At the turn of the 1980s, bands appeared on the Hungarian music scene which did not heed the status quo of the so called “pop-business.” They represented a grassroots new wave, which meant a turn to elementary music sources and the development of a poetically elevated world of lyrics. They soon became popular among the urban youth, but at the same time they were strategically marginalized by the monopolized channels of exposure of the time.

In this climate, it came as something of a surprise that one of these bands, Bizottság (Comittee), was able to release an album in 1983. The story has become a familiar anecdote. Due to the issue of popularity, a radio reporter asked one of the decision makers at the state record company if they would release some music by the new wave bands. He routinely replied that they had already discussed the matter with Wahorn from Bizottság. This was not true, but Wahorn just happened to be listening to the radio, and he sought out the decision-maker to discuss the matter.

After awhile, they agreed to make a concert album under the condition that the band change its name (from Bizottság to A. E. Bizottság in reference to Albert Einstein). The album was popular, and it sold out within days. However, the numbers were manipulated. It was released in only 14,000 copies, so the officials could later argue that only a small number of copies had been sold, it had not been popular enough and represented merely a niche type of music (a “gold standard” for success at the time was 100,000 copies sold).

The album presents several of the characteristics that made Bizottság (Comittee) special: the surreal lyrics fit the times, since in many cases the words were not used in their usual meanings in public discourses (though the lyrics remain poetic even today); the funny, improvised dialogues between songs; the special sound (for example the distinctive breaks developed by their female drummer, the peculiar riffs played by the guitarist, the sharp sound of the organ made in GDR, etc.); the remarkable post-production work (it is worth noting that the song Bestia (Beast) was altered by the censors: the word “siege” is made inaudible with the use of sound effects).

Altogether, it was an impressive debut album, and despite the limited number of copies made (a year later, another 10,000 copies were released, and twelve years later it came out on cd as well), it is regularly included to this day on the lists of the most remarkable Hungarian records ever made.

Travel reports of lecturers and members of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation are embodied in six volumes. In terms of time, they cover the period from 1983 to December 1989, mainly from Prague, Brno and Bratislava. The reports include the length and main purpose of the stay, a description of the trip including possible complications in crossing borders, meetings with other people and subjects of their interviews, information on specific activities of the state police, etc. Visitors of Czechoslovakia also proposed other forms of cooperation in their reports. There are unique and very specific documents mapping the concrete forms of the Czechoslovak dissent linked with underground universities, efforts of the foreign organisation and important Western representatives of science to support the unofficial educational environment, and documents describing the contemporary social and political conditions in Czechoslovakia including the activities of the state police.  

A presentation at the seminar "Philosophy and Studies of Women," which was organized by the "Woman and Society" Section as a part of the first seminar of women's studies, "Women's Studies of Philosophy and Literature," which was held in the 1982/83 academic year. The presentation was held in the premises of the Association of University Professors at 5 p.m. on May 6, 1983, and was the basis of a later book, The Woman Question and Self-Management (Zagreb, 1987).

Despot's basic thesis, presented in this manuscript and presentation, is that a woman is "below the level of emancipation of her class" regardless of whether she belongs to the proletariat or bourgeoisie (Despot, 1983, 2). For her, the role of Marxist feminism can be seen as a struggle for more women to work on jobs that are not poorly paid and require higher or high qualifications, jobs and salaries that would enable them to support themselves (Despot, 1983, 3). Despot is of the opinion that anyone who “is not economically emancipated is not free in these abstract work exchange units either.” She also thinks that the true proletarian “must fight against those degrading influences left by the bourgeoisie, thereby criticizing the incompleteness of the Yugoslav version of socialism”(Despot, 1983, 4-5).

The alternative religious group Christian Community organized a camping excursion in Vas County by the Szajk Lakes on 11–21 August 1983. State security agents camouflaged as –vacationers took photos of this event. The typical photo exemplifies the methods used by the secret police observers, who hid behind trees and bushes. The photographs did not enable the police to identify any of the participants or to prove that they were engaged in any illegal activity.

Among the climbing items that could not be improvised, and which indeed it was not advisable to try to improvise, Dragoș Petrescu points to two in particular: climbing rope and karabiners. “In both cases, you’re playing with your life if you try to improvise,” he emphasises. “My father was at mathematics congress in Greece and he brought me from Athens a Simond karabiner (French) made of Zicral (zinc-aluminium alloy). In the mid-1980s, it was something exceptional to have that kind of thing in Romania; it was very light; it had a safety catch, and it was very sturdy. I received it in 1984. It is historic, I might say, and has a great affective role for me.” Around the same time two Bonaiti karabiners (an Italian firm now called Kong) came into his collection. They had belonged to one of the great Romanian climbers of the time: Mihai Pupeza. “My acquisition of the Bonaiti karabiners happened in 1983, or more likely early 1984. These were items that had to be procured from the West and they were truly the essence of mountaineering equipment. They were, in a sense, the keystone of the personal equipment with which we went to the mountains,” says Dragoș Petrescu. All three karabiners are to be found today in his private collection and are in perfect working order.

Step by Step is a mail artwork from the beginning of the 1980s which Baász made for a Hungarian exhibition. The stamp depicts a pair of legs tied together, which obviously carried ambiguous meanings at the time. Baász made it for the International Mail Art Exhibition curated by Antal Vásárhelyi and organized by the Young Artists’ Association in Budapest in 1984. The work was highly celebrated and published the same year in Élet és Irodalom [Life and Literature], a Hungarian weekly, as an illustration for János Bencze’s article Szabadlábon [At Large]. The artwork provoked a conviction from the Romanian embassy in Budapest and ultimately served as a pretense for the interrogations to which Baász was subjected by the Romanian political police between October 3 and 8, 1984. It was during this interrogation-series that Baász formulated his ars poetica.

The document that records the extent of the search carried out at the home of the Petrescus on 18 May 1983 is in the family’s private collection in an original copy, made out by the officers who took part in the event. Another two copies were kept by the communist authorities of the time. The minute records that the Petrescus were present at the search, as were two witnesses. It consists of four pages, very clearly written, and is made out in the name of the Iaşi County Inspectorate of the Securitate. Each page is signed both by the representatives of the forces of control and repression and by the witnesses and the couple themselves. The document lists the objects that were kept by the Securitate on this occasion: books; audio cassettes, including one containing a recording of Virgil Ierunca’s broadcast on Radio Free Europe in which he highly praised Dan Petrescu and other young intellectuals in Iaşi for their articles in the student magazines Dialog and Opinia Studenţească; rolls of recording tape; photographs; letters from various people; pages of notes; and a folder labelled “Furrows across the baulks – feuilleton novel of the collectivisation,” containing forty-five leaves of the manuscript of this collective novel. Among the books confiscated were some that later became classic works of critical analysis of the communist system, but which were very recent publications at the time, for example La Nomenklatura, les privilégiés en URSS  by Mikhail Voslensky (1980) and L'Union soviétique survivra-t-elle en 1984? by Andrei Amalrik (1977). There were also critical works on Romanian communism published by Romanian writers in exile, such as La Cité totale by Constantin Dumitrescu (1980). The couple managed to save some books from confiscation, but of those removed from their home by the Securitate only one was given back to them, though it is not clear on which criteria this particular book, Les Sources et le sens du communisme russe by Nikolai Berdyaev, was returned – perhaps because it dated from 1938, so was much older than the others. Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu recalls how they managed to hide some of the most critical, and implicitly the most incriminating books: “The next day, 18 May 1983, at six o’clock sharp in the morning, the guys burst in. […] At first they were very pleasant. They gave us time to get dressed, and those minutes gave us a chance to remove some books, to give them to my aunt, who stuck them under her jacket, under her overcoat. Solzhenitsyn, for example. We saved the Gulag and a few others. My aunt took them into her room, where they had no mandate to enter and where they didn’t think of entering. [… Wherever they had a mandate,] they left nothing untouched. Nothing, nothing. You realised that you could hide something anywhere, in the garden, in the house, in the woodshed, and they would rummage around and they could find it. They were capable of moving everything, of going through everything.” And regarding the immediate consequence of the search, interrogation at the Securitate headquarters, she adds: “The search lasted approximately five hours. From six in the morning to eleven. […] Then they took us up – ‘up’ meaning to the Securitate. It was on a street named Triumfului. Now after 1989, the gangs of Securitate people have built a district of apartment blocks that they own.” Dan Petrescu adds, with regard to the manner in which those who came conduct the search acted in order to find what interested them, underlining that the Securitate was particularly interested in a cassette with the recording of a Radio Free Europe broadcast, in which some young Iaşi writers had been highly praised, among them himself, and in the manuscript of the collective novel: “They had come on the basis of information, for they were looking for certain things. They were looking for a recording of a broadcast on Radio Free Europe where [Virgil] Ierunca praised us and… they were looking for books […] They confiscated a lot of books from us. Only one was given back to us, after the search. Berdyaev – his book about the sources and the meaning of communism. At the same time they asked me about the novel [“Furrows Across the Baulks” revisited]. I said to them: ‘Why are you still looking for it? Because you’ve already got it.’ They had taken it from George Pruteanu. […] It didn’t exist in more than one manuscript. There were no copies. It passed from one to the next and each one added to it. They were also looking for letters in the search.” Dan Petrescu adds, to give a clearer picture of those months, another detail that casts a new light on that moment: “The search took place, at our home, in May 1983. In March, I found out later in documents at CNSAS, the Securitate guys had made new recruits in literary circles in Iaşi. Ten new names. In editorial boards of periodicals, publishing houses, that sort of thing.”

Zbigniew Warpechowski affectionately repeats “I love you” to a yellow canary in a cage. The declarations become increasingly obtrusive and aggressive. He ties the canary to army boots with a red ribbon and commences to goose-step vigorously. The delicate canary tries to fly away, but time and time again is brutally pulled to the ground by the jolt of the military boot.

Afterwards he pours petroleum onto a plate and dips his hair in it. He sets the plate on fire, uses the flame to cut the ribbon and releases the canary. Finally he lowers his head, igniting his own hair and runs out of the room with his head on fire.

According to the description on the webpage of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw this represents a “one of the most explicit examples of the use of the language of aggression and self-aggression with the aim of amplifying the message encoded in the performance.”

The performance took place in 1984 in Stuttgart developing “the threads from the action at BWA Gallery in Lublin in 1983, which was interrupted by a group of hooligans sent by the security services.”

Liget Gallery is a small non-profit gallery operated by the Cultural House of the 14th district of Budapest. Since its founding in 1983, it has arranged approximately 450 exhibitions and events in the gallery and elsewhere. In the 1980s, it started to present solo shows of works by radical artists from the region and exhibit new tendencies within the local scene. The archive documents these activities.

11 issues of a bookwork-like samizdat art magazine published in 1983-1985 by Artpool in Hungarian (with summaries in English) about  local and global art events related to the neo-avantgarde (which were “invisible” to the official art press of the time). The unique character of this publication-series lay in the creative misuse of differing regulations concerning graphical artworks and the press. For this reason, each copy was certified as art, signed, and numbered. The materials published were produced (recorded, photographed, typed, copied, stamped, bind) and distributed by the editors themselves, and the layout was convergent with mail art and fanzine traditions, done by a trained and talented graphic artist.

At the beginning of 1983, the Czech photographer Jindřich Štreit began a discussion with Jan Švankmajer, a prominent Czech artist and animator, about the possibility of holding an exhibition of the Surrealist group in Czechoslovakia at the premises of the former Sovinec school. The preliminary date of the exhibition was scheduled for May to June 1983. Štreit knew from the beginning that it would not be easy. That is why he had written a request for permission for the exhibition from the Local National Committee in Jiříkov. On this occasion, he also applied for the possibility of publishing a small catalogue for the exhibition, which also succeeded. The catalogue eventually remained as the only evidence after an unrealized exhibition.

The central motto of the exhibition was the sentence, "No tyrant can forbid dreams". Soon it turned out that the opposite was true. After a few months of preparation with Alena Nádvorníkova, František Dryje and Martin Stejskal, which other members of the group attended, and after the demanding installation process, which was carried out by Jindřich Štreit two days before the planned opening with Jan and Eva Švankmajer, the exhibition was cancelled. On Friday 6 May 1983, the afternoon when the exhibition was ready, Bruntal State Security officials arrived and ordered the exhibition not to be opened and to be removed as soon as possible. The exhibition stayed on until Saturday 7 May 1983, when visitors started to arrive in the morning. On the planned Saturday opening, one of the other artists, Albert Marenčín and his wife, travelled from Slovakia. In this situation, nothing could have been done. From Saturday morning, State Security members stood in the square and in front of the building of the former school where the exhibition was installed and watched who went to the exhibition. On the same day Jindřich Štreit also summoned the morning brigade of the citizens of the village to repair the water reservoir. A cluster of working people served as a security filter for visitors from the morning. Everyone who went to the exhibition was familiar with the situation and was warned about the danger of confrontation with the State Security. On Sunday 8 May 1983, the situation was repeated, but on a smaller scale. That day the show had to be shut down. An extensive collection composed of the works of the so-called second surrealist generation has not been seen ever since.

Youth Park of Balokányliget, 21 May 1983 

A solo exhibition by Marijan Molnar was held in the premises of the Koprivnica Gallery in Koprivnica. The exhibition lasted from May 20 to June 6, 1983. The exhibition also presented work from the "For the Democratization of Art" cycle, in which the artist states the principles by which art should be treated and what to expect from art. The exhibition was well attended by the Koprivnica cultural circle, and the main local media (Glas Podravine) and local cultural media (Gesta) carried positive reviews on the exhibition. 

In 1983, FV Video and the band Borghesia (Neven Korda, Goran Devide, Zemira Alajbegović, Aldo Ivančič, Dario Seraval, and Sergej Hrvatin) staged the performance Kdo je ugasnil luč? (Who turned out the lights?) as part of the Spring Festival. The content of the show was transmitted by a variety of devices, such as slide projectors, film projectors, and even a video projector to a structure of television monitors, loudspeakers, and screens. As Neven Korda says, the eclecticism in their manner of expression led them to think of themselves as a “punk theatre.” They saw in punk a certain energy that tears down the old without disdaining the past: “We wanted to rescue the past from servitude to the bureaucratised apparatuses of the state’s ideology.” The FV theatre’s show sought inspiration in topics from art history and society in general. It was a spectacle with its principal focus on the media.

On the 28th of October 1983, there evolved a stormy public debate at the Faculty of Law, ELTE Budapest, about the scandalous case of “World in Move” between the official speaker of the event, the Deputy Minister of Cultural Affairs, Dezső Tóth, and the audience of some 600 students and young intellectuals. By that time the chief editor Ferenc Kulin had been replaced for more than a month, and the whole editorial staff of the journal resigned in demonstration, and the Budapest students protested with a large-scale signature collecting action.

The debate, which lasted nearly four hours, was intended to be held as a routine procedural event of the Youth Press Festival. However, due to its enflamed topics, the Hungarian Broadcast of Radio Free Europe in Munich also reported on the program, and the emigre press Irodalmi Újság – Gazette Litteraire Hongrois later on published lengthy details of the recorded speeches. The main issues of the evening were: the misdeeds of censorship, and lack of freedom of press and democracy. The paper sheets of the collected student signatures were passed by Ferenc Langmár to the deputy minister with the noisy ovation of the audience. Among the speakers there were some well-known activists of the Hungarian democratic opposition, like the philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, who ended his speech by saying: “We do not desire scandal, but liberty!” 

The document issued by the Securitate, the original of which is to be found in the Alexandru Călinescu private collection, is written by hand and now quite hard to read because of its deterioration over time. It is entitled “Minute of home search,” with a clear mention of the date on which this search was carried out: 18 May, 1983. The report has four pages, each of them signed by each of the three representatives of the communist secret police, by those whose home was searched, Alexandru Călinescu and his wife, and by two witnesses. It is mentioned that the search began at 07.00 and finished at 12.45. It is interesting to observe that, as Alexandru Călinescu recalls, similar searches began simultaneously at the homes of other authors who published in the magazine Dialog articles that had been deciphered by various informers and drawn to the attention of the Securitate as failing to conform to official ideology. For it to be seen that so-called socialist legality was respected, the document also mentions that following the search no objection or any form of opposition was expressed by the person searched, namely Alexandru Călinescu.

The minute presents schematically a record of the objects confiscated as a result of this search by the secret police. The materials that aroused the suspicion of the secret police were grouped in thirty-two categories. Most of the objects confiscated consisted, in the order in which they are mentioned in the document issued by the Securitate, of: 1) various hand-written or typed manuscripts; 2) foreign, especially French, newspapers and magazines – a diverse range, from Le Monde to Le Canard enchaîné and from L’Express to Le Nouvel Observateur; 3) books in foreign languages, but not necessarily of an anticommunist character, as can be seen from the example of the two volumes taken from the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller; and 4) audio cassettes. A critical reading of this minute gives an idea, with abundant examples, of the scale of the constraints imposed by the communist regime in Romania in the 1980s. The moment of the search is very important in the economy of the Alexandru Călinescu private collection: it was on this occasion that many materials that made up the collection disappeared, as with the exception of the cassettes, none were every returned. This record of the search constitutes the only testimony to the existence of these objects – manuscripts, periodicals, books – in the collection.

The event Kaj je alternativa? (What is the alternative?) was organised by the FV group in Šiška Youth Centre in Ljubljana. In May 1983, the FV 112/15 group entirely moved its social activities from Disco Študent, situated in the basement of Building IV in the Rožna dolina student dormitory complex, to the Šiška because the authorities were exerting pressure on them. The poster was designed by Dušan Mandić, later a member of the Irwin group and Neue Slowenische Kunst.

Mandić’s design for the poster, which advertised the event, combined aspects of the aesthetics of the FV group and the band Laibach, with elements appropriated from socialist aesthetics mixed ambiguously with elements of petit-bourgeois romanticism. The poster underscored the FV brand, reproducing in the background a Laibach woodcut, the Metalworker, along with the band’s name (Laibach), which was prohibited at that time because of a crossed-out swastika, and slogans. This poster earned Mandić a visit from the police, which arrived with a search warrant, although Mandić was never prosecuted in court for it. Mandić says that the poster was made because Igor Vidmar, who wore two badges with anti-fascist content but decorated with swastikas on them, was imprisoned for two months. Mandić also included the problematic badges on the poster, and this was the reason why the police questioned him. At the police station, he stated that he was only a contractor, since the League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia and Radio Student has commissioned the poster and, therefore, they should be placed in custody.

Soon cultural theory came to the defence of the subculture for the first time. The poster was even printed in Mladina in a somewhat censored form, but it appeared in full in the first issue of the alternative publication Viks. The event What is the alternative? was organised as a theoretical symposium, featuring some of Slovenia’s most prominent contemporary theorists, artists and cultural figures, such as Slavoj Žižek, Rastko Močnik, Lev Kreft, Pavle Gantar, Iztok Saksida, Dušan Mandić, etc. Some people were disappointed because the debate remained at the theoretical level and did not address some of the real issues that the alternative scene was grappling with, such as battles over space or the legal problems faced by the band Laibach. The event What is the alternative? revealed certain other internal contradictions within the alternative scene.

Šimun Šito Ćorić, a Croatian theologian, writer and psychologist, collected interviews and texts by some of the most important Croatian dissidents (Marko Veselica, Vlado Gotovac, Franjo Tuđman, Petar Šegedin, Ivan Z. Čičak, Ivan Supek, Zlatko Tomičić) in 1983 and published them in English in the book So Speak Croatian Dissidents. He attempted to warn the world public about the unenviable position of Croatia in Yugoslavia, and especially the unfortunate status of persecuted Croatian dissidents. Most of them were sentenced to prison sentences after show trials. The author published the book under the pseudonym Boris Katich because he feared the Yugoslav secret service would retaliate against him (although he was then living abroad), or his family, who lived in Yugoslavia.In his introduction, Ćorić wrote about the "Croatian question" in Yugoslavia, reflecting on the position of Croatia in the Yugoslav federation and presenting the ideas and demands of Croatian dissidents. He wrote short biographies of the dissidents, particularly emphasising the reasons why the communist regime persecuted them. The book included Franjo Tudjman's paper "Croatia in Yugoslavia," and Tuđman's response to the indictment filed against him by the District Court in Zagreb in 1981; the interview granted by Ivan Zvonimir Čičak to Swedish television, which was also published in the German newspaper (Der Spiegel) in 1977; two interviews with Vlado Gotovac by the Swedish and Dutch media; an interview Petar Šegedin granted to Swedish television; part of Ivan Supek’s book Krivovjernik na ljevici (Heretic on the Left); the article by Antun Nizeteo on the Croatian poet and dissident Zlatko Tomičić, and seven poems by Zlatko Tomičić. The book was released by the publisher ZIRAL in Norval (Ontario, Canada), and was published in two later editions.