Activity Report 2020

"A Dreadful Course of Calamities" befell us at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives last year. Some of them were foreseen and expected:

following the eviction of CEU from Hungary, the move of the University from Budapest to Vienna; the difficulties of providing access to archival materials to the students and faculty of CEU; the intensification of the government’s war on culture, research, education and civility; the government’s growing impatience with the past, and the efforts to rewrite wholesale the history of both the country and Europe.

Some of the calamities, however, were (for most of us) unexpected: the fast-emerging indifference, both local and global, to historical facts; and obviously the plague, the pandemic that paralyzed the globe.

We had tried to prepare for the expected disasters. After long and careful preparations, two years ago, we started a highly ambitious digitization program, to have our moving image holdings digitized both for long-term preservation but also for the purpose of providing remote access to our film holdings. By next year, most probably, all our moving images, but also a large part of our photographic collections (consisting of thousands of hours of films and well over a hundred thousand photographs) will be digitized. Our image collections can thus be used in class in Vienna, and students will be able to make use of these important and unique sources in their coursework.

Blinken OSA has set up a so-called “private research cloud” in order to make the digitized part of our holdings, both textual and visual, remotely available, primarily for students and faculty of CEU. All members of the CEU community are able to have remote access to the holdings in the Archive, as if they were doing research in our in-house research room. Since “fair use” copyright exception allows educational and cultural institutions to provide access to copyrighted material for educational purposes, with the help of the research cloud the Archives can make even copyrighted material, including feature films, available to the CEU community.

We were preparing for the foreseeable, the move of the University, but we were unprepared for the invisible, the coming of the virus. When the miasma reached the country, the building of the Archives, with its research and public programs facilities had to be closed down. OSA has started offering a new service: digitization on demand for the research community. We set up a hotline, to let researchers consult with our research services staff, who help remote researchers to find their way around our electronic finding aids, and the staff of the archive tries to satisfy the research needs by immediately digitizing previously undigitized material even when the facilities are under lockdown.

We managed to continue teaching at CEU online, preserving our long-running successful courses, and started to take a very active part in a new Erasmus Mundus program financed in cooperation between the European Union and the Japanese government. The program, “History in Public Spaces” is a pioneering offering in public history in Europe. As part of the two-year M.A. program, (each semester of which takes place in a different cooperating country: Austria-Hungary, Portugal, Italy, Japan) students are supposed to spend an intensive internship month at OSA. Because of the pandemic, we had to improvise a month-long online virtual internship program on archives and on our philosophy of public programs.

The unexpected situation required us to move our public engagements into virtual space. During the first phase of the pandemic, we were offering special readings on the history of pandemics and epidemics, on the philosophical and public policy questions of quarantine, public health, and the possible social and cultural consequences of the pandemic. We continued our public exhibition programs with “Faith-Trust-Secrecy”, religion and religious practices through the lenses of the secret police under Communism; “Post-Soviet”, a photo and an accompanying diary exhibition of the works of Lenke Szilágyi, a member of the Archives staff and one of the most highly regarded contemporary Hungarian photographers; and “From Harvest to Harvest”, a historical exhibition on the turbulent postwar year between mid-1918 and mid-1919, the history of two, nowadays hotly contested revolutions in Hungary. The exhibition and its accompanying programs are part of a multi-year program series to counter the ongoing official historical revisionism in Central Europe and especially in Hungary.

Despite all the difficulties and the lockdown, in the course of the second wave of Covid 19, Verzio, the 16th annual international human rights documentary film festival was organized online with an all-time record number of viewers. With a grant received, following a grant competition by the US Embassy in Budapest, the Archives planned to organize a massive school program on 1989, the year of the political transition. The program was intended to supplement a year-long project whereby with newly available documents, a dedicated website and knowledge source were created to counter with credible factual sources the new revisionist official narrative of the fall of Communism and the political transition. The pandemic made the presence of high school classes in the Archives impossible, so a new virtual program, with software for computer games, had to be developed in order to move the students from the Archives into the virtual space. Our colleagues also managed to continue our high-school teacher training program on the history of the twentieth century, the only available accredited alternative program available in the country.

The year witnessed the complete abolition of academic autonomy in Hungary: the remaining research institutes in the humanities and the social sciences were either closed down or taken over by the government; public universities privatized, i.e., handed over to private foundations appointed by the Prime Minister; new pseudo “research institutes” were created and stuffed with enormous sums of money and important archives of recent history were evicted from their buildings. Blinken OSA remains one of the few, if not the only still existing autonomous, free research center and repository of important historical sources testifying about the past “as it really was.”

Following the defeat of Donald Trump, a close friend of the Hungarian government, the new US President, Joe Biden appointed Antony Blinken, the son of Donald and Vera Blinken as the 71st Secretary of State of the United States.

In 2018, I started working at the Blinken OSA as Project Program Officer, a title enigmatic enough to allow me the flexibility necessary for the creative work through which I believe I can contribute to the Archives. Introducing myself on the Blinken OSA website’s staff page three years ago, I wrote that as Project Program Officer I work on the accessibility of the heritage preserved and created in the Archives—which is something I still believe in. The Blinken OSA preserves an extraordinary collection capturing and addressing issues related to the history of the Cold War and Communism, as well as to human rights in a broader sense. This heritage, although related to the past, bears many lessons for the present as well as the future. Instead of being static, however, the very operation of the Archives constantly guarantees that records here are not only conserved and processed by archivists and researched by researchers, but are also accessible.

The accessibility of this heritage is crucial; it means a demystification of archives. The textual, visual, audiovisual documents preserved at the Blinken OSA are not only available to privileged scholars but can be studied by anyone (to which digitization and online availability are fundamental). Furthermore, the Archives strives to find, on the one hand, new contexts for archival records by rearranging them into curated collections and public exhibitions, and on the other, new audiences by introducing these records to relevant communities and non-academic forums like news websites and educational programs. My task is to help these attempts either by organizing city walking tours on the history of the regime change for secondary schools or by editing a blog series on a popular, independent news website. I strongly believe that an archives is not merely a repository of documents, but also has the duty of opening the heritage it preserves to the widest possible audience, thus mediating its lessons and values. The pandemic has shown that this mission and the accessibility it requires are more than timely.

András Bozóki Collection - Interviews on the Hungarian Regime Change and Samizdat Literature

András Bozóki is a Hungarian political scientist, sociologist, and university professor at CEU. His research interests include democratic transformations, political systems, Central European politics, and political ideologies. The interviews donated by András Bozóki were conducted as a part of a research project carried out in 1997. The series includes almost 200 audio interviews conducted by András Bozóki and his team with participants of the Hungarian regime change, many of whom are still active in politics. The interviews give a comprehensive overview of the transition period in Hungary, with a special emphasis on the National Round Table negotiations. The results of the project were published in Gördülő rendszerváltás [Rolling Transition] by András Bozóki in 2019. The transfer also contains Hungarian samizdat journals, mostly Beszélő and Demokrata.

Records of Collegium Budapest - Institute for Advanced Study

From the autumn of 1992 to September 2011, Collegium Budapest was an international institution set up for postgraduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral studies. In 2011, following a series of unsuccessful negotiations with the Orbán government, the institution was closed. During the years when it operated, representatives of any discipline, from any country in the world, could be invited to the college for a full academic year. In a short time, the institution became one of the centers of Hungarian scholarly life. During its existence, 20-30 scholars per year received bursaries from the institution; altogether over 400 scholarships were awarded. The majority of the materials accumulated during the operation of Collegium Budapest were transferred to Blinken OSA's storage in 2019, the new accrual was placed at the archives in 2020 by Gábor Klaniczay, former Director of the institute. The collection includes materials related to projects and conferences, the building and guesthouse of Collegium Budapest, and also photos.

István György Tóth Personal Papers

István György Tóth (1956-2005) was a professor of history at the Central European University. Among the great eras of history, his interest was directed towards the centuries of the Early Modern Age. His accumulated documents were processed and made available for research over a decade ago, and in 2020, a new addition further enriched this collection. The accrual contains manuscripts, materials related to his dissertation, research notes and copies of archival documents, scholarly articles, course readers, theses that he supervised, and materials on CEU related academic issues, as well as a couple of microfilms and a box of electronic files on 3.5' floppy disks and CDs.

Gertrud Bortstieber Personal Papers

Economist and translator Gertrud Bortstieber (1882-1963), the second wife of philosopher György Lukács, was one of the first Hungarian female mathematicians. The Archives acquired 18 boxes of her correspondence and manuscripts in 2019. In 2020 the collection was further expanded with original copies of Gertrud Bortstieber's personal correspondence, donated by her grandson, István Jánossy. The letters in this part of the collection have been digitized and shared with the archives. The collection consists of letters written between 1918 and 1959, to a friend of Gertrud Bortstieber, also to relatives in Wien, Bortstieber's son, and other members of her family.

László Mester Collection

László Mester was mayor of Budapest’s 18th District, Pestszentlőrinc and Pestszentimre, between 1994 and 2010, and a Hungarian Socialist Party member of the Hungarian Parliament between 2002 and 2010. He began his political career in the Hungarian Communist Youth Organization and joined the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party in 1975. In 1989 he was a founding member of the Hungarian Socialist Party. After his retirement, he recorded a series of biographical interviews in which he gave an account of his decades in politics. The collection of audio recordings of interviews conducted by Endre Domaniczky with László Mester has been donated to the archives. The entire series of interviews lasts more than 19 hours.

Ádám Modor Collection

Blinken OSA received the personal papers of Ádám Modor (1958–2009), publisher, head of the Katalizátor publishing house, further enriching the Archives’ collections presenting the activity of the Hungarian democratic opposition. Ádám Modor worked primarily as a samizdat editor and distributor, briefly contributed to Beszélő as a printer, and assisted the Áramlat publishing house as an editor. His attempt to explore the history of the democratic opposition and samizdat resulted in various publications; among them, his monograph on the early years of the Fidesz party, titled Ellenségből ellenzék (From opponent to opposition), a book he edited about Tibor Pákh, and one he wrote on György Krassó. The collection that Blinken OSA received includes sources covering most of Ádám Modor’s public activities from his samizdat years to the film interviews with democratic opposition activists.

Gábor Miklós Collection

Journalist Gábor Miklós, former Warsaw correspondent for the daily Népszabadság donated his manuscripts of articles written between 1982-1985. The collection focuses mainly on Polish domestic matters, also during the period of Martial Law, and includes internal reports for the editorial board of Népszabadság.

François Fejtő Papers

François Fejtő, (Ferenc Fejtő, 1909-2008) was a Hungarian-born journalist and political scientist, and a friend of László Rajk, whom Fejtő knew from his university years in Budapest and from the illegal communist movement since the late 1920s. Fejtő, an émigré in Paris since 1938, wrote several denunciatory articles when Rajk was arrested, tried, and executed for treason in 1949. The single item in the fonds is a digital text file, which is the scanned version of a manuscript by Francois Fejtő on the László Rajk sh

DIGITIZATION OF VIDEO, SOUND, AND PHOTO COLLECTIONS

The following collections were digitized and their digital master files quality control was performed:

• The digitization of the Film Library holdings involved making ISO (preservation master) and mp4 (browsing) copies of 4524 DVD-ROM and Blu-ray films. Films on VHS cassettes as well as born-digital films will be preserved and made accessible in a separate project.
• 146 DVDs within the video collection: HU OSA 305-0-3 Black Box Foundation Unedited Video Material were digitized into ISO files for long term archival preservation. (The full and detailed cataloging of the series was completed in 2016 and 2017.)
• 25 VHS/S-VHS cassettes of HU OSA 344-0-1  Films of the Workers’ Militia
• 61 VHS cassettes of HU OSA 378-0-1: Iraq monitoring
• U-Matic/Beta SP of HU OSA 366-0-1 Hungarian Propaganda and Tourism Agency Film Collection (in progress)
• BetaSP/ VHS cassettes of HU OSA 350-1-1 Records of the International Monitor Institute Europe (Balkan Archive). In progress.
• 40 BetaSP cassettes of HU OSA 350-2-2 Records of the International Monitor Institute Asia (Cambodia).
• 72 BetaSP cassettes of HU-OSA-350-3-1 és 350-3-2 Records of the International Monitor Institute Africa (Rwanda & Sierra Leone).
• 6 BetaSP cassettes of HU-OSA-350-4-1 Records of the International Monitor Institute Middle-East (Afghanistan). 
• 9 BetaSP cassettes of HU-OSA-350-4-2 Records of the International Monitor Institute Middle-East (Iran).  In progress.  
• 160 VHS/S-VHS cassettes of HU OSA 13-3-1 Records of the Soros Foundation–Hungary: Publications: Film, Video. In progress.  
• 35 VHS cassettes in HU OSA 304-0-16 Records of the International Human Rights Law Institute Relating to the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia
• HU OSA 309-0-2 Monitoring of Television from Bosnia and Herzegovina  (in progress)

• 126 Audio cassettes of HU OSA 203-13-1 Interview with Writers and History of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, (audio)
• 122 Audio cassettes of HU OSA 445 András Bozóki Collection (audio). The recordings are interviews with politicians who played active roles in the Hungarian change of regime in 1989. Following the digitization, the contents of the interviews will be cataloged and published on OSA’s website.
• Digitization of over 10 thousand frames of photo negatives. One of the largest private photo archives documenting the 1989-1990 regime change in Hungary, a photo archive of Éva Kapitány’s work was brought to OSA for preservation and access.
  Over 10 thousand photo negative frames were selected, pre-processed, and digitized. The future fonds is HU OSA 440 Éva Kapitány Photo Collection.
• About 30 audio and About video cassettes from various series were digitized at the request of researchers.

PROCESSING, CATALOGING

During the lockdown, OSA’s AV team has enhanced its cataloging efforts. Video, audio, photo, and paper collections were processed, and the metadata was entered into OSA’s Asset Management System (AMS) or into transitional “production databases”. The assets from these production databases will be mapped and transferred into AMS in the catalogue year 2021. The following collections were processed and described:

The c. 120 hours of video recordings in the series HU OSA 305-0-5 Recordings of the Opposition Roundtable Negotiations in Hungary, 1989 have been processed in OSA’s Archival Management System. As a result, a Finding Aids, containing all the names of the participants, and the issues discussed during these negotiations with historical relevance and importance is now accessible for the general public.

Over 10 thousand photos of the HU OSA 440 Éva Kapitány Photo Collection were catalogued. Each photo was described and geo-tagged, thus creating one of the largest Hungarian regime change photo archives. Editing and proofreading the Hungarian Language metadata of the first 7500 items were completed. This makes the Catalog ready for publishing in the year 2021.

As part of the processing of HU OSA 369 Records of the Roma Sajtóközpont Egyesület: Research Unit: Sociological Survey Interviews Related to the Roma in Hungary 1971 research,

187 survey questionnaires were cataloged. These textual records constitute a rich archival primary source for those interested in the living and working conditions of Roma in Hungary under the Kadar regime.

Over 250 digitized photographs of Radio Liberty Public Affairs Photographic Files, in boxes 1 and 6 were cataloged. The entries are published in the series: HU OSA 300-1-8.

Translation into English and editing descriptive metadata of over 1000 video items of HU OSA 305-0-7 Monitoring of the Hungarian Television by Black Box is nearing completion.

The soundtracks of items in the video collection HU OSA 305-0-7 Black Box Foundation Monitoring of the Hungarian Television were checked to identify items with low sound quality. The mono and stereo video recordings were listed, and the information entered into the Findings Aids of the series.

HU OSA 305-0-6 Roma Media School Films, including about 150 films on 53 Beta SP cassettes, were cataloged with detailed annotations.

Scripting 204 military history films for future editing and cataloging. This way OSA will be able to publish yet another important collection of Hungarian communist propaganda films.

Enriching metadata in HU OSA 419 Júlia Vajda Totalitarianism and Holocaust Interview Collection. In progress

Preparing/cleaning series for upload to Research Cloud. In progress.

VIDEO PRODUCTION

Before and during the lockdown several film productions were completed:

Shooting video, editing the footage, providing descriptive metadata, and uploading the final product to OSA’s Youtube channel. The videos are interviews with researchers in the “Why OSA? Research in the archives” series.

Filming, editing the video footage, doing post-production work on and uploading to OSA Youtube channel recordings of public events, such as conferences, book launches, exhibition openings recorded at OSA over several years, including

Carlo Ginzburg in OSA in 2013

Blitz Conference on the future of the Royal Palace

Book launch of the biographical interview with László Rajk

Exhibition in memory of László Rajk

Opening of Faith - Trust - Secrecy: Religion through the lenses of the secret police exhibition

Shooting video for Donald Blinken’s birthday

The shooting of the film   Everything on the Goldberger House – virtual house tour with Iván Székely

Shooting opening of the Night of the Museums by Endre Kukorelly

Sound editing and video post production of RIA, RIA, MEMÓRIA - CEU - Bibó István Free

Post-production of  Jamming Station  film with András Simongáti

Contribution to Verzio International Human Rights Festival.

Participating in the  exhibition From Harvest to Harvest with preparing AV material.

EDUCATION

Participating in the development of OSA educational material

Sound recording for   Escape Kádár video game.  

Within the framework of a joint course with the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, colleagues in the AV team hosted a group of Media Design MA students. After examining and discussing with the help of OSA staff the importance of archives in shaping historical consciousness and its role in contemporary art and culture, the students were required to develop their own independent projects based on the audiovisual collections of Blinken OSA, by remixing and creatively re-using the available materials.

RESEARCH AND PURCHASE OF EQUIPMENT

The AV team made considerable efforts to research the field of equipment for digitizing photos and photo negatives. To enhance the capability to digitize 16 mm film, U-Matic, and Beta SP NTSC videos, OSA has purchased appropriate film and video players.

Video, sound, and lighting equipment was also procured to upgrade OSA’s video production. The most important pieces of equipment are the 4k capable camera, the professional tripod, and gimbal, also the essential sound and lighting equipment, among others.

A total of almost HUF 2.4 million HUF was spent.

At first 2020 looked like another good year for research in the Archives. Although the first news about the new and unknown virus started to circulate in the media in the second part of January, our Research Room was fully operative and busy with students and Visegrad fellows. News about the spread of the virus became more frequent day by day, while concern and insecurity started to grow. While in January the virus seemed to be something distant that would bypass Europe, in February it came closer to us. Thus February remained the last busy month in the Research Room. When Italy and Austria became "hot spots," the threat of the Covid-19 virus became real and imminent. With the arising pandemic and its consequences for health, health care systems, and economies, many governments brought in legal provisions for partial and strict lockdown, hoping the virus could be eradicated. Friday, March 13, was the last day the Research Room operated in the "old normal" way. We decided to close the Research Room fully, and the rest of the archives partially, first for one month until mid-April, then until May. In June, the epidemiologic situation improved slightly, and we introduced partial opening: first researchers could book into the Research Room by email, then an online reservation system was introduced, limiting visits to five persons at a time, and not more than a two two-hour-slot a day per individual. The months of July and August brought a modest number of researchers. Obviously, only researchers residing in Hungary could attend the Research Room. We also made individual arrangements with CEU students who (depending on the Austrian pandemic restrictions) could come from Vienna for a very limited time.

September brought the beginning of the second wave of the pandemic which again severely limited our activities. A rule of one person per office at a time was made. By the end of September, a new lockdown was introduced, extending beyond 2020, and is still in place, past February 2021. In this period, our Research Room has been closed again, with a few special arrangements for researchers who needed only a short while to finish their research.

OSA started to investigate ways to facilitate remote research right from the beginning of the first lockdown. To that end, we took several steps. First, we enriched and made our online accessible Digital Repository and Curated Collections more visible. Second, we created Research Cloud, a Microsoft Office - SharePoint platform where we can upload digital content from our archival and other materials. The Research Cloud is reserved for CEU students, faculty,, and staff. Thanks to archival and IT colleagues' efforts, during the summer OSA continued to enrich the Cloud content. Third, to be able to serve non-CEU researchers we have created a separate space in Research Cloud where we serve individual requests for digital content. Fourth, we introduced our Digitization on Demand Service, open for CEU and non-CEU people. OSA has made special efforts and human resources arrangements to meet as many digitization requests as possible, as fast as possible.

Over the months of the pandemic, more than 40 individual researchers have been served remotely. While the on-demand digitization service is very new, it appears to be popular.

• There were altogether 497 unique visits to the Research Cloud. (Total from when we started the site. 29 in the last month). There are 40 registered researchers, plus 45 request-based materials directories.
• OSA Online Catalog generated approx. 16,000 unique visits and 230,000 unique page view.
• Russia, Hungary and the USA are the three countries where we have the most visits.
• Digital Repository items were accessed 87,913 times. The average time spent on a digital repository page there: 1 minute 46 seconds.
• Curated Collection items were accessed 825 times, which is 0.78% of total visits (106,317). The average time spent here: 2 minutes and 52 seconds.

Data in Table 1 illustrate the "pandemic" 2020, with a sharp fall in figures in all categories. We were closed for almost half of the year; the number of visits fell from 1161 in 2019 to only 380 in 2020. The same applies to newly registered researchers, whose number dropped from 319 in 2019 to 137 in 2020. As already mentioned, the majority of researchers were from Hungary, with a few exceptions. The number of requests fell by almost three quarters, from 924 in 2019 to 225 in 2020. Finally, the number of served archival units fell by more than by two-thirds,, from 2937 units in 2019 to 884 in 2020, a drastic drop that illustrates how research can be influenced by external factors, in this case by the pandemic.

Although the start of 2021 is still impacted by the Covid-19 virus, we should remain optimistic and trust in science and the speedy inoculation of the population, as a result of which our lives and work, including academic research can return to normal. Once we are there we hope to welcome our Visegrad fellows, CEU students, and others who could not visit us in 2020 or in early 2021. Let us hope that we can be fully operational from September 2021 and that the pandemic will be over and the virus finally tamed.

Almost all professional and informal activities of Blinken OSA in 2020 were heavily impacted by the circumstances of the pandemic, as can be seen from the chapters of this report. The Reader might think that from the range of our activities research was impacted the least, but this is not true. Researchers do not only need access to sources but they also need an inspiring environment, good working conditions, intellectually stimulating discussions, joint coffee breaks, and the like. We were not fortunate enough to enjoy such an environment in most of 2020. Still, our colleagues produced remarkable research results even under these circumstances.

Oksana Sarkisova was on sabbatical in January-June 2020 working on the manuscript for Snapshot Histories, the first book to connect domestic photography, family memory, and the debates over the Soviet past in a way that takes into account both the material and the narrative dimension of remembering. The overarching framework of the book approaches family photographs as moving targets of both state memory politics, and of generational and individual efforts to grapple with their history.

Ioana Macrea-Toma did extensive research through the collection of Radio Free Europe's Audience and Analysis Surveys in order to propose a new methodology to deal with the knowledge produced by Cold War sociologists and pollsters. Her main concern is how to treat such observational data about Eastern Europe without endorsing either a radical deconstructivist approach that sees in them a mere political artifact or the opposite objectivist perspective which takes them for granted as real data about listenership and political opinions. This research will be part of a future book about truth-seeking in the Cold War.

István Rév’s research work in 2020 was published in the form of two book chapters: “How Hungary Won the Second World War” was published by Routledge in the book The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe (edited by Ljiljana Radonic) and “Accessing the past, or Should Archives Provide Open Access?” was printed by The MIT Press in the volume Reassembling Scholarly Communications, Histories, Infrastructure, and Global Politics of Open Access (edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Grey). István also worked (and is still working) on two book-length manuscripts on “Conceptual Trials” and on “The alleged secrets of children in history”.

Csaba Szilágyi prepared and submitted his Ph.D. project proposal with the title “Roles, responsibilities, and limitations of archives/archiving in postwar memory politics: the case of archiving the documentary and material heritage of the 1991-1995 wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. He introduced a new topic in the Archives, an Evidence and Human Rights course: Human rights archives and social in/justice. Csaba was locating and reading relevant literature, as well as processing interviews with the Yugoslavia Archive Project team archivist in preparation for a co-authored article on epistemic violence in archives of violent past(s). He also did archival consultancy: researching for and preparing a concept paper, an archival facility plan and budget (including storage and ICT needs), and a training program for project archivists for the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center and Cemetery (BiH).

András Mink was mostly concerned with editing a book based on a long series of oral history interviews conducted by him and Tamás Meszerics between 2009-2015 with János Kis, philosopher, political scientist, leader of the Hungarian democratic opposition from the mid-1970s, one of the founders of the democratic republic in 1989-1990. The book was published in early 2021, under the title Szabadságra ítélve (Condemned to Liberty). Besides this work, he was the curator of the exhibition From Harvest to Harvest – the Hungarian Calvary, 1918-1920 The exhibition opened in Galeria Centralis, then was forced to move online due to the lockdown of public spaces, and this included intense research work in Blinken OSA’s holdings and other historical sources.

Katalin Székely did research for Blinken OSA’s online and offline public exhibitions: Faith – Trust – Secrecy: Religions through the Lenses of the Secret Police, which was organized in the framework of the international Hidden Galleriesresearch program and included documents from the newly received collection of personal papers of Zsuzsa Horváth, From Harvest to Harvest – the Hungarian Calvary, 1918-1920, together with András Mink, and two exhibitions realized in 2021 – but the respective preliminary research was conducted in 2020 –, Records Uncovered: Gay and Lesbian Histories in Central and Southeastern Europe, 1945–1999, and Order and Dreams, of which Katalin was curator, in cooperation with OFF-Biennale Budapest. In 2020 Katalin continued her ongoing research in the framework of her Ph.D. thesis written for the Media and Contemporary Culture Ph.D. Program at ELTE. She investigates the paradigm shift of conceptual art in the local (Hungarian and Central and Eastern European) context and the reception of conceptual art on different levels of art communication.

Anastasia Felcher published an article and two book chapters in 2020. Her article "Recent Public Discourses on Anti-Jewish Violence in Moldovan History, 1991–2019" was published in the journal "Holocaust and Genocide Studies", and two chapters on politics of history and memory in Moldova and de-facto state Transnistria are part of the edited volume "The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Russia and in Countries of Eastern Europe" published in Russian by the European University at St. Petersburg Press. Anastasia also worked (and is still working) on a book manuscript “Jewish Culture and Heritage in Transition" on politics of memory, preservation, and representation of Jewish past in Eastern Europe after 1989/91. She also engaged in archival research based on the OSA holdings that would reveal aspects of communicating about cultural heritage behind and beyond the Iron Curtain starting from the mid-1950s.

Iván Székely finalized his chapter “Freedom of Information: A Constitutive Public Good in Democratic Societies” for the Research Handbook on Information Policy, to be published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2021. His illustrated article “TK 3.0 – A nyilvános archívum” [TK 3.0 – The open archives], was published in Jel-Kép, the quarterly journal of the Hungarian Communication Studies Association, in which he presented the vicissitudes of the documentation of the Mass Communication Center, later renamed as the Hungarian Institute for Public Opinion Research, which finally arrived in Blinken OSA; the considerations of its archival arrangement and description, and, in order to encourage research, provided a brief practical guide for using Blinken OSA’s online catalog. Iván continued his active participation in the editorial work of the quarterly journal Információs Társadalom (Information Society), which now publishes every second issue in English.

Blinken OSA continued its long-standing practice of organizing internal seminars where interested colleagues can discuss current research questions. In 2020, under the leadership of Ioana Macrea-Toma, the archival seminar series continued the discussion on current socio-political contexts by addressing issues related to the Cold War's legacies, from the recurrence of "totalitarianism" (as theorized by Masha Gessen in her book The Future is History, 2017), to the efficiency of the human rights paradigm (with the help of Samuel Moyn's reflections) and the related identitarian politics which shape activism nowadays. The questions an archive is interested in with regard to the changes within such paradigms and trends are whether and how a complex archival institution should change its approaches to teaching, research, cataloging, and public programming within current concerns. For example, the participants in the seminar reflected on what the balance would be between developing more comprehensive analyses with regard to non-democracies (as Samuel Moyn and Mark Lilla urge us) and preserving a profile given by the main collections that we have. What kind of vision should we have about the acquisition of new materials? Or, how could our collections serve the discussion on Masha Gessen's insights on reading and understanding Russian society through the lens of "recurrent totalitarianism”? Last but not least, one recurrent dilemma is how past cataloging categories could be calibrated to current research questions while preserving the archival vocabularies of the past.

Verzió, a joint project of Blinken OSA Archives and the nonprofit Verzió Film Foundation, began its activities in 2020 by presenting the program of the repeated screening series, Re:Verzió, with 8 individual events to take place between February 20 and May 28. The traditional Spring film club of Verzió was designed to show once more some of the most beloved films from the program of the latest, 16th festival edition of 2019, including the winners and audience favorites - followed by discussions with the filmmakers, experts, journalists, and human rights activists. The first two screenings took place as planned at the Blinken OSA Archive, but the rest of the program was postponed indefinitely due to the spread of the coronavirus in Hungary.

On February 20 we hosted a full-house screening of the Oscar-nominated Romanian documentary, the opening film of 16th Verzió, Collective (d. Alexander Nanau, 2019, 109 min). The screening was followed by an exciting panel discussion with guests Márton Asbóth, Head of the Privacy Project at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ) and coordinator of the campaign against hospital infections, and Gabriella Lantos, renowned health care manager. The discussion focused on the responsibility of the chain of authorities in hospital management and ideas about how to reform the failing health care system in Hungary. At this point, we had no idea how urgent the topic would be in just a few weeks from then.

Read the review of the event at the OSA Blog.

The second screening took place on March 5, 2020, with the winner of the Audience Award, The Euphoria of Being (d. Réka Szabó, Hungary, 2019, 83 min). Our guests were Éva Fahidi and Emese Cuhorka, the main protagonists of the film. It was once in a lifetime experience for all attendees, to have the opportunity to talk to one of the last living Holocaust survivors who turned their pain and loss into art, making their memories last forever.

Realizing that the pandemic was not going to be over for quite some time while preparing for the upcoming, 17th Verzió Film Festival, we hosted two online screenings in June: The Wait (d. Emil Langballe, Denmark, 2016, 58 min) in cooperation with Menedék Association, and DANGEROUS ACTS: starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus (d. Madeleine Sackler, Belarus, 2013, 76 min) as part of the program series at the night of the Museums.

Once the Archives opened again for visitors, we hosted a physical event in the frame of the annual Budapest Pride Festival. At the Hungarian premiere screening of Indianara (d. Marcelo Barbosa, Aude Chevalier-Beaumel, Brazil, 2019, 84 min) with the COVID-19 health and safety measures in place, we could host a maximum of 50 attendees– most of whom remained for the follow-up discussion with guests Alexandra Bakony documentary film director and Tímea Orbán, vice-president of Transvanilla Transgender Association. Resonating with the topic of the film about Brazilian transactivist, Indianara, with the active participation of the viewers we discussed the infamous 33rd paragraph, that took away Hungarian trans people’s rights to change their legal name or gender.

The 17th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival was organized between 10 and 22 November 2020 exclusively online due to the risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 was an extraordinarily challenging year from all aspects, and it also turned out to be the year when Verzió successfully implemented the first fully online film festival in Hungary that paved the way for many future online events.

Over 20,000 people attended the festival virtually, which exceeds both the number of previous Verzió festival attendees and the general expectations. Although we missed the conversations in the cinemas, our festival crew, the audience, and the filmmakers also grieve the casualties of the worldwide pandemic. The upside of this virtual shift is that we could make the films accessible to more people than ever before. The number of online visitors from the countryside increased and they came not only from throughout Hungary but also from around the world.

We set up our own streaming site, festival.verzio.org, with secure streaming conditions and a user-friendly design. Next to the public streaming site, Verzió maintained an industry streaming platform during the festival, industry.verzio.org, which gave free access to all the films for hundreds of our guests: film professionals including distributors, directors, producers, and festival representatives, teachers, journalists, and sponsors, our partners from cultural institutions, embassies, and NGOs.

The Trafó House of Contemporary Arts has hosted the festival’s Opening Night for several years. And while we could not celebrate this year with an in-studio audience, we still broadcast the live event, from Trafó, on November 10. Fortheopening of the 17th Verzió, we invited the students of the University of Theater and Film Arts Budapest (SZFE - Színház- és Filmművészeti Egyetem) tojoinus. Nearly 40 university citizens (students, faculty, and staff) representing the free SZFEcommunity, one of the most significant protagonists of public discourse in Hungary in 2020, opened the Festival with a special performance and excerpts from a documentary film about the occupied university.

The film program included 51 films from 39 countries. The program comprised three competition sections, the International Competition, the Student and Debut Competition, and the Hungarian Competition, and four thematic sections, In the Name of Justice, Archive of the Planet, Anthropocene, and Student Verzió. Winners of each competition section were awarded a monetary prize.

Despite the lack of physical meeting space, the films were accompanied by 46 events in the course of 13 days: masterclasses, roundtables, and conversations with filmmakers, with the participation of a total of 132 international guests. The audience could choose from 14 roundtables and 12 Q&As, and 10 DocPro and Duna Dock industry events. In addition, we also hosted 6 online Student Verzió film clubs, two DJ sets, the Opening Night, and the Award Ceremony.

Round table topics included racism, the psychological impact of asylum-seeking on underage refugees, the Belarus resistance movement, climate movements, freedom of press and freedom of speech, gender issues in documentary film, the vulnerability of the LGBTQ communities, the use of archival footage in documentary cinema, student movements and participatory filmmaking, and discussions with students and debut filmmakers about their films on family matters and historical traumas.

Industry discussions were organized in cooperation with the Association of Hungarian Documentary Filmmakers (MADOKE) and DunaDock, with the participation of national and international documentary filmmakers in the fields of documentary filmmaking, financing, distribution, and festival organization. Topics included gender inequalities in the documentary film industry, the impact of the current situation on film festivals, and the changed circumstances of film education institutions and their best practices. Master-classes were also given by renowned film professionals such as Peter Kerekes, Nenad Puhovski, Atanas Georgiev, and Tue Steen Müller.

The screenings of Student Verzió were fundamentally reshaped by the pandemic situation. High school students switched to digital education again in November, thus, were placed in the usual post-screening conversations with interactive, online film clubs.

The successful cooperation with universities continued in the frame of the UniVerzió program. University seminars where students can engage with different aspects of Verzió continue to be popular classes at the Budapest Metropolitan University (METU) and at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE BTK) as well.

At ELTE BTK, Media Studies BA students pursued a course on human rights documentary film festivals and Verzió led by András Müllner. Throughthe course, students can discuss the role of human rights documentary film festivals and engage with the Festival by moderating Q&As and writing film reviews. The students’ reviews were published on the Verzió Blogduringthefestival and contributed to the visibility of the films in the program.

Verzió has established a tradition of exhibiting alternative film posters at the charity café of the Hungarian Red Cross. Posters were created by METU Graphic Design MA students; accompanying events were organized by METU Design Culture MA students. The exhibition was opened by slam poetry artist and activist Molnár Áron NoÁron on November 10.

Six films and their creators were awarded by international jurors at the online Award Ceremony on November 20. Verzió awarded the winners with 3500 euros in total. The awards of the 17th Verzió were designed by the students at the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design (MOME).

Human Rights Film Award: WelcometoChechnya (USA, d. David France)

Student/Debut Film Award: Sonny (Poland, d. PawełChorzępa)

Best Hungarian Film Award: GiveMeShelter (Hungary, d. Mihály Schwechtje)

AudienceAward: Terminal Stage (Hungary, d. Ilona Gaal and Balázs Wizner)

Human Rights Special Award: The Earth is Blue as an Orange (Ukraine, Lithuania, d. Iryna Tsilyk)

Student/Debut Special Award: Stunned, I RemainAlert (Brazil, d. Lucas H. Rossi dos Santos and Henrique Amud)

Verzió’s media partners were the largest independent news platforms: 24.hu, HVG.hu, 444.hu, telex.hu and among the new partners there were merce.hu and wmn.hu. The general press coverage counts more than 200 appearances including printed and online press, TV and radio interviews.

In 2020 Blinken OSA’s core budget, about 2 % of the total budget of the Central European University, comfortably covered Blinken OSA’s basic professional operations. For the past 15 years, this budget has been complemented with an annual grant of $237,000 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, its extensive processing and digitization operations, its mission-related public programs for students and researchers as well for the general public, and its internationally acclaimed multi-year audio-visual preservation project aiming to save about 14,000 hours of endangered VHS recording, mostly related to the early years of the Central European University and the Soros Foundations Network.

In 2020 Blinken OSA carried on its educational project for non-Budapest-based secondary school students, focusing on the anniversary of the regime change in 1989 from the award for an extended one-year support from the Embassy of the United States of America.

Despite the restrictions caused by the Covid-19 epidemic, in 2020 OSA put all its financial resources to good use and not only managed to cover its archival and records management tasks but also moved its public program activities online; meanwhile, it maintained its overall financial balance throughout the year.

2020 was marked by the uncertainties imposed both by the Covid-19 epidemic and by the changing institutional and academic environment resulting from the move of the Central European University from Budapest to Vienna. Both put additional strains emotional as well as practical, on the community of Blinken OSA. The 2019/20 and 2020/2021 academic years took many of Blinken OSA’s short-term CEU student staff away from the country.

At the end of 2020, the staff of OSA numbered 41, although this figure fluctuated over the year, as some new colleagues were only contracted for a definite term. Out of the 41 colleagues, 9 had short-term contracts, 1 colleague was on IT payroll, and OSA had a core staff of 32, of whom 27 worked on a full-time basis. The OSA staff came from 6 countries.

Tasks that the core staff of OSA could not pick up, and which could not be handled by the technological developments, were covered by externally contracted service providers, interns, and CEU students on fixed-term employment contracts. In 2020 a total of 14 interns from 7 different countries were working in OSA. Out of these 4 students came from the CEU and were employed by OSA on a fixed-term contract basis; the others, among them one Erasmus exchange student and 1 exchange student from the George Mason University in the US, worked for OSA pro bono.

In order to make all of OSA’s operations transparent and easy to follow OSA circulates the OSA Weekly, a list of 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 inspection by the staff, also serve the purpose of transparency and open communication.

Fellowships

OSA has a long history of offering different types of fellowships, be these research grants for current Masters and Ph.D. students, individual researchers, exchange students, artists, journalists,s or even groups of researchers dedicated to certain research agenda. To date, OSA has awarded over 1,200 grants.

Currently, OSA offers only two support schemes, out of which the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA, awarded jointly with the International Visegrad Fund, supports 15 researchers a year and the Aaron Swartz Fellowshipsupports one successful candidate a year. In 2020 the Aaron Swartz Fellowship was not awarded. 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 was dormant in 2020 while reconstruction work was carried out in the Hoover Archive.

The Visegrad Scholarship at OSA scheme, offered jointly with the International Visegrad Fund, was awarded to 17 Visegrad scholars; due to the epidemic, only 7 could start their research in OSA, all of whom gave their respective university-wide online presentation within the framework of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Lecture Series. The list of successful candidates and their research reports can be accessed under http://www.osaarchivum.org/work-with-us/fellowship/visegrad-scholarship/winnners-and-reserves