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 collection holds much valuable information on the policy of Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee towards various manifestations of cultural opposition. The documents also reflect the situation of the Lithuanian intelligentsia, whose main goal was to preserve the Lithuanian cultural heritage. The documents cover the period of liberalisation, i.e. de-Stalinisation, in Soviet Lithuania.

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.

The crackdown on the Croatian Spring and the repression against its members came in December 1971, after the twenty-first session of the Presidium of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, held in Tito's residence in Karađorđevo. Croatian political leaders were removed from their posts and banned from engaging in any public work. On the eve of the twenty-third session of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia held in Zagreb on 12 December 1971, where they formally resigned, as a show of support students organised various activities. According to the report written by Valentin Huzjak, secretary of the Republic Internal Affairs Secretariat of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, early in the morning on that day, approximately 1,000 students gathered in three student dormitories in Zagreb and then went to demonstrate in front of the Central Committee's headquarters, but were halted by police forces. In the student dormitories they shouted and wrote slogans on the walls in support of Savka Dabčević-Kučar, Miko Tripalo, Pero Pirker and other political leaders dismissed from their posts. Huzjak also reported that later in the afternoon, approximately 500 students demonstrated, shouted and posted slogans and distributed handwritten pamphlets on Zagreb’s main square. According to the report, a few dozen people were arrested, and while breaking up the demonstrations, the “police used nightsticks.ˮ Besides the staff of the Public Security Service in Zagreb, 812 police officers from other towns and cities were engaged to suppress the demonstrations.

The document is available for research and copying.

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.

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.      

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 poster gives details of two extraordinary concerts held on 10 and 11 May 1985 by some of the most appreciated rebel artists and rock groups of that period. Among the participants were the bands Roșu și Negru (“Red and Black”), Hardton, Post Scriptum, Celelalte cuvinte (“The Other Words”), Compact, Progresiv TM, Vali Sterian și Compania de Sunet, (“Vali Sterian and the Sound Company”), and the soloists Florian Pittiș and Alexandru Andrieș. All these participants were in the grey zone of tolerance admitted by the communist regime in Romania, and numbered among those that the younger generation considered nonconformist in comparison with the musical landscape of the period. The poster is not spectacular: on a white background, the text is printed in two colours, red and blue. The rock concerts announced by this poster were held in the Polyvalent Hall. Completed in 1974 and inaugurated under the name of “Palace of Sport and of Culture,” this hall was the largest performance space in Romania at the time, with a capacity of over 5,000 places. At both concerts, the auditorium was completely packed, due to the fact that they brought together an unusually large number of stars of nonconformist music. Such concerts with a very large audience posed a particular problem for the communist authorities, who were afraid that any crowd gathered at a performance might turn into a collective protest against the economic crisis, which was weighing more and more heavily on the population of Romania. The moment at which the concerts took place is also significant, because 1985 marked a turning point. On the one hand, for fear of revolt, such shows with large numbers of stars were not organised again after this event. On the other, the years that followed up until 1989 were the most difficult for the majority of people in communist Romania, who saw the growing discrepancy between their daily lives and those of people not only in the West but also in all the other communist countries.

Krzysztof Skiba's archive is a private collection of photos, movies, zines, books, articles, and leaflets documenting the alternative culture phenomena that Skiba participated in during the 1980s. The majority of the collection covers the street happenings created by the Gallery of Maniacal Activities in Łódź, the activities of anarchist Alternative Society Movement in Gdańsk, the very first years of the punk cabaret Big Cyc, and the first exhibition of the third circuit papers and magazines co-organized by Skiba in 1989.

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. 

The unique resource value of the collection stems from the historical fact that the continuity of Hungarian scouting established in 1910 was in fact maintained by the émigré Hungarian scouting movement worldwide for more than four decades, from 1948 to 1989, in a period when it was prohibited in communist Hungary. According to Hungarian émigré scout leaders, the movement was intended to serve a two-front struggle of cultural resistance: on one hand against the official forgery of “the real” national heritage in communist Hungary; and on the other against the linguistic and cultural assimilation of Hungarian émigré youth within the multi-ethnic environment of some 20 countries of 4 continents worldwide.

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.

The Libri Prohibiti’s collection of Czech exile monographs and periodicals contains over 8100 publications including the complete works of many publishers. More than 940 titles of Czechoslovak exile periodicals, some of them complete editions, are part of this collection as well.

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.

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.

The Memory of Nations is an extensive online collection of the memories of witnesses, which is being developed throughout Europe by individuals, organizations, schools and institutions. It preserves and makes available the collections of memories of witnesses who have agreed that their testimony should serve to explore modern history and be publicly accessible. The collection includes testimonies of communism resistance, holocaust survival, artists of alternative culture and underground and many others.

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 Otto 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 Otto Tasinato and various photographs of his.

The collection consists of documents from various KGB departments, found in its rooms and offices in 1991. This material gives good information about the last days of the KGB: what kind of files were on the desks, on the shelves and in the cupboards of KGB officers.

The poster for the first feminist-lesbian cultural night, organized by the Lilith Women’s Club, was made by the artist known under the pseudonym Jona Veronika Rev. This event, held in Ljubljana April 1984, is considered the first public lesbian gathering in Yugoslavia. The poster is a unique piece of art, currently exhibited at the Lesbian Library and Archive in Ljubljana. The painter, Jona Veronika Rev, was a frequent collaborator of Lilit and, later on, Section LL of the ŠKUC Association. Since 1984, Rev has made several posters and visuals for their events, including the front-page illustration for the special issue of Mladina, dedicated to lesbianism with the title ”We Love Women“ (”Ljubimo ženske,” Mladina, no. 37, Oct. 30, 1987, Ljubljana). The poster, alongside an invitation for the event and a round table discussion on sexuality, contains feminist and lesbian visual cues and symbols, decorated with a hammer and sickle, the symbol of the international workers’ and communist movement. A leaflet, lost since then, was handed out with a copy of the poster. It referred to various modes of lesbian gender expression so as to communicate the nature of the event clearly to lesbians, without explicitly calling it lesbian. Such semi-clandestine means of communication demonstrate the necessity of keeping lesbian identity hidden in the then predominantly homonegative social context.

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 ‘Fuck 89’ collection is an archive of Warsaw anarchistic movement from the last years of state socialism and the beginning of capitalism. It documents activities of groups such as A-Cykliści (A-Cyclists), Alternative Society Movement, Wolność i Pokój (Freedom and Peace), Intercity Anarchist Federation, and others.

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 collection consists of poetry and translations by the anti-Soviet partisan Bronius Krivickas (1919–1952). It comprises of six manuscripts: poems, and translations of Goethe’s poetry by Krivickas, when he was a guerrilla fighter against the Soviet regime.

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.

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).

On 11 December 1971, the Public Security Secretariat in Zagreb filed criminal charges with the District Public Prosecutor in Zagreb against student leaders Ivan Zvonimir Čičak, Dražen Budiša, Ante Paradžik and Goran Dodig on grounds of enemy propaganda and “criminal offences against the people and state by a counter-revolutionary attack on the state and social order.ˮ They were charged, inter alia, for incitement by “speeches and textsˮ calling for “violent and unconstitutional changes to the state and social order,ˮ “disrupting the fraternity and unity of Yugoslav nationalities,ˮ as well as “undermining the economic basis of socialist development.ˮ All four were convicted: Dražen Budiša to four years in prison, Ivan Zvonimir Čičak and Ante Paradžik to three, and Goran Dodig to one. Their prosecution is an example of the repression at the end of 1971 and in 1972 against members of the student movement, and participants in the Croatian national movement and the Croatian Spring in general. It resulted in several hundred convictions for political offences and the purge of several thousand members of the League of Communists of Croatia (Croatian Encyclopaedia online. “Hrvatsko proljećeˮ. Accessed on 30 May 2018). This collection includes over 1,000 pages pertaining to such indictments and criminal indictments.

The documents are available for research and copying.

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.

The informative file on the creator of The Club of the Free Kings, Puiu Apostolescu, contains five photographs of two badges made of wood. They were carved by Apostolescu and sent to his friend, Eugen Mircea, in Târgoviște. The insignia were confiscated by the Dâmbovița county branch of the Securitate on the occasion of a search at Eugen Mircea’s home. The badges were one of the distinctive elements of a member of The Club of the Free Kings. They were supposed not only to differentiate the Free Kings from their peers but also to underline the hippy character of the group. Thus, on one side, the badges contained the name of the group, and the word “hippy.” The word “free” is written twice in the combination, with “The Free Kings” and “The Free Club.”On the reverse, the badges are individualised, as they contain the English nicknames of Eugen Mircea (Christ) and Puiu Apostolescu (O’Brien McHarrison) as a way of stressing their friendship and membership of the group (ACNSAS I 3032, ff. 128–132).

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.

The Czechoslovak Students’ Movement of the 1960s Collection (Ivan Dejmal Collection) at the Libri Prohibiti Library contains valuable sources documenting Czechoslovak students’ movement in the 1960s, and especially during the years 1968 and 1969. Materials, which were collected by the leading Czechoslovak student activist Ivan Dejmal, illustrate, among other things, students’ activities during the so-called “Prague Spring” or reactions of students’ milieu to Jan Palach’s self-immolation in 1969.

Published on 30 March 1982 by the French daily Le Matin, the article entitled “Le témoignage d’un Tzigane” (The testimony of a Gypsy) was written under the pseudonym “Alexandru Danciu” by Nicolae Gheorghe. A few days later the article was read during one of the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and it was republished in an issue of L’Alternative magazine the same year. The article was a reply to a contribution of the French journalist, Bernard Poulet, who was attacked and badly beaten when he tried to contact the Romanian dissident Vasile Paraschiv. The official explanation that Poulet got from the authorities was that he had been attack by a group of “Gypsies.” Using as a pretext the false conclusion of the investigation, “Alexandru Danciu” denounced “the methods of the Romanian Securitate to silence political dissidents,” and also “a multilaterally developed prejudice (...) racism against Gypsies.” The latter was used “more and more often by Romanian officials to explain many of the negative developments in the country,” such as the lowering of incomes, the increase in common law offences, and violence against foreigners. In what follows, “Alexandru Danciu” lists the violent methods used by the Militia against the Roma: beatings for “quicker civilising,” home searches and abusive arrests, forced labour on various construction sites, including the Danube–Black Sea Canal, or in agriculture during the summer. After stating that discrimination was part of the daily life of Roma people, Nicolae Gheorghe denounced the refusal of the Romanian communist regime to deal with their serious social problems and to recognise them as national minority. For the authorities, the integration of Roma people into Romanian society was not a viable solution since they saw them “only as a residue of the past, which must disappear through assimilation into the multilaterally developed society.” Most likely Nicolae Gheorghe’s article reached the West with the help of one of his many academic contacts before the Securitate opened an informative surveillance file on him. Its reading at the microphone of Radio Free Europe led to the intensification of the Securitate’s surveillance of Nicolae Gheorghe.

In 1969, Reverend Canon Dr. Michael Bourdeaux, along with political scientist Peter Reddaway, diplomat and writer Sir John Lawrence and Soviet historian Leonard Schapiro, set up the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism, later known as Keston College and Keston Institute. It soon grew into a widely known British human rights organization and a resource center, unique in a way, as its field of expertise focused on church-state relations and persecutions of religious believers behind the Iron Curtain. From its foundation, the creation and development of an archive of documentation was a primary aim for Keston. Today, the Keston Archive and Library remains a unique collection of primary-source material on religious life and religious persecutions in socialist countries, containing, among other things, the world’s most extensive collection of religious samizdat. The Keston collection fills an important gap between state historical records and official church histories, giving voices to ordinary believers in their everyday struggle to freely express their faith.

Punk in Polish People's Republic began in 1978 and it quickly gained popularity in Warsaw, as well as in other cities. In its initial phase, the movement maintained close ties with student clubs and galleries, where performance art, mail art, and concrete poetry flourished at the time. The collection of a punk photographer Anna Dąbrowska-Lyons includes zines, photographs, and newspaper clippings from the years 1978 to ca. 1982. The most interesting of these materials were featured in the album titled Polski punk (Polish Punk) published in 1999. The album documents the first wave of punk in Warsaw, while also presenting original, artistic photographs, collages, and graphics which blend the Western influence of punk and the new wave with the poetry of futurism, Dada, and conceptual theories of the 1970s.

The Aktionsgruppe Banat Ad-hoc Collection reflects the type of cultural opposition represented by a group of Romanian-German writers, who founded together the literary circle Aktionsgruppe Banat and developed a neo-Marxist criticism of “really existing socialism.” The collection comprises two types of items: (1) manuscripts and other materials confiscated by the Securitate from these writers, (2) documents issued by the Securitate concerning their cultural activity, which the communist regime perceived as dangerous.

Artlist is an online database that maps the development of modern and contemporary Czech fine art from the second half of the 20th century. Artlist is a unique project that allows free and online searches of authors and their works, including the artist's biography and catalog, and a detailed description of the life of the artist and his work.

The collection of photographs by Croatian conceptual artist Tomislav Gotovac presents four performances (Reading the Newspapers, Listening to the Radio, Watching Television and Telephoning) from the 1980 and 1981 in which the artist awaited the death of Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito, thus underscoring the social and media psychosis of that moment. The work used a subversive strategy by which the artist indirectly drew the public and socialist regime into the performance, leaving them to think: what is the artist showing?

The virtual Museum of the Orange Alternative is an Internet archive containing full documentation, i.e. photographs, posters, leaflets, articles, films, and other testimonies of the activities of the Orange Alternative in Wrocław and other cities, as well as its predecessor the New Culture Movement and the alternative graffiti in Polish People's Republic. Orange Alternative was a youth movement whose street happenings in the 1980s gathered hundreds and sometimes thousands of people dressed as dwarfs, singing songs for children, and ostentatiously chanting slogans expressing support for the police and the government.

The Iljko Karaman Collection is an archival collection established in 1949 by the Zagreb Deputy Public Prosecutor, Iljko Karaman (1922-2010), who deposited the collection at the Croatian State Archives in 1992. The collection includes unique material related to state censorship practices in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Independent State of Croatia, the People’s Republic of Croatia and the latter Socialist Republic of Croatia until the 1980s.

Allen Ginsberg, American poet and leading figure of the Beat Generation, arrived in Prague in February 1965. During his stay in Czechoslovakia, he attended several public readings and discussions. At the beginning of May, during the May celebrations, he was elected by students “The King of May”. However, a week later, he was deported by the State Security to the airport and expelled from the country. Later, Czechoslovak press launched a denigration campaign and accused him of “corrupting the youth”.

The Jindřich Chalupecký Collection at the Museum of Czech Literature contains Ginsberg’s address from 1965 written by Ginsberg himself. This address illustrates Chalupecký’s interest in the American poet and probable contact between them during Ginsberg’s stay in Czechoslovakia in 1965. Moreover, Chalupecký’s name appeared in Ginsberg’s diary that was confiscated by the Czechoslovak State Security.

The collection of Society for Queer Memory represents a unique set of daily needs items, printed materials, private funds and oral testimonies capturing the history, memory and everydayness of LGBT/queer people living in Czech milieu. The oldest members of the community are perceived as bearers of a specific historical memory based on their experience of the second half of the 20th century, when they were criminalized and subjected to repression by the state. Thus, the collection focuses also on defensive strategies of “dual life” of this particular social group, both official and private.

The Ethnographic Research in Dobrogea Ad-Hoc Collection at the ASTRA Museum (Colecţia Ad-Hoc Cercetarea Dobrogeană) reflects the activities carried out between 1964 and 1989 by collaborative teams of ethnographers, photographers, and architects to rescue and recover the cultural heritage of villages in the region of Dobrogea, which were affected by forced collectivisation and the building of the Danube–Black Sea Canal.

The memorandum signed by Ion Cioabă and Nicolae Gheorghe was presented to Vasile Vâlcu, the prime-vice-president of the State Council of the Socialist Republic of Romania, during an audience on 11 October 1982. It contained a complex list of proposals for “the integration into work and society” of Roma that mirrored faithfully the results of Gheorghe’s research and his ideas about solving their problems. 

After stating that “the Gypsies” considered themselves “devoted citizens of the Romanian socialist state, which, under the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party, ensured all the conditions for raising our level of living,” the two signatories raised the question of those nomadic Roma who did not enjoy the benefits of socialist modernisation. For those Roma who continued to live on the edge of poverty due to their nomadic lifestyle, the two Roma leaders devised a complex set of measures that would help them integrate into mainstream society. These included the sedentarisation of Roma by offering them jobs and a place to live, the schooling of Roma children, the participation of Roma people in social, cultural, and educational activities in order for them to learn the rules of living in a society, the observance of their particularities as a minority group, and the creation of a commission to ensure the implementation of these measures and the representation of Roma at the local and central level. Although the memorandum received no answer and the communist regime continued its policy of forced assimilation of Roma, its authors were not prosecuted by the authorities.

The Video Archive of the Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts (VVP AVU) is the only Czech institution which specialises in video art and video documentation of Czechoslovak and Czech art, both prior to and after 1989.

The Cornel Chiriac Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS comprises documents created or collected by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, about Cornel Chiriac, a non-conformist Romanian journalist and jazz drummer, together with letters written by his fans, which were intercepted by the Securitate and never reached him. Cornel Chiriac was one of the most beloved radio and record producers at Radio Romania and then at Radio Free Europe and became an idol of the younger generation in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

The private collection of historian Gábor Klaniczay (1950-) includes written, visual, and audio sources from the 1970s and 1980s. These sources all concern the alternative, underground cultural trends, art, music performances, and political oppositional movements of the period. The almost entire series of the samizdat publications from Hungary also constitute an important part of the collection, as do the leaflets and posters from his trips to Paris and New York.

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.

Dated on 15 October 1971, the letter was signed by three members of The Club of the Free Kings. The club was in fact a group of teenagers, fourteen to sixteen years old, who gathered occasionally in order to listen to foreign music. In order to distinguish themselves from their peers, each member of the group took an English nickname and decided to wear a yellow T-shirt with the group’s initials and a flower imprinted on it. They also made badges for themselves with the name of the club, their nicknames, and the word “hippy,” as they wanted to be identified as a hippy group. Because their favourite music programme at RFE was Cornel Chiriac’s programme Metronom, they decided to write him a letter on behalf of the group. In their message, these young people described the impact of Theses of July 1971, which imposed an embargo on foreign cultural products of all kinds: “After the famous date of 7 July 1971 [actually, Ceaușescu delivered his speech on 6 July], a date that will remain forever inscribed in the calendar as a day of mourning, the lives of young people in Romania worsened even more: gone were the beards and the long hair, gone was pop, beat or progressive music. Everything was gone!” (ACNSAS, Informative Fonds, file 3032 vol. 1, f.21). Their letter represented a quite radical criticism of the cultural policies of Ceaușescu’s regime and the economic difficulties the Romanians had to face in their daily life. Moreover, they considered Cornel Chiriac’s show Metronom to be an escape from the grim reality of their lives and a window to “a freer, more beautiful life, a life you would like to live.” In the final part of the letter, the signatories asked Cornel Chiriac to broadcast their favourite songs. Unfortunately for them, the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, intercepted the letter and subjected its authors to an investigation. In the end, the members of The Club of the Free Kings received a warning from the Securitate and had to sign a declaration in which they recognised their guilt and pledged not to get involved in similar activities in the future.

This fascinating collection sheds insight on generally unknown moments of everyday life in southwest Bulgaria during state socialism, including: the experience of and resistance against collectivization; experiences reflecting the religious policy of the communist regime (e.g. towards Muslims) and others elements of everyday life. The collection is one of the first created by the Balkan Society for Autobiography and Social Communication - Blagoevgrad (BSASC). It mainly consists of oral histories and photographic documentation, which aim to share ordinary people's experience of socialism.

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 Václav Havel Library is gradually gathering, digitizing, and making accessible written materials, photographs, sound recordings and other materials linked to the person of Václav Havel.