COURAGE

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The card contains three cut and glued press clippings containing reports on trials for “offences against the people and the State by enemy propaganda.” As a criminal act aimed against the people and the State, enemy propaganda was defined in the 1951 Criminal Code as propaganda by illustration, writing, or public speech at rallies or otherwise, aimed against the state structure and social system, and against political, economic, military or other important institutions of the people’s government. Strict imprisonment was stipulated as punishment for the perpetration of such a crime.

Two press clippings refer to trials against Vlatko Pavletić (Zagreb, 2 December 1930 – Zagreb, 19 September 2007), the then editor-in-chief of the magazine Kritika, a publication of  the literary organization Matica hrvatska and the Croatian Association of Writers. The third clipping refers to a trial against journalist Smiljana Rendić (Split, 1926 – Trsat, 1994), because of her article “Izlazak iz genitiva ili drugi hrvatski preporod” [‘Exit from the genitive or the second Croatian revival’], published in 1971 in the issue no. 18 of the same magazine, which was therefore banned. Together with a group of officials of Matica hrvatska,  Pavletić was arrested in 1972 and then sentenced to a year and a half of strict imprisonment as a Croatian nationalist on charges of “attempting to overthrow and alter the state structure.” Rendić was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and was banned from public activity for one year after her release. They demonstrate a number of cases of prosecution against members of the Croatian Spring that followed the suppression of that reform movement in Croatia at the end of 1971. A significant part of this prosecution encompassed cultural institutions and humanist intellectuals. The work of Matica hrvatska and its magazine Kritika were banned by the communist authorities. The collection includes a number of press clippings about these events, grouped in several topics in the categories for Culture (filing folders KUL 320 and KUL 491) and Domestic affairs (filing folder UP 27 and UP 28), and in the dossiers Public Persons category. The documents are available for research and copying.

The philosophical notes of Lajos Szabó made in the years he spent abroad (between 1956 and 1967) fill more than one hundred and sixty notebooks. These notes in most cases are not contiguous texts, but groups of keywords and names, as Attila Kotányi drafted it, “systematizing scalings marked by abbreviations, paths of the branching correlations.” Szabó considered exact wording important, so he worked continuously on the purgation of language.

This concrete page was written in German. The first keyword, prismatic, refers to the interrelation of logic, ethics, and aesthetics (they relate as the prism makes colors visible). This concept has great significance in his thought. According to Kotányi, “this triple interrelation is the central dome of his philosophy.” As he worded it, “Prismatic research reveals the vortex motion of beauty, good, and true, in contrast with the dimness of ‘spirit’. The spirit is the unity, movement and energy of this three motifs.”

Petko Ogoyski in his collection with a piece of bread, the daily ration in the forced labour camp in Belene on the island Persin, he received on the day of his liberation from the camp in August 1953 and preserved. During the period of state socialism, the materials showing the repressive nature of the regime in Bulgaria were hidden at the birthplace of Petko Ogoyski, in the village of Ogoya, located between Sofia and the city of Vratsa. They were shown and made known to the public after the political turn in November 1989. After the end of the socialist state, numerous events were organized in which Petko Ogoyski participated and used materials of his collection (s. Events).

A request to stop the prosecution of Ján Čarnogurský, Hana Ponická, Anton Selecký, Miroslav Kusý and Vladimír Maňák addressed to the Czechoslovak President Gustáv Husák on 5 October 1989. The collection contains many requests or appeals to the President dealing with the prosecutions of church officials or believers. This request complains about the ignoring of other requests and criticises the imprisonment of Ján Čarnogurský, founder of the samizdat Bratislava Papers, and Miroslav Kusý. The appeal is signed by Roman Kaliský, František Mikloško, Martin M. Šimečka, Ján Langoš and other contributors in Bratislava Papers.

This samizdat miniature with its photocopied (from a microfilm) and manually bound pages represents a typical form of smuggling underground materials from Soviet Ukraine. Microfilms and miniature forms were the only way to safely smuggle abroad illegal literature and documents from the Soviet Union.

This samizdat book was rolled and hidden in a luggage of a Smoloskyp courier. This was the way how Smoloskyp couriers managed to smuggle many other Ukrainian samizdat and dissident materials, including Bil’mo by M. Osadchyi, O. Berdnyk’s manuscripts, the entire collection of the documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, D. Shumuk’s memoirs, a photo collection belonged to M. Rudenko, and so on. The obtained materials were later published in both Ukrainian and English, and were circulated in international media.

Mykhailo Braichevsky wrote his article Priednannia chy voz’ednannia? (Annexation or Reunification?) in 1966 in which he openly criticised the Theses on the 300^th Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia (1654-1954), a document imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1954 as the only permitted interpretation of the events of 1654 in Ukrainian history, namely, the Pereiaslav Council and the Treaty of Pereiaslav, after which Ukraine became a part of the Russian Empire. Braichevsky’s work was circulated in samizdat in Ukraine,  smuggled abroad, and was published in Canada as a brochure. As a result of this writing, Braichevsky was fired from the Institute of History, where he worked as a researcher. In the next decade he was oppressed by the Soviet authorities and the Communist Party that demanded his public “repentance” and acknowledgment of his research “falsities.” He was not allowed to officially continue his research career.