The regime change in Academic history was heralded in 1989-1990 by two symbolic events. The first one was the statement of the Socialist Party on the re-evaluation of post-1945 Hungarian history, which fundamentally modified the earlier interpretation presenting the era as one of fulfillment or even quasi-salvation. The second event was the election of Domokos Kosáry, widely considered to be the leader of the so-called „bourgeois” historians, to the post of the President of the Academy of Sciences.
The re-evaluation of the recent past was the work of a committee composed of Gyula Horn, Mária Ormos and Ferenc Tőkei, chaired by the President of the Academy, Iván T. Berend. The Socialist Party decided about the setting up of the committee in 1988 and tasked it with investigating „the paths of the history of the last decades”. The members of the committee broke with earlier received opinion – which some among them had expressed, as well – and no longer defined the Horthy era as either a fascist or semi-fascist period in history. Instead, they chose to describe it as a strongly centralized power structure that had, at times, taken on markedly dictatorial features, and which failed to live up to democratic standards for various reasons, including the lack of secret ballot in most districts. They re-evaluated the economic performance of the period, as well. As far as post-1945 developments were concerned, they acknowledged the decisive influence of „Soviet military and political presence”, and the illegal nature of the Communist drive for power before and after 1948.
Their criticism of the Rákosi-regime, a term chosen to refer to the period between 1949 and 1956, was much sharper in character than previous assessments, and the popular sentiment against Rákosi which had contributed decisively to the 1956 events were described no longer as counterrevolutionary.
The term popular uprising was chosen to refer to the revolution. This element of the work received widespread publicity in advance, when in January 1989 Imre Pozsgay used it in a radio interview prior to the publication of the
committee’s work in the spring of that year. This reappraisal was to become the first in the line of party documents which from here on acknowledged the
„unusual harshness” of the reprisals, stating that the government engaged in illegal uses of its powers on occasion. At the same time, the decades after the reprisals were described as „one of the greater periods of modernization, economic growth, social achievement and cultural attainments in modern Hungarian history”.1 These claims, especially the re-evaluation of the 1956 events – came as a revelation to may. At the same time, as subsequently the regime change picked up pace, and ideological pluralism became tangible and even institutionalized, these early signs lost much of their significance. It had lasting effect on intellectuals of the Socialist Party, the heir to the Socialist Workers Party of yore, but it did not really determine the course and assessments of historical research into the recent past.
In the spring of 1990, when he was elected as President of the Academy, Domokos Kosáry was already 76 years old. His career had been stifled by the Sovietization after 1945, which affected historians as it did all walks of life. His previously rapid ascent had been broken and he himself had been fired from all of his positions. Between 1951 and 1956, Kosáry worked as a librarian. In 1956 he sided with the revolution, which earned him a prison sentence lasting three years, from 1957 to 1960. After his release he took up work as an archivist, was not employed as a researcher until 1968. Following this change of fortune, the ever more liberal regime sought to integrate him more fully. In 1982 he was elected as correspondent member of the Academy, in 1985 he joined the ranks of the ordinary members. In 1988 he was presented with the State Award, even though he had never joined the party or denounced civic-bourgeois and democratic values.
As the president of the Academy, Kosáry continued the rehabilitation of scholars, underway since 1989, who had been stripped of their memberships in 1949 and subsequently marginalized – much as it had happened to him. At the same time, he spoke out firmly against any discrimination against members elected in or after 1949. While he himself felt that some members had been elected for political reasons and not based on merit, he distanced himself from all forms of witch-hunts, and actively opposed any such initiatives.
„Administrative regulations of such arbitrary force – he declared after his election – as were the corollaries of the past dictatorial system, will not be adopted in a democracy by us. […] Stalinism cannot be fought with Stalinist methods.”2 He insisted on preserving the institutions of the Academy, which had been created after 1949 and which had become largely independent of universities. His goal was to prevent the Academy from once again becoming a mere body, if an exclusive one, of scholars, and to preserve it instead as the most important locus of scientific coordination and governance. He was successful on both points. His two presidential terms spanning six years
1 Társadalmi Szemle 44 (1989). Különszám. – Quations on pages 10., 14., 36. and 38.
2 Kosáry Domokos: Hat év a tudománypolitika szolgálatában. Bp., 1996, MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 21-25.
culminated in the 1994 adoption of the law on the Academy of Sciences by Parliament. The law reinstated the autonomy of the Academy, granting it full discretion and immunity from political influence in how its own revenues and its share of state subvention were to be used.
It followed from the survival of the network of research institutes belonging to the Academy that the Institute of History, established in 1941 and placed under the Academy in 1950 remained as the central institution of Hungarian historical research, even if its role as coordinator has decreased. The institution, barring a brief period, has been run since 1988 by Ferenc Glatz, employing, in 1990, 102 persons, 50 among them researchers. Their numbers have remained virtually unchanged: in 2009 100 people were employed by the institute. One of the chief tasks of the institute has remained the organization of fundamental research into Hungarian history. As a result, several series publishing historical sources and handbooks is still overseen there. Some of the flagship undertakings include the Historical Atlas of Hungary and work on a new Hungarian Historical Chronology. The book series Studies in Social and Cultural History includes 42 volumes published between 1987 and 2010.
The character of the change of regime largely determined the transformation and scaling down of the Institute of Party History which had been overseen by the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. Its financing was lost with the self-transformation of the one-time state party in autumn 1989. In 1990 the organization followed suit and changed its name from Institute of Party History to Institute of Political History. Its research profile was adapted accordingly. Research into the history of workers’ movements was broadened to encompass contemporary history which usually refers to the study of post-1945 history. This had to be accomplished in parallel to a serious reduction in funding. As a result of losing funding especially under the Antall and the Orbán governments, the number of employees has been reduced from 125 in 1989 to a mere 35. Of these, 12 were employed as researchers. The journal published by the Institute, Párttörténeti Közlemények (Review on Party History) was renamed Múltunk (Our Past) in 1989 and has been published under its new title since. This change can be interpreted as signaling both a broadening of profile and freedom from ideological control.
The umbrella organization for historians, the Hungarian Historical Society founded in 1867, underwent a period of grave financial difficulties after the regime change, and its consolidation did not come about before the new millennium. It boasts of over 1500 members, two thirds of them teachers, the rest being researchers, archivists, librarians and museum employees. The Society is the publisher of the scholarly journal Századok (Centuries), which was first published in 1867.
The István Hajnal Circle was organized in some ways as a reaction to the allegedly ossified and servile Historical Society. It was officially founded in 1989, yet its informal roots reach back to the mid-1980s. Its founders had a threefold motivation: the rejuvenation of Hungarian historical research which, they felt, was out of touch and overly centered on politics by introducing and
popularizing social history and its methods, offering a generational forum for younger scholars and offering an institutionalized forum in opposition to the historical research centered around the Academy, which they perceived to be still at least partly under party control. The activities of the Circle are chronicled in the volumes holding the presentations of its annual conferences, of which 21 had appeared in print prior to 2009.
The István Hajnal Circle ceased to be the only alternative forum of research with the change of regime, with several newly founded institutes appearing in the field. Some of these were the results of specific political preferences, while others sought to correct the thematic lacunae of pre-1989 research. Of all initiatives, research focusing on the history of 1956 was the quickest to achieve solidly institutionalized form. The institute originally named Research Post of the Academy of Sciences and the National Library for the Study of 1956 was founded in 1991, employing 14 people. While undergoing changes in structure, it has continued to function under the name of Institute for the Study and Documentation of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, employing – in 2010 – 21 full time and three part-time staff. The institute does not publish a journal of its own, but presents an annual edited volume or Yearbooks, as well as occasional publications, some of which are conference volumes reporting on events organized by the institute. Among its collections, the Oral History Archive is a standout achievement, housing interviews some of which date back to the early 80s and which were collected with the support of the Soros Foundation.
Apart from the history of the 1956 revolution, impossible to research prior to 1989, considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to the study of Hungarian minorities abroad and Hungarian Jews. In 1990 the Antall government decided to unite the Hungarological Institute founded in 1985 and the Institute of International Affairs which had formerly belonged to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It had a dual profile that included non-applied research and consultancy in matters of foreign policy, regional policy and minority policy. A purely applied, policy profile was given to the Institute and Public Foundation for the Comparative Study of European Minorities founded in 1998. This institution was followed by the Academy’s Institute for the Study of Minorities in 2001, which included Roma Studies among its priorities. At the beginning of the new millennium, no less than three institutes conducted research into the past and present of Hungarian minorities, as well as offering consultancy work to the governments in office. Of the three institutes, Teleki employed around two dozen persons, the Foundation for the Comparative Studies of Minorities included 2-3 researchers, while the Institute of the Academy had initially 17, but in 2009 no less than 33 people on its payroll. This dysfunctional structure was trimmed back when in 2006 the government decided to close down the Teleki Institute, reestablishing instead the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs which had been shut down in 1990. The uncontested central institution of minorities research became the Institute for Minorities Research of the Academy.
Jewish and Holocaust studies lacked a similarly extended institutional background. A Jewish history research group was founded as early as 1986 within the Historical Institute of the Academy, while the Assyriology and Hebraic Studies Department of Eötvös Loránd University set up a research group on Jewish Studies in 1988. Neither initiative, however, managed to grow into a full-fledged institute. Instead, the Hungarian Auschwitz Foundation and Holocaust Documentation Centre was founded in 1990, which took on itself the collection and publication of relevant source materials and also organized a series of conferences. In 1994, the Hungarian Jewish Archives were also founded. The institution has been publishing the Cahiers of the Hungarian Jewish Archives since 1997, yet the journal has appeared infrequently and only a few issues exist. Finally, the Holocaust Memorial Centre was opened in 2004, located in Páva street. The Centre publishes occasional volumes, but does not have a journal of its own.
A much larger institution with 62 employees in practice and up to 74 in theory was set up in 1997 under the name of Office of Historical Research with the mission of collecting and processing the documents produced by the security services of the socialist period. It was transformed after a few years into Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, employing 98 persons.
Admittedly, the majority of these are archival workers and the number of researchers has not grown beyond a dozen. The institute appears in Academic life through its Yearbooks and occasional publications, as well as hosting and organizing conferences.
Apart from and beyond the aforementioned centers, two non-university affiliated institutions of historical research have been founded in recent years.
In 1999, the Institute of the 20th Century set up shop in Budapest, while the Institute for Habsburg History came into being in 2003. In contrast to the previously mentioned institutes, neither represents a research centre in the conventional sense. They are rather agencies which have few permanent employees and give grants, support ongoing research, organize conferences and publish various volumes, financed from the support the government budget accords to them. An activity of special significance among these is the publication of an English-language book series by the Habsburg Institute (as it is commonly known) which spun ten volumes in 2009.
Higher education underwent no smaller changes than the network of research institutes after 1989. Various private colleges and schools of divinity contributed to the sharp rise in the number of institutions of higher education in the 1990s, with their number growing from 57 to 90. The past years have seen these numbers decrease somewhat, and an equilibrium of sorts has emerged with about 70 colleges remaining. Among the first newly founded schools were the Pázmány Péter Catholic University (1992), János Kodolányi College of Székesfehérvár in 1992, the Károli Gáspár Protestant University in 1993, and Central European University in 1994. All of the above – as well as some other institutions – have had some sort of history program.
The number of full-time students grew from 70 thousand to 217 thousand between 1990 and 2006, while the total number of students went from 100 thousand to 380 thousand during the same period. This was largely due to the combined effect of new colleges being founded and already existing ones being enlarged. While in 1990, 20% of secondary school graduates went on to receive college-level education, around 2000, the figure stood at 45%. At the same time, neither the numbers of instructors, nor infrastructural investments have kept pace with the sharp rise in student numbers. The quality of education has, understandably, suffered as a result.
Postgraduate training was reorganized after 1989, as well. The so-called university doctorate and the Candidate of Sciences degree, established in 1949, were abolished, and the Anglo-Saxon system of awarding PhD-s was adopted in its stead. Students seeking a postgraduate degree have been required to join a doctoral school since 1993, these latter were set up as parts of universities.
Postgraduate doctoral training, which is scheduled for three years, leads up to the defense of the doctoral thesis. A Doctoral School in History currently exists at seven institutions in the country, with four being the old, large universities, complemented by the Catholic university, Central European University and Eszterházy Károly College in Eger. The title of Doctor of the Sciences, established in the 1950s, has been preserved. This would have yielded a two-tier system of professional qualifications, yet this system has been complicated somewhat by the 1993 law on higher education, which reinstituted the system of habilitation as it had existed prior to the Second World War. Full professorships and in some cases even associate professorships were made conditional on passing this procedure of qualification. The highest scholarly honor, membership of the Academy, was not changed in either form or function.
University training in history reflects the broader trends in higher education, these being the prevalence of mass education and a lowering of the overall quality of education. The number of history departments has grown in tandem with the number of universities and colleges, while a larger pool of qualified instructors never materialized. More or less all older and newer colleges and universities can boast of some significant and recognized scholars, yet the number of mediocre and unprepared instructors has increased significantly.
Some impressive initiatives stand out from among the overall negative trends. Central European University, founded in 1994, lives up to wider European standards as regards its library, the system of tuition and its overall atmosphere. While a smaller project, the Atelier workshop of Eötvös Loránd University has made dozens of students familiar with the current achievements of French historical research, while as a result of their publications, any student could become familiar with current perspectives on history. The third worthy initiative came from Szeged, where Gyula Kristó, Ferenc Makk and others set up a Workshop of Medieval Studies in 1992. The workshop become the foundation of the specialization track in medieval studies, launched in 1993, as
well as of the doctoral school founded in 1994. Throughout this period, the centre has been intensively engaged in publishing scholarly materials, including the series Szeged Library of Medieval History, Diplomatic Records of the Anjou Age, as well as some further occasional volumes.
The flora of historical research have undergone similar changes. The representative journal is still Századok, which, however, has lost its pre-1989 role as general guiding light. It has given up on publishing digests of foreign periodicals, book reviews of international and Hungarian works are printed without an apparent system. Other established journals which survived the financial hardships of the early 1990s included Történelmi Szemle [Historical Review], Világtörténet [World History], Hadtörténeti Közlemények [Mélanges of Military History], Agrártörténeti Szemle [Review of Rural History], Levéltári Közlemények [Archival Mélanges] and Levéltári Szemle [Archival Review], complemented by the popular História.
The established journals were joined by many recently founded ones. One of the latter is Aetas, launched in 1985 and published since without interruption, having grown from a student review into a nationally significant scholarly forum. Its original focus on medieval history has been complemented by an emphasis on methods and theories, as well as other eras. Published continuously since 1989, Rubicon has grown in size and professionalism, representing an opportunity for the broader public to become familiar with history much like História does. It is printed in 10-15, sometimes 20 thousand copies, making it into an invaluable link between the profession and the
The established journals were joined by many recently founded ones. One of the latter is Aetas, launched in 1985 and published since without interruption, having grown from a student review into a nationally significant scholarly forum. Its original focus on medieval history has been complemented by an emphasis on methods and theories, as well as other eras. Published continuously since 1989, Rubicon has grown in size and professionalism, representing an opportunity for the broader public to become familiar with history much like História does. It is printed in 10-15, sometimes 20 thousand copies, making it into an invaluable link between the profession and the