COURAGE

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The Alexandru Călinescu private collection epitomises the trajectory of an intellectual in an important university city who began to practise a camouflaged contestation, published in local student magazines, with a limited readership, and ended up in unequivocal public opposition, disseminated transnationally through foreign radio stations. The collection marks some of the key episodes in the movement of resistance to and contestation of the communist regime as it manifested itself in Iaşi, the historical capital of the region of Moldavia and the city with the oldest university in the Old Kingdom of Romania. At the same time, the collection and the personal story of Alexandru Călinescu illustrate a lesson in dignity in very difficult times, when there were few who had the courage to speak openly against the Ceaușescu regime.

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). 

The Andrei Pandele private collection is the most significant testimony in pictures, mainly black and white, to the demolition of historic monuments and districts in the Romanian capital in the period of late communism. Together with photographs that are essential for the preservation of the memory of a mutilated city and a vanished cultural heritage, the collection also includes a series of images capturing aspects of the degradation everyday life throughout the profound crisis of the 1980s. These suggest both the absurdity of the policies of the Ceaușescu regime and the grotesque mutations in the everyday routine of ordinary people to which these policies gave rise.

The Andrei Partoş–Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti Private Collection includes photographs, publications, and various documents regarding a seasonal radio station that operated during the summer holiday period in Costineşti, which was officially and popularly considered to be the seaside resort for young people. This radio station and its associated activity in Costineşti was a social phenomenon without any term of comparison in the Romania of the 1980s, an epitome of the alternative culture of the younger generation under later Romanian communism and a formative experience for the generation who supports the democratic consolidation in present-day Romania.

Andrei Siniavskii was a Soviet dissident, writer and literary critic and student of literature. The bulk of the collection includes his writings, correspondence and photographs. It is an extensive collection, containing material that he produced and collected over his lifetime, together with his wife Mariia Rozanova, who was lesser known but also a significant figure in the dissident movement. These include his writings, diaries, correspondence, interrogation and records from the 1966 trial of Siniavskii and another writer Yuli Daniel, printed matter, sound recordings, photographs, and memorabilia relating to Russian literature, civil rights in the Soviet Union, political trials and conditions of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, and Russian émigré affairs. This collection also includes records of the Russian-language Paris journal Sintaksis, published and edited by Siniavskii himself.