Central/Eastern Europe

Western leaders gave multiple assurances against NATO expansion to Gorbachev in 1990-1991 according to declassified American, Russian, British, Germans documents

Officials in 1960s  Sought Studies of “Longer-term Consequences of Nuclear Attacks on the Health of People or on Their Living Environment”

In recognition of the extraordinary challenges facing Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, the National Security Archive took out this full-page advertisement in The New York Review of Books' June 8, 2017, edition.  Featured is the Archive’s award-winning Cold War documents reader series published through CEU Press.

Washington D.C., May 10, 2017 – The United States’ cautious response to the unexpectedly powerful popular uprising in Hungary in 1956 grew out of the Eisenhower administration’s policy of “keeping the pot boiling” in Eastern Europe without having it “boil over” into a possible nuclear conflict, according to an unpublished Defense Department historical study posted for the first time by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University. 

Washington, D.C. February 28, 2017 - President Dwight D. Eisenhower ruled out military intervention in Eastern Europe early in his administration, despite campaign rhetoric about rolling back world Communism, according to a U.S. Defense Department draft history published today by the National Security Archive. Fear of provoking war with the Soviet Union drove the decision, the study finds, based on research in a variety of government and public sources.

Washington D.C., December 18, 2016 – Previously secret transcripts of the summit meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985 to 1988, and then George H.W. Bush with Gorbachev from 1989 through 1991, show the Soviet leader pursuing an arms race in reverse, Reagan recommending quiet dialogue on human rights, and Bush seeking new nuclear weapons before coming around to cuts at the end, according to a new book published this month by the National Security Archive and Central European University Press.

The first sign of the long-suppressed dissatisfaction of the Hungarian people with a repressive and an economically inefficient regime appeared on October 6, 1956, at the ceremonial reburial of Laslo Rajk, a former cabinet minister who had been wrongly accused of various crimes and executed.