In Search of Hungarian Archives

Mapping official reactions to a contemporary crisis should theoretically be fairly straightforward. You draw a chart of concentric circles starting from the top of the hierarchy and gradually descend down to the regional and local levels, then track down the corresponding archives. Press coverage and diplomatic exchanges are the easiest to get hold of. I am currently drawing up a synopsis of reactions across the Austro-Hungarian border to the 1907 peasant uprising in Romania. Were there any reactions? Why would there have been any in the first place?

Several brief reasons:
1) basic self-preservation reason: if your neighbour's house is on fire, you are likely to wonder if the fire is going to spread to yours as well.
2) demographic reason: almost 3 million Romanians lived in the Hungarian half of the Monarchy at the time, for the most part concentrated along the eastern border, i.e. the border with Romania (the Romanian population was among the poorest);
3) some commonalities of land tenure:  latifundia system and periodical peasant unrest
4) nationality politics: what did the virtual implosion of the Romanian state teach the political leaders of Hungary, both those belonging to the Hungarian ruling class and the political leaders of the non-Magyar nationalities?

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The longest stretch of the border with Romania was part of the Hungarian half of the Monarchy. This could only have been a reason for joy on my part as the Hungarian state possessed at the time a comparatively well-organized policing system, informers' networks, a solid and effective system of keeping tabs on the population. This was the result not just of post-Ausgleich Hungarian state-building, but also the Habsburg legacy of Polizeistaat going back to Metternich and Joseph II. In other words, this state had better 'eyes' than the others across the triple border.

So I thought to myself: Budapest archives, here I come!

The first surprise was to find in the Cluj archives in Romania a hefty holding (fond) entitled 'Royal Hungarian Ministry of the Interior'. The final number below refers to the number of archival units in this fond (a unit can be anything from a one-page to a hundred-page folder). What I found even more encouraging was that it covered the entire post-Ausgleich period.

My enthusiasm was short-lived as I soon found out that the holding is currently unavailable for research: it hasn't been catalogued yet and it is part of a long backlog of uncatalogued material. Never mind, who needs to look at facsimile copies of the Hungarian archives? I'll go to Budapest and get my material straight from the horse's mouth. This is where I made the second discovery. What the Romanian archives are in possession of are not copies or facsimiles or microfilms. They are THE REAL THING! The Cluj fond seems to be part of the original archive of the Royal Hungarian Ministry of the Interior which ended up in Romania as war booty taken by the Romanian army in 1919.

This also comes out of the information provided by the Magyar Országos Levéltár in Budapest: part of the archive was taken by the Romanian army and part of it was damaged during revolution and war.

Now, where do I go from here? The archive which promised to hold the most thorough population surveillance reports is not in one piece and the most relevant splinter is off-limits.

Happily a colleague from Budapest (Bálint Varga, to whom I am very grateful as I am to Kati Prajda for putting me in touch with him) pointed out some interesting literature in Hungarian about 1907 in Romania. The books date back to the anniversaries of the uprising (1957, 1967) and were published in Bucharest, Romania. Most importantly, they quote 1907 reports of the Hungarian gendarmerie. These, as the authors pointed out, were at that time in the archive of the Institute for Romanian Communist Party History. This at least testifies that this splinter of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior archive was indeed in possession of the Romanian authorities and had not been destroyed by the 1950s and 1960s.

My friend Manuela Marin, who has been working for quite a while with Romanian Communist Party archive material, tapped into her network of colleagues to help me suss out where this archive could be. It appears that this too has been off-limits, with hopes of gradually being made public but its actual whereabouts, or whether it is still in one piece, is not certain.

I end this blog post with the hope that my request for special access to the uncatalogued archive in Cluj will be approved and that I will at last be able to see 1907 in Transylvania through the vigilant eyes of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie.