The collection of the Vera & Donald Blinken Open Society Archives is based on the archives of Radio Free Europe (RFE) and the documents of the Research Institute of Freedom Radio. Nevertheless, the Hungarian samizdats did not become part of the archive as part of this process. The national sub-collections of RFE (of these, the Russian and Polish units are some of the biggest in the world) did not include Hungarian items. András Mink, a colleague at the Blinken OSA Archives who has been taking part in this work since the early stages, said in a COURAGE interview that the RFE-collection must have contained Hungarian items, as several radio programs were based on such information, but this material may have been lost or may have become private property
Gábor Demszky was the first person to donate his samizdat collection to the archive. He had a personal relationship with the leader of the archive, István Rév, who participated in the organizing of free universities. Demszky officially opened the Blinken OSA Archives on 15 March 1996. An important aspect of his decision was that he did not want to choose a state-controlled and supported institution as a place to preserve his samizdats. The Blinken OSA Archives, as an independent archive, was attractive for people who thought in this way. Since Demszky himself operated a samizdat publishing office and edited journals, he definitely had duplicate copies, which obviously made it easier to donate his collection.
The arrival of one group of documents motivated owners of similar collections to make donations. Blinken OSA Archives became famous as a samizdat collecting archive. In addition to Gábor Demszky, other key figures of the cultural opposition, such as György Krassó, philosopher János Kis, and film director Pál Schiffer, gave their illegal books and journals to the archive, though these donations were only made about 10 years later.
The creating of uncensored publications began to become widespread in Hungary in 1977, following the Russian movement model and through Polish mediation. In this early period, the most significant samizdats were the anthology entitled Marx in the Fourth Decade, Profil (edited by János Kenedi), and the Bibo Memorial Book edited by Ferenc Donáth and others. Beszélő (“Speaker”), Máshonnan beszélő (“Speaker from Somewhere Else”), Hírmondó (“Messenger”), Égtájak között (“Between the Poles”), Demokrata (“Democrat”), and Magyar Zsidó (“Hungarian Jews”) were the important Hungarian samizdat journals. Beszélő was exceptional, as it was in publication for decades. The other journals existed only for a shorter time and were published in only a few issues. These issues were mostly created by typewriter, the copying technique developed from the stencil through the so-called “ramka” to the offset printing.
The “ramka” was an invention of the Polish opposition. It was a simple screen-printing machine which required difficult, time-consuming physical work but which nonetheless revolutionized people’s ability to make copies of written documents. The Hungarian activists learned this practice from the Polish experts: László Rajk, Jr. traveled to Poland at the request of János Kis and Géza Bence. Gábor Demszky took a trip as a private initiative to learn about underground samizdat printing. The technique of “ramka” soon became popular. Demszky’s publishing office and Jenő Nagy’s publishing office used it, as did other, smaller publishers. We find numerous books and journals made using the “ramka” technique in the collections of the Blinken OSA Archives.
By following the Polish model, the opposition gradually separated into open opposition and clandestine opposition. In public, the editors’ names appeared in the journals, and the presence in the public eye protected them, but the background staff, printers, and members of the distributing networks operated in a secret, conspiratorial way. The AB Independent Publishing House, the first samizdat publishing office, was in operation from 1982 to 1989. It published books with political subjects and literature by Hungarian and foreign authors (George Orwell, Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera, etc.). Jenő Nagy’s ABC Publishing House, György Krassó’s Hungarian October publishing house, and other smaller groups were also active and contributed to the availability of illegal publications. In May 1989, the government ended the rule according to which all publications had to be checked by the government before going to press and permission had to be granted by the censors for publication. The age of Hungarian samizdats thus came to an end.
The samizdats as memorial objects bear the marks of the circumstances under which they were created, i.e. by hand. Pages are pinned with paper clips and handwritten texts have been added to the covers of books and journals. Interruptions in publication and varied lengths and formatting are all indications of the ways in which the alternative printing studios were compelled to work.
In some publications, one finds messages from the editors which are actually additional information about the history of the creation of a samizdat. The last page of Beszélő includes the editors’ names and addresses. The handwritten handout is about the publishing method used in the creation of the texts sent to the editorial office, the purchasing possibilities in the so-called Samizdat boutique (in László Rajk’s flat), and the cost of the production process.
On the last page of György Konrád and Iván Szelényi’s essay-collection entitled Az értelmiség útja az osztályhatalomhoz (“The intellectuals on the Road to Class Power”), we read the publication history of the book and the authors’ story about their interrogation and Szelényi’s emigration.
The Blinken OSA Archives joined the project of Samizdat Text Corpora (STC) of the International Samizdat [Research] Association (IS[R]A) in 2006. The aim is to compile a unified catalogue of the samizdats which were made in different languages and in different countries to facilitate research.
