This manuscript was written on 2 April, 1969. Rendić raises the question of the position of the Catholic Church and Catholics after the so-called "liberalization" of the Yugoslav regime. She came to the conclusion that after ceasing the policy of open force, nothing had substantially changed in their position. She added that both the Church and Catholics live together in a sort of social ghetto isolated from the mainstream of socialist society, since "as it is with all liberalization, the Church remained in a ghetto, the Church is not moving from the ghetto at all" (Rendić 1969: 12). For this state of affairs, Rendić pointed to, as she said, the "totalitarian atheism" of the then socialist regime in Croatia and Yugoslavia, who taught that the progress of time would necessarily lead to the disappearance of religious consciousness throughout socialist society (Rendić 1969: 10).

János Gémes (“Dixi”), the poet. Here he is in live speech, constantly provoking situations around him, like it is depicted in the photo, on the terrace of the Kárpátia restaurant, most probably in 1969. Dixi was a well-known, ubiquitous persona of the Budapest nightlife for decades.

He delivered endless monologues, orated in an associative manner, creating connections between the beginning and the end of a sentence with word play, twirling a few times the texture. He was a baffling personality, often grandiose, many times provocative, sometimes aggressive. He saw through people and never cared about the consequences.

The author of the photo is unknown. It is probably cut out from a larger photograph, as the edge is jagged. The most interesting feature of the photograph is that someone pegged out the eye of the protagonist with a needle. According to Zuzu this gesture is feminine.

Gábor Bódy introduced Dixi to Zuzu in 1971. At that time Dixi lived temporarily across the street from Zuzu at a guy’s apartment who was in the business of tailoring blue jeans—a hot, rare commodity at that time. He was a habitué at the Kárpátia, and people favored his company. He usually sat on the terrace, close to the entrance, from where it was possible to look into the restaurant as well as onto the street. He was older than them (they were still in high school, Bódy a university student).

Many students, artists, writers, poets, and musicians were hanging out at Kárpátia in those times, practically forming a regular audience. Zuzu, together with his friend Gomba (Erzsébet Gombás, one of the main characters of the film The Third by Gábor Bódy), went there often after school. This photo has preserved the familiar setting.

A file belonging to the ‘Ideological trends’ section contains valuable material for the investigation of political pressure and prohibitions in relation to cultural and artistic work in Yugoslavia. The featured item of the collection consists of documents gathered under the heading, ‘Information on the performance “When Pumpkins Blossomed” at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre by Dragoslav Mihailović’ (KPR II-4-a/73), which encompass party material from 1969 relating to the performance. At issue is a play based on the novel of the Serb and Yugoslav writer, Dragoslav Mihailović. The novel appeared one year earlier but did not generate much controversy. However, the inclusion of the play in the programme of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade alarmed the communist party. ‘The novel was not suited for a theatre production, so I rewrote half the text,’ explained Dragoslav Mihailović in an interview with the Večernje Novosti newspaper (Matović 2016). The play’s story of a Belgrade boxer addressed the topic of violence and for the first time publicly broke the silence about the Goli Otok camp and the political and police torture of dissidents in Yugoslavia at that time. Mihailović, who himself had been an inmate of Goli Otok in the beginning of the 1950s, confirmed that ‘I did not mention Goli Otok in the novel. I only mentioned Bakar, which was the last stop for Goli Otok. Later I mentioned it in the play, maybe because when we were developing the performance, it was openly talked about’ (Matović 2016).

The mentioned documents disclose that the intelligence service of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists reacted straight after the first few performances. The record reveals that criticism was directed at the ideological and ethical messages sent by the play; then objection was made to the inacceptable political attitudes professed by the protagonist, ‘that led to doubt in the policies of the SKJ and our country during the period of resistance to Cominform’. Criticism was expressed about ‘the pessimistic conclusions regarding the fate of the human personality in whatever system, and naturally also in this, our own’, while the insertion of sentences that were not in the novel drew special attention, such as: ‘They are worse than the Germans’ (implying the communist authorities), uttered by the protagonist’s father on leaving the prison. The documents show that all this disturbed the City Committee of the League of Communists which called on the organization of the League of Communists of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre to discuss ‘the ideological content of this drama and the political implications that challenge, in the socio-political and cultural life of the city, putting this work on stage’.

Directly following this criticism, the Belgrade press began to attack the play and leading newspapers consequently wrote about it being, ‘a political pamphlet according to the taste of the likes of the Cominform’. Several documents that in fact represent an analysis of the press by the intelligence service of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists, allow us to follow the development of the situation chronologically from day to day, culminating in Tito’s remarks regarding the play. At the congress in Zrenjanin at the end of October 1969, he said, ‘It seems there is something shadowy in the head of the author who in every way attempts to prove that our society is no good. And who says so. That’s written by someone who was at Goli Otok. The number of those who think and talk like that is very small. (...) There are individuals who spit on the accomplishments of our revolution and on the victims who fell in that struggle, but not once have shown that they do not love this country. They do not love this society; they do not love socialism and don’t belong to it with their being. But, once again the same ones are popping up who at the time of the Informbiro [the break from Cominform] revealed who and what they are. We will not undertake administrative measures. I don’t think that arrests are necessary now, but it is the responsibility of the communists to disenable those who deal with such affairs. The voice of our public must be strong and decisive in relation to such incidents’.

Soon after this speech by Tito, the play was removed from the programme of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre. In their analysis about how institutions like the Yugoslav Drama Theatre remember the dark sides of their history, Dragićević Šešić and Stefanović proposed the term “institutional trauma” when referring to “censorship and self-censorship, rejection of creative dissident personalities, etc.” (Dragićević Šešić and Stefanović 2014, 13). They also maintained that “the trauma in Serbian theatrical censorship was linked to the fact that there was no official censorship. That message would be transmitted mostly by telephone to theater managers, and then through a complex procedure the collective "decided" to remove the performance from the stage. Therefore, it was more traumatic than as it would have been in the situation of real state censorship.” (Dragićević Šešić and Stefanović 2014, 19).

The János Dobri Collection of the Reformed Congregation of Cluj–Dâmbul Rotund contains materials covering the confessional life and activity of the eponymous pastor, which alongside proofs of his individual stand and sacrifice, in the course of the official and private correspondence with the Romanian authorities and private individuals, and beyond the struggle for survival of the Reformed church, also provides an insight into the details of the fight for minority and human rights in the twentieth century.

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

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

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

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

The Movement of Revolutionary Youth (HRM) was a predominantly student group with a radical left orientation that was founded at the beginning of December 1968 and that stood up against the upcoming Normalization until it was broken by the State Security during the winter of 1969 to 1970. Members of the HRM organised intense activity ahead of the first anniversary of the August occupation when they wanted to mobilize people against the Normalization regime. They published several leaflets for this occasion, one of them being the leaflet “To all – to all – to all!” which was signed by “workers, students, intelligentsia” and that urged non-violent protests on 21 August 1969, such as to boycotting public transportation, the press and shops. Pavel Šremer and Radan Baše from the Movement, and in cooperation with a printing trade union in Prague, saw to the printing of 200-thousand small leaflets. Initially, poet Jaroslav Seifert was asked to write up the text of the leaflet by the students. He thanked them for their trust but he declined their request arguing that they would manage to write the right text themselves. The final version was written collectively under the supervision of Petr Uhl. The whole event was finally called the Black Coffee Operation after two men in the printing trade union, Černý and Turek, and also as an allusion to the statement of the First Secretary of the SED Walter Ulbricht about the “coffee sediment of intellectuals in Prague”. The leaflets were also distributed beyond Prague, predominantly in North Bohemia and scattered by an engine driver, who was an acquaintance of Pavel Šremer, and his colleagues.

This ceramic piece was created by Halyna Sevruk. She titled it "Ivan Svitlychny" in order to show her deep love and respect for this leader of the Ukrainian sixtiers movement. Her portrayal meant to underscore his importance in forming the Ukrainian national consciousness and civic bravery of the sixtiers, who were persecuted for their words and their pursuit of truth. The martyred figure is winged and crucified. Quite importantly, at the very center of the piece is a book, as Svitlychny was a soul who thrived on knowledge. The curator of the Sixtiers Museum, Olena Lodzynska, noted during our interview that the date of creation (1969) is also significant, as it was well before the mass arrests that happened in the winter of 1972, when Svitlychny and many other sixtiers were taken by the Soviet authorities. This gives the piece an unsettling and prescient quality.