The collection of files of political prisoners contains the criminal cases against people who were charged by Soviet security institutions (NKVD/MGB/KGB) of real or imaginary crimes against the Soviet state from 1940 to 1986, including many intellectuals and religious activists. The files of visual artist Kurts Fridrihsons and poet Knuts Skujenieks, participants in the Action of Light, and many others, are in this collection.

The collection of Pavel Kohout is an extraordinary set of materials documenting a transformation of the author's personality from a prominent literary into a representative of the cultural opposition engaging in the Charter 77 and then being in exile.

The Union of Writers of Soviet Latvia was an important cultural organization, which was created in 1940 as a subsidiary of the Writers' Union of the Soviet Union, and whose task was to control the literary world and keep it within the confines of Socialist Realism. From the beginning of the 1960s, with the coming of a new generation of writers, the Union’s defense of the national culture and gaining more creative freedom became central issues. These tasks were implemented by combining open demands with accommodating the system and exploiting its weak spots. The collection reflects the political and creative struggle with the authorities and within the Union. 

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 largest collection of photographs in Croatia, and one of the most complete in the world. It consists of the works of the most famous Croatian photographers, who documented everyday life of Croatia from the 1920s until his death in 1970, including the activity of EXAT 51 and New Tendencies.