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Stanislav Pitaš is a Czech signatory of Charter 77, political activist, organiser of concerts and representative of the East Bohemian underground. He has worked as a blue-collar worker for most of his life. He maintained contact with the dissidents around Václav Havel and with the underground community in Vísca near Chomutov, East Bohemia. He distributed the samizdat periodicals “Vokno” and “Voknoviny”. During his travels in Poland, he collaborated with Solidarity and actively supported the movement. In the 1980s, he moved to Broumov, North Bohemia, where he organised underground concerts and happenings. As a signatory of Charter 77, he was under supervision and was the target of intimidation by the State Security (StB). He was imprisoned three times between 1985 and 1989. In 1985 this was for allegedly ridiculing the president of Czechoslovakia when he and his friends created a satirical collage of Gustav Husák. On his way to a demonstration in Prague on 28 October 1988, he refused to follow the orders of StB officers, and instead passively lay down and was arrested. His subsequent complaint served as a pretext for the StB to accuse Pitaš of assaulting an officer. In 1989 he was imprisoned for the alleged theft of socialist property. He requested that his sentence be suspended because his mother was seriously ill; his request was not granted, despite Pitaš’s hunger strike. His mother died without Pitaš being able to pay his last respects. Before her death, she sent a letter to the prosecution office in Náchod, where she wrote that she was proud of how she had raised her son. All Pitaš’s trials were followed and reported by the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). Pitaš was released following a general amnesty in December 1989. After the Velvet Revolution, he was active within prison and police vetting committees. He organises concerts and other events in Šonov and Broumov.

Petr Pithart was born on 2 January 1941 in Kladno. His father, Vilém Pithart, was a lawyer and a member of the pre-war Communist Party, imprisoned by the Nazis in Theresienstadt in 1944 and later in Dachau. The Pithart family moved to Prague in 1946. Petr Pithart studied at grammar school and Charles University’s Law Faculty. He became a member of the Communist Party during his studies. He worked as an assistant professor at the faculty between 1962 and 1971 and published in Literární noviny from the middle of the 1960s. He resigned his membership of the Communist Party in September 1968. In 1969, Pithart and his family relocated to Oxford, where he had been granted a scholarship, but returned to Czechoslovakia in autumn the same year, having been called upon by the Czechoslovak government. He was dismissed from the university in 1971 and worked on hydraulic structures in South Bohemia. Between 1973 and 1977, while working as a business lawyer in Prague, he co-organised the smuggling of samizdat and exile literature together with Jan Kavan, who lived in London. After signing Charter 77 in 1977, he handed the organisation over to Jiřina Šiklová. As a signatory of Charter 77, he was immediately dismissed from his job. He worked as a night guard, packaging controller and librarian. His writings were published as samizdat volumes, and some of them were signed under his pen name J. Sládeček.

Petr Placák is a Czech journalist, historian and significant political activist before 1989. He is the son of Bedřich Placák, a spokesman for Charter 77. He played clarinet in the underground music group “The Plastic People of the Universe” (PPU) between 1982 and 1986. He was kept under surveillance by the State Security (StB), worked as a blue-collar worker and published samizdat volumes. In 1988, he founded the opposition initiative “České děti” (Czech Children) – the initiative presented a monarchist programme, shocking at that time, and various forms of humorous protests. Placák was one of the organisers of the demonstrations commemorating the 20th anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was sentenced to a suspended sentence because of his activities during “Palach’s week” in January 1989 (a week-long succession of demonstrations to commemorate Jan Palach’s self-immolation in 1969). Between 1989 and 1990, he was active in the Coordination Centre of the Civic Forum. Placák co-founded the monarchist movement “Koruna česká” (Czech Crown) after 1989. He works as a journalist and is editor-in-chief of the cultural and social revue “Babylon”. His essay “Fízl” (2007) reflects on his personal experience of StB repression and examines the psychological aspects of life under a dictatorship, which was awarded the Czech “Magnesia Litera” book prize in 2008. He has published some of his works under his pen name Petr Zmrzlík.

Mykola Plakhotniuk was born in the Kursk region of Russia in 1936, after his parents fled the village of Tykhyj Khutir near Kyiv with their large family, in order to escape the famine of 1932-1933. He was a medical doctor, a member of the sixtiers movement, a human rights activist, and member of the Kyiv Club of Creative Youth. He was arrested in 1972 and held for nine years in maximum security psychiatric facilities in Dnipropetrovsk and Kazan, institutions created by the KGB and known for practices of extreme isolation and near complete lack of prisoner rights. In 1978, Plakhotniuk was relocated to a regular psychiatric clinic in Smila in the Cherkassy region of Ukraine, where he was held alongside other patients who were committed against their will. There he was able to see family and friends, like Nadia Svitlychna, who visited him there before she left the Soviet Union for New Jersey, USA. After being released in March 1981, he was rearrested in September and sentenced in 1982 to four years in hard labor camps. 

Plakhotniuk enrolled in medical school in Kyiv in 1959 (which he completed in 1966) and quickly branched out into civic engagement, attending literary studios in 1962-63, where he was exposed to a number of young poets. In the dorms, a group of like-minded medical students formed, where they talked about language issues and other social problems. In 1963, he sent a letter to the Ministry of Education, requesting instruction in Ukrainian. Later that year, he organized a poetry reading at the institute, attended by Vasyl Symonenko, Mykola Vingranovskyi, and others. Shortly thereafter, Symonenko succumbed to injuries to his kidneys, suffered during beatings at the hand of the KGB. When Plakhotniuk organized an evening of poetry in Symonenko’s honour, he attracted attention to himself. He was called to a Komsomol meeting, where he received a warning but continued with his activism. In 1965 until his arrest in 1972, Plakhotniuk organized evenings of carolling, drawing in students from universities throughout Kyiv. During the first wave of arrests in 1965, he defended Ivan Svitlychny and Ya. Hevrych in an open letter to the editor titled “Behind them stands Truth.” He wrote several other letters in defense of others that had been persecuted by the state security services.

In 1970-1971, Plakhotniuk helped Chornovil edit the Journal “Ukrainsky Visnyk,” which chronicled these repressions. He also helped establish the tradition of gathering in front of the statue of Taras Shevchenko in the centre of Kyiv on May 22, the anniversary of the return of Shevchenko's remains to Kyiv, where a funeral mass was held prior to his repatriation to Kaniv. This tradition is maintained in activist circles to this day. In 1967, six attendees were seized and taken away with no explanation, prompting Plakhotniuk and several others to go to the Central Committee’s office building and demand answers. Because of this activism, he was arrested in 1972, along with many others. Plakhotniuk was sent to psychiatric wards twice, the first time to a maximum security facility. After refusing to sign a confession upon his release, he was sent to less punitive ward, which was even more psychologically taxing given the mixing of political prisoners with individuals suffering from psychiatric conditions. He was released in 1984, after which he worked as a doctor until his retirement in 1998.

Arsenie Platon (born in 1932 in Bulbocii Noi village, Soroca District) was a person of peasant background and a self-taught and aspiring poet who was arrested on 14 October 1961 and accused, several days later, of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, being indicted according to Article 67, part 1, of the Criminal Code of the Moldavian SSR. This accusation resulted from a search of Platon’s house conducted on 18 October 1961 by the local police and KGB officials. The incriminating evidence uncovered by the police included several notebooks and albums containing “anti-Soviet” poems and a number of draft proclamations calling for the overthrow of Soviet power. These materials pointed to Platon’s deep discontent with the regime and his radical nationally oriented views, which prompted the Soviet authorities to take his case rather seriously, despite the spontaneous and isolated character of Platon’s act of defiance. Platon originated from a peasant family which was relatively prosperous during the interwar period, but was apparently heavily affected by the Soviet requisitions during the famine of 1946–1947 and the ensuing collectivisation. He studied in a Romanian primary school up to the age of twelve, which might have played a role is his future protest. Platon’s father died in 1950, leaving the family materially stranded. However, his remaining relatives did not display any anti-Soviet tendencies and integrated successfully into Soviet society. The family moved to Bălți in the late 1940s, when several of Platon’s siblings and his mother settled in the city. It seems that the motivation for Platon’s anti-Soviet opinions was provided not so much by his family background as by his reading during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he displayed his first literary interests. In the early 1950s, Platon trained as a carpenter and a plumber, working for several years in a Bălți factory. His life took a turn for the worse in 1956, when he was arrested and convicted for hooliganism, after which he spent almost a year in a labour correction camp. Contact with the inmates and his feeling of being unjustly condemned probably also played a role in his growing discontent and disenchantment with the regime. As became clear during his later trial, he made a number of friends in the camp who might have influenced his critical attitude toward Soviet power, also increasing his national awareness. It is probably during this time that he became ill with tuberculosis, thus enhancing his marginality within Soviet society. After his return from prison in 1957, Platon became increasingly preoccupied with his literary pursuits, enrolling in several literary circles in Bălți, including the one functioning within the city’s Pedagogical Institute. During the following years, he published a number of poems (some of them extolling the communist party and the Soviet fatherland) in several local and central periodicals. It is obvious that Platon strove for literary recognition, although his success as a poet was partial, at best. During the investigation of his case, Platon claimed that one of his co-workers, Nikolai Emelianov, had a decisive impact on his “ideological conversion” to nationalism and on the consolidation of his anti-regime views, although this seems rather a deflecting strategy aimed at diminishing his own guilt in the eyes of the KGB officials. During this time, Platon did not have a permanent job. Because of his disability, he was only employed in temporary or menial assignments (e.g., writing slogans for local factories and institutions or working as a guard). In the summer of 1961, Platon graduated from a part-time evening school for working-class youth. Despite his claims to the contrary, the Soviet authorities paid close attention to the spread of Platon’s opinions within his network of friends and acquaintances, spending considerable time and effort in order to assess the social impact of Platon’s “anti-Soviet” activities. They also ordered the defendant’s psychiatric assessment, which was carried out in early December 1961 and found that the accused was perfectly sane and responsible for his actions. On 4 January 1962, notwithstanding his disability and poor health, Arsenie Platon was sentenced to three and a half years of prison in a high-security labour correction colony. Platon’s file contains no further information about his fate after his prison term ended. This case is revealing for alternative forms of “opposition from below” that emerged partly as a compensating strategy for overcoming an individual’s marginality and partly due to Platon’s particular interest in the literary field, which exposed him to “subversive” texts and authors.