ANALYSIS: Why oral history matters (07/11/99)

ANALYSIS

Why oral history matters

by Michael J. Jordan
RFE/RL Newsline

BUDAPEST - Placed before the conference participants was a plastic three-ring binder, with three inches' worth of newly declassified documents. Those documents revealed the content of the Hungarian Politburo and Soviet-Hungarian meetings during the country's 1989 transition from Communist dictatorship to parliamentary democracy.

But early on at the Budapest conference, as ex-dissidents debated that peaceful "negotiated" transition with their Communist-era adversaries, those records took a back seat. The former opposition was more preoccupied with intrigue: wire-tapping, secret agents, back-room deals.

On the hot seat was Gyorgy Fejti, the Politburo member who had controlled the Ministry of Internal Affairs and its police, secret police, spies and informants. But the tight-lipped Mr. Fejti gave his interrogators little satisfaction. As he would later tell a foreign journalist: "I'm here because 1989 was an exciting time and I'm curious what their perceptions were, but I have no desire to earn the everlasting love of these people. I'm not an angel, nor am I the devil. I'm just an average, down-to-earth guy."

Still, the conference filled in gaps that could never be drawn from archives. Other players explained their actions, motivations and emotions.

On the heels of a similar meeting between U.S. and Vietnamese officials earlier this month, it was the latest in a growing number of "collective, critical" oral-history projects that are bringing together players from main Cold War events, from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to the Vietnam War and martial law in Poland in 1980-1981. As more archives are released, historians hustle to confirm all that they can while "witnesses" are alive to recount their role in history.

"Reality is composed of both fact and perception, so documents alone don't come close to telling the whole truth," said Thomas Blanton, executive director of the Washington-based National Security Archive, a backer of these conferences. "While you can't fully re-create that reality or atmosphere of that period ... you can get close enough by restoring human will and human agency to what happened."

Oral history itself is nothing new - it predates written history. But this new trend was spurred by a need to learn the lessons of the past. In October 1987, with a spiraling nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union, a small group of U.S. historians organized a conference in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss the Cuban missile crisis.

Later, during the mid-1990s, the non-profit National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars teamed up to organize a series of conferences in Central Europe, titled "Cold War Flashpoints," on the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956, the Prague Spring in 1968, and the birth of Solidarity in Poland in 1980-1981.

One of the highlights of that series was in November 1997, when Poland's Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski was forced to defend his decision to impose martial law. Gen. Jaruzelski claimed he was a patriot, not a traitor, and that he had prevented a Soviet invasion. But the evidence presented at the conference, combined with the live testimony of Soviet military officials, indicated the Soviets would not have invaded.

History, of course, is typically told by the winners. But today there is a drive to get numerous perspectives. Moreover, until 1989 most U.S. Cold War historians relied on English-language texts based primarily on U.S. or British accounts.

Today, more archives are being unearthed, transcribed and translated. And that has triggered a domino effect, said James Hershberg, director-emeritus of the Woodrow Wilson project. "We're creating an international openness movement, where openness is used as ... leverage against closed archives everywhere," Mr. Hershberg said. "An opening in one place encourages an opening in another. We take newly released Soviet archives to the CIA, which pressures the CIA to release even more."

While the key figures in history can freely publish one-sided, self-serving memoirs of how events unfolded, in these oral history roundtable discussions historians can confront those figures with the evidence. Such was the case in Budapest.

"By preparing all those documents, we gave scholars a chance to have an impact on how events are remembered," said Csaba Bekes, director of the Cold War History Research Center in Budapest. Participants "can't just tell us anything, to mislead us as they would like. We ... squeezed more information out of them than they otherwise would have produced."

Conferences like the one in Budapest also overcome the initial suspicion of participants, build trust and encourage further participation. "Witnesses" have a vested interest in attending these conferences, say organizers. They cite the case of Gen. Jaruzelski, whose actions continue to be a politically sensitive topic in Poland.

"History is going to get written one way or another, so you might as well try to influence it," Mr. Hershberg says. "If you don't show up, you're leaving your history to someone you may disagree with. Sometimes, just to hear what their counterpart says is incentive enough. We don't have to bribe them with honorariums."

On the agenda this October are conferences in Warsaw and Prague, with others perhaps in Germany, Romania and Bulgaria. They will conclude in 2000 with a large-scale conference in Moscow.

But no one should expect a similar conference on NATO's campaign against Yugoslavia. A "critical mass" is necessary, said Mr. Blanton of the National Security Archive. "Unless there is sufficient distance from those events, with enough memoirs written and enough archives released, it may be premature," he says. "We spend a lot of energy trying to generate that critical mass."

Michael J. Jordan is a Budapest-based journalist.

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