Based on the materials from her collection, Alenka Puhar published the book Peticije, pisma in tihotapski časi (Petitions, Letters and a Time of Smuggling) in Maribor in 1985. The book was based on her experience of participation in the petition for the abolition of the death penalty in Yugoslavia, which was conducted at the end of 1983. A group of citizens, including Alenka Puhar, sent the petition to various institutions, including the Assembly of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The petition was not successful because the death penalty was abolished only in 1989, but it paved the way for new civil society campaigns in Slovenia, which had their peak in the Slovenian spring at the end of the 1980s, and in the collapse of the communist regime followed by the establishment of the independent Republic of Slovenia.

The book was first published in 1985 and it had two reprints in 2005 and 2009.

Süleyman Kazımov Saadettinov was born on 9 April 1951, in the village of Bashevo, Kardzhali province, Bulgaria. He worked as a mechanical engineer. Süleyman Saadettinov resisted against the so-called “Revival Process” implemented by Communist Party and its campaign of forced name-changing in December 1984 and refused to change his Turkish name to Bulgarian. His resistance was peaceful; he attended a small protest against the “Revival Process”. Because of his resistance, he was arrested and sent to prison and the forced labour camp or the ”concentration camp’, as the collectors define it, in Belene, on the island Persin on Danube river. After about one year he was released and kept on probation until deportation from the country during the summer of 1989. Süleyman Kazımov Saadettinov was expelled with his family from Bulgaria in the summer of 1989, before the collapse of the socialist regime. He and his family found refuge in Turkey. He took the Turkish citizenship. Now he lives in Bursa and has double citizenship – Bulgarian and Turkish.

According to the account of Süleyman, the photograph was secretly taken at a moment when camp prisoners were removed from the camp to work outside of the camp area, near to ordinary workers. In the working area, Süleyman and his friends saw a photographer, taking photos of ordinary workers. They asked the unknown photographer to take a photo of them. The photographer secretly took the photo of the group of prisoners and a week later brought them the developed photograph. When Süleyman was set free from the camp, he took the photo with him.

Süleyman is on the right of the picture, the man crouching and with a mustache.

“The Founder’s personal notes”

In: The Yearbook of the Soros Foundation, Hungary 1984–1985

“It was not my choice that I was born in Hungary in 1930. However, it was my own deliberate decision, one of the most important ones in my life, that 17 years later I left this country. And my return with this foundation is but a late consequence of this early age choice.” These opening sentences are the most “personal” notes in the founder’s preface to the first yearbook of the Soros Foundation, Hungary (HSF) 1984–1985.

Soros used this opportunity to address the public freely (i.e. without much risk of being censored) and share authentic information and assert the principles on which his recently established foundation was based.

The was important in part simply because in the first few years the foundation was given hardly any press coverage in communist Hungary except for some short official statements published in dailies, according to which a New York stock investor had signed a contract with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) and opened a small office in the Buda Castle district to receive applications for grants and other forms of support. Apart from this, no reports were printed and no interviews were done in the print and broadcast media. Even in 1987, Soros and his secretary staff still had to fight for the right to publish lists of successful grantees at least in HVG (the three-letter abbreviation used for an earlier title of the same periodical, Heti Világgazdaság, or “Weekly World Economy”), an economic weekly. The first principle Soros insisted on, thus, was the importance of free and permanent control by the pubic (instead of by the party and the secret police) of the operations of his foundation. Similarly, he asserted a number of other safeguards as a founder. He maintained the right to choose his personal colleagues, to decide on his own on the amount of his yearly donations to be spent (which began at one million dollars and grew to nine million dollars by 1990), and to exercise a veto in all strategic or personnel decisions, i.e. decisions concerning curators, projects, grants, prizes, etc.

As for the applications and projects, Soros readily informed the public about ongoing practice and plans for the future. The foundation wished to maintain the individual system of both dollar-based and forint-based grants and support. The Literary and Social Science grant systems were running successfully, but they also planned to test and introduce some new projects which offered support for study abroad and research grants and support for conferences, as well as funding for filmmakers, theater groups, and artists active in the fine arts. Applicants who fell in other categories were equally welcome to submit inventive workplans and new, creative initiatives.

Invitation and program schedule for the IHF Cultural Symposium, Budapest 15–18 October 1985

Although the plans and practical preparations for the alternative programs of the Budapest Cultural Forum 1985 had been started more than a year earlier, it was this invitation letter and program schedule sent to all Western participants by the International Helsinki Federation from its Vienna Office, an invitation signed by Chairman  Karl Joachim Schwarzenberg on 1 September 1985, that proved the success of devoted efforts made by the IHF staff to organize a three-day East-West Cultural Symposium in Budapest in parallel with the official opening session of the CSCE European Conference.

The main subjects of the alternative forum were much more challenging. They included “Writers and their Integrity” and “The Future of European Culture,” and they offered a good opportunity for free and stimulating exchange of ideas for participants from both East and West. The list of authors invited seemed quite imposing, as it included prominent figures such as György Konrád, Susan Sontag, Per Wἃstberg, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Derek Walcott, Timothy Garton Ash, Alain Finkelkraut, Danilo Kis, Jirzi Grusa, Ed Doctorow, and Amos Oz. This forum was perhaps the first chance since 1945 for writers from both East and West to enter free public debates on sensitive cultural and political issues such as exile, censorship, self-censorship, the role of national identity in literature, the rights of minorities, the right to history, or the basic question of whether European culture is separate from world culture. And is European culture really one indivisible culture? These questions and issues represented an utterly new approach which regarded cultural freedom as a vitally important and integral part of the overall realm of human rights.    

How did the Budapest “Cultural Counter-Forum” manage to implement the promising plans made by the IHF? Not quite as was expected. Apart from Hungarians, no other participants from Eastern Bloc countries could attend the symposium, either because they could not get passports or because of the were forced to live under police surveillance or under house arrest, or they had been interned or jailed, like many Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Romanian writers at the time. They were partly represented by some Western writers with Eastern origins, e.g. Jirzi Grusa, Danilo Kis, and Amos Oz, and Timothy Garton Ash, who came from Warsaw to Budapest, spoke for the Polish writers who at the time were still suffering from the harsh measures of martial law. Things were similar in the case of writers who belonged to ethnic minorities. Hungarian participants, like poet Sándor Csoóri and philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, spoke on their behalf, as did two of the most harassed writers and samizdat makers, Géza Szőcs, who was originally from Cluj / Kolozsvár / Klausenburg, and Miklós Duray from Bratislava / Pozsony / Pressburg. Szőcs and Duray addressed open letters to the participants in the Counter-Forum

The Irina Margareta Nistor Private Collection includes a series of written documents, together with a few dozen VHS video cassettes preserving a small part of the Western films that were introduced clandestinely into Romania between 1985 and 1989, to be translated and dubbed and then distributed on video cassettes (semi)clandestinely. This collection epitomises a popular culture phenomenon without any equivalent in Eastern Europe, which emerged in Romania as a reaction to the reduction of the official programme broadcast on television channels to just two hours per day and to news broadcasts about the activity of Nicolae Ceauşescu and the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party.

The architect Gheorghe Leahu kept a secret diary in the period 1985–1989. In view of the risk of being arrested if the diary was discovered by the Securitate, he stored it in his garage, in a black cover, under some spare tires. After work, Leahu would write in this diary about aspects of his daily life and personal impressions. In the context of an increasingly repressive regime during the 1980s, this was a way of venting an intellectual’s resentments in communist Romania. In his diary, Leahu reported in detail on the severe shortages which affected everyday life in Romania in the 1980s, on the absurdity of the policies of Ceauşescu’s regime, and on the ridiculous nature of the official propaganda, especially the cult of the dictator’s personality.Leahu was very critical of the regime in the pages of his diary. According to these notes, day to day life in Romania in the 1980s had become a fight for survival, a desperate struggle for food and other consumer goods, and professional activity, a long line of humiliations, caused by the arbitrary and absurd interventions of the holders of political power in the activity of architects. He also constantly criticised the policies of urban restructuring of the capital. In one of the passages dealing with this topic, Leahu noted the effects these policies were having on the identity of the city, but also on everyday life: “Old buildings are being demolished at an infernal pace, many new low-quality buildings are taking their place, the city is losing its personality, it is being completely transformed, the blocks of flats are steamrolling over entire neighbourhoods with gardens and backyards and decades– or centuries-old trees. Instead of life in a quiet backyard, we squeeze into blocks of flats like worms on the vertical, subject to barbarous austerity measures, with hot running water only five times a week, for two hours, always in the cold during the winter, we are becoming depersonalised like soldiers of a blind army of workers” (Leahu 2013, 56). The diary, published in 2005 by the Civic Academic Foundation under the title: Arhitect în “Epoca de Aur” (Architect in the “Golden Age”), constitutes a valuable historical source of information concerning everyday life in Romania in the 1980s. The content of the diary and the conditions in which it was written reflect the atmosphere of generalised fear, frustration, and helplessness in which many Romanian intellectuals were living in the 1980s.

Gyöngy és homok: Ideológiai értékjelképek a magyar irodalomban (Pearls and Sand: Ideological Value-Symbols in Hungarian Literature) is a literary historical-aesthetic study of the so-called "pearl-mussel motif” so popular in the Transylvanian lyrical creation of the 1920s and the 1930s, also present in the subsequent periods. Beyond this, it is also an analysis of the underlying ideology behind the poetic image, that is, of Transylvanism. This work did not originally express an explicit ideological challenge to the communist regime, but its fate of being confiscated by the secret police transformed it into a significant part of Gyimesi’s intellectual legacy directly linked to her dissident activity, as József Imre Balázs points out. At the same time, in its cultural meaning, Pearls and Sand was a genuine “oppositional” work, whose critical understanding of Transylvanism brought a refreshing critique of the dominant tradition of the Hungarian minority culture before 1990. The reframing of the concept of Transylvanism after the First World War focused on the idea of a federal Transylvania within Romania consisting of ethnically diverse independent cantons organised after the Swiss model. Even if the enormous demographic changes in Transylvania brought about by the Romanian political leadership during the last decades of communism would have thwarted all real chances of seeing this implemented, Transylvanism remained an influential ideology among the members of the Hungarian community and a fertile ground for literary and artistic creation.

Early Transylvanism of the Hungarian community was a response to the traumatic territorial changes that culminated with the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty and created a de facto, formerly inexistent minority community, which was separated from its “mother country.” Under these circumstances there was a need to define the self-awareness of the Hungarian minority and to strengthen its national identity. This “strategy” of survival was much needed as the political-moral collapse of the Hungarian ruling elites following the military defeat in 1918 drove many people to suicide, alcoholism, or emigration. By 1924 as many as 200,000 people emigrated from Transylvania to Hungary. Transylvanism was a spiritual-moral defence, a positive response to the negative consequences of the Trianon Treaty which facilitated the moral acceptance of the situation the Hungarians in Transylvania found themselves confronted with. Its primary ideological function was to turn necessity into virtue: presenting disadvantage as an advantage, regarding the self-reliance of the minority as a beautiful possibility for independence, as a chance for creating specific values. This is how Transylvanism compensated for the sense of loss generated by the new situation. In the light of survival this ideology played a positive part, as in the so-called heroic era it helped Hungarians in Romania to recover from the post-Trianon trauma. It must be mentioned that this ideology was shared by a rather small group of people whose members undertook the mission, the sacrifice, mainly out of Christian faith; however, it is evident that this personal belief could not be turned into the ideology of one and a half million people.

The criticism of Transylvanism started already in the second half of the 1930s with the so called “populist” writers. They reached the conclusion that Transylvanism was not the sober conscientisation of the minority situation and of fundamental Hungarian interests, but a mere “faith and aspiration,” or wishful thinking, which created a false image of reality. The historical facts used as arguments represented, according to these critics, half-truths that were over generalised by writer-ideologists to cover up other mainly negative historical facts. This illusory image of reality proved to be necessary in the further stages of minority life as well and it fulfilled a similar role. After the Second World War both proletarian internationalism and the illusion of the “Danube basin” fraternity aimed at mitigating the conflicts of interest between winners and losers, between majority and minority. After many writers and cultural activists officially rejected the “dual commitment” in 1968, Transylvanian regionalism regained its former prestige, also strengthened by the newly established minority institutions. The manipulations of the Ceaușescu regime and the cooperative attitude displayed by certain Transylvanian Hungarian representatives towards a more liberal version of Romanian communism seemed to facilitate the validation of this illusory regional self-esteem. Accordingly, Transylvanian ideology revived again in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the need for redefining the collective identity of the Hungarian minority re-emerged, while its existence as minority was still unsolved. This appeared primarily in the conscious revival of tradition, as in Ernő Gáll’s historical works and in his ideology focused on the “dignity of the individual.” The publications of György Beke and the poetry of the second Forrás-generation poets also maintained the illusion of positive possibilities of coexistence, that of the decisive role played by Transylvanian historical traditions and the myth of the moral surplus inherent in the human character of minority individuals, which derives from the need to play roles such as “coping,”  “service,” and “readiness to sacrifice” which paralyse the need for formulating real interests.

Gyimesi was preoccupied with Transylvanism – the interwar minority ideology – because she recognised that such a moral-centred ideological phenomenon holds the possibility of continuous political compromise from the outset. It is very difficult to draw the line between the morality of standing one’s ground and resignation. She raised the question whether the ideology of intellectuals heroically embracing minority destiny is a self-justification for not doing anything to change their situation? While writing her work she considered that the political tradition of compromise also contributed to the fact that her generation found itself in a minority situation even worse than that of the interwar period. It was her admitted purpose to point at the utopian, mythical features of this ideology that hid the real political interests of the minority and, instead of a strategy aimed at the satisfactory solution of the situation, compensated Transylvanian Hungarians with illusions. The manuscript was finished in the early months of 1985 when it seemed that an emotion-free, adequately abstract set of concepts was suitable to carry out a critique of the leading ideology of the interwar period in publishable form. She tried to avoid all those pathetic symbols and metaphors that – in the Romanian Hungarian spiritual life of the 1980s – defined in a concealed form the sense of identity among the Hungarians in Transylvania, and, by highlighting the positive values of the Transylvanian spirit and of the minority destiny, she tried to cope with the “double oppression” under the dictatorship.

The view of Transylvanism expressed in Pearls and Sand is characterised by a rather harsh critical voice. However, this is not performed in a direct manner. Criticism is primarily targeted at the clarification of concepts, determined by the need to grab the values polished into myths in their real essence. The detached dissection of the ideology components led to reactions that included labelling the author as destructive and describing the effects of the manuscript as damaging, on grounds that this merciless uncovering of the contradictory value structure of Transylvanism could easily discourage the reader from further accepting this seemingly hopeless minority situation. Beside the rather self-critical view of the past which was at the same time directed at the present, Gyimesi was unable to offer arguments in support of hope, and could not offer a perspective regarding the future, as between 1985 and 1987 she saw no real chances of a change in the deprivation of rights which the Hungarians in Transylvania had to endure. She considered it important to perform an accurate assessment of the situation and of minority awareness, to express the need for reflection, the desire for spiritual detachment, the system of analytical concepts by which she could identify even the most delicate contradictions.

The study could not be published. It was confiscated by the Securitate for the first time on 1 October 1985, during a home search conducted at the author’s residence. Gyimesi had to provide translations of random excerpts from her study to her interrogators. Almost a year later, on 30 August 1986, the Limes circle organised by Gusztáv Molnár provided the occasion for discussing the manuscript during a meeting in Ilieni, Covasna county. Sándor Balázs, Béla Bíró, Ernő Fábián, and Levente Salat were the authors of comments (I236674/4). They intended to publish this debate material along with the study “later on, when times turn more favourable.” On 7 February 1987 the Securitate conducted a home search at Gusztáv Molnár’s flat in Bucharest and seized this work along with the Limes circle materials (I236674/1). However, by that time one copy was already in a “safe place.” The study was confiscated for the third time during the home search at Gyimesi’s residence on 20 June 1989 (Cs. Gyimesi 2009).

Gyimesi intended her study – finally published in 1992 after the regime change – to be a “warning mirror,” which would prevent Transylvanian Hungarians from falling into the traps of self-deception inherent in interwar ideology. The idealising moral view characteristic of Transylvanism, the patience exaggerated to the point of helplessness, the tendency to embrace suffering could get in the way of the struggle for human rights. Gyimesi held the opinion that a balance had to be found between the Transylvanist ideology of survival and the legal and political guidelines of the struggle. Furthermore, she believed that there was a need not only for emotional-moral reconciliation but, first of all, for a legal framework to ensure a humane, worthy life so that Hungarians in Transylvania could lead a harmonious, full-fledged life in Romania despite their minority status.

Vincas Pietaris (1850–1902) was a Lithuanian national activist and writer. He is famous for writing Algimantas, the first historical novel in Lithuanian. The novel was published for the first time in the United States in 1904–1906. (It was published for the second time in interwar Lithuania.) The novel takes a popular approach to the formation of the Medieval Lithuanian state, and the heroic struggles between the Lithuanian dukes and their enemies. By glorifying Lithuania's past, it influenced Romantic nationalism. Because of this, Algimantas became very popular in interwar Lithuania.

However, the novel and its author were practically unknown in Soviet Lithuania. Gediminas Ilgūnas started to work on his biography of Pietaris in about 1980. He travelled twice to Russia, where Pietaris had lived and died. The biography was published during Gorbachev's perestroika in 1987. At that time, various historical studies and popular works about the history of the Lithuanian state were becoming more popular among different sections of the population. Various historical issues relating to the Medieval and modern state were being discussed in the Sąjūdis press. The biography of Vincas Pietaris was part of this growing movement. The novel Algimantas was published later in 1989, and became very popular with the Lithuanian public.

‘Aldona Liobytė. Smiling Resistance' was the title of one of the first books about the writer, publicist and interpreter Aldona Liobytė. Being a very active person with a strong sense of humour, Liobytė initiated and led informal networks among the Lithuanian intelligentsia. She kept up social ties and correspondence with many artists, discussing and making suggestions about creative work and everyday life, as well as supporting the ideas of the younger generation of artists. Through her personal ties and networks, she expressed an outlook (usually in the form of humour, irony or sarcasm) that had a sense of the existence beyond official Soviet ideology. While she was forced to leave her job at the Literary Fiction publishers because of her un-Soviet attitudes, she continued to work in the cultural sphere, writing for children and the younger generation. Translating from other languages was also an important activity and a reliable source of income for Liobytė's family . The collection consists of the papers of Aldona Liobytė, which are split between the Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum and Liobytė’s daughter Gintarė Paškevičiūtė-Breivienė.

After Ivan Aralica had been granted the Vjesnik literary Ivan Goran Kovačić Award for literature, members of the Zadar branch of SUBNOR condemned this act. This was first commented by the local weekly Narodni list in a lead under headline “Vigilance fell asleep” written by the editor-in-chief Dane Vučenović. In the article, the frequency of attacks on self-management socialism is mentioned and the attempts of “defeated groups from the era of the so-called ‘massive movement in Croatia’.” Vučenović stressed that in that period the opponents of socialism increasingly came out openly in many centres, and so in Zadar, where the writer Ivan Aralica lives, the winner of the Ivan Goran Kovačić Award for the novel The Souls of Slaves (1984). He agreed with the SUBNOR Zadar branch, which criticized the Vjesnik jury for giving the award to a writer whose profile was inadequate because of his participation in the Croatian Spring in Zadar. “We think that such an attitude of the Zadar veterans has a positive significance, and that in the process of giving awards, the political profiles of candidates should be taken into account, at least when special awards are at stake,” Dane Vučenović concluded, indirectly pleading for interventionism in the assessment of literary works.

Ivan Aralica himself stated in his letter of 26 July 1985 to Zlatko Crnković that this lead was an overture for the attacks on him: “It has been a long time since I wanted to write to you, ever since I came to Zagreb at the beginning of July, because right on the eve of my departure from Zadar the campaign against me started with the lead in Narodni list (Aralica and Crnković 1998, 123).

Special issue of the Hungarian samizdat paper Hírmondó on the debates at the Counter-Forum in Budapest, October–November 1985

The Hungarian samizdat periodical Hírmondó (“Messenger”) was launched in 1993 by Gábor Demszky, also the founder of AB Independent Publishing House and from 1990 to 2010 the Mayor of Budapest, and hardly more than a year later also the founder of Beszélő (“Speaker” or “Prison visitor”). Soon, other samizdat papers were also launched, such as Demokrata (“Democrat”) which was founded by Jenő Nagy, and Máshonnan Beszélő (“Speaker from Elsewhere”), an East European Monitor which reflected the increasing interest among the public in the uncensored press and the Hungarian samizdat press. Hírmondó was published as a screen-printed bimonthly; by the Autumn of 1985, it had been published in 15 issues, each of which sold well. Its profile, style and character were somewhat different compared to other free press products, such as Hírmondó, which preferred to publish shorter articles and interviews. Its greatest asset was rather the fresh news blocs based on many sources.

Well over of one third of its October–November 1985 issue was dedicated to the debates which had just taken place at the Budapest Cultural Forum and the Counter-Forum. This issue included 10 documents, interviews, essays, and articles, for instance conference papers by Danilo Kis, Amos Oz, Edward Albee, and Peter Curman, open letters by Géza Szőcs and Miklós Duray, interviews with Jurij Ljubimov and Danilo Kis, US Congressman D’Amato’s speech, etc. Hungarian readers were also given a detailed introduction to the principles and activities of International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, which had been founded three years earlier. Though the articles and comments were published with no names, the issue nonetheless seems to be the product of good teamwork among the authors, editors, translators, and interviewers. Two of the authors who published anonymously in the issue were editors Miklós Haraszti and Gábor Demszky. Their witty styles and challenging statements make their writings easy to identify.  

The Dziekanka Workshop was the space of intersection of many domains: visual arts, theatre, music, philosophy. Among music groups that gave concerts in Dziekanka, one might mention punk bands TZN Xenna and Dezerter, intuitive Ossian, and ephemeral projects set by Krzysztof Knittel, Marcin Krzyżanowski, Mieczysław Litwiński, Andrzej Przybielski, and other avant-garde musicians. Familja Radio Warszawa was related with Dziekanka as well. The group was established by Jerzy Caryk, Kuba Pajewski, and Libero Petrič with the participation of many other musicians, artists, and actors. The group combined musical improvisation with electronic experiments and joyful atmosphere while their performances were enriched with elements of theatre and astonishing scenographies. The photography made by Tomasz Sikorski presented the installation-environment created by Familja Radio Warszawa in Dziekanka, December 28-31, 1985.

Secret report of the Hungarian State Security Service, 16 October 1985

The state security services of communist Hungary began to follow the preparations underway for the Counter-Forum Budapest 18 months earlier, i.e. as early as March 1984, by gathering regular information and agent reports on the informal meetings of IHF representatives and some Hungarian dissident intellectuals in Budapest. By the opening of the official CSCE Cultural Forum in mid-October 1985, the entire staff of the Hungarian secret police had been mobilized with the main task of preventing any potential conflict or open scandal before, after, or during the six-week-long prestigious East-West diplomatic conference, as a “top secret” daily information report dated 16 October 1985 (just one day after the grand opening of the CSCE Conference) clearly proves. It seems to be a telling sign of flurry and an excess of caution or paranoia that on that day this was the second report submitted by the secret service on the same subject: reporting on all suspicious signs and information concerning the efforts of the IHF to find public places: restaurants, conference rooms in downtown Budapest for the use of the Counter Forum. This brief report, which contained both false and misleading information, also illustrates the incompetence of the Hungarian secret police, as they do not seem to have been aware of the latest news, according to which the Counter-Forum had been refused permission to hold its session in a public place a day before and so was hosted by Hungarian dissident poet István Eörsi and film director András Jeles, who offered their private residences for the sessions.   

Ziyatin Nuriev was born in the village of Most, municipality of Kardzhali (1955). He graduated from the High School of Arts in Kazanlak and then studied painting at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia. During his second year at the Academy, he changed his speciality to sculpture in the class of Prof. Iliya Iliev. Nuriev graduated from the Academy in 1982.

Initially, Ziyatin Nuriev worked with basalt, one of the hardest materials. His favourite themes are the figure and the portrait. He took the human figure to abstract form using various materials – marble, bronze, wood, ceramics. Even his first participations in national exhibitions were noticed – in 1985, in the National Youth Exhibition, he won the prize of the Union of Bulgarian Painters and two years later, he received the annual prize in sculpture of the Union of Bulgarian Painters. Some of his works were bought by the National Art Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery and other leading galleries in the country.

During the so-called Revival Process (an attempt of the Bulgarian Communist Party to forcibly assimilate the Muslim population – Turks, Pomaks, Tatars, Roma), the name of Ziyatin Nuriev was changed to Zlatin Norev. The Revival Process began in the early 1970s and continued until the end of state socialism. The measures for the implementation of this policy included forced change of the Arabic-Turkish names with Bulgarian, restrictions in the use of the mother tongue by representatives of the above-mentioned groups, forced restraint of their traditional customs and rituals and of the use of their religion. The assimilation policy of the socialist authorities provoked a wave of resistance which played a significant role in the development of open civil opposition to the communist regime.

Until 1990, Ziyatin Nuriev worked in Bulgaria but afterwords he moved to Istanbul.

When often asked if he feels distressed about Bulgaria because of the "Revival Process" and the change of names, Ziyatin Nuriev answers: "I was distressed about the country not as people but, let's say, as government. How could I be distressed and offended by my friends, acquaintances, neighbours? It wasn't their fault. They were even more surprised and frightened than us. Because we were in a way prepared in advance. Something was telling us it was going to happen. I remember many people, colleagues and friends, who literally broke into tears. But these are other things – ethnical affiliation, this and that; that's not a problem for me. This is a wholly different story. If you ask me if I'm offended or distressed about Bulgaria – no, absolutely not. Because Bulgaria is my home. I'm glad that I was not alone at the exhibition last night. [...] I'm not a patriot, neither Bulgarian nor Turkish." (Dzhambazov 2016)

"The changes in Bulgaria in the 1990s enabled my departure for the megalopolis [Istanbul – A.K.]. But it wasn't planned. I didn't want to leave my own country. Remember the insanity of 1989 when many people were expelled or forced to leave the homeland. Not that I didn't want to see the world and live in it but I didn't want it to happen that way. That's why I arrived in Istanbul as an ordinary tourist, not an exile (1990). It was summertime and with a friend of mine went to see the museums. We walked along the İstiklal Avenue and then entered the trade centre for textiles and fashion. We were filled right away with a sense of luxury and glitter, felt the smell of incredible scents. I introduced myself to the manager and showed her my brochure. It turned out that we were at "Vakko", chain stores with galleries located in the biggest Turkish cities – Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir... My first exhibition in Turkey was at Vakko in Ankara in 1991. The same year, I was offered a lecturer's position at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Marmara University. For 16 years now, I lead there the workshop on stone-cutting which I actually founded. [...]

Do you remember the Revival Process?

- We all have to remember it so that we won't repeat the same savagery. But I must also forget about it because of the relations with my friends, fellow-citizens, compatriots" (Cesur 2006).

Ziyatin Nuriev participated in international symposia and exhibitions in Poland, Turkey, Japan, the Canary Islands and others. He never broke his connection with Bulgaria; he had exhibitions in Burgas (Prolet Gallery, 2006??), Varna (Gallery 8, 2014), Plovdiv (Resonance Gallery, 2015), Kardzhali and Sofia (2016). His sculptures can be seen in many Bulgarian towns and cities.

The sculpture "Window" was created in 1985, the year when the campaign for a large-scale change of the Arabic-Turkish names with Bulgarian was at its height; all administrative structures, the repressive apparatus and the state organizations of the totalitarian regime were engaged; in only two months, the names of over 800 000 people were changed. The assimilation policy of the socialist authorities provoked a wave of resistance which played a significant role in the development of open civil opposition to the communist regime.

Although the author says that they are not directly related to the "Revival Process", the works of Ziyatin Nuriev express his protest. Despite the similarity in material and technique between "Window" and his earlier works ("Dream", 1982; "White Light", 1983; "Head", 1984), the difference in the message of the sculpture is considerable: "The wound of unbearable violence is engraved in this sculpture; a wound on the person's morals, on the family, the society. The window of Ziyatin Nuriev gives us the possibility and the impossibility to touch what we won't ever experience. The possibility – because he has brought out to the surface the iceberg of pain; the impossibility – because he has locked up all external expressions of pain.

The eyes are missing.

The lips are missing.

In the place of the eyes, from the meandering edge of the eyelid line, depending on the light, the shadows casted could call the look of sorrow from which a sigh slips out whispering. 

In the place of the lips, on the border where the two halves of the face meet, the concealed lamentation passes over, the red vertical line of the silence.

Ziyatin chooses for the first and may be for the last time the bust, the most used pattern for heroization of the character. He deprives his character of individual characteristics but presents him with plastic uniqueness – he takes from the crown, prolongs the scull, flattens the body, marks the nose and cuts the volumes by sharp edges. He includes the clasped hands which emphasize the geometry of the forms as well as the delicacy of the details. At first, the sculpture looks deceivably fragile but it has the mighty hardness of the basalt. The differences in the texture of the basalt cause differences in the shades of grey. This is particularly visible in the place of the eyes; the tangle of dark and light spots begins from the area of the eyes, runs through the temples and reaches the back of the head. The grief is transformed into enlightenment. The shades of grey are not enough and Ziyatin uses brick-red to wound particular edges or places of the head and the body.

The window is blocked up for those who observe and open for those who can sympathize." (Iliev 2011: 34-35)

The Zagreb Gymnasium private collection consists of memorabilia from the 1985-89 period. The school was then named as the Educational Centre for Languages, and two of its classes, which retained the classical curriculum, were considered a peculiarity. It was highly exceptional at the time, because in the framework of the secondary school reform implemented by Stipe Šuvar in 1975-76, which promoted so-called “directed education,” all gymnasia in Croatia were transformed into some manner of vocational schools with the aim of preparing the students for the labour market. From the communist perspective, the classical education was deemed unnecessary petty bourgeois elitism, which prepared select students for the university and enhanced class inequality.

The two-page typed petition Petice Podněty katolíků k řešení situace věřících občanů v ČSR was written by Augustin Navrátil in 1985, preceding the most famous petition from 1988 called the "Moravian Challenge" signed by over half a million people. The petition is in Jan Tesař’s collection, and is the second petition of Augustin Navrátil, with 20 signatures on religious freedom. It includes the requirements of a free study in theology, an autonomous church administration, a separation of the Church from the state, an end to the discrimination of believers, etc. The petition was distributed in Czechoslovakia and also in exile. Jan Tesař and Navrátil were in contact, so the petition has been saved in his collection. It is an important material illustrating the forms of discrimination against believers and churches, as well as a historical documentary on the breakthrough of the "Moravian challenge".

This was the very first album created by the artist Lóránt Méhes from the photos accumulating in his box, incorporating the best photos from his collection. In this sense it differs from the rest of the compilations, which are all arranged in chronological order (these photos are featured exclusively here and are missing from those other chronologies).

In the last decades of Romanian communism, queues for various foodstuffs or common consumer goods were an everyday sight. Images of queues are common to all the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. However Andrei Pandele’s photographs are different because they illustrate a period of decay and degradation of human life that was unparalleled in the Soviet bloc. They show the absurdity of the arbitrary measures taken by the Ceaușescu regime, which reintroduced food rationing on the pretext of so-called “rational nutrition.” The severe shortage of food products was the direct result of the decision to be able to pay off Romania’s foreign debt and so become less dependent on the West, thus implicitly being under less pressure to release dissidents who had been arrested for the crime of criticising the regime’s policies. Andrei Pandele’s photographs are impressive because they show not only a dark and dirty Bucharest with interminable queues, but also people completely without hope. “It took me years to notice what I wasn’t interesting in noticing. People look, and as a rule, they only see what interests them. It’s absolutely natural. It was a question of practice, of education of the eye, to which, I must acknowledge, my architectural training had also contributed. Why do I say this? Because I was not, at first, in real time, conscious of exactly what I was photographing. Some places, their hidden, grave symbolism, I myself discovered long after I had taken the pictures. Often we see what we are able to see…,” says Andrei Pandele, with regard to what he calls a “rabid abnormality.” In this connection, he mentions that: “in my photographs of everyday life during communism, implicit, but visible when you look carefully at the photographs, is the abnormality that is/was represented by the small details. Buckets of cheese on the pavement. Or shopping backs lined up on the pavement, empty bags. Or bottles of milk frozen in the street. And many other things. It was, as I say, a rabid abnormality.”