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Vasyl Stus was born in the village of Rakhnivka, in the Haisynskyi district of the Vinnitsa region in Ukraine in 1938, moving with his family to Stalino (now Donetsk) the following year. Stus spent his formative years in Donetsk, later studying history and philology at Donetsk State University and teaching Ukrainian in the village of Tauzhne in Kirovograd oblast in 1959, before two years of service in the army. When he returned, Stus taught Ukrainian at a school in Makeevka in Donetsk oblast. In 1963, he matriculated to the Institute of Literature named after Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv, which was an important turning point in his personal history. There he became involved in the literary scene and the sixtiers movement, turning a quiet poet into a political figure.

Along with Viacheslav Chornovil and Ivan Dziuba, Stus spoke out against arbitrary arrests of artists, writers and human rights activists, which had taken place as part of the post-Khrushchev crackdown on the intelligentsia in 1964-1965. They used as their platform the Kyiv screening of Sergei Parajanov’s internationally acclaimed film “Shadow of Forgotten Ancestors,” based on a novel written by Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Dziuba spoke first, denouncing the arrests, but the KGB did not let him finish speaking. They chased him off the stage and switched on sirens to drown out his voice. According to Nadia Svitlychna, who was also in attendance, Stus stood up and shouted: "All those against tyranny, rise!" Only a few people out of several hundred stood up and they paid dearly for doing so. The philologist Yuriy Badzio and the literary critic Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska both lost their party memberships. Badzio was fired from his job and then in 1979 imprisoned for his work "The Right to Live," while Kotsiubynska's career as a gifted literary specialist and translator was over. In her recollections, Kotsiubynska remembered this episode vividly, noting that when Stus sat down, he was shaking, making Kotsiubynska wonder how a gentle soul like this would make it in such a harsh world. Indeed what sets Stus apart from so many others was the source of his intellectual resistance to the Soviet regime. It seemed to well up from a deeply principled core, which despite his gentle nature was the source of incredible intransigence in the face of myriad indignities forced upon Soviet citizens.   

For his participation in this protest, Stus was kicked out of the Institute of Literature in Kyiv, after which he tried to have his poetry published through official channels to no avail. His volume "Kruhovert" ("Maelstrom") was rejected by Soviet censors, as was “Zymovi dereva" (“Winter trees”), despite generally positive reviews from his colleagues, the poet Ivan Drach and the literary critic Yevhen Adelheim. Both these volumes were published unofficially and circulated through underground networks. The publication of "Zymovi Dereva" in Brussels in 1970 was one of the charges levied against Stus during his trial, which took place in January-September 1972. During the trial, Stus was imprisoned in a cell at KGB headquarters on Volodymyrska St. in Kyiv, where he wrote "Chas Tvorchosti" ("Time of Creativity"). Total isolation fueled Stus's creativity rather than stymieing it, one of many reasons he proved so difficult to break. 

Stus was sentenced to 5 years of hard labor and three years of exile, which he spent in Mordovia and the Matrosov settlement in Magadan oblast. His sentence ended in 1979, after which Stus returned to Kyiv and immediately took to defending members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group who had fallen under scrutiny. In May 1980, he was arrested again and given another 10 years of hard labor and 5 years of exile, which he served in Perm-36, a forced labor camp for political prisoners. He staged hunger strikes to protest his treatment in the camp, but managed to write and smuggle out a number of poems.

In an interview with several members of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group (KHPG) in 1999, Armenian political prisoner Paruyr Haykiryan, who also served two sentences in Perm, recalled that neither Chornovil nor Stus behaved as though they were prisoners in a concentration camp. They lived for the sake of literature, art, and Ukrainian history. Hayrikyan said that Stus’ Ukrainian comrades deliberately shielded him from the banal language of Soviet protest, at times insisting that he not sign petitions, so that his poetry could speak for itself.

The Stus he describes is someone who maintained his humanity, never resorting to violence even when attacked by other prisoners. When his manuscripts were confiscated Hayrikyan helped organize a hunger strike demanding that Stus’ papers be returned to him. The camp administrators returned the nearly 100 manuscripts taken from Stus, indicating that indicates that they were trying to prevent Stus’ private principled rebellion from spreading to other inmates. Even so, his last collection of poems "Ptakh Duzhi" (close to 300 poems) was destroyed in Kuchino. 

As powerful a force as Stus was in unofficial circles, among Soviet internal exiles comingling in hard labour camps and in émigré communities, he was not that well known in his own country until the late 1980s, when the policies of glasnost and perestroika lifted the veil on the suppressed recent past. In an interview with Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, Yevhen Zakharov, director of KHPG, said the first time he had heard of Stus was in 1988, when he managed to get his hands on a volume published outside the Soviet Union. Zakharov was floored by how much Stus’ poetry pushed past what was imaginable in Soviet Ukraine.

On August 28, 1985, Stus was once again thrown into solitary confinement, because whilst reading a book he leaned his elbow on the bars in his room, which was a violation of the prison code. In response, he staged another hunger strike, which he vowed to keep to the end. He died during the night on September 4, under suspicious circumstances. Stus was buried in Perm before being repatriated to Ukraine in 1989, he now lies in repose at the Baikovo cemetery in Kyiv.

Frantisek Starek (born 1952) is a former dissident, signatory of Charter 77 and active member and contributor to “second culture” – the underground movement.

He took part in organizing musical events and performances, lectures, and the dissemination of samizdat literature. As a part of the well-known trial of the underground band Plastic People of The Universe (1976), Starek was convicted of public offence and disorderly behaviour, and subsequently imprisoned. The reason for this was his above-mentioned activities and contacts with prohibited artists like Svatopluk Karasek (a musician) and Ivan Magor Jirous (a poet, artist and underground mentor).

Along with his involvement in the underground movement, he also participated in the distribution of Charter 77 materials and in organizational tasks. He was also a signatory of Charter 77. His most important action in the field of second culture was his editorial work in Vokno, second culture journal. Vokno became an information channel and shared platform of the Czech underground, which enabled communication and text circulation across the republic.

Starek also actively collaborated with the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS – Výbor na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných) and other civic and opposition movements. On an international level, he kept in contact with the Polish Solidarity.

As well as his oppositional activities, he worked in many different jobs, such as geophysicist, lumberjack, and steam engine stoker.

Due to his oppositional and underground activities, he was imprisoned several times during the communist regime. After the collapse of the regime, he continued publishing Vokno for a short time. After that, he entered the State Secret Services and remained there for a long time (1990-2007). He then started working as a researcher at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. He focuses on topics related to the underground movement, so he is both a researcher and contemporary witness.

Starek was honoured with a state medal for of his work in state security in 2003. He also takes part in many commemorative events which aims to popularization of history, anti-communist opposition, memory of communist crimes and underground and independent culture. He is a co-author of Baráky, a publication which describes the community-based lives of youths in revolt, and he also worked on a documentary series called The Underground Phenomenon. He still publishes his Voknoviny and takes part in organizing cultural events and concerts (thematically connected to the underground movement).

In 2016, he was a senate candidate of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS – a right wing Czech party) as non-party member in one of Prague’s districts. He ended up in 3rd place.

Ivan Supek was a Croatian physicist and writer and one of the most prominent Croatian engaged intellectuals in the latter half of the 20^th century. He was born in Zagreb in 1915, where he graduated with degrees in mathematics and physics from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in 1939. At the end of 1940, he obtained his doctorate in physics in Leipzig, after which he became an assistant to Werner Heisenberg and worked on research into superconductivity and quantum electrodynamics. As a young man in the early 1930s, he joined the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ), and then the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). However, at the end of the same decade, during the so-called “conflict on the left,” he refused to “inherit the dogmatically understood dialectical materialism which he considered incompatible with modern knowledge, freedom and creativity,” and when he refused to accept Stalin's infallibility, “he was excluded from the KPJ in 1940” (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015).

In March 1941, because of his anti-fascist attitudes and activities, he was arrested by the Gestapo, but after several months he was released at Heisenberg's intervention. Instead of continuing his work with Heisenberg, Supek returned to Zagreb and joined the anti-fascist movement in Croatia. As a member of the Presidency of the First Congress of Croatian cultural workers in Topusko in June 1944, he held the only speech on science, emphasising the potential danger of developing nuclear weapons (http://info.hazu.hr/en/clanovi_akademije/osobne_stranice/ivan_supek).

After the Second World War, he was the first professor of theoretical physics at the Faculty of Science and Mathematics (University of Zagreb), where he founded the school of theoretical physics. He was also the founder and the first director of the Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB), founded in 1950 for research in the field of atomic physics. Supek was “the most prominent opponent of the political drive in Yugoslavia aimed at the development of nuclear weapons” (Ilakovac 2013, 37). That is why he was forced to resign from the IRB in 1958 (Ilakovac 2013, 16).

Besides his work in the field of physics, he made a significant contribution to the philosophy of science, striving to link the natural sciences with philosophy, art, humanism, religion and ethics. He was the first professor of philosophy of science at the University of Zagreb. In the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU, today the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, HAZU), of which he was a full member since 1961 (he became a corresponding member in 1948), he founded the Institute for the Philosophy of Science and Peace in 1965. The foundation of this institute was a part of his efforts in the struggle for the principles of peace, prosperity and disarmament, which was then most actively promoted at the global level by the Pugwash Movement. He joined the movement in 1961 and initiated the formation of its Yugoslav branch. On this agenda, Supek developed intense international cooperation and initiated and edited the journal Encyclopaedia moderna, which was also based on the principles of the Pugwash Movement.

During the Croatian Spring, he was the chancellor of the University of Zagreb (1968-1972) and encouraged the establishment of the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik (1970). Because of his disapproval of the conclusions of the twenty-first session of the Presidency of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in December 1971, which condemned the goals of Croatian Spring, and because he expressed solidarity with the persecuted Croatian intellectuals after the fall of the Croatian Spring, he came under attack by the regime and in the 1970s he was marginalized as politically unfit. Then he turned to the literary work that had preoccupied him since his youth.

He wrote mostly novels and plays. In 1959, he wrote his first novel Dvoje između ratnih linija (Two Between the Firing Lines), inspired by the so-called “conflict on the left” before the Second World War and concerned with the fate of an individual caught between conflicting collectives. In the same year, he published the play Na atomskom otoku (On the Atomic Island), which was soon banned, because the censors realised that it was a critique of the secret nuclear bomb project in Yugoslavia (http://info.hazu.hr/hr/clanovi_akademije/osobne_stranice/ivan_supek).

In the 1960s, he wrote several historical novels and dramas, some of which may be seen as expressions of disagreement with the social and political system in Yugoslavia. The biographical-historical drama Heretik (The Heretic, 1968) was the only of his plays that was well received by audiences and critics. While telling the story of the Renaissance heretic Mark Antun de Dominis, Supek alluded to the status of dissidents in the latter half of the 20^th century. In this drama, he also alluded to his own position as a man acting against the dominant social streams (Senker 2015, 45), although at that time (in the 1960s) he still had a distinguished position in public life (interview with Marotti, Bojan). After the fall of the Croatian Spring, his works became undesirable to the authorities. The first edition of his novel Opstati usprkos (Surviving in Spite, 1971), was burned at the beginning of government’s clash with the Croatian Spring, and his novel Extraordinarius was withdrawn from sale in 1974 because of content that alluded to the Croatian Spring, (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015).

In the 1980s he fell into even greater disfavour due to his writing. The book Krivovjernik na ljevici (Heretic on the Left) had a significant impact. The book was published in Bristol in 1980. It depicted the most recent history of Croatia from Suepk’s perspective and criticised the repressive methods by which the Communist Party built its totalitarian rule in Yugoslavia. That is was why he found himself in the line of fire by dogmatic communists. These attacks intensified after 1983, when a portion of Supek’s memoirs was published in the book So Speak Croatian Dissidents (Norval: Ziral), and especially when he published his book Krunski svjedok protiv Hebranga (Crown Witness against Hebrang) in Chicago (in English and Croatian). Supek described the circumstances of Andrija Hebrang's murder and the role of the UDBA (State Security Service) in that act. The regime unjustifiably began to label Supek as an “Ustasha” and a “leader of hostile émigré communities.” He was called for interrogations by the police, and his passport was confiscated, which was particularly difficult for him as an internationally renowned scientist.

As the crisis of the communist system in Yugoslavia escalated, Supek renewed his public activity and welcomed the introduction of the multiparty system (Ilakovac 2013, 21). In 1991 he was elected president of the JAZU (which was soon renamed HAZU) and remained at its head until 1997. He was a vocal opponent of the military aggression against the Republic of Croatia in the early 1990s and sought support from the global public for Croatia's struggle for independence. He was also a harsh critic of all democratically elected Croatian governments, stressing certain negative social phenomena (Ilakovac 2013, 40-41).

According to some of his associates, Supek liked to act outside of institutions. Though he was a left-wing intellectual, the militant aspect of socialist regimes deterred him from fostering closer co-operation with communist rulers (interview with Marotti, Bojan). Bojan Marotti describes him in an interview for COURAGE as an individual who liked his heretical position, as a man who always walked in the opposite direction, who opposed the state and the prevailing currents in everything. Even after the collapse of communism, when Croatian patriotism became the dominant paradigm, he soon moved to a specific heretical position, although he was a Croatian patriot (interview with Bojan Marotti). Supek received the Ruđer Bošković Award for Science (1960) and the Republic of Croatia Lifetime Achievement Award (1970), and the Croatian Post Office issued a stamp bearing his image in 2015 (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015). He died in Zagreb in 2007. He was the brother of sociologist and philosopher Rudi Supek.

Croatian ethnographer Olga Supek was born in Paris on January 3, 1949. She graduated with a degree in ethnography and sociology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in 1973 and earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1982. She worked at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb (1976-1988) and the Department of Ethnography at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb (1988-1991). From 1991 to 2008, she lectured on cultural anthropology at the University of Texas, where from 1999 until 2006 she was the head of the College of Arts and Sciences Advising Center. Since 2009, she has taught ethnography and cultural anthropology at the University of Zadar. She is the daughter of renowned Croatian sociologist Rudi Supek, and one of his legitimate heirs. When arranging the Rudi Supek Personal Papers in the Croatian State Archives, and during the preparation of the collection’s analytical inventory, she helped to identify the persons in the photographs.