The Scriptum.cz web archive provides access to various non-commercial and online Czech exile and samizdat periodicals. This is a unique collection of works that are often not accessible anywhere and are constantly being refilled.

According to documents in the Reformed Congregation of Cluj–Dâmbul Rotund's Collection, on 13 March 1971 the West German foundation Gustav-Adolf-Werk offered a donation of 50,000 deutschmarks as ecumenical help for church construction (KKREL 1971/7, Report no. 28). This turned out to be of major importance in the process of constructing the church building. The fact that the state could benefit from foreign currency on the construction site counted as a very strong argument and played a huge role in the history of the reluctantly issued building permit. Between 1971 and 1976 there existed mostly only correspondence between the foundation and the pastor of Dâmbul Rotund, János Dobri on the question of when they would take over this sum of money, with the parish having to answer that they had not yet obtained approval for it. In the communist regime, any donation in money or of a different nature coming from abroad could be accepted and taken over only with "religious affairs departmental" permission from Bucharest. Regulation no. 16455/1971 of the Department of Religious Affairs (Departamentul Cultelor), referring to Decree-Law No. 334/1971 paragraph 5 point “r”, stated that gifts and bequests given or accepted by clerical organisations could be made only with the approval of the Department of Religious Affairs. Furthermore, any inventory objects, with or without historical or artistic value, books, manuscripts, musical instruments, money, material, or producs, regardless of their value could only be donated or accepted with the prior approval of the Department of Religious Affairs (KKREL 1971/7, Rescript no. 1420). Eventually, in addition to approving the construction of the church building, the Department granted permission for the use of the donation. According to the knowledge of Reformed pastor András Dobri and cantor Anna Jankó, only the first half of the amount was transferred officially to the Romanian National Bank, while the other half was transmitted through other "gates." In those times foreign exchange was not permitted for Romanian citizens living in the country. Only foreigners could change foreign currency and thus deliver the donated money. As the exchange rate was very unfavourable, those concerned decided to change the foreign currency with the willing help of Polish tourists. The greater amount obtained this way could be used properly during the construction. Because of the large amount involved, almost all members of the presbytery, which was then made up of about twenty-eight members took a part of it, which they then offered as donations in their own names for the church construction. In fact, based on oral history interviews, the possibility is not to be excluded that the second part of the West German donation was transferred officially in a similar way to the first, while the church members were used to collect other foreign cash donations, as the Gustav-Adolf-Werk donation was not enough on its own to pay for the construction (statement of Anna Jankó; statement of András Dobri).

The Securitate materials on János Dobri also give information about the donation. Based on the documents contained in the informative file, on 5 March 1971 Reformed Bishop Gyula Nagy was informed in a letter from the West German donor – through Pastor-Secretary General Dieter Knall – that the sum of money destined for the church construction in Dâmbul Rotund had been prepared, and he was asked to accept the donation in the name of the Reformed Church District of Cluj. A positive response was preceded by the consent of the Department of Religious Affairs in Bucharest (ACNSAS, 211500/4, 147). Since August 1972 the counter-intelligence in Cluj led by Colonel Sándor Peres had dealt specially with the case. When the Securitate learned that a considerable sum had been allocated by the Gustav-Adolf-Werk foundation for church construction, Peres had stated that in order to receive the money, the Church officials would have to talk with the county religious affairs inspector, "studying the possible modes of coordination." This statement is significant especially in the light of a later declaration of the county religious affairs inspector Hoinărescu Țepeș Horia, according to which no Hungarian churches or chapels were to be built in Cluj as long as he held that position in the city. (ACNSAS, I211500/5, 152–153). The later actions involved in the church construction prove the success of the "coordination," bearing in mind the interests of the single-party state.

Some of the photographs taken by Lucian Ionică are snapshots of moments of high drama. Among them, those “hard to look at” images from the Paupers’ Cemetery, with the bodies of those killed by the repressive forces of the communist regime, hastily buried by the representatives of those forces, and then disinterred in order to be laid to rest in a fitting manner. There are also in the collection some photographs with portraits of children wounded during the Revolution of December 1989 in Timişoara. They were taken in the Timişoara Children’s Hospital on 24 December. The photographs show the wounded children in bed; the three snapshots include portraits of two boys and a girl. “For a few years after I took those photos I tried to trace the children I had photographed. I couldn’t find them, although I tried repeatedly. In the confusion and the strong emotions of the events back then, I didn’t have the inspiration to make a note of their names. Today I don’t know what has become of them, what they are doing,” says Lucian Ionică, confessing his regret at being unable to follow the story of those whose drama he immortalized in December 1989. “In the Timişoara Revolution, there were a lot of teenagers in the street. However the repressive forces had no compunction about firing at them. They were victims of the Army in the first place. Opening fire on minors is impossible to accept. Of course it is not justified against adults either, but the brutal actions of the soldiers against the children show how faithful those in the forces of repression were to Nicolae Ceauşescu,” is the comment of Gino Rado, the vice-president of the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara, summing up the tragic consequences of the involvement of forces loyal to the communist regime in the repression of the demonstrators, including minors (Szabo and Rado 2016). According to research carried out at the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara, as well as other official statistics  documenting the scale of the repression in the city in December 1989, at least six children or adolescents under the age of 18 were killed in this symbolic city of the Romanian Revolution. The youngest hero-martyr was Cristina Lungu; when she was fatally shot in December 1989, she was only two years old.

This collection comprises various documents (including trial records) relating to the activities of Alexandru Șoltoianu, a well-known oppositional figure in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) in the late 1960s and 1970s. Closely linked to the Usatiuc–Ghimpu–Graur group, Șoltoianu pursued a parallel project of creating a mass nationally oriented anti-Soviet political party known as National Rebirth of Moldavia (Renașterea Națională a Moldovei), to be based upon a broad network of student associations. Șoltoianu’s case files are currently held in the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova (ANRM). These materials were transferred to the ANRM from the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). 

Almost two years after his condemnation, in the spring of 1955, Zgherea filed a petition addressed to the General Prosecutor of the Moldavian SSR, requesting the revision of his sentence. In this petition, Zgherea again admitted his guilt, but emphasised that his conversion to Inochentism was mainly caused by the influence of his parents. He claimed that, due to his young age and to the unsatisfactory level of his education, he did not fully understand the implications of his actions at the time. He also declared that, during his detention in the labour camp, he “fully realised the mistaken nature of his views” and therefore was ready to “cut all his ties to the sect of the Inochentists.” This remarkable example of repentance and apparently successful “re-education” should not be taken at face value, especially given the fact that during the trial Zgherea refused to abjure and renounce his faith. However, in the post-Stalinist Soviet context, this proved an effective strategy for alleviating his plight and for receiving a reduction of the sentence and, ultimately, a full amnesty. In his review of Zgherea’s case, one of the employees of the MSSR’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, Major Rogachev, noted the defendant’s partial admission of guilt and his apparent repentance as alleviating circumstances. In the Resolution he sent to the General Prosecutor of the MSSR, A. Kazanir, on 28 April 1955, Rogachev concluded that, although Zgherea’s “guilt” was not in doubt, the punishment was “too severe and did not correspond to the seriousness of his actions.” Therefore, Rogachev recommended that the prosecutor’s office file a formal protest to the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the MSSR in order to request a revision of Zgherea’s case, which the prosecutor did in due course. As a result of this protest, after reviewing the case, on 9 June 1955 the Supreme Court issued a special decision which reduced Zgherea’s sentence to five years of hard labour and a further three-year suspension of civil rights. The main argument of the court was that Zgherea “did not have a leading position within the sect.” This motivation points to a shift in the authorities’ perception of the social danger of the Inochentists and similar religious movements and to a more differentiated approach to the individual guilt of their members. Moreover, Zgherea was amnestied according to the provisions of the Decree of 27 March 1953, which ended the main wave of Stalinist repressions and secured a legal basis for the gradual release of political prisoners. He was to be released from the labour camp as soon as possible, while his penal conviction was dropped. This case certainly did not illustrate an entirely new attitude of the regime toward religious dissent, which continued to be viewed with suspicion and repressed. However, there was a marked shift in the authorities’ repressive strategies, which became subtler and more differentiated. The case of Gheorghe Zgherea is thus a fascinating example of essential ideological continuity uneasily combined with changing methods of addressing and dealing with dissent and opposition in the religious sphere.   

This unique collection of samizdat literature (1972-1989) contains samizdat books by Czech and Slovak authors whose works could not officially be published in socialist Czechoslovakia, as well as a collection of samizdat periodicals and individual texts.

The bequest of Rusko Matulić, an American engineer and writer of Yugoslav origin, is held in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The collection largely encompasses Matulić's activities as a political émigré in the United States of America, when he mainly dealt with the publication of the bi-monthly bulletin of the Committee Aid to Democratic Dissidents in Yugoslavia (CADDY). The bulletin and organization acted as a part of the Democratic International, established in New York in 1979. Mihajlo Mihajlov, one of the most prominent Yugoslav dissidents, was a member and the main initiator of launching the CADDY organization and its bulletin. Rusko Matulić was Mihajlov's main collaborator in the overall CADDY project.

The Pavao Tijan Collection is deposited in the Archives of the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts in Zagreb. It demonstrates the cultural-oppositional activities of the Croatian émigré Pavao Tijan, who lived in Madrid after the Second World War. There, Tijan organized anti-communist activities against the Yugoslav regime and also against global communism during the time of the Cold War. This collection is very important to the little known Croatian cultural history of the émigré colony of Spain.

The Jan Zahradníček Collection at the Museum of Czech Literature is an important resource documenting the literary and Catholic opposition to the communist regime in post-war Czechoslovakia. It includes Jan Zahradníčekʼs poetry manuscripts, written illegally in the 1950s, in Pankrác Prison.

The founder of the Folk Dance House Movement was Béla Halmos. Halmos, as a musician, a folklorist, an instructor, an organizer and the leader of the Hungarian revival movement, supported the Hungarian folk culture and Dance House Movement. The Folk Dance House Archives started to function in 1999. The root of the Archives was the private collection of Béla Halmos, and it continuosly grew thanks to gifts and donations.

This ad-hoc collection was separated from the fonds of judicial files concerning persons subject to political repression during the communist regime which is currently stored in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). It focuses on the case of Gheorghe Zgherea, a person of peasant background who was a member of the Inochentist religious community, a millenarian and eschatological movement active in Bessarabia and Transnistria mostly during the first half of the twentieth century. The collection materials are revealing for the repressive policy of the Soviet regime in the religious sphere, showing the Soviet authorities’ hostile attitude toward non-mainstream and marginal denominations, which were perceived as a particularly serious threat. Zgherea, a preacher within his community starting from late 1950, was accused of “roaming the villages” of the Moldavian SSR and spreading “anti-Soviet ideas” among the local populace by “using their religious prejudices.” Arrested on 2 May 1953, he received a harsh sentence of twenty-five years of hard labour. His sentence was reduced to five years of hard labour in June 1955, when he was also amnestied according to a special decree of March 1953. Zgherea’s case thus points to the changing strategies of the regime applied after Stalin’s death, but also to the continuity of repression and to the shifting practices of stifling dissent in post-Stalinist Soviet society.

The Woman and Society Feminist Collection at the Centre for Women's Studies in Zagreb consists of one register containing the manuscripts from the lecture cycle which was organized by the "Woman and Society" Section in 1982/83. The lectures dealt with the “woman question” in the historical context, as well as the “woman question” issues in socialist self-management and Marxist theory. The Collection testifies to the engagement of a smaller number of intellectuals who sought to put the “woman question” into public focus, thus affecting the improvement of the status of women in Yugoslavia, while the authorities argued that it was unnecessary because they thought that the ˝woman question˝ was resolved within Marxism.

The collection, which is the private property of István Viczián, illustrates the history of the Calvinist youth organization of Pasarét under socialism. The collection includes letters and photographs, which provide insights into the aspirations of the group to create an active religious community in an era when such communities were a threat to and contradiction of official communist youth policy.

István Bibó (1911–1979) was a Hungarian political scientist, sociologist, and scholar on the philosophy of law. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Bibó acted as the Minister of State for Imre Nagy’s second government. When the Soviets invaded and crushed the revolution, he was the last minister left at his post in the Hungarian parliament building. Rather than flee, he remained in the building and wrote his famous proclamation, “For Freedom and Truth,” until he awaited arrest. Bibó became a role model for dissident intellectuals in the late communist era and a symbol of non-violent civilian resistance based on a firm moral stand. Since Bibó’s death in 1979, the family collection of his bequest, which includes personal documents, photos, manuscripts, books, and video and sound recordings, has been in the care of art historian and educator István Bibó Jr., who keeps the materials in his home in Budapest.

The private collection of Tamás Csapody (1960–) includes documents related to movements for the reform of the compulsory military service and the introduction of alternative civilian service. Refusal to perform military service was an illegal act in the countries of the Warsaw Pact. Csapody’s collection, as the only collection focusing this specific topic, contributes to remembering the stories of people who were penalized by the laws of the Kádár regime because of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

Invitation and program schedule for the IHF Cultural Symposium, Budapest 15–18 October 1985

Although the plans and practical preparations for the alternative programs of the Budapest Cultural Forum 1985 had been started more than a year earlier, it was this invitation letter and program schedule sent to all Western participants by the International Helsinki Federation from its Vienna Office, an invitation signed by Chairman  Karl Joachim Schwarzenberg on 1 September 1985, that proved the success of devoted efforts made by the IHF staff to organize a three-day East-West Cultural Symposium in Budapest in parallel with the official opening session of the CSCE European Conference.

The main subjects of the alternative forum were much more challenging. They included “Writers and their Integrity” and “The Future of European Culture,” and they offered a good opportunity for free and stimulating exchange of ideas for participants from both East and West. The list of authors invited seemed quite imposing, as it included prominent figures such as György Konrád, Susan Sontag, Per Wἃstberg, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Derek Walcott, Timothy Garton Ash, Alain Finkelkraut, Danilo Kis, Jirzi Grusa, Ed Doctorow, and Amos Oz. This forum was perhaps the first chance since 1945 for writers from both East and West to enter free public debates on sensitive cultural and political issues such as exile, censorship, self-censorship, the role of national identity in literature, the rights of minorities, the right to history, or the basic question of whether European culture is separate from world culture. And is European culture really one indivisible culture? These questions and issues represented an utterly new approach which regarded cultural freedom as a vitally important and integral part of the overall realm of human rights.    

How did the Budapest “Cultural Counter-Forum” manage to implement the promising plans made by the IHF? Not quite as was expected. Apart from Hungarians, no other participants from Eastern Bloc countries could attend the symposium, either because they could not get passports or because of the were forced to live under police surveillance or under house arrest, or they had been interned or jailed, like many Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Romanian writers at the time. They were partly represented by some Western writers with Eastern origins, e.g. Jirzi Grusa, Danilo Kis, and Amos Oz, and Timothy Garton Ash, who came from Warsaw to Budapest, spoke for the Polish writers who at the time were still suffering from the harsh measures of martial law. Things were similar in the case of writers who belonged to ethnic minorities. Hungarian participants, like poet Sándor Csoóri and philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, spoke on their behalf, as did two of the most harassed writers and samizdat makers, Géza Szőcs, who was originally from Cluj / Kolozsvár / Klausenburg, and Miklós Duray from Bratislava / Pozsony / Pressburg. Szőcs and Duray addressed open letters to the participants in the Counter-Forum

Kultúrnu opozíciu reprezentujú najmä samizdaty. Druhým nemenej dôležitým médiom boli audiokazety, ktoré na Slovensku zasiahli tisíce mladých ľudí v podzemnej cirkvi. Obsah týchto kaziet bol pestrý. Romány pre dievčatá a chlapcov, prípravy na manželstvo, duchovné cvičenia pre dospelých. Z kaziet sa vyrábali kópie a tak sa šírili ďalej. Kopírovaniu kaziet sa venovaj hlavne manžel pani Múčkovej.

The History of Homosexuality in Croatia Collection covers some of the most salient aspects of Croatian gay and lesbian private and public life in the socialist period (1945-1990). Court verdicts for same-sex sexual relations testify to the active institutional persecution of homosexuality, mostly in the immediate post-war period, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Personal memories and oral history recollections illustrate the harsh everyday life reality of homosexuals in socialist Yugoslavia, but they also tell amazing stories of individual or collective resistance to institutional and social homophobia.

The events that transpired alongside the fall of the Romanov monarchy in February 1917, the takeover of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and the dissolution of the Constitutional Assembly in January 1918 are immensely significant for understanding Ukrainian history and cultural opposition to communism. During that year of upheaval, many divergent visions for the future were articulated throughout the Russian Empire. In the Imperial Southwest, the Bolsheviks battled monarchists, nationalists, socialists, greens and anarchists over how to move forward during and after the collapse of empire.

The Ukrainian Museum-Archives has in its possession an original broadside of the Third Universal, issued by the Central Rada on November 20, 1917, in the four major languages used in the Imperial Southwest—Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish. This document is reflective of efforts by the Central Rada to appeal to various communities living on the territory, while negotiating with the Provisional Government for greater autonomy. As historian George Liber notes, the first two proclamations of Rada did not define the borders of Ukraine, but the Third Universal asserted that the nine provinces in the Imperial Southwest with Ukrainian majorities belonged to the Ukrainian National (or People’s) Republic. The document also claimed parts of Kursk, Kholm/Chelm and Voronezh provinces, where Ukrainians also constituted the majority. The Central Rada also pledged to defend the interests of all national groups living in these territories and articulated a law protecting personal and national autonomy for Russians, Poles, Jews and others.

Shortly after this, the UNR established diplomatic ties with a number of European countries and even the United States. Britain and France tried to persuade the UNR leadership to side with them against the Central Powers, which they refused as they were determined to stay neutral. The Soviet Russian Republic initially recognized the UNR, but this was short-lived as the Red Army soon moved in from the north and east. This prompted the Rada to issue the Fourth Universal on January 25, 1918, which declared independence of the UNR as defined by the Third Universal. This made the push for greater autonomy within the context of empire a war of nationalist secession. (Liber, 62-63)

The Karl Laantee collection at the Estonian Cultural History Archive is part of the large archival legacy of Karl Laantee, an émigré Estonian religious activist, and announcer with the Voice of America radio station. 

The manuscript of Mihajlov's travels, “Moscow Summer,” written in English is in the box 28. The text was the fruit of Mihajlov's visit to the Soviet Union in the summer months of 1964. Mihajlov supported Nikita Khrushchev's reforms and the program of de-Stalinisation, and he criticized the changes in the Soviet leadership after Kruschev’s fall. This criticism alarmed those in charge of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy, since it could once more undermine Soviet-Yugoslav relations, which had normalized in the mid-1950s.

Referring to the publication of the first two essays of this book, Tito himself called out Mihajlov in February 1965 as a result of pressure from the Soviet ambassador due to his criticism of the new political course following the fall of Khrushchev in the autumn of 1964. Despite censorship of Mihajlov’s essays in Yugoslavia, American politicians and the public were interested in Mihajlov's case precisely because of his stance on the Soviet Union during the political upheavals in the upper echelons of the Soviet party in those years.

The Ellenpontok – Tóth Private Collection includes several hundred letters dating from that time. Especially interesting are the letters and notes of various shapes and sizes, smuggled primarily across the Romanian–Hungarian border by individuals during the eighties. In that time the relevant Transylvanian events had news value. Measures taken against the Hungarian minority were hardly talked about in the press, so it was essential to spread information to the broader public, partly with the purpose of protecting the victims of such measures, and partly in the hope that the situation of the minority would be improved by drawing the attention to these atrocities occurring under the Romanian communist regime.

This smuggled letter, size 15 cm x 14 cm, was delivered to the Tóth family in October 1984 while they lived in Budapest. The senders were the Spaller couple, old friends of the Tóths living in Oradea. Both Árpád Spaller and his wife Katalin obtained their degrees at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, in 1970 and 1971 respectively, in special education (health pedagogy) and Romanian language and literature. After graduating they both worked as teachers in Oradea (Spaller and Spaller 2006).

The text of the letter is as follows:

”Dear Ica, Karcsi and Zsuzsika!

Excuse us for not having written so far, although we were glad to receive your postcard. The truth is that we hesitate to even send a postcard for fear we might end up like Kati Gyulai [Gyulai Katalin, verse performer from Oradea (Molnár 1993)], who underwent a thorough customs control only to be refused entry to the country. Quite an unfortunate case. On the other hand, they keep a close eye on us and they mean it seriously. They keep harassing people. Árpi Varga, [Árpád Varga, 1951-1994 (Sipos 1995)], that miserable historian from Tileagd was also threatened. They also showed up in the home of Sófalvi, that photographer from Satu Mare who took photos at the Literary Round Table, and confiscated some of his films and books. We have no idea when this will end but we ought to be cautious.

Unfortunately, we were denied entry to Hungary. We were informed about this in September, although the decision was already made in June. So, we can apply again next June. Unfortunately, we cannot expect much. The help from our acquaintance hasn’t been efficient which doesn’t surprise us. We do not have any other contacts to turn to, so applying under such circumstances is totally pointless. Do you happen to know anyone influential who could help us? To be honest, it would mean a lot to us now, because we are rather disappointed. We would appreciate your help.

Otherwise, everything is the same. We are working and living from one day to the other. Endre attends school, he pretty much needs our assistance. The little one is growing. As for us, not much good news to tell. The Ady Circle is still active with the old members. Sometimes, when we have time, we also attend.

If you don’t mind we need to ask you to stop writing to us, or if there is anything important, address your letter to Péter Juhász [railway worker] Biharkeresztes MÁV station 4110. From time to time, we shall send you news about us. So, please don’t write directly to us. But please let us know how you are in a letter sent to the above address. And please be cautious in the case of the others, too.

With love, Árpi and Kati.

October 6, 1984”.

The letter of the Spaller family perfectly illustrates the fear present in those times, affecting both the public sphere and the everyday life of the individual. People, afraid they might be observed and harassed by the Securitate, in the constant climate of insecurity, chose to be silent, avoiding any form of public manifestation. It also says a lot that the senders of the letter did not give a Romanian address for direct correspondence, but that of the railway station in Biharkeresztes, a Hungarian settlement 6 km from the Hungarian-Romanian border, which is also a border crossing point.              

The reasons behind emigration did not require much explanation back then. Beginning with January 1983 it became increasingly difficult to obtain a residence permit from the Hungarian authorities, as the application involved the presentation of a letter of invitation. This seemingly insignificant administrative obstacle – as revealed also in the above letter – could represent an enormous impediment for families who planned to emigrate, though emigration did not prove to be an impossible endeavour on the whole: in 1987 the Spaller family moved to Hungary where they managed to find jobs that suited their qualifications. At present they live in Budapest (Spaller and Spaller 2006).

After listening in November 1987 to the news broadcast by Radio Free Europe (RFE) about the anti-communist revolt of the workers in the factories of the city of Braşov, Doina Cornea openly displayed her solidarity with the protesters. On 18 November 1987, she drafted 160 manifestos, which were spread with the help of her son Leontin Horaţiu Iuhas in several public spaces in Cluj (Cornea 2009, 194–195). Consequently, on 19 November 1987, she and her son were arrested by the Securitate after a detailed home search (Cornea 2006, 203). During home searches on 19 and 23 November 1987, the Securitate confiscated many documents from Cornea’s private dwelling, including all the drafts of her letters to RFE.

Among these documents, the Securitate confiscated the handwritten draft of the first letter she sent to RFE entitled: “Letter to those from home who have not given up thinking with their heads.” According to interviews granted by Doina Cornea, this letter was drafted by Cornea and her daughter Ariadna Combes in July 1982 (Cornea 2009, 169-170). The document was smuggled to the West and sent to RFE with the help of her daughter, who chose to remain in France in 1976 and visited her mother in July 1982 (ACNSAS, FI 000 666, vol. 2, f. 11). In August 1982, the letter was broadcast by RFE during the radio programme “Talking with RFE listeners.” It was the first letter in a series of twenty open letters sent by Doina Cornea to RFE in the period from 1982 to 1989, through which she asserted herself as one of the most prominent Romanian dissidents (Cornea 2009, 195–196). The open letters sent by Doina Cornea to RFE intensified the surveillance and repressive actions of the Securitate, which had already been monitoring her closely since 1981. Due to the fact that the strict surveillance in communist Romania did not allow the development of a samizdat and tamizdat milieu, RFE played a key role in conveying the messages of Romanian dissidents to their fellow citizens (Petrescu 2013, 277).

The letter starts with a reference to radio programmes of RFE that had been previously broadcast. During these radio programmes, journalists specialising in East European issues had dealt with the crisis that affected communist Romania during 1980s and identified political and economic factors as the immediate causes. Instead of these causes, Doina Cornea emphasises in her letter causes relating to moral and cultural values. By idealising interwar Romania, she brings into discussion the destruction of the Romanian intellectual elite during the first two decades of communist rule and the decay of the educational system. In Cornea’s opinion, this “spiritual crisis” is illustrated by the everyday “compromises” and “lies” that citizens living under a communist dictatorship have to “accept and circulate” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, f.1). Her argumentation in this respect is similar to that developed by Vaclav Havel’s essays and epitomised by his principle of “living in truth” (Havel 1990). Cornea argues that “the people is fed only with slogans,” which stifle all openness towards “truth, revival, and creativity” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, ff. 2–3). She criticises the conformism of Romanian intellectuals and state policies which limit theoretical education (especially the humanities) and promote technical education in order to fill the need for cadres in the rapidly growing heavy industry.

She concludes her text by asking for a reform in the educational system and encourages those working in this field at least to take advantage of the limited possibilities available to them to promote what she considers to be authentic cultural and moral values. According to Cornea, those working with students should not teach them “things in which they themselves do not believe” and they should “encourage the creativity of young people and not be afraid to say what they think” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, ff. 4–5). At the end of the letter, Doina Cornea inserted her name with the mention: “for the messengers of RFE listeners” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, f. 5). She did not intend to reveal her real identity to the listeners of RFE, but just to prove the authenticity of the document to the editors of the radio programme. Due to a misunderstanding, her real identity was revealed during the radio show.

In November 1987, after the draft of this document was confiscated by the Securitate, the secret police used it as an argument of accusation during Cornea’s interrogation. This focused especially on the channels used by Cornea to send the letter to RFE. Although she did not mention it during the interrogation, the Securitate suspected that her daughter Ariadna Combes had helped her in this respect. For this reason, Cornea’s daughter thereafter did not receive a permit to enter the country to visit her family until the fall of the communist regime.

The collection is important proof of the activities of a left-thinking historian, a "spiritual father" and co-founder of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), a co-publisher of unofficial periodic Dialogy, who was imprisoned several times and forced to go to exile, where he collaborated with dissidents from other socialist countries.  

Skilling’s Golden Wedding anniversary, was at the Old Town Hall in April 1987. The journey Gordon Skilling made to Prague in April 1987, marked the celebration of Skilling's 75^th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Sally. The wedding ceremony was arranged by his dissident friends in the Old Town Hall, which was also the same ceremonial hall where they were married in 1937 (their wedding in October 1937 took place during G. Skilling’s first time in Czechoslovakia, where he studied the History of Central Europe as a student of London University). The anniversary celebration was a delicate irony in which the guests were fond of - a tribute to the "enemy of the state" because the Communists had released a number of dissidents which they had not known about. The next day in the Prague Evening, the news appeared, with a somewhat funny title, "Wedding Overseas". Jiřina Šiklová gained a great credit for this, because she paid the newspaper editors with the make-up from Tuzex at that time.

Gordon Skilling himself remembers this after years in an interview with Lidove Noviny in June 1993: "It was an interesting ceremony because perhaps all Czech dissidents - Havel, Pithart, Dienstbier and others - were present. It was strange that, in this honest ceremony, the chairman of the National Committee for Prague 1 spoke about what I did for Czech history. But he did not know that I also wrote a book about the Prague Spring, a book on Charter 77 and other things. He did not know it, and so he was very glad. Absurd situation. But the dissidents liked it. They were smiling internally. And then we had a gala dinner at the Municipal House. I like to recall the event."

At the beginning of the 1980s, citizens in Slovenia became more aware of the need for their involvement in decision-making processes and that brought about the first initiatives to protect human rights. One of those initiatives was a petition for the abolition of the death penalty in Yugoslavia. A group of activists, including Alenka Puhar, collected signatures for the abolition of the death penalty and sent them to several institutions on November 23, 1983: to the Assembly of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY/SFRJ), the League of Communists of Slovenia (LCS/SKS), the League of Communist Youth of Slovenia (LCYS/SKOS) and others. The petition was discussed in public and among the political leadership, and it was published in Ljubljana’s magazine Mladina on December 1, 1983. However, the petition did not produce any results at the time. The death penalty in Slovenia was abolished only in 1989 at the time of the Slovenian Spring.

Alenka Puhar's collection contains the original petition with signatures that were collected in that campaign. Puhar testifies that over 1,500 signatures were collected. She wrote about her experience working on this petition in the book Peticije, pisma in tihotapski časi (Petitions, Letters and a Time of Smuggling) which she published two years later. (Puhar 1985: 152)

Vytautas Skuodis (1929-2016) was a Lithuanian scientist, Soviet dissident and former political prisoner. From 1979, he was a member of the dissident organisation the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. In 1978, he initiated and edited the journal Perspektyvos (Perspectives), the most recognised underground publication among the Lithuanian intelligentsia. The Vytautas Skuodis collection holds various manuscripts of Skuodis’ monograhs, a PhD dissertation, articles, lectures, letters, reviews of diploma works by students, notes, memoirs and diaries. These documents are relevant to the topic of cultural opposition, because they reveal personally the involvement of Skuodis and other people in anti-Soviet activities.

This eighty-eight-page manuscript contains the texts of eight sermons and seems to have been prepared to be sent abroad for publication. The author was a priest and professor at the Theological Institute in Bucharest, and was imprisoned between 1948 and 1964. While in the notorious prison of Pitești, he was forced to take part in the infamous re-education experiment in that prison, which turned a part of the prisoners into the torturers of the others. Tormented by such a terrible sin, Calciu-Dumitreasa tried, according to his own confession, to write about this prison experience in order to come to terms with it. However, he changed his priorities when, in the aftermath of the earthquake of 1977, the demolition of churches in Bucharest began while the hierarchy of the Romanian Orthodox Church kept quiet. It was then that Calciu-Dumitreasa conceived this series of non-conformist sermons, in which he argued against atheist education and reminded his students of fundamental Christian values, of their mission as priests who must build, and not destroy, churches in order to take care of their parish communities. Seven of the sermons were delivered by the author in the Radu Vodă Church in Bucharest between 8 March and 19 April 1978. Particularly important is the sermon of 15 March 1978, in which Calciu-Dumitreasa explicitly condemned the demolition of the Enei Church, the first church demolished in Bucharest. The sixth sermon, of 12 April 1978, was no longer delivered in the church but in front of it, for the authorities had closed the church and locked the students in their dormitories in order to impede them from attending what had turned in the meantime into an increasingly popular event. The eighth sermon was supposed to open a new cycle entitled “Christianity and Culture” on 17 May 1978, but it was never delivered due to the author’s removal from his teaching position. Continuously harassed by the secret police, in 1979 Calciu-Dumitreasa endorsed the establishment of the Free Trade Union of the Working People of Romania, which caused his arrest and imprisonment for another five years. He was released only in 1985, after intense international lobbying, especially by the United States administration, which threatened the Romanian communist regime with the withdrawal of Most Favoured Nation status. A year later, he went into exile in the United States, where he remained until his death. This manuscript was probably confiscated on the occasion of his arrest in 1979. This version of the sermons differs slightly from the post-communist published volume because it mentions the persons who were responsible for the interruption of his cycle of sermons in 1978.

At the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara may be seen Lorenţ Fecioru’s vest with the holes made by the bullets that killed him and the traces left by their victim’s blood. This object with a profound emotional charge was donated in 1999 by the mother of the hero-martyr. The material traces of the violent death of this young man are symbolic for all the young people who, with the recklessness and courage of youth, took part in the Revolution of 1989. At the same time, the manner in which he met his death is illustrative of the repression that followed in the days immediately after the outbreak of the popular revolt in Timişoara. Along with over 1,000 others, Lorenţ Fecioru is a martyr of the bloody events that led to the change of regime in 1989 and one of those to whom all Romanians are indebted for the freedom that they enjoy today. It is a civic duty of all Romanian citizens to preserve their memory, a duty that the Memorial has taken upon itself to pass on to generations who did not experience the Revolution of 1989.

Lorenţ Fecioru was one of those who, alongside the poet Ion Monoran, took part in the stopping of trams in Maria Square on 16 December. He died in the night of 17–18 December from the effects of a bullet fired by a sniper straight into his heart. In the public documents issued after the Revolution of 1989, it was initially stated that Lorenţ Fecioru was shot on the steps of the Cathedral of Timişoara. The facts, however, are otherwise, albeit equally tragic. Two decades after the tragedy played out, Lorenţ Fecioru’s youngest son related for a national newspaper what actually happened to his father: “My father was shot by a sniper in the night of 17–18 December. In the Securitate files photographs have been found that were taken during the day, when my father and some of his colleagues from work went out into the street and climbed onto tramcars, onto buses. I understand that in the file is written ‘mission accomplished.’ He was on the balcony with his friends that evening, telling them that he had seen when the photographer took pictures of them and that he was afraid to go out onto the balcony. The moment he went out onto the balcony he was shot. I saw the bullet that killed him, because he was shot in the heart and the bullet came out through his back and ricocheted off two walls in the house. His friends took him to the morgue, and by ‘good fortune’ they found a coffin, otherwise he would have been incinerated like the others.” This version is confirmed by researchers at the Memorial to the Revolution. Gino Rado, the vice-president of the Memorial, mentions that Lorenţ Fecioru was on the balcony at his home on Calea Şagului in Timişoara when he was fatally shot. The vest donated by the family of the hero-martyr Lorenţ Fecioru is on the same ground-floor level of the building of the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara, very close to the corner dedicated to the child-martyr Cristina Lungu.

Skilling H. Gordon (1912-2001) was a prominent Canadian historian, political scientist and Slavist. His life and work were closely linked to the dramatic fate of Czechoslovakia from the late 1930s to the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

The collection belongs to the group of the most relevant archival resources for researching the communist regime’s relationship with and repression against religious communities in Croatia, and their organisations, priests and other religious officials. It contains documents collected or produced by the State Security Service of the Republic Internal Affairs Secretariat of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, the civilian security and intelligence service in Croatia in the period from 1946 to 1990. Different cultural opposition activities of certain religious communities and their members can be studied on the basis of its documents. Criticism (concealed and public) of communist rule and its social and political system, i.e. the official doctrine of atheism, is especially visible.          

The report on “the legal situation and the clandestine activities of the religious group entitled Jehovah’s Witnesses” was drafted by the First Directorate of the Securitate (in charge of gathering information within the country). This report synthesised the evolution of the religious community of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Romania, their legal status during the past and at the time of its issuance, and the policies of the Securitate regarding this religious denomination.

The collection consists of material about violations of the rights of national minorities and deportees, and people persecuted for anti-Soviet activities, as well as documents about samizdat publications and the persecution of believers. 

After sending two open letters to RFE in the period 1982–1983 and discussing with her students texts by Paul Goma and Mircea Eliade which were not officially published in Romania, Doina Cornea was put under close surveillance and threatened by the Securitate, in order to make her give up her oppositional activities. In June 1983, she lost her teaching position at the University of Cluj because she had refused to cede to these pressures. Despite these repressive measures against her, Cornea continued to send open letters of protests and to show solidarity with other dissidents in Romania (Cornea 2009, 176–177). Among these acts displaying solidarity with other oppositional activities, those supporting the 1987 workers revolt from Braşov attracted the most violent reactions on the part of the Securitate.

In November 1987, Cornea learned of the Braşov workers’ revolt from RFE radio programmes. Immediately afterwards she displayed a placard in front of her house in Cluj through which she expressed her solidarity with the workers. On 18 November 1987, she drafted 160 manifestos written in violet ink on sheets of paper similar to A5 format with the text: “Solidarity with the workers from Braşov” (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, f. 109). These manifestos were spread with the help of her son Leontin Horaţiu Iuhas in various public spaces in Cluj, namely in the main squares and in factories (Cornea 2009, 194–195). On 19 November 1987, Cornea and her son were arrested by the Securitate and its employees conducted a detailed home search (Cornea 2006, 203). On this occasion the ink with which these documents were written and some copies of the manifestos were confiscated. The latter would be attached to the criminal file and invoked as proofs of the accusation during Doina Cornea’s interrogation by the Securitate in late November 1987 (ACNSAS, P 000 014, vol. 2, f. 109).

The collection consists of artefacts about the 'Action of Light', established by Paulis Kļaviņš, which operated in the 1970s and 1980s. It aimed to support religious dissidents and human rights campaigners in Latvia, and to inform the public in the West about the real situation in Soviet Latvia.