COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

The machine-read transcript of the audio recorded interviews from the secret meetings which took place in Božena Komárková´s flat, comprised of 42 pages. She discusses her life, reflection of T. G. Masaryk, St. Augustine, relationship to democracy, Christian faith, Socialism and Christianity, church affairs after the Communist coup in 1948, etc. The transcription is crossed out and supplemented by Božená Komárková´s comments. Part of the collection is also the original audio record. This document shows authentic and original views from the meetings and a wide range of views from the prominent figure of Protestant dissent - Božena Komárková.

The 11th Congress of the Union of Artists, which took place on 13-14 November 1987, was a significant event not only for artists, but also for other groups among the Soviet Lithuanian intelligentsia, which started to raise more vociferously questions about the historical memory, greater modernism, the historical heritage, and others. During the congress, speakers spoke about the necessity for the National Gallery and the Directorate of Art Exhibitions to apply more flexibility in managing this sphere of culture, and they also spoke about the need to democratise the work of art critics, about the necessary avoidance of pitching Soviet art against modernism, the importance of the integration of contemporary art into the global context, and a broader dialogue with foreign countries. During the congress, all the old Board of the Union of Artists was changed for new people (such as Bronius Leonavičius and Arvydas Šaltenis), who a few months later became leaders of the Sąjūdis national movement. Arvydas Šaltenis, one of the leaders of contemporary artists, called this congress a 'revolutionary congress, which was noticed by a public audience' (see http://www.bernardinai.lt/straipsnis/2016-07-25-arvydas-saltenis-nereikia-meluoti-grazinti-pudruoti-tikroves/146626), and which had an impact on Sąjūdis. 

The 5th Congress of Soviet Lithuanian Writers, which took place on 27-28 May 1970 in Vilnius, was a significant event among local writers, showing that ethnic values had become one of the main issues with local writers, but at the same time revealing that there were limits to Modernist expression. During the Congress, writers of the older generation, who dominated the Union of Writers, criticised their younger colleagues, calling their Modernist position Formalism. At the Congress, writers such as Eduardas Mieželaitis, Algirdas Pocius, Vytautas Bubnys and Algimantas Baltakis criticised authors such as Jonas Mikelinskas, Romualdas Lankauskas and Juozas Aputis, for disassociating themselves from tradition and everyday problems. 
This document is important, because it reveals that the older generation had adapted to the stricter ideological policies of Brezhnevism, and disciplined their younger colleagues. 

Travel reports of lecturers and members of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation are embodied in six volumes. In terms of time, they cover the period from 1983 to December 1989, mainly from Prague, Brno and Bratislava. The reports include the length and main purpose of the stay, a description of the trip including possible complications in crossing borders, meetings with other people and subjects of their interviews, information on specific activities of the state police, etc. Visitors of Czechoslovakia also proposed other forms of cooperation in their reports. There are unique and very specific documents mapping the concrete forms of the Czechoslovak dissent linked with underground universities, efforts of the foreign organisation and important Western representatives of science to support the unofficial educational environment, and documents describing the contemporary social and political conditions in Czechoslovakia including the activities of the state police.  

In his manuscripts, Tripalo records the notes of the proportions of the reformist movement, which his opponents called maspok. As one of the leading individuals, considered to be the most prominent public tribune, Tripalo became a chronicler and analyst of this phenomenon. As in the other Tripal annotations, his analytical and critical discourse testifies on the democratic evolution of an important party dissident.

As one of the key participants in the Croatian national movement called the Croatian Spring, Miko Tripalo in his dissident phase wrote reviews in which he analysed the issue of inter-ethnic relations in Yugoslavia. Tripalo's critical observations were directed at the actions of Croatian politicians who had gained affirmation after the fall of the Croatian Spring – people like Stipe Šuvar and Milka Planinc. Those notes are valuable contributions to a critical reflection on the open issues of Croatian national emancipation. 

The Hidden Galleries collection features a number of so-called network schemes created by the secret police and offers the unique possibility to compare examples from a number of different national contexts and time periods. Network schemes were created by the secret police as visual tools developed to envision underground religious communities as centralized and hierarchical organizations. Such schemes, which were devised by the Soviet secret police but were also used in Romania, Hungary and elsewhere, depict the network of insurgent religious and political organizations from bottom to top and include complex sets of social links and hierarchical relations as perceived by the secret police. Local religious groups are routinely represented as interconnected and subordinated ‘cells’ of highly organized vertical networks with groups made to fit the same organizational logic whether this reflected reality or not. At the same time, the schemes were also used to show the results in progress of secret police operations against the targeted groups. The schemes sometimes indicate which individuals had been arrested within the network and the number of arrested believers in the repressed group as well as showing which groups and individuals remained free or under surveillance. The network schemes were either printed using photo-printing technology, sometimes including collections of photographic images of those represented, or were hand-drawn. 

http://hiddengalleries.eu/digitalarchive/s/en/item/16

One of the best known books by Franjo Tuđman, Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti: rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosilja (Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy) was published in mid-1989, but the manuscript was completed in February 1988. Tuđman unsuccessfully attempted to publish the book in Croatia for a year and a half. Without the approval of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia, it was difficult to find a publisher who would have the courage to publish the book, which dealt with a topic for which Tuđman had been prosecuted by the regime twice. Finally, Marija Peakić-Mikuljan, director of the Matica hrvatska publishing house, took the risk. But even when the book was printed in June 1989, an order from the top of the communist regime in Croatia came not to distribute it. Nevertheless, the unfolding political situation in 1989, in which the political authority of the League of Communists continually declined, opened the way for its distribution.

The focus of the book is the issue of victims of World War II. Tuđman tried to draw attention to the manipulations and forgeries which tended to multiply the numbers of Serbian victims and accuse the whole Croatian nation as genocidal and criminal (Jareb 2011, 305). Tuđman was one of the first historians who encouraged scholarly research into this problem in the mid-1960s. In the book, he also shows how and why his efforts were impeded, and how he was later marginalised and imprisoned. The book represents an outline of his previous research and papers on the issue of victimhood. Tuđman opposed the so-called Jasenovac myth – the one-sided approach and multiplication of the number of casualties, especially of Serbian victims. Tuđman described the origin of the myth which was, in his view, “used (...) as a direct foundation for the theory of the genocidal character of any expression of Croatian identity” (Tuđman 1989, 120). Tuđman exhibited consistency in fighting against unscholarly approaches and exaggeration of the number of victims because he was also critical of the so-called Bleiburg myth. He rejected similar exaggerations of the number of victims killed by the communist authorities in 1945 (the so-called Bleiburg tragedy) that are popular in the Croatian diaspora.