“Let me sink upwards (Waving image),” oil, gumming, mixed media, fiberboard, 305 × 342 cm.

The large format oil painting of Sándor Altorjai, consisting of two panels with adjoining sections of collages and applications: there is a jacket, a hat, a beard, a few old bank notes, and photos fixed on the left panel, and on the right there are plenty of photos, photocopies, and press clippings. The painted parts were made with multiple techniques, with brush, dripping, scratch, overprint, uncovering, one can see even marks of paint applied by feet. Originally a sculptural, shiny waving hand protruded from one of the sleeves of the jacket (in accordance with the subtitle).

The photos were taken during a film shoot with a close friend of the artist, Miklós Erdély, depicting him masked as a “poor Jew,” confronted with texts and press clippings of the period. The photocopy of the author’s identity card, placed in the lower right corner (substituting the sign), deserves special attention, because at that time it was forbidden to reproduce an official document in any form.

The work has an adventurous history. It was intended to be shown first at the yearly exhibition of the Studio of Young Artists in the Ernst Museum in 1967, but an unusually large jury arriving five days prior to the opening judged it inappropriate (along with 69 other artworks). However, this single work could not be carried away immediately due to its size and weight, so it remained in the exhibition space, but was covered with a drape. This way many visitors could see it by moving the drape.

The very same thing happened in 1980, at an exhibition organized after the death of the painter. Just before the opening, a party delegation from the district council descended on the spot and told to the director of the institution that the picture was inappropriate for exhibition due to its ambivalent Jewish aspects. The director called the curator to act accordingly, but he refused to remove the object because of its size and weight. The director then covered the picture with a drape himself, but the audience undraped it several times during the opening event.

The collection shows the activities of Modris Tenisons’ troupe. In 1966, Modris Tenisons founded the first mime troupe in the Soviet Union. It was made a separate section of the Kaunas National Drama Theatre in 1967. Later, in 1970, it moved to Kaunas Musical Theatre. The troupe was well known for its performances, as well as for creating and living in the Hippie community in Kaunas. After the self-immolation of Romas Kalanta in Kaunas in 1972, and the youth protests against the Soviet regime, Modris Tenisons and his troupe were forced to leave Kaunas Musical Theatre and end their creative work.

The minutes of the meeting of the three parties, convened to determine the responsibilities of Zvonimir Komarica, then director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, and also the chairman of the Commission on International Cultural Relations of Matica hrvatska (MH) and a member of the MH managing board, regarding the adoption of the Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language. Komarica was accused of participating in the debate on the text of the Declaration, and did not publicly dissociate himself nor attempt to prevent its publication. He was then expelled from the League of Communists of Croatia (LCC). The subject of the meeting was also the signing of a letter of support to Ljudevit Jonke, a signatory of the Declaration by members of the Emigrant Foundation of Croatia, Ivan Čizmić and Nada Bukan, for which they were also expelled from the LCC shortly thereafter.

By 1995, the document was, along with the other records of socio-political organisations, a part of the Archive of the Institute of History of the Labour Movement of Croatia/Institute of Contemporary History. That year, in July, it was handed over to the Croatian State Archives (CSA) ​​where it is kept today. The documents are accessible for use without any restrictions.

Alenka Puhar is the author of the first translation of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 into Slovenian, and at the same time into the language of any communist country. Puhar translated the novel in 1967 when she was still a student and it had a great influence on her. This was primarily reflected in the fact that the book gives its reader a device for critical thinking, which helped Puhar compare the society in the novel 1984 to Yugoslav society and come to comprehension that they are similar totalitarian systems. This knowledge determined Alenka Puhar’s future professional path.

The collection contains the first printed version of the novel 1984 which was translated in 1967, but does not include Puhar’s manuscript, which she handed in to the publisher. She did not keep the manuscript.

Pavel Doronin started his “anti-Soviet” activities in November 1967, when, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, he produced a short leaflet with a message criticizing the regime and considered “subversive” by the Soviet authorities. The content of this text – Кто Продаёт Свою Совесть / Кто Причиняет Стране Страдания (Who Sells One’s Consciousness / Who Causes Suffering to the Country) – represented an acrostic with the first four letters of each line forming the initials of the Soviet Communist Party – КПСС / CPSU). Thereafter, Doronin constructed seven typeset-stamps in his apartment (each one coinciding with a word of the acrostic), which he then used to print twenty-four leaflets.  Doronin spread the leaflets by, on the one hand, distributing six copies throughout Chișinău and, on the other hand, by sending the rest of the leaflets by post to various Soviet institutions, factories, and religious organizations. Another form of expressing his discontent was the drafting of caricatures and letters that he sent to various Soviet newspapers. Thus, in May 1970 Doronin creatively altered an anti-American caricature published in the Soviet journal Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star), the official organ of the Soviet Ministry of Defence, by inserting Breznhev’s portrait instead of the original image of the American president and by writing the initials of Czechoslovakia, Egypt and Vietnam against the background of heavy weapons, initially intended to refer to US war-mongering. Although during the preliminary inquiry the defendant insisted that he only intended to show the discrepancy between the official Soviet rhetoric of peace and the reality of Soviet military involvement abroad, the interpretation that the KGB investigators favoured emphasized the more serious accusation that Doronin in fact viewed the whole foreign policy of the USSR as more aggressive than that of the US. Finally, in a series of letters that he sent to the Soviet central newspapers Pravda and Izvestiia in October 1970, Doronin criticized various sensitive aspects of Soviet official policies and everyday life. Besides several short texts focusing on the ”Jewish question,” he also reacted to the debate around Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s nomination to the Nobel Prize for Literature. Reacting to the writer’s condemnation by the official Soviet press, Doronin wrote: “The journalists of a newspaper that is called Pravda (Truth) should be ashamed of spreading all sorts of baseless calumnies and of mocking a man who deserves only recognition, honour and respect from the Soviet people and all other peoples! And this is happening in a country where everyone is boastfully talking about Man as the main value? After all this, how can one believe in a Socialist future?” In another note he sent to Pravda, referring to a trial of a black marketer (spekuliant), Doronin harshly criticized the corruption and inequality within Soviet society, claiming that some party members were becoming a privileged class of “exploiters” instead of providing worthy examples of honesty and hard work. Despite the occasional, isolated and sporadic character of Doronin’s acts of defiance, this case is a fascinating example of how personal, social and political grievances could combine to stimulate an individual’s critical acumen beyond the limits usually tolerated by the regime. Doronin certainly did not fit the typical image of an anti-Soviet dissident or oppositional figure. However, the authorities took his “ideological deviation” seriously enough to spend considerable efforts in order to investigate his case and to condemn him for his “dangerous” views, despite his “sincere repentance” during the trial. 

The Alenka Puhar Collection on the Human Rights Movement in Slovenia/Yugoslavia was mostly created in the 1980s and testifies to the struggle of Slovenian and Yugoslav activists to promote and protect human rights in Yugoslavia. Alenka Puhar was one of the key people in the 1983 campaign to abolish the death penalty in Yugoslavia, and in the organization of mass protests in Ljubljana in 1988 and in the Slovenian spring in the late 1980s. The collection documents the struggle and connections between Slovenian activists and other Yugoslav activists and dissidents who had the common goal of promoting and protecting human rights in Yugoslavia and ultimately the collapse of the communist regime.