The archives presented 27,000 pages of digitalised documents, 72 hours of recordings and 70 minutes of film footage at the press conference on Friday. To protect the rights of those involved with the trial, the materials will be made available only to scholars and researchers. However, the Open Society Archives, as a research organisation, will play parts of the audio recordings for the public between June 9 and 15.
Experts at the Hungarian National Archives say the Open Society Archives' plans to make the recordings public are illegal. They are also unacceptable from a scholar's point of view as the archives are only presenting a part of the whole.
Hungarian National Archives director Lajos Gecsényi told the press conference that a decision was made last autumn to digitalise the documents and make them available to scholars and researchers, and, if the legal conditions change, to offer them in their entirety to the general public.
The National Széchényi Library's Historical Interview Collection and State Security Services History Archives participated in the digitalization of the documents.
"Perhaps we will be surprised about who wrote what and when," says library director István Monor.
Nagy was sentenced for organising an uprising against the state and treason on June 15, 1958. He was executed together with former Defence Minister Pál Maléter and the pro-reformer journalist Miklós Gimes on the following day. Nagy's remains were buried along with his associates in an unmarked plot in one of Budapest's biggest cemeteries. In 1989, they were reburied at a ceremony attended by more than a hundred thousand people.
Source: Múlt-kor
