Our Research
The Blinken OSA Archivum is a research institute engaged in dealing with past and present historical issues through an investigation of archival collections both as sources and as a subject matter. It thus conducts academic seminars and outreach projects in the shape of laboratory activities, having a practical and a theoretical dimension. The two research foci at the Archivum, together with the Visegrad fellowships program at Archivum, and the CEU Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) - Democracy Institute (DI) - Archivum joint fellowship program, provide a platform for productive interdisciplinary exchange.
Research at the Archivum includes staff members with various disciplinary backgrounds: history, archival science, literary studies, cultural heritage, information science. They teach archival courses and internships at the Archivum in Budapest, internal archival seminars, B.A. and M.A. courses and seminars at CEU (in Vienna) within the History Department and the Legal Studies Department, as well as courses at Hungarian universities. The Archivum’s researchers provide expertise for public programs at Galeria Centralis, to curatorial and metadata enhancement archival projects. They contribute to the Visegrad fellowship program by designing the program, mentoring, and working together with fellows. The Visegrad fellowship program is intricately connected to the reflexive-research program at the Archivum. It is designed to foster cooperation between in-house researchers and fellows along yearly themes that could lead to collective publications.
Research agenda
Research Field 1: On the Archive
With this research field, the Archivum investigates theories and methodologies related to the archives, both in general and applied to collections created during the Cold War and after. This research program considers that the core collection of the Archivum , the research papers of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, posits several challenges. Given the fact that the Cold War was primarily informational and that Western media outlets such as RFE/RL created an enormous databank as the basis for their broadcasts intended to provide alternative news to the countries under communist rule, the archive itself became a weapon and a repository of irreducible facts. This research platform thus deals with the problematic nature of information during an ideological war, the tension between a politicized vocabulary and the concrete phenomena, the referential relevance of items created under these conditions, the interventions of the archivists/ documentarists, the relationship between different Cold War archives, socialist state archives and secret police documents, and the relationship between human rights information gathering and larger Cold War issues. The status of textual and audio-visual documents produced by institutions belonging both by ordinary people and the grey zones are also under scrutiny.
For more recent times, the questions raised are about the circulation of information under authoritarian regimes or in contexts of crisis, as well as access to and credibility of archival sources in times of distrust in institutions, the role of archives within the volatile era of digitalization, but also “post-truth” and “alternative facts.” The case study of a Cold War archive provides even here an indispensable perspective for the understanding of the afterlife of a bipolar world.
Within this frame, individual researchers at the Archivum have recently worked and published on the knowledge-production practices during the Cold War (Ioana Macrea-Toma), the photographic family archives during the Soviet era (Oksana Sarkisova), the memory and preservation of Jewish heritage (Anastasia Felcher), the role of archives in managing or transforming the memory politics with regards to recent wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Csaba Szilágyi), policy recommendations with regards to access to archives (Iván Szekely), comparative studies of partisanship through voting behaviour and statistical data (Gábor Tóka), oral histories and evidentiary issues of post-war Hungarian opposition (András Mink),trust in archives and archivists, access to archival documents (István Rév).
This research platform also brought together the Archivum’s researchers and its Visegrad fellows within the project Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives. It was aimed at fostering a methodological toolkit about how to work with sources belonging to adversarial truth regimes. An international workshop was organized in 2021. A publication is pending.
As the core collections of the Archivum are a rich storehouse of competing historical representations and interpretations, we have been interested in our archival work, teaching, and research activities in historical revisionism, that is in the presentist conviction that the present can change the past (historical facts), not only the perception and interpretations of past events. This kind of historical revisionism treats and evaluates events and characters of the past according to certain moral standards of today, typically with a therapeutic intent to compensate for real or imagined historical injustices.
Research Field 2: Through the Archives
This research field is connected to the first one but shifts its focus to the political and ideological events and practices outside the archives. It investigates what the world of the past looks like when looking at it through the archival holdings, practices, and processes. It deals with topics like propaganda, censorship, everyday life, evolution, opposition, resistance, and truth-telling under communism and after, and the complex discursive, political, and archival practices that shaped them.
The Archivum is one of the largest repositories of uncensored speech, anti-authoritarian samizdat texts, published and distributed without official permission. The challenge is to analyze resistance phenomena as well as the content of their productions through the lens of archival items and concepts that were themselves part of the ideological battles of the past, such as the Samizdat Archives at RFE/RL. Cold War institutions like RFE/RL were not just instruments of Cold war policy, but also repositories of independent Eastern European and Russian culture and anti-authoritarian political thinking. Research at the Archivum makes visible these collections together with similar in-house documents belonging to the personal archives of the main oppositional figures in Hungary.
The 2022 exhibition Fearless brought together the Archivum’s researchers and archivists to commemorate, recall, and raise awareness of the importance of fearless speech in a series of events.
The 2023-2024 theme of the Visegrad fellowship program at the Archivum, Lessons of the Cold War?, attracted fellows that studied the connections and differences between past issues related to oppressive regimes, censorship, violence, and information manipulation to current phenomena.
