News

Of Bitches and Bandits

Film Week 1996

The Film Week showed that the Hungarian film industry has succeeded in defending its strategical position. Hungarian film still exists. It has finally and ostentatiously turned its back on traditional historical and socio-political themes. There were a few ventures of this kind but their approach to vital questions for the wider community was also expressed through the personal lives of the characters. [...]

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[...] Péter Gothár's Letgohang Vaska won the prize for best film. Just as with The Section in 1995, Gothár's film and the camerawork of Francisco Gózon were again honoured with well deserved best prizes this year. The "Russian-speaking Hungarian" film, based on László Bratka's "Gulag fairy tale", tells a playful and fantastic story about the world of St Petersburg at the time of the October Revolution, inspired by the Russian tradition of satirical grotesque which stretches back from Gogol to Bulgakov. The film was shot in St Petersburg and cites at every turn such legendary monuments to the Bolshevik Revolution as the Smolny or the Aurora battle cruiser and refers to the approach and style of such Russian films of the 1920s as Eisenstein's Strike and Battleship Potemkin or Pudovkin's Mother. But Gothár has not just made a parody of history films but an adventure film in which the simple but canny robber heroes always outwit the wicked enemy that outnumber them - unmistakably the party leadership and its repressive institutions in a devastating caricature. After a while we do not even notice that the actors are speaking Russian without subtitles because the pictures tell us almost everything and the Hungarian commentary by Gábor Máté as the narrator-storyteller does the rest.

 Miklós Györffy

Open  Society Archives

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The bulk of the archival collection is news clippings on various subject matters covering the political, economic and cultural life of each respective country. The collection also contains situational reports, press analyses, and detailed background reports on the socialist countries. These background materials were elaborated upon by the Radios' staff, as well as by outside experts. The collection is therefore not only a mass of information on many different and interrelated issues, but also represents the collectors' view on what was considered important or interesting, as well as their interpretation of the information they collected. As most of the information collected by the Radios originated from official sources of the socialist regimes in the region, it is both interesting and ironic that the Radios used this information as background and support for arguments against these very same regimes.

Most of the national collections contain an extremely wide-ranging and all-round collection of news-clippings on different subjects, from "Party congresses" to "Shoe retailers". Each country's collection contains a separate collection of biographical files about and from the most prominent politicians, public figures, and artists, including dissidents. Besides these major collections, some smaller, but unique sub-collections deserve special attention. Detailed descriptions of each collection, country by country, are contained in our catalogues available in the Reading Room. These descriptions and more sophisticated finding aids will be available on Internet WWW Network, hopefully in the near future. Some of the more interesting holdings are as follows:

• The extensive Polish and Russian samizdat collections contain many items which, smuggled to the West, were then broadcast into Poland and Russia with the Radios serving as a surrogate "publisher".
• The Archives has the largest collection in one place of complete runs of various periodicals from the region, including regional dailies. The most notable holdings include a complete run of Pravda from 1917, many copies of the regional Pravdas, all of the periodicals published during the Prague Spring, and, as an example from outside the region, the New York Times from 1941 to the present, all of which are available on microform.
• During the time the Radios were funded through the CIA they collected information through the so-called "field offices" from non-official sources, mostly from East-European refugees. These became the so-called "Items" whose collection was ordered to be to be destroyed after the scandal broke out in the US Congress on the financing of the Radios in 1972. However significant fragments of the Hungarian and Czech "Items" from the '50s were retained, and the latter were even microfiched.
• The declassified confidential US State Department files on the Soviet Union from the 1920s to 1960s are available on microfiche, including diplomatic post reports.
• The most famous of the several national biographical files, also available on microfiche, is the so-called Kraus file which contains more than one hundred thousand card files on party apparatchiks and members of the Soviet Communist Party.

  Open Society Archives
Eötvös u. 1
H-1067 Budapest, Hungary
Phone: 361 342 058
Fax: 361 327 3260
email: archives@ceu.hu

Collegium Transsylvanicum

The CT functions as the mother institute of the Invisible College, running its bank account and responsible for accounting. The Invisible College runs lecture series as well as tutorial programs. The scope of its operations has been continually expanding since its inception in 1993, with the third entrance examination held in 1995.

The CT also offers financial aid to authors of textbooks. Indeed, the CT regards the promotion of the writing and publication of new textbooks as a significant factor in the process of educational renewal. György Székely textbook editor organizes the textbook support project. 236 teachers have applied thus far, 80 of whom are currently receiving stipends for writing textbooks. For a large number of the textbooks, the MSS are complete and ready for printing. The alternative textbook of Hungarian literature for the tenth grade, for instance, is expected to be published in the Fall of 1995.

With the assistance of the New York-based Hungarian Human Rights Foundation, the Collegium Transsylvanicum offers scholarships designed to give students with outstanding achievements that freedom from financial hardship which is the most elementary prerequisite of dedicated research. This year, the "Adopt a Student in Transylvania" scholarship, also initiated in New York by Éva Cs. Gyimesi, was granted, from among 21 applicants, to three students each in the social sciences, in the natural sciences, and in the humanities.

Launched in 1995, the Institute for Scientific Research Programs comprises special workshops in physics, chemistry, economics, etc., each operating with a small group of students. Many of them were organized upon the initiative of students who maintain contact with each other and the faculty through a tutorial system or in seminars. There are seven workshops: the Diotima Circle (led by Péter Egyed), the Program in Cultural Anthropology (led by Enikõ Magyari Vincze), the Philosophical Inquiry Program (led by Károly Veress), the Max Weber Workshop (a student initiative of sociology students), the Program for the Development of Intelligence and Talent (led by István Szamosközi), the Workshop for Students Studying and Teaching Equilibrium Chemistry and Electrochemistry (led by Csaba Muzsnay).

Those teaching assistants expecting to assume teaching positions in villages can acquire information on the local lifestyle, the everyday problems of villages, the difficulties specific to the economy of villages, and on ethnography in the Village Seminar. The leader of this student-organized seminar holds a special scholarship.

The assets of the Collegium Transsylvanicum consist of the library and the equipment of the college, the manager's office, and the private library of the late Géza Ottlik. The foundation has received substantial support from the HESP Program of the Soros Foundation and the Illyés Foundation.

The CT also plans to set up a computer pool for those teaching in Hungarian at the university. As Éva Cs. Gyimesi describes the vision behind the college: "The Collegium Transsylvanicum could lay the institutional foundations of an independent Hungarian university, a basis from which the autonomous activities of the various divisions could unfold so as to include even independent resource policies and research strategies".

Collegium Transsylvanicum Foundation
CP 1091
3400 Cluj
Romania

Collegium  Budapest

Focus Theme Group
Political Psychology of the Post-Communist Era

1. The trauma associated with the sudden withdrawal of the state from its welfare and support functions. How does the loss of job and retirement security interact with anxieties produced by the swift growth of violent crime and the continuing spread of blatant corruption among officials high and low? Is envy, or resentment targeted at visibly well-off "new élites," an important social force?
2. Adaptation. Which strategies of coping are more common and most successful? Which members of the old regime élite have been most successful at "landing on their feet" under the new conditions? Which members of the old regime élite have become losers under the new system? What different value-hierarchies are characteristic, respectively, of well-adapted and ill-adapted social groups? How has the role of women in the family (as the main vehicle of coping with economic crisis) changed over the past five years?
3. New cultural identities and the politics of resentment. Under what conditions are economic insecurity, anxiety and frustration transformed into aggressive behaviour against an "other"? What role do the categories "East" and "West" play in the contemporary sense of identity? How have responses to the question "are we part of Europe?" evolved over the past years?
4. Memory and generation divisions. What differences can we discover between images of the past held by the young and the old?
5. Social distrust. How does a basic lack of trust among buyers and sellers affect economic transactions? What strategies are used to compensate for a basic lack of confidence that contracts will be enforced? Do some social groups have shorter time horizons than others? How are educational, career, and familiar choices shaped by uncertainty about the future among the young?

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Collegium Budapest
Institute for Advanced Study
Szentháromság tér 2.
H-1014 Budapest
Phone: 361 156 12 44, 36l 156 19 34
Fax: 361 175 95 39
E-mail: colbud@colbud.hu