alternative forms of education
alternative lifestyles and resistance of the everydays
avant-garde, neo-avant-garde
censorship
conscientious objectors critical science
democratic opposition
emigration/exile environmental protection
ethnic movements
film
fine arts folk culture
human rights movements
independent journalism
literature and literary criticism media arts
minority movements music national movements party dissidents
peace movements philosophical/theoretical movements
popular culture
religious activism
samizdat and tamizdat
scientific criticism social movements
student movement surveillance
survivors of persecutions under authoritarian/totalitarian regimes
theatre and performing arts
underground culture
visual arts
women's movement
youth culture
applied arts objects
artifacts
cartoons & caricatures
clothing equipment
film
furniture
graphics grey literature
legal and/or financial documentation manuscripts memorabilia
music recordings
other other artworks
paintings
photos publications
sculptures video recordings voice recordings
The VONS collection of Libri Prohibiti comprises of documents created by VONS – the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. The basis of the VONS collection is the archive of this organisation created mainly at the end of the 1970s and in the first half of the 1980s.
The collection reflects the variety of religious dissent in communist Romania, and illustrates the underground religious practices and overt religious oppositional activities from the late 1940s until the 1980s. The collection comprises, on the one hand, documents and other cultural artefacts created by various religious denominations and confiscated by the Securitate and, on the other hand, documents created by the secret police. The latter illustrate the intense surveillance and the repressive policies of the secret police directed towards those religious activities that opposed the policies of the communist regime in Romania.
Vasyl Stus was an iconic figure of the human rights movement in Soviet Ukraine and one of the leading Ukrainian poets of his generation. Volumes of his poetry circulated widely through samizdat in the 1960s-1980s. While conducting searches, the KGB would find his works in the homes of every writer, artist, chemist, and human rights activist, whose activities were cause for concern. As with many writers, Stus’s struggle with the Soviet regime, particularly his brutal incarceration and torture in a Soviet prison camp, which led to his death in 1985, have in many ways overshadowed his human and artistic legacy. The Vasyl Stus Collection at the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv was donated by the Stus family after Ukrainian independence in 1991, with the aim of popularizing and making more accessible his writings. These materials include previously unknown works, volumes of Stus’s vast correspondence, as well as fragments of writings that survived his imprisonment in strict-regime hard labor camps in Mordovia and Perm.
This ad-hoc collection was separated from the fonds of judicial files concerning persons subject to political repression during the communist regime, which is currently stored in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). It focuses on the case of Viktor Koval, an engineer of Russian ethnic background who expressed ”anti-Soviet” political opinions during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was working at an electrical equipment factory in the city of Bălți. In August 1982, Koval was found guilty of “spreading calumnies and lies aimed at discrediting the Soviet state and social order.” However, instead of being sentenced to prison, he was sent to a special psychiatric facility of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), where he spent almost eight years before being released in May 1990. Koval’s case is a revealing example of the use of punitive psychiatry in order to suppress voices critical of the Soviet regime. His file is also significant in the context of the early 1980s, usually viewed as a period featuring few open manifestations of oppositional activity.