Challenging Archives is a series of podcasts jointly organized by Review of Democracy and Blinken Open Society Archives, based in Budapestthis is the fourth episode of the Challenging Archives series.
The Blinken Open Society Archives, or the OSA, is a complex archival institution. On one hand, it is a repository of vast collections that document how power operated across the twentieth century. OSA holds 10,000 linear meters of archival material, 17,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, and 15 TB of digital records, as well as 150,000 photographs, 6000+ documentary film titles and 22,000 library items. Their catalogue is available online.
OSA is not only an archive. It is one of Europe’s leading research centers on the history of the Cold War, state socialism, human rights, and surveillance. The OSA Archivum also provides fellowships for promising researchers who want to investigate the archival funds. Particularly the Visegrad Fellowship supports scholars, engaged artists, journalists, and scholars at risk who want to work directly with these materials. Since its start in 2010, the Visegrad Scholarship has been awarded to more than 290 fellows from over 65 countries. The next application deadline for the Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken Open Society Archivum (OSA) in Budapest is November 10, 2026, at 12:00 PM
In our series, we will invite Visegrad Fellows to share their experience working with this fascinating archive.
Alternative histories of 1989 became much more prevalent in the last decade. The Netflix series Kleo, the Instagram account DDR Mondbasis, or the book Stealing the Future propose a new version of late socialism and transition towards capitalism. Our guest today, Dorine Schellens, thinks this is not merely a generational shift or a matter of taste. Instead, the stakes are deeper: they challenge the consequential historical framework.
During her Visegrad Fellowship at the Blinken OSA Archivum, Dorine Shellens worked on her book project “Beyond Post-Communism, Imagining the Future in Times of Transition”, where she examines alternative futures imagined by cultural actors in Soviet Russia and East Germany during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Throughout our conversation, the overarching question is: When an old world suddenly disappears, how do people begin to imagine a new future? As our guest emphasizes, the answer for this question might be provided by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck:
[Koselleck] argued that our relationship with the future is not defined by one particular model or one particular framework. Instead, in our societies we have multiple narratives, models of the future that coexist and sometimes also start competing with each other. We relate to the future (…) with a range of different emotional responses.
The topic of the possible futures of socialism is extremely actual and has a longer history than we might have thought. For instance, historians explored this methodological avenue to understand the stakes of perestroika. Yet, most of the studies on this topic have focused so far only on strictly understanding the experts’ take.
Dorine Schellens argues that dissidents and writers also envisioned divergent paths for their societies. Their projects ranged from reformed versions of socialism to radical nationalist ones. So far, few historians have used the Koselleck’s approach to understand them. In this context, the OSA Archivum proves to be extremely valuable in providing nuances:
until 1991, we are dealing with a very tightly controlled public space. Literary landscape (…) excluded many people through persecution, through censorship, through self-censorship. And this is where I think the archives really come in and are really important because so many people tried to contribute or contributed for themselves on paper, but their voices were never heard- in many cases until today publicly.
Throughout the podcast, Dorine Schellens also expands on the methodological challenges of working in the archive, particularly how to reconstruct ideas that were suppressed or unpublished.
Dorine Schellens is a cultural historian with expertise in contemporary Russian and German literature and culture. She is a university lecturer at Leiden University and received a PhD in 2020. She is also a scholar activist through her work at the University of New Europe.
The interview was conducted by Adrian-George Matus. Alina Young edited the audio file.
