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The Istrian Fighter Digital Collection is available at the University Library of Pula website. It is the collection of the first Croatian youth journal Istrian Fighter/IBOR, which was published in Pula from 1953 to 1979 (with two minor interruptions). The journal was published by the Istrian Fighter Literary Club with the objective of preserving the Croatian language in Istria. The journal developed a reputation as a critical media in the 1970s, covering more and more cultural, local and social themes whose tone was not well-received by the socialist authorities, so the financing of the journal was cancelled in 1979 after which it ceased publication.
The Scriptum.cz web archive provides access to various non-commercial and online Czech exile and samizdat periodicals. This is a unique collection of works that are often not accessible anywhere and are constantly being refilled.
Some of the photographs taken by Lucian Ionică are snapshots of moments of high drama. Among them, those "hard to look at" images from the Paupers' Cemetery, with the bodies of those killed by the repressive forces of the communist regime, hastily buried by the representatives of those forces, and then disinterred in order to be laid to rest in a fitting manner. There are also in the collection some photographs with portraits of children wounded during the Revolution of December 1989 in Timişoara. They were taken in the Timişoara Children's Hospital on 24 December. The photographs show the wounded children in bed; the three snapshots include portraits of two boys and a girl. "For a few years after I took those photos I tried to trace the children I had photographed. I couldn't find them, although I tried repeatedly. In the confusion and the strong emotions of the events back then, I didn't have the inspiration to make a note of their names. Today I don't know what has become of them, what they are doing," says Lucian Ionică, confessing his regret at being unable to follow the story of those whose drama he immortalized in December 1989. "In the Timişoara Revolution, there were a lot of teenagers in the street. However the repressive forces had no compunction about firing at them. They were victims of the Army in the first place. Opening fire on minors is impossible to accept. Of course it is not justified against adults either, but the brutal actions of the soldiers against the children show how faithful those in the forces of repression were to Nicolae Ceauşescu," is the comment of Gino Rado, the vice-president of the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara, summing up the tragic consequences of the involvement of forces loyal to the communist regime in the repression of the demonstrators, including minors (Szabo and Rado 2016). According to research carried out at the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara, as well as other official statistics documenting the scale of the repression in the city in December 1989, at least six children or adolescents under the age of 18 were killed in this symbolic city of the Romanian Revolution. The youngest hero-martyr was Cristina Lungu; when she was fatally shot in December 1989, she was only two years old.
Kolekcijoje saugoma vertinga informacija apie Lietuvos komunistų partijos Centro komiteto (LKP CK) politinę laikyseną prieš įvairias kultūrinės opozicijos apraiškas. Dokumentuose atsispindi ir lietuvių inteligentijos, kurios pagrindinis tikslas buvo Lietuvos kultūrinio paveldo išsaugojimas, padėtis. Dokumentai apima liberalizacijos periodą, t. y. destalinizaciją sovietinėje Lietuvoje.
This unique collection of samizdat literature (1972-1989) contains samizdat books by Czech and Slovak authors whose works could not officially be published in socialist Czechoslovakia, as well as a collection of samizdat periodicals and individual texts.
Artpool Art Research Center collects, archives, and makes available documents for researchers regarding marginalized art practices of Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s and contemporary international art tendencies. Topics in the archive include progressive, unofficial Hungarian art movements (such as underground art events, venues, groups, and samizdat publications between 1970 and 1990) and new tendencies in international art beginning in the 1960s.
In addition to functioning as a research center, Artpool considers itself an active archive. It organizes events in search of new forms of social activity, participates in the process in a formative way, and simultaneously documents and archives these process in order to promote the free flow of information.
The Grgo Šore Goli Otok Collection is part of a broader collection consisting of documents from personal and family bequests and is kept in the Croatian History Museum. The collection includes documentation about Goli otok (a small rocky island in the Adriatic Sea), official correspondence, newspapers and photographs. In his manuscripts, Grgo Šore described in detail all of the horrors he experienced on Goli otok during his captivity as a falsely accused "Cominformist." Particularly noteworthy are the drawings depicting the brutal treatment of inmates by the prison guards.
The Jan Zahradníček Collection at the Museum of Czech Literature is an important resource documenting the literary and Catholic opposition to the communist regime in post-war Czechoslovakia. It includes Jan Zahradníček's poetry manuscripts, written illegally in the 1950s, in Pankrác Prison.
The Closed Stacks Department of the National Széchényi Library (OSZK) was established in 1946. Everything that was not permitted by the censors and could not be part of the public collection of the library was put here. The librarians argued that the task of the national library was to collect every type of publication regardless of its content. The books and journals which were published by Hungarians who fled the country after the Revolution of 1956 added to the number of items. The department became a meeting point for members of the emerging opposition in the 1980s, which created an opportunity to get actual samizdat writings.
This ad-hoc collection was separated from the fonds of judicial files concerning persons subject to political repression during the communist regime which is currently stored in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). It focuses on the case of Gheorghe Zgherea, a person of peasant background who was a member of the Inochentist religious community, a millenarian and eschatological movement active in Bessarabia and Transnistria mostly during the first half of the twentieth century. The collection materials are revealing for the repressive policy of the Soviet regime in the religious sphere, showing the Soviet authorities' hostile attitude toward non-mainstream and marginal denominations, which were perceived as a particularly serious threat. Zgherea, a preacher within his community starting from late 1950, was accused of "roaming the villages" of the Moldavian SSR and spreading "anti-Soviet ideas" among the local populace by "using their religious prejudices." Arrested on 2 May 1953, he received a harsh sentence of twenty-five years of hard labour. His sentence was reduced to five years of hard labour in June 1955, when he was also amnestied according to a special decree of March 1953. Zgherea's case thus points to the changing strategies of the regime applied after Stalin's death, but also to the continuity of repression and to the shifting practices of stifling dissent in post-Stalinist Soviet society.
The collection of Ladislav Mňačko (1919–1994), a Slovak writer and former prominent Czechoslovak journalist, consists of unique correspondence, manuscripts, prints and clippings which help to describe the life of this significant writer, who after August 1968 was a critic of the communist regime and a representative of Czechoslovak exile literature.
The Nelu Stratone collection is one of the most impressive collections of rock, jazz, and folk records created in communist Romania, as a result of the happy combination between its owner's exceptional passion for alternative music and his ability to acquire records that were not imported officially. The collection is important not only for its size, but even more for the significant number of albums of Western provenance, which were unavailable in shops in Romania but could nevertheless be obtained due to the existence of an alternative market for such products. The creation and preservation of such a collection were activities regarded with suspicion by the communist authorities in Romania, because they proved the younger generation's fascination with Western cultural products, in contravention of the spirit of Nicolae Ceauşescu's Theses of July 1971.
Vjesnik Newspaper Documentation is an archival collection created in the Vjesnik newspaper publishing enterprise from 1964 to 2006. It includes about twelve million press clippings, organized into six thousand topics and sixty thousand dossiers on public persons. Inter alia, it documents various forms of cultural opposition in the former Yugoslavia, but also in other communist countries in Europe and worldwide.
The collection includes Croatian State Security Service's file on the case of first and best known Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Djilas, and its reception in Croatia. During 1953, Djilas published a series of articles in the newspaper Borba on the need for democratization and liberalization of Yugoslav society, which led to his condemnation at Party forums and expulsion from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. In Croatia, similar ideas were mainly manifested in the weekly Naprijed, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Croatia. It led to open conflict with Party leaders and the suppression of the newspaper, while its journalists were forced to halt their careers in journalism. The collection includes different analysis and reports on operational measures conducted by the Croatian State Security Service against the Naprijed group and other Djilas supporters (Djilasovci) in Croatia until the beginning of 1960s.
The Doina Cornea Private Collection is an invaluable historical source for those researching the biography and especially the dissident activities of the person labelled by the Western mass media as the "emblematic figure" of the Romanian resistance to Ceauşescu's dictatorship. This collection comprises manuscripts of her open letters of protest, her diary, samizdat translations, correspondence, drafts of her academic works, photos, paintings, video recordings, and her personal library. This private collection is by far one of the most significant and valuable collections reflecting the cultural opposition to the Romanian communist regime.
The collection of Milan Jelínek documents in detail the Communist thinking of a formerly protected linguist, and the later, a critic to the regime, becoming a samizdat publisher and co-organiser of lectures at the underground university.
The beginnings of the Video Studio Gdansk are connected to the I National Congress of "Solidarity", organised in Gdansk in 1981. At first, the independent "Solidarity" filmmakers documented the union's most important events, however soon the first documentaries were produced. Video Studio Gdansk has been operating for almost 40 years, and its archive today consists of several thousands of video materials. It mostly comprises own videos, created by the Studio: raw footages (of the most important oppositional events, like strikes, clashes, protests), documentaries, reportages, few feature films, and numerous recordings of television theatre, public debates, cultural events, etc.
Limes was a circle of Hungarian dissident intellectuals which operated more or less actively from 1985 until the 1989 Romanian revolution. The aim of the circle was to provide a pluralist platform of cooperation for Hungarian intellectuals, which meant holding monthly/bimonthly organized meetings and publishing a journal dealing with the history and actual situation of the Hungarian minority from Romania, as well as other outstanding research work pertaining to other domains. The circle was also devoted to maintaining high standards of scientific work in Romania. As there was no chance of getting anything past the censors in Romania, the plan was to smuggle manuscripts to Hungary and to publish the journal there.
The initiator was Gusztáv Molnár, who mostly due to his job as a literary editor at the Bucharest-based Kriterion publishing house had a large personal network among Transylvanian Hungarian critical intellectuals. The core of the group was represented by the following individuals: Vilmos Ágoston, Béla Bíró, Gáspár Bíró, Ernő Fábián, Károly Vekov, Levente Salat, Csaba Lőrincz, Ferenc Visky, András Visky, Péter Visky, Levente Horváth, Sándor Balázs, Sándor Szilágyi N., and Éva Cs. Gyímesi. Through the process of editing the journal, many more intellectuals became acquainted with the activity of the Limes group.
Between September 1985 and November 1986, six meetings were held in four different localities in Romania in the homes of members of the group. The meetings encompassed a presentation (usually of a manuscript) followed by a debate, and all proceedings were recorded. The series of meetings was interrupted by a search and seizure performed by the Securitate in Molnár's apartment in Bucharest. All documents related to Limes were taken and later studied by the authorities. By this time, the plan to make four Limes issues had already been completed, and the manuscripts for the first two issues had already been collected. The contents included transcripts of the Limes debates and studies and documents covering topics such as "national minorities," "nationalism," "totalitarianism," "autonomy," and "Transylvanianism" as a guiding ideology for the Hungarian minority in Romania. The topics also included the situation of the Csángó Catholic (Hungarian-speaking) population in Romania.
The Limes group ceased its activity after the intervention of the Romanian secret police, and in 1987, summons and warnings were issued to the members of the group. Though no more meetings were organized, after a while, Limes members resumed work on the texts. Molnár moved to Hungary in 1988, but the editorial work was continued in Romania by Éva Cs. Gyímesi Éva and Péter Cseke in Cluj. The first issues of Limes was published by Molnár in Budapest in late 1989. The content does not coincide with the initial first volume of the Limes, but the issues did contain excerpts from the debates which were held at the first two meetings.
Invaluable insights into the details of the Limes story and other events in the lives of outstanding Hungarian intellectuals are provided by the Securitate files on professor of philosophy at the Babes Bolyai University Sándor Balázs (1928–), which are available for research in the Historical Collection of the Jakabffy Elemér Foundation. This is because the Limes activities in Cluj were recorded by the county agency of the Securitate as part of the information surveillance files on Sándor Balázs. His code name was "the Sociologist" (Sociologul), but the table of contents at the beginning of the dossier refers to "the Sociologists" (Sociologii), the code name used to denote the Limes group.
The "Sixtiers Museum" Collection is located in a small museum in Kyiv, Ukraine in a building belonging to the Ukrainian political party Rukh. Nadia Svitlychna and Mykola Plakhotniuk founded this museum as way of honouring and documenting the struggles of a cohort of Soviet Ukrainian dissidents during the 1960s-1980s. Included in the permanent exhibition are paintings, graphics, sculptures, embroidery and other artworks produced by artists affiliated with the sixtiers movement. The museum also displays the poems, letters and literary works of the writers in their midst, as well as their typewriters, handcrafted items made while in the GULag, or clothes worn while living in exile, like Svitlychna's own camp uniform. Also figuring prominently are posters for events and exhibitions organized by this group. The guided tour is a moving, concise rendition of their struggle, aimed at the museum's target audiences, young students, scholars, and the general public.
These materials depict the lives of a dynamic group of Soviet Ukrainians engaged in a principled creative and ideological struggle with the Soviet regime in the 1960s and 1970s. They were poets, artists, graphic designers, historians, doctors, and even a Soviet army official, all of whom became deeply involved in human rights activism under late socialism. Many were members of large Soviet institutions—like the Ukrainian writers and artist unions, the Literary Institute in Kyiv, the Soviet armed forces. The Soviet government's ideological retrenchment after Khrushchev transformed these dissidents, who had worked hard to try and reform the system and make it more humane, into individuals in open conflict with the authorities.
The Libri Prohibiti's collection of foreign samizdat monographs and periodicals contains mainly Slovak and Polish samizdat literature. Russian samizdat and periodicals from the former German Democratic Republic are marginally represented.
Kolekcija pasakoja apie žymios lietuvių humanistinės ir pedagogės Meilės Lukšienės gyvenimą ir veiklą. Ji ne tik dalyvavo Sąjūdžio veikloje, yra Lietuvos tautinės mokyklos koncepcijos autorė, bet ir buvo kultūrinės opozicijos sovietmečiu dalyvė. Jos veikla XX a. VI dešimtmetyje buvo svarbi lituanizuojant Vilniaus universitetą. Dėl šios veiklos ji 1958 m. buvo apkaltinta "buržuaziniu nacionalizmu" ir pašalinta iš Vilniaus universiteto Lietuvių literatūros katedros.
This eighty-eight-page manuscript contains the texts of eight sermons and seems to have been prepared to be sent abroad for publication. The author was a priest and professor at the Theological Institute in Bucharest, and was imprisoned between 1948 and 1964. While in the notorious prison of Pitești, he was forced to take part in the infamous re-education experiment in that prison, which turned a part of the prisoners into the torturers of the others. Tormented by such a terrible sin, Calciu-Dumitreasa tried, according to his own confession, to write about this prison experience in order to come to terms with it. However, he changed his priorities when, in the aftermath of the earthquake of 1977, the demolition of churches in Bucharest began while the hierarchy of the Romanian Orthodox Church kept quiet. It was then that Calciu-Dumitreasa conceived this series of non-conformist sermons, in which he argued against atheist education and reminded his students of fundamental Christian values, of their mission as priests who must build, and not destroy, churches in order to take care of their parish communities. Seven of the sermons were delivered by the author in the Radu Vodă Church in Bucharest between 8 March and 19 April 1978. Particularly important is the sermon of 15 March 1978, in which Calciu-Dumitreasa explicitly condemned the demolition of the Enei Church, the first church demolished in Bucharest. The sixth sermon, of 12 April 1978, was no longer delivered in the church but in front of it, for the authorities had closed the church and locked the students in their dormitories in order to impede them from attending what had turned in the meantime into an increasingly popular event. The eighth sermon was supposed to open a new cycle entitled "Christianity and Culture" on 17 May 1978, but it was never delivered due to the author's removal from his teaching position. Continuously harassed by the secret police, in 1979 Calciu-Dumitreasa endorsed the establishment of the Free Trade Union of the Working People of Romania, which caused his arrest and imprisonment for another five years. He was released only in 1985, after intense international lobbying, especially by the United States administration, which threatened the Romanian communist regime with the withdrawal of Most Favoured Nation status. A year later, he went into exile in the United States, where he remained until his death. This manuscript was probably confiscated on the occasion of his arrest in 1979. This version of the sermons differs slightly from the post-communist published volume because it mentions the persons who were responsible for the interruption of his cycle of sermons in 1978.
Jaromír Šavrda, a writer, poet, journalist and dissident from Ostrava, was, because of his samizdat activities, twice held in the custodial prison in Ostrava and later imprisoned in Ostrov nad Ohří, first from September 1978 until March 1981 and then from September 1982 until October 1984. During his second stay in prison, Šavrda wrote two books reflecting his experiences as a political prisoner; they depict his personal experiences from police persecution and describe the lives of people that Šavrda met in prison. The first of the books was "Vězeň č. 1260" (The Prisoner No. 1260), written between September and November 1982 and published as samizdat, followed by "Ostrov v souostroví" (The Island in the Archipelago), written by Šavrda between November 1982 and January 1983. After his return from prison, this two texts were published in 1987 as an omnibus called "Přechodné adresy" (The Temporary Addresses), at first in samizdat edition Popelnice and then in edition Expedice. "Přechodné adresy" was first officially published in the 1990s (Ostrava: WMCG 1991, 1993). Both texts were also published separately with original titles in 2009 (Prague: Pulchra, 2009). "Přechodné adresy" (2009) is also a name of a documentary film about Jaromír Šavrda directed by Petra Všelichová.
Ferdinand Peroutka, who represented the democratic past of Czechoslovakia, and mainly the First Czechoslovak Republic, became the director of the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in New York on 6 April 1950. The Czechoslovak service of the RFE began its regular broadcasting from Munich on 1 May 1951 with the famous phrase "This is the voice of Free Czechoslovakia, Radio Free Europe." One of the first speakers was also Ferdinand Peroutka, who stated, besides other things: "One magazine would mean little in a country where freedom reigns. But one free magazine, one radio station in a dictatorial regime – that is a revolution, because such a system is based on the fact that only the government can speak and nobody can answer back, that anyone can be charged, but nobody can defend themselves. However, once even a fraction of freedom enters that rigid and artificial system, from anywhere, once it is again possible to set argument against argument, once it is no longer possible to act without criticism, once there is a place to call untruths into question, then this whole proud system quavers."
The Literary Archives of the Museum of Czech Literature possesses a mimeograph copy of the typescript of this speech.
The document that records the extent of the search carried out at the home of the Petrescus on 18 May 1983 is in the family's private collection in an original copy, made out by the officers who took part in the event. Another two copies were kept by the communist authorities of the time. The minute records that the Petrescus were present at the search, as were two witnesses. It consists of four pages, very clearly written, and is made out in the name of the Iaşi County Inspectorate of the Securitate. Each page is signed both by the representatives of the forces of control and repression and by the witnesses and the couple themselves. The document lists the objects that were kept by the Securitate on this occasion: books; audio cassettes, including one containing a recording of Virgil Ierunca's broadcast on Radio Free Europe in which he highly praised Dan Petrescu and other young intellectuals in Iaşi for their articles in the student magazines Dialog and Opinia Studenţească; rolls of recording tape; photographs; letters from various people; pages of notes; and a folder labelled "Furrows across the baulks – feuilleton novel of the collectivisation," containing forty-five leaves of the manuscript of this collective novel. Among the books confiscated were some that later became classic works of critical analysis of the communist system, but which were very recent publications at the time, for example La Nomenklatura, les privilégiés en URSS by Mikhail Voslensky (1980) and L'Union soviétique survivra-t-elle en 1984? by Andrei Amalrik (1977). There were also critical works on Romanian communism published by Romanian writers in exile, such as La Cité totale by Constantin Dumitrescu (1980). The couple managed to save some books from confiscation, but of those removed from their home by the Securitate only one was given back to them, though it is not clear on which criteria this particular book, Les Sources et le sens du communisme russe by Nikolai Berdyaev, was returned – perhaps because it dated from 1938, so was much older than the others. Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu recalls how they managed to hide some of the most critical, and implicitly the most incriminating books: "The next day, 18 May 1983, at six o'clock sharp in the morning, the guys burst in. […] At first they were very pleasant. They gave us time to get dressed, and those minutes gave us a chance to remove some books, to give them to my aunt, who stuck them under her jacket, under her overcoat. Solzhenitsyn, for example. We saved the Gulag and a few others. My aunt took them into her room, where they had no mandate to enter and where they didn't think of entering. [… Wherever they had a mandate,] they left nothing untouched. Nothing, nothing. You realised that you could hide something anywhere, in the garden, in the house, in the woodshed, and they would rummage around and they could find it. They were capable of moving everything, of going through everything." And regarding the immediate consequence of the search, interrogation at the Securitate headquarters, she adds: "The search lasted approximately five hours. From six in the morning to eleven. […] Then they took us up – 'up' meaning to the Securitate. It was on a street named Triumfului. Now after 1989, the gangs of Securitate people have built a district of apartment blocks that they own." Dan Petrescu adds, with regard to the manner in which those who came conduct the search acted in order to find what interested them, underlining that the Securitate was particularly interested in a cassette with the recording of a Radio Free Europe broadcast, in which some young Iaşi writers had been highly praised, among them himself, and in the manuscript of the collective novel: "They had come on the basis of information, for they were looking for certain things. They were looking for a recording of a broadcast on Radio Free Europe where [Virgil] Ierunca praised us and… they were looking for books […] They confiscated a lot of books from us. Only one was given back to us, after the search. Berdyaev – his book about the sources and the meaning of communism. At the same time they asked me about the novel ["Furrows Across the Baulks" revisited]. I said to them: 'Why are you still looking for it? Because you've already got it.' They had taken it from George Pruteanu. […] It didn't exist in more than one manuscript. There were no copies. It passed from one to the next and each one added to it. They were also looking for letters in the search." Dan Petrescu adds, to give a clearer picture of those months, another detail that casts a new light on that moment: "The search took place, at our home, in May 1983. In March, I found out later in documents at CNSAS, the Securitate guys had made new recruits in literary circles in Iaşi. Ten new names. In editorial boards of periodicals, publishing houses, that sort of thing."
The exhibition entitled "A harcoló város/The Fighting City, 1986" was organized by the amateur artist group Inconnu to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The police banned the event on the opening day and destroyed the artworks. However, before that, an agent took photos of the compositions. Thus, the secret police itself created, through the act of destruction, a group of sources which is today the single visual trace of the exhibition. This photo collection is kept in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Forces (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára – ÁBTL).
The document reproduces the report drawn up by two representatives of the communist Militia following the search carried out on 3 December 1986 for the purpose of investigating the possible illegal basis of the collection of art stored in Brad at the home of Dr Sorin Costina. Under Law 18/1968 regarding the control of the provenance of goods not acquired through legal means, the possessions of any physical person could be checked if there were "data or indications," basically meaning information collected through informers, pointing to "an evident disproportion" between the estimated value of a person's possessions and the income legally obtained by that person. The text of this minute, drawn up in the wooden language of the communist authorities, does not identify in its conclusions any illegality that might have been found as a result of the search. However it is highly relevant with regard to the manner in which the communist authorities penetrated the private lives of citizens. The document mentions that the search lasted approximately three hours and provides in ten hand-written pages a detailed inventory of all the items found in the Costina family home. It was drawn up in three copies, one of which, in the original, is now in the Costina family archive.
Gábor Demszy's collection contains not only samizdat books and journals but also objects. The ramka (bolting-cloth stretched on a wooden frame) was a tool used in the samizdat printing process and today constitutes an important relic object of this technique.
The Goma Movement Ad-hoc Collection includes numerous plans of action against the individuals involved in supporting the open letter of protest against the violation of human rights in Romania which was to be addressed to the CSCE Follow-Up Conference in Belgrade. Each Securitate informative surveillance file contains periodically updated plans of action, but these usually required only the approval of the high-ranking Securitate officer in charge of the case of the person in question. What is remarkable about this plan of action, which is part of Goma's personal file, is its endorsement by the highest possible office holders in the Ministry of the Interior, to which the Direction of State Security was directly subordinated in 1977: the plan was countersigned by Nicolae Pleșiță, first deputy minister, and finally approved by Teodor Coman, the minister of the interior himself. Obviously, the hierarchical level of those who endorsed this plan indicates the great importance attached to this case. It is worth noting that the "successful" handling of the Goma Movement, in which Pleșiță involved himself and acted as Goma's head interrogator, led to his promotion to the rank of lieutenant general in 1977. The same year, he coordinated the repressive measures taken by the regime in the aftermath of the Jiu Valley miners' strike of August. Pleșiță remains notorious, however, for his actions while head of the Centre for Foreign Intelligence between 1980 and 1984, in particular for the 1982 failed attempt at suppressing Goma while in exile in Paris, and for the 1981 bomb attack on the RFE headquarters in Munich, for which the Securitate seems to have hired the infamous terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. After 1989, Pleșiță showed no remorse for his misdeeds, and all attempts to hold him legally responsible for these wrongdoings eventually failed.
Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca had an intense correspondence with Romanian intellectuals in exile and a part of this correspondence is preserved in the collection housed by the National Archives in Bucharest. Among the letters preserved here there is one signed by the well-known historian of religions, Mircea Eliade. Eliade left Romania in 1940 and dedicated his entire intellectual activity in exile to the study of history of religions and the history and philosophy of culture.
In his letter of 27 March 1971, which was read by Monica Lovinescu in her broadcast on RFE under the suggestive title of Refutation, Mircea Eliade speaks about the interview he granted to Adrian Păunescu and published in the Romanian magazine Contemporanul (The contemporary) on 10 and 17 March 1971. The historian of religion underlines the fact that he agreed to answer Păunescu's questions on condition that the interview would be published in full. To his unpleasant surprise, the conversation was drastically censored and according to Eliade, the cuts dramatically altered the meaning of the interview. Specifically, the Romanian censorship removed those parts in which Eliade mentioned autobiographical details connected to his youth in interwar Romania, such as the impact that Nae Ionescu, a very influential right-wing-oriented journalist and professor of philosophy, had on his intellectual development. Also, the names of other renowned Romanian exiles such as Emil Cioran and Eugène Ionesco were removed, as was any reference to his co-generationist, Mircea Vulcănescu, who ended his life in a communist prison. Finally, any mention of his writings about the history of religion and philosophy of culture, which were central in Eliade's work, were absent from the published interview. Consequently, Eliade bitterly concluded that: "As for the memories of the nights spent together in the winter of 1971, they are evoked by the poet and journalist Adrian Păunescu and belong to him entirely. When we were talking, I thought we were speaking the same language: the old, honest Romanian language that I learned in my childhood and which I am still speaking now, in my old age. I admit with immense sadness that I was wrong."
The censorship of the interview can be easily understood if one considers the political and cultural context in Romania at the beginning of the 1970s. The nationalist turn of the Ceaușescu regime (Petrescu 2009, 523–544) did not result in the rehabilitation of Nae Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, or Mircea Vulcănescu whose names were still on the list of the Romanian censorship. Moreover, the ending of the liberalisation period, marked by the so-called Theses of July 1971 on improving political-ideological education, made even more problematic the publishing of any reference to religion and history of religions. The paradox that Mircea Eliade accepted an interview with Adrian Păunescu only on the basis of the latter's assurance that the text was going to be published uncensored in Romania can be understood if one takes into consideration the situation of the two protagonists involved. Since Mircea Eliade left Romania in 1940, he had lost touch with what was really going on in the country, and he seems to have been unaware about what censorship really meant and how it actually worked. As for Adrian Păunescu, at that time a young man of only twenty-eight and without any obvious connection with the communist regime, he had come to the United States at the invitation of several Romanian writers. Enticed by the young poet's genuine interest in his person and work, Mircea Eliade not only agreed to grant him an interview, but also answered wholeheartedly the provocative questions asked by Adrian Păunescu, at that time a promising and uncommitted young writer (Manolescu 2014).
Kolekciją sudaro medžiaga apie tautinių mažumų ir deportuotųjų teisių pažeidimus ir apie žmones persekiotus už anti-sovietinę veiklą. Kolekcijoje taip pat yra dokumentai apie savilaidos (samizdat) publikacijas ir tikinčiųjų persekiojimus.
The collection of the Czech journalist, dramatist and director of the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe, Ferdinand Peroutka (1895–1978), contains unique sources for the history of the Czechoslovak exile after 1948.
Pogrindyje publikuota spauda buvo gerai organizuota ir konceptualiai pagrįsta savilaidos forma. Kolekciją sudaro du pogrindžio leidiniai, tai Lietuvos katalikų bažnyčios kronika ir Rūpintojėlis. Kronika kaip pogrindžio leidinys išliko ilgiausiai, savo publikacijose pateikdama sovietų skleidžiamoms žinioms alternatyvią informaciją. Jei Kronika buvo inicijuota katalikų kunigų, tai Rūpintojėlis buvo labiau tikinčiųjų iniciatyva, kuris tapo pripažintu leidiniu dėl aukšto kultūros ir intelektualinio lygio.
Kolekciją sudaryta iškeltos šaltinių: Lietuvos ypatingajame archyve yra saugomos iš KGB paveldėti leidiniai, taip suskaitmeninti Kronikos leidiniai, patalpinti internetiniame puslapyje http://www.lkbkronika.lt.
In the period from 1975 to 1976, William Totok spent more than eight months in arrest at the Securitate for his involvement in the Aktionsgruppe Banat literary group, considered subversive by the authorities,and for his criticism of Ceaușescu's political regime. Totok was released in June 1976 after the publication in the newspapers Frankfurter Rundschau and Le Monde of articles presenting the abuses of the communist authorities in his case. After his release, Totok drew up a manuscript of memoirs entitled Projekt für eine intellektuelle Extermination (A project for an intellectual extermination), in which he recounted his experience as political prisoner. In May 1982, the Securitate carried out a search at his domicile and at that of one of his friends, the Romanian-German writer Horst Samson. On this occasion several documents were confiscated, including one copy of the manuscript of these memoirs (ACNSAS, I 210 845, vol. 2, 265–66; Totok 2001, 107–108).
In this manuscript, Totok recounts in detail the conditions in the political prison in Timișoara, the interrogations carried out by the Securitate, and the story of a letter drawn up between the two periods of arrest (Totok was released for a short period in October 1975, only to be arrested again in November 1975). In this letter, sent by his mother to the Federal Republic of Germany after his second arrest, Totok related the dramatic events of the abusive arrest of his colleagues and himself in October 1975 and all the harassments of the secret police. Fortunately, the copy of the manuscript of this memoirs that was confiscated by the Securitate was not the only one. Totok managed to hide a copy and to smuggle it out of the country to the Federal Republic of Germany after his emigration in March 1987. In 1988, Totok published a revised and extended version of this manuscript under the title: Die Zwänge der Erinnerung: Aufzeichnungen aus Rumänien (The constraint of memory: Recollections from Romania).
The collection was created in the Ukrainian diaspora by the Smoloskyp Publishing House. Deeply involved in political and cultural opposition in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, Smoloskyp built a communication channel between Ukraine and the international community, making the Ukrainian oppositional movement internationally known. In 1998, the collection was institutionalized as the Museum-Archive and Documentation Centre of Ukrainian Samvydav in Kyiv. It holds the most extensive collection of Ukrainian samizdat; Ukrainian diaspora periodicals; the collection of Ukrainian tamizdat (samizdat materials published abroad in Ukrainian, Russian, English, French, German and other languages); hundreds of photos of Soviet-era political prisoners and dissidents; the archives of several committees for human rights in Ukraine from the US, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and other countries.
The Ion Dumitru Collection is the richest and most diverse of all the private archives of the Romanian exile community, which makes it indispensable for the study of the history of postwar Romanian exile. The collection is also a fundamental source for documenting and understanding Romania's (domestic and foreign) political, cultural, economic, and social evolution during both the communist and post-communist periods. At the same time, this private archive is a historical source both for understanding how the Bucharest authorities acted to divide the Romanians abroad and to counteract their actions aimed at unmasking the wrondoings of the communist regime between 1948 and 1989 in the West and for how Romanians within the country perceived the emigrant community.
The collection of incomplete investigative files at the National Archives of Estonia is an extensive, though partial, set of investigative files about people who were persecuted during the Soviet period. A significant part of the collection is made up of the files of persecuted cultural figures. The cases included in this collection were still open when the KGB was liquidated in 1991.
The digital collection of the Oral History Center contains more than 2000 interviews with twentieth-century witnesses, which are divided into different themes and topics, thus presenting a unique collection of professionally created interviews and memories, many of which are related to the theme of cultural opposition.
Among the first few hundred recordings in the oral history archive of the Sighet Memorial, Aristina Săileanu-Pop's testimony stands out due to the fact that it tells of the personal experience of one of the most striking representatives of the organised resistance in the mountains of Maramures after the seizure of power by the communist regime. The recording of this testimony is number 254 in the archive. The audio document comprises some three hours of recording and is in digital format. The archived interview was taken by Liana Petrescu, and is accompanied by a file entry on the interviewee which summarises the content and provides Aristina Săileanu-Pop's biographical details. An edited transcript of the recording was reproduced in the volume Să trăiască partizanii până vin americanii! Povestiri din munţi, din închisoare şi din libertate (Long live the partisans till the Americans come! Recollections from the mountains, from prison, and from freedom) published by the Civic Academy Foundation publishing house in 2008. The interview includes accounts not only of the personal experiences of Aristina Săileanu-Pop, but also of similar experiences of other members of her family and other partisans involved in the resistance movement in the mountains of Maramureş. These either did not survive the prison experience that followed their capture by the Securitate troops or they were older and passed away before the fall of communism, without having the possibility of narrating the traumatic experiences they had been forced to undergo. Aristina Săileanu-Pop considers that it is her duty to preserve their memory too.
As regards the significance of her own confrontational experience, Aristina Săileanu-Pop believes that her personal victory over the communist experiment in the history of Romania was due to her refusal to give up Christian moral principles: "It was a victory for all those who kept normality. I consider myself one of them. A peasant, I was and I remain a normal person; neither I nor my relatives had any inferiority complexes. My father was often in the company of important people of the time, although he was a forester. When Constantin Brătianu handed over the land, forests and all, to the people of Lăpuş, my father invited him to dinner and then they danced the Unification Hora together. We didn't suffer any inferiority complexes. We always thought it was to the benefit of the country for there to be as many intellectuals as possible. From our village a host of boys and girls left for high school, because the peasant wanted his child to get book learning. Now, this "class" hatred was something incomprehensible; it exploited all the worst in people. It destroyed so many destinies; it left behind it suffering and death; it wanted to separate people from God. To take away their faith, hope, and love. The experiment you speak of ended with an ocean of injustices. I am just a drop in that ocean."
In the preface to the volume mentioned above, Romulus Rusan responds to this story that is so moving in its simplicity, and offers a very beautiful portrait of a strong character, worthy to be taken as a life's model: "Aristina Pop passes through the most terrible sufferings, but always finds a protective hand to defend her. She is the person who knows how to make herself loved because she is incapable of hate. She disarms the investigators by her ingenuousness, the women guards by the fact that she could be their child, the doctors by the altruism of her youth. […] She does not lose her faith, refuses resignation, continues to hope. After she comes out of prison, when the Securitate try to use her, she tells them they would do better to send her back behind bars. She gets married 'at first sight' to a young man, Nicolae Săileanu, who had been in the same prison as her and who had fallen in love with her without knowing what she looked like, just from hearing her story. [...] How did such a character manage to make herself loved in a world of hate, of class struggle? The secret is Aristina's alone, and consists, beyond doubt, in her innate knowledge of how to remain normal in a world of abnormality."
Skirt, in Sorin Costina's private collection, is a painting in oil on canvas. It is unsigned and undated, but is one of the well-known works of the artist Ion Grigorescu, at present the most well-known Romanian artist internationally. The painting is 32 cm in width and 58 cm in height. It was acquired on 20 April 1982 at an exhibition in Căminul Artei (Home of Art), the Union of Visual Artists gallery in Bucharest, at a price of 1,000 lei. At the time of its acquisition it was unframed. Its present frame was made from a rod of oak, at the suggestion of another contemporary artist of considerable fame in Romania, Paul Gherasim. It was brought to the collectors home by Ion Grigorescu himself, who stopped for a time in Brad in June 1982 on his way to a monastery in the region. Skirt may placed in the context of the artist's visual experiments with the human body, a taboo theme in the communist period. It has been displayed in a number of thematic or solo exhibitions, including various Ion Grigorescu retrospectives, the most recent of which was hosted by the Museum of the Criş Land in Oradea in 2018.
This chart epitomises the typical and efficient method which the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, used against those who attempted to establish networks of dissent in Romania. It seems to have been drafted for the Securitate officers who prepared the operative decision-making process regarding an emerging human rights movement in Romania, inspired by Charter 77. The driving force behind this movement was the writer Paul Goma, who initiated the movement in February 1977 by drafting a collective letter of protest against the violation of human rights in Romanian, which he and more than 200 other individuals eventually endorsed and addressed to the CSCE (Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe) Follow-Up Meeting in Belgrade. It was the first time that the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, had faced such an enormous challenge, and thus it had to react quickly in order to curtail the spread of the movement. In order to counteract this movement, the secret police had to collect in two months complex information about all those involved.
This chart and its annexes epitomise the collection of these complex data in the short time span between 9 February, when the collective letter was first broadcast by Radio Free Europe, and 1 April 1977, the day when the secret police arrested Paul Goma. The first thing one notices about this chart is its resemblance to the drawings made by high school teachers to facilitate a better understanding of a topic. The chart actually highlights Goma's connections with the internal and external supporters of this movement which at that time constituted a collective action of unprecedented magnitude in communist Romania and implicitly a novel challenge for the Securitate. The chart only contains a schematic representation of Paul Goma's relations with other persons (schema legăturilor lui Paul Goma). The central field, which features Paul Goma, is connected left and right with two columns of differently coloured fields. The left-hand column seems to represent a typology of individuals whom Goma had contacted in order to send documents relating to the activity of the emerging movement across the border to a Western country. They are divided into four categories: diplomats, foreign journalists, "reactionary elements from the emigration" and "autochthonous elements." The right-hand column seems to categorise all those who had contacted Goma with the purpose of endorsing the movement. At the time when this chart was drawn, the Securitate had been able to scrutinise only 288 persons out of 430; the number of those identified to date is added in pencil. About these persons, there are three types of information offered: the actions taken (against them), their method of contacting Goma, and their political background (antecedente politice). The complex data collected about all these, which is included in annexes to this chart, included age, ethnicity, profession, education, place of residence and political background, meaning information about previous anti-regime activities.
The chart is an unusual type of document in the archives of the Securitate. Its unique character is directly related to the novelty of the challenge which the Securitate had to confront with Paul Goma's attempt to establish a Romanian Charter 77. The novelty was twofold: it consisted both in the network established and the ideas expressed by this movement. Such a rapid solidarisation of individuals around a common purpose did not occur in communist Romania either before or after the Goma movement. At the same time, the defence of human rights was a totally alien idea and ideal in the political traditions of Eastern Europe in general, and of Romania in particular, even considering the period before the communist takeover. Thus, this emerging movement which implied the defence of a political idea (and not a material benefit) must have been really puzzling for the Securitate officers, who did their best to grasp the situation and understand the "real" motivations of the individuals protesting for the observance of such an "abstract" issue as human rights. This coloured chart and its annexes testify to the methods used by the Securitate in order to disaggregate a collective action for a common interest, the observance of human rights, into a multitude of individual actions, driven by personal interests and thus easier to break apart. In Goma's words, "this is the use of statistics in the house of terror" (Goma 2005, 412).
The Libri Prohibiti's collection of Czech samizdat monographs and periodicals contains over 17 500 units from Czech samizdat publishers from the 1950s to the 1980s, and more than 440 Czech samizdat periodical titles.
The Youth Subcultures Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS comprises documents created or collected by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, about the emergence and development of Western-inspired subcultures among the members of the younger generation in Romania, subcultures which the communist regime considered harmful for their education and whose influence it thus tried to counteract. This collection illustrates that young people even in an isolated country like Romania in the 1970s and the 1980s still became exposed via Western broadcasting agencies to Western cultural goods, especially to music, which made them adopt alternative life styles and wear provocative outfits in order to build distinctive collective identities. Out of the many young people who attracted the unwanted attention of the Securitate two cases stand out and are featured in this ad-hoc collection: Clubul Regilor Liberi (The Club of the Free Kings) in Brăila and Organizația Tinerilor Liberi (The Organisation of Free Young People) in Bistrița.
The collection contains documents about Estonian emigré communities in the West, primarily on political and religious subjects. Additionally, it includes material in the Estonian language about the Voice of America radio station. Furthermore, the collection boasts extensive material about the dissident movement in Estonia in the 1980s.
Vasyl Stus was an iconic figure of the human rights movement in Soviet Ukraine and one of the leading Ukrainian poets of his generation. Volumes of his poetry circulated widely through samizdat in the 1960s-1980s. While conducting searches, the KGB would find his works in the homes of every writer, artist, chemist, and human rights activist, whose activities were cause for concern. As with many writers, Stus's struggle with the Soviet regime, particularly his brutal incarceration and torture in a Soviet prison camp, which led to his death in 1985, have in many ways overshadowed his human and artistic legacy. The Vasyl Stus Collection at the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv was donated by the Stus family after Ukrainian independence in 1991, with the aim of popularizing and making more accessible his writings. These materials include previously unknown works, volumes of Stus's vast correspondence, as well as fragments of writings that survived his imprisonment in strict-regime hard labor camps in Mordovia and Perm.
The collection includes different operational reports, transcripts of conversations, anonymous letters and pamphlets, as well as other written materials collected by the Croatian State Security Service during Operation Tuškanac, conducted against students and professors at the University in Zagreb in the early 1970s, based on charges of nationalist and hostile activities against the communist regime in Croatia. It was one of several operations conducted by the Croatian State Security Service against members of the Croatian Spring, a national movement which included student reform demands among its essential elements.
The Goma Movement Ad-Hoc Collection at CNSAS reflects the activity of an ephemeral collective protest for human rights, which emerged under the influence of Charter 77, gathered rapidly about the same number of supporters, but unlike its model, succumbed only a few months later. It bears the name of the main proponent of this movement because this corresponds not only to its canonisation in post-1989 historical writings, but also to the pre-1989 interpretation of the secret police, which focused on identifying the network linking Goma to the other supporters and collecting complex data about all these individuals.
The Krunoslav Draganović Collection on World War II and Post-war Victims is an archive collection whose original collector was the priest Krunoslav Draganović, who, relying primarily on the testimonies of survivors and other witnesses, planned to publish a book on the crimes of the Yugoslav communists.
The Czechoslovak Writer Publishing House collection deposited in the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature (LA PNP) contains sources documenting the course of review processes, which often led to demands for changes to literary works. This was also the case for the experimental text entitled "Dancing lessons for the advanced in age" (1964) written by the well-known Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997). This text was finally shortened by the author following the reviewers' requirements. "Dancing lessons for the advanced in age" consists of the only continuous and unfinished sentence representing the monologue of the seventy-year-old uncle Pepin who recalls his past. Other sources stored in the LA PNP documents include the prohibition of Hrabal's collection of short stories "Lark on a String".
Since its publication in 1981, Virgil Ierunca's book Pitești has been a key work for those interested in studying the extreme forms of repression implemented by the Romanian communist regime during its first years of rule. The book examines the implementation of an "experience of a grim originality" called '"re-education" that took place in Pitești prison between December 1949 and August 1952. The idea of re-education was inspired by the theories of the Soviet educator Anton Makarenko (1888–1939). He was a specialist in juvenile delinquency and a partisan of the re-education of young detainees with the help of other detainees of the same age who were already re-educated. The Romanian communist authorities took Makarenko's ideas onto the next level by making permanent torture the main instrument for the re-education of younger students guilty for having other political sympathies than communist ones.
In his book, Virgil Ierunca describes how the re-education experiment began in Pitești prison at the end of 1949 with the blessing of the then head of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, Nikolski, and who were the main persons among prisoners involved in implementing the experiment. The book contains a detailed account of the many types of tortures that young detainees had to endure to be become re-educated and describes the last days of those who died because of torture in Pitești prison, based on the accounts of former prisoners who emigrated from Romania. From Ierunca's point of view, the main purpose of the experiment was the destruction of the personality of the individuals who at the end of their re-education lost their moral values and standards and became "new men." Consequently, they were not only forced to renounce their families, friends, and religion, but also to became the torturers of their friends or other inmates.
Virgil Ierunca also shows how the re-education was transferred from Pitești to other Romanian jails, such as Târgu-Ocna, Ocnele Mari, and Gherla and how it ended in 1952 when the Romanian authorities blamed their ideological enemy, the Iron Guard and its followers, for the atrocities that had happened in Pitești prison. Commenting on the issue of responsibility, the author mentions that the Romanian authorities and the first prisoners who tortured without being previously tortured were the only ones to blame for the deaths and the destroyed lives in Pitești prison.
The Charter 77 Foundation was founded in Stockholm in 1978 to support persecuted and imprisoned chartists and dissidents in Czechoslovakia, as well as to support opposition activities in the fight for human rights and civil liberties. The Charter 77 Foundation was led and organised by Frantisek Janouch.
The Oral History Collection of the Sighet Memorial contains several thousand testimonies of great relevance for what the Romanian communist regime meant in general and especially for the prison experience of thousands of former political detainees. The distinctiveness of this oral history collection is strictly connected to the recovery and systematic conservation of the memory of those who went through significant traumatic experiences during the communist regime, with the aim of saving from oblivion that part of history which was officially suppressed until 1989, but which emerged spontaneously to the surface immediately after the change of regime.
The poem Die moritat von den 10 wortarten der traditionellen grammatik (sic!) [The street ballad of the ten parts of speech of the traditional grammar] was written by Gerhard Ortinau and published in 1974 in the literary magazine Neue Literatur in a collage of texts created by the young Romanian-German writers from Aktionsgruppe Banat. The poem is made up of three parts entitled: schaltung (lining up), umschaltung (dealigning), gleichschaltung (bringing into line), which depict through metaphors how the political system worked in Ceaușescu's Romania. Ortinau used in this poem seemingly absurd statements such as: "a pronoun was arrested" and "the adverb was cut off from the newspaper" to suggest practices such as political repression and censorship. The poem ended with a paraphrase, which represents an irony concerning the Ceaușescu's dictatorship: "Die sprache c'est moi!" (sic!) [The language c'est moi!]. The non-conformist character of the poem can be seen also from the spelling, which avoided the usual capital letters for nouns, specific to the German language.
The publication of this collage of texts, Neue Literatur, was possible due to the relative liberalisation that took place in Romania during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For a short period of time, cultural institutions enjoyed more autonomy in their relation with the political decision-makers and censorship was less strict. In this context, Gerhardt Csejka, one of the editors of Neue Literatur, had a key role in promoting the texts of Aktionsgruppe Banat and helping them to pass the filter of censorship (Iorgulescu 2006, 419–421). The Securitate noticed the hidden message in this text due to the notes provided by informers from the German speaking literary milieu of the Banat, who gave to the secret police a detailed interpretation of its metaphors and word plays. For example, one informer explained to the Securitate officer in a note of September 1974 that the title of the third part of the poem was an allusion to the so-called Gleichschaltung, the process by which the Nazi regime imposed its control on all areas of German society (ACNSAS, I 210 845, vol. 2, 15 verso).
This twelve-page typewritten document, which the author endorsed with his signature, represents a condensed version of his memoirs. After his release from prison in 1964, Steinhardt wrote several versions of his memoirs, out of which some were confiscated by the secret police, while others reached Radio Free Europe and were broadcast in the late 1980s. Steinhardt very much valued this manuscript, which he considered his literary testament, so he dedicated considerable effort to its preservation with a view to future publication. One version of the memoirs, which the author entrusted to a friend before his death in 1989, was published immediately after the fall of communism and became a best-selling book. There is another published version of the memoirs, which was discovered more than two decades later, hidden in the monastery of Rohia, where Steinhardt became a monk in 1980. The short version, confiscated by the Securitate and preserved in this collection, focuses even more clearly than the published ones, which number hundreds of pages, on the same identity issue: the author's conversion to the Orthodox faith, which happened while he was imprisoned. This central event in his life illustrates that Aleksander Wat's widely-known prison experience was not unique in the Soviet bloc. Steinhardt's conversion, however, was neither a result of his illumination in adverse conditions nor a part of his strategy of physically and mentally surviving the experience of imprisonment; it was his response to an identity question, which imprisonment did not trigger, but only precipitated. This short version of his memoirs makes this clear by chronologically reiterating his formative years, the intense socialisation with his Romanian friends and the bothersome questions related to his Jewishness, to show ultimately that he realised well before his imprisonment that he was closer to the Romanian intellectuals of his generation than to the Jewish community. As Steinhardt put it, his conversion was a "love story: a double falling in love with both the Christian Church and the Romanian nation." Particularly interesting also is the author's perspective on the tragedies of the twentieth century, which affected him directly, i.e., the adversities he had to endure as a Jew under a right-wing military dictatorship and as a Romanian intellectual under the communist regime. Unlike others who experienced such traumas, Steinhardt chose to come to terms with his troubled past not only by forgiving his perpetrators, but also by forgetting about retribution. As he put it in order to justify his option for monasticism, the prison experience had shown him "the world as it is," and this made him willing to regard it "not with animosity, but from a distance."
Before 1989, the Czech dramatist and dissident Václav Havel was imprisoned several times for his beliefs and activities, his longest prison term lasting from 1979 to 1983. This period is reflected in Havel's letters to his wife, later published as "Dopisy Olze" ("Letters to Olga"). Already in prison Václav Havel began to design these letters as a future book and tried to develop within them a more general reflection on human identity and responsibility. Especially after the summer of 1980, Havel's letters to his wife Olga gradually turned into philosophical essays. On the other hand, the letters from the first year of imprisonment, written from June 1979, contained, besides philosophical, literary and other reflections, also more practical passages, including concrete instructions to Olga concerning their household or Havel's everyday needs. This is also the case of letter "number 4", which was written by Václav Havel on 8 July 1979 while in custody in Prague – Ruzyně. In this letter, Václav Havel informed Olga about the letters he had so far received, he described how he had been spending his time in custody and wrote that despite his imprisonment he was "sure of his truth" and did not regret anything. This letter was in an abridged version (without passages about practical matters and specific instructions to Olga) published in "Letters of Olga" issued by the samizdat Expedition Edition in 1983. It has appeared in subsequent samizdat, exile, and after 1989, official editions of "Letters to Olga" as well.
In 1998, this letter, along with 160 other letters from 1979 to 1983 and 11 letters from 1989, was donated by Václav Havel to the Museum of Czech Literature.
The brochure Infiltrarea: Cazuri de folosire a acestei metode ofensive de muncă pentru cunoașterea, prevenirea și contracararea acțiunilor îndreptate împotriva securității statului (Infiltration: Cases of the use this offensive method of work for the knowledge, prevention, and countering of actions directed against state security) is a top-secret publication of the Ministry of the Interior that was used for the professional training of Securitate personnel. The booklet deals with one of the main methods used by the Romanian secret police in its mission of annihilating the potential actions of all those who were suspected of "hostile attitudes" towards the communist regime: the so-called infiltration of an informer. Infiltration basically means the insertion of an informer (or an undercover officer) into the immediate personal entourage and/or the professional milieu of the targeted victim. According to the definition included in the brochure, infiltration refers to establishing a relation between the informer and his/her target that aimed at winning the trust of the latter in order to fulfil the former's "informative-operative tasks." The brochure also describes how the Securitate officer should prepare the infiltration by paying attention to the personality of the target, selecting the most appropriate informer in accordance to the profile of the target, and carefully preparing him/her for a successful infiltration. Another section deals with the practical problems that might occur during the infiltration. These refer to the supervision of the infiltration by the Securitate officer and the collection of information from his/her "source." The last part of the brochure focuses on the cases in which not an informer but an undercover Securitate officer is required to infiltrate a particular target. These theoretical notes were followed by four annexes in which four cases corresponding to four different methods of infiltration are described in detail. One of these cases refers to the successful infiltration of a group of young Romanian German writers who in 1972 in Timișoara established the literary circle known as Aktionsgruppe Banat. Although the text used pseudonyms and omitted the name of the group, the general information provided allows a researcher to discern that the case under debate is that of Aktionsgruppe Banat. The brochure describes the problem faced by the Securitate, which directly derived from the functioning of this informal circle without formal approval that led to the production and dissemination of writings critical of the "realities of socialist Romania," as some sources interpreted these for the secret police. Following a failed attempt at recruiting two of the literary group members as informants, the Securitate decided to infiltrate an outside informer into the group. The text describes how the officers carefully selected the informer, nicknamed "Gruia," on the basis of his common professional background and interests to the target, "Otto Wilhelm," one of the members of the non-conformist literary group. The text also underlines how the informer was trained to initiate the first contact with his "victim," and how they became friends given their shared interest in literature and the alleged common experience of being marginalised by the communist regime due to their non-conformist stances. The success of the infiltration was unquestionable as not only did the target, "Otto Wilhelm," invite "Gruia" to attend the meetings of the literary circle, but he also entrusted some of his manuscripts to him to read. The brochure does not state this, but this informer must have decisively contributed to the formal dismemberment of Aktionsgruppe Banat after the arrest of four members in 1975.
This ad-hoc collection mainly consists of documents separated from the fonds of judicial files concerning persons subject to political repression during the communist regime which is currently stored in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). It focuses on the case of Arsenie Platon, a person of peasant background and an aspiring poet, who was tried and convicted in 1961 for displaying nationalist views and for conducting "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" among his friends and acquaintances. Platon's "anti-Soviet" opinions were mostly expressed in a series of poems and short proclamations in which he criticised ethnic discrimination against the Moldavians and called for the overthrow of Soviet power. This case is emblematic for less widely known forms of grassroots cultural opposition, falling under the same broad category as the cases of Gheorghe Muruziuc and Zaharia Doncev. Platon's file includes no further information about his fate after the end of his prison term.
The Commission for Ideological and Political Work of the People's Youth of Croatia (1945-1962) was crucial in the development of young people regarding their guidance and education based on socialist values. The Commission worked under the aegis of the Communist Party, and its primary task was to monitor all activities that were opposed to the regime. Therefore, the numerous documents in this collection encompassing the period from 1945 to 1962 show different oppositional aspirations and activities of young people in Croatia in the immediate post-war period up to the beginning of the 1960s.
The cover of the classroom samizdat was designed for the matriculation of students from class 4K in 1989. It parodies the exceptional case of the Educational Centre for Languages, which retained the teaching of Latin and Greek despite the Šuvar school reforms by using the very popular comic strip Asterix.
The cartoon paraphrases the first sentences of the popular comic: "In the year 1974 AD, all schools in Croatia were subject to the so-called Education Reform . All? Well, not entirely. One small school north of Andautonia [an ancient Roman town near Zagreb] has been mounting resistance to this reform persistently for years. This is a story about a generation of its dwellers…"
The victorious Roman eagle carries a flag with Šuvar's slogan "School and factory" and beneath it there is a plaque, which instead of the Latin SPQR (senatus populusque Romanus) carries the abbreviation for Yugoslavia, that is, SFRJ (Socijalistička Federativna Republika Jugoslavija).
The last poem in the samizdat is "Don't give up, our Classical School, don't give up, our youth," which pays a tribute to the school's classical curriculum and its exceptional status ("Oh, our reformed Classical School/Hold on tight!/We know that it's not easy/in this world./In this world of strictly directed heads.")
Alexandru Călinescu acquired his Swiss-made Hermes Baby typewriter around the middle of the 1970s. In general, in shops in communist Romania, the only typewriters to be found were produced in other communist countries, especially East Germany and Czechoslovakia, later also China. The Swiss machine was purchased "on occasion," as the term was at the time for things bought second-hand, either from shops operating the so-called "consignation" system by which citizens could legally sell to or buy from other citizens, or directly from an "acquaintance," as was Alexandru Călinescu's case. "To be precise, I got it from the father of this acquaintance; he wasn't very interested in it, didn't use it, and I had liked it from the time I first saw it," he recalls.
It was on this typewriter that the great majority of the text written by Alexandru Călinescu in the last fifteen years of Romanian communism were typed. In contrast to other types of material connected with his journalistic activity, the typewriter was not confiscated during the search in 1983. "It was registered with the Militia, as the law required at the time, there was nothing illegal about it, so they didn't touch it," Alexandru Călinescu recalls. According to the then extremely recent Decree no. 98 of 28 March 1983 regarding the regime of duplicating apparatus, materials necessary for the reproduction of writing, and typewriters, physical persons could only have typewriters, not copiers, and "only on the basis of an authorisation issued by the Militia." In order to obtain an authorisation from this authority of the communist state, it was necessary, according to this legislative act, to hand in, on acquisition, after any repair, and at the beginning of each calendar year, "a page with the characters of the letters, figures, and orthographic signs." The decree introduced a strict control over typewriters and other means of multiplying texts in order to limit the possibility of producing manifestos or samizdats. Alexandru Călinescu's typewriter was, however, a very old model, on which – as he explains – he had to change several ribbons every year, as their quality was poor and they became worn through relatively fast. At present, the Hermes Baby typewriter, which weighs approximately 7 kg, is in Alexandru Călinescu's private collection and is in good working order.
[1] Gulyás János, Szamizdatos évek, film.
The Alexandru Călinescu private collection epitomises the trajectory of an intellectual in an important university city who began to practise a camouflaged contestation, published in local student magazines, with a limited readership, and ended up in unequivocal public opposition, disseminated transnationally through foreign radio stations. The collection marks some of the key episodes in the movement of resistance to and contestation of the communist regime as it manifested itself in Iaşi, the historical capital of the region of Moldavia and the city with the oldest university in the Old Kingdom of Romania. At the same time, the collection and the personal story of Alexandru Călinescu illustrate a lesson in dignity in very difficult times, when there were few who had the courage to speak openly against the Ceaușescu regime.
"I have been sentenced to 6 months in prison for unnatural fornication. I do not believe my behaviour should be punishable by law since it does not constitute a crime. From the most ancient times of human history, among the oldest civilizations, the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, in the Islamic world, in Japan and China, this 'unnatural fornication' had been tolerated. It was only with the emergence of the Catholic Church and its supremacy that this fornication was proclaimed the sin of Sodom, and harshly punished […] Countries that managed to wrest themselves free from Catholic supremacy introduced more tolerant regulation of sexual matters, regarding marriage and even homosexuality. As far as I know, there is not a single modern state that would consider adultery or homosexuality crimes" (HR-DAZG-1007-527: "Žalba [Branka Vujaklije] na presudu Okružnog suda u Zagrebu K 236/949-7", prosinca 1949. [Appeal (of Branko Vujaklija) against Zagreb District Court verdict K 236/949-7, December, 1949]).
With these words Branko Vujaklija, a 23-year-old theology student and Serbian Orthodox cleric from Zagreb, attempted to convince the Croatian Supreme Court to release him from prison where he was held for "unnatural fornication."
During his trial, Vujaklija unapologetically declared he was homosexual. He tried to explain to the judge that he was only acting in accord with his "natural sexual instincts," that his sexual relations were always with consenting adults and never in public, so therefore, Vujaklija argued, he could not have been declared guilty. The judge ignored his arguments, and found his acts extremely immoral (Dota 2017, 94-95). Vujaklija did not give up and wrote an appeal (part of which was quoted earlier). He changed his argument: since he was sentenced as a moral degenerate and a debauched bourgeois, this time Vujaklija himself decided to use ideological arguments as well. He tried to explain to the judges that the contempt towards homosexuality had its origins in the Catholic tradition that should have no place in a new, modern and progressive socialist society. However, his efforts were in vain, and the Supreme Court of Croatia rejected his appeal (Dota 2017, 95).
Both the court sentence and Vujaklija's appeal were retrieved during Domino's research, and thus became part of the Collection History of Homosexuality in Croatia. The 1949 verdict, as well as other related documents, including the cited appeal letter, were originally held in the State Archives in Zagreb (DAZG), and are part of the Zagreb County Court Fund (HR-DAZG-1007).
These documents testify to the ideological motivations behind the persecution of homosexuality in the post-revolutionary phase of communist Yugoslavia, but also to the resistance mounted by some sentenced homosexuals against the authorities. Vujaklija was bold and daring enough not only to depict his homosexuality as a completely natural phenomenon, but also to demand his own acquittal and the decriminalization of the same-sex sexual relations in general.
Vanda Zaborskaitė (1922-2010) buvo lietuvių literatūros profesorė. 1961 m. ji buvo atleista iš Vilniaus universiteto dėl kaltinimų nacionalizmu ir įsidarbino Lietuvos istorijos institute. Nors čia ji turėjo įvairias tyrimų temas, ji tęsė savo tyrinėjimus labai sudėtinga tema – poeto Jono Mačiulio- Maironio (1862-1932) kūryba.
The Éva Cseke-Gyimesi Ad-hoc Collection kept by CNSAS contains, besides Securitate files, pieces of evidence regarding the critical approach to the regime inherent in the targeted person's professional activity, and her struggle against the violation of human rights and for the institutionalisation of minority rights. The collection represents the model story of the Transylvanian Hungarian intellectual observed in the 1970s and 1980s, which exhausts both the meaning of secret police harassment and that of coping with this type of harassment.
The collection illustrates Zvonimir Kulundžić's intellectual work as a journalist, historian and literary critic who chose to pursue his activity independently outside of the institutions controlled by the socialist government. The Collection includes books, original manuscripts, the author's published articles, his correspondence and polemics, which reflect a critical standpoint toward Croatia's institutional historiography and literature in the period from the 1950s to the late 1980s.
This samizdat miniature with its photocopied (from a microfilm) and manually bound pages represents a typical form of smuggling underground materials from Soviet Ukraine. Microfilms and miniature forms were the only way to safely smuggle abroad illegal literature and documents from the Soviet Union.
This samizdat book was rolled and hidden in a luggage of a Smoloskyp courier. This was the way how Smoloskyp couriers managed to smuggle many other Ukrainian samizdat and dissident materials, including Bil'mo by M. Osadchyi, O. Berdnyk's manuscripts, the entire collection of the documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, D. Shumuk's memoirs, a photo collection belonged to M. Rudenko, and so on. The obtained materials were later published in both Ukrainian and English, and were circulated in international media.
Mykhailo Braichevsky wrote his article Priednannia chy voz'ednannia? (Annexation or Reunification?) in 1966 in which he openly criticised the Theses on the 300th Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia (1654-1954), a document imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1954 as the only permitted interpretation of the events of 1654 in Ukrainian history, namely, the Pereiaslav Council and the Treaty of Pereiaslav, after which Ukraine became a part of the Russian Empire. Braichevsky's work was circulated in samizdat in Ukraine, smuggled abroad, and was published in Canada as a brochure. As a result of this writing, Braichevsky was fired from the Institute of History, where he worked as a researcher. In the next decade he was oppressed by the Soviet authorities and the Communist Party that demanded his public "repentance" and acknowledgment of his research "falsities." He was not allowed to officially continue his research career.
The Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, OH contains a hidden world-class archival collection amassed over the last century. Founded in 1952 by Ukrainian WWII refugees, the materials document the lives and struggles of multiple generations against communism. The museum-archive took on the mission of preserving Ukrainian culture at a time when it was being destroyed in the Soviet Union, assembling a vast collection of books, periodicals, photographs, ephemera, diplomatic papers and other materials that document a century of struggle. This is a unique institution that spans international borders, but is simultaneously integrated into an urban American neighborhood. The collection is based in Cleveland's historic Tremont neighborhood and attracts partners like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine, and other institutions interested in digitizing its hidden gems.
The diaries are presented in the form of separate notebooks which were written by Milan Jelínek over a continuous, yet not daily, period of time. Jelínek recorded his everyday impressions, commenting on current events; a large part of them are summaries and short reviews of the books he read. The diaries prove the mindset of an enthusiastic Communist transformed to a critic, and the disappointment of the social and political development following the Prague Spring. There a also very valuable and non-encrypted, "uncensored" records about the publishing of samizdat titles and the organisation of the underground university within the activities of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation. What is interesting, are also the characteristics of other people from the academic and dissident environment.
"Goli Goli Goli – The Truth about Goli otok" is a typewritten text about the days of captivity on Goli otok, but it is partially different from the original, and begins with a short biography of the author before his arrest, including specific events that preceded the arrest. Šore spoke about his arrest in Travnik in June 1949 and his transfer to the prison in Sarajevo. On September 1949, about 400 detainees were transported by train from Sarajevo to Herceg Novi, and then by truck to the former Austro-Hungarian fortress on Cape Oštro at the entrance to Boka Kotorska Bay. There, Šore's group joined detainees from Montenegro, and then all boarded a ship that took them to Goli otok. This was the first group of "Cominformists" who came to Goli otok. Before them, there was a smaller group of people on the island who welcomed them with clubs, curses and verbal abuse. Šore spent three years in this environment, in which he experienced the most brutal methods of political "re-education." Immediately upon their arrival at the prison camp, all inmates had to publicly present facts about their "hostile work" against the communist regime and plead guilty. Also, all inmates had to go to the State Security Administration office to report all the "enemies" among inmates or among those who were still outside the prison camp. Political meetings were held regularly in the prison camp, where the criminal conduct of a particular inmate was discussed based on evidence obtained by mutual spying. Furthermore, 'cultural-educational' work was carried out every night, which consisted of reading Party literature, making posters, writing pamphlets, and even short comedy shows. In all forms of cultural and educational work, Josip Broz Tito and his policy in conflict with the Cominform Resolution was praised by the detainees (Interview with Peić Čaldarović, Dubravka).
The prison camp's administration punished inmates with brutal methods that consisted of heavy physical labour, inciting violence among inmates, psychological abuse, and deprivation of food and water. According to Šore's memories, the main penal measures in the camp were: boycotts (severing of any communication with an inmate, overtime labour and reduction of food and water rations), carrying "Anita" (exhaustion by carrying a heavy load), tracer (exhaustion caused by carrying heavy loads with another inmate), the swan (exhaustion by carrying a heavy load together with six other detainees) and the chamber-pot 'honour' (guarding the wooden lavatory in the barracks many times per day or for many days). The physical exhaustion of inmates was done to psychologically transform them, or erase their personalities, to create persons loyal to the Party led by Tito. Inmates who underwent been internal punishment or refused to submit to political "re-education" ended up in Building 101. Its purpose was to break disobedient detainees with more difficult conditions of daily labour and more extreme torture methods (Interview with Peić Čaldarović, Dubravka).
Šore described each of these situations and methods of political "re-education" precisely from his own experience or based on the example of one of his fellow inmates. He illustrated some of the most difficult aspects of everyday life with his own drawings under the heading: Tracer/Carrying Heavy Rocks, Water and Food/Boycott by the Wall, Chamber-pot Honour /Swan (Interview with Dubravka Peić Čaldarović).
Rimantas Vėbra (1931-1999) buvo istorikas, 19 a. istorijos specialistas. Jo tyrimai apima lietuvių tautinio atgimimo 19 a. antrojoje pusėje studijas. Nors Vėbra nebuvo aktyvus anti-sovietinio judėjimo dalyvis, jo profesionali istoriko veikla buvo riboja dėl ideologinės linijos nesilaikymo.
This collection comprises various documents (including trial records) relating to the activities of Alexandru Șoltoianu, a well-known oppositional figure in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) in the late 1960s and 1970s. Closely linked to the Usatiuc–Ghimpu–Graur group, Șoltoianu pursued a parallel project of creating a mass nationally oriented anti-Soviet political party known as National Rebirth of Moldavia (Renașterea Națională a Moldovei), to be based upon a broad network of student associations. Șoltoianu's case files are currently held in the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova (ANRM). These materials were transferred to the ANRM from the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive).
This ad-hoc collection comprises a series of archival materials relating to the activity of the musical band Noroc (officially known as the Noroc Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble). This group of young musicians reached the peak of its popularity during the period 1968–1970. Noroc represented one of the most important examples of an alternative musical style and subculture not only in the Moldavian SSR, but also at the all-Union level. Its members practised an original genre mixing local folkloric elements and Western influences (mostly jazz, rock, and beat). Due to the "subversive" character of their music, the band was dissolved by the Soviet Moldavian authorities in September 1970. The materials in this collection were selected from Fonds No. 51 (Fonds of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Moldavia), which is currently held in the Archive of Social-Political Organisations (AOSPRM) of the Republic of Moldova. These documents reflect the emergence of a mass youth subculture in the USSR in the late 1960s and the ideological constraints placed by the regime on such displays of an alternative lifestyle.
Jaroslav Drábek Jr (1901–1996), a Czech lawyer, journalist and member of the Czechoslovak resistance movement during the Second World War, was the author of a lecture entitled "A Contribution to the History of the Beginning of the Czechoslovak Resistance", which was presented on 9 December 1960 as part of the series "Contributions to the Development of the Idea of the Czechoslovak State" organized by the Czechoslovak Society for Arts and Science. The 33-page article includes descriptions of Drábek's memories of his resistance activities, his escapes, interrogations, the Gestapo, and his colleagues in exile in London. Drábek also described other experiences from the postwar period, such as the arrest and torture of his colleague after the Communist coup. After February 1948, Drábek emigrated from Czechoslovakia. The document also includes a letter from the Czech scientist and prominent member of the anti-Nazi resistance, Professor Vladimír Krajina, who also emigrated after 1948. In his letter, Krajina mentions the fact that it was Jaroslav Drábek Jr who persuaded him to be active in the resistance during the Second World War.
Film Notations of European Solidarity Centre are biographical interviews, conducted with democratic opposition activists and creators of independent culture in socialist Poland. They are first-hand testimonies of people who organised illegal gatherings, demonstrations, art exhibitions, film screenings, literature circulation etc. Collection includes rare interviews that cannot be seen anywhere else.
The Jaromír and Dolores Šavrda Collection consists mostly of materials documenting the life and work of Jaromír Šavrda (1933–1988), a Czech journalist, writer, political prisoner and significant representative of dissent in Ostrava. Parts of the collection are, for example, Jaromír Šavrda's biographical documents, his literary work including poetry written in prison, samizdat editions of his works as well as works written by other authors, manuscripts and typescripts of books and magazines, materials documenting his activities in dissent and his correspondence.
Knuts Skujenieks (b. 1936) is a Latvian poet, a dissident who was sentenced in 1962 to seven years in prison for anti-Soviet activities. The collection holds manuscripts from all his creative life, but the most powerful are the manuscripts he created during his imprisonment: poems and other literary texts, correspondence with his wife and colleagues, and many other documents that reflect the development of his poetic language and political consciousness.
Securitatea was a quarterly aimed at improving the training of Securitate operative personnel. Its articles were written by Securitate officers for Securitate officers and thus they touched upon practical problems faced during their specific mission of preventing and neutralising any actions that potentially threatened the communist regime. Among the many dangers that were outlined in the pages of the quarterly as undermining "state security" were foreign radio stations, and especially Radio Free Europe (RFE). The article chosen as a featured item of the collection presents under the title "Cu referire la relațiile cetățenilor români cu unele posturi de radio capitaliste" (About the relations of Romanian citizens with some capitalist radio stations) the perspective of the Securitate upon the activity of RFE and evaluates its contribution in providing an alternative source of information for Romanians. In the absence of underground publications, RFE represented the main source of alternative information in communist Romania. Thus, the Securitate regarded RFE and contacts between Romanian citizens and employees of the Romanian desk of this radio station as dangerous to the communist regime. Accordingly, the entire article focuses on revealing how RFE allegedly acts in order to undermine "state security." Starting from the premise that RFE is the locus "of espionage, ideological diversion, and hostile propaganda," the anonymous author traces the connection between this radio station and the American espionage machine, namely the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency was credited with financing RFE and setting its agenda even after the American Congress officially took responsibility for financially supporting its functioning. The control of the CIA over RFE was underlined once again when discussing its organisation. The two management structures in the United States and Europe were allegedly infiltrated by CIA agents who engaged the radio station in their "ungentlemanly" war against communist countries and used it to collect information about them. As a result, the CIA used the microphone of RFE to proffer slanders and shamefully distort the realities of the communist countries, according to the Securitate's interpretation of the broadcasting of news and other political programmes by this radio station. Even worse from the point of view of the Securitate was that people travelling abroad were an easy prey for "agents" working at the Romanian desk of RFE. After underlining the connection between its director, deputy director, and programme producers with the CIA, the article describes how they allegedly succeeded in manipulating Romanian tourists in order to collect valuable information about the country, its leadership, and the impact of its social and economic policies on the mood of the population. In other cases, they even managed to trick their "victims" and persuade them to emigrate. The narrative of blaming RFE for these "unpatriotic" deeds was an ideologically convenient explanation for the fact that the great majority of Romanians listened to and trusted RFE, in spite of the fact that this might have caused problems. At the same time, such a narrative was meant to highlight the vital role played by the Securitate as a guardian of the communist regime in Romania.
Students also demonstrated their support for Croatian reformist and nationally-oriented political leaders by distributing handwritten pamphlets on different types of paper. This collection includes several examples of such pamphlets, and one mentions Savka Dabčević-Kučar and Mika Tripalo, both removed from their posts in December 1971. On the pamphlets themselves or in separate notes, the State Security Service recorded where and when the pamphlets were found. Together with other materials collected during Operation Tuškanac, these pamphlets were used in the prosecution of participants in the student movement.
The documents are available for research and copying.
Even Paul Goma has characterised this document as a tragi-comical one. The note contains a list of the Militia officers who were involved in his case, whom the Securitate officers asked their superiors to reward for helping in this mission. The rewards were: 3 metres of cloth and a leather folder for the commander, watches, leather briefcases, leather wallets and radios for the others. Usually, the Securitate rewarded its informers with small amounts of money and some cheap products. They rather preferred to facilitate various services. This note is unusual because this is about rewarding some Militia officers. Besides the amusing aspect regarding the modest level of this reward, the document is relevant for the relation between the secret police, the Securitate, and the Militia, because the money for procuring these items originated from the Securitate's financial funds. The document qualifies as a masterpiece of the collection especially because of its uniqueness, which can be explained only by considering how unusual was the emergence of the Goma Movement for the Romanian secret police. The Securitate officers faced for the first time the taking shape of a large coherent movement, so they used all possible methods in order to curtail its development. This small document is a rare piece of evidence regarding the subordination of the Militia to the Securitate, which otherwise it is not obvious from the documents in the CNSAS Archives (ACNSAS, Informative Fonds, File I 2217/10, f. 113-114).
The Andrei Pandele private collection is the most significant testimony in pictures, mainly black and white, to the demolition of historic monuments and districts in the Romanian capital in the period of late communism. Together with photographs that are essential for the preservation of the memory of a mutilated city and a vanished cultural heritage, the collection also includes a series of images capturing aspects of the degradation everyday life throughout the profound crisis of the 1980s. These suggest both the absurdity of the policies of the Ceaușescu regime and the grotesque mutations in the everyday routine of ordinary people to which these policies gave rise.
The video periodical Black Box was the first independent film production studio during the last years of communist rule in Hungary. It reported on demonstrations and civilian initiatives that the official media passed over in silence or reported on with disinformation. With its film reports, and portraits distributed in samizdat channels, at the beginning Black Box managed to create the largest film collection documenting the events of the transitional period and the change of political system both in Hungary and in other communist countries.
Straipsnis "Religinė atributika Justino Marcinkevičiaus knygoje "Gyvenimo švelnus prisiglaudimas" analizuoja lietuvių rašytojų darbų naujas tendencijas. Jame tvirtinama, kad autorių kūryboje galima aptikti pasirodančius religinius ir sakralinius momentus, ypač aptariamame poeto Justino Marcinkevičiaus darbuose. Pasak straipsnio, tokia kūryba kontrastuoja su sovietine ideologija.
Invitation and program schedule for the IHF Cultural Symposium, Budapest 15–18 October 1985
Although the plans and practical preparations for the alternative programs of the Budapest Cultural Forum 1985 had been started more than a year earlier, it was this invitation letter and program schedule sent to all Western participants by the International Helsinki Federation from its Vienna Office, an invitation signed by Chairman Karl Joachim Schwarzenberg on 1 September 1985, that proved the success of devoted efforts made by the IHF staff to organize a three-day East-West Cultural Symposium in Budapest in parallel with the official opening session of the CSCE European Conference.
The main subjects of the alternative forum were much more challenging. They included "Writers and their Integrity" and "The Future of European Culture," and they offered a good opportunity for free and stimulating exchange of ideas for participants from both East and West. The list of authors invited seemed quite imposing, as it included prominent figures such as György Konrád, Susan Sontag, Per Wἃstberg, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Derek Walcott, Timothy Garton Ash, Alain Finkelkraut, Danilo Kis, Jirzi Grusa, Ed Doctorow, and Amos Oz. This forum was perhaps the first chance since 1945 for writers from both East and West to enter free public debates on sensitive cultural and political issues such as exile, censorship, self-censorship, the role of national identity in literature, the rights of minorities, the right to history, or the basic question of whether European culture is separate from world culture. And is European culture really one indivisible culture? These questions and issues represented an utterly new approach which regarded cultural freedom as a vitally important and integral part of the overall realm of human rights.
How did the Budapest "Cultural Counter-Forum" manage to implement the promising plans made by the IHF? Not quite as was expected. Apart from Hungarians, no other participants from Eastern Bloc countries could attend the symposium, either because they could not get passports or because of the were forced to live under police surveillance or under house arrest, or they had been interned or jailed, like many Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Romanian writers at the time. They were partly represented by some Western writers with Eastern origins, e.g. Jirzi Grusa, Danilo Kis, and Amos Oz, and Timothy Garton Ash, who came from Warsaw to Budapest, spoke for the Polish writers who at the time were still suffering from the harsh measures of martial law. Things were similar in the case of writers who belonged to ethnic minorities. Hungarian participants, like poet Sándor Csoóri and philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, spoke on their behalf, as did two of the most harassed writers and samizdat makers, Géza Szőcs, who was originally from Cluj / Kolozsvár / Klausenburg, and Miklós Duray from Bratislava / Pozsony / Pressburg. Szőcs and Duray addressed open letters to the participants in the Counter-Forum