“Goli Goli Goli – The Truth about Goli otok” is a typewritten text about the days of captivity on Goli otok, but it is partially different from the original, and begins with a short biography of the author before his arrest, including specific events that preceded the arrest. Šore spoke about his arrest in Travnik in June 1949 and his transfer to the prison in Sarajevo. On September 1949, about 400 detainees were transported by train from Sarajevo to Herceg Novi, and then by truck to the former Austro-Hungarian fortress on Cape Oštro at the entrance to Boka Kotorska Bay. There, Šore's group joined detainees from Montenegro, and then all boarded a ship that took them to Goli otok. This was the first group of "Cominformists" who came to Goli otok. Before them, there was a smaller group of people on the island who welcomed them with clubs, curses and verbal abuse. Šore spent three years in this environment, in which he experienced the most brutal methods of political “re-education.” Immediately upon their arrival at the prison camp, all inmates had to publicly present facts about their "hostile work" against the communist regime and plead guilty. Also, all inmates had to go to the State Security Administration office to report all the “enemies” among inmates or among those who were still outside the prison camp. Political meetings were held regularly in the prison camp, where the criminal conduct of a particular inmate was discussed based on evidence obtained by mutual spying. Furthermore, ‘cultural-educational’ work was carried out every night, which consisted of reading Party literature, making posters, writing pamphlets, and even short comedy shows. In all forms of cultural and educational work, Josip Broz Tito and his policy in conflict with the Cominform Resolution was praised by the detainees (Interview with Peić Čaldarović, Dubravka).

The prison camp's administration punished inmates with brutal methods that consisted of heavy physical labour, inciting violence among inmates, psychological abuse, and deprivation of food and water. According to Šore's memories, the main penal measures in the camp were: boycotts (severing of any communication with an inmate, overtime labour and reduction of food and water rations), carrying "Anita" (exhaustion by carrying a heavy load), tracer (exhaustion caused by carrying heavy loads with another inmate), the swan (exhaustion by carrying a heavy load together with six other detainees) and the chamber-pot ‘honour’  (guarding the wooden lavatory in the barracks many times per day or for many days). The physical exhaustion of inmates was done to psychologically transform them, or erase their personalities, to create persons loyal to the Party led by Tito. Inmates who underwent been internal punishment or refused to submit to political "re-education" ended up in Building 101. Its purpose was to break disobedient detainees with more difficult conditions of daily labour and more extreme torture methods (Interview with Peić Čaldarović, Dubravka).

Šore described each of these situations and methods of political "re-education" precisely from his own experience or based on the example of one of his fellow inmates. He illustrated some of the most difficult aspects of everyday life with his own drawings under the heading: Tracer/Carrying Heavy Rocks, Water and Food/Boycott by the Wall, Chamber-pot Honour /Swan (Interview with Dubravka Peić Čaldarović).

National Film Archive - Audiovisual Institute is a state institution founded in 1955 and led by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Its main aim is to preserve the Polish cinematographic heritage and to disseminate the film culture. The National Film Archive consists of all sorts of materials of Polish and foreign cinema production: audiovisual materials, photographs, posters, screenplays, and reviews (both press reviews and censorship decisions).

Rimantas Vėbra (1931-1999) was a Lithuanian historian and specialist in 19th-century history. His research covers the Lithuanian national movement in the second half of the 19th century. While he was not an active participant in the anti-Soviet dissident movement, his professional activity was restricted because of his writings, research works that were perceived by the authorities as unconventional, and his deviation from the ideological norm.

One of the most imposing rooms of the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara is dedicated to the tricolour flags that were in the street or in various institutions during the very tense days of December 1989. It houses some fifteen flags, all original. “They are flags that have, in a sense, been to war; people came out to demonstrations with them in the days from 15 to 22 December; some of them were shot at; some were discoloured by the weather on those days; they are important symbolic objects that had very important trajectories for the revolutionary movements of 1989, in those heated and bloody days in Timişoara,” says Gino Rado. The majority have a hole where the communist emblem was removed – the flag with a hole in the middle became one of the emblematic images of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. Of all these flags, only one is of the Communist Party: it was taken down from the building of the Party Committee in Timişoara. They came to the Memorial as donations over a number of years, mostly in the period 1990–1994.

This collection comprises various documents (including trial records) relating to the activities of Alexandru Șoltoianu, a well-known oppositional figure in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) in the late 1960s and 1970s. Closely linked to the Usatiuc–Ghimpu–Graur group, Șoltoianu pursued a parallel project of creating a mass nationally oriented anti-Soviet political party known as National Rebirth of Moldavia (Renașterea Națională a Moldovei), to be based upon a broad network of student associations. Șoltoianu’s case files are currently held in the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova (ANRM). These materials were transferred to the ANRM from the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). 

This unique collection of samizdat literature (1972-1989) contains samizdat books by Czech and Slovak authors whose works could not officially be published in socialist Czechoslovakia, as well as a collection of samizdat periodicals and individual texts.

Artpool Art Research Center collects, archives, and makes available documents for researchers regarding marginalized art practices of Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s and contemporary international art tendencies. Topics in the archive include progressive, unofficial Hungarian art movements (such as underground art events, venues, groups, and samizdat publications between 1970 and 1990) and new tendencies in international art beginning in the 1960s.

In addition to functioning as a research center, Artpool considers itself an active archive. It organizes events in search of new forms of social activity, participates in the process in a formative way, and simultaneously documents and archives these process in order to promote the free flow of information.

The Grgo Šore Goli Otok Collection is part of a broader collection consisting of documents from personal and family bequests and is kept in the Croatian History Museum. The collection includes documentation about Goli otok (a small rocky island in the Adriatic Sea), official correspondence, newspapers and photographs. In his manuscripts, Grgo Šore described in detail all of the horrors he experienced on Goli otok during his captivity as a falsely accused “Cominformist.” Particularly noteworthy are the drawings depicting the brutal treatment of inmates by the prison guards.

The Jan Zahradníček Collection at the Museum of Czech Literature is an important resource documenting the literary and Catholic opposition to the communist regime in post-war Czechoslovakia. It includes Jan Zahradníčekʼs poetry manuscripts, written illegally in the 1950s, in Pankrác Prison.

The Closed Stacks Department of the National Széchényi Library (OSZK) was established in 1946. Everything that was not permitted by the censors and could not be part of the public collection of the library was put here. The librarians argued that the task of the national library was to collect every type of publication regardless of its content. The books and journals which were published by Hungarians who fled the country after the Revolution of 1956 added to the number of items. The department became a meeting point for members of the emerging opposition in the 1980s, which created an opportunity to get actual samizdat writings.

This ad-hoc collection was separated from the fonds of judicial files concerning persons subject to political repression during the communist regime which is currently stored in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). It focuses on the case of Gheorghe Zgherea, a person of peasant background who was a member of the Inochentist religious community, a millenarian and eschatological movement active in Bessarabia and Transnistria mostly during the first half of the twentieth century. The collection materials are revealing for the repressive policy of the Soviet regime in the religious sphere, showing the Soviet authorities’ hostile attitude toward non-mainstream and marginal denominations, which were perceived as a particularly serious threat. Zgherea, a preacher within his community starting from late 1950, was accused of “roaming the villages” of the Moldavian SSR and spreading “anti-Soviet ideas” among the local populace by “using their religious prejudices.” Arrested on 2 May 1953, he received a harsh sentence of twenty-five years of hard labour. His sentence was reduced to five years of hard labour in June 1955, when he was also amnestied according to a special decree of March 1953. Zgherea’s case thus points to the changing strategies of the regime applied after Stalin’s death, but also to the continuity of repression and to the shifting practices of stifling dissent in post-Stalinist Soviet society.

The collection of Ladislav Mňačko (1919–1994), a Slovak writer and former prominent Czechoslovak journalist, consists of unique correspondence, manuscripts, prints and clippings which help to describe the life of this significant writer, who after August 1968 was a critic of the communist regime and a representative of Czechoslovak exile literature.

This collection consists primarily of the items confiscated by the Securitate on 1 April 1977, on the occasion of the house search and arrest of the driving force behind an emerging movement in defence of human rights in Romania, Paul Goma, a writer censored in Romania but successful abroad. A particular feature of this collection is that the confiscated items were not destroyed, but were preserved by the Securitate and finally transferred to CNSAS in 2002, from where they were returned to Goma in 2005. Thus, the collection is one of the few which travelled after 1989 from Romania into exile and is now to be found in Paris, where Goma was forced to emigrate a few months after his arrest and the confiscation of the collection.

The Nelu Stratone collection is one of the most impressive collections of rock, jazz, and folk records created in communist Romania, as a result of the happy combination between its owner’s exceptional passion for alternative music and his ability to acquire records that were not imported officially. The collection is important not only for its size, but even more for the significant number of albums of Western provenance, which were unavailable in shops in Romania but could nevertheless be obtained due to the existence of an alternative market for such products. The creation and preservation of such a collection were activities regarded with suspicion by the communist authorities in Romania, because they proved the younger generation’s fascination with Western cultural products, in contravention of the spirit of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Theses of July 1971.

In the collection of the Ideological Commission of the League of Communists of Croatia (IC LCC) (1956-1965), a number of documents illustrate the IC LCC's view of ideologically inappropriate occurrences in cultural creativity (art, literature, film), the media (the press, radio and television), education and science in Croatia. This commission had the task of monitoring, analysing and directing overall activity in these areas, issuing its directives and establishing staffs in all major institutions and organizations. In this way, it also reacted to ideological currents that did not align with the accepted direction, and it thereby became the deciding factor in cultural policy in Croatia. 

The 34-minute long documentary film ‘Danube-gate’ by Black Box is an event tracking documentation of the secret spying scandal that exploded in Hungary in January 1990. Police Major József Végvári, an active member of the infamous III/3 secret department, in late 1989 called on the cameraman of Black Box to help to reveal the fact that months before the free elections, the ex-communist ruling party, renamed MSZP, was still surveilling the activists of the democratic opposition, just as it did for several prior decades.

Vjesnik Newspaper Documentation is an archival collection created in the Vjesnik newspaper publishing enterprise from 1964 to 2006. It includes about twelve million press clippings, organized into six thousand topics and sixty thousand dossiers on public persons. Inter alia, it documents various forms of cultural opposition in the former Yugoslavia, but also in other communist countries in Europe and worldwide.      

The video and audio library of the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature consists of audio and video recordings of Czech poets and writers from 1932 until 2013; the collection also covers the literary scene in Czechoslovakia before 1989, including the activities of unofficial or “banned” writers and artists and their work in exile. One important part of the collection are recordings made between 1990 and 2013 as part of the Authentic project, which focused on recording videos and audios from various spheres of the Czech literary scene.

UDB-a captain France Malešič recorded the information obtained by an UDB collaborator with the code name Murovič Agata. At the meeting held on December 5, 1950, the collaborator reported about Maks Samec’s contacts with foreign experts, his health condition and the situation at the institute as well. This was a regular meeting between Malešič and his subordinate that was part of a broad surveillance scheme by the Slovenian branch of secret political police (UDB-a).

One of the documents in the Alexandru Călinescu private collection reflects the perspective from which this critical intellectual in Iaşi was regarded by the authorities in the last years of communism, when the dissidents in the city, including Alexandru Călinescu, became radicalised in their attitude towards the Ceaușescu regime. The document was discovered on 23 December 1989, in the cabinet of the person who had been propaganda secretary for Iaşi county up until the previous day, and thus came into the possession of Alexandru Călinescu. It had also been sent, as Alexandru Călinescu recalls, to the then rector of A.I. Cuza University of Iaşi, “so he would work on me, but without success, of course,” he adds. This document was published by the former dissident in 2018 under the suggestive title “My life told by the Securitate,” together with other documents of the same type and an article summarising the context of the last two years of communism in Romania.

The Securitate informative note begins by recalling the intellectual origins of the person in question and emphasising that “he has always manifested a particular interest in entering into relations with foreign citizens of all categories, especially language assistants, diplomats, reporters, journalists, writers, etc., but with many of these he exceeded the official context, […] repeatedly transgressing in a flagrant and ostentatious manner the provisions regulating relations with foreigners.” Because he had “cosmopolitan” ideas and implicitly a “communion of ideas” with some of these foreigners, “he particularised the relations in such a manner that they developed from simple friendship to seriously affecting the interests of the Romanian state,” the document continues. The informative note on Alexandru Călinescu emphasises his role as the leader of the oppositional group around the magazine Dialog: “He has been considered the mentor of a group of young people with literary ambitions, launched by the above-mentioned publication, and has appointed himself a ‘school leader’ of the so-called ‘1980 generation,’ to whom he has passed on his harmful ideas.” The articles published in Dialog under the direction of Alexandru Călinescu by him and his disciples are characterised as being ‚ “of a contestatory character, which has attracted the attention of reactionary circles in the West, who provided them with publicity through the ill-famed radio station Free Europe.” As the leader of the new generation at Dialog, which he directed towards “hostile activities,” Alexandru Călinescu was considered to have “arrived at the threshold of treason,” resulting – according to the note – in no more than a sanction through Party structures with a “vote of blame.” The note goes on to emphasise that the individual in question “has not drawn appropriate conclusions from the measures taken in 1983. Making a mockery of the good advice and disregarding the clemency that was shown in his case, he has continued to maintain the same position, at first more prudently, then more and more openly and ostentatiously.” The document then recounts how Alexandru Călinescu “has gone further down the slope of treason,” by facilitating Dan Petrescu’s and Liviu Cangeopol’s meetings with French journalists to whom they granted interviews “with a particularly hostile content,” and thus becoming “the coordinator from the shadows of the alleged Iaşi dissidence.” Moreover, the document states, Alexandru Călinescu has shown solidarity with the dissidents in Bucharest, who have taken a public position in defence of Mircea Dinescu. The conclusion of the informative note with regard to the individual under surveillance is that “he more and more often exteriorises ideas inciting opposition to the socialist regime in our country, […] letting himself be influenced by what is happening in other socialist countries.” It is interesting to observe the interpretive key in which the Securitate informative note narrates all these real actions of contestation of the regime, as a result of which Alexandru Călinescu had become at the end of the 1980s one of the most heavily surveilled critical intellectuals in Iaşi and indeed in the whole of Romania. In the words of the secret police documents, “by the hostile actions he has carried out, especially in the last two years, […] Alexandru Călinescu has proved [...] that he has crossed the threshold of treason to the country and has become a tool of reactionary circles in the West, through which he has seriously compromised his status as citizen, Party member, and university teacher.” In other words, all that after 1989 became an act of courage was considered an act of treason before 1989.

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.

A valuable part of the Doina Cornea private collection is made up of photographs. Some of these photographs (more than a dozen), which were taken by the Securitate in the late 1980s, ended up in Cornea’s possession in a strange way that illustrates the contradictions of the turbulent Romanian exit from Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In the late 1980s, the Securitate put Doina Cornea under strict surveillance and she became the target of harsh repressive measures on the part of the state authorities due to her oppositional activity. These photographs were taken by the Securitate during the complex operation of keeping Cornea under surveillance and were aimed at analysing her daily activity and social network. Later, the photographs were archived by the secret police in their “informative surveillance file” (dosar de urmărire informativă) on her and were usually attached to an “informative” report drafted by Securitate employees for the higher echelons of the secret police. The items remained in the possession of the secret police until December 1989. During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Doina Cornea became a leader of the population of Cluj in revolt and acted as their unofficial representative. The Romanian army changed sides on 22 December 1989 and joined the population in revolt. In this turbulent period, the Ministry of National Defence became the institution with custody of the Securitate archives.

According to her son, Leontin Horațiu Iuhas, after 22 December 1989, Doina Cornea, as a representative of the local population, had several meetings with the leadership of the Romanian Fourth Army, which had its headquarters in Cluj. During one of these meetings, in order to show their support for the population in revolt and as a gesture of benevolence, the leadership of the Romanian Fourth Army gave Cornea several photographs from her Securitate files (Interview with Leontin Horațiu Iuhas). This gesture could be understood as an attempt of the leadership of the local military to gain the sympathy of the dissident after they had been involved in the repression of the local uprising of 21 December 1989 (Adevărul 2009).

One of these photographs shows Doina Cornea, her son Leontin Horațiu Iuhas, and two members of the French Embassy staff in Bucharest, talking in front of her home in Cluj. The Securitate was monitoring all her social contacts and tried its best to stop all contacts that were important for her oppositional activity, such as those with Western journalists and diplomats. However, after she was released from arrest in December 1987 due to international pressure, the secret police was put in the situation of having to tolerate her contacts with the staff of Western embassies in Bucharest in order to avoid international scandals. This photograph reflects the paradoxical situation of Doina Cornea, who was practically forced into house arrest, but was able to meet the diplomatic staff of Western embassies due to her international reputation.

The collection includes Croatian State Security Service's file on the case of first and best known Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Djilas, and its reception in Croatia. During 1953, Djilas published a series of articles in the newspaper Borba on the need for democratization and liberalization of Yugoslav society, which led to his condemnation at Party forums and expulsion from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. In Croatia, similar ideas were mainly manifested in the weekly Naprijed, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Croatia. It led to open conflict with Party leaders and the suppression of the newspaper, while its journalists were forced to halt their careers in journalism. The collection includes different analysis and reports on operational measures conducted by the Croatian State Security Service against the Naprijed group and other Djilas supporters (Djilasovci) in Croatia until the beginning of 1960s.

The Doina Cornea Private Collection is an invaluable historical source for those researching the biography and especially the dissident activities of the person labelled by the Western mass media as the “emblematic figure” of the Romanian resistance to Ceauşescu’s dictatorship. This collection comprises manuscripts of her open letters of protest, her diary, samizdat translations, correspondence, drafts of her academic works, photos, paintings, video recordings, and her personal library. This private collection is by far one of the most significant and valuable collections reflecting the cultural opposition to the Romanian communist regime.

The collection of Milan Jelínek documents in detail the Communist thinking of a formerly protected linguist, and the later, a critic to the regime, becoming a samizdat publisher and co-organiser of lectures at the underground university.

Charter 77 was an informal Czechoslovak citizens' initiative that criticised state power for the non-recognition of basic civil and human rights, following the movements of the CSSR and their signing of the Final Act at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe on 1^st August 1975 in Helsinki.

Petko Ogoyski - one of the few living artists who survived socialist prisons and labor camps, was an important figure in the Bulgarian cultural opposition against the communist regime. As a member of the Bulgarian Agrarian People’s Union-Nikola Petkov (BZNS-Nikola Petkov) and poet/writer, Ogoyski was imprisoned twice (1950-1953 and 1962-1963) by the socialist state for writing “hostile” poems, texts and aphorisms and for “conspiracy”.  

The Tower-Museum was established as a private initiative of the family Petko and Yagoda Ogoyski. The exhibition is partly a national and local ethnographic one, including household appliances, costumes, and weapons from the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, this was a way to circumvent the censorship of the communist regime. Among the ethnographic materials, Petko Ogoyski kept and preserved evidence from the periods of his imprisonment in six prisons and two forced labour camps; as also notes, books and poems written by him during and after the discharge from prison. The materials of the Tower Museum have been collected by Petko Ogoyski since his first imprisonment in 1950.  

The collection of Petko Ogoyski documents the repressions of the socialist state over dissidents and is a valuable source of the forms of asserting political principles and moral positions by intellectuals.

An open letter written in January 1965 by Knuts Skujenieks from the prison camp was addressed to his writer colleagues. He asked them not to keep silent about his fate, because ‘culture does not exist without its carriers, and it is important to fight for them, and not to contribute to their moral and physical annihilation.' The letter is a statement of Skujenieks' civic position, a protest against inertia and the fear in Latvian society. It was perhaps too bold for the political climate of Latvia, because it presented evidence that in prison Skujenieks became spiritually more liberated than his colleagues who enjoyed physical freedom, although it has to be admitted that the spirit of resistance of the younger generation of writers in Latvia in the 1960s was stronger than in the 1970s. Official discussions by the Writers' Union in 1965 and 1968 of the poetry he wrote in Mordovia testify to this.

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 beginnings of the Video Studio Gdansk are connected to the I National Congress of “Solidarity”, organised in Gdansk in 1981. At first, the independent “Solidarity” filmmakers documented the union’s most important events, however soon the first documentaries were produced. Video Studio Gdansk has been operating for almost 40 years, and its archive today consists of several thousands of video materials. It mostly comprises own videos, created by the Studio: raw footages (of the most important oppositional events, like strikes, clashes, protests), documentaries, reportages, few feature films, and numerous recordings of television theatre, public debates, cultural events, etc.

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 seals and stamps created by Józef Figiela are an interesting visual representation of the strikes in the Gdansk Shipyard of the August 1980. They are also a testimony of an incredible engagement and effort put in sharing the strike’s ideals by a person who used his artistic abilities for this purpose, as well as a talent and enthusiasm of his teenage daughter.  Józef Figiela is both a sailor and an artist by profession, and he has alternately practiced both of them throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In August 1980 he had already been signed in for another cruise when the strike in the Gdansk Shipyard broke. His ship was stuck in the harbour and he used this opportunity to support the protesters. He became a member of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee as a delegate of the Association of the Polish Fine Artists of the Gdansk Region, and as a graphic artist he joined the fight for changes. On 20 August 1980 he created his first seal of the strike’s underground post. It shows a hand clenched into a fist (symbolising the fight), Gdansk’s coat of arms, and some nautical motifs (an anchor, sea waves), as well as a sign: “strike”. The original linocut is a part of the collection of Michał Guć, who is also in the possession of the authentic copies in the form of stamps on the envelopes.

The seals in the form of stamps were copied in the Polish national colours onto the envelopes and specially prepared postcards. During the strikes, Figiela prepared 4 linocuts, which as copies were disseminated among the strikers. Figiela’s seals stand out from other underground stamps with their precise execution and interesting graphic design. However, their content is quite typical for this type of philatelist: it refers to the Polish patriotic emblems, fight symbols, and the shipyard itself. There are also some religious (Catholic) motifs.

It is worth mentioning that with his activity Figiela inspired to action his daughter Dąbrówka, who as a just 15-year-old girl created her own seal, as well as she helped her father in creating copies. Every day Dąbrówka would cut out the postcards and glue on them the official state stamps, and in the evenings she would go to the post office, asking the workers to mark the papers with tomorrow’s date. Next, her father and her pressed their seals onto the envelopes, and the next day Figiela took them to the shipyard and shared them among the strikers. Thus, the materials have always had the current date.

The last seal Figiela created just before the end of the strike. It shows the Polish flag and a hand holding some flowers – it symbolised the peacefulness of the protests. The text says: “victory”.

Michał Guć estimates that altogether there were around 300-400 paper copies of Józef and Dąbrówka Figiela’s stamps disseminated in August 1980.  It is a relatively small number which was caused by the fact that making copies was a very time-consuming activity and that only two people were involved in their production. Low number of existing stamps makes every original copy a valuable item.

Source:

Stocznia Gdańska im. Lenina, Michał Guć, Gdynia 2017 (unpublished text, shared by the author in July 2017).

This collection contains the files of the State Security Service of the GDR that are preserved and administered by the Federal Commissioner for Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR (BstU). The surveillance records of the secret police represent a singular body of sources that offer unique glimpses into the cultural opposition to the GDR. The destruction of large numbers of these documents could only be averted in 1989/90 owing to the spirited actions of “Civil Committees”.

The novel “The Invalid Siblings” (Invalidní sourozenci, 1974) is one of the most important works by the Czecho-Slovak poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher and “guru” of the Czechoslovak underground, Egon Bondy (real name Zbyněk Fišer, 1930–2007). Marcel Strýko, a Slovak philosopher and dissident, compared the dystopian novel to “a catechism of the Czechoslovak underground”. The novel, which was completed in February 1974, presents a vision of the moral and ecological crisis of a totalitarian society in the distant future. The plot takes place around the year 2600 on the last piece of land surrounded by rubbish. After this last area is also flooded, only the “invalids” (intellectuals, outcasts from totalitarian society, reminiscent of underground dissidents) survive on an improvised raft. The sequel to “The Invalid Siblings” was Bondy’s novel “Afghanistan”, written in 1980. At first “The Invalid Siblings” was published in 1974 as a samizdat volume. The novel was also published in exile by Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto in 1981. After 1990, the novel was published several times in (the former) Czechoslovakia. The novel has also been published abroad.

A manuscript of the novel was bought by the Museum of Czech Literature (PNP) in 1986 and is now part of the Egon Bondy collection deposited in the Literary Archive of PNP.

Judging from the level of difficulty of the twenty-two questions contained in it, the target group of the document identified as a questionnaire included the most sophisticated members of the Hungarian elite in Romania, who did not necessary work in the cultural sphere, but who had presumably been selected as a result of previous inquiries. The questionnaire, made up of three major sets of questions, first assesses the social status, qualification level, and general culture of the subject, then examines the subject’s sense of identity, and finally investigates, also out of a need for identifying a solution, the nature of the connections and relationships between Romanians and Hungarians, as well as experiences regarding coexistence.

I. The first set of questions focuses on the subject’s social status. It begins by examining the social background of the subject – family, origin – and then inquires about his/her age to further turn to a direct reference to the “small Hungarian world” in Northwestern Transylvania during the Second World War (Sárándi and Tóth-Bartos, 2015), which suggests that the questionnaire focuses primarily on mature individuals holding well-defined views on the Transylvanian issue. Questions four and five address the length and possibilities of past education in the mother tongue in the family of the subject, respectively, in his/her “range of vision.”

The Questions:

1. What kind of family do you come from?

2. What type of social environment do you come from? (rural, urban, peasant, worker, bourgeois, aristocrat, etc.)

3. How old are you? Were you alive between 1940 and 1944?

4. How long and what were you able to study in your mother tongue?

5. What about your family and /or “range of vision”?

II. The second set of questions – questions 6 to 14 – is directed at the subject’s sense of identity. The assessment of collective memory is followed by a nostalgic question, which, beside the inventory of violations of human rights experienced in the present, makes the subject draw a comparison with the rights undoubtedly held in the past. The question about general knowledge of Hungarian history is followed more emphatically by that about self-declared knowledge of post-1918 Transylvanian history and of the public figures related to it. Then the author of the questionnaire moves on to the mapping of reading habits and needs in the mother tongue, of cultural life and religion. The question referring to the level of Romanian language skills is still relevant. As the knowledge of language represents a prerequisite for social integration, this also means that as long as the coexisting nations are unable to eliminate language barriers, their cultures cannot get closer to each other, cannot coexist in harmony. Radio listening habits provide answers regarding the need for information of Hungarians in Transylvania, but also about their possible resignation and indifference. The inquiry about connections in Hungary presupposes the existence of a current network of contacts in the “mother country,” including relatives, friends, and acquaintances. The thirteenth question, about the new situation in Hungary – which offers a clue about the date of the document – presumably hints at the changes that took place during the official mandate of the moderate reformer Károly Grósz, appointed president of the Council of Ministers in June 1987. On May 1988, the reform wing of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) obtained the long-awaited goal of removing the old and ill János Kádár from the party leadership and elected Grósz as his successor upon a programme of transition to a market economy and political decentralisation. However, it cannot be excluded that allusion was made to symbolic events of 1989 relating to the commemoration of the Revolution of 1956, such as the reburial of Imre Nagy and his comrades, or the radio speech by the senior party official Imre Pozsgay about the re-evaluation of this tragic event in Hungary’s recent past (Romsics 2013). The last question in this section, referring to a “prominent Transylvanian personality” takes into consideration the greater political events and perhaps it looks ahead in allowing for an unpredictable political turn in Romania.

The Questions:

6. What can you recall, or how far back does your collective (family, workplace, etc.) memory extend?

7. Would you like to regain anything from the past? If yes, what?

8. Are you familiar with Hungarian history, and with the history of Transylvania in particular? (What do you know about the events following 1918? Are you familiar with the operation of the Hungarian National Party [Bárdi 2014, Horváth 2007, György 2003]? Are you familiar with figures such as Ct. Bethlen György [1888–1968, president of the Hungarian National Party representing the Hungarian minority in Romania in the interwar period (ACNSAS, I185019)], Jakabffy Elemér [1881–1963, Hungarian, later Romanian Hungarian politician, lawyer, publicist (Balázs 2012, Csapody 2012)], Makkai Sándor [1890–1951, Transylvanian Hungarian writer, pedagogue, Reformed bishop (Veress 2003)], Mailáth [Majláth] Gusztáv Károly [1864-1940, Transylvanian Roman Catholic bishop, member of the nobility, honorary archbishop (Marton and Jakabffy 1999)], Domokos Pál Péter [1901-1992, teacher, historian, ethnographer, one of the pioneers of research into the Csangos (Jánosi 2017, Domokos 1988)] etc.?

9. Do you own Hungarian books? Do you read in Hungarian? If yes, how much? How do you gain access to Hungarian books? Do you go to the theatre? Are you a church-goer? (Is the use of the Hungarian language or the fact that you are a believer behind church attendance?) 10. How well do you speak the Romanian language?

11. Which radio station do you listen to? That of Budapest or that of Bucharest? And which Radio Free Europe broadcast do you listen to: the Romanian or the Hungarian one?

12. Do you have contacts in Hungary?

13. What do you think of Hungary in this new situation?

14. Is there a prominent Transylvanian personality you know about and consider worth paying attention to?

III. The third set of questions – questions 15 to 22 – analyses the relationship between Romanians and Hungarians. Thus, beside inquiring about the nature of relationships maintained by the subject and his/her environment with his/her ethnic Romanian fellow citizens, these questions focus also on the ethnic characteristics of the coexisting population, whether the demographic balance in a given settlement, which was centuries ago favourable to the Hungarian community, has been subject to modifications by the communist regime by attracting inhabitants from other regions populated mostly by Romanians. Having future coexistence in view, question 17 is aimed at learning the “lacking needs” of the subject, so it inquires about the required minimum conditions in terms of human rights that allow him/her to live as a Hungarian there, in that given place. Amidst the measures aimed at the assimilation of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, such as the continuous diminishing of educational opportunities in the Hungarian language, the closing down of Transylvanian Hungarian theatres, the potential destruction of villages, the phenomenon of emigration, which affected the Romanian citizens too, in the context in which the nationalism of Ceaușescu’s regime was become more and more radical, when politics-fuelled intolerance towards ethnic otherness was a daily presence, the question about individual views regarding the future of the minority community might have seemed surreal. Thoughts referring to the renewal of the indigenous minority were closer to utopia as the flagrant violation of human and minority rights provided no realistic grounds for this. The last two questions of the questionnaire – questions 21 and 22 – about positive experiences as a Hungarian living in Romania, positive experiences concerning the Romanian–Hungarian relationship – illustrate, even in their choice of words – “have you ever,” “accompany or would accompany” – the perspicacity with which the author of the questionnaire acknowledges the situation of the Transylvanian Hungarian minority of the period preceding the change of regime.

The Questions:

15. What is the nature of your (your personal and your community) relationship with Romanians?

16. Are you surrounded mostly by Romanians or by Hungarians in your living environment? If you live predominantly surrounded by Romanians, when was this situation installed? Is it a result of incoming settlement or is it the indigenous population?

17. What is it that you lack most in living there as a Hungarian?

18. What is your opinion about your own future, the future of your family, and that of Transylvanian Hungarians?

19. Do you see any possibilities of renewal?

20. If you are a church-goer, what do you know and what can you witness from the Greek Catholic movement?

21. Have you ever had any positive experiences as a Hungarian? If yes: when and what kind of experience was it?

22. List the positive experiences that accompany or would accompany the relationship between Romanians and Hungarians?

There is no doubt that Gyimesi is the author of this document. In numerous places her works include analyses of the given situation and sense of identity of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania (Gyimesi 1993). Most probably the document escaped the attention of secret police officers conducting the home search on 20 June 1989 due to the absence of title and date. The physical existence of a questionnaire examining minority life in the darkest days of Romanian Communist dictatorship is startling in itself. Research conducted in the form of questionnaires presupposes the subject’s right to free opinion and is interpreted as an accessory of democratic systems. However, the existence of the document does not mean that the intended survey was actually conducted. For Gyimesi, who was the subject of informative surveillance, in a world abounding in collaborators with the secret police, this questionnaire must have meant a handhold which should have helped her in identifying persons with similar views on whom she could have counted in the struggle against the violation of human and minority rights. This may have served as a basis – as a possible interpretation – for her efforts to recruit reliable colleagues for the editing and distribution of the Cluj-based samizdat paper known as Kiáltó Szó, which she conceived in the fall of 1988 together with Sándor Balázs, a philosopher and university professor. Out of the nine edited issues of the samizdat – which was little known even by the Securitate – only two were published, though this had nothing to do with the editors: the publishing of further issues was rendered unnecessary under the circumstances following the fall of the Ceaușescu-dictatorship.

The ‘Office of the President of the Republic’ collection was a constituent part of the former archive of J.B. Tito and today comprises a separate unit within the Archives of Yugoslavia. It contains materials that were created in connection with the activity of the president of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, who was at the helm of the state from 1945 to 1980. The collection is exceptionally rich in material relevant for the study of all aspects of Yugoslav history, and also contains documents relating to opposition activities during the time of his rule.

Limes was a circle of Hungarian dissident intellectuals which operated more or less actively from 1985 until the 1989 Romanian revolution. The aim of the circle was to provide a pluralist platform of cooperation for Hungarian intellectuals, which meant holding monthly/bimonthly organized meetings and publishing a journal dealing with the history and actual situation of the Hungarian minority from Romania, as well as other outstanding research work pertaining to other domains. The circle was also devoted to maintaining high standards of scientific work in Romania. As there was no chance of getting anything past the censors in Romania, the plan was to smuggle manuscripts to Hungary and to publish the journal there.

The initiator was Gusztáv Molnár, who mostly due to his job as a literary editor at the Bucharest-based Kriterion publishing house had a large personal network among Transylvanian Hungarian critical intellectuals. The core of the group was represented by the following individuals: Vilmos Ágoston, Béla Bíró, Gáspár Bíró, Ernő Fábián, Károly Vekov, Levente Salat, Csaba Lőrincz, Ferenc Visky, András Visky, Péter Visky, Levente Horváth, Sándor Balázs, Sándor Szilágyi N., and Éva Cs. Gyímesi. Through the process of editing the journal, many more intellectuals became acquainted with the activity of the Limes group.

Between September 1985 and November 1986, six meetings were held in four different localities in Romania in the homes of members of the group. The meetings encompassed a presentation (usually of a manuscript) followed by a debate, and all proceedings were recorded. The series of meetings was interrupted by a search and seizure performed by the Securitate in Molnár’s apartment in Bucharest. All documents related to Limes were taken and later studied by the authorities. By this time, the plan to make four Limes issues had already been completed, and the manuscripts for the first two issues had already been collected. The contents included transcripts of the Limes debates and studies and documents covering topics such as “national minorities,” “nationalism,” “totalitarianism,” “autonomy,” and “Transylvanianism” as a guiding ideology for the Hungarian minority in Romania. The topics also included the situation of the Csángó Catholic (Hungarian-speaking) population in Romania.

The Limes group ceased its activity after the intervention of the Romanian secret police, and in 1987, summons and warnings were issued to the members of the group. Though no more meetings were organized, after a while, Limes members resumed work on the texts. Molnár moved to Hungary in 1988, but the editorial work was continued in Romania by Éva Cs. Gyímesi Éva and Péter Cseke in Cluj. The first issues of Limes was published by Molnár in Budapest in late 1989. The content does not coincide with the initial first volume of the Limes, but the issues did contain excerpts from the debates which were held at the first two meetings.

Invaluable insights into the details of the Limes story and other events in the lives of outstanding Hungarian intellectuals are provided by the Securitate files on professor of philosophy at the Babes Bolyai University Sándor Balázs (1928–), which are available for research in the Historical Collection of the Jakabffy Elemér Foundation. This is because the Limes activities in Cluj were recorded by the county agency of the Securitate as part of the information surveillance files on Sándor Balázs. His code name was “the Sociologist” (Sociologul), but the table of contents at the beginning of the dossier refers to “the Sociologists” (Sociologii), the code name used to denote the Limes group.

The “Sixtiers Museum” Collection is located in a small museum in Kyiv, Ukraine in a building belonging to the Ukrainian political party Rukh. Nadia Svitlychna and Mykola Plakhotniuk founded this museum as way of honouring and documenting the struggles of a cohort of Soviet Ukrainian dissidents during the 1960s-1980s. Included in the permanent exhibition are paintings, graphics, sculptures, embroidery and other artworks produced by artists affiliated with the sixtiers movement. The museum also displays the poems, letters and literary works of the writers in their midst, as well as their typewriters, handcrafted items made while in the GULag, or clothes worn while living in exile, like Svitlychna’s own camp uniform. Also figuring prominently are posters for events and exhibitions organized by this group. The guided tour is a moving, concise rendition of their struggle, aimed at the museum’s target audiences, young students, scholars, and the general public.

These materials depict the lives of a dynamic group of Soviet Ukrainians engaged in a principled creative and ideological struggle with the Soviet regime in the 1960s and 1970s. They were poets, artists, graphic designers, historians, doctors, and even a Soviet army official, all of whom became deeply involved in human rights activism under late socialism. Many were members of large Soviet institutions—like the Ukrainian writers and artist unions, the Literary Institute in Kyiv, the Soviet armed forces. The Soviet government’s ideological retrenchment after Khrushchev transformed these dissidents, who had worked hard to try and reform the system and make it more humane, into individuals in open conflict with the authorities.

The collection of the significant Czech journalist, dissident, signatory to Charter 77 and politician, Jiří Ruml, contains both published and as yet unpublished texts from 1967 to 1989, correspondence, Czech and foreign samizdat and exile publications. There are also writings by his friends, many of whom were also important signatories of Charter 77.

The Libri Prohibiti’s collection of foreign samizdat monographs and periodicals contains mainly Slovak and Polish samizdat literature. Russian samizdat and periodicals from the former German Democratic Republic are marginally represented.

The collection is about the life, work and activities of the famous Lithuanian humanist Meilutė Lukšienė. Although she is well known in Lithuania as the initiator and creator of the concept of the Lithuanian National School, and as an active member of Sąjūdis (the national movement) in the late 1980s, Lukšienė was also involved in cultural opposition during Soviet times. She was a key figure who promoted lithuanianisation at Vilnius University as early as the 1950s. Accused of 'bourgeois nationalism', she was dismissed from the post of head of the Department of Lithuanian Literature in 1958.

Ferenc Erős’s interview collection includes in-depth interviews with second-generation Holocaust survivors. This project was one of the first which seeks to revive suppressed memories of the Holocaust and the effects of the psychological strategies used to grapple with these memories and the ways in which trauma are transmitted within families.

The Polish Underground Library was set up in 2009 in collaboration with the The Karta Center Foundation in Warsaw. It is comprised of Polish underground and exile publications, Polish flyers, posters, sound and visual recordings that are part of the Libri Prohibiti’s collections.

This eighty-eight-page manuscript contains the texts of eight sermons and seems to have been prepared to be sent abroad for publication. The author was a priest and professor at the Theological Institute in Bucharest, and was imprisoned between 1948 and 1964. While in the notorious prison of Pitești, he was forced to take part in the infamous re-education experiment in that prison, which turned a part of the prisoners into the torturers of the others. Tormented by such a terrible sin, Calciu-Dumitreasa tried, according to his own confession, to write about this prison experience in order to come to terms with it. However, he changed his priorities when, in the aftermath of the earthquake of 1977, the demolition of churches in Bucharest began while the hierarchy of the Romanian Orthodox Church kept quiet. It was then that Calciu-Dumitreasa conceived this series of non-conformist sermons, in which he argued against atheist education and reminded his students of fundamental Christian values, of their mission as priests who must build, and not destroy, churches in order to take care of their parish communities. Seven of the sermons were delivered by the author in the Radu Vodă Church in Bucharest between 8 March and 19 April 1978. Particularly important is the sermon of 15 March 1978, in which Calciu-Dumitreasa explicitly condemned the demolition of the Enei Church, the first church demolished in Bucharest. The sixth sermon, of 12 April 1978, was no longer delivered in the church but in front of it, for the authorities had closed the church and locked the students in their dormitories in order to impede them from attending what had turned in the meantime into an increasingly popular event. The eighth sermon was supposed to open a new cycle entitled “Christianity and Culture” on 17 May 1978, but it was never delivered due to the author’s removal from his teaching position. Continuously harassed by the secret police, in 1979 Calciu-Dumitreasa endorsed the establishment of the Free Trade Union of the Working People of Romania, which caused his arrest and imprisonment for another five years. He was released only in 1985, after intense international lobbying, especially by the United States administration, which threatened the Romanian communist regime with the withdrawal of Most Favoured Nation status. A year later, he went into exile in the United States, where he remained until his death. This manuscript was probably confiscated on the occasion of his arrest in 1979. This version of the sermons differs slightly from the post-communist published volume because it mentions the persons who were responsible for the interruption of his cycle of sermons in 1978.

Jaromír Šavrda, a writer, poet, journalist and dissident from Ostrava, was, because of his samizdat activities, twice held in the custodial prison in Ostrava and later imprisoned in Ostrov nad Ohří, first from September 1978 until March 1981 and then from September 1982 until October 1984. During his second stay in prison, Šavrda wrote two books reflecting his experiences as a political prisoner; they depict his personal experiences from police persecution and describe the lives of people that Šavrda met in prison. The first of the books was “Vězeň č. 1260” (The Prisoner No. 1260), written between September and November 1982 and published as samizdat, followed by “Ostrov v souostroví” (The Island in the Archipelago), written by Šavrda between November 1982 and January 1983. After his return from prison, this two texts were published in 1987 as an omnibus called “Přechodné adresy” (The Temporary Addresses), at first in samizdat edition Popelnice and then in edition Expedice. “Přechodné adresy” was first officially published in the 1990s (Ostrava: WMCG 1991, 1993). Both texts were also published separately with original titles in 2009 (Prague: Pulchra, 2009). “Přechodné adresy” (2009) is also a name of a documentary film about Jaromír Šavrda directed by Petra Všelichová.

The collection includes documents (archival material) stored in the archive of the "Commission for the Disclosure of Documents and Announcing Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens with the State Security and the Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian People's Army", commonly called "Commission for Dossiers" (Comdos) in Bulgarian. 

The collection documents developments among the Bulgarian intelligentsia during the communist regime through the perspective of the secret police and reveals their strategies of observation and persecution of critical intellectuals.

The Soros Foundation Hungary project in support of new democratic organizations in 1989–1990

By the spring of 1989, Hungary had managed to halfway through the process of political transition: the political monopoly of the one-party communist system had already been shaken, but civilian society and democratic forces still could not break through the colossal structure of the forty-year-old monolithic regime. There were fewer and fewer legal and political barriers to democratic organizations, and the main obstacles were the lacks of finances and media coverage concerning the awakening society and the political opposition. Independent media channels and organs in the print press which could inform the public efficiently about major political changes were still badly needed in the country. Similarly, there was not adequate public space or office infrastructure for the newly launched local and national movements, proto-parties, organizations, student clubs, trade unions, etc. The accelerated process of forming new parties, together with the beginning of the Roundtable Sessions of the Democratic Opposition and then the Nationwide Negotiations made it clear that the traditional semi-conspiratorial, amateur strategies used by the oppositional forces were wholly insufficient to remove the old monopoly power system.

From the outset, Soros Foundation Hungary (HSF), as the main supporter of independent civilian initiatives, realized that it was time to overtly “underwrite democracy,” to borrow from the title one of the books by Soros. In the spring of 1989, Soros publicly offered a sum of one million US dollars in support of the newly launched democratic organizations. The grand curatory (the main decision-making Advisory Board) discussed the practical details of the planned project at two sessions. The call for applications was then published, and an operative staff was formed in May to manage the project, led by László Sólyom. It included Gábor Fodor, Elemér Hankiss, László Kardos, and a dozen members of the SFH secretariat.

The new support project, as was expected, became extremely popular within a short period of time, and the deadline for the submission of applications was eventually extended six times to eighteen months, with more than double the sum Soros originally had intended to spend on the project. (It proved to be an almost ceaseless rally, which is well reflected in the fact that, as late as October 1990, there was still a package of 25 new applications for support waiting to be assessed, most of them convincing cases with rightful claims.) In 1989, 353 applications were received from various parts of the country. During the first year run of the project, the Advisory Board of the Soros Foundation Hungary approved claims made by 157 applicants and donated a total of 44 million Hungarian forints. It also distributed badly needed office equipment: 49 copy-machines, 26 computers, 12 telefax machines, 6 phone sets with recording machines, and 3 laser printers.

Some of the successful applicants gained support from the Soros Foundation Hungary in 1989–1990:

Nationwide movements, and organizations: League to Abolish Capital Punishment, the Independent Lawyers’ Forum, the International Service for Human Rights, the Asylum Committee, the Press Club for Free Public Speech, the Raoul Wallenberg Society (Budapest-Pécs) Committee for Historical Justice, the Foundation for Aiding the Poor. Trade unions: the League of Independent Democratic Trade Unions, the Trade Union of Employees of Public Collections and Cultural Institutions, the Educators’ Democratic Trade Union, the Solidarity Alliance of Workers’ Trade Unions, the Scientific Workers’ Democratic Trade Union, the Chemical Industry Workers’ Democratic Trade Union. Church organizations: (Lutheran) the Evangelical Youth Association, the Association of Christian Intellectuals, the Ecumenical Fraternal Society of Christians, the Hungarian Protestant Cultural Society. Minority organizations: the Association of Transylvanian Hungarians, the Rákóczi Union, the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Society, the PHRALIPE Independent Gipsy Association, the FII CU NOI Roma Society. Environment Protection: the Danube Circle, the Independent Center for Ecology, the Holocén Society for Nature Protection.

Of the roughly 500 applicants, 201 organizations and organs (printed press, local radio and tv channels) received valuable financial and material help from the Soros Foundation Hungary. The project, the deadline for which was extended six times, lasted until late 1990, and it distributed more than double the originally offered sum, i.e. significantly more than two million USD.

Ferdinand Peroutka, who represented the democratic past of Czechoslovakia, and mainly the First Czechoslovak Republic, became the director of the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in New York on 6 April 1950. The Czechoslovak service of the RFE began its regular broadcasting from Munich on 1 May 1951 with the famous phrase “This is the voice of Free Czechoslovakia, Radio Free Europe.” One of the first speakers was also Ferdinand Peroutka, who stated, besides other things: “One magazine would mean little in a country where freedom reigns. But one free magazine, one radio station in a dictatorial regime – that is a revolution, because such a system is based on the fact that only the government can speak and nobody can answer back, that anyone can be charged, but nobody can defend themselves. However, once even a fraction of freedom enters that rigid and artificial system, from anywhere, once it is again possible to set argument against argument, once it is no longer possible to act without criticism, once there is a place to call untruths into question, then this whole proud system quavers.”

The Literary Archives of the Museum of Czech Literature possesses a mimeograph copy of the typescript of this speech.

The document that records the extent of the search carried out at the home of the Petrescus on 18 May 1983 is in the family’s private collection in an original copy, made out by the officers who took part in the event. Another two copies were kept by the communist authorities of the time. The minute records that the Petrescus were present at the search, as were two witnesses. It consists of four pages, very clearly written, and is made out in the name of the Iaşi County Inspectorate of the Securitate. Each page is signed both by the representatives of the forces of control and repression and by the witnesses and the couple themselves. The document lists the objects that were kept by the Securitate on this occasion: books; audio cassettes, including one containing a recording of Virgil Ierunca’s broadcast on Radio Free Europe in which he highly praised Dan Petrescu and other young intellectuals in Iaşi for their articles in the student magazines Dialog and Opinia Studenţească; rolls of recording tape; photographs; letters from various people; pages of notes; and a folder labelled “Furrows across the baulks – feuilleton novel of the collectivisation,” containing forty-five leaves of the manuscript of this collective novel. Among the books confiscated were some that later became classic works of critical analysis of the communist system, but which were very recent publications at the time, for example La Nomenklatura, les privilégiés en URSS  by Mikhail Voslensky (1980) and L'Union soviétique survivra-t-elle en 1984? by Andrei Amalrik (1977). There were also critical works on Romanian communism published by Romanian writers in exile, such as La Cité totale by Constantin Dumitrescu (1980). The couple managed to save some books from confiscation, but of those removed from their home by the Securitate only one was given back to them, though it is not clear on which criteria this particular book, Les Sources et le sens du communisme russe by Nikolai Berdyaev, was returned – perhaps because it dated from 1938, so was much older than the others. Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu recalls how they managed to hide some of the most critical, and implicitly the most incriminating books: “The next day, 18 May 1983, at six o’clock sharp in the morning, the guys burst in. […] At first they were very pleasant. They gave us time to get dressed, and those minutes gave us a chance to remove some books, to give them to my aunt, who stuck them under her jacket, under her overcoat. Solzhenitsyn, for example. We saved the Gulag and a few others. My aunt took them into her room, where they had no mandate to enter and where they didn’t think of entering. [… Wherever they had a mandate,] they left nothing untouched. Nothing, nothing. You realised that you could hide something anywhere, in the garden, in the house, in the woodshed, and they would rummage around and they could find it. They were capable of moving everything, of going through everything.” And regarding the immediate consequence of the search, interrogation at the Securitate headquarters, she adds: “The search lasted approximately five hours. From six in the morning to eleven. […] Then they took us up – ‘up’ meaning to the Securitate. It was on a street named Triumfului. Now after 1989, the gangs of Securitate people have built a district of apartment blocks that they own.” Dan Petrescu adds, with regard to the manner in which those who came conduct the search acted in order to find what interested them, underlining that the Securitate was particularly interested in a cassette with the recording of a Radio Free Europe broadcast, in which some young Iaşi writers had been highly praised, among them himself, and in the manuscript of the collective novel: “They had come on the basis of information, for they were looking for certain things. They were looking for a recording of a broadcast on Radio Free Europe where [Virgil] Ierunca praised us and… they were looking for books […] They confiscated a lot of books from us. Only one was given back to us, after the search. Berdyaev – his book about the sources and the meaning of communism. At the same time they asked me about the novel [“Furrows Across the Baulks” revisited]. I said to them: ‘Why are you still looking for it? Because you’ve already got it.’ They had taken it from George Pruteanu. […] It didn’t exist in more than one manuscript. There were no copies. It passed from one to the next and each one added to it. They were also looking for letters in the search.” Dan Petrescu adds, to give a clearer picture of those months, another detail that casts a new light on that moment: “The search took place, at our home, in May 1983. In March, I found out later in documents at CNSAS, the Securitate guys had made new recruits in literary circles in Iaşi. Ten new names. In editorial boards of periodicals, publishing houses, that sort of thing.”

The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Offences against the Polish Nation (IPN) was created under parliament act of 1998 and is a state body authorised to carry out research, educational, archival, investigative, and vetting activities. The head office is located in Warsaw and there are 11 branch offices in larger cities, as well as 7 delegations. The historical scope of Institute’s activities is very ample, as its operations concern the period from 1944 to 1989.  Its tasks include collecting and managing national security services’ documents created between 22 July 1944 and 31 July 1990, as well as investigating Nazi and communist crimes - against Polish nationals or Polish citizens of other nationalities - committed between 8 November 1917 and 31 July 1990. Other important activities include scientific research and public education. Institute of National Remembrance collaborates closely with State Archives, veteran organisations, historical associations and foreign agendas involved in research and commemoration of the recent history, in particular history of Central-Eastern Europe. 

The exhibition entitled “A harcoló város/The Fighting City, 1986” was organized by the amateur artist group Inconnu to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The police banned the event on the opening day and destroyed the artworks. However, before that, an agent took photos of the compositions. Thus, the secret police itself created, through the act of destruction, a group of sources which is today the single visual trace of the exhibition. This photo collection is kept in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State  Security Forces (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára – ÁBTL).

The document reproduces the report drawn up by two representatives of the communist Militia following the search carried out on 3 December 1986 for the purpose of investigating the possible illegal basis of the collection of art stored in Brad at the home of Dr Sorin Costina. Under Law 18/1968 regarding the control of the provenance of goods not acquired through legal means, the possessions of any physical person could be checked if there were “data or indications,” basically meaning information collected through informers, pointing to “an evident disproportion” between the estimated value of a person’s possessions and the income legally obtained by that person. The text of this minute, drawn up in the wooden language of the communist authorities, does not identify in its conclusions any illegality that might have been found as a result of the search. However it is highly relevant with regard to the manner in which the communist authorities penetrated the private lives of citizens. The document mentions that the search lasted approximately three hours and provides in ten hand-written pages a detailed inventory of all the items found in the Costina family home. It was drawn up in three copies, one of which, in the original, is now in the Costina family archive.

Gábor Demszy’s collection contains not only samizdat books and journals but also objects. The ramka (bolting-cloth stretched on a wooden frame) was a tool used in the samizdat printing process and today constitutes an important relic object of this technique.

The Goma Movement Ad-hoc Collection includes numerous plans of action against the individuals involved in supporting the open letter of protest against the violation of human rights in Romania which was to be addressed to the CSCE Follow-Up Conference in Belgrade. Each Securitate informative surveillance file contains periodically updated plans of action, but these usually required only the approval of the high-ranking Securitate officer in charge of the case of the person in question. What is remarkable about this plan of action, which is part of Goma’s personal file, is its endorsement by the highest possible office holders in the Ministry of the Interior, to which the Direction of State Security was directly subordinated in 1977: the plan was countersigned by Nicolae Pleșiță, first deputy minister, and finally approved by Teodor Coman, the minister of the interior himself. Obviously, the hierarchical level of those who endorsed this plan indicates the great importance attached to this case. It is worth noting that the “successful” handling of the Goma Movement, in which Pleșiță involved himself and acted as Goma’s head interrogator, led to his promotion to the rank of lieutenant general in 1977. The same year, he coordinated the repressive measures taken by the regime in the aftermath of the Jiu Valley miners’ strike of August. Pleșiță remains notorious, however, for his actions while head of the Centre for Foreign Intelligence between 1980 and 1984, in particular for the 1982 failed attempt at suppressing Goma while in exile in Paris, and for the 1981 bomb attack on the RFE headquarters in Munich, for which the Securitate seems to have hired the infamous terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. After 1989, Pleșiță showed no remorse for his misdeeds, and all attempts to hold him legally responsible for these wrongdoings eventually failed.     

Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca had an intense correspondence with Romanian intellectuals in exile and a part of this correspondence is preserved in the collection housed by the National Archives in Bucharest. Among the letters preserved here there is one signed by the well-known historian of religions, Mircea Eliade. Eliade left Romania in 1940 and dedicated his entire intellectual activity in exile to the study of history of religions and the history and philosophy of culture.

In his letter of 27 March 1971, which was read by Monica Lovinescu in her broadcast on RFE under the suggestive title of Refutation, Mircea Eliade speaks about the interview he granted to Adrian Păunescu and published in the Romanian magazine Contemporanul (The contemporary) on 10 and 17 March 1971. The historian of religion underlines the fact that he agreed to answer Păunescu’s questions on condition that the interview would be published in full. To his unpleasant surprise, the conversation was drastically censored and according to Eliade, the cuts dramatically altered the meaning of the interview. Specifically, the Romanian censorship removed those parts in which Eliade mentioned autobiographical details connected to his youth in interwar Romania, such as the impact that Nae Ionescu, a very influential right-wing-oriented journalist and professor of philosophy, had on his intellectual development. Also, the names of other renowned Romanian exiles such as Emil Cioran and Eugène Ionesco were removed, as was any reference to his co-generationist, Mircea Vulcănescu, who ended his life in a communist prison. Finally, any mention of his writings about the history of religion and philosophy of culture, which were central in Eliade’s work, were absent from the published interview. Consequently, Eliade bitterly concluded that: "As for the memories of the nights spent together in the winter of 1971, they are evoked by the poet and journalist Adrian Păunescu and belong to him entirely. When we were talking, I thought we were speaking the same language: the old, honest Romanian language that I learned in my childhood and which I am still speaking now, in my old age. I admit with immense sadness that I was wrong."

The censorship of the interview can be easily understood if one considers the political and cultural context in Romania at the beginning of the 1970s. The nationalist turn of the Ceaușescu regime (Petrescu 2009, 523–544) did not result in the rehabilitation of Nae Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, or Mircea Vulcănescu whose names were still on the list of the Romanian censorship. Moreover, the ending of the liberalisation period, marked by the so-called Theses of July 1971 on improving political-ideological education, made even more problematic the publishing of any reference to religion and history of religions. The paradox that Mircea Eliade accepted an interview with Adrian Păunescu only on the basis of the latter’s assurance that the text was going to be published uncensored in Romania can be understood if one takes into consideration the situation of the two protagonists involved. Since Mircea Eliade left Romania in 1940, he had lost touch with what was really going on in the country, and he seems to have been unaware about what censorship really meant and how it actually worked.  As for Adrian Păunescu, at that time a young man of only twenty-eight and without any obvious connection with the communist regime, he had come to the United States at the invitation of several Romanian writers. Enticed by the young poet’s genuine interest in his person and work, Mircea Eliade not only agreed to grant him an interview, but also answered wholeheartedly the provocative questions asked by Adrian Păunescu, at that time a promising and uncommitted young writer (Manolescu 2014).

The collection consists of material about violations of the rights of national minorities and deportees, and people persecuted for anti-Soviet activities, as well as documents about samizdat publications and the persecution of believers. 

The collection of the Czech journalist, dramatist and director of the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe, Ferdinand Peroutka (1895–1978), contains unique sources for the history of the Czechoslovak exile after 1948.

The Central Press Supervision Authority files, stored at the Security Services Archive in Prague, contain materials documenting the control of press and newly issued publications in Czechoslovakia from 1953 to 1968. Examples of censorship with extensive transcriptions from ‘defective’ literary works are very valuable as they include unknown information on the ways authors and editors negotiated with the censors, reveal the origins of the works, provide information on the alterations that were imposed and the existence of text variants, and they even cover prominent authors’ previously unknown works.