Csaba Békés

Csaba Békés's research developed into an effort to reconstruct 1956 by cross-checking records held in several countries rather than relying on a single national archive. In the 1990s he headed the international research division of the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, coordinating international collaborative research, and carried that work into a new institutional framework: he founded the Cold War History Research Center in December 1998 and served as its founding director. The Center presents itself as the first scholarly institution founded as a non-profit organization in East Central Europe and has been affiliated with Corvinus University of Budapest since 2009. Its mission was to provide freely available English-language online materials on the contemporary history of the former Soviet bloc: articles, documents, chronologies, bibliographies and databases, with a website launched in 2000 that became a major resource in the field. The best-known publication of this documentary work is the 2002 volume of sources he co-edited with Malcolm Byrne and János M. Rainer. It comprises 120 original documents, from the minutes of Khrushchev's first meeting with the Hungarian leadership in 1953 to Yeltsin's declaration of 1992; the great majority appeared in English for the first time, and almost all came from Hungarian, Soviet and American archives that had been inaccessible until the 1990s. The volume was published by Central European University Press as the third in the National Security Archive Cold War Readers series, with a foreword by Charles Gati and an introductory essay by Timothy Garton Ash.