The collection of the material for the ‘private archive’ and on the political elite started in 1985, then continued with the cooperation of the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science (HAS) from 1988 (commissioned and financed by the publishers of the HVG weekly) and was complemented with a large number of documents just before the 1990 parliamentary elections. Its establishment was linked to the parliamentary almanacs in which the 1990 elections were documented. The various types of material (interviews, correspondence, questionnaires) gathered during the research process were published not in a separate volume but in a thematic ‘election supplement’ by the publishers of the HVG weekly. Later, József Marelyin Kiss and József Kovalcsik published the written documents of the parties and MPs (amounting to some 50–60 archive boxes) as research results of the Foundation for Contemporary Research. The publishing process restarted, and still runs, in the form of a book series, with the addition of material concerning MPs in the later volumes. Altogether, the collection references the personal data, jobs, and CVs of 7,838 people with correspondence and questionnaires and it became the basis of the Collection of Political Transition.