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In the view of historian Myroslava Mudrak, “Tabirne” (Billiards) is “an exercise in ironic expression.” “Through pastel tones (usually employed by the symbolists who would describe ethereal themes, suspended dream-like situations, somewhat out of touch with the concrete vividness of reality, where saturated primaries and secondary hues would be used), which tend to create a mood of warmth and intimacy, we have the epitome of the grotesque and decadent (another feature of symbolist art).  Typical of this approach is the existential moment—the questioning of “who am I?” “where am I going?” “what’s next for me?” “how did I get here?"  Not only are the incarcerated (in the background) facing the agony of this questioning, but even the Cheka members are put in a situation, which is somewhat out of character with their role.  In a brief, relaxational moment, they seem to let down their guard to feel the weight of their charge lifted momentarily, yet at the same time, still carrying on, making the viewer aware of the horrible and deadly nature of that charge, visible at the end of their sticks.“

Norijada is the colloquial name of the celebration day for Zagreb secondary school students, which usually falls on the May 30. On that day, seniors from all around Zagreb are officially entitled to mark the end of their schooling, and "go crazy" (noriti or ludovati) for the last time before setting out for more serious business, preparation for graduation and university studies. Anthropologically speaking, it was a kind of a rite of passage toward adulthood. This ritual ­­– most probably originating in the post-war period – in the classics program secondary school in the late 1980s was especially colourful because the students would wear ancient Roman costumes in order to highlight the orientation of the school. These were typically white togas for boys and luxurious white long dresses for girls. One also had to pay attention to authentic hairstyles and jewellery, because it significantly contributed to the overall impression. On this occasion the school students would act out rather loudly and colourfully.

The standard activities generally transpired as follows: first, the students would gather on the main staircase of their school, and begin singing songs that usually describe different (bad) traits of their teachers, who had to remain quiet for the sake of peace. The ties with their student status were visibly broken, and equality with the adult world, which allowed some degree of criticism, was perhaps the inherent meaning of this procedure. At the end of this event, one of the students, usually the funniest, would read the ‘last testament’ of the departing generation to the younger ones. The testament usually consisted of the ten commandments, which reversed the house rules of the school (for instance, “Never greet a teacher when one passes by or near you,” etc.). The first part of separation was thus finished, and the students would finally leave the school. They went out to the streets to meet students from other schools and display solidarity with them. This was the moment when real Norijada began, and students officially announced their separation from their previous life. On that day the students were allowed to do anything (except commit crimes). They would wander around, or swim in the wishing well and other fountains, or tease chance passers-by. They would usually get dead drunk and smoke heavily, and everybody was invited to do so because everybody was supposed to feel the same way. Moreover, in order to leave some trace of their “crazy” generation, students usually wrote graffiti on walls, citing their class, school and the year of the Norijada.

One of the documents in the Alexandru Călinescu private collection reflects the perspective from which this critical intellectual in Iaşi was regarded by the authorities in the last years of communism, when the dissidents in the city, including Alexandru Călinescu, became radicalised in their attitude towards the Ceaușescu regime. The document was discovered on 23 December 1989, in the cabinet of the person who had been propaganda secretary for Iaşi county up until the previous day, and thus came into the possession of Alexandru Călinescu. It had also been sent, as Alexandru Călinescu recalls, to the then rector of A.I. Cuza University of Iaşi, “so he would work on me, but without success, of course,” he adds. This document was published by the former dissident in 2018 under the suggestive title “My life told by the Securitate,” together with other documents of the same type and an article summarising the context of the last two years of communism in Romania.

The Securitate informative note begins by recalling the intellectual origins of the person in question and emphasising that “he has always manifested a particular interest in entering into relations with foreign citizens of all categories, especially language assistants, diplomats, reporters, journalists, writers, etc., but with many of these he exceeded the official context, […] repeatedly transgressing in a flagrant and ostentatious manner the provisions regulating relations with foreigners.” Because he had “cosmopolitan” ideas and implicitly a “communion of ideas” with some of these foreigners, “he particularised the relations in such a manner that they developed from simple friendship to seriously affecting the interests of the Romanian state,” the document continues. The informative note on Alexandru Călinescu emphasises his role as the leader of the oppositional group around the magazine Dialog: “He has been considered the mentor of a group of young people with literary ambitions, launched by the above-mentioned publication, and has appointed himself a ‘school leader’ of the so-called ‘1980 generation,’ to whom he has passed on his harmful ideas.” The articles published in Dialog under the direction of Alexandru Călinescu by him and his disciples are characterised as being ‚ “of a contestatory character, which has attracted the attention of reactionary circles in the West, who provided them with publicity through the ill-famed radio station Free Europe.” As the leader of the new generation at Dialog, which he directed towards “hostile activities,” Alexandru Călinescu was considered to have “arrived at the threshold of treason,” resulting – according to the note – in no more than a sanction through Party structures with a “vote of blame.” The note goes on to emphasise that the individual in question “has not drawn appropriate conclusions from the measures taken in 1983. Making a mockery of the good advice and disregarding the clemency that was shown in his case, he has continued to maintain the same position, at first more prudently, then more and more openly and ostentatiously.” The document then recounts how Alexandru Călinescu “has gone further down the slope of treason,” by facilitating Dan Petrescu’s and Liviu Cangeopol’s meetings with French journalists to whom they granted interviews “with a particularly hostile content,” and thus becoming “the coordinator from the shadows of the alleged Iaşi dissidence.” Moreover, the document states, Alexandru Călinescu has shown solidarity with the dissidents in Bucharest, who have taken a public position in defence of Mircea Dinescu. The conclusion of the informative note with regard to the individual under surveillance is that “he more and more often exteriorises ideas inciting opposition to the socialist regime in our country, […] letting himself be influenced by what is happening in other socialist countries.” It is interesting to observe the interpretive key in which the Securitate informative note narrates all these real actions of contestation of the regime, as a result of which Alexandru Călinescu had become at the end of the 1980s one of the most heavily surveilled critical intellectuals in Iaşi and indeed in the whole of Romania. In the words of the secret police documents, “by the hostile actions he has carried out, especially in the last two years, […] Alexandru Călinescu has proved [...] that he has crossed the threshold of treason to the country and has become a tool of reactionary circles in the West, through which he has seriously compromised his status as citizen, Party member, and university teacher.” In other words, all that after 1989 became an act of courage was considered an act of treason before 1989.

One of the most imposing rooms of the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara is dedicated to the tricolour flags that were in the street or in various institutions during the very tense days of December 1989. It houses some fifteen flags, all original. “They are flags that have, in a sense, been to war; people came out to demonstrations with them in the days from 15 to 22 December; some of them were shot at; some were discoloured by the weather on those days; they are important symbolic objects that had very important trajectories for the revolutionary movements of 1989, in those heated and bloody days in Timişoara,” says Gino Rado. The majority have a hole where the communist emblem was removed – the flag with a hole in the middle became one of the emblematic images of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. Of all these flags, only one is of the Communist Party: it was taken down from the building of the Party Committee in Timişoara. They came to the Memorial as donations over a number of years, mostly in the period 1990–1994.

Samizdat magazines appeared in Bulgaria only at the end of the 1980s. Two important Bulgarian samizdat magazines were conceived together, their first issues were published at the same time: "Glas. Nezavisimo spisanie za literatura i publitsistika [Voice. Independent Magazine for Literature and Journalism]" with founder and editor-in-chief Vladimir Levchev and "Most. Almanah za eksperimentalna poezia [Bridge: Almanac for Experimental Poetry]" with founder and chief editor Edvin Sugarev. Both magazines were printed on typewriter and reproduced on xerox at no more than 100-200 copies. The first issue of "Glas [Voice]" was reproduced on documentary photo paper. The artist was Stefan Despodov, who created the covers by hand. The magazine was produced in the bathroom of Vladimir Levchev, which was turned into a photo laboratory.

Vladimir Levchev says: "In the autumn of 1988, the Club for Publicity and Democracy, then known as the Klub za glasnost i preustroystvo [Club for Glasnost and Reconstruction] was organized. At the end of December, enthusiastic about the new developments, Edvin and I spontaneously decided to start a Samizdat magazine. We acted very expeditious. Since then there were two accessible xerox machines in Sofia and they were under surveillance, and there were no computers at all, the 'samizdat' was, of course, a technically difficult task. On Edvin's idea, we bought two-sided photo paper, and using my bathroom for a lab, after a week's work, we produced around 100 counts of two independent magazines, Edvin's 'Most' and 'Bridge'. We photographed each page printed on a typewriter - it was like a hand paved street ... First we thought of making two issues of one magazine so that if we were arrested after the first issue, we would do a second one. But then we switched to two different magazines. After we prepared the issues, we distributed them to friends, famous 'dissidents', people with access to a copy machine at their office, who could made more copies. ... The first issues of the two magazines came out in January 1989.

In January 1989, with Blaga Dimitrova, I signed the letter in support of Petar Manolov and became a member of the Club [for publicity and democracy] and then of 'Ekoglasnost'. A little later, Deutsche Welle, the BBC and Radio Free Europe reported about the magazine, and in the autumn, during the Eko-Forum, Rumyana Uzunova also took an interview with me. I was released  from the magazine I worked at at that time, “Narodna Kultura” ['People's Culture'] and fined 500 leva for issuing an unregistered magazine. They called me to the Bulgarian Book and Print Association [i.e. the censorship authority] and I was threatened that if I publish another issue, I will be fined 1,500 levs, and State Security will deal with my case and I will probably go to jail. I did, however, issue another issue - this was during a 'Ekoglasity' subscription […], an eco-forum. No one could even suspect that even on November 10, 1989 Zhivkov would resign. Until 10th of November 1989, I published four issues." (quoted after interview of V. Levchev, Rudnikova 2006)

In the first issue of the magazine "Glas [Voice]" the founder Vladimir Levchev - after the introduction ending with the words "It [Bulgaria] yearns for a little publicity, for democracy!" - statet the main objectives of the magazine as “to publish mainly literature, poetry, criticism and essays, which hardly can find a place on the pages of the official jurnals”, as well as of critical texts on ecological, economic and social problems, written by Bulgarian and foreign authors.

Both samizdat magazines cooperated with well-known Bulgarian intellectuals who published their critical views of the regime: the writer-dissidents Blaga Dimitrova, Radoy Ralin, Valeri Petrov, Binyo Ivanov, Dragomir Petrov; the emmigrants Tzvetan Todorov, Atanas Slavov, Tsvetan Marangozov and many other well-known authors parallel to young authors such as Rumen Leonidov, Anni Ilkov, Mirela Ivanova, Virginia Zaharieva, Elisaveta Musakova, Ilko Dimitrov, Hristo Stoyanov, Antoaneta Tzeneva, Boryana Katsarska and other; the critics Aleksandar Kyosev, Mihail Nedelchev, Alexander Yordanov; the philosophers Zhelyu Zhelev (the later president of the country), Ivan Krastev, Kalin Yanakiev and others.

After the fall of the communist regime, "Glas" and "Most" were legalized. Many independent journals appeared, even printing became expensive. The magazine "Glas" remained a literary magazine, the publishing of several issues was sponsored by the Open Society Foundation of George Soros. In 1994, Editor-in-Chief Vladimir Levchev left for the United States. For several years he kept the magazine on the Internet, and in Sofia Rumen Leonidov and Vladimir Trendafilov published several more issues. The last issue of the magazine "Glas" was num. 14/1994.

Today, "Glas" and "Most" magazines  are bibliographic rarities. Thanks to the "Free Poetry Society", created in 1990 by Blaga Dimitrova, Vladimir Levchev, Edvin Sugarev and other writers, and re-organized in 2016, all issues of the two magazines are uploaded with free access to the website of their society, www.freepoetrysociety.com.