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 Radio Free Europe/Free Europe Committee - Encrypted Telex Communication.
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.