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The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (popularly called the Pugwash Movement) is an international organisation of scientists and intellectuals who advocate world peace. It has emerged as an international conference on science and global problems, and at the time it was “a significant international factor and channel of communication among scientists,” (Knapp, 1995, 71), primarily discussing the dangers of the development of nuclear weapons.

After each conference, the presented papers were published, but this was not the case with the first conference held in 1957. Only in 1982, on the twenty-fifth anniversary, were the proceedings published with all papers and almost all materials that were then discussed. The first conference was attended by 22 participants (of whom sixteen were physicists, two chemists, one biologist, two physicians and one lawyer) from ten countries (seven from the USA, three from the USSR, three from Japan, two from the United Kingdom, two from Canada, and one each from Australia, Austria, China, France and Poland) (Rotblat 1982, 11).

The first conference ended with a joint warning from scientists from all five countries that had or were developing nuclear weapons that the potential nuclear war would end as a “world catastrophe, with hundreds of millions people killed instantly, and hundreds of millions more dying in the aftermath” (Knapp 2013, 88-89). Croatian scientist Ivan Supek was the first man from Yugoslavia who joined the Pugwash Movement and promoted its ideas. At that time, due to plans on the possibility of developing a nuclear program, the Yugoslav authorities received the ideas of this anti-nuclear movement with scepticism. Thanks to Supek's advocacy, the Yugoslav public became aware of the movement and their activities.

The memorandum signed by Ion Cioabă and Nicolae Gheorghe was presented to Vasile Vâlcu, the prime-vice-president of the State Council of the Socialist Republic of Romania, during an audience on 11 October 1982. It contained a complex list of proposals for “the integration into work and society” of Roma that mirrored faithfully the results of Gheorghe’s research and his ideas about solving their problems. 

After stating that “the Gypsies” considered themselves “devoted citizens of the Romanian socialist state, which, under the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party, ensured all the conditions for raising our level of living,” the two signatories raised the question of those nomadic Roma who did not enjoy the benefits of socialist modernisation. For those Roma who continued to live on the edge of poverty due to their nomadic lifestyle, the two Roma leaders devised a complex set of measures that would help them integrate into mainstream society. These included the sedentarisation of Roma by offering them jobs and a place to live, the schooling of Roma children, the participation of Roma people in social, cultural, and educational activities in order for them to learn the rules of living in a society, the observance of their particularities as a minority group, and the creation of a commission to ensure the implementation of these measures and the representation of Roma at the local and central level. Although the memorandum received no answer and the communist regime continued its policy of forced assimilation of Roma, its authors were not prosecuted by the authorities.

The report on “the legal situation and the clandestine activities of the religious group entitled Jehovah’s Witnesses” was drafted by the First Directorate of the Securitate (in charge of gathering information within the country). This report synthesised the evolution of the religious community of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Romania, their legal status during the past and at the time of its issuance, and the policies of the Securitate regarding this religious denomination.

This document contributes to the understanding of the activity of the postwar Romanian exile community in the 1980s, especially regarding the correspondence and interaction between its most active members. During the communist period in Romania, the Romanians of the emigration were in general located at significant distances from each other, being settled on several continents: Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Africa. The most active of them founded organisations, associations, institutions, institutes, foundations, publications, and publishing houses in their countries of residence. The purposes of their efforts were to: represent the Romanian nation, its democratic values and principles, and to defend its interests until the collapse of the communist regime; to coordinate the activity of Romanians abroad to carry out activities that would help to restore the democratic system in Romania; to represent the exile community within democratic societies and solve its problems; to establish links with Western governments and international organisations; to collaborate with representatives of the other "captive nations" in Central and Eastern Europe to form a common front to unmask and remove communism. Such an approach was also that of Ion Dumitru, a personality of the exile community, who set up in the mid-1960s one of the most important publishing houses of the Romanian emigration. It was founded in Munich, where he settled in 1961, and was officially registered in 1976 as a printing company. The Ion Dumitru Publishing House published over eighty books by exiled Romanians, many of them extremely valuable for national culture and history. To acquire such volumes, the owner of the publishing house, Ion Dumitru, maintained an ample correspondence with those interested. A proof of these relationships is this letter, which Ion Dumitru addressed to Leonid Mămăligă on 8 August 1982. Leonid Mămăligă, who wrote under the name L.M. Arcade , was a personality of the Romanian exile community, in which he made a name for himself, in particular, through the establishment and coordination for more than thirty years (1958–1989) of the Neuilly-sur-Seine Cenacle. The purpose of this cenacle, unique in France during those years of exile, was respond to the need for a Romanian place to offer Romanian intellectuals outside the country the possibility of thematic meetings and discussions. Also, the cenacle represented a platform of expression for Romanian intellectuals in exile, which helped them to keep alive the Romanian identity abroad and to put Romanian culture in communication with that of France. At the same time, the cenacle stimulated the act of creation both in Romanian and in French, by supporting and promoting Romanian writing, as it had its own publishing house, Caietele Inorogului (The unicorn notebooks). As or the subject of the letter that Ion Dumitru addressed to Leonid Mămăligă, in it he talks about sending a package of books published by his publishing house for another well-known Romanian exile, Aurel Răuţă, a professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Aurel Răuţă was a notable personality of the exile community because of his publishing activity and the founding, among others, of the Asociația Hyperion (Hyperion Association) in Paris. This was a distribution platform for books by Romanians in exile. In ten years of activity, he distributed to Romanian emigrants more than 10,000 volumes, published at more than 130 publishing houses. The document in the Ion Dumitru Collection in the IICCMER archive is a copy in A4 format.