COURAGE

connecting collections

The Memory of Nations is an extensive online collection of the memories of witnesses, which is being developed throughout Europe by individuals, organizations, schools and institutions. It preserves and makes available the collections of memories of witnesses who have agreed that their testimony should serve to explore modern history and be publicly accessible. The collection includes testimonies of communism resistance, holocaust survival, artists of alternative culture and underground and many others.

The Michael Shafir Collection represents a significant part of the personal library of its founder, who selected and accumulated items while in exile, in accordance with his academic and professional interest in what was known during the Cold War as East European politics. As he held various positions in Radio Free Europe (RFE), the collection also includes many documents relating to the activity of this institution, most of them from the late 1980s, but also some from the 1990s.    

The Mihai Moroșanu Private Collection comprises various materials relating to the anti-regime activity of Mihai Moroșanu, one of the most famous Moldovan dissidents of the Soviet period, well-known for his staunch criticism of the regime and for his strong nationally oriented views. The collection consists of a number of personal files, interviews, photos and judicial materials relating to Moroșanu’s case, spanning the period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Due to his uncompromising resistance to the Soviet regime, Moroșanu is one of the very few authentic dissident figures in the Moldovan context.  

The Mihajlo Mihajlov collection gives an overview of his life and work as a Yugoslav dissident who lived in exile in the USA since 1978. Due to his efforts to democratize Tito's Yugoslavia and introduce political, economic and cultural pluralism, he became a political prisoner, first in the period from 1966 to 1970 and later from 1974 to 1977. After the “Mihajlov case” in Yugoslavia in 1966, a wave of dissident movements emerged in the Eastern bloc countries. Together with Milovan Đilas, Mihajlov became one of the most famous figures of the dissident movement in the Cold War world in general. The collection is stored at the Hoover Institution, located at Stanford University in the USA.

The Mihnea Berindei Collection stored at the library of the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iași comprises the founder’s personal library. It consists of two major parts. First, it includes almost two thousand books, of which over a hundred are directly relevant for the history of the communist regimes in Romania and the neighbouring countries. These publications also reflect Berindei’s interest in human rights issues in communist Eastern Europe and the USSR. Second, it features a substantial sample of periodicals (magazines and journals), mostly published in exile and dealing with Eastern and Central Europe during the communist era. Mihnea Berindei donated his library to the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History in Iași shortly before his death, in 2016. This collection is significant due to its focus on the publications and activities of the Romanian exile community in the West. It also emphasises its founder’s abiding interest in the history and political trajectories of the East European communist regimes.