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Gheorghe Muruziuc (b. 19 November 1930, Fălești; d. 25 September 1998, Bălți), completed four grades in a Romanian primary school and then pursued his incomplete secondary education under the Soviet school system. Probably due to this mixed schooling experience, he acquired a Romanian national consciousness. In 1949, he was forcibly mobilized to the coal mines in Novoshakhtinsk, Rostov on Don region. He became a high-skilled electrician and returned to the MSSR in the early 1960s. He participated in the construction of the sugar factory, and in 1963 he was hired as an electrician at the same plant. In the early 1950s, while in Abkhazia, he married a woman of Tatar origin. Muruziuc initially tried to sew and publicly display a Romanian flag on 12 June 1966, on the occasion of elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, but he was apparently prevented from doing so by his wife. However, on the night of 27/28 June 1966, when the Soviet authorities were preparing to celebrate the twenty-sixth anniversary of  “Moldavia’s  liberation from the Romanian capitalist and bourgeois yoke” (as the events of June 1940 were commonly labelled in official Soviet parlance), he raised the Romanian tricolour on the chimney of the sugar factory in Alexăndreni at about 4,30 am. When the day broke, the Soviet authorities panicked and sent representatives of all relevant institutions to descend upon the factory: the district militia, the local and district party committee, the administration of the factory, and the KGB from Bălți and Chişinău. Muruziuc held out for five hours on the roof of the factory, more precisely on the 45m factory chimney. All sorts of officials tried to persuade him to descend, but those who tried to climb on the roof were discouraged by Muruziuc, who used a batch of bricks and cement fragments to drive them away. After five hours, during which the whole village was discussing Muruziuc’s action, he decided to climb down. He was immediately interrogated by the local prosecutor, and on 30 June his case was discussed in an open party meeting at the factory. It is important to note that he had been a candidate member of the CPSU since March 1966. During the party meeting, he reiterated his position, refusing to resort to self-criticism. In fact, he asserted that “Moldavia should only exist for Moldavians, and persons of other nationalities should pack their suitcases and leave Moldavia’s territory.” He also voiced his opinion that “the Moldavian Republic should leave the USSR according to national criteria.” Significantly, both during this meeting and later interrogations, Muruziuc claimed to speak for the “whole Moldavian people” and to be defending its interests, ostensibly neglected and ignored by the Soviet authorities.

 

He was arrested on 3 July and officially accused of “fomenting national hatred and undermining the national and racial equality” of Soviet peoples. He was also accused of disturbing public order (“hooliganism”) due to his behaviour during the factory incident. During his interrogations at the KGB headquarters in Chișinău, the changes in his testimony prompted the KGB officials to suspect him of being mentally ill. He was scheduled to undergo a detailed psychiatric assessment and was hospitalized in Costiujeni psychiatric hospital, near Chişinău, for twenty-four days. Interestingly, the punitive medical system, frequently used in the USSR to silence dissenting views, failed in this case. According to Muruziuc’s later claims, he was helped by one of the doctors, who advised him to avoid taking the prescribed medicine and thus remain sane. After that, the KGB investigated him for several months in a row, and interviewed a large number of witnesses (family members, co-workers, factory officials, acquaintances, etc.). In November 1966, he was sentenced to two years of incarceration in a labour camp in Ivdel, situated in Sverdlovsk region in the Urals. He was released before completing his sentence, in March 1968 (after one year, nine months, and ten days). He displayed dignified behaviour during the trial, and stated openly what he thought, in particular that Moldavia was being robbed of its resources and that Moldavians (that is, ethnic Romanians) were being discriminated against by the Soviet authorities. Moreover, Muruziuc advocated the MSSR’s breakaway from the USSR and the settlement of the national problem either by creating an independent state or by uniting with Romania. At a certain moment, he was encouraged to leave for Romania together with his family, probably because the Soviet authorities realized that he was “incorrigible” from an ideological viewpoint. However, Muruziuc turned down the offer, saying that he wanted to remain in the MSSR, where he was born. Upon his return from the labour camp, the KGB offered to provide him with an apartment in any city of the MSSR, but he categorically refused and insisted on living in Alexăndreni. It was only years later, when his children were grown up, that he moved to Bălţi, the largest city in the northern part of the republic. His family suffered a lot, as the authorities harassed them while he was missing in 1966–1968. Some workers of the sugar factory were instigated by their chiefs to label Muruziuc’s family members “fascists.” When Muruziuc returned from prison, he insisted on being hired at the sugar factory again. Although the authorities refused at first, he ultimately got his old job back. He later worked for a construction firm in Bălți and remained critical of the regime. He was legally rehabilitated on 11 March 1991, when the Moldovan Supreme Court annulled his sentence and closed the case against him. 

Anna Mydlarska is a filmmaker, archivist, translator, and academic teacher. From the beginning of the 1980s she cooperated with "Solidarity": she was Lech Wales’s interpreter during the interviews with foreign journalists. She was also the worker of the National Commission of Solidarity and Solidarity’s Bulletin in Gdansk, where she regularly translated foreign press articles. Apart from that, she translated illegal foreign literature for the underground publications.

She has been the head of the Department of Film Documentation in European Solidarity Centre (ECS) in Gdansk since the institution’s creation in 2008. She has been overlooking the content and organisation of “Mediateka”: a media library which archives original video and voice recordings from the 1970s and 1980s. Mydlarska also leads ECS’s Film Notations, which is her authorial project, based on the interviews with Solidarity’s activists and leaders of political and cultural opposition.

Her life mission is to preserve the memory of the democratic movement and the people of political and cultural opposition in socialist Poland. She acts as a film director, producer and screenwriter – not only in the project of Notations, but also in numerous documentary films. In 1996 she was awarded the so-called “Polish Pulitzer” (the Main Award of Polish Journalist Association) for her documentary “The Dawn of Emigration – Conversations in Paris” (pl. “Zmierzch emigracji – rozmowy paryskie”). In 2006 she received the “Merited for Polish Culture” medal.

She is a wife of Jacek Mydlarski, a painter associated with Polish cultural opposition scene of 1980s.

Mykolaitis-Putinas is a famous Lithuanian novelist, poet, playwright and literary theorist, and a professor at Kaunas and later Vilnius University. In 1909, he entered the seminary in Seinai. He was ordained a priest in 1915. He later continued his studies at the St Petersburg Catholic Academy. Mykolaitis-Putinas published his first collection of poems in St Petersburg. After St Petersburg, he continued his studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. After completing his studies, he returned to Lithuania. In 1933, he published his most famous novel ‘In the Shadow of the Altars’, which caused a great scandal in Lithuania, as it describes a priest’s doubts and his eventual renunciation of his vocation. In 1935, Mykolaitis-Putinas left the priesthood. He started teaching at Vilnius University in 1940, where he became a professor.

Mykolaitis-Putinas decided not to flee but to stay in Soviet Lithuania in 1944. During the Soviet period he was known not only as a poet and a novelist, but also as a teacher at Vilnius University (until 1954). He nurtured a lot of writers and critics, and passed on the traditions of literature in independent Lithuania to the new generation of teachers and scholars. (For a very short period of time, from 1945 to 1946, Mykolaitis-Putinas was director of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature.) During the Late Stalinist period, he was criticised by Party officials for his political passivity and his anti-Marxism. In 1946, Mykolaitis-Putinas was obliged to publicly repent for his stance. Only a couple of his writings were published during this period. The government halted the publication of his famous novel ‘In the Shadow of the Altars’. (The novel was only published in Soviet Lithuania in 1954.) Another novel by him Sukilėliai (Rebels), in which he described an uprising of 1863 in Lithuania against the Imperial Russian government, was published in 1957. Mykolaitis-Putinas’ collected writings were published between 1959 and 1969 in ten volumes. A complete collection of his writings in 13 volumes started to be published in 1989; the 12th volume was published in 2013. 

Mészáros grew up in a rural environment, but regularly commuted to a neighbouring city to attend school. As a college student, he had to cross half of the country, since he attended the Berzsenyi Dániel College of Pedagogy (today the University of West Hungary) in Szombathely. In the 1980s, there were only two institutions of higher education in Hungary which offered Library Studies, and the better program was at Berzsenyi College, so the city of Szombathely drew in students who were interested in this field from all over the country. This is significant because the town is located at the western border of Hungary. The Austrian media was easily accessible in Szombathely, and Western materials could be smuggled over the border. Police officers boarding at Celldömölk monitored passengers on trains and asked them about the reasons for their trips near the borders, but these investigations did not primarily target students.  

At the college, however, the students did worry about being under surveillance. Members of the police were regular guests at the dormitory, from where a student was taken in several times because he was a Jehova's Witness. As was not uncommon for members of this denomination, the student underlined passages from the Bible, and officers found this very suspicious. At the college, Mészáros encountered samizdat materials for the first time. It is also telling about the atmosphere in which they lived that Mészáros was only able to borrow the first samizdat he saw for a couple of hours, because the owner was worried about agents reporting to the political police.

The first samizdat Mészáros read was a typewritten copy of Hungarian philosopher and social critic Béla Hamvas' essay entitled "Direct Morality and Bad Conscience" (1960). He got his hands on Hamvas’ work in 1986, shortly after the Chernobyl disaster, which proved a memorable experience. As Mészáros remembered, official Hungarian media understated the significance of the event, implying even that it was not a nuclear catastrophe. At the Department of Physics at Berzsenyi College, however, they registered high levels of radiation. This information was circulated in Szombathely, and it was reinforced by Austrian news programmes which reported about Austrian authorities closing playgrounds, since the sand was very responsive to radioactivity. Hungarian media, in contrast, did not even report on whether conditions, and failed to communicate that radioactive clouds were passing over the country. Mészáros was reading Hamvas at the time, and Hamvas wrote dictatorships eventually end up falsifying even the weather reports. (According to Hamvas, "The weather report has to cease to be simple mediation of data, and it must contain disinformation that is somehow favourable to the government.") These lines were a revelation for Mészáros. He realized that this was the reality in which he lived.

Radio broadcasts were also important sources for Mészáros in this period. When he was in Györ in Western Hungary for compulsory military service, he was listening to the Cologne-based Deutschland Funk while he was on guard. The watchtowers were ideal places to listen to Western radio broadcasts, because the reception was relatively good. He was also listening to Radio Free Europe, but he did that at home. At the college, he was himself involved in the college radio, and in 1987, they produced a program on the 1956 Hungarian revolution: they interviewed students, asking them what they knew about and what they thought about the revolution. At the time, this was permitted, but a political police officer came to supervise the program on the spot. Still, recording and circulating a program from Austrian television was out of the question. According to Mészáros, such these kinds of ambivalences and contradictions were very characteristic of the system at the time. But the regime could not prevent information from being mediated to other parts of the country.

In 1988, Mészáros began his job at his first workplace, the Petőfi Literary Museum, where he has been working ever since. He was a trainee at the Museum in his final year of the college, together with his supervisor at the time, Zsolt Bánki.

Margita Múčková (* 1954) is from Senec. While studying at secondary school, she met with professor Ivan Gróf, a Salesian priest who worked with young people. He gradually involved her in spreading the gospel during communism. At that time, Margita Múčková's activities involved copying spiritual literature and disseminating it. In the last year of her study (1972), she took part in spiritual exercises with Ivan Gróf in Pezinok. In 1975, Gróf was detained for 48 hours by the secret police. During his detention, the police had access to his documents, which contained information about his contacts and collaborators. As a result, the secret police turned their attention also to Mrs. Múčková, who later worked in Medika (a company supplying medicines to pharmacies and hospitals).
On 10 October 1975, at 1:00 pm, police officers came to her place of employment and detained Mrs. Múčková, explaining that she was to be accussed as a witness (this followed the detention of Mr. Gróf). At only 20 years old, she was held in the police station and subjected to interrogation. During this hearing, they screamed at her and questioned her about her brother, who secretly studied theology. They also asked her about Gróf and their activities together. Mrs. Múčková answered the questions, signed the minutes, and was allowed to go home. Later she continued Christian activities with her husband, but they were under surveillance by the secret police.
As Mrs. Múčková remembers: "We never criticised the state, nor did we even sign the Charter 77. Professor Gróf said that our policy is the policy of the Gospel, and if they will persecute us for that, so be it. But anti-state activities, or materials, or swearing ... those things were not done. We tried to distance ourselves from those things." 
Mrs. Múčková remained at home on maternity leave for an extended period, and her children were also at home because she refused to send them to be educated at the socialist kindergarten. She was active in the secret church until the revolution. Her husband died tragically in 1995.