Jerzy Regulski was one of the most significant creators of the Polish local political system after 1989. He participated on Rountable Talks where he chaired the local government group. In 1989 he was elected a member of the Senate, in which he continued working on the local government reform and the relations between the different levels of authority.

Materials of Jerzy Regulski, donated to the Archives of Transition, map the reflection of the democratic opposition on the state of the Polish politics and society. In his notes, memoirs, and letters, Regulski started the discussion reaching beyond party interests and ambitions, and tried to envisage the potential future of Polish democracy in statu nascendi. The heritage of Regulski remains a unique source on the history of the parliament and the local democracy.

Regulski’s materials were donated to Archives of Transition in 2009. They contain 5 meters of document (92 files and 668 scanned documents). 

 The Jan Hus Educational Foundation's collection presents an extraordinary set of materials documenting a work of a British organization focusing on supporting of cultural opposition in Czechoslovakia, mainly through underground university, scholarships, and the publication and translation of forbidden or unaccessable books.  

The seals and stamps created by Józef Figiela are an interesting visual representation of the strikes in the Gdansk Shipyard of the August 1980. They are also a testimony of an incredible engagement and effort put in sharing the strike’s ideals by a person who used his artistic abilities for this purpose, as well as a talent and enthusiasm of his teenage daughter.  Józef Figiela is both a sailor and an artist by profession, and he has alternately practiced both of them throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In August 1980 he had already been signed in for another cruise when the strike in the Gdansk Shipyard broke. His ship was stuck in the harbour and he used this opportunity to support the protesters. He became a member of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee as a delegate of the Association of the Polish Fine Artists of the Gdansk Region, and as a graphic artist he joined the fight for changes. On 20 August 1980 he created his first seal of the strike’s underground post. It shows a hand clenched into a fist (symbolising the fight), Gdansk’s coat of arms, and some nautical motifs (an anchor, sea waves), as well as a sign: “strike”. The original linocut is a part of the collection of Michał Guć, who is also in the possession of the authentic copies in the form of stamps on the envelopes.

The seals in the form of stamps were copied in the Polish national colours onto the envelopes and specially prepared postcards. During the strikes, Figiela prepared 4 linocuts, which as copies were disseminated among the strikers. Figiela’s seals stand out from other underground stamps with their precise execution and interesting graphic design. However, their content is quite typical for this type of philatelist: it refers to the Polish patriotic emblems, fight symbols, and the shipyard itself. There are also some religious (Catholic) motifs.

It is worth mentioning that with his activity Figiela inspired to action his daughter Dąbrówka, who as a just 15-year-old girl created her own seal, as well as she helped her father in creating copies. Every day Dąbrówka would cut out the postcards and glue on them the official state stamps, and in the evenings she would go to the post office, asking the workers to mark the papers with tomorrow’s date. Next, her father and her pressed their seals onto the envelopes, and the next day Figiela took them to the shipyard and shared them among the strikers. Thus, the materials have always had the current date.

The last seal Figiela created just before the end of the strike. It shows the Polish flag and a hand holding some flowers – it symbolised the peacefulness of the protests. The text says: “victory”.

Michał Guć estimates that altogether there were around 300-400 paper copies of Józef and Dąbrówka Figiela’s stamps disseminated in August 1980.  It is a relatively small number which was caused by the fact that making copies was a very time-consuming activity and that only two people were involved in their production. Low number of existing stamps makes every original copy a valuable item.

Source:

Stocznia Gdańska im. Lenina, Michał Guć, Gdynia 2017 (unpublished text, shared by the author in July 2017).

“Self-Identification” is a performance and a series of photomontages in which a naked female figure enters the public space of Warsaw; she waits in a line, walks on a crowded street, or stands in front of a uniformed female police officer controlling the traffic. 

The action comprised leaving the gallery space naked and going to the representative Old Town. There, by the locally well-known Palace of Weddings, the performer joined a group of wedding guests and groomsmen cheering after the ceremony. As Museum of Modern Art explains, thus the artist confronted the institution of marriage determining one of the core elements of femininity seen as a paradigm of personality made up by patriarchal culture.”

During the vernissage of the photomontages Ewa Partum, naked, read out to the audience a feminist manifesto, in which she denounced the inequality of prestige of men and women in the art world.

In the catalogue for the exhibition, whose print was withheld for years by the censorship office, Partum wrote about the “cultural and social status” of women “understood as a kind of sum of roles, a model born out of tradition (...) a certain set present in social awareness.” She calls this “role model of a woman” a “product of patriarchal culture”, which “impairs women while maintaining appearances of respect for her”.

The story of acquisition of Iuri Shukhevych’s handwritten diary by Smoloskyp is unknown. This piece of Ukrainian samizdat was among numerous illegal documents smuggled by Smoloskyp couriers from Ukraine. In his diary, Shukhevych gives an account of Stalinist labour camps and ruminates on the destiny of the Ukrainian liberation movement. Smoloskyp and personally Osyp Zinkevych, who was a member of OUN’s leading body, PUN) participated in the campaigns in defence of Iuri Shukhevych, son of OUN-UPA military leader, Shukhevych, who spent over thirty years in Soviet labour camps. This diary along with many other primary source documents (for instance, the full collection of the documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki group) was used by Smoloskyp in their numerous publications on Shukhevych and other repressed Ukrainian nationalists.

This document is an important source of documentation for the understanding and writing of the history of the Romanian exile community in the 1980s. It concerns the organisation that Romanians of the emigration established to unmask the wrongdoings of the communist regime in their native country to the West in the hope that they would find external support for the removal of communism in Romania. In particular, the document illustrates exile actions for the observance of human rights in Romania, as it testifies to the existence of a political body set up for this purpose, namely Liga Românilor din Exil pentru Drepturile Omului (The League of Romanians in Exile for Human Rights). It had its headquarters in Paris and was coordinated by Virgil Veniamin, who was a personality of the exile. A graduate of the Law Faculty of the University of Paris in 1930, he was a professor of international law and a lawyer, as well as being a distinguished member of a Romanian political party, the National Peasant Party. The establishment of the communist regime found him at home in Romania, which he left clandestinely in February 1948, settling in Paris. In exile, he was particularly noted for his activity as president of the Carol I Royal University Foundation and as a member of the Romanian National Committee, considered by its founders as the Romanian government in exile. In the 1970s he was involved in a major scandal in the Romanian exile community when he was accused of collaborating with the Securitate in Bucharest. Today, based on the documents contained in the file on him created by the former Romanian secret police, it can be ascertained that he was indeed an agent of influence of the communist regime within the exile community. The document kept in the Ion Dumitru Collection is a request sent by the collector to Virgil Veniamin on 23 February 1980, asking him to accept affiliation to the central section in Paris of Liga Românilor din Exil pentru Drepturile Omului (The League of Romanians in Exile for Human Rights) of a newly established West German section based in Munich, in which Ion Dumitru had been elected chairman. In response to this request, Ion Dumitru received a favorable reply from Virgil Veniamin. Both documents, in A4 format, can be found in the private archive of Ion Dumitru at IICCMER.

Between 7 December 1980 and 6 January 1981, an exhibition was organized which was based on the objects in the folk religious collection in Esztergom. It was placed in the Esztergom Basilica, more precisely around the Holy Cross altar.

After the call issued on 6 January 1980, many objects were donated to the collection, so the exhibition could draw on 6,000 objects given by 240 donors. Icons, carvings, primers, chaplets, statues, embroideries, and religious manuscripts were put on exhibit as testimony to vibrant spiritual life. The purpose of the exhibition was dual: the organizers wanted to demonstrate the importance of religious objects, which were extraordinary in the communist period, and they also wanted to answer a question of raised by the churchgoing public: “What shall we send?” Zsuzsanna Erdélyi and László Lékai emphasized that they were open to every object which had something in connection with the subjective, the local, the folk, and official religious life.

The exhibition was a well-organized event which drew masses of visitors and also included showings by actors, actresses, and opera singers (Katalin Gombos, Anikó Rohonyi, Imre Sinkovits, Gábor Németh, András Vitai) and an organist (István Baróti). After their performance, excerpts of holy legends were read, and the event came to a close with meditation.

The exhibition was successful because many other objects were offered. On the other hand, the organizers faced the problem of how to deal with the names of the givers, how they could present the religious objects, and how they could help collect the artifacts.

This featured item consists of an archival unit with describes the state party's ban of Zhelev's book Fascism and actions taken to prevent its distribution. It contains, among others things, book reviews by Prof. Nikolay Genchev and Prof. Mitryu Yankov and minutes of discussions about the book, from the period September 24, 1980, to March 25, 1983, totaling 186 pages. The book Fascism, originally entitled The Totalitarian State, was written by Zhelyu Zhelev during his period of internal exile in the village of Grozden, Burgas district (1966–72). In his work, Zhelev analyzed the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Franco Spain, and described the basic principles of fascist regime. Even without directly criticizing communist governments, he presented obvious analogies between fascist and socialist states. This book represents not only Zhelev’s critical philosophy and sociology but also the difficulties of publishing non-conformist texts and the significance of samizdat work.After finishing the manuscript in 1967, Zhelev attempted to publish it in a number of state publishing houses, but was rejected on the grounds of “lack of paper” or “overfilled publishing plans”. However, the manuscript was quickly distributed as samizdat. In 1968, Zhelev started talks with the Freedom publishing house of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, but the suppression of the Prague Spring prevented the publication of the book in Czech.

In 1979 he submitted the manuscript to the People's Youth [Narodna mladezh] publishing house, the publisher of the Bulgarian Komsomol. He received two positive reviews by leading professors, the philosopher Kiril Vassilev and the historian Nikolay Genchev. In his review in September 1980, Genchev highlighted the qualities of the manuscript: "The author has shown the historical way of gaining power used by the fascist parties in Germany, Italy and Spain, the processes of subordination of the state to the fascist party, the transformation of the fascist party into a ‘state within a state’, the imposition of fascist ideology as a dominant one, not bearing any political or spiritual opposition. (…) The great social consequences of the empowerment of fascism have been shown: the unification of the spiritual life, the depersonalization of the individual, the imposition of an authoritarian way of thinking, the comical cult[A1] [A2]  of the Führer, the transformation of the people into a crowd under the pressure of an unprecedented repressive apparatus and the overall moral degradation as a result of the historic experiment called fascism." He ends with the firm recommendation: "There can be no doubt that the proposed manuscript should be printed."

In March 1982 10,000 copies of the book were published in Bulgaria by Narodna Mladezh as part of the series “Library of Mavros. Popular Marxist Library”. The book caused a sensation. For three weeks, it could be found in bookstores before State Security prohibited its production and sale and confiscated copies because of its “lack of a partisan class approach”. Four thousand copies were destroyed.

The authorities responded with comprehensive and massive repression against all those involved in the issue. Three editors were dismissed: the editor of the book, poet Kiril Gonchev; the editor of the series, Violeta Paneva; the editor of political literature at the publishing house, Stefan Landzhev. The editor-in-chief of Narodna mladezh, Prof. Ivan Slavov, received a written reprimand as a disciplinary measure by the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). The reason was the “underestimation of the ideological and political shortcomings of the book Fascism.” Because of his extremely positive review, Genchev was forced to resign from his position as dean of the Faculty of History and his historical program on state Television were suspended for a period of almost four years. Asen Kartalov, who had written a positive review in the Plovdiv-based journal Fatherland Voice [Otechestven glas], received a "strong last warning before expulsion from the Party”. Zhelev himself, who had already been expelled from the Communist Party in 1965 and who at that time was a senior researcher of the Scientific Council at the Institute of Culture and head of the Culture and Personality Department, became victim of a sudden reorganization of the Institute. He was excluded from the Scientific Council and the Culture and Personality Department was closed.

The regime also ordered a critical review by the prominent scholar Mitryu Yankov, Head of the Contemporary Philosophical and Sociological Theories Department at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The manuscript of the review, dated July 19, 1982 and 31 pages long, is preserved in the collection. Yankov’s criticism is scathing. He accuses the author of "too subjectivist a scheme and a subjectivist approach", of "deliberately ignoring the class approach, the author of this book tries to discredit the state and the political system of socialism through numerous analogies with fascism", "copying and compilation", and so on.

The review was written for the Philosophical Thought [Filosofska misal] academic journal. The editorial board of the journal held a discussion of more than 21 hours about Zhelev’s book on October 13, 1982. The full minutes of it are also part of this archival unit (i.e. the featured item). The meeting begins with a statement of its chairman Dobrin Spasov: "The book of Zhelev has become somewhat of a public phenomenon, which deserves the full attention of sociologists. It has become something like a bestseller and if the information is accurate, its price has reached 150 Leva in second-hand bookshops [average monthly salaries in 1982 were 197 Leva]" (42). In the course of the debate various opinions were expressed; several participants criticized Yankov's review and portrayed it as propaganda without serious scientific arguments. Finally, the chairman of the meeting Dobrin Spasov assured Mitryu Yankov "that despite the heated disputes that have arisen here, we admire his courage to come up with a firm opinion of this issue, on which many experienced comrades avoid giving their opinion." The review was eventually published under the title "For Scientific, Marxist-Leninist Analysis of Fascism" (Filosofska misal, no. 12, 1982). The main accusations against Zhelev’s book were the lack of a “partisan class analysis of fascism” and plagiarism of Karl Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies”.

The featured archival unit also contains the open-letter response by Zhelyu Zhelev. In his letter to the editorial board he demanded that the journal either produced proof of the accusations of plagiarism or to write a public apology. If not, he threated to sue them. The editorial board of Filosofska misal was overwhelmed by letters of protest from those prominent in academia and in cultural life who expressed their “indignation that scornful articles in the spirit of the 1950s are being given space, while not giving the oppressed the opportunity to respond” (as one letter writer wrote).

The ninety-third issue of the Keston News Service (KNS) is one example of the kind of information disseminated by the Keston Institute. This particular document details incidents of a Pentecostal Ukrainian family being accosted by local Soviet authorities for applying for emigration and renouncing their Soviet citizenship. The youngest son appeared to have been physically assaulted by two unnamed men, but the family was denied legal recourse on the grounds of their repudiation of the Soviet Union. Although Keston’s reporting on religious life in the Soviet Union was not always explicitly critical, the publication of reports on the conditions of religious life to a Western audience undoubtedly contributed to the public’s perception of the Soviet Union as anti-religious and lacking in human rights. The dissemination of such information via KNS coincided with various human rights campaigns initiated by non-state actors in the West and the Soviet Union, such as the Helsinki Groups. Keston Institute was part of a larger constellation of individual and organizational actors who transnationally supported political and religious dissent in the Soviet Union.

The third performance from the Homage to Josip Broz Tito cycle, "Watching Television," was performed by Tomislav Gotovac in Vjesnik's Bookstore on the so-called Flower Square (the former Square of Brotherhood and Unity) in Zagreb on Sunday, June 8, 1980. It lasted from 6.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. and was photographed by Milisav Mio Vesović and Ognjen Beban.

According to Ana Lendvaj, the intention of the third performance was to ˝focus on the media itself: the colour television and the absorbed viewer are the content of that action˝ (Lendvaj, “Watching the Television,” 1980). The third performance was done after the death of President Tito, at the same time after the largest manifestation, probably in the entire history of Yugoslavia, of the uniformity of the Yugoslav media system, which in the days following Tito's death practically had only one news item in the media space. The artist used subversive action, in which he did not criticize the regime, but encouraged the public and the regime itself to think. 

In 1988, Vantzeti Vassilev fled to Serbia, from where he moved on to Italy and, eventually, to New York in 1989. During his escape, Vassilev managed to bring out a copy of the manuscript Semenata na straha [The Seeds of Fear]. Another copy of the manuscript remained hidden at home, in the ceiling of his old barn, where he recovered it in 2016. In New York, Vantzeti Vassilev became an author of autobiographic novels. He also finished Semenata na straha [The Seeds of Fear] as a first-person account of the humiliation and impasse of a young scientist under the conditions of a totalitarian regime. The book was published in Sofia in 1991 with the financial support of Open Society Institute and then presented in New York.

Zsuzsanna Erdélyi’s collection was the outcome of an unanticipated event in socialist Hungary. The ethnographer and her colleague Sándor Bálint created a collection of objects pertaining to Catholic folk practices in the mid-1970s with the public support of Cardinal László Lékai and the Catholic press. The survival of a significant number of private religious objects during the communist era demonstratd that many citizens lived active spiritual lives and cultivated the heritage of their parents and grandparents, despite the government prohibition against religion.

Urbs Paterna was the manuscript newspaper compiled by activists from Noor-Tartu (Young-Tartu). Its first issue bore the name Kodulinna Teataja (Journal of the Hometown). Urbs Paterna was reproduced manually in a few copies, and not all issues have been preserved. These rare copies were passed from hand to hand. In this way, Noor-Tartu also avoided the censor. This number is the third, and dates from 11 April 1980. This and other numbers do not contain any opposition content, only articles about culture, poetry, and discussions about the movement. It is not known whether the authorities reacted in any way to this issue, for at that time the movement could act relatively freely, and without major restrictions. Like the entire collection, this particular copy of the newspaper belongs to the core group of Noor-Tartu. It has not attracted wider attention, which is the intention of the current holder of the collection. Only Indrek Riigor briefly mentioned the newspaper in his BA thesis. It is possible that it will be used for research after the collection is given to an institution.