Gadó was born in a Jewish middle-class family. Both of his parents were deported in the Second World War, but they were among the few who survived. In the post-war era, members of the family joined the Hungarian Communist Party, and he was raised in this spirit. He started his career as a convinced communist and a more or less loyal cadre of the regime in the 1950s, and he remained a communist until the 1960s. Beginning in 1958, he worked at the archives of the party daily Népszabadság [Freedom of the People], from where he was fired for one of his articles in 1963. He took a position at the Central Statistic Office (KSH), which was kind of a depot for ideologically deviant social scientists and intellectuals. At both places, he had some degree of access to confidential papers of the Hungarian News Agency (MTI). At KSH's library he started to read the foreign press extensively. Furthermore, a friend living in Switzerland got him a subscription to the Neue Zurcher Zeitung (and also paid for it), so Gadó was well informed in foreign affairs. His views changed as a result, and he ceased to be socialist. He left the Worker's Union in 1965 and the Party in 1967.
1967 was a year of revelations for him: the Six-Day War demonstrated that Jews did not need to accept the role of the victim, but could act as self-confident agents fighting for liberty. For Gadó, helping nurture this sense of confidence and develop a dissident stance towards the Kádár regime were two sides of the same coin. He started to rediscover his Jewish heritage, and as a consequence he came to appreciate the historical role of the middle class in Hungary. He found that the regime's official cult of the proletariat prevented the middle-class from fulfilling its role in contemporary society, so he came to regard socialism as a dead end. In terms of foreign policy, the regime took a pro-Arab, anti-Israeli position, and it represented Israel as the aggressor, which further distanced Gadó from Kádárism.
He started to produce leaflets using a toy-press made for children in 1970/71. On the leaflets he printed slogans like "The press is lying about Israel!" He also wrote on walls with chalk, and he was arrested for this in 1973. The following year, he was imprisoned for 9 months. The political police never tried to turn him into an agent. Personal circumstances may have played a role in this: Gadó personally knew Sándor Geréb and Pál Hajdú, leaders of the III/III Department at the time, who had been members of the Hungarian Workers' Youth Association (MADISZ) after the Second World War, together with Gadó.
After he was released, he considered emigrating, but he was not given a passport. It was also difficult for him to get a permanent job: he made his living doing translations. In the early 1980s, he became involved in samizdat production via György Krassó. Once Krassó asked Gadó if he had a copy of Villon in the emigré poet György Faludy's translation, because he wanted to publish it in samizdat. Gadó lent him the book. Through Krassó, he met Demszky, János Kenedi, and János Kis, and he became involved in the activities of the democratic opposition. He published in several organs of the press, including Hírmondó and Beszélő, he produced independent samizdat brochures. In 1986, he allied with Jenő Nagy and Tamás Mikes to launch Demokrata. This organ was supposed to address the less educated strata of society, and it was also radical. They aimed to reach a wider audience than the other samizdat periodicals.
In 1987, Gadó started his own samizdat journal, Magyar Zsidó [The Hungarian Jew]. It was released in 800-1000 copies. Gábor Demszky provided a typewriter, and Attila János Ötvös printed the journal. Costs were covered by Gadó himself, and it was a more or less self-sustaining investment. In spring 1988, the third issue was confiscated by the police, but György Krassó, who was then already living in exile, mimeographed the copy he had, and sent it to Demszky from London. Demszky then reproduced it in Budapest in multiple copies.
He made his living as a translator and also as a distributor of samizdat materials. He was constantly under surveillance by the political police. After the change of regimes, he became the first legal Hungarian correspondent of Radio Free Europe.
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Location:
- Budapest, Hungary
Henryk Gajewski (born 1948) is an artist, a photographer, a film director, a theoretician, and a cultural activist. In the years 1972-1978 he ran the Galeria Remont and subsequently, until 1982, the Post Remont gallery, an experimental arts and education centre open to new trends in culture. Gajewski organised the international festival of performance art, the International Artists’ Meeting (I AM) in 1978, and was one of the main promoters of punk music in Polish People's Republic. Soon after the introduction of martial law, he emigrated to the Netherlands where he lives today.
Gajewski was born in Białystok. As a student of Faculty of Electronics at the Warsaw University of Technology he founded Galeria Remont in the “Riviera” Student Dormitory, which he managed with Andrzej Jórczak and Krzysztof Wojciechowski until 1977. Initially Gajweski conformed with conceptualism, dominant in contemporary art at that time, however he would gradually turn towards sociocultural contexts and conditions of artistic activities. Already in his first exhibition at Remont Gajewski titled Ona (Her) in 1972 he confronted two types of images of women: from the press and popular newspapers and those made by kindergarten and primary school-age children. Two years later Gajewski created Book for Elise (Książka dla Elizy) for his daughter. The work featured blank spaces, which were to be filled in the subsequent years with photographs taken at various locations and in different situations as his daughter grew up. The book itself was meant to circulate among the artists, Gajewski’s friends, in fashion similar to mail art.
Gajewski's fascination with child's imagination manifested itself most significantly in Other Child Book (Inna książka dla dziecka) a project carried out between 1977 and 1981 with participation of 250 artists from 29 countries (i.a. Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Henryk Stażewski). The books that had been sent in were presented in 1979 at the Palace of Culture and Science and in the main hall of Warsaw University of Technology. The aim of the initiative was to create books for children that would instil sensitivity and creativity, thus substituting textbooks, which teach submission and routine. Gajweski organised actions and workshops with children dedicating great attention as to how stimulating creativity can impact and the social reality.
Educational work and activities were just one of many means that Gajewski used in an attempt to escape the ivory tower of modernist art. Others included playing with audience, as in case of the fictitious meeting with Andy Warhol in 1974. Gajewski designed a poster with the image of the creator of pop art, his name, date, and a note: “exhibition opening, meeting”. Also, as a part of the hoax, even a luxury apartment at one of high-profile Warsaw hotels was to be rented for Warhol. Once the audience gathered in large numbers at Galeria Remont at the time indicated on the posters, it turned out the American artist did not arrive. The point of this action was indeed a “meeting” however not with Andy Warhol, but rather with the persons arrived at the venue.
The interpersonal, existential sense of a meeting was highlighted once more in 1978 during the International Artists’ Meeting, abbreviated as “I AM” or “I am”. It was the first review of performance art of such extent in Central and Eastern Europe. It was this event that contributed to the establishment of performance art as an art category as such. Also, thanks to the concert of The Raincoats I AM symbolically introduced punk to Poland, i.e. a first official punk performance, that within a year and half triggered a proliferation of Polish bands, and made Remont a permanent venue for punk events.
Gajewski worked closely with Jan Świdziński and shared his concept of contextual art — an art consisting primarily of communication between persons in various situations and negotiating meanings between different contexts. The communication aspect of art seems to be crucial for Gajewski, which partially explains his interest in punk. Interpersonal art that relied on communication had to transcend institutional frameworks and be in touch with the social transformations’ dynamics. Gajweski perceived punk, with all its vividness, expression, and provocativeness, as an extremely significant manifestation of social life, a popular culture phenomenon, which could not be disregarded. Having avid interest in futurology, he tried to combine artistic praxis with sociological forecasts, which led him to the formulation of the concept of “pre-facts”, i.e.events that cause the occurrences of particular facts in the future. The phenomenon of punk in the late 1970s can be interpreted as a “pre-fact” of the nearing social unrest.
From 1978 to 1981 Remont was probably the most important spot on punk community’s map of Warsaw. It hosted concerts and Sound Clubs (rock, world, reggae, and ska music events), as well as meetings of fans and artists. Gajewski photographed the colourful punk community, shot films with musicians, e.g. Tilt Back in 1980 and Passenger in 1984, published a cassette tape with the recordings of performances during the 1st Polish New Wave Festival in Kołobrzeg in 1980, and finally, published the PUNK, Post, and Post Remont leaflets and fanzines.
Meanwhile, in 1978, Galleria Remont closed down and was replaced by Post Remont, a centre focused on education and cultural activism, open to new trends, styles, and genres, breaking with a typical profile of a gallery. Punky, experimental Post Remont was an act of defiance both aimed at the world of conceptual art, visibly exhausted in the late 1970s, and at the trivial and idle popular culture offered by entertainment industry. Post Remont hosted presentations of artists’ books, mail art, video art, happenings and performance art. Its activities were interrupted by the introduction of the martial law in December 1981.
Shortly afterwards, at the beginning of the following year Gajewski left for Amsterdam, where he continued his artistic activities. He presented his complicated life story in Identity, a 1985 film addressing the issues of origins, religion, language, and fatherland from the perspective of a Polish immigrant in Amsterdam. “I was born in Bialystok, Poland, the home-town of Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of the Esperanto language. (Esperanto was designed as an international language.) Since 1982, I have lived in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Here I communicate with people in English. My children, Eliza and Pierre, write to me in French and I answer them by recording my voice on an audio cassette (I cannot write in French). I was taught Russian for 11 years, as was every educated Polish citizen, but I cannot identify myself with that language. Slowly but surely I am forgetting my mother tongue and, at the same time, my English is too poor for me to adequately express myself. Say hello to Ludwig Wittgenstein, but tell him that besides language there is also FEELING.”
Gajewski continues his career as an artist and a filmmaker. His works were presented at i.a Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, MACBA in Barcelona, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, and Verzetsmuseum in Amsterdam. Apart from his artistic pursuits, Gajewski runs a tango dance school.
His activities in the 1970s and early 1980s were met with unappreciative and distrustful reactions of the authorities of Polish People's Republic. Gajewski’s wide contacts abroad raised suspicions, while artistic provocations and promotion of punk bands caused distrust. The world of art also displayed disapproval, repulsed with Gajewski’s legitimisation of loud-mouthed punk bands.
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Location:
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
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Location:
- Kraków, Poland
Galántai, György is an artist, researcher, cofounder of Artpool, art director of the Artpool Art Research Center and curator of Artpool’s website. From 1963 to 1967, he studied painting at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest. From 1970 to 1973, he was the initiator and organizer of semi-legal exhibitions, actions, and happenings in an unused chapel in Balatonboglár, which he had rented from the Catholic Church; his Chapel Studio was finally closed down by the police. Subsequently, Galántai’s artistic activities were restricted and tightly monitored.
In 1970, Galántai abandoned painting and began to experiment, primarily with graphic art, visual poetry, sound poetry, and performance and mail art. In 1975, he created his first metal sculptures. He has also made prints, paintings, kinetic and sound sculptures, actions, and performances. He is the author of several multimedia installations and communication projects.
His view of art bears close affinities with the spirit of Fluxus, defining the task of art as inventing conceptual objects, creative situations, and spiritual spaces. In spite of this, the idea behind the Artpool project is to create an active archive: the way in which it operates also generates the material to be archived. As an artist, Galántai was already involved in the mail art network when Artpool was founded, so the network offered a natural framework for this kind of operation and provided sources for growth. Artpool issued calls, organized events, released publications, and extensively documented the events of the local neo-avant-garde scene. The active archive concept can be seen as an open artwork in itself or an activist kind of art practice.
During the socialist era in Hungary, Galántai organized underground exhibitions, so he was considered a “dangerous element” by the authorities because he allegedly spread western propaganda. He was monitored by the III/III department of the State Security Services, who opened a dossier called “Festő” [Painter], which focused solely on his activity. In 1998, he made public the content of the dossier on the internet: http://www.galantai.hu/festo/default.html.
Galántai, György received a fellowship from the DAAD in 1988/89 and was guest artist at Arizona State University in 1990.
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Location:
- Budapest, Hungary
Ștefan Gane (b. 1924, Bucharest, d. 1988, Paris) was a Romanian architect who asserted himself in the Romanian exile in France from 1985 when he set up in Paris the International Association for the Protection of Monuments and Historic Sites in Romania. This association was established in order to present to political decision makers and international public opinion the project of the communist regime in Romania for the destruction of Romania’s architectural and urban heritage. The actions taken by this association focused on dissemination of information on the demolition of the city centre of Bucharest, as part of the project devised by the authorities of the totalitarian regime in order to reconstruct it according to the communist architectural vision. Ștefan Gane was joined by a series of personalities of the Romanian exile community who, together with him, wrote letters and memoirs to Western officials (for example, to the President of France, François Mitterrand), to international organisations such as UNESCO, and to the editorial offices of foreign publications. They also organised protests in the streets of Paris, the goal of which was to inform and mobilise public opinion in the West to such an extent as to trigger an external intervention to hamper the destruction project planned by the Ceaușescu regime.
Prior to his emigration to France, Ștefan Gane worked as an architect in his hometown. In Bucharest, he started to express his dissatisfaction with the communist regime in 1977 after the earthquake, which served as a pretext for the destruction or mutilation of many historic monuments. His dissatisfaction was related to the Bucharest systematisation programme of the Ceaușescu regime. Against this background, Ștefan Gane started to pursue a cultural opposition activity directed against the arbitrary policy of the Ceaușescu regime aimed at annihilating an essential part of the national past. In this connection, between 1977 and 1985, when he emigrated to France, he secretly photographed a series of historic monuments that were destroyed or mutilated by the Communist authorities. His purpose was to preserve the memory of some national heritage monuments and gather testimonies for future generations about the Ceaușescu regime's policy of transforming the urban landscape and destroying what did not fit the communist vision of national heritage. After settling in Paris, he publicly and openly expressed his views on the demolition project devised by the Ceaușescu regime. He died of cancer in Paris in 1988, and was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where a number of prominent personalities are buried.
His activity, however, was continued by a former colleague from the Faculty of Architecture in Bucharest, Sanda Budiș, who joined his actions from 1985 to 1988. On 10 May 1988, she founded the Association for the Protection of Villages, Monuments, and Historic Sites in Romania based in Switzerland. Among other activities, this association dealt with the establishment of partnerships between Swiss and Romanian villages, which were organised by Opération Villages Roumains (OVR). OVR was founded in December 1988, in Belgium, with the purpose of adopting and saving all 13,123 Romanian villages, which, according to Ceaușescu's announcement, should have disappeared from the map. The OVR action managed to take on a considerable scale in just a few months, with the creation of committees of this association in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Denmark. Basically, OVR followed an already existing model in postwar Western Europe, aiming at creating partnerships between localities with a similar economic and geographical profile in order to create local development opportunities through joint efforts as well as transnational solidarities. Although there had been partnerships with localities in Eastern Europe, OVR was without a correspondent in the Communist bloc, considering the magnitude and speed of its evolution.
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Location:
- Paris, France
Hristo Ganev (1924 - ) adopted the communist views at young age and became a member of the Labour Youth Union (LYU). During World War II he participated in the communist resistance movement and was the youngest partisan of the Chavdar Brigade. After the establishment of the new authorities, Hristo Ganev was among the young people who were sent to the Soviet Union for training in the field of cinema. In 1954 H. Ganev graduated in film dramaturgy from the All-Russian State University of Cinematography in Moscow. His graduation work as a script-writer was the biographical film about the life of Nikola Vaptsarov "Song of Man" (1954) (director Borislav Sharaliev). The movie was assigned, one of the first of the nationalized in 1948 cinematography. The aim was to create an epic and monumental idea about the poet – worker and communist. The film was screened though there were also negative reviews on the part of the censorial bodies: although the film was mainly made up to the standard of the aesthetics of the time, the script-writer and the director tried to present "the poet in more intimate and human light" (Станимирова 2012: 63).
The second half of the 1950s and the 1960s were a time when bright talents in every field of the culture were blooming; at the same time, the pressure of the authorities on the intellectuals was increasing. The movie "Life Flows Quietly By..." (1957) directed by Hristo Ganev's wife, Binka Zhelyazkova, was banned by a ministerial decree. The long story of the discussions of Hristo Ganev's script (initially called "Partisans" but later renamed "Life Flows Quietly By...") shows the mechanisms and institutions of censorship in socialist Bulgaria. The following joint films of the director Binka Zhelyazkova and the script-writer Hristo Ganev also posed inconvenient questions to the authorities about the moral crisis, the exchange of communist ideals for high party positions and everyday life comfort and criticized the search for enemy amidst your own ranks, the conformism, and the compromise.
In 1971, Hristo Ganev and the writers Blagoy Dimitrov, Valeri Petrov, Marko Ganchev and Gocho Gochev refused to uphold a telegram written by the Union of the Bulgarian Writers (UBW) stigmatizing the Nobel Committee for awarding the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Because of their clear stand, the four members of the Bulgarian Communist Party were expelled from the party and the non-party Blagoy Dimitrov was expelled from the Writers' Union. They were all banned for five years from working; that was a period during which Hristo Ganev earned his living by shooting advertising productions for the television. Yet Hristo Ganev remained true to his ideals; his joint films with Binka Zhelyazkova ("Life Flows Quietly By...", "We Were Young", "The Swimming Pool", "The Big Night Bathe", "On the Roofs at Night") are steeped in faith in the idea to which they had devoted their youth and in sorrow for the idea having become mercenary. In their movies, the two artists clashed views and moral values and exposed the moral degradation of the system and the use of power for personal benefit. Their films are distinguished for vanguard directorial decisions as well as for dramaturgical construction with strong dramatic characters, bright and memorable situations, impressing details.
Hristo Ganev has rendered great services to the development of the animation cinema as an ideological and graphic paradigm. In his animation scripts, Ganev treated the "theme of the moral crisis and the maze in the time of the socialist imperative of the "active positive character". Using the symbolic language of the conditional, non-linear, fragmentary and suggestive building of the plot, absolutely free of ideological matrices he was able to express his view on the meaning of life, on the decline and betrayal against the ideals." (Матеева 2014) The expressive vision was mainly achieved with the help of the director Anri Kulev.
During the entire period of state socialism, Hristo Ganev was notable for his work as well as for his civil stand in defence of the freedom of speech and art; he publicly supported banned works from various spheres of the culture; he declared against the repressive measures against the intellectuals by directly accusing the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party.
After the political changes, Hristo Ganev continued to treat in his animation scripts themes that interpreted existential problems of the modern man: freedom and compromise; the damages caused by the consumption force, egoism and complacency eroding the value system; love and loneliness. Even today, Hristo Ganev's films find public response and win great recognition.
After the political changes, Hristo Ganev received a series of (state) awards (Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Bulgarian Cinema and Culture of the Ministry of Culture, 2007; Stara Planina Order, 2010; honorary diploma and the St. Paisii Hilendarski Annual State Award, 2011; Ivan Vazov Medal of the Union of the Bulgarian Writers, 2014). One could not forget Hristo Ganev's speech when receiving the Paisii Hilendarski Award: "My long and variegated life during monarchy, socialism and democracy taught me to meet punishments and awards with slightly skeptical distance. I know that often they were both undeserved." (by Дончева 2014: 37)
Filmography
- Man's Song (1954), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Borislav Sharaliev
- Two Victories (1956), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Borislav Sharaliev, Veselin Hanchev
- Life Flows Quietly By.../ Partizans (1957), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- We Were Young (1961), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- Feast of Hope (1963) Documentary, directed by Hristo Ganev
- Devil in the Church (1969) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Ivan Veselinov
- The Little Man (1976) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, director Gencho Simeonov
- Hypothesis (1976) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, director Gencho Simeonov
- The Swimming Pool (1977), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- The Big Night Bathe (1980), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- Bagpipes (Gayda) (1982) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev and Nikolay Todorov
- Safari (1984) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- The Merry Rascal (1987) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- Beggarly Trio (1988) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev
- On the Roofs at Night (1988), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- The Tender Monster (1994) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- The Tenth Circle (1998) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anna Haralaptieva
- The Slim Man (2001) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- Poet and Pegasus (2003) Animation, Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- The Rag (2007) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- Love With Rain (2015) Cartoon, Hristo Ganev scriptwriter, directors: Asya Kovanova, Andrey Kulev-
Location:
- Sofia, Bulgaria
Virginijus Gasiliūnas is the head of the Manuscript Division of the Library of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. The Manuscript Division holds 90,000 document units (manuscripts and photographs). The manuscript collection has about 66,000 units, and is divided into 109 funds. Most of the manuscript collection is made up of the personal funds of Lithuanian national activists, writers and scholars. Gasiliūnas has been the head of the Manuscript Division since 2010. He is an expert on modern Lithuanian literature, and a co-founder and editor of the independent cultural-intellectual journal Sietynas (The Chandelier), established by a group of young Lithuanian activists in 1988.
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Location:
- Vilnius , Lithuania
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Location:
- Budapest, Hungary
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Location:
- Berlin, Germany
- Rostock, Germany
Geipel therefore had to start a new career outside of athletics. She studied German philology in Jena and moved more and more openly in oppositional circles. After fleeing the country via Hungary in the summer of 1989, she enrolled at the university of Darmstadt studying philosophy there. Since 2001, she has been professor for German poetic language at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. Geipel fights for the legal recognition of GDR doping victims. Since the 1990's, she has also been working as a publicist. Together with Joachim Walther she founded the "Archiv of Suppressed Literature in the GDR".
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Location:
- Berlin, Germany
Zina Genyk-Berezovska was a Czech literary scholar, linguist and translator, who was born in a village outside Prague in 1928 into a community of Ukrainian émigrés. She was an important figure in the Ukrainian community in Prague, and was also integrally involved in the sixtiers movement, underscoring its transnational character. Genyk-Berezovska communicated regularly with Ukrainian literary figures and human rights activists, often putting her own self at risk by transporting samizdat from Ukraine to Czechoslovakia.
In 1953, Genyk-Berezovska completed her studies at Charles University in Prague, where she had focused on Slavic and Germanic Philology. Her research specialized on Ukrainian and Czech literature and the links between them, which helps situate Ukrainian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries firmly in the European tradition. She also translated many works of Ukrainian baroque literature into Czech, including texts by Hryoriy Skovoroda, Ivan Kotliarevsky, Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and others. Often speaking on Czech radio, Genyk-Berezovska also regularly contributed to Ukrainian émigré journals “Duklja” and “Slavia” in Czechoslovakia, while also maintaining close ties to both the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv and the Slavic Department of Lviv University.
Genyk-Berezovska was close to Lesya Ukrainka’s sister O. Kosach-Shymanovska, and also had friends and colleagues among the sixtiers movement, including Yevhen Sverstiuk, Ivan Svitlychny, Mykhailyna Khomivna Kotsiubynska and others. She played a crucial role in getting their materials published abroad in émigré journals, which allowed knowledge of the struggles of Ukrainian dissidents and human rights activists to circulate in the west. This Czech-Ukrainian corridor provides a unique window into the translational and multi-generational dimensions of cultural opposition to socialism in Ukraine and in Ukrainian émigré communities. It was thus fitting that the archive of Zina Genyk-Berezovska and her husband Kostiantyn Genyk-Berezovsky was transferred to the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in full in 2003, where it rests alongside the archives of her friends and fellow activists Vasyl Stus and Mykhailyna Khomivna Kotsiubynska.
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Location:
- Kyiv City, Kiev, Ukraine 02000
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
Kostiantyn Genyk-Berezovsky was a Ukrainian philologist born near Ivano-Frankivsk in 1919. He went to study at Jagellonian University in Krakow in 1938, but shortly after the start of World War II moved to Prague, where he became a member of the anti-fascist movement. He was arrested in 1942 by the Gestapo and spent the remainder of the war in the concentration camp Flossenbürg. After World War II, he studied medicine (1946-1949) and philosophy (1949-1953) at Charles University in Prague, where he received his doctorate. From 1953-1979, he was a faculty member of the Slavic Department, where he taught Ukrainian. This institution became one of the major Ukrainian studies centres in Prague after World War II. He also taught Ukrainian language and literature at newly established Ukrainian schools in Prešov and Bardiyiv. Genyk-Berezovsky also wrote and edited Ukrainian textbooks for the community and also contributed to the Ukrainian-Czech and Czech-Ukrainian dictionaries.
The home of Kost and Zina Genyk-Berezovskykh became an unofficial center of Ukrainian life and community in Prague. It was a warm place where it was possible to look deep into the past, as observed by Mykhailyna Khomivna Kotsiubynska, who was responsible for bringing their personal archive to Kyiv in 2003. No one interested in Ukraine, or Ukrainian literature, who came through Prague missed an opportunity to visit their home and vast library and archive, which filled two rooms. People came to their home to connect, to discuss important matters of the day, to get help, and even to sing, as Kost’ knew many folk songs and loved to sing them. The home of the couple was a community centre in the truest sense, connecting two cultures and two worlds in one.
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Location:
- Flossenbürg, Germany 92696
- Kraków, Poland
- Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
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Location:
- Berlin, Germany
Nicolae Gheorghe was a Romanian sociologist and the most important activist for the rights of Roma people in Romania. He was born on 12 November 1946 in Roșiorii de Vede, Teleorman county in a mixed Roma family. His father was a Zlătar (“goldwasher”) and his mother belonged to a mixed family of Vătrași and Lăutari (settled Roma and musicians). Nicolae Gheorghe's parents tried to escape “the burden of ethnicity,” as his father worked as a driver and his mother made sure her son was clean and well-groomed and had no contacts with other Roma children. When Nicolae Gheorghe was nine years old, his family moved to Bucharest. In the Romanian capital, the Gheorghe family members left behind their Roma past to become a fully integrated into mainstream society. In particular, Nicolae Gheorghe made every effort to hide its ethnic origin and to suppress any remains of his Roma identity (Sandu 2012). He graduated from the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Bucharest and became a researcher at the Centre of Sociological Research in Bucharest. According to his testimony, he started reconsidering his ethnic identity as the Romanian regime moved towards a more nationalistic stance and by its policies started unofficially to emphasise the ethnic differences among its citizens (Rombase 2017). This influenced not only his behaviour but also his research agenda. One of his colleagues at the Centre of Sociological Research and an informer of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, recorded how the rediscovery of ethnicity influenced Nicolae Gheorghe’s behaviour: “a year or two, Gheorghe Nicolae did not openly state that he was a Gypsy or that he was interested in the Gypsy problems.” But since 1982 he “has let his moustache grow, he often speaks Gypsy on the phone, and sometimes says he is dissatisfied with the way the Gypsies are treated” by the Romanian authorities (ANCSAS I 234356, f. 98 v).
Nicolae Gheorghe’s entire research activity focused on Roma people in various Romanian counties. He became particularly interested in the community of Roma tent-dwellers in Sibiu County who managed both to preserve their traditions intact and to integrate into Romanian society. During his fieldwork, Nicolae Gheorghe met Ion Cioabă, the traditional leader or the bulibașa of Roma people in Sibiu. From Ion Cioabă and his family, he learned the Romani language, he learned about Roma culture and the pride of being a Roma and living according to Roma traditions. Also, due to their close relations, Ion Cioabă offered Nicolae Gheorghe financial and moral support for his research in the Roma communities in the country in the early 1980s (ACNSAS, I 234356, ff. 40–41 f–v, 42, 46–47 f–v, 48, 98 f–v).
The results of Nicolae Gheorghe’s research revealed that Roma people lagged behind Romanians and other minorities from a social, cultural, economic, and even political point of view. That was because their collective access to “the resources of socialist development and modernisation (education, training, positions in organisations, housing, social participation)” was unequal in comparison to other ethnic groups. Apart from increasing the opportunities of Roma people to get access to education, professional training, and programmes for social integration, Nicolae Gheorghe pleaded for their official recognition as a “co-inhabiting nationality,” the term used by the communist regime to label the national minorities in Romania. This was meant not only to raise the awareness of the authorities about the disadvantaged situation of the Roma people and to force them act accordingly, but also to ensure their recognition as a distinct ethic group whose cultural specificity, including the use of the Romani language in education and printed culture, and political representation should have been protected. In short, the Romanian sociologist insisted that the best solution to solving the difficult situation in which Roma people found themselves was their integration as a distinct minority group in Romanian society (ACNSAS D 144 vol. 15, ff. 67–73).
Nicolae Gheorghe devised a strategy that would bring sufficient arguments for the recognition of Roma people as a “co-inhabiting nationality.” In various contexts, including his contacts with foreign researchers, he repeatedly mentioned that there were more Roma than population censuses recorded, and he used his fieldwork to support this statement. Apart from the numeric argument, Gheorghe also strove to demonstrate that Rome people had their own culture and that they preserved their ethnic identity through language, traditions, and customs. And finally, he authored alone or together with Ion Cioabă documents that were sent to the Romanian authorities and in which he described the difficulties facing Roma people and the possible means of solving their problems (Marin 2017, 44–47).
Nicolae Gheorghe’s endeavours conflicted with the Romanian authorities’ point of view on solving the “Roma question.” The census of 1977 revealed an increase of over 80% in the number of Roma in comparison to the previous count of the population in 1966. The growth triggered several studies about the living conditions of Roma people. The results confirmed that “Roma question” was foremost a “social problem” as extreme poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and poor health and hygiene were still part of the Roma’s everyday life. The studies also identified the main cause of the Roma’s difficult situation in their preservation of their traditional nomadic and seminomadic way of life (Marin 2017, 25–29, 38). Thus, instead of granting them the status of a “co-inhabiting nationality” and admitting the possibility of their integration into Romanian society, the authorities decided that the best way to solve the problems of Roma people was the levelling of their ethnic and cultural particularities through forced assimilation.
The plans for forced assimilation and the increased discrimination that Roma people were subjected to by the Romanian authorities, especially by the communist Militia, were denounced by Nicolae Gheorghe in an article published in Le Matin on 30 March 1982 (ACNSAS, I 234356, ff. 230 f–v, 231). The article, written under the pseudonym “Danciu Alexandru,” was read during one of the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe. It was a reply to a piece written by the French journalist Bernard Poulet, who had told the readers of Le Matin how was attacked and badly beaten when he tried to contact the Romanian dissident Vasile Paraschiv. The official explanation that Poulet got from the authorities was that he had been attacked by a group of “Gypsies.” Nicolae Gheorghe rebuked the conclusion of the investigation by showing that Roma people were usually blamed for everything that went wrong in Romania, and denounced the violence used against them by the Militia and the refusal of the Romanian authorities to grant them the status of a “co-inhabiting nationality” (ACNSAS, D 144, vol. 15, ff. 315–317 f–v, 318). Suspecting that Nicolae Gheorghe was the author of the article read at Radio Free Europe, the Romanian secret police intensified their informative surveillance of him. At that time the Securitate had already opened an informative surveillance file (dosar de urmărire informativă) against his name due to his frequent contacts with foreign academics and his “Gypsy nationalism,” as the secret police had labelled his interventions in favour of Roma people’s rights.
The set of measures designed by the Securitate to neutralise the allegedly negative consequences of Gheorghe’s “Gypsy nationalism” resulted in three main directions of actions. First, the Romanian authorities did not grant him an exit visa for his journeys abroad in 1983, not even for a Fulbright Scholarship, on the ground that his research topic could raise some “problems that can be speculated abroad about so-called racial discrimination.” Moreover, his connections with foreign researchers were cut off as the Securitate intercepted and confiscated the correspondence between them (ACNSAS, I 234356, ff. 148–150, 174–175 f–v). Second, taking advantage of a personal conflict between Ion Cioabă and Nicolae Gheorghe, the Securitate managed to break up the collaboration between the two and thus, undermine any further common actions in favour of the recognition of the Roma as a “co-inhabiting nationality” (ACNSAS, I 234356, ff. 255 v, 257 f–v, 172057 vol. 2, f. 30 f; D 8685, ff. 119 f–v–120). Lastly, the secret police resorted to one of its preventive measures, so-called “positive influencing measures” (măsuri de influențare pozitivă). These measures generally used the network of informers, family members, and educational agents to protect the person in question from allegedly negative influences that might lead to his or her taking part in “anti-social and potentially harmful actions” (Burlacu 2009, 64). Consequently, the secret police used two persons close to Nicolae Gheorghe, namely his line manager at the Centre of Sociological Research and also his godfather. The first deterred Gheorghe’s attention from the “Roma question” by involving him in other research projects that gradually monopolised a significant part of his working time (ACNSAS, I 234356, ff. 263, 273–274 f-v). His godfather, identified under the pseudonym “Ionescu Vasile,” constantly showed him that his obsession with the study of Roma issues had led (“through repeated absences from home and lack of interest in problems of practical life”) to the dissolution of the family and represented a step back in his career as a sociologist. Moreover, he also tried to demonstrate the futility of Gheorghe’s support for the integration of Roma people into Romanian society by showing that their assimilation was the only possible means for their transformation into “normal citizens, useful to society” (ACNSAS I 234356, ff. 262, 275 f–v). The cumulative result of his isolation from Ion Cioabă, the breakup of his marriage, and the “positive influencing measures” taken by the Securitate was that Nicolae Gheorghe abandoned his studies regarding Roma people and his actions in favour of their recognition as a “co-inhabiting nationality.” Consequently, in April 1989 the secret police decided to close their informative surveillance of him and even considered recruiting him as an informer (ACNSAS, I 234356, ff. 320 f–v, 321).
After the fall of the communist regime, Nicolae Gheorghe rebuilt from scratch the civic movement for the rights of Roma people in Romania. In 1993, he founded The Roma Centre for Social Intervention and Studies (Romani Criss), which in the following years would become one of the most important nongovernmental organisations for the defence of Roma rights in Romania and indeed in Europe. He also made an important contribution to the creation of the first political organisation of Roma people in Romania and in uniting the many Roma organisations for the purpose of creating a national strategy for dealing with the problems of this minority (Rădulescu 2013). Nicolae Gheorghe also distinguished himself as an internationally known Roma activist. He was one of the vice-presidents of the International Roma Union between 1991 and 1993. In collaboration with the International Federation on Human Rights, he authored a document about Human Rights Protection of the Roma, which was accepted into Resolution 65/1993 by the UN Commission on Human Rights. As an NGO representative, Nicolae Gheorghe acted as an official observer at the meetings of the European Council’s group of specialists on issues affecting the Roma and also the Sinti. From 1999 he was advisor for Roma and Sinti issues at the Contact Point for Roma and Sinti Issues created by the OSCE at the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw. He received human rights awards from the French state in 1992 and five years later from the European Union (Rombase 2017; V. Ionescu 2013).
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Location:
- Bucharest, Romania
Ghimpu, Gheorghe (b. 26 July 1937, Colonița village, now Chișinău; d. 13 November 2000, Chișinău) was an outstanding member of the National Patriotic Front and the main ideologue of the movement. He produced or co-wrote most of the group’s programmatic documents. He studied at the Tiraspol Pedagogical Institute, graduating in 1960 from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. Subsequently, he worked as a schoolteacher in Strășeni district and as a university instructor in Tiraspol and Chișinău. He also worked as a minor official within the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). At least from the mid-1960s, he began to openly display his oppositional and nationalist views, which earned him several reprimands and ultimately cost him his job in the Komsomol. In 1970 he was admitted to the doctoral programme of the Institute for Biological Phisycs of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. However, he was expelled for ideological reasons in November 1971. Under the impact of the Prague Spring and the subsequent events in Eastern Europe, he founded the National Patriotic Front together with Alexandru Usatiuc. He later insisted on the spurious claim that this organisation had existed in the MSSR since the late 1940s and that it was merely “revived” in the late 1960s. He was arrested in January 1972 and sentenced to six years in a high-security labour correction colony. After his return to Chisinau, he was barred from engaging in any public activity and from teaching. He resumed his involvement in politics after 1989, being one of the founders of the Moldovan Popular Front. He was a member of Moldova’s first democratically elected Parliament between 1990 and 1994. In a highly charged symbolic gesture, he was allowed to install the Romanian flag (tricolour) on the Parliament building on 27 April 1990, thus consecrating the first act of symbolic rupture with the Soviet past. He remained actively involved in politics until his death in November 2000 as a result of injuries suffered in a car accident. He was the only member of the group who became a practising politician after 1989.
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Location:
- Chișinău, Moldova
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Location:
- United States
Gjuzel’s father, Dimitar Gyuzelov, was a Bulgarian revolutionary and member of the pro-Bulgarian Macedonian Youth Secret Revolutionary Organization (MYSRO), which was active throughout most of Macedonia over 1922–41, conducting guerrilla attacks on Serbian administrative and army officials. Bogomil’s father was imprisoned and after release was banished from Macedonia. The Gjuzel family lived in Čačak, Serbia, where Bogomil Gjuzel was born in 1939. During the Second World War, parts of Macedonia were occupied by the Bulgarian army, which allowed the Gjuzel family to return to Macedonia in 1941, where Bogomil’s father became the director of Radio Skopje. After the withdrawal of the Bulgarian troops from Macedonia in 1944, Bogomil’s father was killed by Macedonian Communists for being a “traitor to the nation”.
Because of his involvement into the opposition activities, he was arrested in March 1985 and imprisoned. In September 1985 he was released. In 1987 Zbigniew Gluza initiated the Eastern Archive.
After 1989 he was a president of two legal entities – the Eastern Archive Foundation and the Karta Foundation, merged into the KARTA Centre Foundation in 1996. Since 1990 has also been the editor-in-chief of the "Karta" quarterly. He invented biographical dictionaries of former dissidents and opposition activists. He was also one of the key persons during the opening of the History Meeting House in Warsaw in 2006. Zbigniew Gluza is also the creator of many exhibitions.
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Location:
- Warszawa, Warsaw, Poland
Leszek Gnoiński (born 1966) is a music journalist, screenwriter, and a director. He is also an author and co-author of numerous books and documentaries on Polish rock music. Gnoiński is the co-author of the narrative of the permanent exhibition at the Polish Rock Granary. He lives in Cracow.
Gnoiński was born in Warsaw. In the 1990s he worked in Super Express daily, where he wrote the column on rock music. He was also a collaborator of Tylko Rock (Rock Only) and Machina magazines. In 2000s he became the vice editor-in-chief of Muza magazine and the editor-in-chief of the cgm.pl webportal. He also worked for Discovery Historia TVN channel, and wrote for Dziennik and Dziennik Polski, as well as for t-mobile-music.pl. He edited over a hundred albums of 1980s and 1990s Polish rock bands, including 30 albums for the series titled Polish Music Stars of the 1980s (Gwiazdy polskiej muzyki lat 80.) added to the Dziennik daily. He hosted radio shows in Warsaw Radio 94 and Cracow Ex FM. He serves as a member of the ZPAV (Polish Society of the Phonographic Industry) Phonographic Academy, and used to be a juror of the rock festival in Jarocin and the festival of Polish videoclips Yach Film.
Gnoiński’s most important books include Raport o Acid Drinkers (1996), Encyklopedia polskiego rocka (1996) – jointly with Jan Skaradziński, and the best-selling Kult Kazika (2000), Myslovitz. Życie to surfing (2009). Together with Wojciech Słota he created the film Chasing the Acids – w pogoni za Acid Drinkers (2006), the Historia polskiego rocka TV series (2008), Beats of Freedom – Zew wolności (2009) and Nieważne jak wysoko jesteśmy (2011), as well as series of documentaries on Jarocin produced especially for the Polish Rock Granary (2013). In 2016, together with Marek Gajczak, he shot a documentary titled Jarocin, po co wolność, and on his own film Fugazi. Centrum wszechświata dedicated to the famous transformation-era Warsaw club.
Gnoiński’s attitude was shaped by the nonconformist message of the early 1980s rock music. He is attached to the idea of rock being a vehicle for dissent against the state and social system. Nevertheless, the peak of his professional activities took place in the 1990s and 2000s, when rock suffered from commercialisation, becoming one of many options available in the music market.
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Location:
- Kraków, Poland