Intervision: Searching for Traces

Researching Intervision - the Eastern European organization for television program exchanges between 1960 and 1993 – relies on examining primary sources spread over several archives throughout Europe. It requires collecting structural and administrative data, doing interviews with contemporary witnesses and evaluating statistics on a topic that was formerly either focused on the nation or described from a Western perspective. This article makes an overview of the primary sources available for researching the history of program exchange in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and singles the archival challenges one is confronted with in this type of research.