COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

From 1964 until the end of the 1970s, Hedwig Ulrike Ruşdea, a museologist at the Museum of Folk Technics, conducted multiple pieces of field research on the technology of windmills and on their history and role within rural communities in the region of Dobrogea. In this file, she compiled specification sheets for the researched windmills, notes on the history of artefacts, interviews with former owners, who had been labelled as kulaks (chiaburi in Romanian) by the communist regime because of their owning a windmill, observations on the economic and social role of windmills, analyses of their numeric evolution, photographs of windmills rescued from the villages of Enisala, Dunavăţ, Frecăţei, and Mahmudia in Dobrogea, and reports on the acquisition of these windmills. The information included in this file persuaded the leadership of the Museum to rescue and reassemble the four mills at its open-air exhibition located on the outskirts of Sibiu. The various data gathered in the file are also a valuable historical source on the history of the region's cultural heritage and on the impact on this heritage of the economic and social modernisation policies implemented by the communist regime.

He estimates that, he was called before the Cultural Committee of the League of Communist Youth of Vojvodina at least twice per year, which he considered to be tyrannical. “These people lack a fundamental understanding of what I’m doing. There are exceptional analytical texts that address certain phenomena: death, literature, irony, postmodernism…those various qualities within modern society and culture that expose a new reality and that introduce new questions to our culture. So what do they do? They file a forty page report. Should I kill myself over it? I sit there instead, forced to listen to this nonsense, and worry that I’ll be replaced. And they all continue on, with business-minded faces, going through papers and discussing them as if it were the last judgement of the Provincial Youth Alliance. (…) The people of the party who oversee everything came from the PC (Provincial Commune of the League of Communists of Vojvodina, cf. Aut). I was a young man then. And the Youth Union was assigned to eradicate not just me, but the entire editorial board.”Among the various forms of persecution, Zivlak also noted that every day for two months, a police officer required him to identify himself before entering the editorial office. Jovan Zivlak is forthright about psycho-somatic problems that he developed because of these pressures. He speculates that the only reason he remained  editor-in-chief of Polja for eight years was because Novi Sad lacked the media to carry out a personal attack on him.