COURAGE

connecting collections

The collection Poster and Graphic Design of the Slovak National Gallery (SNG) was established in 1962 through the acquisition of a collection of posters and other graphic works from the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague. Although this collection was not created primarily to preserve oppositional art, it provides an excellent overview of official Slovak posters and graphic works, many of which have oppositional content. Such content can be seen especially in works produced after 1968 or in the work of artists who were persecuted after 1968. The collection today contains more than 3000 items, and it is being added to every year.

The collection Printer Krumpholc contains documents published during 1970s and 1980s on a secret press located in the basement of the home of Jan Krumpholc (1927-2010) in Radíkov, near the Czech city Olomouc. Mr. Krumpholc was a political prisoner, and his collection therefore offers valuable insight into the work of a persecuted oppositional figure. In 1950 he was sentenced in a show trial to imprisonment for 25 years for the offence of treason and being an enemy of the Republic. In 1969 he was released due to an amnesty. His secret press had a manual duplicating machine, on which religious and other prohibited literary works were copied. Various other printed papers were copied as well, including those dealing with violations of fundamental human rights in Czechoslovakia.

The National Museum-Memorial to the Victims of Occupation “Prison on Lonskogo Street” has a small, but growing, archival collection. A detention facility used by the Polish police, the Nazi and Soviet occupational regimes, and lastly the KGB, this museum-memorial has a storied past. The building was used by regional state security services (SBU) as a prison until 1996. After the local community caught wind of a plan to allow developers to build on the site in 2006, activists mobilized to transform the prison into a site commemorating the thousands of prisoners executed by the NKVD in 1941 as the Red Army fled from advancing Nazi forces, and those incarcerated here in the decades that followed.

Curators have amassed 2,000 items since the museum’s opening in 2009. In addition to World War II propaganda from Nazi and Soviet forces, it holds the personal belongings of political prisoners and detainees—letters, personal documents, and samizdat publications used to prosecute dissidents, artists, and human rights activists in Lviv and its surrounding environs in the 1960s and 1970s. The latter is an ad hoc collection of about 50 items described in the rest of this entry, which includes embroidery, rosaries made out of bread, and other materials created by prisoners serving out lengthy sentences in Siberian labour camps under Brezhnev. Situated within the larger context of the museum-memorial’s holdings, these materials about Lviv’s dissidents is important for understanding the Soviet Union’s treatment of its most intransigent opponents well into the Brezhnev era.