RFE/RL Communist Radio Monitoring Now Online
On June 17, 2025, the Blinken OSA Archivum hosted members of the press to present its newly digitized and published collection, created in collaboration with Arcanum Adatbázis Kft., featuring broadcasts of Hungarian Radio before the regime change.
Transcripts of Hungarian Radio broadcasts from 1951 to 1992 are now available online. Radio Free Europe transcribed these programs as part of its Cold War radio monitoring activities. The Blinken OSA Archivum preserves the original documents, while Arcanum Adatbázis Kft carried out the digitization.
Radio monitoring, which began in 1951 and continued uninterrupted for forty years, provides a daily record of news, analysis, and interviews broadcast on state radio, covering everything from sports updates to weather reports. Life in the 1950s is reflected in a distinctive mix of pervasive propaganda and ordinary broadcast content. These transcripts are unique, as the original audio recordings were destroyed during the 1956 siege of Hungarian Radio. In the years that followed, only selected and sporadic recordings or transcripts were preserved. The Blinken OSA Archivum decided to make the transcripts publicly accessible online after the Hungarian Radio Archive was effectively closed to researchers and the public by MTVA.
Given that official state radio served as the primary news source throughout the 20th century, its content should be freely accessible today. Such access is essential, as it represents a fundamental historical source for understanding socialist information policy and propaganda.
A joint digitization project with Arcanum has resulted in the creation of over half a million pages of material, comprising transcripts of Hungarian Radio broadcasts from 1951 to 1992. These transcripts are now fully accessible —both browsable and searchable—on Arcanum Newspapers, and in the Archivum’s online catalogue. The collaboration also includes transcripts from Romanian, Czechoslovak, Polish, and Bulgarian state radio stations, expanding the total collection to over two million pages.
The collaboration between the Blinken OS OSA Archivum and Arcanum continues with a groundbreaking digitization initiative: the complete journal collection of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute will soon be available online. This collection forms the foundation of the Cold War press within the Arcanum database, which already features more than 650 newspaper titles in twenty languages, totaling seven million pages. Over the next year, the project will focus on processing fifty years of Soviet press, adding an additional 5 million digitized pages to this extensivecollection.
István Rév, Director of the Blinken OSA Archivum; Katalin Dobó, Chief Librarian of the Blinken OSA Archivum; and Előd Biszak, Managing Director of Arcanum Adatbázis Kft., briefed the press on the background and implementation of their joint effort to create this exceptionally important historical resource.
