The Budapest foundation, founded in May 1984, was George Soros’ first pilot enterprise in the one-time communist bloc, years before he opened the similar Beijing, Moscow, and Warsaw offices in the late 1980s or established his huge foundation network in the early 1990s throughout Central and Eastern Europe. At that “pre-Gorbachev” time, it was the only authorized “foundation” as such, even in Hungary, with a more or less protocol-like, official partnership with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless, this “strange marriage,” which was forced by the regime, could not prevent the foundation’s inventive curators and a small but animated operative team from going on with the daring “expedition” and breaking more and more taboos of the late Kádár era by offering hundreds of grants, stipends, and other means of support for artists, writers, scholars, students, etc. every year. The Budapest Soros Foundation, which split with the Academy of Sciences in 1990, has continued to work independently on a steadily growing yearly budget from New York and to face the old and emerging challenges faced by a civil society.