The 34-minute long documentary film ‘Danube-gate’ by Black Box is an event tracking documentation of the secret spying scandal that exploded in Hungary in January 1990. Police Major József Végvári, an active member of the infamous III/3 secret department, in late 1989 called on the cameraman of Black Box to help to reveal the fact that months before the free elections, the ex-communist ruling party, renamed MSZP, was still surveilling the activists of the democratic opposition, just as it did for several prior decades.

This collection contains the files of the State Security Service of the GDR that are preserved and administered by the Federal Commissioner for Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR (BstU). The surveillance records of the secret police represent a singular body of sources that offer unique glimpses into the cultural opposition to the GDR. The destruction of large numbers of these documents could only be averted in 1989/90 owing to the spirited actions of “Civil Committees”.

The Libri Prohibiti’s collection of foreign samizdat monographs and periodicals contains mainly Slovak and Polish samizdat literature. Russian samizdat and periodicals from the former German Democratic Republic are marginally represented.

In 1990-1991, the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation put on an exhibition about student organizations before the Soviet occupation in 1940. Artefacts were displayed in the exhibition that could not be displayed before for political reasons: flags and other attributes of fraternities and other student organizations, as well as many photographs showing their traditions and activities, including pictures from the collection of photographic negatives of Krišs Rake (1897-1965), which was acquired by the museum at the beginning of the 1970s.

27 September - 10 November 1990

Franklin Furnace, New York

The exhibition presented 32O Hungarian, Polish, Czechoslovak, East-German, and Romanian publications from the period between 1956-199O. Since the selection was not confined to political publications in the literal sense, it included a remarkably rich array of materials from the perspective of artistic forms: self-publishing, political, cultural, and art books, book series, reviews (AL, AB HIRMONDO, BESZÉLŐ, Cseresorozat, TANGO, Világnézettségi Magazin etc., and publishers: ABC, ARTPOOL, HITEL Független Kiadó, KRAG, M.O, SzNOB International, SNTL, WSH etc./ and a number of cassettes, stickers, posters, pins, badges, T-shirts, arm badges, documention of various illegal street actions, etc.)

Curators: John P. Jacob and Tibor Várnagy

The material belongs to the final stages of the ecological protests – in 1990 and 1991. The request for international assistance on resolving the environmental problem was one of the ways, sought by the citizens of Ruse in finding a solution to their predicament. Along with numerous petitions to international organizations and media that covered the issue, this bilingual black banner with white-paint letters was one of the most direct expressions of the desire for international help. The banner was donated by Iskra Pencheva, a participant of the ecological protests, to the Rousse Regional Museum of History in 1991.

Already during the Velvet Revolution, students of the archives at the Faculty of Arts, UJEP in Brno started to create an archive of documents, photographs, posters, banners and other items of this important time. The collection grew, not only through their efforts but also spontaneously grew as the collection began to be organised by many students, and in the end, during 1990 it was also completely finished and prepared. The basement of its organisation has become an inventory, which are summarising the individual parts of the collection. There is, for example, an inventory of documents, photographs, newspapers, etc. They are hand written in exercise books, and they are still key in locating the huge amount of documents and charters.

The volume written by Dan Petrescu together with Liviu Cangeopol is, beyond doubt, one of the key books of Romanian dissidence. Its subject matter is extremely wide-ranging but, either explicitly or implicitly comes under the general theme of the values of liberal democracy and the “open society.” The book was begun in the spring of 1988 and finished the same year, in the autumn. Shortly after it was finished, its content was recorded on five audio cassettes. Later, the tapes were removed from their plastic housings and transported, after a tense journey, to the West by the Italian language assistant Anna Alassio, who had been attached to the University of Iaşi. “An audio-book avant la lettre. From the time of communism. The book, in its read form, was the length of five cassettes. But it wasn’t enough just to do that. We then took the cassettes apart and removed the tapes, so that, for transport, they would occupy as little volume as possible and not resemble anything we had sent out before. The rolls of tape occupied a very small space, and could be easily hidden and then remounted very easily. Which is what happened later, thanks to Dan Alexe. But not before further adventures. The Italian woman went with the cassettes to some members of the Romanian exile community and at first they told her that nothing could be done. She got angry, and reproached them that the language assistants were taking risks and when they reached their destination nothing could be done with what they brought. Finally they discovered Dan Alexe and he managed to mount the tapes.” Parts of the book were broadcast on Voice of America, but the whole book could unfortunately only be published after the fall of communism, in the February 1990 edition of the periodical Agora, the first and only alternative cultural journal in Romanian published in the United States. After the fall of communism, the book was also published in Romania, in two editions, 1990 and 2000. The second edition appeared in the “Societatea politică” (Political society) series at the Nemira publishing house, and in addition to the initial text, it also included all the other dissident texts of Dan Petrescu and Liviu Cangeopol, the minute of the 1983 search, the notices of fines issued for Dan Petrescu’s interviews on 10 October 1989 on Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, and the lists of signatures in support of Dan Petrescu collected by Ioan Petru Culianu in November 1989, when the former was on hunger strike. Like the first edition of 1990, the volume includes a preface by Vladimir Tismăneanu, an explanatory note on the context that gave rise to the book, a letter from Dan Alexe telling of the process by which the book went from audio tape to text transcribed for publication, and a letter of support from the poet Mariana Marin. In addition, the second edition has a postface by Cristina Petrescu.

András Kisfaludy’s collection suggests ways of interpreting retrospective gazes on the alternative culture of the socialist period. While Kisfaludy is the owner of a sizable private collection that concerns alternative and dissent culture of the era, he is more a creator than a collector of documents. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was a member of the famous youth gang called "Kalef" (in 2006, he made a film about the gang). From 1968 to 1971, he was the percussionist of the underground band "Kex.” Kisfaludy began to make documentary films on cultural opposition in the 1990s. The core of his oeuvre was done between the early 1990s and early 2000s. The status of the collection is special because the rights of the movies belong exclusively to András Kisfaludy, so the collection exists only as a private collection. However, the majority of his films are accessible via Youtube.

Lydia Sklevicky's Feminist Collection at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb consists of a newspaper and periodicals collection, documentation and a library that testify to Sklevicky’s professional work and interests, primarily related to feminism and the issues of women's rights in Yugoslavia and the world. Sklevicky was one of the protagonists of the late 1970s and 1980s who put women's issues in focus and criticized the unenviable position of women in Yugoslavia, particularly by pointing out the discrepancy between their contribution in World War II and their prominent role in the post-war period on the one hand, and their re-marginalization since the mid-1950s on the other. 

One of Árpád Göncz’s first trips abroad in May 1990 as newly-elected President of the Hungarian Republic was to Indianapolis, US in order to receive a Honorary Doctorate from the Senate of Butler University. On this occasion, he first read his essay “The nameless Hungarian,” a brief historical overview of twentieth century in Hungary and East Central Europe. (The speech held at the ceremony was somewhat longer than the essay, but only the Hungarian draft survived in a later book publication, without the final English version. Here, all the three texts can be read attached.) This somewhat “bitterly optimistic” summary reflects Göncz’s charmingly brave and honest character, his wisdom, his deep empathy, and his sense of humor, as well as his sincere conviction that all the pains, failures, and losses of a horrible century can only be surpassed by the powerful collective reserves of freedom and liberty.

Just few days after he was elected president, Václav Havel travelled to Ostrava on 3 January 1990. The so-called “Steel Heart of the Republic” therefore became the first city (besides Prague) visited by Havel as the president. Havel’s first steps led to Jaromír Šavrda’s grave at the Ostrava-Hrabová cemetery. There he paid tribute, by taking a bow and laying flowers, to the significant Ostrava writer, journalist, dissident and his own friend who died in May 1988 shortly before the Velvet Revolution. Havel’s symbolic gesture helped to spread awareness of Jaromír Šavrda; many Ostrava citizens first heard of him thanks to Václav Havel’s visit. The iconic pictures of the event are now part of the Jaromír and Dolores Šavrda Collection in the Ostrava City Archive.

The former chairman of the Zadar municipal committee, Romano Meštrović, extracted the documents on the mass movement of 1971 in Zadar as an ad hoc collection already in 1990. The archival materials testify to the local communist purges after the quelling of the Croatian national liberal movement known as the Croatian Spring. It mainly consists of different reports, assessments and the minutes of the inquiry panel, which investigated and accused the reformist Party members for nationalist, i.e., anti-socialist activities also in the cultural field. The city of Zadar and its communist leadership was considered one of the epicentres of the Croatian Spring, heavily criticised by Josip Broz Tito at the Karađorđevo meeting at the end of 1971.