The full title of this central document in the Marian Zulean collection is Întîlnire la nivel înalt: Moscova, 29 mai – 2 iunie 1988. Documente și materiale (Summit meeting: Moscow, 29 May – 2 June 1988: Documents and materials). The book documents in detail the content of the visit to the USSR made by US President Ronald Reagan in the early summer of 1988, at the invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev.

The volume consists of a series of transcriptions of the public moments of the meetings of the leaders of the two states, four speeches by each of them, press statements and addresses by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, transcriptions of question and answer sessions in front of the press, and the answers given by the Soviet leader in an extensive interview granted to the newspaper The Washington Post and the magazine Newsweek prior to the visit. The book also gives details of the ceremony of exchanging instruments of ratification with the reference to the coming into force of the treaty eliminating medium-and shorter-range missiles, and the text of the joint statement made at the Moscow summit. Not least among the interesting features of the book is a substantial photographic archive of the state visit.

In order to understand why such a book constituted an alternative source of information, it must be recalled that, in comparison, the reflection of this visit in the Romanian press was minimal. Marian Zulean remarks: “I remember that it was just mentioned briefly in short news items. Because in fact what was happening then between the USSR and the USA did not suit the leaders of the communist regime here at all. Once I read this book, to which I added what I heard on Radio Free Europe, I really understood what had happened during those days in the USSR.”

The book is preserved in good condition in the Marian Zulean collection. It has 128 pages and was published, directly translated into Romanian, by Novosti Press Agency in 1988. The book was purchased at the International Trade Fair for Consumer Goods (TIBCO), where the USSR had a very large stand.

A valuable part of the Doina Cornea private collection is made up of photographs. Some of these photographs (more than a dozen), which were taken by the Securitate in the late 1980s, ended up in Cornea’s possession in a strange way that illustrates the contradictions of the turbulent Romanian exit from Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In the late 1980s, the Securitate put Doina Cornea under strict surveillance and she became the target of harsh repressive measures on the part of the state authorities due to her oppositional activity. These photographs were taken by the Securitate during the complex operation of keeping Cornea under surveillance and were aimed at analysing her daily activity and social network. Later, the photographs were archived by the secret police in their “informative surveillance file” (dosar de urmărire informativă) on her and were usually attached to an “informative” report drafted by Securitate employees for the higher echelons of the secret police. The items remained in the possession of the secret police until December 1989. During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Doina Cornea became a leader of the population of Cluj in revolt and acted as their unofficial representative. The Romanian army changed sides on 22 December 1989 and joined the population in revolt. In this turbulent period, the Ministry of National Defence became the institution with custody of the Securitate archives.

According to her son, Leontin Horațiu Iuhas, after 22 December 1989, Doina Cornea, as a representative of the local population, had several meetings with the leadership of the Romanian Fourth Army, which had its headquarters in Cluj. During one of these meetings, in order to show their support for the population in revolt and as a gesture of benevolence, the leadership of the Romanian Fourth Army gave Cornea several photographs from her Securitate files (Interview with Leontin Horațiu Iuhas). This gesture could be understood as an attempt of the leadership of the local military to gain the sympathy of the dissident after they had been involved in the repression of the local uprising of 21 December 1989 (Adevărul 2009).

One of these photographs shows Doina Cornea, her son Leontin Horațiu Iuhas, and two members of the French Embassy staff in Bucharest, talking in front of her home in Cluj. The Securitate was monitoring all her social contacts and tried its best to stop all contacts that were important for her oppositional activity, such as those with Western journalists and diplomats. However, after she was released from arrest in December 1987 due to international pressure, the secret police was put in the situation of having to tolerate her contacts with the staff of Western embassies in Bucharest in order to avoid international scandals. This photograph reflects the paradoxical situation of Doina Cornea, who was practically forced into house arrest, but was able to meet the diplomatic staff of Western embassies due to her international reputation.

On the occasion of the nineteenth Party conference, held in Moscow in late June 1988, in the context of the increasingly obvious reformist tendencies of the late Perestroika period, Viktor Koval filed a petition requesting the revision of his case, his full rehabilitation, and his release from the psychiatric hospital. This petition was examined by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Moldavian SSR in early October 1988. On 6 October, the special prosecutor responsible for supervising KGB investigations, M. V. Prodan, issued a special resolution denying Koval’s request and upholding the earlier decision of the Supreme Court. This resolution was approved by the General Prosecutor of the Moldavian SSR, N. K. Demidenko, six days later, on 12 October. This document is especially significant as it shows the reluctance of the Soviet justice system to acknowledge the repressive character of punitive psychiatry (and thus its own subservience to the regime) even as late as 1988, despite the general atmosphere of liberalisation. The prosecutor based his decision on the fact that Koval’s purported “socially dangerous acts” were confirmed by “the witness accounts, the material evidence, the conclusions of the psychiatric assessment, and the evaluation of the defendant’s handwriting,” as well as by other documents from the KGB file. After reviewing these materials, the prosecutor concluded that Koval’s assertions and papers comprised “certain well-founded critical remarks concerning the imperfections of our socialist society. At the same time, the essence of his activity did not focus on the criticism of the existing flaws in order to remove them from society. Rather, he constantly emphasised the advantages of the capitalist system and the Western way of life, and used rude and insulting expressions in connection with the role of the ruling communist party. He also stated demagogically that the people lacked any rights, that the country was ruled through fascist methods, and that the people were exploited. His main goal is obvious – to discredit the socialist order and the system of state power.” This assessment provided a glimpse into the logic of the regime’s actions and into the reasons for qualifying Koval’s case of political opposition as particularly dangerous. Although ritualistically invoking the results of the psychiatric assessment, the prosecutor in fact synthesised the regime’s attitude toward Koval’s and other similar examples of “ideological deviance.” It is not surprising that the official found the decision to subject Koval to forced medical treatment to be “correct” and rejected his petition for rehabilitation as “unfounded.” However, the prosecutor’s arguments seem more sincere and less euphemistic than earlier instances of comparable legal documents, probably reflecting a slight change in emphasis (if not in essence). Koval’s release from hospital only occurred in May 1990, when the article incriminating him was excluded from the Penal Code. His final rehabilitation followed in November 1991, when the Moldovan Supreme Court annulled the previous judicial decisions and openly admitted that Koval had suffered for his political opinions. However, even on that occasion punitive psychiatry as such was not officially condemned by the Moldovan justice system. It was only following a recommendation of the Presidential Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Regime in Moldova that the government officially condemned the use of psychiatric hospitals as a major strategy for the repression of dissent during the later stages of the Soviet regime.

Among the open letters addressed by Doina Cornea to Ceauşescu himself, that entitled “Stop the demolition of the villages” (Opriți dărâmarea satelor) was among the most significant and certainly the one that aroused the greatest international reaction. The letter opposed the programme of “rural systematisation,” which entailed the planned demolition of more than 7,000 Romanian villages (Ceaușescu 1989, 395). Cornea drafted the open letter in July 1988 in a period when the demolitions had been intensified. The letter was also broadcast by RFE in September 1988 and published later by the French newspaper Le Monde (Cornea 2006, 220).

In comparison with other open letters that focused more on future-oriented reforms (such as those dealing with the educational system), this letter is “nostalgic and past-oriented,” and deals with the protection of the Romanian peasants’ habitat and way of life, which she argues is the core of Romanian national identity (Petrescu 2013, 314). This approach was based on her readings of Romanian philosophers and writers such as Lucian Blaga, Constantin Noica, and Nicolae Steinhardt, who dedicated many of their works to the “spirituality” of the Romanian village. She thus places herself in a cultural tradition which since the end of the nineteenth century had emphasised peasant culture as a key element for defining Romanian national identity (Hitchins 1994, 298–299). Consequently, she considers Ceauşescu’s plan to restructure most of the Romanian villages as a malicious attempt to destroy “the soul of the nation.” She also invokes the fact that the rural habitat is a part of world cultural heritage and criticises the demolitions from a preservationist perspective. Thus, she asks Ceauşescu to stop the demolition of the villages and to consult of the will of the Romanian people concerning the future of the national programme of “rural systematisation.”

At the end of the letter, Doina Cornea mentions another twenty-seven persons who had expressed their solidarity with the open letter of protest and agreed that their names could be included on the list. Most of them were either Cluj-based supporters of her oppositional activity, such as the dissident Iulius Filip (who in 1981 had addressed an open letter of support to the Polish free union Solidarity), or part of a group of workers in the town of Zărneşti (Braşov county, Romania), who had initiated a local free union. This open letter, together with her interviews granted to Western journalists, inspired the collective initiative Opération Villages Roumains (OVR), “the largest ever network of transnational support against the abuses of Ceausescu’s regime,” which opposed the demolition of Romanian villages by encouraging a symbolic adoption of the endangered Romanian rural sites by Western communes (Petrescu 2013, 317).

Gediminas Ilgūnas was a well-known Lithuanian writer, journalist, ethnographer and traveller. In the 1950s, he was accused of anti-Soviet activity and imprisoned. On being released from prison, he and his close friends started to organise ethnographic expeditions, collecting material about important personalities in Lithuanian national history. The collection holds various manuscripts, including documents relating to his activities in the Sąjūdis movement and his political activities as a member of the Supreme Council, short memories about the Stalinist period, and material collected for a biography of Vincas Pietaris. The collection shows the actions of a Soviet-period cultural activist who tried to collect and preserve Lithuania's past culture.

In 1988, Berlin became the cultural capital of Europe. For the occasion, the German fashion designer Claudia Skoda was asked to create a fashion show by inviting artist from different corners of Europe. Skoda invited Király, who was the only representative of the Eastern Bloc. His collection was strongly inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s costumes at the Triadic ballet in that he created his dresses using only circles, triangles, and squares from the perspective of design and only red and black colours separately from the perspective of colour. In the end, he created 40 dresses, of which three have survived as part of his bequest.

The former Black Hole (Fekete Lyuk) in Budapest had become a legend already in its first few years of existence as the most important underground nightclub of the transition period. The building in Golgota Street originally was a community center at the residential area for the workers of the Ganz-MÁVAG machine factory. After 1945, it was operating under the name Vörösmarty House of Culture (it was a kind of a “community center”) under the oversight of VASAS, the Hungarian Metalworkers’ Federation. The basement, which served as a community bath until 1969, was transformed into a center of contemporary alternative and independent music in just a few weeks in 1988. The Black Hole opened its gates relatively late, in February 1988: perhaps this could not have taken place at any other time. Club life in Budapest was just beginning to take root, and while the plans to open the place had been drawn up in 1985, permission was granted only in 1988, when the party-state eased the pressure it had been putting on this kind of undertaking. “Adult educator” (népművelő) Gyula Nagy, the leader of the community center, ran the place.

In the initial period, the target audience was primarily a narrow circle of young intellectuals, but when a frequented punk club in the working class district Kispest closed, the repertoire of the Black Hole expanded. The club became a kind of home to several subcultures: young intellectuals who sought ways of expressing dissent, path-seeking artists, punks, skinheads, and a variety of nonconformists mingled in the smoky basement. The performers were similarly diverse. The Hole provided a platform for all sorts of upcoming bands, which was extraordinary during an age of censorship and “blacklisted” performers. In this sense, the name alternative music center stood not for a single music genre, but for the diversity of the featured genres. Numerous bands started their careers at Black Hole, and some of them even managed to acquire national or international reputations. From Auróra to F.O. System to Pál utcai Fiúk, almost everybody performed at some point in Black Hole. The place remained popular in the first few years after the transition too: a diverse array of bands performed there, such as Kispál és a Borz and VHK. Foreign bands also came to perform at the club, such as No Means No, Chumbawamba, and Fugazzi. The club quickly acquired an international reputation. In 1989, the club was on Rolling Stones magazine’s list of the 50 best clubs of the world. The core members also edited a fanzine entitled Lyukság (Hole-ness), and the constant rehearsals were complemented with other cultural programs. In addition to film screenings, literary evenings, readings, and various performances, the club also served as a site for exhibitions. Later, a studio was added to the Hole, and the Voice of the Black Hole Cultural Association helped countless bands publish and distribute cassettes.

It was essential to the spirit of the club to reject all formalities, which was evident in the looks of the club. There was not attempt to change the labyrinth of the former community bath. On the contrary, during the process of renovation, the holes and cracks were either left in the walls or even deliberately emphasized. The walls were covered with graffiti, and there were very few pieces of furniture, and they were not of a particularly high quality. People could sit on the floor or on discarded train seats. The same principles applied to rules of politeness. People could casually dance on the table, pogo, or take a quick nap on the floor, and a passing sickness did not mean much of a problem either.  Prices were low and the opening hours were long. The place was tremendously popular, and with popularity came trouble. There were fights, drug use, and deviant behaviors. Nonetheless, Black Hole was a kind of home for many young people, and in this sense, the club was not the cause of these problems. It was a place where people could find refuge from their problems, and it was also a place where they could take their problems. In addition to the many cultural programs, the Black Hole also ran a drug monitoring program. Meanwhile, in 1989, the Faith Church held ceremonies in the community center right above Black Hole for six months.

The outsider nature of the club, both in terms of content and form, drew a considerable amount of attention. The night club was presented by the press as the “gates of hell” and a “rathole.” The reputation of Black Hole as a dangerous place spread rapidly. This negative presentation was a kind of advertisement for the club, and it was also a sign of softening. While police presence was constant, it consisted mostly of a single officer, László Kerti, who spend most of his time at Black Hole as a kind of “indoor major.” The club also had to maintain daily contact with the cultural department of the Budapest Police Headquarters. It had to submit the lyrics to the songs performed by the bands, and the files on the bands under observation (Sziámi, Európa Kiadó, Bizottság, and more) and their activities at the Black Hole grew. The very existence of Black Hole was in many ways a matter of sheer luck.

This spirit of this vibrant, unique, and sometimes frightening sphere was captured by Tamás Urbán, the well-known forensic and social documentary photographer. Urbán began taking photographs there at the request of Youth Magazine (Ifjúsági Magazin, IM) at the end of the 1980s. IM was the first periodical to publish a report on Black Hole legally, and Urbán took photographs there several times after that, not so much because of the music, but because of the atmosphere. Black Hole was connected to Urbán’s major topics in several ways, not just through the various subcultures and junkies, but also through personal relationships. His photo series offers portraits of the performing musicians and snapshots of the carefree parties, offering insights into an unrepeatable, unique sphere of the age.

Watercolour painting was for Gheorghe Leahu a form of escape from the constraints imposed on the activity of architects under communism, which became more severe in the last decade of the regime. In the 1980s, Ceauşescu intensified the process of urban restructuring of Bucharest, which entailed the demolition of entire areas in the centre of the Romanian capital to make room for new boulevards. These actions were legitimised by the concept of “urban systematisation,” which was presented in the official discourse as a process of modernisation through which the city would acquire a new socialist identity. The watercolours painted by Leahu in the 1970s and 1980s portray urban landscapes, especially in the old centre of Bucharest. In addition to their artistic value, these watercolours represent, according to their author, a “source of documentation” concerning the architecture of the Romanian capital before the demolitions brought about by the so-called “urban systematisation.” A selection of these watercolours was included in an album that Gheorghe Leahu sent in 1986 to the Sport Turism Publishing House, entitled: Bucureşti – arhitectură şi culoare (Bucharest – Architecture and Colour). The album was passed by the censors, even though its introduction made no mention of Nicolae Ceauşescu. (Although this was not an official requirement of the publishing houses, most authors did refer to various quotations from the Secretary General in order to get their books published, so in the end, this reference became the norm, while its absence was seen as an ideological failing on the part of the author in question.) After the album was printed in 1988, the 4,500 copies were withdrawn before reaching the bookshops and destroyed. In addition to the failure to mention Ceaşescu’s name, another cause for the withdrawal of the album was the fact that it contained watercolours representing many old churches. Their presence contradicted the policy of the communist regime of discouraging the protection of the architectural heritage of the capital. Some employees of the printing house managed to rescue several copies, which they delivered to the author. The volume was republished in 1989 in a censored edition, and again in 1991, this time in an edition free of any censorship constraints. This volume, as well as others published by Leahu after 1989, represented an important component of the post-communist visual identity, and promoted in the public space a nostalgic approach to the old centre of Bucharest.

The documentary entitled, “Parcel 301” (1988) brought Black Box fame. The film presents the inauguration of a memorial designed by László Rajk in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, on the 16^th of June 1988, and the commemoration ceremony of the 1956 revolution and Imre Nagy that turned into an anti-dictatorship demonstration in Budapest on that same day. It is based on reports and interviews with 1956 revolutionaries, relatives of those executed for their involvement in the revolution, as well as political opposition figures. On the 16^th of June 1988, the 30th anniversary of the execution of Imre Nagy and other martyrs of the revolution, there was an unveiling of a monument for the victims of the 1956 Hungarian revolution in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. That same day, in Budapest, a commemoration of the revolution began at the unmarked graves of Parcel no. 301 in the Rákoskeresztúr Cemetery. The commemoration turned into an anti-dictatorship demonstration that continued at the Batthyány eternal flame and Heroes’ Square. The victims’ relatives and ’56 revolutionaries recalled 1956 and what this day meant to them.

The most important among the books of Đinđić’s collection is his analysis of the political and constitutional system of Yugoslavia and its key shortcomings in “Yugoslavia as an Incomplete State”. The book was published in 1988 out of a series of essays Đinđić had published in “Literary News” [Književne novine] between 1986 and 1988. Using theoretical analysis, Đinđić criticized the ruling ideological paradigm of the time and “affirmed for the first time, on a theoretically relevant basis, liberal thought on the level of the individual, society and politics.” (N. Dmitrijević, Kontinuitet nedovršene državnosti (Foreword) in: Đinđić, 1998, IX).

Đinđić wrote on Yugoslavia: “Not even the more sober-minded observers will be able to escape the impression that the most fundamental matters are, indeed, contested here. The impression that Yugoslavia is, as a matter of fact, an unfinished state. So to say, it is an open option, which withstands any final definition... In the vacuum spreading with the communist term (or, more precisely, non-term) of statehood, a variety of herbs grew, which turned the lack of premises for life in its own premise for life.“ Đinđić also analysed key problems in Yugoslavia, anticipating its dissolution, the victory of nationalism, and warned about the far-reaching consequences. This book is considered among the most important works in political theory during the 1980s in Serbia.

Publishers did not want to release some of Zvonimir Kulundžić's polemic books. On the other hand, Kulundžić himself was not ready to make compromises which some publishers were demanding. Therefore, Kulundžić published some of his most important books in his edition, without any institutional support. Nevertheless, some of his books were printed in a large number and were even sold out, such as the book Tragedija hrvatske historiografije (Tragedy of Croatian Historiography) (Zagreb, samizdat, 1970). Kulundžić gained readers quickly because of his controversial attitudes, subjects he dealt with and the thesis he offered, but also because he communicated directly with readers. In his books, he invited readers to buy his books directly from him. Most of Kulundžić's readers were subscribers of his self-published editions. This featured item - "Call for Pre-Order" - is the last page of the 2nd edition of the book Tajne i kompleksi Miroslava Krleže: koje su ključ za razumijevanje pretežnog dijela njegova opusa (Secrets and Complexes of Miroslav Krleža: which are the key to understanding the overwhelming part of his opus) (Ljubljana: Emonica, 1988). In this book author announces the release of his new book Odgonetavanje zagonetke Rakovica (Unriddle of Rakovica's Riddle) (Zagreb: Multigraf, 1994) and invites readers to ask for a copy of the book, saying "Let you become patriots and preachers on the cultural site of the Croatian people". He instructs the reader to cut off a part of the book (order form) write his home address with the text: "Please ensure a copy of your book Unriddle of Rakovica's Riddle, and send it to me when the book comes out."

Cross-border solidarity and global networking with progressive movements was at the core of Slovene peace movement’s activity. The regular information bulletins in English were published and widely distributed to convey a strong message to the international community concerning the dedication of the movement to the values of global solidarity, non-violent action and peaceful resolution of conflicts. The network of recipients of the papers ranged from political actors, the media, action groups and NGOs. This is why opposition political groups that appeared in Slovenia in late 1988 entrusted the peace movement with promotion of the “Slovenian spring” abroad. It was this movement that published news about democratic movements and organised the first political missions abroad. It was also instrumental in promoting the rights of the four opposition personalities put before a court martial in 1988 (Janša, Borštner, Tasič Zavrl) which triggered a massive resistance movement against the Yugoslav regime and finally led to independence.

The term “repartition” – the act of assigning a professional job to university graduates requires some explanation. Prior to 1989, university graduates in Romania were assigned to a workplace by the Ministry of Education through a centralised system. The position assigned as a result of “repartition” could not be abandoned by the new graduate for three years (or two years in the case of those who had an overall grade over 9 out of 10), otherwise the person in question could not continue working in his/her field. “Repartitions” were carried out in accordance with a list of workplaces compiled by the Ministry, and fresh graduates could choose a place of work upon consideration of their accomplishments and other points of view. Quite often this led to the destruction of projected marriages, as couples could not get places together unless they were already married before the “repartition.” (Cs. Gyimesi 2009).

In order to understand the importance of the selected feature item it is necessary to provide details regarding the context. Hungarian students of Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Philology, almost exclusively opted for Hungarian paired with a foreign language, or for a foreign language as major paired with a minor in Hungarian language. In 1985, graduates in Hungarian and a foreign language (English, German, French, Russian) were offered five places in Transylvania (two of these in cities) and sixteen positions in the other regions of Romania, all of them in the severely deprived countryside. In fact, most teaching positions for university graduates in communist Romania were in remote places in the countryside, since all major cities were “closed,” which means that no working place in those cities was available in the 1980s. When it came to occupying the two more advantageous positions in Transylvanian cities it turned out that these were listed only as a trick, as these positions were not made available to Hungarian candidates on the grounds that they were “high responsibility positions” that fell within the competence of the Securitate. The nominal list of advertised positions shows that graduates majoring in Hungarian were assigned to posts exclusively in schools located in the so-called Old Kingdom of Romania (i.e. Wallachia and Moldavia, regions where there was not a significant Hungarian element in the population) or in Romanian-medium schools in Transylvania, where they were forced to teach their secondary academic discipline (Russian, German, etc.) to Romanian children. Not a single position was offered to these graduates in the counties of the overwhelmingly Hungarian-populated Székely Land in eastern Transylvania, although there was a clear shortage of Hungarian teachers and also despite the fact that schools in these counties forwarded their demand for about 30-40 newly-graduated Hungarian teachers to the central authorities. It would have served as an alleviating circumstance in this respect if the Hungarian graduates had been given the possibility of teaching the foreign languages they had studied as a secondary academic discipline subordinate to Hungarian in the settlements they were sent off to. However, most of them did not have this opportunity, as the schools of the listed localities beyond the Carpathians did not even have departments for the foreign languages these graduates had been forced to accept, or they were given only a few classes of foreign languages together with classes of gymnastics, handicrafts, music, etc. in order to make up the twenty-two weekly classes required for a full-time position.

Encouraged by their tutor, Gyimesi, the 1985 graduates issued a protest against the official procedure by collective absence from the place-selection meeting. They submitted their complaint to the Ministry of Education in a memorandum signed by all of them, requesting the modification of repartitions that had in the meantime been resolved ex officio. Many prominent Hungarian personalities in Romania also protested against the discriminatory repartitions in a joint petition (Edgár Balogh, Sándor Kányádi, György Beke, etc.); nevertheless, collective action yielded no results whatsoever. Freshly graduated teachers were vigorously called upon to compulsorily occupy the jobs imposed on them – failing to do so leading to their dismissal and the payment of a fine.

The extensive repartition manipulations had repercussions on Romanian higher education in Hungarian. As a result of the repartitions, the number of university applicants for Hungarian language and literature saw a considerable decrease, as the Hungarian teaching profession had no future under the given circumstances. At the same time the number of advertised university places was also reduced. By the academic year 1985–1986 the number of available places sank to just seven, a third of the number in previous years. Beginning with 1986, Romanian grammar was introduced as a compulsory subject at the entrance examination, which made things even harder for candidates from purely Hungarian-inhabited regions who had a poor command of Romanian. Moreover, after the entrance examination, at the start of the academic year it was announced that instead of the foreign language – which had also been a subject at the examination – the Romanian language would be the secondary discipline subordinate to Hungarian, and, similarly, a foreign language as a major was paired with Romanian instead of Hungarian as a minor. This practically meant that Hungarian students majoring or minoring in Hungarian language had no possibility of becoming qualified in a foreign language. A Hungarian student could only study English, German, French or Russian if he/she chose Romanian as a major.

Repartitions in the Old Kingdom of Romania affected not only philology graduates. In the same way hundreds of teachers of other subjects, engineers, doctors, etc. were placed in settlements beyond the Carpathians. The most striking case in this respect was that of the graduates of the University of Medical Studies of Târgu Mureș, predominantly Hungarians, who could only occupy jobs outside Transylvania, according to a centrally established territorial placement plan. The equivalent of this process in the opposite direction was that many graduates from the Universities of Bucharest, Iași, or Craiova received often repartitions in Transylvania. The undisguised trend unfolded according to the so-called homogenisation concept that was promoted nationwide. It was evident that the chances of students wishing to continue their studies in Hungarian gradually diminished, since their background of increasing educational deprivation in the Hungarian language represented a serious disadvantage in higher education. As a consequence of the central dispositions, many Hungarian teacher positions were occupied by unqualified substitutes lacking a degree. Children of Hungarian nationality were offered a single chance for advancement: if they stopped using their mother tongue. All this foreshadowed the disappearance of Hungarian intellectuals, the marginalisation of Hungarian language and culture, and gradual assimilation (ACNSAS, I017980/6, 136–144).

Under the given circumstances Gyimesi, who had endured harassment on multiple occasions, turned to Deputy Minister of Education Viorica Nicolau, with whom she had made acquaintance after the latter – along with the Cluj university rector and the central party secretary – had attended the disciplinary meeting on 10 October 1987. In the three-page memorandum deliberately dated 8 March 1988, the International Day of Women, Gyimesi tried to win over the deputy education minister as an ally in her efforts to find a more just and equitable solution to the repartition of graduates while making an appeal to the empathy of a women/mother in defending innocence (ACNSAS, I017980, vol. 1, 247–249; I017980/5, 70–73). The letter was broadcast on Radio Free Europe as well, with the obvious intention of drawing the attention of foreign forums to the defence of minority rights in Romania. Several Romanian colleagues expressed their feelings of sympathy to Gyimesi and conveyed their congratulations (Cs. Gyimesi 2009).

The eight-page text written by the Czechoslovak historian and dissident Milan Hübl introduces its readers to the issue of convicts and their language. At the beginning are some brief but very interesting statistics comparing the sentences and records of criminal offences (regardless of length of sentence) in the years 1925, 1928, 1978, 1979 and 1980. Hübl goes on to write about prison structures and prisoners. The main focus of the text is prisoners’ slang. Hübl was familiar with this topic because he had also been imprisoned for several years. His own correspondence, written during his imprisonment between 1972 and 1976, is among the sources for this chapter, which focuses on the prison slang in the Brno region, the so-called “plotňáčina”. The text ends with following sentences: “While browsing through my letters, I realised that they would be a valuable source when I started writing my memoirs. A lot of information has been preserved that would have been difficult to recall without them. At least something positive came from being in jail.”