Obituary: Éva S. Balogh (1936–2021)

Abstract

Born in Pécs, Éva S. Balogh was a twenty-year-old undergraduate student at Eötvös Loránd University at the time of the 1956 revolution. During the uprising, she helped publish a revolutionary student newspaper and fled Hungary in December 1956 to find refuge in Canada following the Soviet suppression of the revolt. Balogh completed a B.A. in history at Carleton University in Ottawa, followed by an M.A. and PhD in history from Yale University. Her scholarly career included serving as a professor of Russian and Eastern European history, as well as working in senior academic administration as the dean of Yale’s Morse College from 1973 to 1978. After this, Balogh’s career shifted focus, and she helped establish Brevis Press, a publishing company.Balogh was an early user of the Internet in March 1994, being an active participant in two nascent discussion groups on Hungary and Hungarian politics. Eventually, she established and moderated her own online discussion group on Hungary, before launching the Hungarian Spectrum blog in June 2007 from her home in Bethany, Connecticut. In a video interview with journalist Benjamin Novak, Balogh once recounted a friend’s initial reaction to her first blog post. “Oh, Éva,” the friend said with a tone of gentle pity, “a blog isn’t meant to be a historical treatise.”1 That comment reflected the challenge of transitioning from academic to journalistic writing.However, it was a challenge that Balogh would meet head on, as she wrote daily blog posts that mostly read like long-form journalistic articles. Her pieces offered analysis of Hungarian current affairs and trends in contemporary society, based on a wide range of Hungarian-language sources, as well as on her own connections to, and discussions with, key people in Hungarian democratic opposition circles. Balogh’s writing combined informed opinion and news reporting—all from a broadly liberal democratic angle. Balogh also produced English translations of Hungarian written sources. Over the course of fourteen years, Balogh published some 5,000 articles in Hungarian Spectrum—rarely missing a day and writing nearly all the published pieces herself. Her process was to spend each morning reading Hungarian news sites—both from the left and the right political spectrum—and then the second half of the day on writing her daily blog posts, most of which exceeded 1,000 words in length.In 2011, Balogh’s commitment to democratic values in Hungary led her to become a founding member of the Canadian Hungarian Democratic Charter. Her diligent daily reporting in Hungarian Spectrum also brought her widespread recognition. In 2019, when George Soros won the Ridenhour Courage Prize, he donated the $10,000 that he had received to Hungarian Spectrum, in order to raise international awareness of Hungary’s slide into authoritarian rule. In addition to her thousands of Hungarian Spectrum articles, Balogh also published guest columns in the Hungarian daily Népszava.When Balogh died suddenly of cardiac arrest on November 30, 2021, Hungarian Spectrum had over 7,000 subscribers. The site became a true vocation for Éva—her commitment and passion never wavered. While her sudden death leaves a void for thousands of loyal readers, Hungarian Spectrum is archived by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University and by the Library of Congress.2