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János Maróthy (1925–2001) was an internationally acknowledged Hungarian Marxist musicologist and one of the key figures of academic research on popular music in socialist Hungary.

He started his career in the late 1940s and found employment in many important musical institutions. He was the head of the Mass Musical Department of the Association of Hungarian Musicians (established in 1949), and an active member of the Association’s Popular Musical Department. He also became the editor of the leading musicological journal Új Zenei Szemle ([New Musical Review]; founded in 1950), in which he published the very first Hungarian socialist realist music reviews that tried to be an example for the ideal music reviews of the future. And in his early scientific work, he tried to popularize the findings of Soviet musicology.

From the late 1950s on, due to the changes occurring in both national and international policy, Maróthy gradually reconsidered the cultural and ideological legacy of the early 1950s and developed his own music historical model, in which musical genres excluded from the traditional music history canon gained particular attention. At that time, he became a research fellow at the Budapest Bartók Archives, a forerunner of the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At the end of the 1960s, he was a founding member and leader of the Department of Sociology of Music at the Institute of Musicology.

As one of the first Hungarian propagators of the genre of protest song and pol-beat and an ardent supporter of bottom-up initiatives, Maróthy launched a systematic collection of documents and audio recordings related to these types of music. This collection, along with the partly overlapping workers’ song research, is a good indicator of Maróthy’s role and the directions of his research at the very start of Hungarian popular music studies (in the early 1970s).

Nijolė Maslauskienė is the head of Lithuanian Communist Party (LCP) Documents Archive which is the subdivision of Lithuanian Special Archive. Maslauskienė is a leading expert in LCP archives, she wrote a couple of articles on the history of LCP. She has been working in the archive since 1987.
Nijolė Maslauskienė graduated Vilnius University in 1981 and started her professional career in 1987 in the Archive of the Institute of Communist Party History. Her main research area is the history of Lithuanian Communist Party.
According to Maslauskienė, cultural opposition is a special way of thinking and acting. It is a certain social position taken by a person. These people never protested directly against the Soviet regime. They never criticised the regime openly, for they were not underground activists. The main concern of the 'cultural opposition' was to use legal political ways to preserve Lithuania's national cultural heritage. Maslauskienė does not identify with the cultural opposition herself.
Maslauskienė considers the preservation of documents relating to cultural opposition and the anti-communist movement as being very important. After she was informed about the project, she told interviewers that the staff of the archive would prepare special exhibitions for visitors (students) about the activities of the cultural opposition during the Soviet period.

Theatre historian, editor, lecturer; research assistant at the Department of Theatre Studies at the The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw. Employee of the Archive of the Studio Theatre of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Initiated research and publishing projects related to the work of Jerzy Grzegorzewski. Author of publications in Polish proffesional magazines:  "Dialogue", "Theatre", "Contemporary Culture", "Aspirations" and "Dwutygodnik.com".
Supervisor of the Jerzy Grzegorzewski Section, author of monographs based on the archives of the director's work, curator of archival selection at http://jerzygrzegorzewski.net/.

Goranka Matić was born in Maribor, Slovenia, in 1949. She graduated in art history from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1975. She has worked as a photographer since 1980. During that period, she was especially active in the area of rock music photography and produced record covers for some of the most well-known rock bands in the region. Her pictures were published in the magazines Džuboks, Start, Svjet, Polet, Omladinski novine, Dugi, Liberation and Delo. From 1986, she began to exhibit her photographs in Yugoslavia and abroad. In the course of her long artistic career, she has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and solo shows. She was photo editor for the weekly ‘Vreme’ and the newspaper ‘Politika’, and since 2010 was employed in the Art department at the public broadcaster Radio and Television of Serbia. She taught photojournalism at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade for eight years. She has been a member of the Serbian artists’ and designers’ association ULUPUDS since 1986. Goranka Matić has won several awards, among them the ‘October Salon’ (Oktobarski salon) prize in 1989, ‘Conquest of Freedom’ (Osvajanje slobode) in 2002 and the ‘Politika Prize’ (Politikine nagrade) in 2004. She has published her photographs in the books ‘Days of Pain and Pride’ (1995) and ‘Ten Years of Opposition: Citizens of Serbia for Democracy and an Open Society’ (2001).