The Scriptum.cz web archive provides access to various non-commercial and online Czech exile and samizdat periodicals. This is a unique collection of works that are often not accessible anywhere and are constantly being refilled.

This photo reflects the way in which the Romanian exile organised itself and acted to present in the West the urban systematisation project of the Ceaușescu regime, which involved the demolition, mutilation, or destruction of the national heritage. The photo captures the moment when the International Association for the Protection of Monuments and Historic Sites in Romania was set up in Paris in 1985. On that occasion, the Association organised a protest on the streets of Paris, during which it displayed a series of placards with texts about Communist Romania, accompanied by photographs of historic monuments destroyed by the Communists or about to be demolished or moved. These details are captured in the photograph in question, which can be found in the Ștefan Gane collection in the original, 10x15 cm, printed on colour paper. The purpose of the Association was to draw the attention of political decision-makers and international public opinion to the project of the communist regime in Romania for the demolition of the architectural and urban heritage. The actions undertaken by the Association focused in particular on drawing media attention to the demolition of the city centre of Bucharest, which was planned by the authorities of the totalitarian regime so that they could reconstruct it according to the communist architectural vision.

In 1958, a group of 55 Latvian scientists and cultural figures signed a petition against the Pļaviņas Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) project, because it envisaged the flooding of part of the Daugava valley, one of the most beautiful areas in Latvia, which was rich in archaeological and historic monuments. It also had a symbolic value as part of the Latvian nation-building narrative. Due to the efforts of the Soviet authorities to suppress the protest, very few documents are available, some of which are in the Museum of the River Daugava.

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.

The Pavao Tijan Papers are deposited in the Archives of the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts in Zagreb. It demonstrates the cultural-oppositional activities of the Croatian émigré Pavao Tijan, who lived in Madrid after the Second World War. There, Tijan organized anti-communist activities against the Yugoslav regime and also against global communism during the time of the Cold War. This collection is very important to the little known Croatian cultural history of the émigré colony of Spain.

Jiří Lederer (1922-1983) was a Czech journalist and publicist, one of the most prominent journalists during the "Prague Spring" in 1968. In the 1970s he participated in the work of the Czechoslovak opposition and was one of the first signatories of Charter 77. During the 1970s he was imprisoned several times. In 1980 he went into exile. The collection mainly contains materials and notes from the period around the Prague Spring.

This letter is an important document for the history of the post-war Romanian exile community because it is proof of the activity of fighting communist propaganda outside the country, as well as of the integration of Romanian culture into Western culture. Such activity was also carried out by Sanda Budiș, an exile community personality, who emigrated to Switzerland in 1973. One of her actions, alongside another representative of the Romanian exile community in Switzerland, the lawyer Dumitru Stambuliu, consisted in supplying the Swiss Library for Eastern Europe in Bern with publications of the Romanian exile community. The starting point of Sanda Budiș’s project was a book donation from Romania, which the Romanian ambassador to Switzerland made to the Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne in 1984. This donation took place during a festivity advertised in the local press. In response, Sanda Budiș took the initiative to donate publications of the Romanian exile community from her personal library to this library, but her donation was denied "for political reasons." Consequently, she addressed the leadership of another institution – the Swiss Library for Eastern Europe in Bern – which served at the time as a documentary fonds for the Swiss Eastern Institute (Institut suisse de recherche sur les pays de l'Est–ISE/Schweizerische Ostinstitut–SOI), an institute that carried out research on communist countries. At the Institute, both the management and the members were Swiss personalities with authority in their field of expertise. The management of this library accepted her donation “with great satisfaction, especially as it is literally flooded by propaganda publications sent free and regularly by the various propaganda officers of the Ceaușescu regime.” In order to counteract the propaganda of the Romanian communist authorities, Sanda Budiș continued her efforts by sending letters to the management of important and representative publications of the Romanian exile community. Among the recipients of such letters was Virgil Ierunca, who accepted her invitation and sent to the library not only newspapers and magazines of the exile community, but also books published by Romanians abroad. Ierunca also responded to Sanda Budiș in a letter in which he congratulated and thanked her for the action she had initiated. The original handwritten letter is to be found today in the Sanda Budiş Collection at IICCMER.

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.

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.

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 Karl Laantee collection at the Estonian Cultural History Archive is part of the large archival legacy of Karl Laantee, an émigré Estonian religious activist, and announcer with the Voice of America radio station. 

This photograph from the Ștefan Gane Collection is a testimony to the Ceaușescu regime's policy of transforming the urban landscape and destroying everything that was opposed to its vision. An example of this is the almost total destruction in 1985 of the Mihai Vodă Monastery, of which only the church and the bell tower were preserved and moved to another site down an incline.

The church of the former Mihai Vodă Monastery is an emblem of premodern Bucharest and one of the oldest buildings that have been preserved in Bucharest. Built in 1594, over time it had several destinations, including Princely Residence, Military Hospital, Medical School, and headquarters of the State Archives. It was founded by one of the most important rulers in the Romanians' national history: Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave). He was the ruler of Wallachia between 1593 and 1601 and the only leader of one of the premodern states existing in the modern perimeter of modern Romania that unified, for the period 1600–1601, a territory roughly equal to that of today's Romania. Thus Mihai Viteazul was considered from the nineteenth century an important figure in national history. Under the communist regime, historiography of gave Mihai Viteazul a much more important place in national history than he had had before. He was named as the prefigurer of the so-called "Union of 1918". This historical event consisted of the annexation of the historical regions of Austro-Hungary, inhabited mostly by Romanians to the so-called Old Kingdom of Romania and was materialised in the Peace Treaties of Saint-Germain (1919) and Trianon (1920). This image of Mihai Viteazul as anticipator of the “Union of 1918” was strongly promoted under the Ceauşescu regime not only through textbooks and historical works, but also through the historical film Mihai Viteazul, made in 1970.

Despite the overwhelming importance the communist regime granted to Mihai Viteazul, the monastery complex he founded became the most famous victim of the total demolition of Bucharest. The site where it was located, a high position in the urban landscape of the capital, was assigned by the communist authorities to the building that is now home to the Romanian Parliament. In 1985 the monastery was demolished, but not entirely. At the last moment, the church and the bell tower were moved, despite the initial plan that everything should be destroyed. The church was moved to the base of the hill, where it was subsequently hidden by communist buildings. The church was originally located on Mihai Vodă Hill, on the former Archives Street no. 2, and was moved to Sapienţei Street no. 4, where it still stands. This photograph was taken clandestinely by Ștefan Gane a few months before the edifice was moved, and went with him to France in 1985 when he emigrated. The photo in question, which is today in the Ștefan Gane collection, is in the original, 10x15 cm, printed on black and white paper. Today it is an important historical source for understanding and writing a part of Romania's recent history in connection with the project of destruction of the national patrimony practised by the communist regime between 1977 and 1989.

Ivan Medek (1925-2010) was a prominent Czech music publicist, a signatory of Charter 77 and a founding member of VONS. In 1978 he went into exile, where he founded the Press Service and worked with Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. This collection contains unique documents from his exile activity.

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”.

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 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 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.

The personal collection of Croatian philosopher and sociologist Rudi Supek contains documents and photographs that testify to Supek's intellectual activity, which had been prevented in some phases of his life. Supek was the editor of two critically-oriented Marxist journals, Pogledi and Praxis, and as one of the main protagonists of the Korčula Summer School of Philosophy, he expressed views that did not align with those promoted by the Communist authorities. Supek's disagreement with the practices of the communist regime stemmed from his understanding of the position of intellectuals in society and his stance that there is no socialism without democracy. This collection also illustrates Supek's work as one of the pioneers of the environmental movement in Yugoslavia.

Part of a civic and ethical project with no equivalent in any of the other former communist countries of Europe, the Museum collection of the Sighet Memorial is an extraordinary site of memory, both individual and collective, of Romanian communism seen from the perspective of the victims of the regime. The Museum collection of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance includes an impressive number of documents, photographs, letters, newspaper collections, books, manuscripts, albums, and various other objects illustrating both the repressive dimension of the communist regime in Romania and the reaction of Romanian society to that regime, in accordance with the vision promoted by the Civic Academy Foundation through the intermediary of the International Centre for Studies into Communism. 

The collection illustrates Adrian Marino’s intellectual evolution as a historian and literary critic who chose to pursue his activity outside the institutions controlled by the communist regime. The Marino Collection includes books, original manuscripts, and the author’s correspondence, which reflects a critical perspective on Romanian literary life in the period 1964–1989.

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 protest campaign against the construction of the Daugavpils hydroelectric station in 1986-1987 was the first issue during perestroika in Latvia to involve the wider public, especially the intelligentsia, and it was the first step on the path that led to the restoration of national independence. This was the first case during the Soviet occupation when the endeavours of the intelligentsia to defend the natural and historical riches of Latvia were successful. The collection consists of material gathered by the staff of the Museum of the River Daugava, and donated to the museum in 1987-1998 by several people who were involved in the 1986-1987 protest campaign, mostly among the protesters, but there is also material provided by their opponents too. 

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 Sanda Stolojan Collection is an important source of documentation for understanding and writing the history of that particular segment of the Romanian exile community which was actively involved in the West in unmasking the communist regime in Romania. At the same time, this private archive contributes to an understanding of Romanian–French bilateral relations between 1968 and 1998. In particular, the collection illustrates the activity of the collector and other personalities of the exile aimed at promoting respect for human rights in Romania and stopping the demolitions imposed by the communist authorities as part of Bucharest's systematisation programme, and later at supporting the reconstruction of democracy in their country of origin.

Václav Havel (1936-2011) was an important Czech playwright and essayist, a critic of the communist regime, one of the initiators of Charter 77, a founding member of VONS (The Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted), a political prisoner and later president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. The collection consists mainly of materials of his dramatic creation and its dissenting effect.

The Ștefan Gane Collection documents in photographs and slides the extent of the demolitions imposed by the so-called systematisation programme in Bucharest following the devastating earthquake of 4 March 1977, which the communist regime used as a pretext for destroying or mutilating numerous historic monuments. The Ștefan Gane Collection is also an important source for understanding and writing the history of that particular segment of the Romanian exile community which was extremely active in disseminating in Western countries information about the aberrant policies of the Ceaușescu regime. In particular, this personal archive illustrates the efforts of the collector and of other personalities from the exile community to stop the systematisation of Bucharest.

This letter is an important document for the history of the post-war Romanian exile community because it is a proof of the attempt of a Romanian dissident to establish a connection with the emigration. The purpose was to gain the support of Romanians abroad. If their situation was publicised in the West, then there were chances that once returned to their country they would not suffer the reprisals of the communist regime. Also, such actions were meant to trigger the support of international public opinion in criticising Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship. One such example was the action of the Romanian writer and journalist Victor Frunză during a tour in France in 1978. In Paris, he wrote a letter to Eugène Ionesco (Eugen Ionescu), a French-language writer originally from Romania, a representative of the theatre of the absurd and a member of the French Academy. In this document, sent on 8 September 1978, Victor Frunză informed Eugène Ionesco that, in France, he criticised openly the situation in communist Romania, especially the personal power and personality cult of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Starting from the idea that he was not the first Romanian and hopefully not the last to do so, Frunză told Ionesco that his approach was deliberately chosen, in full awareness of the possible consequences for him: "When I did this, I knew what I could expect, but I have defeated my fear (...). The sense of the justice of my criticisms gives me the strength to resist. There is no fear of the reprisals that will come anyway, but in the face of the fears of others who can in my mind support me, and in fact will leave me. Immense is the fear of staying alone, as in a desert." In conclusion, Victor Frunză asked Eugène Ionesco to publicly support his action of criticising the dictatorship and personality cult of Nicolae Ceaușescu.

The collection includes various pieces of documentation about the ‘Phosphorite War’ that took place in Estonia in 1987, and material about the Estonian television programme ‘Panda’ in the second half of the 1980s. The collector of the material is Juhan Aare, the journalist and politician who unleashed the Phosphorite War. The most valuable part of the collection is made up of the letters written by people in Estonia and sent to Juhan Aare or to Estonian Television. These letters refer to the environmental situation and the national question in Estonia.

The collection comprising the documents collected by Ion Raţiu and Viorel V. Tilea gives detailed insights into the activities of its two creators, who were key political and cultural personalities of the Romanian diaspora. It represents one of the most valuable sources of documentation for the history of the Romanian exile community in the West during the Cold War period.

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.

The Ion Dumitru Collection is the richest and most diverse of all the private archives of the Romanian exile community, which makes it indispensable for the study of the history of postwar Romanian exile. The collection is also a fundamental source for documenting and understanding Romania's (domestic and foreign) political, cultural, economic, and social evolution during both the communist and post-communist periods. At the same time, this private archive is a historical source both for understanding how the Bucharest authorities acted to divide the Romanians abroad and to counteract their actions aimed at unmasking the wrondoings of the communist regime between 1948 and 1989 in the West and for how Romanians within the country perceived the emigrant community.

This is the collection of the prominent Yugoslav intellectual and dissident, Zoran Đinđić. During the seventies, Đinđić was active in the Student Union of the Faculty of Philosophy and in informal groups of the radical left. He left Yugoslavia in 1977 and returned at the beginning of the 1990s, becoming one of the most important leaders of the opposition movement after the state’s disintegration. From 2001 to 2003, he served as prime minister of Serbia. The largest part of the collection is focused on the period after 1990, thanks to his active political engagement, while a smaller part covers his dissident activities during the socialist era. 

The collection "Only the Forbidden Newspapers Remain in History!" (Stefan Prodev) is one of the many collections of funds of the National Library "St. Cyril and St. Methodius "(NBCM), containing rich and diverse materials for and from the socialist period.

The newspapers and magazines presented in the collection show the possible forms of opposition by journalists and authors; the ways in which questions of freedom of the press were raised; the attempts to circumvent censorship and to rise critical issues on the regime; to develop new insights into artistic and genre diversity.

Among the very few images that were taken from a high position, Lucian Ionică draws attention to those taken in a central place for the revolutionary events of Timişoara in December 1989: the former Opera Square, now Victory Square. He mentions that he never really felt any serious threat when he tried to take photographs, and that, on the contrary, he experienced a moment of great good fortune and generosity precisely on the occasion of taking these photographs from above. “In my case, the fear I had had that I might encounter hostile reactions proved unfounded. No one bothered me, no one prevented me from taking photographs. On the contrary, for one of the photographs I was even the beneficiary of a combination of favourable circumstances: in Victory Square, to capture that crowd, I couldn’t photograph from ground level. I had to go upstairs in a building. And I went upstairs in the building situated diagonally opposite the Opera Theatre, where at the time there was a milk-bar – now it’s McDonalds – and on its façade, high up, you can still see the marks of bullets from the Revolution. Quite simply, I just knocked on a door, and the gentleman agreed to let me onto his balcony. And from there I took photographs – one of which is among the best known photographs of Opera/Victory Square during the Revolution. I took a few pictures from there.”

Among these photographs mentioned by Lucian Ionică, one in particular, even after such a long time, has a very powerful significance for him: “From the balcony  I took a number of photographs, among them one that I would like to see turned into a monument. Of course there would have to be an artist, a sculptor who wanted to do this. There was, and I think there still is an electrical installation there. It’s an installation enclosed in a box, like a 70cm x 70cm square about 2 metres long. Well, on the surface of that there were five people, like a living statue. The image is very powerful, both visually and symbolically. As if people were standing on a pedestal, ordinary people on a pedestal. If a sculpture in realistic style were made from that photograph, it would show, in my opinion, that desire of people both to see and to participate in what was happening there.

The collection of Jaroslav Šabata is a unique collection and testimony of a former member of the Communist Party and later a Charter 77 spokesperson. This collection is made up of the private documents of Šabata, which he gathered during his lifetime and which were donated to the archive after his death. 

This thematic collection documents the work of the Commission for the Examination of Nationalist Phenomena in the Emigrant Foundation of Croatia (EFC) of Executive Council of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia (EC CC LCC), in the period from 1964 to 1967. The commission was established solely to monitor the activities of the EFC's president, Većeslav Holjevac, and some of his associates, who were considered as opposition figures and nationalists. The collection contains documents that explicitly cite examples of oppositional activities in the EFC which testify to the role of the EFC leadership in opposition in the field of culture pertaining to Croatian emigrant communities, as well as the role of CC LCC in their condemnation.

Rudolf Mihle (1937–2008) was one of the most important Czech amateur filmmakers. Many of his films criticised the communist regime and society. Therefore, some of his films were censored and could not be distributed. He was an active member of the Czech Club of Amateur Filmmakers.

This issue numbers only fourteen pages and comprises the “Introduction” signed by Attila Ara-Kovács and Antal Károly Tóth’s “Memorandum” and “Programme Proposal,” together with a presentation of the contents of the previously published seven issues. At the time of publishing the editors placed their hope in the “inner and activated” resistance of the population and on “the support of Hungary and of the democratic powers of the world,” while expecting repressive actions against themselves. In their effort to change the system “they saw a friend, a supportive partner with sober judgment in everyone who detested tyranny, and especially in the Romanian people.” They stated that they were ready to share their dedication and solidarity with all of their Romanian friends and fellow sufferers in order to regain their common freedom. Moreover, the authors found it important to underline that “this solidarity, this dedication does not convey and bear any hidden intentions.”

The “Memorandum” which was also sent to the participants of the Madrid CSCE Follow-up Conference, takes a stand in favour of the Hungarian minority, providing a brief account of the ethnic policy of Ceaușescu’s regime, the measures aimed at assimilation and as the methods applied to hamper the preservation and development of the Transylvanian Hungarian collective identity. It highlights the concept of second-class citizenship and the lack of possibilities of self-defence, the nonexistence of community interest groups. It pointed out that the chances of changing the situation are most affected by the fact that international conventions fail to take a stand with regard to the collective rights of minorities and that the mode of approach applied in international practice that only considers the point of view of human rights, ignores the values inherent in an ethnic minority, a community marked by rich tradition, particular culture and collective identity. The editors argue that minority values should deserve separate protection in contrast to those of the majority population which enjoy a dominant position. They state that an international effort which tries to protect the rights of minorities without taking into consideration their group character involuntarily places them at the mercy of the majority. In order to change their disenfranchised situation, the editors request that the conventions about to be concluded at the Madrid Conference should include the rights of Transylvanian Hungarians to preserve their values. The “Memorandum” summarises the aspirations of the editors in four paragraphs in which they ask that the Transylvanian Hungarians be allowed the possibility to feel that they are an organic part of the Hungarian nation “and thus all ethnic minorities should be granted equal rights,” that they might preserve their particular collective values and be able to create an organisation to promote their independent interests. They see a guarantee for the enforcement of these rights in the establishment of an impartial international committee.

They annexed a “Programme Proposal” to the “Memorandum,” in which they formulated in detail the most important demands in with of solving the situation of the Transylvanian Hungarians in communist Romania. The six-page document explains that the rights necessary for survival exist merely in theory and underlines the strong discrepancy between the situation depicted in official declarations or speeches and the everyday practice. Under these circumstances, demanding any rights seems an impossible mission. Moreover, the approval of any motion whatsoever is unimaginable without the proper intervention of some influential personality. Based on the assumption that two ethnic groups can only live together side-by-side if they treat each other as equal partners, the editors requested that Hungarians in Romania be granted the possibility “to freely demand the defence of their rights and interests.” They were aware of the improper timing of their demand as “even cultural claims formulated in pretentious language were openly labelled as reclaiming-revisionist.” They were also aware that although the Eastern European situation rendered the chances of seeing such claims solved entirely impossible, the worsening conditions forced them to take action considering that, as they themselves explained: “we cannot afford the luxury of waiting for a miracle to happen if we want to see a change.”

The “Programme Proposal” formulates the “demands” in ten paragraphs that occasionally make necessary the inclusion of several subparagraphs. The first demand repeats the first paragraph of the “Memorandum,” namely, that the Hungarians in Romania should be considered as an organic part of the entire Hungarian nation, and, as Romanian citizens, they should have the right to freely maintain their contacts with the Hungarian People’s Republic “both on an institutional and an individual level.” They also added another nine subparagraphs in which, among others things, they touched on the right to travel freely, the abolition of the regulation concerning the accommodation of foreign friends and of the practice of confiscating Hungarian cultural products at the customs, the right to freely invite Hungarian bands and personalities from the neighbouring countries, and the right of Transylvanians to have access to Hungarian TV channels as well as to books and publications from outside Romania which were in the Hungarian language.

The second “demand” asks for an institutional framework which would allow the cultural autonomy and the preservation of the collective identity of the Hungarian minority in Romania. This demand is detailed in eighteen subparagraphs. They demand that art. 22 of the 1965 Constitution should be completed with the right of minorities to create an interest organisation with an independent media organ, responsible for the administration of Hungarian cultural life and school policy, the control of Hungarian staff policy, the protection of monuments, and the legal remedy for minority grievances. They demand that a stand should be taken officially in favour of recognising minority culture as an organic part of Hungarian culture and not some branch of Romanian culture. They also demand that special departments of minority education should be founded within the Ministry of Education and in the county school inspectorates, and the reintroduction of Hungarian nursery-schools, schools, and universities thus providing the opportunity for all Hungarian children to learn in their mother tongue, with special emphasis on the possibility of learning Romanian history and geography in Hungarian. Furthermore, they demand the enforcement of Law 6/1969 concerning teaching staff status, which stipulates that teachers who have no or only partial knowledge of Hungarian cannot teach Hungarian classes. They take a stand in favour of eliminating the criteria of a compulsory number of pupils in a class, in order to ensure the survival of rural Hungarian schools and ask for the adoption of the Yugoslavian minority Act which permitted the establishment of a school even in case of nine children. They demand that the minority publishing house Kriterion should have an extended sphere of competence and a more solid financial background so that it can perform the tasks ignored by other publishers. It is also stated that that the Hungarian press and Hungarian radio and television programmes should focus on relevant problems of the Hungarian minority. They also demand that the authorities cease to treat Hungarian intellectuals as suspicious elements and put an end to their permanent monitoring and harassment by the secret police for the sole reason that they are Hungarians. The last subparagraph demands real freedom of religion and the internal autonomy of Hungarian churches.

The third demand, detailed in three subparagraphs, calls for the autonomy of regions populated by a Hungarian majority – the so-called Székely (Szekler) Land – together with equitable representation in the government. The fourth point, also structured in three subparagraphs, requests the suspension of the Ceaușescu regime policy of changing the ethnic constitution of historical Transylvania, the Partium, and the Banat. The fifth point, including nine subparagraphs, requests for the Hungarians in Romania the possibility to create and develop their sense of identity, defined both by their past and by their present. The sixth paragraph demands that the free use of the Hungarian language – both formal and informal – should be equally justified in all areas of greater Transylvania which are also inhabited by Hungarians. Subparagraphs three and four formulates the claim that in settlements with mixed population, the teaching of the Hungarian language should be made compulsory in Romanian schools. In addition to this, they demand that such localities be provided with bilingual signs, including the names of settlements, streets, shops, factories, public institutions, museums, and product names.

The seventh point formulates the claim that the Hungarian minority should enjoy equal opportunities of self-fulfilment to the Romanians, and that professional development and the selection of employees should be performed according to qualification and not according to ethnic criteria. The eighth point underlines the need to preserve historical and cultural traditions, whereas paragraph nine refers to the Moldavian Csángós who were a Hungarian-speaking group. This paragraph asked that Csángós be considered also Hungarians, against the practice of the official statistics that considered them Romanians, and that they be allowed to participate in Hungarian cultural life. The tenth paragraph, in compliance with paragraph four of the “Memorandum,” demands that the competence to examine and decide in case of pressing issues concerning the situation of Hungarians in Romania should be assigned to an impartial international committee, comprising both Romanians and Hungarians.

Although the consideration of the interests of the Hungarian minority were a priority in formulating the “demands,” the editors were aware that “their consideration cannot be isolated from the solution of matters of general interest” and that “first and foremost the Romanians should have the competence” to draw international attention to the common issues. The editors did not consider this unusually harsh “measure” to be premature, arguing that, “it is high time the wall of silence were demolished and that the massive and seemingly indestructible practice of injustice and arbitrariness that haunts the entire population of Romania (with the exception of a few) as a nightmare were ultimately [denounced as] responsible for today’s totally catastrophic conditions.” They believed that the programme proposal also served the interests of the Romanians “as lawfulness would implicitly add to their rights.”

The eighth issue of Ellenpontok is the best-known issue of the samizdat to date. The “Memorandum” and “Programme Proposal” that it included are considered to be documents of historical significance, for they represented the most renowned documents of the Hungarian civil opposition in Romania at that time. In the course of time these two documents have been published on more occasions. In Hungary they were published in the well-known samizdat Beszélő, No. 5-6 (December 1982). In France, Párizsi Magyar Füzetek (Hungarian Brochure of Paris), No. 12 (1983) published an article under the title “What’s Happening in Transylvania?” and included the full “Memorandum” and excerpts from the “Programme Proposal.” These documents were also mentioned in the most prestigious papers in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Britain. Radio Free Europe broadcast the contents of the documents on several occasions, especially during the year 1982. The “Memorandum” and “Programme Proposal” were also included in Géza Szőcs’s volume Az uniformis látogatása (The visit of the uniform), published at the end of 1986 in New York. After the regime change the two documents were published on multiple occasions in the works of Antal Károly Tóth. It speaks for their value and significance that Éva Cseke Gyimesi included both documents in her 2009 volume Szem a láncban: Bevezetés a szekusdossziék hermeneutikájába (Piece in a chain: Introduction to the hermeneutics of Securitate files), “since the memory of these documents has faded and the younger generation know almost nothing about them.”

The Hans Otto Roth Collection includes documents gathered in the period 1919–1951 by the creator of the collection in order to illustrate his activity as a political leader and journalist of the Transylvanian Saxons who opposed both the pre-communist extreme right movements and regimes and the communist regime.

The Éva Cseke-Gyimesi Collection is arguably the most comprehensive example of Transylvanian Hungarian cultural opposition in Romania. It consists of books, manuscripts, typed texts, private correspondence, newspaper clippings, and other items reflecting Éva Cseke-Gyimesi's cultural opposition to Ceaușescu's regime. The collection allows one to understand Éva Cseke-Gyimesi's criticism exercised through her professional works, her democratic resistance marked by a truly pro-European perspective, and her struggle for human rights illustrated by letters of protest, memorandums, pamphlets, and samizdats which she authored, endorsed, or distributed.

The Zina Genyk-Berezovska Collection at the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv is crucial for understanding the transnational networks underpinning cultural opposition in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora community in Prague. The latter was largely composed of anti-Bolshevik émigrés that had fled to Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, after their failed attempt to establish the Ukrainian National Republic amid the chaos of the First World War. Genyk-Berezovska was born and raised in this community, studied Slavic languages and literatures at Charles University in Prague, later teaching and translating Ukrainian literature into Czech. Through personal connections, Genyk-Berezovska was also deeply involved in the cultural renaissance in Soviet Ukraine known as the sixtiers movement. 

In addition to the more than 800 letters Genyk-Berezovska received from her many correspondents in Ukraine, her archive contains her own works as a scholar of Ukrainian and Czech literature, translator, and prominent community figure, as well as those of her husband Kost’ Genyk-Berezovsky, a philologist who taught Ukrainian at Charles University in Prague. Their family archive served as a repository for materials about prominent members of the Ukrainian émigré community in Czechoslovakia, including the Ukrainian sculptor Mykhailo Brynsky, the Czech writer František Hlaváček, the Ukrainian chemist and statesman Ivan Horbachevskyi, and Petro Krytskyi, a former colonel in the Ukrainian National Republican army, among others. This unique collection highlights both the transnational and the intergenerational dimensions of Ukrainian cultural opposition to communism.

The collection illustrates Alojzij Šuštar's theological and pastoral work as a priest and archbishop who led the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Ljubljana despite the restrictions on freedom imposed by institutions under the communist government’s control. The Collection includes books, original manuscripts, Šuštar’s published articles and his correspondence and polemics, which demonstrate his critical stance toward Slovenia’s communist regime in the late years of the regime and in the period of transition to democracy.

This ad-hoc collection is related to the activities of the first explicitly anti-communist organisation of the post-Stalinist period that operated in the Moldavian SSR, the Democratic Union of Socialists. The materials within this collection focus on the activity of the founder and main ideologue of the group, Nicolae Dragoș, a schoolteacher who challenged the political and ideological monopoly of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the impact of Khrushchev’s “thaw” and aimed at creating an alternative political movement based on a platform of “democratic socialism.” The Dragoș case files, originally held in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive), were transferred to the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova in 2012.  

The collection includes the documents of the Danube Circle Association, which was a non-governmental organization in opposition to the government’s project to construct a River Barrage Dam near Nagymaros (Hungary) in the 1980s. The Danube Circle movement tried to prevent the construction of the dam with samizdats, public debates, and protests. The Circle was one of the new types of alternative movements, which expanded the base of the “traditional” intellectual opposition.

The collection belonging to the Memorial to the Revolution of 16–22 December 1989 in Timişoara brings a distinct and quite remarkable civic and ethical dimension to the institutionalization of the memory of the recent past of Romania. The monuments, exhibition spaces, objects, documents, photographs, and personal testimonies included in this collection illustrate the authenticity of the popular revolt that began in the city of Timișoara. To be more precise, the collection illustrates both the huge scale of the armed repression in those days and the extraordinary citizen resistance that the authorities were faced with in this key city for the fall of communism in Romania. The Memorial also includes a research centre and a publishing house, ensuring that there is constant scholarly and editorial activity aimed at developing the potential of the historical resource that it administers.

Ljubomir Tadić was a professor of philosophy, academic, and politically active intellectual over many decades. During the socialist period in Yugoslavia he was a prominent opposition figure and critically minded intellectual who struggled against the Yugoslav system. Ljubomir Tadić’s collection is located in the Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade.

The Prosvjeta collection presents the role of the strongest cultural and educational society of Serbs in Croatia. The association, in addition to the affirmation of Serbian culture and traditions, also sought to enhance the political status of the Serbian people in the Socialist Republic of Croatia (SRC). Therefore, its actions were characterized as contrary to the regime and the association was at first marginalized and then terminated.

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.

National Commission of "Solidarity" Trade Union collects, develops, stores, and publishes archival materials of the Independent Self-governing Labour Union "Solidarity”, primarily from the 1976-1990 period. The Archives are located at the National Commission of "Solidarity" head office and serve the purpose of documenting the social phenomenon of democratic opposition in Poland, in particular in the 1980s. Apart from documents it holds audio and video recordings, photographs, and other items. The Archives continuously add and digitise new, both private and institutional, collections from various parts of Poland.

The collection documents the work of Croatian historian and political émigré Nikola Čolak (1914-1996). In 1966, he belonged to a group of academics and thinkers from Zadar, who officially sought to break the Communist Party's monopoly on truth by establishing the first journal not controlled by the Party. After the suppression of this initiative, Čolak was forced into exile in Italy. The so-called Movement of Independent Intellectuals represented the first attempt to create a formal cultural opposition circle not only in Croatia, but in Yugoslavia as a whole, which is recorded through this collection.

The Mircea Carp Collection includes original documents and copies gathered by its creator during his activity as a journalist for the radio stations Voice of America and RFE in the period 1955–1995. This collection is one of the largest collections related to the activity of the Romanian emigration. It illustrates the instrumental role that these two radio agencies played in the case of communist Romania as alternative sources of information and transmission belts between critical intellectuals and society.

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.