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Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa (1925–2006) was a Romanian Greek-Orthodox priest, an anti-communist dissident, and a fighter for human rights. He was born on 23 November 1925 in Mahmudia, Tulcea county, near the Danube Delta, in a large poor family; he was the only one of the eleven children who managed to go to school (Bourdeaux 2007). During his high school years, Calciu-Dumitreasa joined for two short periods of time Frăția de cruce (Blood Brotherhood), the youth organisation of the Romanian extreme right political party, the Iron Guard. Because of his political sympathies, he was put on trial, but he was acquitted by the Military Court of Constanța in 1942. After the end of World War II, Calciu-Dumitreasa again joined Frăția de cruce as a medical student in Bucharest. After the communist takeover in 1948, he was imprisoned and sentenced to eight years in prison because of his political allegiance to the Iron Guard. As he told The Washington Post in 1989, he was jailed because he and other like-minded friends protested against “atheism, the collectivisation of the means of production, and the destruction of the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie”(Sullivan 2006).

In 1949, Calciu-Dumitreasa was sent to the Jilava penitentiary and then transferred to the prison in Pitești. At Pitești he participated in the infamous process of re-education that used permanent torture as the main instrument for transforming detainees into “new men.” In 1954, as the regime tried to distance itself from what happened in the Pitești prison, he was tried for his part in the re-education programme and received another sentence of fifteen years. He was released from prison in 1964 when the communist regime declared a general amnesty for all political prisoners (Deletant 1995, 39; Cătănuș 2007, 243). According to his own confession, tormented by the terrible sin of being one of the torturers at Pitești prison, Calciu-Dumitreasa found in Orthodox Christian faith a means of coming to terms with his painful past and thus decided to become a priest and distanced himself from his former political allegiances. Because on his release from prison he was forbidden from studying theology, he studied French. Then, with the consent of Patriarch Justinian of the Romanian Orthodox Church, he secretly completed his studies for the priesthood (Sullivan 2006). Ordained as a priest in 1973, he became a teacher of French and New Testament at the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Bucharest (Cătănuș 2007, 243).

Calciu-Dumitreasa’s dissident activities began in September 1977, when he deplored the demolition of churches in the centre of Bucharest, especially of the Enei church, the first such historical monument which was torn down after the earthquake of March 1977, on the grounds that it was too damaged to be consolidated. On 30 January 1978, he delivered a sermon in the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest against atheism and labelled materialism as “a philosophy of despair.” One year after the earthquake of 4 March 1977, Calciu-Dumitreasa delivered another sermon to commemorate the death of the students who had died under ruins of the collapsed building of the seminary. His actions were severally sanctioned by his superiors who forbade him to preach in the Patriarchal Cathedral and questioned his decision to organise a service in memory of the seminary students (Cătănuș 2007, 244). Despite these early warnings, Calciu-Dumitreasa decided to hold a series of seven non-conformist sermons at the church of the seminary between 8 March and 19 April 1978. Targeting both seminary students and young people in general, the sermons dealt with sensitive issues for the communist regime and the Romanian Orthodox Church, such as atheist education, the relation between the state and the church, and the role of priests, who were supposed to take care of their parish communities and should thus oppose the demolition of the churches (Cătănuș 2007, 244).

The new patriarch, Justin Moisescu, considering that Father Calciu-Dumitreasa had betrayed the Church, expelled him from his teaching position at the Orthodox seminary. Harassed by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, he endorsed in 1979 the initiative of a group of workers and intellectuals in the city of Drobeta-Turnu Severin to create the Free Trade Union of the Working People of Romania, and agreed to act as its spiritual leader. On 10 March 1979, he was arrested, put on trial, sentenced to ten years of imprisonment on the charge of “propagating fascist ideology,” and sent to the prison in Aiud. The charge was fabricated, as the communist regime tried to use his former political engagement with the Iron Guard to discredit him and justify his imprisonment. His arrest triggered a wave of international protests involving British, French, and Swiss members of parliament, members of the US Congress and international organisations such as Christian Solidarity International. Due to this international pressure, Calciu-Dumitreasa was released in 1984. As the renewal of Most Favoured Nation status for Romania by the US Congress was conditional on the observance of human rights, the authorities granted Calciu-Dumitreasa and his family exit visas in 1985 (Deletant 1995, 100, 231, 195). During his exile in the United States, he worked in construction as an unqualified worker to support himself and his family. Calciu-Dumitreasa did not abandon his fight against the communist regime and its atheism, as he continued to deliver radio sermons, to give interviews to foreign radio stations, including Radio Free Europe, to lead demonstrations, and to lobby the US Congress. All his actions were aimed at raising the awareness of international public opinion about the repressive nature of the Ceaușescu regime (Sullivan 2006; Cătănuș 2007, 246-260). From 1989 until his death in 2006 he ministered at the Holy Cross Church in Alexandria, Virginia. He is buried in Romania.

Constantin Caraman (b. 4 august 1912, Oancea, Galaţi county; d. 11 July 2001) was a Pentecostal minister who signed the open letter of protest against infringements of human rights in Romania relating to religious freedom entitled: The neo-protestant denominations and human rights in Romania, which was broadcasted by Radio Free Europe in April 1977. He was imprisoned for practising his faith from 1950 to 1951 and from 1964 to 1965. After signing the open letter he was arrested and interrogated by the Securitate (Silveșan and Răduț 2014, 66–67).

Mircea Carp is one of the best known Romanian journalists who worked for the radio stations Voice of America and RFE. Carp was an uncomfortable journalist for the communist regime in Bucharest because of the critical message he conveyed in his radio programmes, which were very popular in Romania.

Mircea Carp was born on 28 January 1923 in Gherla (Cluj county) in a family with roots in the nobility, with a long intellectual and military tradition. Following in the footsteps of his father, who was a career officer, Mircea Carp enrolled in the military high school, and then, in 1942, he was admitted to the School of Cavalry Officers and sent to Germany for specialised studies. He fought in the Romanian army against the USSR, but also against Nazi Germany, after Romania left the Axis Alliance on 23 August 1944. In August 1946 he was purged from the Romanian army for political reasons, and in August 1947 he was arrested and interrogated for his anti-communist convictions and activity. Because no evidence against him was found, he was released shortly after. After the forced resignation of King Michael I in December 1947, Carp decided to head for the West, wishing to join the opposition against the communist regime as part of the Romanian exile. In January 1948, Carp managed to cross illegally the border between Romania and Hungary and to reach Austria, where he worked for the American military mission until 1951, when he emigrated to the USA. Here he joined the Press and Documentation Department of the National Committee for a Free Europe, being in charge of editing the magazine Cronica Românescă (The Romanian Chronicle). This anti-communist organisation had been founded in New York in 1949 in order to increase American influence in Europe and to limit that of the Soviet Union. A year later, the National Committee for a Free Europe created the radio station RFE, which it continued to manage.

In the period 1955–1979, Carp worked for the radio station Voice of America, where he occupied the position of anchor, editor, and, from 1969, chief of the Romanian section of Voice of America. In 1973, the management of the radio station decided to reassign him as chief correspondent of the Voice of America office in Europe. Carp’s activity at Voice of America ended in 1979, when he relocated to RFE. Here he was in charge of the radio show “The Political Programme”, which had a great impact on the Romanian public during the 1980s.

Starting from 1969, Carp visited Romania several times, as an American journalist accredited to Bucharest, or as a member of certain American official delegations, such as the one that accompanied President Richard Nixon during his official visit to Romania in 1969. As shown by his surveillance file compiled by the Securitate, Mircea Carp was perceived as an enemy by the political police because in his radio shows he virulently criticised the communist regime in Romania. As a result, Carp was followed by Securitate during his visits to Romania, and his correspondence with friends and family in Romania was carefully monitored. After 1995, Mircea Carp published two biographical volumes. The first, entitled Vocea Americii în România, 1969–1978 (Voice of America in Romania, 1969–1978), focuses on the activity of the Romanian section of the radio station, whereas the second is a volume of memoirs whose title reminds us of the words with which Carp used to end his radio programme at RFE: Aici Mircea Carp, să auzim numai de bine! (This is Mircea Carp, wishing you all the best!).

Igor Cașu (b. 8 October 1973, Borogani, Leova district, Republic of Moldova) is a Moldovan historian, who specialises in the communist period. In 2010, he created the Centre for the Study of Totalitarianism at the State University of Moldova, serving as its founding director. As a member of the Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Totalitarian Regime in Moldova (created by presidential decree in 2010), Igor Cașu was part of the Moldovan “archival revolution” that led to an unprecedented access to formerly restricted archival collections (notably those of the KGB, the Interior Ministry, and the Communist Party). However, this period was short-lived, and access restrictions were reinstated after the Commission ended its work. This increases the value of this private collection, which holds a significant number of copies of archival documents that are not available to the broader public. These carefully selected sources allow an in-depth study of the communist period in Moldova, despite the obstacles that systematic research in public archives still encounters. Igor Cașu is willing to share these documents with the broader research community, which represents a welcome departure from the reluctance of public depositories to open their collections to the public without any restrictions.  At present, Igor Casu continues to serve as Director of the Centre for the Study of Totalitarianism and is also an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the State University of Moldova. 

Although he had no anti-regime family background, Igor Casu states that his first critical attitudes towards the regime surfaced in late 1988 or early 1989 and were connected to his membership of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). He decided to leave the organisation in the context of the wave of glasnost’ and of the emerging historical debates of the Gorbachev era. This act was also possible because of the relaxation of the regime, as a result of which the consequences of this type of behaviour were less severe compared to previous periods. He did not participate in other significant or crucial events related to the movement for “national emancipation” in Moldova.

In his understanding, the extent of cultural opposition in the MSSR was significant, but it was present “to a smaller degree than in other regions of the Soviet Union (e.g., the Baltic states, Western Ukraine or Georgia).” Igor Cașu’s definition of cultural opposition encompasses certain “acts perceived as less political, but nevertheless critical of the regime,” mainly in the field of “cultural policies, linguistic issues, but also [cases] of intellectuals in different spheres (writers, painters, other artists) who expressed ideas that were defined as anti-Soviet or dangerous to the regime.” Cașu emphasises that defining the concept of “cultural opposition” raises a “very difficult methodological issue,” mainly due to the shifting attitude of the authorities towards cases of oppositional discourses and activities.  As he aptly observes, the changing priorities of the central institutions influenced their perception on dissent and implicitly their reaction to such cases. To illustrate his point, Cașu gives the example of the use of the Latin alphabet in the MSSR. Despite the official prohibition of this practice, the consequences for its users could vary widely from one decade to another. Also, for Cașu, “the concept of ‘cultural opposition’ is a construct, whereas the concrete cases of cultural and political opposition can hardly be separated in reality.” This uncertainty also stems from the fact that, in the eyes of the communist authorities, the hierarchy of the relative danger associated with certain acts varied widely, not only across time, but also across space, in the case of different communist regimes.

Mikoláš Chadima is a Czech musician, songwriter, publicist and prominent figure of Czech alternative music of the 1970s and 1980s. As a saxophonist he became known in the second half of the 1970s when he performed with the “Elektrobus”, and “The Rock & Jokes Extempore Band” at "Prague Jazz Days", an official festival show organised by the Jazz Section. He is particularly well-known as the front-man of the music groups “Extempore” and “MCH Band”. Both were key bands of the Czech alternative scene and also to the predecessors and inspirations for the “new wave” bands of the 1980s. Chadima was repeatedly prosecuted for alleged disturbance - in 1979, because he said vulgar words on stage. He also worked in the management of the Jazz Section - an organisation dedicated to alternative cultural activities until it was factually liquidated in 1986. Chadima, as a signatory to Charter 77, was not allowed to perform. Thus, the “MCH Band” performed illegally, often under different names. Chadima distributed recordings of the “MCH Band” and other alternative music groups as samizdat within his “Fist Records”record label. He could perform legally at the end of the 1980s, specifically at the Prague “Concert for Armenia” in 1989. Chadima also published theoretical and memorial works by samizdat. Currently he is a professional musician. His collection of music recordings is stored in the audiovisual section of the Libri Prohibiti library in Prague, an institution dedicated to the collection of samizdat cultural production.

Jindřich Chalupecký was a Czech literary and art critic, theoretician and historian. He studied at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, however he did not finish his studies. He briefly worked as a teacher and, later in various arts organisations, such as The Czechoslovak Union of Visual Artists. From 1930 he published literary and art critiques, and later studies and essays. Some of them were also issued as book editions. He dealt with post-surrealistic crisis of European avant-garde movements in particular. Starting in the 1940s, he co-organised exhibitions. He was a theoretician of the art movement Skupina 42 (Group 42) founded in 1942. The group did not have any defined program, however artists associated with this group were primarily interested in cities and an urban way of life.

Chalupecký could not publish after the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948 as his writings and attitudes diverted from then required socialist-realism. However, his works could officially circulate during the short liberalization period in the 1960s. From 1965 to 1970 he managed the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague. During this period, many important exhibitions were organised there, including the exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s works in 1969. From the beginning of the 1970s, after the suppression of the “Prague Spring”, he once again became a “banned author”. Thus, he published in samizdat or in exile and foreign magazines. During normalization, Jindřich Chalupecký became an important and uniting figure of Czechoslovak unofficial art as many painters and sculptors visited him regularly. Chalupecký also saw some positive aspects of the impact of normalization on artists. According to him, artists were forced to create under the political pressure, however, at the same time, they were freed from the harmful commercial influence.

Chalupecký’s texts were officially issued as re-editions or anthologies only after 1989. Today, Chalupecký is considered to be the most influential personality of the Czech art theory of the second half of the Twentieth Century. His specific and original writings about art can be hardly imitated or surpassed. The legacy of Jindřich Chalupecký has been disseminating since 1990 through the prize named in his honour, the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. This prize is annually awarded to young visual artists under 35 years old.

He studied journalism. In the 1970s he worked in a popular cultural programme Studio 2 on national television. In the 1990s he ran a private production house. He co-founded the Great Orchestra for Christmas Charity Foundation (Fundacja Wielkiej Orkiestry Świątecznej Pomocy), one of the most renowned Polish charity actions which since 1993 has been gathering money for medical equipment.

One of the initiators of the Comitte of Defending Democracy (Komitet Obrony Demokracji) – a civic initiative of a liberal character which organizes mass protests against the government of Law and Justice party since their victory in 2015.

Cornel Chiriac (real name Ionel Corneliu Chiriac) was a Romanian journalist, jazz drummer, and radio and record producer, who worked for Radio Romania and Radio Free Europe (RFE). He was born on 9 May 1942, in Uspenca/Uspenivka (now in Ukraine). Later, his parents moved to Pitești, a city approximately 100 km northwest of Bucharest. Despite the fact that his parents were “intellectuals” (both were teachers), Cornel Chiriac was officially considered a person with a “healthy social origin.” His father, nicknamed “the Marxist,” was a member of the Argeș regional committee of the Romanian Workers’ Party (the official name of the communist party in Romania between 1948 and 1965) and the editor-in-chief of its official publication Secera și ciocanul (The hammer and sickle). His father’s membership of the local party elite sheltered the rebellious adolescent Cornel Chiriac from unwanted interventions on the part of the authorities. It also provided him with access to goods and financial resources unavailable to the rest of the population, which allowed him to buy a camera and a radio for listening to foreign radio stations. In short, he was one of the few privileged young people who could pursue his many hobbies, which included music, acting, painting, photography, and poetry (Udrescu 2015, 16–29, 195).

Cornel Chiriac’s most enduring passion was jazz music, to which he dedicated his entire life. He started to be interested in this musical genre in the middle of the 1950s, when jazz was still identified as a Western cultural product that allegedly undermined the “correct” education of Romanian youth. Thus, Chiriac joined the cultural cold war and took the side of the West in this cultural competition once he began listening to foreign radio stations, especially Voice of America (VOA). His favourite show was Willis Conver’s Music USA - Jazz Hour, a musical programme that VOA started to broadcast worldwide in 1955. For Cornel Chiriac and other young people in the Eastern bloc, Willis Conver’s daily jazz programme was the main source of knowledge about this musical genre and a glimpse into the West and the American lifestyle (Ritter 2016, 13). The adolescent Cornel Chiriac also listened to other foreign radio stations which regularly broadcast jazz (Udrescu 2015, 48). During the late 1950s, Cornel Chiriac’s parents were among the few Romanians who could afford to buy a radio receiver. Their price ranged between 400 and 4,000 lei, at a time when the net average national monthly salary varied between 400 lei in 1956 and 750 lei in 1959 (Marin 2016, 671). Over the next few years, with the help of his parents, Cornel Chiriac bought a portable radio receiver and a Belcanto record player to play his vinyl records (Udrescu 2015, 175-176). Another source of knowledge of jazz music was foreign magazines, especially those from Poland that arrived in Romania for the first time at the end of the 1950s. These publications could be legally bought, but the number of subscriptions was limited to two or three for the entire city. Consequently, Cornel Chiriac started to read La Pologne, a magazine published in French, and later the Polish periodical Jazz, which featured articles about the international jazz community. This turned into his main source of information about jazz music, with the help of a Polish–Romanian dictionary (Udrescu 2015, 63, 67).

Cornel Chiriac’s passion for jazz music influenced his decision in 1961 to produce a samizdat, in fact a hand-written magazine about this musical genre. Its purpose was to make jazz music known in Romania and also provide up-to-date information to other Romanian jazz lovers. The samizdat Jazz Cool included discography of jazz artists and bands, charts published by Down Beat and other magazines, articles translated from the Polish periodical Jazz, and information about jazz concerts and festivals organised around the world. The content, the layout of the text, and the illustrations inserted in Jazz Cool were the work of Cornel Chiriac. Jazz Cool was usually “issued” in a maximum of ten copies as his friend Mircea Udrescu helped him to multiply all the featured items. Apart from editing this hand-written magazine, Cornel Chiriac began to work on the Jazz-Cool-Encyclopaedia, a project which he sadly never finished due to his decision to emigrate. His critical article about the musical orchestra of Pitești was published in the Polish periodical Jazz at the end of the year of 1963 and enhanced his status as a jazz connoisseur (Udrescu 2015, 63–67, 103, 52).

His Jazz Cool samizdat magazine brought Cornel Chiriac the unwanted attention of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate. Consequently, in the summer of 1964 the Securitate held him in custody, searched his house in Pitești, confiscated copies of Jazz Cool, and interrogated him. In order to protect his friends who had helped him with the magazine, Chiriac took all the blame for “publishing” it. After questioning him, the Securitate gave him only a warning and released him after he had signed a declaration that he would never again engage in such activities against the “social order” (Udrescu 2015, 77, 81). Even though Cornel Chiriac might not have previously considered his passion for jazz and foreign music as a form of opposition to the Romanian communist regime, the encounter with the Securitate influenced him in consciously pursuing his passion in that perilous direction.

In the same year, 1964, Cornel Chiriac moved to Bucharest and soon began to work for the national radio station, Radio Romania, as the producer of the music show Metronom, which quickly became extremely popular among young people. There he organised a sound archive, recording as many tracks as he could from the albums he had borrowed from friends and acquaintances (including foreign diplomats, jazz artists, and the offspring of the communist nomenklatura) or had bought on the black market. Taking advantage of the ideological relaxation and liberalisation in the first years of Ceaușescu’s rule, during his show Metronom, he broadcast the latest jazz, rock, and folk music. Thus, he became an epitome of cultural opposition by working inside a Romanian institution. According to one of his many listeners, Cornel Chiriac became an idol for them as he not only broadcast the latest musical tracks, but also educated his audience about how to listen to music, value it, and talk about it. Chiriac took a great interest in Romanian rock bands and brought some of them to Bucharest to illegally record their songs in the studios of Radio Romania (Ionescu 2016, 26–32, 34). In addition, Cornel Chiriac was involved in the organisation of a series of conferences about jazz artists or styles at the Students’ House of Culture in Bucharest. His theoretical lectures on jazz were followed by musical performances, some of them by well-known jazz artists and bands of that time (Udrescu 2015, 93).

A rebel by nature, Cornel Chiriac could not stand any form of censorship and used every available opportunity to revolt against it. For instance, after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he managed to trick the censor and play in his programme a folk song about one big wolf and five small wolves that attacked a sheepfold. This was a thinly veiled criticism of the Warsaw Pact’s brutal interference in Czechoslovakia to stop the Prague Spring. As Ceaușescu himself condemned the invasion, this action remained without immediate consequences, but it later provided further arguments for his ousting from the national radio station. The last straw in his case was the broadcasting of the Beatles’ song “Back in USSR” during the Metronom programme. Consequently, Cornel Chiriac was fired from Radio Romania in 1969, so he decided to flee Romania the same year (D. Ionescu 2016, 40–41). 

Taking advantage of a tourist visa, Cornel Chiriac reached the refugee camp in Treiskirchen, near Vienna. The director of the Romanian desk of RFE, Noel Bernard, found out about his arrival and offered him a job (Morariu 2015). His participation in the cultural cold war against communism entered a new phase. Cornel Chiriac resumed his Metronom show at RFE and also produced several other musical programmes, such as Rock in Concert, By Request, and Jazz à la Carte (D. Ionescu 2016, 47, 61). His music and comments were now blended with criticism against Ceaușescu’s regime and frequent denouncements of the lack of liberty for young people. Cornel Chiriac attracted his loyal listeners from Radio Romania to RFE. Some of them actually discovered RFE due to his musical broadcasts and gradually became faithful listeners of this foreign radio station. Until his violent death on 4 March 1975, Cornel Chiriac continued to receive numerous letters from young people. In their letters, these youngsters described the grim situation in Romania, the tightening of censorship and the reinforcement of ideological control over cultural production and consumption after the so-called Theses of July 1971. They also asked their idol to broadcast their musical preferences, which he always did (Udrescu 2015, 156–157; Măgură-Bernard 2007, 26–28; D. Ionescu 2016, 62). Cornel Chiriac used the radio microphone and his passion for music to create an alternative view of the world for young people in Romania. This was a world which valued freedom, personal choice, diversity in all its forms, and above all moral dignity. While Cornel Chiriac’s broadcasts offered young people a glimpse into the Western world, they also greatly influenced their nonconformism and rebellious attitudes.

Viacheslav Chornovil was a journalist, a sixtier, human rights activist and founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. He studied journalism in Kyiv, finishing his degree after some fits and starts in 1960. After working for a Lviv television station for two years, Chornovil returned to Kyiv, where he applied to do graduate work but was not admitted for political reasons. He instead went to work for Dnipro GES and then a local newspaper. In 1963, together with Alla Horska, Ivan Svitlychny, Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Zverstiuk created the Club of Creative Youth in Kyiv, taking active part in the burgeoning sixtiers movement, disseminating and publishing samizdat, and organizing a number of literary and civic gatherings. In 1965, he, Ivan Dziuba and Vasyl Stus publicly spoke out against arrests that had taken place of a number of their fellow travelers, choosing as their venue of protest the Kyiv screening of Sergei Parajanov’s internationally acclaimed film „Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.” As a result, Chornovil was fired from his job and subject to myriad searches and surveillance. He also refused to testify against the brothers Horyn’, calling the judges considering their case criminals, which resulted in additional punitive measures against him.

After publishing an account of these ongoing repressions abroad, Chornovil himself was tried and sentenced to three years of hard labor in 1967. He was amnestied and released in 1969, resuming immediately his activism, first in support of Ivan Dziuba, who was being pressured to recant the arguments outlined in his work Internationalism or Russification and later in the publication of 5 editions of the journal Ukrainskyi Visnyk (Ukrainian Chronicle), one of the most important samizdat publications in Soviet Ukraine, which also included regular reports of human rights abuses and unjust arrests and detainments. He wrote letters to the Ukrainian Central Committee in defense of historian Valentyn Moroz, after his arrest in 1970 and upon his initiative Ukrainian dissidents formed a committee in defense of Nina Strokata, a microbiologist, who was arrested that year as well.

Given his activism, and his ties to the Lviv dissidents, especially to Iryna and Ihor Kalynets, it is no surprise that Chornovil was arrested again alongside them during the wave of arrests that took place January 12-14, 1972.  In response to threats against his wife and child, Chornovil went on an eight-day hunger strike. Ultimately, the courts handed out a severe sentence of 6 years of hard labor in Mordovia and 3 years of exile in Yakutia. While in exile, Chornovil actively corresponded with his compatriots, among them Iryna Kalynets-Stasiv, with whom he discussed parochial every day concerns alongside the legality of the work regimen forced upon GULag inmates. His lively, accessible and warm delivery are thought to be a unique contribution to our understanding of the Soviet penal system for political prisoners during the union’s decadent phase.

Vlasta Chramostová is one of the most significant personalities from the Czech cultural scene of the 20th century. She was born on 17 November 1926 in Brno as the oldest of five children of the engineer Vladimír Chramosta. She spent her childhood in Skryje u Rouchovan, a village which was destroyed in 1976 during the construction of the Dukovany Nuclear Power Station. She studied at the Department of Drama at the Brno Conservatory between 1941 and 1945. In 1944 she was forcibly made to work as a machinist at a German aircraft factory near Brno. During the war she acted in her first “apartment theatre” with her classmates and in the hall of “Nový domov”, a housing association in Brno. After WWII, she worked at the Svobodné divadlo (Free Theatre, now Brno City Theatre) in Brno, the Olomouc City Theatre and Brno State Theatre. She relocated to Divadlo na Vinohradech (Vinohrady Theatre) in Prague in 1950. In the same year, she married Bohumil Pavlinec, a director of Czechoslovak Radio in Brno. After her divorce, she lived with the artist Konrád Babraj, with whom she had a son. In 1963, her 4-year-old son died in a car accident and Chramostová herself was badly injured. She married the cameraman Stanislav Milota in 1971. At the beginning of Normalization she left Divadlo na Vinohradech in protest at the dismissal of its director František Pavlíček; Chramostová had been one of the ensemble’s leading actresses. She was unable to perform in film, television and radio due to political reasons. She acted for a short time in Divadlo za branou and gave guest performances at the West Bohemian Theatre in Cheb. In 1973 she was officially banned from performing in public. Thanks to her connections in the dissident movement she established “apartment theatre” in her flat near the National Museum in Prague. She organised (with some help from her husband) the first performance in October 1976 to mark the 75th birthday of Jaroslav Seifert, a banned national artist. Václav Havel, who was imprisoned few months later, was among the guests at the premiere. Vlasta Chramostová was one of the first people to sign Charter 77. That led to even more pressure from the State Security (StB) against her and her apartment theatre, which she was forbidden to organise during the 1980s. In January 1989, she attended a memorial event to commemorate Jan Palach. Vlasta Chramostová and Libuše Šilhánková were later given suspended sentences because of their letter to Jakeš and Adamec with a declaration related to the “Palach Week”. In the same year, she was awarded the Poul Lauritzen Foundation Freedom Award for her contribution towards human rights. In 1990, she was declared an honorary member of the National Theatre, where she performed after 1991. She was awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk for her contribution to the development of democracy, humanity and human rights in 1998. During the 1990s, she performed in television and several films and was twice nominated for the Czech Lion Award, the most renowned Czech film award. She was awarded a Special Thalia Award for her lifelong contribution to the theatre in 2007.

Ivan Chvatík is a Czech philosopher and former pupil of Jan Patočka. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. In 1968, Chvatík became an external aspirant at the  Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, supervised by professor Jan Patočka. After Patočkaʼs expulsion from the University in 1972, he stopped official graduate study and continued organising Patočkaʼs private seminars and lectures. Immediately after Patočkaʼs death, Ivan Chvatík deposited Patočkaʼs written legacy in a secret location and began publishing his works as a samizdat. Until 1989, 27 samizdat volumes of Jan Patočkaʼs works were issued. In 1990, Ivan Chvatík and his colleagues were recognised by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences for their samizdat publication activities. Chvatík also cooperated with the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, which was founded in 1982. The Institute handled, among other things, the philosophical legacy of Jan Patočka. Thus, Ivan Chvatík constantly made copies of Patočkaʼs works and, with the help of collaborators, smuggled these reproductions into Vienna. In Vienna, these works were provided to those interested and translated into German or French. In 1984, twelve of Martin Heideggerʼs lectures, translated into Czech by Chvatík, were published in Oxford. These books were then smuggled secretly into Czechoslovakia. Until 1989, Chvatík led a private philosophical seminar on Heideggerʼs “Being and Time,” using his own translation in progress, and organised the visits of foreign philosophical guests at the seminars. In 1990, Chavtík set up the Jan Patočka Archives as a special department at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and today Ivan Chvatík still serves as the director of this archive.

Beginning in 1990, Ivan Chvatík served as a governmental liaison for the founding of the Central European University and as the secretary to the board of trustees of the Prague CEU Foundation, until the end of the CEU in Prague in 1997. Since 1993, he has been co-director of the Center for Theoretical Study, the Institute for Advanced Study at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 1997 Ivan Chvatík received the Jan Patočka Memorial Medal from the Czech Academy of Sciences in recognition of accomplishments in furthering scientific research. Since 1990 he has edited 29 books by Jan Patočka, including 19 volumes of his collected works.

Jan Chwałczyk (1924) is a painter, sculptor, creator of the kinetic installations and mail art. He is a leading representative of the Polish neo-avant-garde. In 1962-1976 he was a member of the Wroclaw Group, and in 1972-1977 he ran the Art of Creative Information Gallery in Wroclaw. An artist interested mainly in the issues of light and colour, and the relationship between the art and science.

Chwałczyk was born in Krosno and studied in the State Higher School for Fine Arts in 1946-1951 in Wroclaw, where he acquired a painting diploma in prof. Eugeniusz Geppert’s laboratory. In the 1950s Chwałczyk created paintings in a manner close to informel, taking an inspiration from nature. In 1955 he took part in the Arsenal Exhibition of Young Fine Artists in Warsaw. From 1957 to 1963 he co-organised the Searching for Form and Colour group, and from 1962 to 1976 – Wroclaw Group. In 1963-1964 he started to practice structural painting, treating the picture as an object, not just a composition. Later he got closer to the kinetic art, starting from the First Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg in 1965, and an Artists’ and Scientists’ Symposium in Puławy one year later.

Since the second half of the 1960s Chwałczyk’s main interests are the light and colour, which was represented on his individual exhibition Portraits and Autoportraits in 1969 in the Under Mona Lisa Gallery ran by Jerzy Lidwiński. Objects created by the artist were reflecting light, falling on different surfaces, and creating various shadows and colours, depending on shape and material. The famous project of the Solar Spectrum Projector – presented by Chwałczyk during the Wroclaw 1970 Symposium – was the concept of a device streaming the solar light in different colours onto certain points of Wroclaw. The same year, during the Artists’, Scientists’ and Art Theoreticians’ Symposium in Osieki, the artist presented another project: the Colourful Configuration of the Spatial Light Transformation, which was supposed to create a portrait of the light in the audience consciousness. Chwałczyk tried to capture the physical features of the light and colour, research their properties as phenomena which enable seeing. Such approach situated him within the op-art stream and on the border of “impossible art”.

In the 1970s Chwałczyk got interested in the influence that art has on the society. He also actively participated in the international net of mail art creators by running in 1972-1977 the Art of Creative Information Gallery – a node in the net of letters’ exchange, artistic prints, and other documents. Chwałczyk initiated the international artistic actions, such as International Artist Cooperation in 1967-1969, Defending the Mental Sphere in 1972-1973, and Counterpoint in 1972-1974. In the frame of the latter one Chwałczyk gathered 68 speeches of the Polish and foreign artists, focusing on the current situation and the future development of art.

Chwałczyk participated in the most important events of the Polish conceptual art: symposiums of the Golden Bunch in Zielona Góra, Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg, symposium in Puławy, outdoor panels in Osieki, as well as the Wroclaw 1970 Visual Arts Symposium, where he coordinated the execution of a project The Unlimited, Vertical Composition of Henryk Stażewski. He also took part in the Biennale in São Paulo in 1981. In 2006 he received the Prize of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, and in 2011 – the Silver Medal for the Meritious for Culture Gloria Artis.

Petr Cibulka is a Czech political activist, signatory to Charter 77 and collector of Czechoslovak unofficial music groups recordings from the 1980s. Cibulka was also a member of the “VONS” (Committee for the Defense of Unjustly Prosecuted), whose aim was to monitor and to inform the public about politically motivated lawsuits and repressions against the opposition, non-conforming citizens, etc. in former Czechoslovakia. Until 1989, Cibulka was imprisoned several times for his attitudes and activities, totalling over five years. During the 1980s, Cibulka collected and distributed recordings of music groups. His private collection was probably the largest of its kind in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia. His collection is now stored at the Libri Prohibiti library, an institution dedicated to the collection of samizdat cultural production. After 1989, Cibulka was also known as the publisher of lists of collaborators of the former StB (State Security), also known as the “Cibulka Lists”. Cibulka is still politically active, he is the founder of the political party “Right Block”, he regularly runs for election in governmental institutions and regional elections, and he was also a candidate for the presidential election in 2013.

Ante Ciliga was born in the village Šegotići, near Pula, then in the province Istria, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on February 20, 1898. A journalist, writer, politician, communist dissident and pamphleteer, he was one of the most prominent Croatian emigrant intellectuals. He attended primary school and the classics gymnasium  in Mostar, and also in Pazin and Brno. He studied in Križevci, Prag, Vienna and Zagreb, where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1924, and he was the first to defend a dissertation on the theme of Marxism at Zagreb University under the title O socijalno-filozofskom aktivizmu Rudolfa Goldscheida: Kritika i obrana marksizma na području filozofije (On Rudolf Goldscheid's socio-philosophical activism: criticism and defence of Marxism in the field of philosophy).

In 1918, he joined Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Slavonia. Shortly afterward, he became one of the founders of the Yugoslav communist movement. He was in Budapest when the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in 1919. After the communist fiasco in Hungary, Ciliga left for his native Istria, where he organized an insurrection against Italian authorities in 1921 in an events known as the  Proština Revolt. He edited and wrote for Borba, the official publication of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (1923-1925), in which he debated with Serbian communists about the national question in Yugoslavia, advocating a federalist solution. In 1924, he became a member of the Central Committee of the CPY and participated in the Third Congress of the CPY in Vienna in 1926. In the same year, due to persecution because of his illegal party work, he was exiled from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. From there he moved to Moscow, where lectured at the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West and supported Trotsky in his struggle against Stalin. Stalin therefore had him i jailed briefly in Leningrad, and afterward, in 1930, he was sent to the Siberian concentration camps, where was released in 1935 after the Stalin-Mussolini agreement, as he had Italian citizenship. At the 4^th Territorial Conference of the CPY in December1934, Ciliga was branded a Trotskyist. He also parted ways with the Trotskyists very soon, but continued to be loyal to socialist ideas. Later, in 1938, he printed his first great work, Au Pays de gran mensonge (In the Land of the Great Lie) in French, which was among the first books to inform the Western world of Stalinist mass terror. At the time, this testimony led to harsh attacks by the Stalinist CPY. After the German occupation of France, in December 1941 he departed for the Independent State of Croatia, where he was interned in the Jasenovac camp because of his suspect communist biography. After his release  from the camp, he began working as a journalist for the weekly magazine  Spremnost, writing articles about Soviet communism. In the final of 1944, he travelled to Berlin, whence he fled to the West, in the American military zone, before the Soviet army entered Berlin.

After the war, he lived in Paris until 1958, and prior to his return to Croatia in 1990, he lived continually in Rome. In 1954, he published his second well-known work, his memoir Sam kroz Europu u ratu (Through Europe in the War Alone). Although he had abandoned the communist movement, he continued to write about socialist ideas on the basis of democracy and to criticize party dictatorships. The whole time he cooperated with Croatian émigré communities and wrote about the Croatian national question and the general situation in Yugoslavia. He joined the Croatian National Council, which was chaired by émigré Branimir Jelić. In 1960, together with Krunoslav Draganović, Veljko Mašina and Miroslav Varoš, he founded the Croatian Democratic Parliament, which, after the conflict between Ciliga and Varoš, was called Croatian Democratic and Social Action since 1964. After 1958, he issued a bulletin under various names (Bulletin of Croatian National Council, Bulletin of Croatian Democratic and Social Action and On the Threshold of the Future) with short interruptions until 1984. In it, he dealt with the history of the Yugoslav communist movement and critically assessed Tito's regime. As a former member of the communist movement and a dissident who had transitioned into a hard-core anticommunist, he was branded a political enemy of the regime in Yugoslavia. Tito mentioned him in his paper at the Fifth Congress of the CPY in 1948, in the context of the menace represented by the “counter-revolutionary Trotskyism of Ante Ciliga”. After the communists fell from power in 1990, he returned to Croatia, where he was granted an honorary function in the commission drafting the new democratic constitution in December 1990. He died in Zagreb on October 21, 1992 at age of 94.

Ion Cioabă was a Roma leader and activist who involved himself in defending the rights of his ethnic group during the communist regime and after its fall in December 1989. He was born on 7 January 1935 in Târgu Cărbunești, Dolj County. During World War II, he and his family were deported to Transnistria. After his safe return to Romania, he became a member of the Workers’ Youth League. During the 1950s he collaborated with local authorities to convince Roma people to give up nomadism and integrate themselves in mainstream society. This brought him prestige among local Roma communities and thus in 1971 he was elected the leader (bulibașa) of the nomad Roma people in Sibiu county and its surroundings. His great influence over Roma groups and his willingness to collaborate with the authorities to settle and “modernise” his nomad peers transformed him into “the best mediator between officials and Gypsies, having the ability to translate the indications or political messages into the Gypsy language, to the values and soul of the Gypsies” (ACNSAS, I 172057 vol. 1, ff. 2 f, 46–49; D 8685, ff. 305–306).

His collaboration with the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, began in 1970–1971. At that time, the Securitate organised a massive operation to collect requests for compensation on the part of those persons (Jews, Roma, Romanians) who had been deported on racial grounds during World War II. This was done in order to reclaim payments from Federal Germany. Ion Cioabă was responsible for collecting the requests of the deported Roma (ACNSAS, D 144 vol. 12, ff. 291–293). His collaboration with the secret police strengthened after his election as a member of the Presidium of the Romani International Union (IRU). He thus began to give full reports about the activity of the IRU and his meetings with its leaders, and about his contacts with other transnational Roma organisations and foreign journalists (ACNSAS, D 8586 ff. 305–306).

Taking advantage of his privileged relations with the Securitate, Ion Cioabă initiated a series of activities in support of the discriminated-against and socially marginalised Roma people in communist Romania. Alone or in collaboration with his protégé Nicolae Gheorghe, he signed memorandums that were presented to the Romanian authorities. These documents described the difficult situation of Roma people and contained a programme of measures to ease their condition through integration into mainstream society (ACNSAS, D 8586, ff. 292–297, 263–265). Moreover, Ion Cioabă joined Nicolae Gheorghe’s endeavour of demonstrating that Roma people had a distinct cultural and ethnic identity and thus deserved to be recognised as a national minority and granted similar rights to other ethnic groups. Consequently, he personally supported the organisation of cultural activities in which the richness of Roma traditions was displayed and used these examples to demonstrate that Roma people were worthy to be integrated as distinct ethnic group in Romanian society (ACNSAS, D 144 vol. 12, ff. 377–379; D 144 vol. 11, ff. 2–3 f–v; D 144 vol. 13, ff. 175–177).

Cioabă also intensely lobbied the Romanian authorities to officially endorse his and Gheorghe’s efforts to get compensation for the deported Roma. The initiative failed as Federal Germany indefinitely postponed the discussion of payment of reparations for deported Roma. At the same time, the Romanian communist regime was not willing to use diplomatic pressure against West Germany as an intervention would certainly have strained its relations with that country (D 144 vol. 12, ff. 252, 253 f–v, 291–293; D 144 vol. 13, ff. 20–21 f–v; I 172057, ff. 4–5 f–v).

After the fall of the communist regime, Cioabă continued his good relations with the Romanian authorities. Thus, in 1990 he was elected a deputy in the first democratic Parliament and obtained compensation for those Roma whose gold coins and jewellery had been confiscated by the former regime.  In order to bolster his authority as the leader of Roma people in Romania, in 1992 he self-proclaimed himself “the international king of Roma.” As the files of the former secret police were gradually opened only after the establishment of CNSAS in 1999, his collaboration was never proven during his lifetime. Thus until the end of his life in February 1997, Cioabă managed to maintain a close collaboration with Nicolae Gheorghe, supporting his initiatives to alleviate the difficult situation of Roma people.

Silviu Cioată (9 iunie 1931, Ploieşti; d. 20 October 1997, Ploieşti) was a minister of the Christian Evangelical Church of Romania (Biserica Creştină după Evanghelie – one of the Plymouth Brethren Protestant denominations). He graduated Medicine in Cluj in 1956. He signed the open letter of protest against infringements of human rights in Romania relating to religious freedom entitled: The neo-protestant denominations and human rights in Romania, which was addressed to several Western embassies and broadcasted by Radio Free Europe in April 1977. For being involved in this initiative he was arrested and interrogated by the Securitate over a period of six months. From 1981 to 1982, he was involved in a network that smuggled religious literature from the West to Romania for which he spent nine months in prison (Silveșan and Răduț 2014, 63–64).

Aurel Cioran, the younger brother of Emil Cioran, was born on 14 May 1914 in the village of Răşinari, Sibiu county, Romania (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and died on 27 November 1997 in Sibiu, Romania. His father Emilian, a Romanian Orthodox priest, was a member of the local elite involved in the political emancipation movement of the Romanians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother, Elvira Cioran (born Comaniciu) had roots in the Romanian minor nobility of Southern Transylvania. In the period 1932–1935, Aurel Cioran attended the Gheorghe Lazăr high school in Sibiu. From his teenage years, Aurel Cioran felt a strong attraction to Orthodox Christian Theology and he contemplated the possibility of becoming a monk. His brother convinced him to give up this intention. Consequently, he attended the Faculty of Law of the University of Bucharest in the period 1935–1937. During his university studies, he was influenced by the historian Nicolae Iorga and philosopher Nae Ionescu and socialised with young intellectuals such as Petre Ţuţea, Mircea Eliade, and Constantin Noica. Being influenced by this cultural milieu, he became a sympathiser of the Legionary Movement. From the 1930s onwards, he openly manifested his allegiance to the Legion and published pro-legionary articles in the Sibiu-based far-right newspaper Glasul Strămoşesc. He fostered a friendship with Constantin Noica, with whom he exchanged correspondence starting in the1960s (Sârghie 2012, 15). In 1937, Aurel Cioran started to work as an apprentice lawyer in Sibiu, and in 1940 he became a fully-qualified lawyer and was admitted to the Sibiu Bar.
In the period May 1942 to January 1944, Aurel Cioran served as an officer of the Romanian army in the Second World War. After returning home from the front he resumed his activity as a lawyer until March 1948 when he was purged from the Sibiu Bar. Due to his allegiance to the Legionary Movement he was arrested in June 1948, and convicted along with twenty-six others for conspiring against state security. He spent seven years in political prisons in Romania. After his release from prison, Aurel Cioran worked for eight years as unskilled worker and he was never again allowed to practice as a lawyer. Starting in the1960s he exchanged an intense correspondence with his brother, Emil Cioran, who had chosen to remain in France after the Second World War, and with other intellectuals such as Constantin Noica. According to Stelian Tănase, his correspondence was kept under close surveillance by the Securitate (Tănase 2009b). In 1981, the Securitate allowed Aurel Cioran to visit his brother in Paris, although this kind of permit was rare under communism in the case of former political prisoners. The strategy of the Securitate was to allow him to visit France in the hope that he would convince his brother to return to Romania in his old age. Emil Cioran’s possible return to Romania was perceived as a legitimising event by the Ceauşescu regime. The Securitate also tried to press Aurel Cioran to collaborate with them, but their attempts ended in failure (Tănase 2009b).

Emil Cioran was born on 8 April 1911 in the village of Răşinari, in the southern part of Transylvania, and died on 20 June 1995 in Paris, France. At that the time of his birth, his native province was still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Emilian Cioran, was a Romanian Orthodox priest involved in the political emancipation movement of the Romanians in Transylvania. Emil Cioran had a happy childhood (Liiceanu 1995, 16) in his native village, a place which at the beginning of the twentieth century was still not changed by the rhythms of modern life. According to Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, the fact that Cioran was born in a historical region where Romanians had a marginal social and political position marked his personality, and this aspect strongly influenced his intellectual work because he wanted to overcome a complex of inferiority (Zarifopol-Johnston 2009, 25).
In 1924, his family moved to Sibiu, where the young Emil Cioran was already attending middle school. The experience of a cosmopolitan city like Sibiu, where Transylvanian Saxons, Romanians, Hungarians, and Jews cohabited, was important for Cioran’s intellectual formation. Here he was introduced to German language and culture, which influenced his entire intellectual work. In the period 1928–1932, Cioran attended courses in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, graduating with a Bachelor thesis concerning the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. During his university studies in Bucharest he was strongly influenced –as were other intellectuals of his generation – by Nae Ionescu, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Bucharest, who had a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Munich (1919). Ionescu was also an active journalist, who shaped public opinion through his articles in the newspaper Cuvântul on key issues such as democracy, nationalism, and Orthodox Christianity. He questioned the process of modernisation in Romania based on Western political values and institutions, and criticised the democratic system, following the organicist approach of Oswald Spengler (Petreu 2016, 15–16). Nae Ionescu considered that democracy was foreign to Romanian political tradition, and displayed an anti-liberal discourse (Petreu 2016, 16–17).  At the end of 1933 he became an active supporter of the Legion of the Archangel Michael and thereafter he manifested an increasingly virulent anti-Semitism.
The adjustment to the new cultural milieu was difficult for the young Cioran, who had been raised in a school system with strong German influences. The cultural elite of the Romanian capital was more oriented towards French culture, which caused him inferiority complexes. In the early 1930s, he managed to enter into the so-called Criterion group of intellectuals. Criterion was a cultural association which in the period 1932–1934 brought together young intellectual such as Petru Comarnescu, Constantin Noica, Emil Cioran, Mircea Vulcănescu, Sandu Tudor, and Mihail Polihroniade. Criterion aimed at organising lectures open to the general public on a broad variety of cultural topics. Within the Criterion group, Cioran developed lifelong friendships with intellectuals such as Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noica, and Petre Ţuţea. During his student years he published articles in the Romanian cultural press. His book debut took place in 1934 when the King Carol II Foundation published Pe Culmile Disperării (On the Heights of Despair). The book received literary awards and was a best-seller in interwar Romania, making him one of the most prominent young intellectuals. Afterwards he published several volumes in Romania: Schimbarea la faţă a României (The Transfiguration of Romania), Cartea Amăgirilor (The Book of Delusions), Lacrimi şi Sfinţi (Tears and Saints), Amurgul Gîndurilor (The Twilight of Thought).
In 1933, Cioran was awarded a Humboldt fellowship and he spent the period 1933–1935 in Berlin. During his stay in Germany, he was influenced by his readings of Georg Simmel and Ludwig Klages (Zarifopol-Johnston 2009, 84–86). He was strongly impressed by the Nazi movement, which he perceived as “vitalist”, a “solution” for the crisis of European civilisation (Laignel-Lavastine 2004, 152). Starting from the Nazi example, he considered that a similar revolution would solve the political problems in interwar Romania, a country where democracy was weakened by rampant corruption and the authoritarian tendencies of King Carol II. This experience led him to write Schimbarea la faţă a României (The Transfiguration of Romania), a book which was on the one hand a virulent critique of the social and political situation in Romanian, and on the other a call to a violent revolution and to the end of the interwar Romanian political and social system. The nationalism promoted by Cioran was different from that displayed by Romanian far-right movements (such as the Legion) because he rejected the mixing of nationalism with Orthodox Christianity and was critical of the worship of the culture of the Romanian peasantry (Laignel-Lavastine 2004, 175–176). According to Zarifopol-Johnston, Cioran’s book “reflects the country’s increasingly radical political climate in the 1930s” (Zarifopol-Johnston 2009, 92). The experience of Nazi Germany and the influence of his professor Nae Ionescu made Cioran draw close to the Legionary Movement. From1933 onwards, Cioran openly manifested his support for it through his articles in the Romanian press.
In 1937, Cioran received another fellowship from the French Institute in Bucharest, and he spent the period 1937–1940 in Paris. In the autumn of 1940, when the Legion came to power alongside general Ion Antonescu, he came back to Romania. During that period, in the course of a radio broadcast, he delivered praise to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Legion murdered in 1938 by King Carol II’s regime. Due to his political involvement, Cioran was appointed in 1941 “cultural adviser” at the Romanian legation in Vichy France. He prolonged his stay in France in 1942 with a fellowship from the Romanian School at Fontenay-aux-Roses. In 1945, Cioran decided not to return to Romania and, during the late 1940s and 1950s he lived a modest life, living in student dormitories and taking meals at student cafeterias. In 1942, Cioran met Simone Boué, who became his companion for all his life. From 1945 onwards, he decided to give up writing in Romanian and chose to write in French. After the publication of his first book in French (Précis de decomposition) in 1949, he became integrated in French literary circles and he was awarded several literary prices. He continued to publish several books of essays in French such as: Précis de decomposition (1949); Syllogismes de l'amertume (1952); La Tentation d'exister (1956); Histoire et utopie (1960); Le Mauvais démiurge (1969); De l'inconvénient d'être né (1973). Although he became a famous writer in the West, Cioran avoided giving interviews to the press. Alexandra Laignel Lavastine has argued that this reluctance and his weak public reaction to the political repression in communist Romania targeting his former friends were caused by the “constant psychological threat” that his fascist past might be uncovered (Laignel-Lavastine 2004, 477, 547). According to the literary critic Matei Călinescu, Cioran tried to deal with his past by rewriting his former texts. Călinescu considers that through his 1956 essay “Un peuple de solitaires”, Cioran “wanted not only to communicate directly with his Western reader, but also to revisit his Romanian older texts in order to distance himself from them–but under the seal of secrecy” (Călinescu 1996, 207–208).