Popély Árpád: 1968 és a csehszlovákiai magyarság - Fontes Historiae Hungarorum 3. (Somorja, 2008)
Helységnévjegyzék
Árpád Popély 1968 and the Hungarian Ethnic Minority in Czechoslovakia Summary Up to date, there is no extensive analysis about the role of the Hungarian ethnic minority in the 1968 reform process in Czechoslovakia, nor there exists a compilation of documents aiding the monographic process. The Czech and Slovak historiogpraphy came down to mostly those questions, which would be of interest to the majority nations of Czechoslovakia, and the Hungarian writings processed the events in an international context and examined the role of Hungary in the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Therefore, upon the 40th anniversary of the Prague Spring, the Forum Minority Research Institute schemed to document and collect the sources related to the participation of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia in the events of 1968 and publish the results. The vast majority of the disclosed 150 documents is related to the activities of Csemadok - the Cultural Association of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia, which openly undertook the defense of the Hungarian minority’s interests. However, apart from Csemadok’s work, the collection offers a broader view, amongst others, of the Slovak- Hungarian disputes over the ethnic questions, the decisions of state and party agencies related to ethnic minorities, the protests of the citizens belonging to the Hungarian minority against the military occupation in August, the process of drafting the constitutional law on national minorities, the beginning phases of the activities of minority state bodies established as a result of the reform process, and lastly about the normalization period and the removal of personalities who took active part in the reform process from public life. The publication therefore is not constrained to the years 1968 and 1969, but the work also contains several documents from the early phases of the normalization. As an appendix, the collection also features Hungarian diplomatic reports about the state of the Hungarian minority living in Czechoslovakia, which allow following the way how the Hungarian foreign policy saw the Czechoslovakian events. Part of the published documents were already featured in the press at that time, others are sourced from the Slovak National Archives, the Hungarian National Archives in Budapest and the funds of the Forum Minority Research Institute. The compiler of the collection features the Hungarian version of the documents available both in Hungarian and Slovak, however, the Slovak-only documents appear in the Slovak language. Some documents have additional footnotes where needed, for informative and explanatory purposes. The first part of the book summarizes the Prague Spring and the events related to the Hungarians in Czechoslovakia in the first years of the normalization, the second part features a bibliography of the sources from the archives and other literature, an explanation and index of names occurring in the documents, a catalogue of abbreviations, respectively an index of Hungarian-Slovak and Slovak-Hungarian placenames. 468
