeds both the number of previous Verzió festival attendees and the expectations of the organizers.
Thanks to the online nature of the festival, the films this year have been accessible to more people than ever before. Virtual visitors have come not only from throughout Hungary, but from around the world, especially the United States, Romania, the United Kingdom and Austria.
The Award Recipients of the 17th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival are the following. Heartfelt congratulations to the filmmakers! You can read the full jury statements here.
Posted: 21/November/2020
The 17th VERZIÓ Human Rights Documentary Film Festival showcases 50 films from 39 different countries, online, 10–22 November. These films bring us closer to topics such as climate change and its consequences, freedom of the press today, political abuse of national resources, and the ongoing struggles of refugees.
Documentary filmmakers capture the transformation and challenges of humanity. By highlighting and celebrating these films, VERZIÓ aims to bring viewers closer to each other’s reality, to provide reliable information, and to raise awareness about common joys and sorrows around the world, and in doing so, to contribute to a more supportive society. This year, to achieve these goals, the festival, founded by the Blinken OSA Archives, presents films in the following sections: International Competition, Student and Debut Film Competition, Hungarian Competition, Anthropocene, In the Name of Justice, and Archive of the Planet.
Join the live events through Verzió's website or Facebook page. During the live discussions ask the guests in the chatbox or record your questions to the filmmakers and share them through the Vialog app, that you can find on the individual films’ pages and the front page as well.
Tickets and passes
Posted: 17/November/2020
Blinken OSA colleagues participated at the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Virtual Convention, 2020.
The convention hosted over 500 roundtables and panels, a film series, receptions, entertainment breaks, and affiliate group business meetings. With over 2,500 session participants and attendees, the 2020 Virtual Convention was a dynamic and productive event.
Yulia Karpova, Assistant Archivist at Blinken OSA, planned to present her new research findings on furniture design for the Research Institute for Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Leningrad in 1938. However, she writes, “because my research trip to St. Petersburg in the spring was canceled, I could not carry out a case study. Instead, I presented a new research project entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Biopolitics: Design for Reproductive Healthcare in Denmark and Russia, 1920s–90s’.”
A Junior Research Fellow at Blinken OSA, Ioana Macrea-Toma participated in the panel Cold War Archives: Sources, Silences, Interpretations, and Ethics, with the presentation ‘Cold War Archives: Ethics and Poststructuralism.’
Posted: 09/November/2020
The timetable of the Opening Night
The Opening Night will be broadcast live on our website and on our Facebook page.
7:00 pm Opening speech by Dr. Oksana Sarkisova, Festival Director
7:10 pm Opening performance by FreeSZFE
The Opening film 76 Days, a Chinese documentary shot in a Wuhan hospital during the first months of the coronavirus outbreak (Viewer discretion is advised.) will be available from 7:00 pm November 10 at festival.verzio.org.
Go to the site and register with a free user account.
To watch 76 Days for free, go to the film’s page, click on the “Kölcsönzés” (Rental) option, and enter the promo code: 76NAPVERZIO
Once the first 200 viewers have “rented” the film, another 400 tickets will be made available at the price of 900 HUF.
More information about tickets and passes can be found here.
9:30 pm Q&A with Hao Wu, director
During our online discussions, you will have the chance to ask your own questions in real-time but you can also prerecord questions and messages to filmmakers on the films' page
Posted: 04/November/2020
We are happy and proud to announce that Samizdat Archives section of our archival catalog has been replenished with 6 more archival series descriptions in the past few months. We have introduced archival descriptions that are available in English and Russian for the newly processed unique archival series that shed light on the convoluted period of Perestroika and transition to post-Soviet reality in Russia and other newly independent states. The Samizdat Archives series newly published in our catalog introduce the public to the informal and regional press, letters addressed to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty by its audience from across the (former) Soviet Union, and multiple diverse documents that witnessed the transition era from political and social viewpoints. The new content can be a very useful help for researchers, journalists, and educators interested in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the aspects of regime change in the entire East European region.
Posted: 29/October/2020
We are happy and proud to announce that our thematic website, 1989: lesz-e? (Will There Be A 1989?) has been seriously upgraded in the past few months. We have uploaded the meticulously rearranged and humungous Hungarian Press Survey from Radio Free Europe, which contains more than 15.000 pages of Hungarian press clippings from the year 1989.
Hypers:
The website: https://1989.osaarchivum.org/
New Content: https://1989.osaarchivum.org/szer-sf
Posted: 27/October/2020
We are happy to announce the second call for the Visegrad Scholarships at OSA in the fall of 2020/21!
Submission deadline: November 15, 2020
We invite applicants from the fields of history, the arts, philosophy, and sociology to reflect on the conditions of knowledge production during and after the Cold War. Scholars and artists are invited to analyze the documentary practices of different agencies and persons on both sides of the Iron Curtain and assess the truth value of related documents/ artifacts.
Visegrad Scholarship at OSA
For a better and deeper understanding of the interdependent recent history of (the center of) Europe, the International Visegrad Fund offers 15 research fellowship grants annually in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest on a competitive basis to support scholars who wish to conduct research in the holdings of OSA, and whose current research projects are relevant to the holdings and the given research priorities of the Fund and OSA.
For detailed information of the call, please check the official OSA Visegrad Scholarship website.
Posted: 26/October/2020
Closer to Each Other’s Reality
The 17th VERZIÓ Documentary Film Festival announces this year’s films
The 17th VERZIÓ Human Rights Documentary Film Festival showcases 50 films from 39 different countries, online, 10–22 November. These films bring us closer to topics such as climate change and its consequences, freedom of the press today, political abuse of national resources, and the ongoing struggles of refugees.