'The Source' and its Other: Hearing Past 'Reversed Jamming' in Information Items

I have been asked to write about my experience of reading Information Items in the RFE Collection’s Polish Unit in OSA, and I would like to discuss the biggest difficulty I encountered in the process; a feature of the documents which can playfully be called reversed jamming or distorted polyphony. Without being long-winded about my particular research aims, I was trying to learn something about students in 1970s Poland from the items produced specifically about students. Why was that so hard? The Items are documents produced from casual conversations between an RFE analyst and ‘the source.’ The source is often enigmatic; sometimes it is an unidentified respondent who claims to know the attitudes of youth, but more often it is a student from the University of Warsaw on an exchange in a Western city where RFE’s field offices were located. Direct letters from students to the editors are few and far between in the series. The typical Item begins with the formula nasz rozmowca twierdzi (the source tells us…) followed by a statement about their specific experience as a student in Poland, or their impressions from the West, their political views, and so on. Often, this precedes a variant of the formula ogolnie sie mowi w Polsce (generally, in Poland it is said/thought that…). At this point, the reader encounters polyphony. It becomes less clear who is speaking: the interviewer or the subject. In most cases, neither is presumably qualified enough in sociology to make a sweeping statement about youth opinions across the country. Is the analyst speaking through or for the source? Is the source speaking to the analyst? Often, the generalized statements about public opinion are backed by a second iteration of ‘nasz rozmowca twierdzi,’ in which case it appears that the source speaks with the analyst, without knowing it. The syntax of the finished Item leaves the reader exasperated as to whether s/he is reading the testimony of the respondent, or the stereotypes of the analyst, or the latter loosely supported by the former, or a fusion of the two.

Gábor Danyi • July 08, 2015

“Do It Today; Tomorrow It May Be Illegal!” – Róbert Szűcs Pálinkás’s Lost Short Film on Illegal Printing Processes

“As long as there are stockings, window frames, and free thought, the independent press cannot be silenced,” was the slogan on the last frame of the short film Gentlemen!, shot by Róbert Szűcs Pálinkás at the Béla Balázs Studio in 1988, which presented a typical way of producing uncensored (so-called samizdat) material. The culture of samizdat, which emerged in Socialist countries in opposition to the monopoly of official state book and newspaper publishing, strengthened in Hungary in the 1980s with the assistance of the Polish opposition. And not without reason—in Poland, underground book and periodical publishing reached extraordinary proportions, as is illustrated by the wealth of material collected by Radio Free Europe, which is available at Blinken OSA.The slogan at the end of the short film referred to the so-called “ramka” technique imported from the Polish opposition, which, as a device easily constructed from window frames and tights, provided in Socialist countries a democratic form of printing available to all. The short film by Szűcs Pálinkás also conveyed the experience Miklós Haraszti, a key figure in developing relations with the Polish opposition, captured by noting, “There are times when the police besiege the thriving samizdat scene. But the ramka cannot be eradicated. The ramka is freedom of the press itself, although no doubt the publisher’s finger is stained with ink, when flipping the regime the bird.”

Clare Svetla Lewin • June 19, 2015

The Value of Alfred A. Reisch Fonds

I personally think the most valuable in Alfred A. Reisch fonds is his extensive research on the CIA’s secretly funded, book-distribution program in which he took part while working for the Publications and Special Project Division (PSPD) from 1956 to 1974. From 2001 to 2013, Alfred Reisch worked on a monograph, Hot Books in the Cold War, which was published in 2013, the same year as his death, by the Central European University Press. The central aim of the book is to tell in a scholarly manner the story of the covert book distribution program that ran from July 1956 until the end of September 1991. This program, which was a very little known Cold War operation, complemented the Western Broadcasts and provided Western literature to Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Robert Parnica • June 18, 2015

American Refugee Committee (ARC) – the Balkan Story now in OSA

From 2000-2002, the American Refugee Committee ran comprehensive support projects to assist Bosniak families from Srebrenica in returning to their homes, which had been inhabited by Bosnian Serbs since 1995: the Housing Support for Families of Srebrenica living in IlijasMunicipality, and the Facilitation of Minority Return to Sarajevo Canton Project. The ARC reconstructed seven homes in Srebrenica, into which three families returned. The four families who did not return in 2002 were: (1) Hidajet Fazlic, who purchased an apartment in Ilijas after inclusion in the ARC’s reconstruction program; (2) Senad Mostic, who chose to receive construction materials from the ARC but was financially unable to complete reconstruction work; (3) Akif Beslija, who plan to return after the birth of their baby in spring 2003; and (4) Mjerja Gljiva, who was evicted from the transitional unit in Breza, and is waiting for to transport and secure shelter for her cows near her reconstructed home.