COURAGE

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He estimates that, he was called before the Cultural Committee of the League of Communist Youth of Vojvodina at least twice per year, which he considered to be tyrannical. “These people lack a fundamental understanding of what I’m doing. There are exceptional analytical texts that address certain phenomena: death, literature, irony, postmodernism…those various qualities within modern society and culture that expose a new reality and that introduce new questions to our culture. So what do they do? They file a forty page report. Should I kill myself over it? I sit there instead, forced to listen to this nonsense, and worry that I’ll be replaced. And they all continue on, with business-minded faces, going through papers and discussing them as if it were the last judgement of the Provincial Youth Alliance. (…) The people of the party who oversee everything came from the PC (Provincial Commune of the League of Communists of Vojvodina, cf. Aut). I was a young man then. And the Youth Union was assigned to eradicate not just me, but the entire editorial board.”Among the various forms of persecution, Zivlak also noted that every day for two months, a police officer required him to identify himself before entering the editorial office. Jovan Zivlak is forthright about psycho-somatic problems that he developed because of these pressures. He speculates that the only reason he remained  editor-in-chief of Polja for eight years was because Novi Sad lacked the media to carry out a personal attack on him.

Following his organisation of the wreath-laying ceremony at the statue of Stephen the Great on 11 October 1964, Moroșanu was severely reprimanded and subsequently expelled from the Polytechnic Institute several days later. The expulsion process followed a carefully staged ritual which involved, among other things, a decision of the “student collective” presumably taken from below. This stage was necessary as a formal preliminary step to the official decision signed by the rector. It also served as a confirmation of the loyalty and political reliability of the student body, which acted in solidarity in order to eliminate any “foreign elements” from its midst. A similar strategy was followed in other cases related to accusations of nationalism against Moldavian intellectuals in this period. The decision of the students’ “general meeting” was issued on 14 October 1964. This document is revealing not only due to its contents, but also because of the euphemistic language it used to argue for Moroșanu’s expulsion. After a preliminary report of the secretary of the Institute’s Komsomol cell, the meeting took note of Moroșanu’s “unacceptable behaviour.” This consisted, among other things, in his unmotivated absences, lack of academic discipline and poor performance, displaying of a rude attitude toward the head of department and his colleagues and, most importantly, in his “pernicious assertions concerning different questions related to the economic and cultural development of the republic.” Moroșanu allegedly dismissed, “rudely, incorrectly and with open contempt,” the attempts of his colleagues to point out his mistaken views and behaviour. The euphemism of the document reached its height when Moroșanu was accused of “performing a series of a-political actions” [a veiled reference to the incident at Stephen the Great’s statue] and of “attempting to assemble around himself a group of students, setting this group against the student organisations of the Institute and thus trying to position himself as a spokesman on behalf of Moldavia’s youth.” Moroșanu was also accused of an unhealthy reaction to criticism, “trampling upon” the student newspaper which printed his caricature. Despite his temperamental issues, it is obvious that his political behaviour was the real issue which led to his expulsion. Although the meeting concluded by recommending Moroșanu’s expulsion on the ostensible grounds of his “behaviour, which was incompatible with the rank of a Soviet student” and his “hooligan-like attitude toward the department’s staffand fellow students,” the invocation of his “a-political deeds” shows the limit of tolerance beyond which the Soviet authorities were unwilling to go. The meeting formally requested Moroșanu’s expulsion from the institute, deeming him “unfit to become a Soviet engineer and organiser of production.” Two days later, on 16 October 1964, the rector of the Polytechnic Institute, S. I. Rădăuțanu, signed an order expelling Moroșanu. Significantly, this document reproduced the decision of the student meetingalmost word-for-word, thus underscoring the staged character of the whole affair. However, in the late 1960s, after serving his prison term, Moroșanu succeeded in being readmitted to the Polytechnic Institute after an audience with the Union minister of higher education. This was due to his persistence and to his skilful manipulation of Soviet legislation.  

A short decision of Socialist Republic of Croatia's Secretariat of the Interior on deleting SCA Prosvjeta from the Register of associations of citizens on the grounds that since January 1972 there was no activity of the Association and that it "does not achieve the objectives for which it was established." It also said that there was "no appeal” against the decision but an administrative dispute before the Administrative Court could have been initiated. Along the decision secretary of SCA Prosvjeta, Svetozar Zec has written a note stating that SCA Prosvjeta was banned in December 1972, that formal decision on the ban hasn’t been issued, but the attitude of the leadership of the socio-political organizations of SRC fully prevented any public operation of the Association.

Almost two years after his condemnation, in the spring of 1955, Zgherea filed a petition addressed to the General Prosecutor of the Moldavian SSR, requesting the revision of his sentence. In this petition, Zgherea again admitted his guilt, but emphasised that his conversion to Inochentism was mainly caused by the influence of his parents. He claimed that, due to his young age and to the unsatisfactory level of his education, he did not fully understand the implications of his actions at the time. He also declared that, during his detention in the labour camp, he “fully realised the mistaken nature of his views” and therefore was ready to “cut all his ties to the sect of the Inochentists.” This remarkable example of repentance and apparently successful “re-education” should not be taken at face value, especially given the fact that during the trial Zgherea refused to abjure and renounce his faith. However, in the post-Stalinist Soviet context, this proved an effective strategy for alleviating his plight and for receiving a reduction of the sentence and, ultimately, a full amnesty. In his review of Zgherea’s case, one of the employees of the MSSR’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, Major Rogachev, noted the defendant’s partial admission of guilt and his apparent repentance as alleviating circumstances. In the Resolution he sent to the General Prosecutor of the MSSR, A. Kazanir, on 28 April 1955, Rogachev concluded that, although Zgherea’s “guilt” was not in doubt, the punishment was “too severe and did not correspond to the seriousness of his actions.” Therefore, Rogachev recommended that the prosecutor’s office file a formal protest to the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the MSSR in order to request a revision of Zgherea’s case, which the prosecutor did in due course. As a result of this protest, after reviewing the case, on 9 June 1955 the Supreme Court issued a special decision which reduced Zgherea’s sentence to five years of hard labour and a further three-year suspension of civil rights. The main argument of the court was that Zgherea “did not have a leading position within the sect.” This motivation points to a shift in the authorities’ perception of the social danger of the Inochentists and similar religious movements and to a more differentiated approach to the individual guilt of their members. Moreover, Zgherea was amnestied according to the provisions of the Decree of 27 March 1953, which ended the main wave of Stalinist repressions and secured a legal basis for the gradual release of political prisoners. He was to be released from the labour camp as soon as possible, while his penal conviction was dropped. This case certainly did not illustrate an entirely new attitude of the regime toward religious dissent, which continued to be viewed with suspicion and repressed. However, there was a marked shift in the authorities’ repressive strategies, which became subtler and more differentiated. The case of Gheorghe Zgherea is thus a fascinating example of essential ideological continuity uneasily combined with changing methods of addressing and dealing with dissent and opposition in the religious sphere.   

The role of the document was to address the Slovenian public on the question of national reconciliation. It was a very critical message questioning the basic premises of the 45 year-long policy of the communist government on the civil war fought between the Slovenians between 1941 and 1945 and the post-war mass killings committed by them. The authorities did nothing, because the Declaration was published on March 13, 1990 and in April of 1990 there were free elections after many decades of communist dictatorship. The Slovenian public was immensely interested in the Declaration. Already in July the Slovenian authorities, including the chairman of the Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia, Milan Kučan, participated in the memorial service on Kočevski Rog led by Archbishop Šuštar. It was a major step toward a public break with the communist monopoly on truth and rehabilitation of the victims of the post-war mass killings perpetrated by the communist government. The document is used in publications and exhibitions. Historians as well as the Catholic Church in Slovenia consider it a symbol of cultural opposition. It is located in box 38 of the Alojzij Šuštar Collection and it is provisionally available.

The Declaration on the Name and Status of the Croatian Literary Language was proclaimed by Croatian linguists published in the weekly Telegram on March 17, 1967, with the signatures of eighteen Croatian scholarly and cultural institutions. Croatian linguists and writers gathered around Matica hrvatska and the Association of Writers of Croatia were dissatisfied with published dictionaries and orthographies in which the language, according to the Novi Sad Agreement (1954), was called Serbo-Croatian. In late 1966 and early 1967, they had decided to write an amendment to the new Constitution which was being prepared in the late 1960s. They secretly prepared a text about the name and status of the language that was officially used in the Socialist Republic of Croatia (SRH) as part of the then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The text of the Declaration was drafted in Matica hrvatska's premises by a group of academics, literary and cultural workers (Miroslav Brandt, Dalibor Brozović, Radoslav Katičić, Tomislav Ladan, Slavko Mihalić, Slavko Pavešić, Vlatko Pavletić). The Steering Committee of Matica hrvatska approved the content of the Declaration on March 13, 1967, and sent it to other Croatian cultural and academic institutions. In the next few days, the Declaration was signed by a total of eighteen Croatian academic and cultural institutions which directly dealt with the Croatian language, and by a significant number of prominent intellectuals.

The publication of the Declaration was not only a cultural but also a political affair. It had additional weight because of Miroslav Krleža, probably the most prominent left-wing intellectual not only in Croatia but all of Yugoslavia, was one of the intellectuals who signed the document. Despite the fact that the writers of the Declaration were cautious in attempting to avoid any boundaries set by the League of Communists (they used the usual communist phraseology and the style of "self-managing socialism" and the Yugoslav slogan of "fraternity and unity"), the publication of the Declaration triggered strong political reactions and set the repressive apparatus in motion. The Croatian language was a litmus test through which the overall economic, political and cultural subordination of Croatia within Yugoslavia was revealed (Kovačec 2017), and the appearance of the Declaration is considered the practical beginning of the Croatian national movement – the Croatian Spring.

The Matica hrvatska Collection at the Croatian State Archives contains the original document of the Declaration with accompanying materials (the manuscript of the Declaration, multiple typescript versions with and without signatures and stamps, Dalibor Brozović's telegrams, letters of the signatory institutions of the Declaration that give their support to its contents).