Dear Reader, the volume you hold in your hands is the first yearbook of the Hungarian Committee of National Remembrance (Nemzeti Emlékezet Bizottsága, NEB). The Committee was established by the Hungarian National Assembly, in accordance with the provisions of the Hungarian Constitution, and officially started its work in February 2014, so our institution is still rather young, with scarcely more than two years of history behind it. Of the five members of the Committee, all of them historians, three members were appointed by Parliament, one member was delegated by the Minister of Justice, and one member was appointed by the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Similarly to its partner institutions abroad, the most important tasks of the NEB include conducting systematic and comprehensive research on the power mechanisms, key organizations, and cadre policy of the communist dictatorship; preserving the memory of the dictatorship; and informing public opinion on this subject, which means that our activities include awareness raising as well as the coordination of large-scale professional research projects. The aim of the twelve studies published in this yearbook is to provide an overview of the first results of the intensive research activities of the NEB, the primary fields of our research, as well as the professional interests of members and full-time researchers of the NEB. We firmly believe that the studies published in this yearbook, although different in their perspectives and approaches, all guide our readers towards the same conclusion: that the communist regimes and their political, economic, and cultural impact on Europe still constitute a historical legacy awaiting further inquiry, both in terms of processing available historical sources, and in terms of a myriad of open questions to be answered by future research. By publishing the first results of our research on the operation of the Hungarian soviet-type dictatorship and the international context of the communist regime in the English language, the NEB and its workshops hope to contribute to continued research efforts by making their findings available to a wider international public.

NEB Yearbook 2014-2015 Hungarian Committee of National Remembrance (download)