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Jindřich Chalupecký was a Czech literary and art critic, theoretician and historian. He studied at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, however he did not finish his studies. He briefly worked as a teacher and, later in various arts organisations, such as The Czechoslovak Union of Visual Artists. From 1930 he published literary and art critiques, and later studies and essays. Some of them were also issued as book editions. He dealt with post-surrealistic crisis of European avant-garde movements in particular. Starting in the 1940s, he co-organised exhibitions. He was a theoretician of the art movement Skupina 42 (Group 42) founded in 1942. The group did not have any defined program, however artists associated with this group were primarily interested in cities and an urban way of life.

Chalupecký could not publish after the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948 as his writings and attitudes diverted from then required socialist-realism. However, his works could officially circulate during the short liberalization period in the 1960s. From 1965 to 1970 he managed the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague. During this period, many important exhibitions were organised there, including the exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s works in 1969. From the beginning of the 1970s, after the suppression of the “Prague Spring”, he once again became a “banned author”. Thus, he published in samizdat or in exile and foreign magazines. During normalization, Jindřich Chalupecký became an important and uniting figure of Czechoslovak unofficial art as many painters and sculptors visited him regularly. Chalupecký also saw some positive aspects of the impact of normalization on artists. According to him, artists were forced to create under the political pressure, however, at the same time, they were freed from the harmful commercial influence.

Chalupecký’s texts were officially issued as re-editions or anthologies only after 1989. Today, Chalupecký is considered to be the most influential personality of the Czech art theory of the second half of the Twentieth Century. His specific and original writings about art can be hardly imitated or surpassed. The legacy of Jindřich Chalupecký has been disseminating since 1990 through the prize named in his honour, the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. This prize is annually awarded to young visual artists under 35 years old.

He studied journalism. In the 1970s he worked in a popular cultural programme Studio 2 on national television. In the 1990s he ran a private production house. He co-founded the Great Orchestra for Christmas Charity Foundation (Fundacja Wielkiej Orkiestry Świątecznej Pomocy), one of the most renowned Polish charity actions which since 1993 has been gathering money for medical equipment.

One of the initiators of the Comitte of Defending Democracy (Komitet Obrony Demokracji) – a civic initiative of a liberal character which organizes mass protests against the government of Law and Justice party since their victory in 2015.

Viacheslav Chornovil was a journalist, a sixtier, human rights activist and founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. He studied journalism in Kyiv, finishing his degree after some fits and starts in 1960. After working for a Lviv television station for two years, Chornovil returned to Kyiv, where he applied to do graduate work but was not admitted for political reasons. He instead went to work for Dnipro GES and then a local newspaper. In 1963, together with Alla Horska, Ivan Svitlychny, Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Zverstiuk created the Club of Creative Youth in Kyiv, taking active part in the burgeoning sixtiers movement, disseminating and publishing samizdat, and organizing a number of literary and civic gatherings. In 1965, he, Ivan Dziuba and Vasyl Stus publicly spoke out against arrests that had taken place of a number of their fellow travelers, choosing as their venue of protest the Kyiv screening of Sergei Parajanov’s internationally acclaimed film „Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.” As a result, Chornovil was fired from his job and subject to myriad searches and surveillance. He also refused to testify against the brothers Horyn’, calling the judges considering their case criminals, which resulted in additional punitive measures against him.

After publishing an account of these ongoing repressions abroad, Chornovil himself was tried and sentenced to three years of hard labor in 1967. He was amnestied and released in 1969, resuming immediately his activism, first in support of Ivan Dziuba, who was being pressured to recant the arguments outlined in his work Internationalism or Russification and later in the publication of 5 editions of the journal Ukrainskyi Visnyk (Ukrainian Chronicle), one of the most important samizdat publications in Soviet Ukraine, which also included regular reports of human rights abuses and unjust arrests and detainments. He wrote letters to the Ukrainian Central Committee in defense of historian Valentyn Moroz, after his arrest in 1970 and upon his initiative Ukrainian dissidents formed a committee in defense of Nina Strokata, a microbiologist, who was arrested that year as well.

Given his activism, and his ties to the Lviv dissidents, especially to Iryna and Ihor Kalynets, it is no surprise that Chornovil was arrested again alongside them during the wave of arrests that took place January 12-14, 1972.  In response to threats against his wife and child, Chornovil went on an eight-day hunger strike. Ultimately, the courts handed out a severe sentence of 6 years of hard labor in Mordovia and 3 years of exile in Yakutia. While in exile, Chornovil actively corresponded with his compatriots, among them Iryna Kalynets-Stasiv, with whom he discussed parochial every day concerns alongside the legality of the work regimen forced upon GULag inmates. His lively, accessible and warm delivery are thought to be a unique contribution to our understanding of the Soviet penal system for political prisoners during the union’s decadent phase.

Vlasta Chramostová is one of the most significant personalities from the Czech cultural scene of the 20th century. She was born on 17 November 1926 in Brno as the oldest of five children of the engineer Vladimír Chramosta. She spent her childhood in Skryje u Rouchovan, a village which was destroyed in 1976 during the construction of the Dukovany Nuclear Power Station. She studied at the Department of Drama at the Brno Conservatory between 1941 and 1945. In 1944 she was forcibly made to work as a machinist at a German aircraft factory near Brno. During the war she acted in her first “apartment theatre” with her classmates and in the hall of “Nový domov”, a housing association in Brno. After WWII, she worked at the Svobodné divadlo (Free Theatre, now Brno City Theatre) in Brno, the Olomouc City Theatre and Brno State Theatre. She relocated to Divadlo na Vinohradech (Vinohrady Theatre) in Prague in 1950. In the same year, she married Bohumil Pavlinec, a director of Czechoslovak Radio in Brno. After her divorce, she lived with the artist Konrád Babraj, with whom she had a son. In 1963, her 4-year-old son died in a car accident and Chramostová herself was badly injured. She married the cameraman Stanislav Milota in 1971. At the beginning of Normalization she left Divadlo na Vinohradech in protest at the dismissal of its director František Pavlíček; Chramostová had been one of the ensemble’s leading actresses. She was unable to perform in film, television and radio due to political reasons. She acted for a short time in Divadlo za branou and gave guest performances at the West Bohemian Theatre in Cheb. In 1973 she was officially banned from performing in public. Thanks to her connections in the dissident movement she established “apartment theatre” in her flat near the National Museum in Prague. She organised (with some help from her husband) the first performance in October 1976 to mark the 75th birthday of Jaroslav Seifert, a banned national artist. Václav Havel, who was imprisoned few months later, was among the guests at the premiere. Vlasta Chramostová was one of the first people to sign Charter 77. That led to even more pressure from the State Security (StB) against her and her apartment theatre, which she was forbidden to organise during the 1980s. In January 1989, she attended a memorial event to commemorate Jan Palach. Vlasta Chramostová and Libuše Šilhánková were later given suspended sentences because of their letter to Jakeš and Adamec with a declaration related to the “Palach Week”. In the same year, she was awarded the Poul Lauritzen Foundation Freedom Award for her contribution towards human rights. In 1990, she was declared an honorary member of the National Theatre, where she performed after 1991. She was awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk for her contribution to the development of democracy, humanity and human rights in 1998. During the 1990s, she performed in television and several films and was twice nominated for the Czech Lion Award, the most renowned Czech film award. She was awarded a Special Thalia Award for her lifelong contribution to the theatre in 2007.