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Ana Monoranu (née Fechete, b. 21 October 1953, Gherla, Cluj county) bears the family name of her husband, as this was registered in official documents, not as publicly mentioned and remembered. After finishing high school in Dej, she moved to Timişoara, where she worked as an electronician. She met Ion Monoran in the late 1970s and they were married in 1983. They had two children. After her husband’s death, she organised all his remaining documents, such as manuscripts, personal objects, and his articles in the newspaper Timişoara or published posthumously, into an archive. After 1990, she was employed in the National Theatre of Timişoara. She has a degree in Social Work from the Faculty of Sociology and Psychology of West University of Timişoara.

Mihai Moroşanu (born 22 November 1939, Drepcăuţi, currently Briceni District, Republic of Moldova) is 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. In 1949, he and his family (his mother, father, two sisters, a brother, and grandmother) were deported to Siberia, Kurgan Region, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The deportation of Moroșanu’s entire family, who were labelled as “kulaks,” was part of the second massive wave of deportations, organised by the Soviet authorities in order to break peasant resistance to the process of collectivisation. The main target of the 1949 wave of forced resettlement was the “class enemy” in the countryside, i.e. the relatively prosperous and middling peasants, identified as “kulak elements.” This traumatic experience left a lasting impression on Moroșanu. In 1953, when he was only fourteen, he was forced to get a job, because his family was facing serious material problems and his parents had become ill. On 12 March 1955, he lost his right arm in the wake of a labour accident, becoming partially disabled at the age of seventeen, which entitled him to a monthly disability pension of 17 roubles and 80 kopeks. He nonetheless attended a seven-grade school in Siberia. In 1958, his family returned to Drepcăuţi and Moroșanu resumed his education. He graduated from a local secondary school in 1961, and the same year became a student at the Faculty of Engineering and Construction of the Moldavian Polytechnic Institute in Chişinău. After completing three years of study, Moroșanu was expelled at the beginning of the fourth year for organising a wreath-laying ceremony at a monument dedicated to the medieval ruler Stephen the Great. This historical figure successfully reigned over historical Moldavia for forty-seven years and thus represents one of the most prominent personalities in Romanian national history. The event took place on 11 October 1964, as Chişinău was celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR), which had been established on 12 October 1924 in order to substantiate the creation of a Moldavian identity among the Romanian-speaking population of the Soviet Union. It was rumoured that the monument to Stephen the Great would be moved to another, less central, location. Moroșanu thus collected signatures from students who wanted to express their opposition to the plan (he managed to collect over three thousand signatures from several educational institutions in Chișinău) and money for a floral wreath with the inscription “from the youth of Moldavia,” which he laid at the statue. As a punishment, he was suspended from the institute and forced to work at a Chişinău-based reinforced-concrete plant for two years. Only after that could he resume his studies. However, he was arrested on 28 July 1966 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on 2 November 1966, on the basis of Article 71 (undermining the national and racial equality of Soviet citizens) and Article 218 part 1 (hooliganism with aggravating circumstances) of the Penal Code of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR). His arrest was due to his involvement in another incident, during which he insisted on speaking Romanian to a Russian shopkeeper in a central Chișinău shop. Thus, Moroșanu was accused of “nationalism.” The irony is that his demand was in line with Soviet legislation, since the federal constitution stipulated that the Moldavians had the right to use their language as the “national” language of the republic. However, the accusation of “nationalism” entailed serious consequences in this period. Moroșanu was amnestied in 1967, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917, but he was released only in September 1968, ten months before the end of his three-year sentence. Starting from January 1969, he was employed by a construction company in Chişinău, where he did his best to prove that he was a highly skilled specialist and thus frequently received bonuses for fulfilling the plan. Immediately after his release, on 30 September 1968, Moroșanu submitted a request to be readmitted to the Faculty of Engineering and Construction of the Polytechnic Institute. His request was denied on a technicality, but the real reason was political: as a person convicted for nationalism, he was a liability for the leadership of the MSSR. During the following year, however, Moroșanu filed a number of petitions to higher Soviet authorities, pleading his case. With the support of Construction Trust No. 13 in Chişinău, where he was working at the time, Moroşanu left for Moscow in July 1969, where he asked for an audience with the minister of higher education. As a result, the minister approved his request in August and he was readmitted as a part-time distance-learning student.

At that time, Mihai Moroşanu was well-known among Chişinău residents due to his courage in defending the Moldavians’ national rights. He did not hesitate to discuss nationally sensitive issues with the employees of the construction trust where he worked after 1968, emphasising the need for Russian-language speakers to learn Romanian. Moreover, while a student in 1963, and then again after 1968, Moroşanu openly talked about the fact that the Ismail region had historically been part of Bessarabia but had been forcibly attached by the Russians to Ukraine. For these ideas, Moroşanu was repeatedly called to the KGB headquarters, harassed, and threatened with incarceration. He avoided further convictions because he fought against the regime with the weapons that it tacitly approved of. In particular, he read carefully and knew thoroughly everything that Marx, Engels, and Lenin had written about Bessarabia, the tsarist regime in the region, and the Soviet nationalities policy. Moroșanu also attentively studied the Soviet laws that were defied in the MSSR. Regarding the issue of southern Bessarabia, he referred to a book by Artyom Lazarev, one of the most visible local dignitaries and a trusted party intellectual. The book, written in 1974, openly criticised the redrawing of the Bessarabian borders in 1940, when the northern and southern districts of this region were transferred to Ukraine, while the rest of Bessarabia was merged with the MASSR to form the new MSSR. However, the KGB and a special commission of the Institute of History of the Moldavian Academy of Sciences concluded that these ideas were dangerous and that they fomented interethnic hatred. Moroşanu’s case proves his perseverance and his constant struggle for the protection of national rights and symbols in the MSSR. His uncompromising stance earned him the respect of certain KGB officers. In the late 1980s, Moroșanu, together with a group of other descendants of former deportees, filed a lawsuit for defamation against the infamous second secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party and Moscow’s unofficial envoy, Viktor Smirnov, who had insulted the “offspring of the former kulaks” during a plenary meeting of the Central Committee on 30 May 1987. Moroșanu finally won the case in April 1990, when the Moldavian Supreme Court forced Smirnov to pay Moroșanu damages and to publicly apologise. Moroșanu also took an active part in the movement for national emancipation in the late 1980s. For example, he was one of the organisers of the famous meeting on 7 November 1989, which became the most massive anti-regime demonstration hitherto organised in the MSSR and culminated in the blocking of a column of tanks by the angry crowd. In the early 1990s, Moroșanu was a member of the Council of the Moldavian Popular Front and was directly engaged in politics. He became less visible in the public sphere in the late 1990s, but remained closely involved in public initiatives related to preserving the memory of Soviet repressive policies. He still remains a symbolic figure for his uncompromising and constant resistance to the Soviet regime. 

Nurie Muratova, PhD, Assistant Professor at Neofit Rilski South-West University (SWU)  - Blagoevgrad. With research interests in the field of archival policies, the archives of women and minorities, Nurie Muratova analyzes in detail the policies of the socialist government in Bulgaria towards Muslim women, revealing insufficiently explored aspects of the history of the so-called revival process among the Pomak population and following the development of censorship mechanisms of the communist regime. Respecting the "right to memory" of all, Nurie Muratova enriches the collection of the Balkan Society for Autobiography and Social Communication (BSASC) with scattered, forgotten and publicly unknown documents, as well as autobiographical and family oral histories, photos and other personal documents of people from different social strata with different ethnic and religious background. 

N. Muratova participates in a number of regional, national and international projects (Digital Archives - Science and Information Complex, Shared Memory Places - Digital Map of Monuments - projects of the Science Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science, To Come Out of the Shadow Supporting the Social Integration of People Threatened with Marginalisation Caused by Their Nationality (2011-2013, Grundtvig Program), Politics of Memory Cultures of the Russian-Ottoman War 1877-1878: From Divergence to Dialogue 7th Marie Curie Framework Program (2012-2016, FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Marie Curie Action International Research Staff Exchange Scheme), Knowledge Exchange and Academic Cultures in Humanities: Europe and the Black Sea Region, late 18th - 21st Centuries (2017-2020, Horizon2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Rise), among others.

Nurie Muratova has made significant contributions in the creation of and digitization for the digital archives at SWU. As a member of BSASC, of the International University Seminar for Balkan Studies and Specializations and of the Multimedia Center for Computer Archives, Digital Archives and History of Local Self-Government, N. Muratova contributes significantly to the digitization of materials, actively participating in the maintenance and completion of the archive collection as well as in helping in its establishment as a scientific and educational dialogue center, which through numerous exhibitions, lectures, meetings, etc., are deepening the public debate on the recent past.

Gheorghe Muruziuc (b. 19 November 1930, Fălești; d. 25 September 1998, Bălți), completed four grades in a Romanian primary school and then pursued his incomplete secondary education under the Soviet school system. Probably due to this mixed schooling experience, he acquired a Romanian national consciousness. In 1949, he was forcibly mobilized to the coal mines in Novoshakhtinsk, Rostov on Don region. He became a high-skilled electrician and returned to the MSSR in the early 1960s. He participated in the construction of the sugar factory, and in 1963 he was hired as an electrician at the same plant. In the early 1950s, while in Abkhazia, he married a woman of Tatar origin. Muruziuc initially tried to sew and publicly display a Romanian flag on 12 June 1966, on the occasion of elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, but he was apparently prevented from doing so by his wife. However, on the night of 27/28 June 1966, when the Soviet authorities were preparing to celebrate the twenty-sixth anniversary of  “Moldavia’s  liberation from the Romanian capitalist and bourgeois yoke” (as the events of June 1940 were commonly labelled in official Soviet parlance), he raised the Romanian tricolour on the chimney of the sugar factory in Alexăndreni at about 4,30 am. When the day broke, the Soviet authorities panicked and sent representatives of all relevant institutions to descend upon the factory: the district militia, the local and district party committee, the administration of the factory, and the KGB from Bălți and Chişinău. Muruziuc held out for five hours on the roof of the factory, more precisely on the 45m factory chimney. All sorts of officials tried to persuade him to descend, but those who tried to climb on the roof were discouraged by Muruziuc, who used a batch of bricks and cement fragments to drive them away. After five hours, during which the whole village was discussing Muruziuc’s action, he decided to climb down. He was immediately interrogated by the local prosecutor, and on 30 June his case was discussed in an open party meeting at the factory. It is important to note that he had been a candidate member of the CPSU since March 1966. During the party meeting, he reiterated his position, refusing to resort to self-criticism. In fact, he asserted that “Moldavia should only exist for Moldavians, and persons of other nationalities should pack their suitcases and leave Moldavia’s territory.” He also voiced his opinion that “the Moldavian Republic should leave the USSR according to national criteria.” Significantly, both during this meeting and later interrogations, Muruziuc claimed to speak for the “whole Moldavian people” and to be defending its interests, ostensibly neglected and ignored by the Soviet authorities.

Anna Mydlarska is a filmmaker, archivist, translator, and academic teacher. From the beginning of the 1980s she cooperated with "Solidarity": she was Lech Wales’s interpreter during the interviews with foreign journalists. She was also the worker of the National Commission of Solidarity and Solidarity’s Bulletin in Gdansk, where she regularly translated foreign press articles. Apart from that, she translated illegal foreign literature for the underground publications.

She has been the head of the Department of Film Documentation in European Solidarity Centre (ECS) in Gdansk since the institution’s creation in 2008. She has been overlooking the content and organisation of “Mediateka”: a media library which archives original video and voice recordings from the 1970s and 1980s. Mydlarska also leads ECS’s Film Notations, which is her authorial project, based on the interviews with Solidarity’s activists and leaders of political and cultural opposition.

Her life mission is to preserve the memory of the democratic movement and the people of political and cultural opposition in socialist Poland. She acts as a film director, producer and screenwriter – not only in the project of Notations, but also in numerous documentary films. In 1996 she was awarded the so-called “Polish Pulitzer” (the Main Award of Polish Journalist Association) for her documentary “The Dawn of Emigration – Conversations in Paris” (pl. “Zmierzch emigracji – rozmowy paryskie”). In 2006 she received the “Merited for Polish Culture” medal.

She is a wife of Jacek Mydlarski, a painter associated with Polish cultural opposition scene of 1980s.