In 1978, Tomasz Konart invited Tomasz Sikorski to have a talk about independent galleries. The condition of the talk was that both participants had to take ten photographies of the interlocutor. The very photographies are the only evidence of the conversation. Also, the time of the discussion was strictly fixed to 30 minutes.The documentation of the action Conversation and Photography was published in the catalog of the P.O. Box 17 Gallery. The catalog was edited by both Sikorski and Konart in 1979. It was made of the loose pages of A4 format. One of the pages showed exactly the action carried on by Konart. The work is a proper example of both the ephemeral nature of the neo-avant-garde art and its intellectual ambitions to analyze its own status.

Skuodis’ letter to the US president Jimmy Carter was written on 28 November 1979. In the letter, Skuodis presented himself as a citizen of the USA (Benedict Scott, born in Chicago in 1929). He reveals the human rights situation in Soviet Lithuania. In the letter, he blames the Soviet regime for the violation of the democratic rights of citizens. He mentions the KGB search of his house in 1979, when many drafts and manuscripts were taken by KGB investigators. One of these was the manuscript of his book Dvasinis genocidas Lietuvoje (Spiritual Genocide in Lithuania). The book is a detailed survey of the KGB’s persecution of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, and Skuodis planned to send it to the West. It was published in Lithuania only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1996.

The book was written by Ljubo Sirc, a Slovenian émigré and economist of liberal orientation and is devoted to criticism of Yugoslav self-management socialism. Sirc's economic analysis proved that the Yugoslav economy led by a self-management model was doomed, since it was led by profoundly utopian and anti-economic thought.

The collection presents photos and other documentation of the annual activity of Gallery P.O. Box 17, run by Tomasz Sikorski and Tomasz Konart from the beginning of 1979 to November of the same year. This gallery was a continuation of the activities of the Mospan Gallery, closed in December 1978. It had no localization - it only had a mailbox. Gallery, by courtesy, were using the space of Dziekanka Students' Art Center and Stodoła Club. At the same time, Sikorski and Konart planned to use the form of mail art. The collection, preserved and developed by Sikorski, is a unique testimony, characteristic for neo-avant-garde art in Poland in the late 1970s.

As Artpool did not have a permanent art space during the years when it was functioning illegally, most of the events which were organized at the time were held at different locations, such as clubs and small galleries. These sites were referred to as the Artpool Periodical Spaces (APS). These exhibition events were always accompanied by documentation materials of some kind, including posters, artists’ books and publications, and catalogues in which theoretical texts and translations on correspondence art, mail art, and artists’ stamps were first available in Hungary. Along with György Galántai’s own network art, these publications formed the essential exchange material when it came to the expansion of the archive.

István Bibó (1911–1979) was a Hungarian political scientist, sociologist, and scholar on the philosophy of law. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Bibó acted as the Minister of State for Imre Nagy’s second government. When the Soviets invaded and crushed the revolution, he was the last minister left at his post in the Hungarian parliament building. Rather than flee, he remained in the building and wrote his famous proclamation, “For Freedom and Truth,” until he awaited arrest. Bibó became a role model for dissident intellectuals in the late communist era and a symbol of non-violent civilian resistance based on a firm moral stand. Since Bibó’s death in 1979, the family collection of his bequest, which includes personal documents, photos, manuscripts, books, and video and sound recordings, has been in the care of art historian and educator István Bibó Jr., who keeps the materials in his home in Budapest.

The article 'Religinė atributika Justino Marcinkevičiaus knygoje "Gyvenimo švelnus prisiglaudimas"' (Religious Attributes in Justinas Marcnkevičius’ book ‘The Gentle Touch of Life’). The article analyses new trends in works by Lithuanian authors. It argues that a sort of trend for religious and sacral moments could be seen in Lithuanian poetry in that time, especially in Justinas Marcinkevičius’ poems, that contradicted Soviet ideology and materialism.

All roads in the Ukrainian archives seem to lead to Vasyl Stus, one of the most prominent poets of the sixtiers generation. He was a central figure in samizdat circles, though his works were largely unknown to the larger public until the late 1980s. This item has a particularly unusual trajectory, as it was smuggled out of Soviet Ukraine by Raisa Moroz. Liuba Vozniak-Lemyk copied by hand five of Stus’ poems on two pieces of cloth and then Moroz sewed them into the wide skirt she would wear as she left the Soviet Union. Vozniak-Lemyk was a member of the Ukrainian underground, sentenced in 1948 to 25 years of hard labor in Siberia, but was amnestied in 1956. Moroz was a human rights activist married to one of the most prominent Ukrainian political prisoners of the Brezhnev era—Valentyn Moroz. On April 27, 1979, he was released unexpectedly from a Mordovian prison, as part of a spectacular exchange of five political prisoners for two Soviet spies that took place at JFK Airport in New York. None of the prisoners knew about the planned exchange nor been asked for their consent. They thought they were having their citizenship revoked and being deported. Raisa was also allowed to leave the Soviet Union as part of this exchange. These poems were published in the Munich-based émigré journal Suchasnist in Ukrainian in December 1979.

Report about "Agency-operational work of the organs of the State Security to prevent the attempts of the enemy to carry out ideological diversion and other subversive activities among the intelligentsia and forthcoming tasks", Sofia, April 10, 1979. The report identifies weaknesses in the work of the State Security. It emphasizes the need to focus on preventive measures and "prophylactic work". For the past two years, the number of agents working with respect to the intelligentsia has doubled. However, the report stresses that the Unions of Artists, Actors and Journalists, and some institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Science and the Ministry of People’s Health are still weakly covered. Thus, the report not only gives a vivid illustration of the work of the State Security in the late 1970s and of its assessment of the political attitudes of intellectuals; it also shows how the state security evaluated its own work and what rhetoric they used to demand more resources.

An explanatory letter from Daina Lasmane, the director of the Dole History Museum, to an official at the Latvian SSR Ministry of Culture about the First River Daugava Festival was written in 1979. It alludes to some accusations against the organisers of the festival, but also the fact that the authorities did not want to voice any official accusations, which was rather typical in the 1970s and 1980s, when repressions against cultural personalities were often covert, or were based on the belief that a reprimand was enough to correct the behaviour of the people involved.

The last issue of IBOR dealing with the topic of total institutions or comprehensive institutions, with special emphasis on psychiatric institutions, came out in September 1979. Using the deductive approach, starting with the profiling of totalitarian institutions, focusing on psychiatric institutions and their patients, the editorial draws conclusions, referring to eminent historical personalities from the fields of philosophy, historiography and culture, that an artist can only be a person who is either on the border of madness or has already passed that boundary. This is backed up by a series of texts and poems, the most provocative among them being "Please Master" by American poet Allen Ginsberg. The poem deals about a paedophiliac-homosexual relationship between a pupil and a teacher and is accompanied by a photo of a child named after the poem.

The poem aroused great controversy in Pula's Party and youth circles, and in republic, local and youth publications, and it was the formal reason for abolishing the journal’s funding. Speaking of topics that were considered undesirable in conservative Pula, but also about the social circumstances in Yugoslavia that bothered the state-party leadership, the IBOR editorial board’s notable cultural-opposition activity was what ultimately led to the cessation of its funding.

The film and television work of the unconventional screenplay writer and director Nikša Fulgosi (1919-1996) is a component of the cultural heritage, which in a peculiar way testifies to the culture of dissent in the period of socialism in Croatia and Yugoslavia. Many of Fulgosi's film works remained unfinished or were "put in the vault" after their completion because the censors considered them unfit for the public. Fulgosi made the first television documentary series about sex for the Zagreb Radio Television in the late 1970s, which was only partially aired.

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.

The premiere of the mega-recital You Don't Renounce What You Haven't Got! by the theatre company Coccolemocco, then operating as a theatre section of the Society of Amateurs in Culture and Arts Vinko Jeđut, was held at the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall in Zagreb as part of Republic Day celebrations, on November 18, 1979. Later, the recital toured festivals in Yugoslavia (Skopje and Young People’s Theatre Days of Dubrovnik) and performed on the Republic Square (today Ban Josip Jelačić Square) on the anniversary of the liberation of Zagreb on the 8^th of May.

In their pursuit of an authentic theatre language, the company continued to explore the forms that were usually ridiculed by professional bel-esprit theatres such as socialist rallies and parades, choral recitations and alike, performed on the occasions of important anniversaries (Republic Day, May Day, Veterans Day, Antifascist Revolt Day) which were staged in a hurry and without any creativity.  The performance You Don't Renounce What You Haven't Got! against any conventions, followed the development of the communist movement in Yugoslavia from the twenties to the late 1970s. The performance consists of texts dealing with the revolution from the position of unrealized left-wing forces, as Brecht sang: revolution’s "mountain hardships" but also "lowland hardships." Writings, poems and quotations by Marijan Stilinović, August Cesarec, Ivo Lola Ribar, Pavao Markovac, Drago Ibler, Krsto Hegedušić, Ivan Krndelj, Ivan Goran Kovačić, Marko Ristić, Radovan Ivšić, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertolt Brecht, Vjeran Zuppa, Branko Matan and others were used. All sections of the Society of Amateurs in Culture and Arts Vinko Jeđut with more than a hundred participants appeared on stage. The show included, in addition to the members of Coccolemocco, a folklore ensemble, orchestras of accordions, brass instruments, tamboura, a wind orchestra, the Jeđutovke Choir, and a group of children from the Nikola Demonja Elementary School.

According to Gordana Vnuk, the recital You Don't Renounce What You Haven't Got! was critical of some aspects in self-managing socialism, such as state-sponsored public events omnipresent at the time. The performance was a persiflage which pointed to the totalitarian aspect of social realism and its forms of public representation. It could have been described as a collage of visually spectacular images characterized by poetic anarchy and subversion outside any protocols (Vnuk, interview, January 26, 2018). Performing this event during official celebrations was probably the greatest persiflage they could have done, and not be punished for it.

Gordana Vnuk cut the newspaper articles about the recital and stored them in her collection, along with the program leaflets, theatre tickets, and other documentation related to the recital You Don't Renounce What You Haven't Got! 

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.

Artpool is an archive, library, documentation center and place of research concerning the progressive, non-official trends in Hungarian art in the 1970s and 1980s (including alternative art scenes and groups, underground art magazines, samizdat publications etc.) and contemporary avant-garde tendencies.

Artpool – beside being a research institute - defines itself as an active archive: seeks out new forms of societal activity, takes a formative role in processes, organizes events, documents, archives them and freely distributes information.

Veljo Tormis wrote his Kurvameelsed laulud (Melancholy Songs) in 1979, and dedicated it to the conductor Neeme Järvi, who was persona non grata in the Soviet Union since 1978. Thus, Tormis was told to cross out the dedication on the first page of the manuscript. However, he refused to do so, and covered it up with a strip of dark paper instead. The dedication is faintly visible through the paper. The manuscript was accepted, and later archived in this form. On a later copy, which also belongs to the same collection, the dedication is rewritten and formulated as a dedication to Neeme Järvi's leaving the homeland. Järvi emigrated to the United States in 1980. Kurvameelsed laulud is not the most famous work by Tormis, but the manuscript is a unique and notable rarity as a reflection of the struggle with Soviet censorship.

The founders of Artpool organized two Artpool’s Art Tours, one in 1979 and one in 1982, with the aim of meeting first some of their Italian and then some of their Western European network correspondents, including Romano Peli, Vittore Baroni, Adriano Spatola, Cavellini, Rod Summers, Julien Blaine, and Ben Vautier. They returned with a bunch of new connections, publications, and plans.

The first tour in 1979 resulted in the organization of the successful Cavellini exhibition (APS no. 5), which was held in the Young Artists’ Club, and the joint performance Hommage à Vera Muhina, which was held on Heroes’ Square, Budapest.

Work was underway on another exhibition entitled Package from Italy (Pacco dall’Italia), but the exhibition was banned before it could be held. The plan was to show visual and sound poetry works collected during Artpool’s first art tour.

Pop culture, mediation, gender roles, and the image of the self were the basic motifs of Péter Sarkadi’s art in the late 1970s. He analysed the image of the star in his compositions: on the one hand, he performatively personified the character (using makeup even in normal life situations), while on the other hand he photographed and then drew or painted them in a distancing, hyperrealist manner.

Rainbow belongs to the series of these works. In this composition, the black and white photograph is directly blown onto the canvas, together with its attributes (perforation, brand), emphasizing the mediating process. The protagonist’s jewellery shimmers, while his flowing makeup is counterpointed with the colorful painted rainbow motif over the eyes.

Before 1989, the Czech dramatist and dissident Václav Havel was imprisoned several times for his beliefs and activities, his longest prison term lasting from 1979 to 1983. This period is reflected in Havel’s letters to his wife, later published as “Dopisy Olze” (“Letters to Olga”). Already in prison Václav Havel began to design these letters as a future book and tried to develop within them a more general reflection on human identity and responsibility. Especially after the summer of 1980, Havel’s letters to his wife Olga gradually turned into philosophical essays. On the other hand, the letters from the first year of imprisonment, written from June 1979, contained, besides philosophical, literary and other reflections, also more practical passages, including concrete instructions to Olga concerning their household or Havel’s everyday needs. This is also the case of letter “number 4”, which was written by Václav Havel on 8 July 1979 while in custody in Prague – Ruzyně. In this letter, Václav Havel informed Olga about the letters he had so far received, he described how he had been spending his time in custody and wrote that despite his imprisonment he was “sure of his truth” and did not regret anything. This letter was in an abridged version (without passages about practical matters and specific instructions to Olga) published in “Letters of Olga” issued by the samizdat Expedition Edition in 1983. It has appeared in subsequent samizdat, exile, and after 1989, official editions of “Letters to Olga” as well.

In 1998, this letter, along with 160 other letters from 1979 to 1983 and 11 letters from 1989, was donated by Václav Havel to the Museum of Czech Literature.

The brochure Infiltrarea: Cazuri de folosire a acestei metode ofensive de muncă pentru cunoașterea, prevenirea și contracararea acțiunilor îndreptate împotriva securității statului (Infiltration: Cases of the use this offensive method of work for the knowledge, prevention, and countering of actions directed against state security) is a top-secret publication of the Ministry of the Interior that was used for the professional training of Securitate personnel. The booklet deals with one of the main methods used by the Romanian secret police in its mission of annihilating the potential actions of all those who were suspected of “hostile attitudes” towards the communist regime: the so-called infiltration of an informer. Infiltration basically means the insertion of an informer (or an undercover officer) into the immediate personal entourage and/or the professional milieu of the targeted victim. According to the definition included in the brochure, infiltration refers to establishing a relation between the informer and his/her target that aimed at winning the trust of the latter in order to fulfil the former’s “informative-operative tasks.” The brochure also describes how the Securitate officer should prepare the infiltration by paying attention to the personality of the target, selecting the most appropriate informer in accordance to the profile of the target, and carefully preparing him/her for a successful infiltration. Another section deals with the practical problems that might occur during the infiltration. These refer to the supervision of the infiltration by the Securitate officer and the collection of information from his/her “source.” The last part of the brochure focuses on the cases in which not an informer but an undercover Securitate officer is required to infiltrate a particular target. These theoretical notes were followed by four annexes in which four cases corresponding to four different methods of infiltration are described in detail. One of these cases refers to the successful infiltration of a group of young Romanian German writers who in 1972 in Timișoara established the literary circle known as Aktionsgruppe Banat. Although the text used pseudonyms and omitted the name of the group, the general information provided allows a researcher to discern that the case under debate is that of Aktionsgruppe Banat. The brochure describes the problem faced by the Securitate, which directly derived from the functioning of this informal circle without formal approval that led to the production and dissemination of writings critical of the “realities of socialist Romania,” as some sources interpreted these for the secret police. Following a failed attempt at recruiting two of the literary group members as informants, the Securitate decided to infiltrate an outside informer into the group. The text describes how the officers carefully selected the informer, nicknamed “Gruia,” on the basis of his common professional background and interests to the target, “Otto Wilhelm,” one of the members of the non-conformist literary group. The text also underlines how the informer was trained to initiate the first contact with his “victim,” and how they became friends given their shared interest in literature and the alleged common experience of being marginalised by the communist regime due to their non-conformist stances. The success of the infiltration was unquestionable as not only did the target, “Otto Wilhelm,” invite “Gruia” to attend the meetings of the literary circle, but he also entrusted some of his manuscripts to him to read. The brochure does not state this, but this informer must have decisively contributed to the formal dismemberment of Aktionsgruppe Banat after the arrest of four members in 1975.

http://www.cnsas.ro/documente/materiale_didactice/D%20008712_001_p21.pdf

The collection of the Slovak writer and publicist Dominik Tatarka (1913–1989) contains unique correspondence, manuscripts and audio recordings illustrating life of this leading Czechoslovak writer, who had been critical to the communist regime since 1950s and became a “banned author” and dissident after 1968.

The files of the Office of the President of the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Croatia in the period 1978-1982 include the preserved petition with copies of 3,002 signatures from Omiš residents opposing construction of a sintered magnesia factory in that area. The petition drive in Omiš was organised on 7 April 1979. It was signed by 3,002 persons: 2,540 eligible voters and 462 students under 18 years of age. According to the file cover, Parliament received the petition on 12 April 1979, and placed it ad acta ten days later, on 24 April. Besides Parliament, the conclusions from the town meeting and the petition with copies of all 3,002 signatures were also sent to the Omiš Municipal Assembly and to a range of republic-level institutions, and to participants in the Second Conference on Adriatic Protection, held at that time on the island of Hvar. That campaign resulted in further debate on the matter by the professional and general public.

The document is available for research and copying.

“The only live tradition of Hungarian alternative political thinking today is that of István Bibó,” said historian Miklós Szabó, a prominent theorist of democratic opposition at the beginning of his review of the Bibó memorial book, published in the first issue of Beszélő (Speaker), a prominent Hungarian samizdat periodical launched in December 1981. As Szabó argues a few lines below, “in the 1970s, there was a real Bibó revival in Hungary; his earlier studies were copied and distributed in samizdat and then discussed by many young intellectuals, and they found new devoted readers even among people who otherwise rarely read similar sources of alternative thinking. (…) Now, the Bibó Memorial Book represents a conscious and intended culmination of this unique revival.”

In early 1979, at the initiative of János Kenedi, a voluntary editorial team of intellectuals was formed to prepare a tribute anthology on the occasion of István Bibó’s 70^th birthday. However, as Bibó died in May 1979, the book became something of a post mortem homage, as it was published a year later in a samizdat edition. (Bibó’s funeral developed into a silent protest demonstration against the communist regime, as thousands of people gathered in a Budapest cemetery, with hundreds of secret policemen among them.)  

This imposing anthology, which consisted of contributions by 76 authors in three thick volumes of more than 1,200 typewritten pages, was no doubt the first important venture with a significant influence in the history of the Hungarian samizdat movement. Furthermore, as an example of united political strivings on the part of all democratic opposition forces in Hungary, it also seemed to set a promising precedent, and it was perceived by the onetime communist party leaders as a real challenge. This is why they tried to prevent any further escalation of a resistance movement organized partly by the former ’56 tradition and partly according to the Polish patterns of self-organized Solidarity.  

The ten-member editorial team included both ’56-ers and ’68-ers, “populists” and “urban” intellectuals, but the list of the 76 authors who contributed was even more diverse: old and young, prominent and hardly-known dissidents, writers, artists, scholars, etc. all readily contributed writings. The contributors included Gyula Illyés, György Petri, István Csurka, György Konrád, Sándor Bali, Sándor Weöres, Lajos Vargyas, and Piroska Szántó, just to name a few. Many of their memoirs, essays, and studies revolved around the relevant traditions of Hungarian national democratic movements and the chances of reviving these traditions. For all their differences, the authors equally shared sincere respect for István Bibó’s personality and his ideas. They also shared the belief that the only solution for the miseries of the Eastern Bloc countries, including Hungary, was real democratic changes in the principle of self-determination. In other words, both the sinister “heritages” of Stalinism and extreme right-wing nationalism should be rejected once and for all.