COURAGE

connecting collections

Juhan Aare (born in 1948) is an Estonian journalist and politician. He is best known as the host of the television programme ‘Panda’ on Estonian Television, which looked at environmental problems in Estonia and abroad. In the edition of the programme that was aired on 25 February 1987, he disclosed secret plans to open phosphorite mines in northern Estonia, which could have caused serious environmental problems. His appeal to the people of Estonia to write letters expressing their thoughts about these plans was effective, and unleashed a large wave of protest in Estonia in the spring of 1987, which is now known as the Phosphorite War. At the same time, he started to collect letters sent to him, and other material connected with the television programme ‘Panda’ and the Phosphorite War in general. In the 1990s he began to supplement the collection with raw material for his book about the Phosphorite War. The book Fosforiidisõda 1971-1989 (the Phosphorite War 1971-1989) was published in 1999. Juhan Aare presented his collection to the Estonian History Museum when the museum was preparing the exhibition ‘EI FOSFORIIDILE! 20 aastat fosforiidisõjast’ (No to Phosphorite! 20 Years since the Phosphorite War). He was also an advisor to the exhibition.

Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1970 and continued post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, which she completed in 1972. Between 1970 and 1973, she took part in the shows and activities based at the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade with the Group of Six Artists. From the beginning of her career in the early 1970s, she was interested in performance as a form of visual art, using the body as a subject and medium. In her performances, she explored spiritual and physical endurance. She left Yugoslavia in the mid-1970s and moved to Amsterdam where she worked on performances together with her professional and personal partner, Ulay. They worked together for thirteen years. In their joint performances, they explored the parameters of power and subordination between themselves as artists and the public. After 1988, Abramović began to work and exhibit on her own. Today, Marina Abramović is an acclaimed performance artist internationally and has shown her work in leading museums worldwide. Since leaving Yugoslavia she has never returned, and today lives in New York.

The writer David Albahari was born in 1948 in Peja (Kosovo).

He studied English literature and language at the University of Belgrade. His first published book was a collection of short stories in 1973. Among various prizes for his work, the most important are the Ivo Andrić Award for the novel Opis smrti [Description of Death] in 1982 and NIN Award for the novel Mamac [Bait] in 1997. In between 1973 and 1994, Albahari worked in editorial board of many Belgrade and Novi Sad based magazines and publishing houses, such as Književna reč, Pismo, Kulture Istoka, Politika, Mezuza, Prva knjiga Matice srpske, among which the most important in the context of cultural opposition was the magazine Vidici.
Polja was among the first magazines to publish his stories. Albahari reflected on this on the fiftieth anniversary of the magazine, stating how much did this support mean to him. (Polja 435, September/October 2005).

His work has been translated into 14 languages. Albahari was translated among others by Nabokov, Updike and Shepard. Although he moved to Canada in 1994 with his family, Albahari does not consider himself a writer in exile and spends time in Serbia too.

In 1937, Vaclovas Aliulis (1921-2015) joined the Marian Order. He completed his studies at the Marian Catholic Gymnasium (an independent religious secondary school) in 1940, and at the Kaunas Seminary in 1945. Aliulis became a Catholic priest in 1944.

Aliulis served as a Catholic priest in various Catholic parishes in Lithuania: in Varėna and Marijampolė (1945 to 1948), and from 1948 in a number of parishes in the Vilnius diocese. At the same time, he was secretary (1965-1979) and chair (1980-1990) of the Liturgical and Church Music Commission of the Lithuanian Conference of Bishops. In 1970-1974, Aliulis was vice-rector of the Kaunas Seminary. In 1974, he was dismissed from the position at the demand of the Soviet government. From 1979, Aliulis lectured on theology and the catechism on underground courses for nuns. He participated actively in underground catechisation, and was a lecturer in the Underground Catholic Seminary, which was established to train priests for Catholic churches in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and other Soviet republics. Twenty priests were prepared in the seminary to serve in Catholic parishes. Knowing that during Soviet times the official training of priests in the Kaunas Seminary suffered from frequent intervention by the government, the activity of the Underground Catholic Seminary was important to the church and the community of believers. 

During the times of Sąjūdis (the Lithuanian national movement, 1988-1990), Aliulis was an organiser of the Catholic press. In 1989, he founded the journal ‘The Catholic World’, and was its editor-in-chief. In 1988-1991, he was a member of the Sąjūdis Council. In 1993-1996, he was the superior of the Marian monastery in Rome, and since 1999 the superior of the Marian monastery in Vilnius.

Painter. After early drawing studies he learned pharmacology, then painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest. He moved to Szigliget in 1965 and beside artistic activities, he farmed there as well. He was brave to use the limitless possibilities of contemporary art, in a sovereign way. He borrowed the extreme handling of materials from surnaturalism, and the open use of forms and content from Pop Art. He painted with pastel and oil, utilized collage and assemblage as well. As a member of the circle around Miklós Erdély, he participated also in art performances. He developed his own private mythology, “gagaism.”

Hanna Anderman came to Warsaw from a small town at the beginning of the 1960s to study in a ballet school. After a serious accident that ended her ballet career, she started to take pictures – following family tradition as her father and brother were professional photographers as well.
She was a photographer and journalist published in magazines such as "itd", "Przyjaciółka" ("Friend" - women's magazine), "Na przełaj" (youth magazine) and others. She also photographed scenes and situations that could not be included in official publications and remained only in her private archive. Her professional career was similar to many others of artists and creators in the socialist times – she balanced the public activities as photographer and journalist with her own political views and survival strategies. She was neither openly opposed to the regime nor apologetically supporting it, which was an often case for Polish citizens.
She used her alias while publishing her works as an artistic and professional pseudonym, which was also common for people regularly publishing in the official press.
In 2008 she decided to create the Association of Documentalists "The Road" in order to promote and display activities of her generation of Polish photographers.

Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis (b.1951) is Lithuania's European commissioner, and a co-signatory to the 1990 Act of the Reestablishment of the State of Lithuania. Andriukaitis' family were deported to Siberia in June 1941. He came to Lithuania only in 1958. After excelling at school, he enrolled at Kaunas Medical Institute, graduating in 1975. He later continued his studies in history at Vilnius University, graduating in 1984.
In 1990, Andriukaitis was elected to the Supreme Council of the Republic of Lithuania (today the Seimas, or Lithuanian parliament), and was a member of parliament for six terms, from 1992 to 2004 and 2008 to 2012, and deputy chairman of its Council from 2001 to 2004. He was health minister of the Republic of Lithuania from December 2012, until he was appointed EU commissioner in November 2014.
Andriukaitis joined the anti-Soviet movement very early on, during his studies at Kaunas Medical Institute. But he publicly expressed his first disagreements with Soviet ideology at secondary school, after the Soviet invasion of Prague in the spring of 1968. Because of his attitude, Andriukaitis was invited for a talk with a KGB officer, where he again expressed his view of the Soviet reality. During his studies at the institute, his non-Soviet activities became more organised and structured. In 1972, he founded an ethnographic folk group in Rumšiškės, which cultivated and propagated the Lithuanian national heritage. Holding meetings for enthusiasts of Lithuanian songs and dancing who tried to break out from the ‘people’s culture of Soviet Lithuania’ made Andriukaitis familiar with many members of the cultural opposition. He used these networks for initiating the underground Strazdelis University, which was founded in January 1976. Andriukaitis was arrested for the first time in September of 1976. After a KGB investigation, he was sent to Ignalina, in a country district of Lithuania. While he was kept there under house arrest and under strict surveillance, with obligatory permanent registration with the KGB, Andriukaitis from time to time managed to escape for meetings of the university. 
According to Andriukaitis, there was a dynamic in Soviet policy in controlling society. Understanding the regime's changes is helpful in making a definition of what was/is cultural opposition. Compared to the time of Stalin's rule, when repressions were at their highest level, during the Khrushchev period there were more possibilities for informal non-Soviet networks to operate. The later Brezhnev period was a return to greater persecution of informal society. Andriukaitis argues that we should consider these political circumstances when identifying what was and what was not cultural opposition: the same actions could be allowed in the Khrushchev period, but persecuted during the Brezhnev period. He sees clear connections between the dissident movement, its groups, and cultural opposition networks. Dissident and underground organisations took a joint stand in cultural resistance to Soviet rule. The networks among the intelligentsia that operated without being strongly conspiratorial were related to the dissident movement, and there was collaboration between the two kinds of networks. The underground Strazdelis University was a dissident organisation.

Ethnographer and politician Bertalan Andrásfalvy was born in 1931 in Sopron. His father was Károly Andrásfalvy, a public administrator in the city of Cluj (or Kolozsvár by its Hungarian name); his mother was Judit Mezey. She was a goldsmith.

Milena Angelova, as a student of history at Neofit Rilski South-West University in the first half of the 1990s, participated actively in field expeditions gathering materials for micro-historical studies. Her doctoral dissertation, dedicated to the Model village program (2004), sets out the main thematic areas in which she develops her research interests - modernization projects, history of social work, social diseases, public health and welfare.

M. Angelova’s has conducted significant research in the field of memory politics, attempts of the communist party to control memory during the totalitarian regime.

With a sense of historical detail and sensitivity to the voices of those ignored by the official historiography groups, M. Angelova actively participates in the diverse activities of the Bulgarian Society for Autobiography and Social Communication (BSASC),  enriches the archive collection, and participates in a number of regional, national and international projects (Digital Archives - Science and Information Complex, Shared Memory Places - Digital Map of Monuments - projects of the Science Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science, To Come Out of the Shadow Supporting the Social Integration of People Threatened with Marginalisation Caused by Their Nationality (2011-2013, Grundtvig Program); Politics of Memory Cultures of the Russian-Ottoman War 1877-1878: From Divergence to Dialogue 7th Marie Curie Framework Program (2012-2016, FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Marie Curie Action International Research Staff Exchange Scheme), Knowledge Exchange and Academic Cultures in Humanities: Europe and the Black Sea Region, late 18th - 21st Centuries (2017-2020, Horizon2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Rise) among others.
As a member of the Multimedia Center for Computer Archives, Digital Archives and History of Local Governance and the International University Seminar for Balkan Studies and Specializations, she contributes to their establishment as scientific and educational dialogue centers that, through numerous exhibitions, lectures and meetings, teach history and deepenen the public debate on the recent past.

Arvydas Anušauskas is a Lithuanian historian and politician, and a member of the Tėvynės Sąjunga - Lietuvos krikščionys demokratai (Homeland Union - Lithuanian Christian Democrat) party. He has been a member of the parliament of Lithuania (Seimas) since 2008. When the Tėvynės Sąjunga was the ruling party (2008-2012), Anušauskas served in the influential position of chairman of the State Security and Defence Committee. Until becoming a member of parliament, he worked at the LGGRTC as director of the Research Department. Since entering the parliament, he has supported many initiatives by the centre regarding the policy of lustration, publishing KGB documents. As well as being active in politics, Anušauskas works in historical research and publishing books on Soviet repressions and KGB activities. His most recent book is KGB. Visiškai slaptai (KGB. Top Secret, Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2015), which describes the activities of the Soviet state security apparatus in Soviet Lithuania.

Andrej Aplenc was born in Ljubljana on September 2, 1930. He is from an old family of Slovenian Liberals. His father was a gymnasium professor, and his mother a teacher. He had two brothers. Both his father and mother were sympathizers of the Partisan movement but did not participate in it. Aplenc was twice detained in the prison camp on the island of Goli. The first time was during his secondary school days and the second time during college. He was a member of the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (LCYY/SKOJ) and participated in the youth brigades, where he was also a troop commander. In 1947 or 1948, he was excluded from the LCYY because of his more open approach to the organization’s functioning (as troop commander he allowed the organization of a dance). He continued to advocate for greater freedom of young people among students in the school, which resulted in his first detention on Goli in 1949. He spent a year on the island and was then released. A year and a half after his release, he was summoned for interrogation by the UDSA/UDBA (State Security Administration) to assess his attitude toward everything he had experienced on Goliand his relationship with other inmates from Ljubljana, who were then released. After refusing to provide the information requested, he was sent to Goli for the second time and spent the next two years there.

After returning from Goli, he had problems reintegrating into society and was initially prohibited from studying. He began to engage in mountaineering, and in his own words – found spiritual balance and peace in that way. Later, he returned to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (Fakulteta za strojništvo), where he graduated. He was offered an assistant’s position at the Faculty provided that he join the Party, which Aplenc refused and then went to Switzerland (he had travel documents). There he married an American of Slovenian descent and went to America with her. He earned a masters degree in mechanical engineering there. He came back to Slovenia in the 1990s. He was rehabilitated by the court and was paid compensation for being detained on Goli. He is the author of the monograph Prodaja Slovenije (The Selling of Slovenia, Mladinska knjiga, 1997), and an associate of the weekly journal Democracy.