Hungarian Spectrum

» see hungarianspectrum.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Nearly everything buried on this site was killed by a decision. A company folded a product into another one, or a service stopped covering what it cost to run. Hungarian Spectrum stopped because the woman writing it died, which is a different kind of ending and not one anybody can appeal.

I did not read it. Hungarian domestic politics was not a subject i followed, and the readership was Hungarians abroad plus the foreign correspondents who needed the country explained to them in English. It came to me as a name on a list of dead sites. What was behind the name is fourteen years of one person's work, posted almost every day.

Éva S. Balogh was born in Pécs in 1936. She was a twenty-year-old undergraduate at Eötvös Loránd University during the 1956 revolution and left the country that december, ending up in Canada. She took a doctorate in history at Yale and stayed to teach Russian and East European history. From 1973 to 1978 she was dean of Morse College. She started the blog on 27 june 2007, at an age when most people have stopped taking on daily obligations.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

The premise was that Hungary was doing something the outside world could not follow in Hungarian and would not otherwise hear about. So she wrote it in English for the nonspecialist reader, from a historian's angle, and she did it as a daily rather than as an occasional essay, which is the part that made it useful. Anyone reporting on the country could read backwards and find out what had actually happened in the week they missed.

It ran on reader donations. Scholars including Kim Lane Scheppele and Charles Gati wrote guest pieces. Balogh was a regular guest on ATV and wrote for Népszava, and in november 2009 she briefed CIA officials on where Hungarian politics was heading. In 2019 George Soros donated his Ridenhour Prize money to the site, saying it rendered an important service by exposing to the world what Orban was telling his own people.

~ the day it died ~

She died of cardiac arrest on 30 november 2021. There was no second writer and no succession arrangement, because for fourteen years there had been no reason to need one. The posts simply stop where she stopped.

That is the structural risk in every one-person publication and almost nobody plans for it. A magazine has an office and a masthead and can hand the thing on. A daily written by one retired historian at her own desk is exactly as durable as she is.

~ the archive ~

It was archived while it was alive, which is rarer than it should be. The Library of Congress had been capturing it since 2013 and the Blinken Open Society Archives took a copy as well, so the fourteen years exist in more than one institution that intends to keep them.

The domain did not survive as well. hungarianspectrum.org now resolves to a parking page, the standard fate of a registration nobody renewed. The wordpress address still answers and still serves the posts. Whether that counts as alive depends entirely on what you think a blog is, and the honest answer is that it is a reading room with the author gone.

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