“Goli Goli Goli – The Truth about Goli otok” is a typewritten text about the days of captivity on Goli otok, but it is partially different from the original, and begins with a short biography of the author before his arrest, including specific events that preceded the arrest. Šore spoke about his arrest in Travnik in June 1949 and his transfer to the prison in Sarajevo. On September 1949, about 400 detainees were transported by train from Sarajevo to Herceg Novi, and then by truck to the former Austro-Hungarian fortress on Cape Oštro at the entrance to Boka Kotorska Bay. There, Šore's group joined detainees from Montenegro, and then all boarded a ship that took them to Goli otok. This was the first group of "Cominformists" who came to Goli otok. Before them, there was a smaller group of people on the island who welcomed them with clubs, curses and verbal abuse. Šore spent three years in this environment, in which he experienced the most brutal methods of political “re-education.” Immediately upon their arrival at the prison camp, all inmates had to publicly present facts about their "hostile work" against the communist regime and plead guilty. Also, all inmates had to go to the State Security Administration office to report all the “enemies” among inmates or among those who were still outside the prison camp. Political meetings were held regularly in the prison camp, where the criminal conduct of a particular inmate was discussed based on evidence obtained by mutual spying. Furthermore, ‘cultural-educational’ work was carried out every night, which consisted of reading Party literature, making posters, writing pamphlets, and even short comedy shows. In all forms of cultural and educational work, Josip Broz Tito and his policy in conflict with the Cominform Resolution was praised by the detainees (Interview with Peić Čaldarović, Dubravka).

The prison camp's administration punished inmates with brutal methods that consisted of heavy physical labour, inciting violence among inmates, psychological abuse, and deprivation of food and water. According to Šore's memories, the main penal measures in the camp were: boycotts (severing of any communication with an inmate, overtime labour and reduction of food and water rations), carrying "Anita" (exhaustion by carrying a heavy load), tracer (exhaustion caused by carrying heavy loads with another inmate), the swan (exhaustion by carrying a heavy load together with six other detainees) and the chamber-pot ‘honour’  (guarding the wooden lavatory in the barracks many times per day or for many days). The physical exhaustion of inmates was done to psychologically transform them, or erase their personalities, to create persons loyal to the Party led by Tito. Inmates who underwent been internal punishment or refused to submit to political "re-education" ended up in Building 101. Its purpose was to break disobedient detainees with more difficult conditions of daily labour and more extreme torture methods (Interview with Peić Čaldarović, Dubravka).

Šore described each of these situations and methods of political "re-education" precisely from his own experience or based on the example of one of his fellow inmates. He illustrated some of the most difficult aspects of everyday life with his own drawings under the heading: Tracer/Carrying Heavy Rocks, Water and Food/Boycott by the Wall, Chamber-pot Honour /Swan (Interview with Dubravka Peić Čaldarović).

Rimantas Vėbra (1931-1999) was a Lithuanian historian and specialist in 19th-century history. His research covers the Lithuanian national movement in the second half of the 19th century. While he was not an active participant in the anti-Soviet dissident movement, his professional activity was restricted because of his writings, research works that were perceived by the authorities as unconventional, and his deviation from the ideological norm.

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). 

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.

Artpool Art Research Center collects, archives, and makes available documents for researchers regarding marginalized art practices of Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s and contemporary international art tendencies. Topics in the archive include progressive, unofficial Hungarian art movements (such as underground art events, venues, groups, and samizdat publications between 1970 and 1990) and new tendencies in international art beginning in the 1960s.

In addition to functioning as a research center, Artpool considers itself an active archive. It organizes events in search of new forms of social activity, participates in the process in a formative way, and simultaneously documents and archives these process in order to promote the free flow of information.

The Grgo Šore Goli Otok Collection is part of a broader collection consisting of documents from personal and family bequests and is kept in the Croatian History Museum. The collection includes documentation about Goli otok (a small rocky island in the Adriatic Sea), official correspondence, newspapers and photographs. In his manuscripts, Grgo Šore described in detail all of the horrors he experienced on Goli otok during his captivity as a falsely accused “Cominformist.” Particularly noteworthy are the drawings depicting the brutal treatment of inmates by the prison guards.

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 Closed Stacks Department of the National Széchényi Library (OSZK) was established in 1946. Everything that was not permitted by the censors and could not be part of the public collection of the library was put here. The librarians argued that the task of the national library was to collect every type of publication regardless of its content. The books and journals which were published by Hungarians who fled the country after the Revolution of 1956 added to the number of items. The department became a meeting point for members of the emerging opposition in the 1980s, which created an opportunity to get actual samizdat writings.

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 collection of Ladislav Mňačko (1919–1994), a Slovak writer and former prominent Czechoslovak journalist, consists of unique correspondence, manuscripts, prints and clippings which help to describe the life of this significant writer, who after August 1968 was a critic of the communist regime and a representative of Czechoslovak exile literature.

The Nelu Stratone collection is one of the most impressive collections of rock, jazz, and folk records created in communist Romania, as a result of the happy combination between its owner’s exceptional passion for alternative music and his ability to acquire records that were not imported officially. The collection is important not only for its size, but even more for the significant number of albums of Western provenance, which were unavailable in shops in Romania but could nevertheless be obtained due to the existence of an alternative market for such products. The creation and preservation of such a collection were activities regarded with suspicion by the communist authorities in Romania, because they proved the younger generation’s fascination with Western cultural products, in contravention of the spirit of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Theses of July 1971.

Vjesnik Newspaper Documentation is an archival collection created in the Vjesnik newspaper publishing enterprise from 1964 to 2006. It includes about twelve million press clippings, organized into six thousand topics and sixty thousand dossiers on public persons. Inter alia, it documents various forms of cultural opposition in the former Yugoslavia, but also in other communist countries in Europe and worldwide.      

The collection includes Croatian State Security Service's file on the case of first and best known Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Djilas, and its reception in Croatia. During 1953, Djilas published a series of articles in the newspaper Borba on the need for democratization and liberalization of Yugoslav society, which led to his condemnation at Party forums and expulsion from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. In Croatia, similar ideas were mainly manifested in the weekly Naprijed, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Croatia. It led to open conflict with Party leaders and the suppression of the newspaper, while its journalists were forced to halt their careers in journalism. The collection includes different analysis and reports on operational measures conducted by the Croatian State Security Service against the Naprijed group and other Djilas supporters (Djilasovci) in Croatia until the beginning of 1960s.

The Doina Cornea Private Collection is an invaluable historical source for those researching the biography and especially the dissident activities of the person labelled by the Western mass media as the “emblematic figure” of the Romanian resistance to Ceauşescu’s dictatorship. This collection comprises manuscripts of her open letters of protest, her diary, samizdat translations, correspondence, drafts of her academic works, photos, paintings, video recordings, and her personal library. This private collection is by far one of the most significant and valuable collections reflecting the cultural opposition to the Romanian communist regime.

The collection of Milan Jelínek documents in detail the Communist thinking of a formerly protected linguist, and the later, a critic to the regime, becoming a samizdat publisher and co-organiser of lectures at the underground university.

The beginnings of the Video Studio Gdansk are connected to the I National Congress of “Solidarity”, organised in Gdansk in 1981. At first, the independent “Solidarity” filmmakers documented the union’s most important events, however soon the first documentaries were produced. Video Studio Gdansk has been operating for almost 40 years, and its archive today consists of several thousands of video materials. It mostly comprises own videos, created by the Studio: raw footages (of the most important oppositional events, like strikes, clashes, protests), documentaries, reportages, few feature films, and numerous recordings of television theatre, public debates, cultural events, etc.

Limes was a circle of Hungarian dissident intellectuals which operated more or less actively from 1985 until the 1989 Romanian revolution. The aim of the circle was to provide a pluralist platform of cooperation for Hungarian intellectuals, which meant holding monthly/bimonthly organized meetings and publishing a journal dealing with the history and actual situation of the Hungarian minority from Romania, as well as other outstanding research work pertaining to other domains. The circle was also devoted to maintaining high standards of scientific work in Romania. As there was no chance of getting anything past the censors in Romania, the plan was to smuggle manuscripts to Hungary and to publish the journal there.

The initiator was Gusztáv Molnár, who mostly due to his job as a literary editor at the Bucharest-based Kriterion publishing house had a large personal network among Transylvanian Hungarian critical intellectuals. The core of the group was represented by the following individuals: Vilmos Ágoston, Béla Bíró, Gáspár Bíró, Ernő Fábián, Károly Vekov, Levente Salat, Csaba Lőrincz, Ferenc Visky, András Visky, Péter Visky, Levente Horváth, Sándor Balázs, Sándor Szilágyi N., and Éva Cs. Gyímesi. Through the process of editing the journal, many more intellectuals became acquainted with the activity of the Limes group.

Between September 1985 and November 1986, six meetings were held in four different localities in Romania in the homes of members of the group. The meetings encompassed a presentation (usually of a manuscript) followed by a debate, and all proceedings were recorded. The series of meetings was interrupted by a search and seizure performed by the Securitate in Molnár’s apartment in Bucharest. All documents related to Limes were taken and later studied by the authorities. By this time, the plan to make four Limes issues had already been completed, and the manuscripts for the first two issues had already been collected. The contents included transcripts of the Limes debates and studies and documents covering topics such as “national minorities,” “nationalism,” “totalitarianism,” “autonomy,” and “Transylvanianism” as a guiding ideology for the Hungarian minority in Romania. The topics also included the situation of the Csángó Catholic (Hungarian-speaking) population in Romania.

The Limes group ceased its activity after the intervention of the Romanian secret police, and in 1987, summons and warnings were issued to the members of the group. Though no more meetings were organized, after a while, Limes members resumed work on the texts. Molnár moved to Hungary in 1988, but the editorial work was continued in Romania by Éva Cs. Gyímesi Éva and Péter Cseke in Cluj. The first issues of Limes was published by Molnár in Budapest in late 1989. The content does not coincide with the initial first volume of the Limes, but the issues did contain excerpts from the debates which were held at the first two meetings.

Invaluable insights into the details of the Limes story and other events in the lives of outstanding Hungarian intellectuals are provided by the Securitate files on professor of philosophy at the Babes Bolyai University Sándor Balázs (1928–), which are available for research in the Historical Collection of the Jakabffy Elemér Foundation. This is because the Limes activities in Cluj were recorded by the county agency of the Securitate as part of the information surveillance files on Sándor Balázs. His code name was “the Sociologist” (Sociologul), but the table of contents at the beginning of the dossier refers to “the Sociologists” (Sociologii), the code name used to denote the Limes group.

The “Sixtiers Museum” Collection is located in a small museum in Kyiv, Ukraine in a building belonging to the Ukrainian political party Rukh. Nadia Svitlychna and Mykola Plakhotniuk founded this museum as way of honouring and documenting the struggles of a cohort of Soviet Ukrainian dissidents during the 1960s-1980s. Included in the permanent exhibition are paintings, graphics, sculptures, embroidery and other artworks produced by artists affiliated with the sixtiers movement. The museum also displays the poems, letters and literary works of the writers in their midst, as well as their typewriters, handcrafted items made while in the GULag, or clothes worn while living in exile, like Svitlychna’s own camp uniform. Also figuring prominently are posters for events and exhibitions organized by this group. The guided tour is a moving, concise rendition of their struggle, aimed at the museum’s target audiences, young students, scholars, and the general public.

These materials depict the lives of a dynamic group of Soviet Ukrainians engaged in a principled creative and ideological struggle with the Soviet regime in the 1960s and 1970s. They were poets, artists, graphic designers, historians, doctors, and even a Soviet army official, all of whom became deeply involved in human rights activism under late socialism. Many were members of large Soviet institutions—like the Ukrainian writers and artist unions, the Literary Institute in Kyiv, the Soviet armed forces. The Soviet government’s ideological retrenchment after Khrushchev transformed these dissidents, who had worked hard to try and reform the system and make it more humane, into individuals in open conflict with the authorities.

The Libri Prohibiti’s collection of foreign samizdat monographs and periodicals contains mainly Slovak and Polish samizdat literature. Russian samizdat and periodicals from the former German Democratic Republic are marginally represented.

The collection is about the life, work and activities of the famous Lithuanian humanist Meilutė Lukšienė. Although she is well known in Lithuania as the initiator and creator of the concept of the Lithuanian National School, and as an active member of Sąjūdis (the national movement) in the late 1980s, Lukšienė was also involved in cultural opposition during Soviet times. She was a key figure who promoted lithuanianisation at Vilnius University as early as the 1950s. Accused of 'bourgeois nationalism', she was dismissed from the post of head of the Department of Lithuanian Literature in 1958.

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.

Jaromír Šavrda, a writer, poet, journalist and dissident from Ostrava, was, because of his samizdat activities, twice held in the custodial prison in Ostrava and later imprisoned in Ostrov nad Ohří, first from September 1978 until March 1981 and then from September 1982 until October 1984. During his second stay in prison, Šavrda wrote two books reflecting his experiences as a political prisoner; they depict his personal experiences from police persecution and describe the lives of people that Šavrda met in prison. The first of the books was “Vězeň č. 1260” (The Prisoner No. 1260), written between September and November 1982 and published as samizdat, followed by “Ostrov v souostroví” (The Island in the Archipelago), written by Šavrda between November 1982 and January 1983. After his return from prison, this two texts were published in 1987 as an omnibus called “Přechodné adresy” (The Temporary Addresses), at first in samizdat edition Popelnice and then in edition Expedice. “Přechodné adresy” was first officially published in the 1990s (Ostrava: WMCG 1991, 1993). Both texts were also published separately with original titles in 2009 (Prague: Pulchra, 2009). “Přechodné adresy” (2009) is also a name of a documentary film about Jaromír Šavrda directed by Petra Všelichová.

Ferdinand Peroutka, who represented the democratic past of Czechoslovakia, and mainly the First Czechoslovak Republic, became the director of the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in New York on 6 April 1950. The Czechoslovak service of the RFE began its regular broadcasting from Munich on 1 May 1951 with the famous phrase “This is the voice of Free Czechoslovakia, Radio Free Europe.” One of the first speakers was also Ferdinand Peroutka, who stated, besides other things: “One magazine would mean little in a country where freedom reigns. But one free magazine, one radio station in a dictatorial regime – that is a revolution, because such a system is based on the fact that only the government can speak and nobody can answer back, that anyone can be charged, but nobody can defend themselves. However, once even a fraction of freedom enters that rigid and artificial system, from anywhere, once it is again possible to set argument against argument, once it is no longer possible to act without criticism, once there is a place to call untruths into question, then this whole proud system quavers.”

The Literary Archives of the Museum of Czech Literature possesses a mimeograph copy of the typescript of this speech.

The document that records the extent of the search carried out at the home of the Petrescus on 18 May 1983 is in the family’s private collection in an original copy, made out by the officers who took part in the event. Another two copies were kept by the communist authorities of the time. The minute records that the Petrescus were present at the search, as were two witnesses. It consists of four pages, very clearly written, and is made out in the name of the Iaşi County Inspectorate of the Securitate. Each page is signed both by the representatives of the forces of control and repression and by the witnesses and the couple themselves. The document lists the objects that were kept by the Securitate on this occasion: books; audio cassettes, including one containing a recording of Virgil Ierunca’s broadcast on Radio Free Europe in which he highly praised Dan Petrescu and other young intellectuals in Iaşi for their articles in the student magazines Dialog and Opinia Studenţească; rolls of recording tape; photographs; letters from various people; pages of notes; and a folder labelled “Furrows across the baulks – feuilleton novel of the collectivisation,” containing forty-five leaves of the manuscript of this collective novel. Among the books confiscated were some that later became classic works of critical analysis of the communist system, but which were very recent publications at the time, for example La Nomenklatura, les privilégiés en URSS  by Mikhail Voslensky (1980) and L'Union soviétique survivra-t-elle en 1984? by Andrei Amalrik (1977). There were also critical works on Romanian communism published by Romanian writers in exile, such as La Cité totale by Constantin Dumitrescu (1980). The couple managed to save some books from confiscation, but of those removed from their home by the Securitate only one was given back to them, though it is not clear on which criteria this particular book, Les Sources et le sens du communisme russe by Nikolai Berdyaev, was returned – perhaps because it dated from 1938, so was much older than the others. Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu recalls how they managed to hide some of the most critical, and implicitly the most incriminating books: “The next day, 18 May 1983, at six o’clock sharp in the morning, the guys burst in. […] At first they were very pleasant. They gave us time to get dressed, and those minutes gave us a chance to remove some books, to give them to my aunt, who stuck them under her jacket, under her overcoat. Solzhenitsyn, for example. We saved the Gulag and a few others. My aunt took them into her room, where they had no mandate to enter and where they didn’t think of entering. [… Wherever they had a mandate,] they left nothing untouched. Nothing, nothing. You realised that you could hide something anywhere, in the garden, in the house, in the woodshed, and they would rummage around and they could find it. They were capable of moving everything, of going through everything.” And regarding the immediate consequence of the search, interrogation at the Securitate headquarters, she adds: “The search lasted approximately five hours. From six in the morning to eleven. […] Then they took us up – ‘up’ meaning to the Securitate. It was on a street named Triumfului. Now after 1989, the gangs of Securitate people have built a district of apartment blocks that they own.” Dan Petrescu adds, with regard to the manner in which those who came conduct the search acted in order to find what interested them, underlining that the Securitate was particularly interested in a cassette with the recording of a Radio Free Europe broadcast, in which some young Iaşi writers had been highly praised, among them himself, and in the manuscript of the collective novel: “They had come on the basis of information, for they were looking for certain things. They were looking for a recording of a broadcast on Radio Free Europe where [Virgil] Ierunca praised us and… they were looking for books […] They confiscated a lot of books from us. Only one was given back to us, after the search. Berdyaev – his book about the sources and the meaning of communism. At the same time they asked me about the novel [“Furrows Across the Baulks” revisited]. I said to them: ‘Why are you still looking for it? Because you’ve already got it.’ They had taken it from George Pruteanu. […] It didn’t exist in more than one manuscript. There were no copies. It passed from one to the next and each one added to it. They were also looking for letters in the search.” Dan Petrescu adds, to give a clearer picture of those months, another detail that casts a new light on that moment: “The search took place, at our home, in May 1983. In March, I found out later in documents at CNSAS, the Securitate guys had made new recruits in literary circles in Iaşi. Ten new names. In editorial boards of periodicals, publishing houses, that sort of thing.”

The exhibition entitled “A harcoló város/The Fighting City, 1986” was organized by the amateur artist group Inconnu to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The police banned the event on the opening day and destroyed the artworks. However, before that, an agent took photos of the compositions. Thus, the secret police itself created, through the act of destruction, a group of sources which is today the single visual trace of the exhibition. This photo collection is kept in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State  Security Forces (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára – ÁBTL).

The document reproduces the report drawn up by two representatives of the communist Militia following the search carried out on 3 December 1986 for the purpose of investigating the possible illegal basis of the collection of art stored in Brad at the home of Dr Sorin Costina. Under Law 18/1968 regarding the control of the provenance of goods not acquired through legal means, the possessions of any physical person could be checked if there were “data or indications,” basically meaning information collected through informers, pointing to “an evident disproportion” between the estimated value of a person’s possessions and the income legally obtained by that person. The text of this minute, drawn up in the wooden language of the communist authorities, does not identify in its conclusions any illegality that might have been found as a result of the search. However it is highly relevant with regard to the manner in which the communist authorities penetrated the private lives of citizens. The document mentions that the search lasted approximately three hours and provides in ten hand-written pages a detailed inventory of all the items found in the Costina family home. It was drawn up in three copies, one of which, in the original, is now in the Costina family archive.

Gábor Demszy’s collection contains not only samizdat books and journals but also objects. The ramka (bolting-cloth stretched on a wooden frame) was a tool used in the samizdat printing process and today constitutes an important relic object of this technique.

The Goma Movement Ad-hoc Collection includes numerous plans of action against the individuals involved in supporting the open letter of protest against the violation of human rights in Romania which was to be addressed to the CSCE Follow-Up Conference in Belgrade. Each Securitate informative surveillance file contains periodically updated plans of action, but these usually required only the approval of the high-ranking Securitate officer in charge of the case of the person in question. What is remarkable about this plan of action, which is part of Goma’s personal file, is its endorsement by the highest possible office holders in the Ministry of the Interior, to which the Direction of State Security was directly subordinated in 1977: the plan was countersigned by Nicolae Pleșiță, first deputy minister, and finally approved by Teodor Coman, the minister of the interior himself. Obviously, the hierarchical level of those who endorsed this plan indicates the great importance attached to this case. It is worth noting that the “successful” handling of the Goma Movement, in which Pleșiță involved himself and acted as Goma’s head interrogator, led to his promotion to the rank of lieutenant general in 1977. The same year, he coordinated the repressive measures taken by the regime in the aftermath of the Jiu Valley miners’ strike of August. Pleșiță remains notorious, however, for his actions while head of the Centre for Foreign Intelligence between 1980 and 1984, in particular for the 1982 failed attempt at suppressing Goma while in exile in Paris, and for the 1981 bomb attack on the RFE headquarters in Munich, for which the Securitate seems to have hired the infamous terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. After 1989, Pleșiță showed no remorse for his misdeeds, and all attempts to hold him legally responsible for these wrongdoings eventually failed.     

Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca had an intense correspondence with Romanian intellectuals in exile and a part of this correspondence is preserved in the collection housed by the National Archives in Bucharest. Among the letters preserved here there is one signed by the well-known historian of religions, Mircea Eliade. Eliade left Romania in 1940 and dedicated his entire intellectual activity in exile to the study of history of religions and the history and philosophy of culture.

In his letter of 27 March 1971, which was read by Monica Lovinescu in her broadcast on RFE under the suggestive title of Refutation, Mircea Eliade speaks about the interview he granted to Adrian Păunescu and published in the Romanian magazine Contemporanul (The contemporary) on 10 and 17 March 1971. The historian of religion underlines the fact that he agreed to answer Păunescu’s questions on condition that the interview would be published in full. To his unpleasant surprise, the conversation was drastically censored and according to Eliade, the cuts dramatically altered the meaning of the interview. Specifically, the Romanian censorship removed those parts in which Eliade mentioned autobiographical details connected to his youth in interwar Romania, such as the impact that Nae Ionescu, a very influential right-wing-oriented journalist and professor of philosophy, had on his intellectual development. Also, the names of other renowned Romanian exiles such as Emil Cioran and Eugène Ionesco were removed, as was any reference to his co-generationist, Mircea Vulcănescu, who ended his life in a communist prison. Finally, any mention of his writings about the history of religion and philosophy of culture, which were central in Eliade’s work, were absent from the published interview. Consequently, Eliade bitterly concluded that: "As for the memories of the nights spent together in the winter of 1971, they are evoked by the poet and journalist Adrian Păunescu and belong to him entirely. When we were talking, I thought we were speaking the same language: the old, honest Romanian language that I learned in my childhood and which I am still speaking now, in my old age. I admit with immense sadness that I was wrong."

The censorship of the interview can be easily understood if one considers the political and cultural context in Romania at the beginning of the 1970s. The nationalist turn of the Ceaușescu regime (Petrescu 2009, 523–544) did not result in the rehabilitation of Nae Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, or Mircea Vulcănescu whose names were still on the list of the Romanian censorship. Moreover, the ending of the liberalisation period, marked by the so-called Theses of July 1971 on improving political-ideological education, made even more problematic the publishing of any reference to religion and history of religions. The paradox that Mircea Eliade accepted an interview with Adrian Păunescu only on the basis of the latter’s assurance that the text was going to be published uncensored in Romania can be understood if one takes into consideration the situation of the two protagonists involved. Since Mircea Eliade left Romania in 1940, he had lost touch with what was really going on in the country, and he seems to have been unaware about what censorship really meant and how it actually worked.  As for Adrian Păunescu, at that time a young man of only twenty-eight and without any obvious connection with the communist regime, he had come to the United States at the invitation of several Romanian writers. Enticed by the young poet’s genuine interest in his person and work, Mircea Eliade not only agreed to grant him an interview, but also answered wholeheartedly the provocative questions asked by Adrian Păunescu, at that time a promising and uncommitted young writer (Manolescu 2014).

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. 

The collection of the Czech journalist, dramatist and director of the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe, Ferdinand Peroutka (1895–1978), contains unique sources for the history of the Czechoslovak exile after 1948.