Keston’s information about this image is somewhat limited. The original photo was taken by Friedensstimme, most probably in the year 1974, when a hand-made printing machine like this one was discovered in a house in Latvia and confiscated by the authorities. Four women, workers of the Initsiativniki Publishing House “Christian”, were arrested on October 24, 1974 for being in possession of this printing machine. According to an article published in the Russian journal Vestnik Istiny (No. 2-3, 1977), this kind of printing press could print 400 copies of the gospels during one working day. These Latvian women were Initsiativniki, a dissident wing of the Soviet Baptist community that emerged after a split in the church’s ranks in 1961. According to scholar Julian Birch, this movement was “an interesting and indeed unusual example of cross-national, or State-wide, dissent within the USSR. 

This is an interview by conducted by VUS reporter Boris Gaj with Đuro Šmicberger (1922-2006), the chairman of the commission on the control and approval of motion pictures for public screening in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Šmicberger talked about the commission’s practices pertaining to the control and authorisation of motion pictures produced in the Slovenian film industry for public screening, as well as the authorisation of foreign films for public screening. Such commissions also existed in other Yugoslav republics. The collection includes about 150 press clippings from the period 1969-1991 which deal with the practices of film censorship, giving examples of blocked films, etc. The documents are available for research and copying.  

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.

Antanas Sniečkus was the first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party from 1936 till his death in 1974. The collection holds many documents, including correspondence with Lithuanian writers, and transcripts of meetings with the intelligentsia (in 1957) which reflect the aspirations and ambitions of the country’s cultural elite to preserve and develop the cultural heritage of the Lithuanian nation. The most interesting documents for the project cover the period of de-Stalinisation in Soviet Lithuania.

The No Art Collection is a part of the Anti-Museum founded by Vladimir Dodig Trokut. It consists of characteristic avant-garde and post-avant-garde artefacts. The Anti-Museum’s No Art Collection was established during the many years of Trokut’s activity as a member of the informal cultural opposition, which was supported by prominent individuals and public personalities, such as artists and politicians like Koča Popović and Jure Kaštelan.

“In the army, the majority of the lower ranks are incompetents. And this in the army of the RSR [Socialist Republic of Romania]! Adolescence made me commit some “follies.” So others think. I don’t. For that reason they’ve brought me here. Military service means pickaxe, shovel, spade. My country needs me, but it despises me. I’m going to do my military service with [common-law] convicts.” This is a short extract from the manuscript that contains Ion Monoran’s army diary. From these few words, the reader may sense the drama experienced by the author when he was forced not only to carry out exhausting work, but also to live among individuals with whom he had nothing in common, and with whom, in normal circumstances, he should never have had to have any dealings.

In 1974 and 1975, Ion Monoran did his military service in special conditions at the Piteşti Petrochemical plant, because he had already been classed as a “hostile element” to the communist regime because of his attempt to flee Romania together with seven classmates when they were in their final year of high school. The harsh experience of doing military service in communist Romania in a special place, together with convicts, is recorded in real time in his diary.

Ion Monoran’s army diary is written by hand and remains unpublished. A few short passages, poeticised, appeared in the volume Eu însumi (I myself). The manuscript consists of approximately thirty pages.

“If only I could flow continually, and not tire, just as the river doesn’t tire,” is one of the last entries in this diary, which records the brutalising experience of an extraordinarily sensitive person confronted with the military service imposed by the communist state and with life alongside common-law convicts.

As the largest national public collection, the Contemporary Collection of the Hungarian National Gallery contains a significant number of Hungarian artworks made between 1945 and today. The acquisition of the collection can be divided into different phases: in certain periods the goal of what type of works to collect shifted in accordance with the actual cultural politics. Since the eighties, they extended the collection backward in time as well, so today they own thousands of pieces which were previously a blind spot due to political reasons, but relevant in terms of cultural opposition. The procurement process is still ongoing.

The Orfeo Group created a rehearsal room in the mansard of their commune in Pilisborosjenő in 1974. This act was motivated in part by an attack launched by the communist cultural political leadership. As a result, the Studio was banned from every community centre in the country. From 1974 to 1976, very intense studio work was organized in this rehearsal room. Lessons were held for the actors in speaking techniques, motion, and theatre practices in the various rooms of the house. It served as a kind of college based on a mentor system, according to Tamás Fodor. In the rehearsal room, they created and performed their 3-act play (The hospital room no. 6., Warren/Militants, Lawn). They held literature evenings and premiers, as well. A select audience of intellectuals, philosophers, and artists visited the house. Today, the rehearsal room is home to the puppets made by Ilona Németh, one of the founding members of Orfeo. This illustrates the continuity between the past and the present.

The photo archive of Goran Pavelić Pipo contains over 15,000 negatives. The photographs are mainly black and white, and on them Pavelić recorded rock concerts and everyday life around the popular Zagreb cafés Zvečka, Blato and Kavkaz in the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, also known as the new wave era. His photographs were conceptually and aesthetically opposed to the photographs in the then official press, such as Večernji list, Vjesnik or Borba, and thus represented a kind of cultural opposition. The Pavelić Photo Archive is extremely important to an understanding the phenomenon of the new wave and the contemporary urban scene in socialist Zagreb.

The film Balada albă (The white ballad), winner of two awards in 1974, is in the Mirel Leventer private collection both in its original format, on a roll of film, and in digitized format. The film reconstructs the tragic death of a colleague from the Architecture Faculty during a winter excursion to the mountains. Because the vacation after the first examination session was in February, many students left to walk in the mountains then, even if the weather conditions were not favourable. In the winter of 1973, a group of Architecture students was caught by a blizzard, and the student in question basically sacrificed his life to save the others. It was a death that shook all his colleagues, and some of them paid him posthumous homage through this film. “It is a film that began like a reportage on the funeral of a colleague of ours, in sixth year. Together with some colleagues, he climbed the mountain in very difficult conditions and in saving the others, he met his own end. He was found dead after three days of blizzard; he was completely frozen and was, by a bitter irony of fate, very close to the chalet, on the way back. A terrible tragedy. Without initially thinking that anything in particular would come out of it, out of a sort of inertia, I filmed the funeral; I filmed it on 8 mm. Then I used the scenes in the 16 mm film. I made a screenplay, together with three other colleagues; we climbed the mountain, we repeated the route the following year; we filmed in similar conditions; we put ourselves in danger too. Then I did the editing in our laboratory at the Faculty; I did amateur editing. That was in 1974; the tragedy was in 1973,” recalls Mirel Leventer. The film was shown at two film festivals, and at each it won an award: the National Festival of Student Art in Cluj-Napoca and the Festival of Bucharest Cine-clubs. It was also awarded a prize by the magazine Cinema. The music is by a well known Romanian singer-songwriter, Dorin Liviu Zaharia. He plays the flute and recites a poem written by himself entitled “La trecătoare” (At the crossing), superimposed on an extract from the melancholic piece “Oh Well, Part Two” composed by Peter Green and performed by the then group Fleetwood Mac, who were in vogue at the time. After 1989, the film was projected as part of the Club A evenings.