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 FV 112/15 Group Collection is a blend of artistic materials representing the time, social movements, and lifestyle of young people in Slovenia in the 1980s. It documents a central part of Ljubljana’s subculture and the alternative youth movement through the work of an amateur theatre group called the FV 112/15 Theatre and through the activities of three alternative clubs. The group cultivated an ironic attitude toward socialism and deconstructed bourgeois stereotypes.

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.

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.

“Frigidna utičnica” [The Frigid Socket] was the first and only radio show dedicated to homosexuality in socialist Yugoslavia. The show, created and hosted by Croatian journalist Toni Marošević, was first aired in the spring of 1984 on Zagreb’s Omladinski radio [Youth Radio, later Radio 101], which in the 1980s was known for stepping out of the official boundaries of socialist journalism. Homosexuality in Yugoslavia was socially mostly unacceptable, almost invisible in the media, and negatively perceived both by most of the population and the ruling Communist Party. Even if it appeared in newspapers and magazines, the topic of homosexuality was usually presented with pity or ridicule (Kuhar 2003). Marošević conceived of “Frigidna utičnica” [The Frigid Socket] as a relaxed, humorous, but also very direct and provocative show, with a simultaneously strong educational component (Bosanac 2013). The first show sparked huge interest and dozens of listener phone calls and comments were aired live. Some were very aggressive, even vulgar, while some expressed support and approval. Also, some negative reviews appeared in the daily press (Tomeković 1984). Even though Marošević was not personally subjected to any sort of pressure from the communist authorities, due to the public controversy the show sparked, the broadcast was cancelled after the fourth week (Dobrović and Bosanac 2007, 233-236). Marošević entrusted his personal bequest to Domino (now part of the History of Homosexuality in Croatia Collection), together with a handwritten note for one of the “Frigidna utičnica” [The Frigid Socket] broadcasts from 1984.

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.

This letter from Juliana Jirousová (then Stritzková) to Ivan Martin Jirous, the key figure of the Czechoslovak underground, from 10 September 1974 is the first of the letters stored in the library Libri Prohibiti. This letter was not sent to prison, unlike the rest of the collection. This is perhaps why it has not yet been published and is unknown to most people. The letter was written before the wedding of I. M. Jirous and J. Stritzková in 1976 and was not the subject of censorship. There is some interesting information about relationships in the underground, friendships, as well as the everyday life which I. M. Jirous and Juliana Stritzková led. In the letter, Stritzková mentioned songs by Karel Soukup (alias Charlie, a Czech underground songwriter), the married couple the Daníčeks (Jiří Daníček was a poet, playwright, script writer, translator and political prisoner. His wife Vlasta, called Amálka in the letter, was Juliana’s best friend), and also about the psychiatric sessions Jirous had to attend.

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.

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 second issue of the magazine Viks, entitled “Homosexuality and Culture,” came out on April 24, 1984, the opening day of the Magnus Film Festival, the first cultural manifestation dedicated to homosexuality in any socialist country. The magazine was edited by a group of gays and lesbians who gathered around the youth cultural center ŠKUC and organized the festival. This special edition of the magazine was printed in 600 copies and handed to audiences at the festival. It contains 42 pages, and approximately 20 illustrations with contemporary, easily recognizable European gay subcultural motifs. Over the three following decades, this issue of Viks gained a cult status in Slovenian and the post-Yugoslav LGBT community, and was exhibited at events dedicated to the history of homosexuality and the LGBT movement.

Alongside the festival’s program and a schedule of affiliated cultural and club events, in an effort to appeal to the younger generation of Ljubljana’s gays, lesbians and artists, Viks also carried several lengthy programmatic articles and interviews with emancipatory, educational and mobilizing overtones. Thus it aligned itself politically and theoretically with contemporary liberationist, leftist and counter-cultural movements in Slovenia and Western Europe. These texts promote an ideal of freely and openly lived (homo)sexuality. Non-normative sexual practices were viewed as strongly dissident in nature, but not so much against socialism as against patriarchal and traditional forms of sexual and family life.

The article “Pink Love under the Red Stars – Homosexuality under Real Socialism” (“Roza ljubezen pod rdečimi zvezdami – homoseksualizem pod realnim socializmom,” pp. 18-21) delivers a historical overview of the legal and social status of same-sex sexual and emotional relationships in socialist countries. The anonymous author is equally critical of the 20^th century discrimination of homosexuality both in western liberal democracies and socialist countries. However, the Stalinist period in the USSR was seen as especially brutal and arduous insofar as it attributed negative political meanings to homosexuality, declaring homosexuals “traitors,” foreign “spies,” decadent bourgeoisie, and enemies of socialism. Soviet homosexuals, the article suggests, were not able to recover from this traumatic period, and were still unable to engage with emancipatory social movements and practices. At the same time, the example of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, known also as East Germany) is held as an example of both positive changes in communist stance on homosexuality, and a way in which, since the late 1970s, a dialogue could take place between the government and gay and lesbian groups.

Frantisek Starek was one of the leading figures of the Czechoslovak underground movement and culture. Due to his long-lasting activity, he has built a very rich and interesting collection. In this collection, a lot of material – often unique – about Czechoslovak counterculture and personal resistance can be found. The collection covers the time period from the seventies to the nineties.

The periodical “Student” was one of the most important magazines in socialist Yugoslavia. The magazine was published by students of Belgrade University and dealt with student problems as well as with broader social and political issues. It was often critical towards the regime and the communist party authorities, which resulted in its being banned several times. The collection is kept at the National and University Library in Belgrade.

Norijada is the colloquial name of the celebration day for Zagreb secondary school students, which usually falls on the May 30. On that day, seniors from all around Zagreb are officially entitled to mark the end of their schooling, and "go crazy" (noriti or ludovati) for the last time before setting out for more serious business, preparation for graduation and university studies. Anthropologically speaking, it was a kind of a rite of passage toward adulthood. This ritual ­­– most probably originating in the post-war period – in the classics program secondary school in the late 1980s was especially colourful because the students would wear ancient Roman costumes in order to highlight the orientation of the school. These were typically white togas for boys and luxurious white long dresses for girls. One also had to pay attention to authentic hairstyles and jewellery, because it significantly contributed to the overall impression. On this occasion the school students would act out rather loudly and colourfully.

The standard activities generally transpired as follows: first, the students would gather on the main staircase of their school, and begin singing songs that usually describe different (bad) traits of their teachers, who had to remain quiet for the sake of peace. The ties with their student status were visibly broken, and equality with the adult world, which allowed some degree of criticism, was perhaps the inherent meaning of this procedure. At the end of this event, one of the students, usually the funniest, would read the ‘last testament’ of the departing generation to the younger ones. The testament usually consisted of the ten commandments, which reversed the house rules of the school (for instance, “Never greet a teacher when one passes by or near you,” etc.). The first part of separation was thus finished, and the students would finally leave the school. They went out to the streets to meet students from other schools and display solidarity with them. This was the moment when real Norijada began, and students officially announced their separation from their previous life. On that day the students were allowed to do anything (except commit crimes). They would wander around, or swim in the wishing well and other fountains, or tease chance passers-by. They would usually get dead drunk and smoke heavily, and everybody was invited to do so because everybody was supposed to feel the same way. Moreover, in order to leave some trace of their “crazy” generation, students usually wrote graffiti on walls, citing their class, school and the year of the Norijada.

This collection expresses the artistic tendencies in the last decades of Polish reality under socialist regime. It includes a huge number of graphics, posters, paintings and drawings, as well as some items produced by opposition members held under detention.

The private collection of musician, DJ, radio journalist, and educator Attila Koszits is the primary source on rock and underground (especially New Wave) culture of the last half century in Pécs, a city in southern Hungary. The collection contains periodicals, photo documentation, literature of music, bootleg recordings, and music recorded on discs and cassette tapes.

The History of Homosexuality in Croatia Collection covers some of the most salient aspects of Croatian gay and lesbian private and public life in the socialist period (1945-1990). Court verdicts for same-sex sexual relations testify to the active institutional persecution of homosexuality, mostly in the immediate post-war period, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Personal memories and oral history recollections illustrate the harsh everyday life reality of homosexuals in socialist Yugoslavia, but they also tell amazing stories of individual or collective resistance to institutional and social homophobia.

The Husar Club was founded by the Club of Friends of Popular Music Rijeka in 1957. In the Husar, young people gathered to "dance to music from LP records." Beginning in 1962, the first rock bands in Rijeka performed in the club. The club operated until 1964 and is considered as the first disco club in Croatia and one of the first in Europe. The establishment of this club heralded the creation of the rock and disco culture movement as a counterculture in socialist Yugoslavia. 

According to the testimony of the Aktionsgruppe Banat members, the poem was the collective work of the entire group, which they assumed and published as such (Totok 2001, 22). The text was sent for publication in Romania in 1974, but the censorship prevented it. It was first published two years later in a changed form in the West German cultural magazine Akzente: Zeitschrift für Literatur (No. 6/1976; Totok 2001, 22–23).

The poem uses wordplays to suggest the omnipresence of coercion in the society they lived in and it represent a subtle critique of the state–citizens relation in Ceaușescu’s Romania. The authors played with the meanings of the German word Engagement which in the poem could be understood both as employment and (ideological) commitment. In the second part of the poem, the authors suggest overtly and ironically the coercive character of the state–citizen relation in the society they lived in and the impossibility of the latter modifying this relation either in ideological or in practical terms:

“I’ve been engaged for too long

I don’t want to be engaged anymore

I have also been engaged too long

yes

with you

also with you

I am no longer engaged

I am not engaged either

yes yes, me neither

in vain, who was once engaged

remains forever engaged.”

The Mērija Grīnberga Jr (1909-1975) collection is a testimony to the rescue by museum employees of cultural values threatened by both the Second World War and by political change. It is also a testimony to the persecution and distrust of members of the 'old' Latvian intelligentsia in Soviet Latvia, despite their sometimes desperate attempts to accommodate the political demands of the regime.

The collection reveals the life and work of the famous Lithuanian theatre director Jonas Jurašas. He was expelled from the position of director of the Kaunas State Drama Theatre in 1972. Jurašas did not agree to work under the proposed conditions of ‘Soviet theatre director’. He expressed his own view of what kind of working conditions and rights artists, and specifically theatre directors, should have. His terms were rejected by Soviet cultural administrators. Jurašas became unemployed, and had to endure poor living conditions. He and his family were among the first people in Soviet Lithuania to request permission to emigrate to the West, and received it from the Soviet government.

The collection of manuscript magazines at the Estonian Cultural History Archives reflects the samizdat activities of writers and other cultural figures during Soviet times. It was formed in the 1990s after several donations, mostly from Jaan Isotamm. Nevertheless, the ‘almanac movement’ had numerous authors, outsiders as well as those recognised by the authorities whose works are now available in this collection. The collection contains manuscript magazines, poetry written in refugee camps, and material about religious movements and groups dealing with esoteric issues, etc. It also includes underground almanacs from Soviet times. These handwritten journals were not censored, and contain literary essays and poems, as well as socio-critical writings.

Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of independent Congo and was assassinated in 1961, only 67 days after taking office. This event triggered protests in Belgrade which fast grew into larger clashes between the demonstrators and police. The biggest riot took place at Tašmajdan Park. The police used water cannon against the protestors. Thirty-five protestors, 51 police officers and nine members of the fire brigade were hurt. The demonstrations were mainly organised in front of the Belgian embassy since it was believed that Belgium, the former colonial power in Congo, had orchestrated the murder. The demonstrators took over and ransacked the embassy. These events in front of the Belgian embassy in Belgrade were recorded and documented in the photographs of Tomislav Peternek, at that time a reporter with the newspaper ‘Borba’. The police used the opportunity to confiscate his films, but later returned them.   

Normally a climbing harness is made from materials tested according to international (UIAA) standards, light, and very comfortable. However these could not be found in the last decade of communism in Romania. The solution achieved by improvisation by Dragoș Petrescu has the following characteristics: “The climbing harness was a very important part. Precisely because you could never be sure of the object you had improvised, you made a combination of chest harness and seat. Out of worn rope, usually six lengths placed parallel and sewn together with synthetic surgical thread, you made a sort of waistcoat with braces made of tape for blinds, which you wore around your chest and with which you tied yourself into the rope. Initially, mountaineers climbed with only the chest harness, only that they realised that once you were hanging on the rope, the chest harness became very tight; the circulation stopped and that could be fatal. Then they came up with the idea that it was good to have a seat as well as the chest harness. The so-called seat was usually made from strapping for car seatbelts sewn with surgical thread, which looked like a belt with two loops for the feet, into which you fastened yourself together with the chest harness. For the seat, you got hold of various materials. Principally seatbelt strapping. Ideally, we used the seatbelts for Dacia cars, but these were quite expensive. Many ‘got hold of’ one of these straps from the people that worked in the factory in Braşov where they were produced and where the unfinished product was sold illegally by the metre. As a rule, we made ourselves both seat and chest harness.” The original complete harness, composed of chest harness and seat, exists in Dragoş Petrescu’s private collection of improvised gear, but it can no longer be used for climbing as the materials from which it is made have deteriorated.

Immediately after the founding of the Society of Students of the Faculty of Arts of UJEP Brno, the first issue of the magazine "Ruch" was published (15 March 1968). The magazine provided the information on the reasons for establishing the association and its internal structure. It gave information about events at the university, petitions, public letters, and contacts with other universities in the Czechoslovakia and abroad. In addition to the predominant political focus of this paper, poems, parodic texts, illustrations appeared. The first issue was followed by the second after three weeks. The print had not been published regularly (was published about once a month), and was officially referred to as an interviewer. It was printed in hundreds of copies (400-600) and was sold at the faculty for CZK 1. The authors of texts and graphics were a changing group of students - usually members of the association.

Milan Knížák is a significant Czech action artist. Since the beginning of the 1960s, he started with performance art – happenings, that were realised mostly in the streets of Prague. Their goal was to connect art and common life. Participants, that were, according to Knížák, the main and irreplaceable bearers of actions of these performances, were engaged in the game while the happenings interfered their lives. The events, according to Knížák’s interpretation, therefore could not have been fictive but had to be what they really were. Knížák also realized several installations – short-term exhibitions – in the streets of Prague, some of them were photographically documented. Knížák and his friends founded a group called “Aktuální umění” (Actual Art), later known as “Aktual”, in 1963. At the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s, Knížák’s actions got more ceremonial and ritual character. Some of the actions of the group Actual from 1962–1969 were documented by Knížák in a unique documentary book “Útoky" (The Attacks) with original and nonconformist artistic concepts; he sold the book, together with another one – “Hry a obřady” (The Games and the Ceremonial) – also documenting actions of Aktual during the 1960s, to the Museum of Czech Literature in March 1971. Similar documentary books were created by Knížák starting in 1964 and became a medium of the artist’s expression and documentation of his work, thoughts and feelings. The books used to have impractical covers (made of cement, wires or nails) to “not die in a library”. They contained original documents, scripts of the actions, texts, photos, drawings, collages, personal belongings or pieces of art works. Knížák’s documentary books (he created dozens of them) were therefore documents and pieces of art at the same time. “Útoky: Kniha akcí Aktualu 1962–1969” is a part of the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature until today and together with Knížák’s book “Hry a obřady Aktualu 1963–1969” forms the Milan Knížák Collection.

The Circle of History Students was a society for history students and lecturers at the University of Tartu during Soviet times which was officially part of the Students' Scientific Union. Although it was an official organisation, the Circle of History Students offered space for relatively free discussions between students and lecturers. It was a breeding ground for the growing protest spirit in the late 1980s. The Circle of History Students archive, which is preserved today in the National Archives of Estonia, contains various documents about its activities. Although it followed the formal rules for Soviet public speaking, these documents also display ironic and critical attitudes towards the regime, and reflect the free atmosphere for research and communication in the society.

Among the open letters addressed by Doina Cornea to Ceauşescu himself, that entitled “Stop the demolition of the villages” (Opriți dărâmarea satelor) was among the most significant and certainly the one that aroused the greatest international reaction. The letter opposed the programme of “rural systematisation,” which entailed the planned demolition of more than 7,000 Romanian villages (Ceaușescu 1989, 395). Cornea drafted the open letter in July 1988 in a period when the demolitions had been intensified. The letter was also broadcast by RFE in September 1988 and published later by the French newspaper Le Monde (Cornea 2006, 220).

In comparison with other open letters that focused more on future-oriented reforms (such as those dealing with the educational system), this letter is “nostalgic and past-oriented,” and deals with the protection of the Romanian peasants’ habitat and way of life, which she argues is the core of Romanian national identity (Petrescu 2013, 314). This approach was based on her readings of Romanian philosophers and writers such as Lucian Blaga, Constantin Noica, and Nicolae Steinhardt, who dedicated many of their works to the “spirituality” of the Romanian village. She thus places herself in a cultural tradition which since the end of the nineteenth century had emphasised peasant culture as a key element for defining Romanian national identity (Hitchins 1994, 298–299). Consequently, she considers Ceauşescu’s plan to restructure most of the Romanian villages as a malicious attempt to destroy “the soul of the nation.” She also invokes the fact that the rural habitat is a part of world cultural heritage and criticises the demolitions from a preservationist perspective. Thus, she asks Ceauşescu to stop the demolition of the villages and to consult of the will of the Romanian people concerning the future of the national programme of “rural systematisation.”

At the end of the letter, Doina Cornea mentions another twenty-seven persons who had expressed their solidarity with the open letter of protest and agreed that their names could be included on the list. Most of them were either Cluj-based supporters of her oppositional activity, such as the dissident Iulius Filip (who in 1981 had addressed an open letter of support to the Polish free union Solidarity), or part of a group of workers in the town of Zărneşti (Braşov county, Romania), who had initiated a local free union. This open letter, together with her interviews granted to Western journalists, inspired the collective initiative Opération Villages Roumains (OVR), “the largest ever network of transnational support against the abuses of Ceausescu’s regime,” which opposed the demolition of Romanian villages by encouraging a symbolic adoption of the endangered Romanian rural sites by Western communes (Petrescu 2013, 317).

According to very early notes and recordings, István Darkó began work on Macskarádió (Cat radio) while at high school, in the early 1970s, using stories from his home-made paper Bendzin and his comic-experiment Utazás a világ körül (Journey around the world) together with other writings, and it continued to grow until the end of his university years, in 1978. Darkó's first tape recorder was the famous Hungarian Mambó, acquired from his parents; later he used a SANYO. He was very inventive, because he knew the technical possibilities of the poor-quality tape recorders. He worked not with the switch cabinet but with his hand, manually touching the tape to the recording head during recording. He did everything with one tape recorder and one microphone.

The audio recordings of Cat Radio are preserved on East-German-made tape with the series mark ORWO TYP 120/360 m Double Play, 5/482. The box is labelled “A MACSKARÁDIÓ különműsora” (Special programme of CAT RADIO). Macskarádió I. (Cat radio I.), the full story itself, is on the first track, and Macskarádió II. (Cat radio II.), which is looser in its structure, composed as an evening music programme, is on the second. On a second tape Darkó stored the various sounds needed for the radio play, for example the clacks of train wheels and animal noises.

Cat Radio is not only a studio, but a spiritual place, where things come together, meet, or break up, an occult place, where the arrangement and matching of the stories takes place. All the characters speak through the voice of Darkó, with the bon ton (mannered, polite) Hungarian movie voice of the 1940s. But these are experienced voices; the performer only ever spoke in the sanctuary of Cat Radio when sufficiently aroused. He made the audio recording in stages. The elaboration of each detail, each sequence is mental. According to Péter Egyed, the fact that Darkó created it over such a long period made it an endlessly complicated story. There are at least three levels, though this is hard to realise after hearing it once or even two or three times. Because of its metaphysics and because of its complicatedness it is obvious that the radio play was not made for a broad public audience. The constant element in the events is persecution. The characters are divided mainly in three groups. As a matter of fact there is a battle of intentions going on, in which the secret service type of deception is crucial. It is a matter of make-believe, gullibility; who is capable of reconstructing the true reality in virtual sound fields? 

In Cluj and in Târgu Mureș the world, or rather worlds, constructed by István Darkó became known. When wanted to be in his element among his acquaintances and friends, he got out Cat Radio and let them listen to it. They listened to it, word leaked out, and the notoriety of Cat Radio exceeded theoretically and also practically the narrower circle of his friends. There was a mystical quality about it. It did not spread samizdat-like, because there was only one original tape, of which a copy was never made. But the fact that this tape was listened to by 10–20–50–100 people and so on made it a semi-public production. What runs on the tape is a continuous analysis of being. In Darkó's world there is a bit of the Orwellian, the hereafter, the world of passing, of things that have not come yet, that cannot be experienced by living people. In his view of life there is also an extraordinary closeness of death. Let's be careful, because we live in a world in which the other one is contained too, even if we don't want to acknowledge it!

When interpreting Cat Radio, Péter Egyed could not ignore the space and time parameters of its appearance. He believed that the material of Cat Radio could not exist independent of what István Darkó had experienced. Why did he not write something else? According to Egyed the Securitate, the state Party and other official agencies were not well-intentioned administrators of humanity, but people following orders and those orders were not about serving the good of civil society. They – contemporaries – were actually playing something according to the script of the multilaterally developed socialist society. It had to be played that things were all right, but everyone knew that it was actually about something else than what they were playing. In the script there is not real life, but Nothing – but where was real life then? Egyed thought that real life was located in what they experienced in intimacy, and what came up in intimacy, real friendships, love relations etc. Society had a life that supported this, as opposed to that which wanted to destroy it. In the army their officers told them that they, the intellectuals, were not needed for the country, either as intellectuals nor as soldiers. They were the "negligible quantity" and they were made to understand that they did not count from the point of view of the socialist future.

The Irina Margareta Nistor Private Collection includes a series of written documents, together with a few dozen VHS video cassettes preserving a small part of the Western films that were introduced clandestinely into Romania between 1985 and 1989, to be translated and dubbed and then distributed on video cassettes (semi)clandestinely. This collection epitomises a popular culture phenomenon without any equivalent in Eastern Europe, which emerged in Romania as a reaction to the reduction of the official programme broadcast on television channels to just two hours per day and to news broadcasts about the activity of Nicolae Ceauşescu and the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party.

The collection shows the life, work and activities of the Lithuanian historian Rimantas Jasas (1929-2002). Jasas never called himself a dissident. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he did not speak much about his involvement in underground (samizdat) literature, and saw himself only as a professional historian. The files in the collection show his close ties with the dissident movement, especially with the Soviet dissident and political prisoner Vytautas Skuodis (1929-2016). Jasas was involved with the samizdat journal Perspektyvos (Perspectives), the most highly thought-of publication by members of the intelligentsia.

From the agents’ reports about the Orfeo-group, one gleans insights into one of the most unique alternative theatre companies in Hungary. These accounts were based on personal meetings and recollections of the performances. The secret police was interested in members’ political views, and they wanted to know how their ideas were presented in the plays and the talks and debates held after the performances. These documents are preserved at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (ÁBTL). The folder with the cover name “Community” shows how the political police created a picture about a group of “hostile” artists, who were perceived as dangerous to “the existing social order.”

The private archives of Ferenc Kálmándy contain the documents of his photo oeuvre since 1978. His photographs document transformations in Hungarian youth culture, underground pop, and intellectual art scene and also the integration of the visual aesthetics of punk, new wave, and post-avantgarde into everyday life.

Oto Tasinato (1921-2011) was one of the first open homosexuals in Czechoslovakia before 1989. He performed dressed in women’s clothing under the pseudonym of Countess Mondschein, and in the 1990s, he was regarded as a legend of the Czechoslovak queer community. The apartment of Oto Tasinato was unfortunately very quickly cleared out after his death in 2011. When the Society for Queer Memory tried to acquired his personal estate or at least part of it, it was regrettably found that all relevant objects of the Tasinato estate had been thrown away and destroyed. All the Society succeeded in securing were humble belongings as his glasses, a hand fan, his last pack of cigarettes, handkerchiefs with a monogram, visiting cards, an stamps. Besides these few belongings the collection also contains an interview with Oto Tasinato and various photographs of his.

The photo collection on graffiti in Poland has been gathered by Tomasz Sikorski since about 1970. The great part of the approximately 1 500 photos was made in years 1970-1990. Sikorski has been up-to-date documenting the paintings occurring on the walls of Polish cities, both artistic and dominated by the political message, created by professionals as well as people without artistic background. On his photographies, one can see works by, among others, Włodzimierz Fruczek, Faustyn Chełmecki, „Major” Waldemar Fydrych”, Jacek „Ponton” Jankowski, Alexander Sikora, Krzysztof Skarbek and Sikorski himself.

The results of the so-called “rearrangement” operations in the centre of Bucharest was as follows: 5.86 km² of the historic centre of the city were demolished; 1.66 km² remained waste ground overgrown with weeds; approximately 20,000 properties were destroyed; over 60,000 families were forced to move; 19 streets were blocked or ceased to exist. The following Orthodox churches were demolished: Enei, Albă Postăvari, Old Spirea, Well of Healing, St. Nicholas Sârbi, Gherghiceni,  St. Nicholas Jitniță, Lady Oltea, St. Vineri Hereasca, Olteni, Old St. Spiridon Vechi, Holy Trinity Dudești, and Bradului (Bradu Staicu). The following monasteries were wholly or partially demolished: Cotroceni, Nuns’ Hermitage, Mihai Vodă, Văcărești, Antim, and St. Pantelimon. The following synagogues were demolished: Aizic Ilie, Rezith Doadh, and Malbim. Other historic buildings were also demolished: the Brâncoveanu Hospital, the great covered market in Unification Square, the Mina Minovici Institute of Forensic Medicine, the Yellow Inn, the Republic Stadium, and the Military Museum. Eight churches were translated from their original sites and hidden among apartment blocks: St. John Moși, Schitul Maicilor, Olari, St. Ilie Rahova, Mihai Vodă, St. John Piață, New St. George Capra, Stork’s Nest; so was the synodal building of the Antim Monastery. “The great merit for the translation, and thus saving from demolition, of these monuments is due to the engineer Eugen Iordăchescu of the Project Bucharest Institute,” says Andrei Pandele. This operation of saving cultural heritage that had been destined for destruction indeed called for professionalism on the part of those who conceived it, but also the courage to propose a compromise solution that would have a chance of being accepted by Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was personally supervising the construction of the House of the People.

The image captured by Andrei Pandele illustrates the translation of the church of the Mihai Vodă Monastery, an emblem of pre-modern Bucharest, originally situated on the hill where the Palace of the Parliament – built during the Ceauşescu regime under the name of the House of the People – now stands. The monastery buildings, which surrounded the church and were completely demolished to make way for the House of the People, were the first location of the State Archives after the founding of the modern Romanian state in the nineteenth century. The monastery was founded in 1594 by Michael the Brave, an extremely important figure in the national past, as he is considered the first to have unified, for a short time in 1600–1601, the territories that now make up Romania. In spite of the fact that during the Ceauşescu regime Michael the Brave became even more important in national history than he had been before, the monastery fell prey to the so-called “urban systematisation” programme promoted by the regime. The monastery church was saved from demolition by the operation of translating it, which in this case was one of the most laborious actions of this kind as it required it not only to be slid along a distance of 289 metres, but also lowered by 6.2 metres. Andrei Pandele’s photograph shows the Mihai Vodă church still on the rails used for the translation, already at the foot of the hill, close to its present position, although it is now hidden behind apartment blocks taller than it, which were built after this image was immortalised.

The collection of Art on the Streets in Poland 1962-2015 is a unique collection of photos documenting various manifestations of creative activities in public space from the last few decades. The creator of the collection, Tomasz Sikorski has accumulated an extensive photographic collection, which also includes photographs made available by other artists. The concept of "art on the streets" allows you to juxtapose self-employed graffiti and happenings, performances and installations created in the public space by avant-garde and neo-avant-garde since the 1960s.

The Beatles were one of the formative groups for Nelu Stratone’s musical culture. The music of this band, about which it was known in Romania too that they were at the origin of an unprecedented worldwide phenomenon, was sought after and much desired by collectors at the time. “I think records of the Beatles were among the most listened to of all that I had in my collection. There were a number of groups or soloists who tried, by imitation more explicit or more discreet, to approach the music they made. But the Beatles were unique,” considers Nelu Stratone. The music of the Beatles was not forbidden in Romania, but their records could not be found for sale except on the alternative market. Even basic information about the group’s discography, about the songs included in each album, was a sort of alternative knowledge, which aroused envy among classmates, admiration among friends, and even attraction (generally on the part of the opposite sex). The Beatles were one of the most popular groups in communist Romania, perhaps precisely because their period of glory coincided with the period of liberalization in the 1960s. Many Romanian bands sang their songs, taking advantage of the lack of clarity concerning copyright, which was characteristic of the entire Soviet bloc. After the Theses of July 1971, which virulently attacked the custom of admiring Western cultural and artistic creations, the words of the Beatles’ songs had to be translated so that they could be sung by Romanian groups. On top of that, their music was broadcast in an utterly absurd form, under the name of the group translated into Romanian as “Scarabeii” (The scarabs) (Stratone 2016, 169). Gradually, radio and TV broadcasts almost completely eliminated Western groups, but the music of the Beatles continued to attract new generations of young people. In the 1980s, the communist authorities tolerated for a while a show put on by Florian Pittiş at the Bulandra Theatre under the title “Poezia muzicii tinere” (The poetry of young music), during which the great successes of the Beatles were presented, followed by playing of music from their repertoire. Young people crowded to get into the show, which quickly became extremely popular, despite the fact that it was not advertised in any way. Sometimes 900 spectators squeezed into an auditorium with 450 places, with the result that in 1985, after four years, the show was banned. In short, the Beatles were dangerous especially because, like other Western bands, they catalysed the energies of the younger generation. “At these shows you recovered your freedom and your dignity,” recalls Andrei Partoş (George 2007). The complete albums of The Beatles, so precious in the days of communism, are now only a memory for Nelu Stratone. At present not one album from this complete set is still in his collection, but all the music that the group performed, together with what their members produced in other musical combinations, can be found in his electronic archive.

The Oral History Collection at CNSAS is a unique collection of this kind as it includes only interviews with individuals who are the subjects of personal files in the CNSAS Archives, and who after studying these personal files created by the Securitate agreed to narrate their own experience of entanglement with the secret police. The interviewees include not only individuals who were under surveillance and thus victims of the Securitate, but also individuals who collaborated with the secret police to provide information on others: family, friends, and colleagues. Both types of interviews represent the response of the interviewees to the narrative created about them by the Securitate.

The collection reflects the variety of religious dissent in communist Romania, and illustrates the underground religious practices and overt religious oppositional activities from the late 1940s until the 1980s. The collection comprises, on the one hand, documents and other cultural artefacts created by various religious denominations and confiscated by the Securitate and, on the other hand, documents created by the secret police. The latter illustrate the intense surveillance and the repressive policies of the secret police directed towards those religious activities that opposed the policies of the communist regime in Romania.

The Transnational Roma Networks Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS comprises documents created or collected by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, about the transnational relations of the Roma community. From among the members of this community who willingly assumed this identity, two leaders and activists, Nicolae Gheorghe and Ion Cioabă, stood out during the 1980s. They were among the few people in communist Romania who had the courage to rise up against the aggressive policy of forced assimilation of Roma that threatened their survival as a distinct ethnic and cultural group. As a result, their stand against discriminatory treatment of Roma people in communist Romania brought them into close collaboration with foreign researchers and Roma transnational organisations, also interested in the fate of the persecuted Roma.

The Mirel Leventer private collection of photographs and films is the richest archive of images from the period of glory of Club A, 1969–1989, when it operated as a (semi-) clandestine and exclusive club, founded and administered by students of the Institute of Architecture in Bucharest (today the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism). Club A was an oasis of freedom created in a basement in the middle of the historic area of the capital of communist Romania for the purpose of being able to organise shows, debates, and concerts that would be an alternative to the officially promoted culture, and to offer young people a place where they could behave as if they were free. In short, the Mirel Leventer private collection preserves the memory of an essential place for the alternative culture of young people in the last two decades of Romanian communism.

The Women’s Activism in Kosovo collection belongs to the Kosovo Oral History Initiative, and contains Kosovan women's vivid personal stories, which often intersect with broader historic events within Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1999. It depicts women's specific forms of engagement and resistance in protests against the Yugoslav regime, as well as their fight for women’s rights. The Women’s Activism collection offers a unique online archive of oral records, giving visibility and permanence to a history of women’s experience, which has been consistently marginalized, if not forgotten. To date, the collection contains thirty interviews with women activists, of which twenty-five are Albanian, three are Serbian, and two are of other nationality.

The Ion Monoran Collection documents the intellectual profile of one of the leaders of the underground cultural movements in the Banat, who, thanks to his ability to catalyse the action of the crowd gathered in the streets of Timişoara on 16 December 1989, became one of the figures who incontestably made a mark on the Romanian Revolution.

The art collection of Indrek Hirv consists of works by artists who continued the spirit of art from before the Soviet occupation. Many of them were persecuted, and later they did not obtain official recognition. Some became reformers of art, who resisted the Soviet discourse and Socialist Realism. Although some works in this collection depicted directly forbidden subject matter, like prison camps and prisoners, resistance to the Soviet regime is expressed mostly through the style.

Noor-Tartu (Young-Tartu) was a non-institutional student movement in Tartu between 1979 and 1984 (from 1979-1981 it was called Kodulinn, or Hometown). It was formed mostly by history students who wanted to do something useful for their city, without being connected to any official institution. Arranging urban space, collecting antiquities and organising cultural events were the main activities of the movement. Various pieces of material (announcements, newspapers, overviews, photographs) about these activities have been preserved. Today, this material forms an unofficial private collection owned by the core group of the Noor-Tartu movement. 

The No Art Collection is a part of the Anti-Museum founded by Vladimir Dodig Trokut. It consists of characteristic avant-garde and post-avant-garde artefacts. The Anti-Museum’s No Art Collection was established during the many years of Trokut’s activity as a member of the informal cultural opposition, which was supported by prominent individuals and public personalities, such as artists and politicians like Koča Popović and Jure Kaštelan.

The Rock Museum was established in 2014 as a grassroots initiative by former musicians, experts, and collectors. The museum is the first collection in Hungary that presents documents and items of importance to the Hungarian rock and popular music scene (with an international and primarily regional focus) from the late 1950s to the present. Generally, the phenomenon of rock music under state socialism is considered a form of cultural resistance.

Photographic collection of European Solidarity Centre documents the most important political events from the 1970s and 1980s in Northern Poland. They are a testimonial of suppression, fight and victory, but they also tell little histories: of alternative lifestyles and artistic sensibility. The still-growing archive resources contain over 63.000 items.

Wald old popp was one of the few musical samizdat publications in communist Romania. It was created in 1969 by Emil Hidoș, a twenty-year-old man from the town of Bistrița, who was passionate about foreign music. He was a faithful listener to Cornel Chiriac’s musical programme Metronom, broadcast by the Romanian department of Radio Free Europe (RFE). The copies of Wald old popp were confiscated by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, in June 1970, after a search at Hidoș’s home. The Securitate used the samizdat as the main evidence against him and for his prosecution under the charge of “propaganda against the socialist order,” and copies of the publication were included in his penal file.

The musical samizdat Wald old popp was a handwritten publication whose chief editor was “Braim Iones,” the nickname used by Emil Hidoș. The copies were made using carbon paper. The subtitle of the samizdat, The Bistrița supplement of musical information, gives a hint as to the purpose of the editor: “to help the young people of this backward town, to inform them about the latest musical news from the world of popp (sic!).” Very interesting is Emil Hidoș’s short self-description, which illustrates his revolt against the limitations the communist regime put on the consumption of foreign cultural goods, which were nonetheless highly interesting to young people: “I am a young man in Bistrița just like you, unhappy with the care shown to us… by the older people, with the way in which they understand how we should spend our free time, have fun etc.” After stating that Romanian youth needed a magazine, a radio or a television programme to get information about the latest musical developments, Emil Hidoș underlined once again his personal revolt against this state of affairs and the fact that he was forced to create “such miserable supplements, which resemble more closely a manifesto than a supplement of music information.” From his point of view, the forced isolation of youth from the outside Western musical world would only increase their revolt against the communist regime to the point where things would get out of hand and the authorities would not be able to silence the young people’s revolt.

This editorial was followed by several articles about the latest developments in “popp” music, as Emil Hidoș misspelled and mistakenly labelled all music played at RFE and other foreign radio stations at that time. The entries concerned the latest “El-PY” (LP or Long Play) of a former member of the British rock band Cream and new releases of albums. Other columns contained the addresses of fan clubs of the most popular bands of that time, such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and a musical chart. A special feature was dedicated to “Events in Bistrița,” where Hidoș described how the authorities had reacted negatively to the exaltation displayed by young people during the concert of Cromatic Group, a rock band from the nearby city of Cluj-Napoca. He used the event as pretext for fresh criticism of the communist regime, which labelled as “hooliganism” the patterns of spending their free time that many young people adopted in revolt against the older generation and implicitly the communist regime. From Hidoș’s point of view, the critical stance of the authorities toward this issue was unfounded, as the officially-sponsored relevant organisations failed to take into consideration alternative and more appealing modes of entertainment. He ended his article by wondering when youth in Romanian would enjoy “total freedom” (ACNSAS, P 14400 vol. 1, ff. 215–223 f–v).

The collection is an album of 24 photographs made by a KGB officer (or secret informer) about the youth protests after the self-immolation of Romas Kalanta in Kaunas in the spring of 1972. The album shows the attitude of the KGB towards the anti-Soviet event and youth protests. On the other hand, it also shows the attitude of the younger generation of Lithuanians towards the regime.

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.

Petru Negură’s private collection includes a wide variety of materials (interviews and archival documents) related to the activities of the Moldavian Writers’ Union (MWU) from the early Soviet period to the late 1950s and early 1960s. The collection focuses on institutional history and on the relationship of Moldovan writers with state power.

The Art Collections of the Museum of Czech Literature contain works of art connected with the literary field (illustrations, visual works by writers, graphics, etc.). The collection has been built from inheritances; a number of works by officially non-approved artists from the period before 1989 are present here.

Klaniczay Júlia (ed..): A Muhina projekt. Létértelmezések Galántai György életművében / The Mukhina Project. Interpretations of Being in György Galántai's oeuvre, Vintage Galéria, Budapest, 2018, 146 p.

This collection of the Czecho-Slovak poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher and “guru” of the Czechoslovak underground, Egon Bondy (real name Zbyněk Fišer, 1930–2007), consists of sources related to the history of the Czechoslovak literary underground and the left-wing opposition to the communist regime.

This collection contains letters which the Libri Prohibiti Library obtained from the estate of the poet and manager of the Czechoslovak underground band Plastic People of the Universe, Ivan Martin Jirous. These letters were written by his wife, the painter Juliana Jirousová, during his many stays in prison. However, we can also find several unknown letters which were written before their wedding. This collection contains over 120 letters.

The Brașov–Orașul Memorabil Collection gathers more than 4,500 scanned copies of personal and official photos illustrating the history of this Transylvanian city, everyday life in Romania under communism, the programme of so-called urban systematisation conducted during Ceaușescu’s regime, and the popular resistance to this arbitrary policy.