The National Archives of Hungary (Budapest, 2006)

THE ARCHIVES OF SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTIONS - Archives of History of Politics and Trade Union by Katalin Zalai

Social Democratic Party, National Peasants' Party. One can discern from the documents that the democratic parties had a direct influnece in the political and economic life of the country after the liberation. Therefore, it is not surprising that among the documents of the parties there are a considerable quantity or copies of state origin since these parties were the parties in power, so the documents were collected properly. An identical situation occurred with the documents of Small-holders' Party, which were relinquished to the Independent Small-holders' and Civil Party in 1990. Noting the imperfect aspects of the regulation regarding the preservation of documents, after the political changes we initiated negotiations about regulating the documents of some parties, setting up archives and possible archival treatment of Letter from Karl Kautzky to Ervin Szabó, 2

nd the surviving documents. As a November, 1908 result, the documents of the faction of MSZP / Hungarian Socialist Party were acquired by our archives from between 1990 and 1998 this way. Moreover, negotiations are still taking place concerning document ownership with the central leading boards and machinery In spite of these obstacles, we were still able to establish a MSZP collection-even though it occurred quite adventitiously. In the fond there are short and different party publications, too, not only documents. We suppose that later on it will be a real mine of information, not only for the researchers of the history of MSZFJ but for the researchers of political science. The collected documents of the more than one hundred years of the Hungarian trade union movements that originated before 1945 were directly acquired from these organizations. However, the materials are imperfect and fragmented. The most valuable are the documents of Builders', Ironworkers', Printers', Tanners' and Food