The ​Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University (OSA) is very proud to announce that in cooperation with the Hoover Institution Library and Archives it has made a new curated collection available online.

The aim of this project is to combine the archivist’s work with the new possibilities offered by modern science and information technology to process, describe, manage, organize, interpret, and visualize more than 20 years of intermingled history of the Free Europe Committee and Radio Free Europe during the Cold War.

This digital collection represents a valuable account of intensive transatlantic communications between two epistemic communities which, although physically separated, were mentally linked in creating and disseminating often contested information towards the countries of the Eastern Block, at the same time creating themselves an “endogenous circle” of communication of important and confidential, often encrypted information to support an “exogenous circle”.

The uniqueness of the project lies not only in the fact that it aims to instigate discussions about the major political, social and cultural narratives of that time but also in showing the entanglement of the FEC/RFE activities in the Eastern-European public and media space. More than 34 000 documents have been “cleaned”, processed, analyzed and made public not exclusively for specialists of this field but for researchers in other social sciences (digital humanities in particular), and all others.

Acknowledgements 

 I would like to thank Blinken OSA’s IT team headed by Jozsef Bone, and Anton Mudrak, for their enthusiasm and creative ideas on data visualization and interpretation in the project, and all the colleagues at Blinken OSA for their support and understanding, as well as our students for their dedicated work and great ideas helping us make this Cold War collection publicly accessible. I would also like to express my gratitude to Martins Zvaners, Anatol Shmelev, Brandon Burke, and A. Ross Johnson from the Hoover Institution for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

On behalf of Blinken OSA, I would like to thank our partner institutions for their contribution in the creation of this online collection: the Hoover Archive and Library at Stanford University for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) photographs and for the video This Is Radio Free Europe (1964) on the opening page of the project. The film gives an overview of Radio Free Europe’s news-gathering and audience research, its production center in Munich, and its transmission operations in Germany and Portugal. Produced by the Free Europe Committee (FEC), the parent organization of Radio Free Europe, the film significantly helped publicize RFE in the United States and elsewhere.

Robert Parnica, curator of the collection