The Kádár era and the transition: elites, values and conflicts

1st year: Groundwork – Conceptualization (élites and sub-elites), preliminary archival research (October 2020 – September 2021)

1. Organizational tasks
   
   - organization of the activity of the research team, division of tasks, schedule of the meetings: the regular sessions of discussion guarantee the basis of the cooperation when contributors of the project share their problems and partial results.
   (Participants: project leader and all of the researchers
    
2. Scholarly activities
   
   -  one of the essential tasks of the first year is the review of the theories of elites and sub-elites in the international and Hungarian scholarly literature and their adoption to the Hungarian social/political circumstances that is to say determining the common conceptual framework for the sub-researches. Defining the group of sub-elites, their agents in Hungary (and comparing them to the sub-elites of other East European Soviet type regimes), considering the relationship between the managerial sub-elit and the other sub-elites, too.
   (Participants: project leader and all of the researchers as well as MA and PhD students)
   - the contributors responsible for the different sub-topics of the proposal prepare their schedule and begins i) the archival research especially in the fonds of the State Planning Office and the Institute for Cultural Relations of the National Archive and at HAS, ii) the research at OSA, Veritas OHA and DOHA iii) research in libraries expanding the exploration on published documents.
   (Participants: all the research members of the team)
    
3. Goals and outputs
   
   - making of a new sub-menu on https://1956osintezet.hu (recently under construction) where short reviews on the project phases, new findings, curiosities, interview excerpts, events and programs may inform the experts and the general public about the state of the research
   (Participants: researchers and the technical assistant to the project responsible for the editing of the website, financed from the project)
   - workshop entitled Elites and subelites: approchements and new concepts to be organized until September 2021
   (Participants: all of the researchers and invited experts of the field)
   - publication: by the end of the project year the contributors sum up the results of the first year of research in common collection of papers in order to inform the Hungarian scholarly public on the aims, concepts and methods of the project. Yearbook 2021. Sub-elites in the Kádár era : new assumptions.
   (Participants: all of the researchers).
    

2nd year: Values, conflicts and narratives – continuing ongoing researches and micro-analyses  (October 2021 – September 2022)

1. Scholarly activities
   
   - the contributors follow their schedule and continue archival research in the appropriate fonds of the National Library, HAS, Budapest Municipal Archives, OSA, Archives of the State Security and in the collections of Veritas OHA and DOHA, and other collections of interviews to be involved. Similarly the researchers continue the gathering of information from libraries.
   (Participants: project leader and all of the researchers)
   - discussions about the partial results of the findings and their persistant collating to the concepts accepted in the first year
   (Participants: project leader and all of the researchers)    
    
2. Goals and outputs
   
   - ongoing publishing of reviews and research materials in the project sub-menu on https://1956osintezet.hu
   (Participants: technical assistant and all of the researchers)    
   - discussion of the PhD thesis of Katalin Somlai
   (Participants: all of the researchers and invited public)
   - the copy-preparation of Somlai’s manuscript (PhD thesis) Go West! The power and the Western scholarships in the Kádár era for press
   (Participants: Somlai)
   - by the end of the year the researchers prepare their paper for the second volume of the project Yearbook 2022. Sub-elites in the Kádár era in micro-analyses
   (Participants: researchers and invited PhD students).
    

3rd year: Tensions and their narratives – analyses on micro and macro levels
(October 2022 – September 2023)

1. Scholarly activities
   
   - the scholars continue archival research in the appropriate fonds of the National Library, HAS, Budapest Municipal Archives, OSA, Archives of the State Security and in the collections of Veritas OHA and DOHA, and other collections of interviews to be involved. Similarly the researchers continue the gathering of information from libraries.
   (Participants: all of the researchers)
   - research on personal documents in the personal fonds at archives and family archives
   (Participants: especially Kőrösi, Tabajdi)
   - making of new life-interviews, their exploration and processing
   (Participants: especially Kőrösi, Somlai, Szegő)
   - in the course of meetings: the presentation of partial results and attempts to summerize them
   (Participants: project leader and researchers)
    

Goals and outputs

- ongoing publishing of reviews and research materials in the project sub-menu on https://1956osintezet.hu
(Participants: technical assistant and all of the researchers)
- broadening of the collection of DOHA by new life-interviews
(Participants: especially Kőrösi and Somlai)
- writing of the monograph Re-forming of Socialism and its copy-preparation
(Participants: Rainer M.)