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Péter Bokros (1957–2017) was an amateur graphic artist and founding member of the Inconnu group. In the 1970s, he created in a lot of works in alternative, experimental genres, and he participated in many oppositional performances in the framework of the activity of the democratic opposition and the independent initiatives of Inconnu.

His artistic interests and attitude were basically determined by his father’s mindset and opinion of the communist cultural policy. Renitent behaviour was part of his family heritage, as he himself noted. His father had been a student at the University of Applied Art in the 1950s. He told a lot of stories to his son about the repression of avantgarde and surrealist artists.

Bokros grew up in Szolnok. He took the entrance exam to the university five times, but was never admitted. He observed that many talent painters were rejected, while the doors to the institution were wide open for the children of party members. Instead of attending university, he learned artistic techniques from his parents, for example, drawing, ceramics, chalcography, etc. He also learned about computer graphics during a journey to Paris.

His workplace often changed. He sought jobs at places where he could develop his skills, for example positions at decoration companies. As an amateur artist, he could not organize an independent exhibition of his works, and he felt that this rule was unfair. He exhibited his works in different and sometimes unusual places, such as libraries, factories, canteens, and hospitals.

He was a founding member of Inconnu in 1978. According to him, the work of the group in Szolnok had no political implications. They had not wanted to act in opposition to the regime, but rather had merely wanted to enjoy their youth. They had plans and to express ideas which had been inspired by Western art trends. In Bokros’ opinion, they were considered dangerous because of their actions and performances and because they tried to connect directly with the people. He said in his interview that the communist cultural policy could not tolerate their existence. 

At the time, it was difficult to learn about avantgarde trends and cultural life in the West. Bokros travelled to Paris, and what he saw there had a profound influence on his artistic vision. Furthermore, his birthplace had an influence on him. In his opinion, “Szolnok was the most communist city in Kádár-system.” The local art groups, which were guided by the ideas of Hungary of the 1950s, attacked Inconnu. In the end, they were banned from every cultural institute and from performing anywhere in the country because of a performance by Bokros in Budapest, which was, as he recalled, one of his strongest body art performances. During the show, they cut themselves with blades.

Bokros was not arrested, but he was put under observation and his residence was searched. After the exhibition entitled “A harcoló város/The Fighting City, 1986,” the members of the group were in even greater danger. They were summoned by the police and threatened with exile from the capital if they were to organize the exhibition.

Bokros was conscripted into the army in 1980, and he spent 14 months in a penalty unit. In 1981, he moved to Budapest and began to study at a decoration and window-dressing school. The other members of the group followed him. Initially, they felt safer in the big city, but after they joined the democratic opposition, the police kept them under even closer observation. They became more and more active and independent. They tried to find their own political stance. During this period, Bokros supported himself as an illegal worker.

Bokros’ criticism of the regime was basically formed by his assessment of the Revolution of 1956, and this was true of the Inconnu group as well. As Bokros said, the events which had taken place on the streets during the revolution and the revolutionary symbols were more interesting to them than the great political programs because of their age.

Bokros gave a long interview to political scientist Ervin Csizmadia in 1992. He shared his views concerning the conflicts and fault lines between the different oppositional groups. He said the young artists who worked together with György Krassó were supporters of actionism, and they had a stronger anti-communist stance, but the intellectuals involved with the samizdat publication Beszélő were more disciplined and organized. He thought that the change of regimes was in fact planned and the majority of oppositional figures did not actually welcome the drastic acts.

Egon Bondy, real name Zbyněk Fišer, was a Czecho-Slovak poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher and “guru” of the Czechoslovak underground. He had been active within Czechoslovak surrealism from the end of the 1940s. He founded the samizdat edition “Půlnoc” (Midnight) with Ivo Vodseďálek at the beginning of the 1950s. Based on a collection of poems “Jewish Names” (Židovská jména) (1949), he chose the pen name Egon Bondy in response to the antisemitic atmosphere of the time. During the 1960s, after graduating in philosophy and psychology from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (1961), he worked as a night watchman at the National Museum and later at the bibliography department of the State Library of the Czechoslovak Republic. He was inclined towards Trotskyism and Marxism at the time and he also focused on Eastern philosophy, such as Buddhism and Taoism. He was entitled to a full invalidity pension from 1967. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a theorist and protagonist of the Czech underground, he wrote for samizdat and exile magazines, while his works were set to music by the underground band The Plastic People of the Universe. He signed Charter 77 in 1977 and was awarded the exile Egon Hostovský Prize for his novel “The Invalid Siblings” (Invalidní sourozenci) in 1981. On the other hand, Bondy had been collaborating with the StB (State security) since 1952. This collaboration lasted, with some intervals, until the change of regime in 1989. Until 1989, his works were mainly published as samizdat volumes or in exile. Bondy was involved in ultra-left-wing groups after 1989. He applied for Slovak citizenship after the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993 and lived in Bratislava. Egon Bondy appears as a literary character in several novels, including works by Bohumil Hrabal. There have also been several documentary films made about him. He wrote more than forty collections of poems, twenty novels and numerous philosophical and journalistic texts. Despite the fact that Bondy collaborated with the StB before 1989, he is one of the most significant figures from Czechoslovak independent and underground culture during the communist era.

21 May 1928, Hajdúszoboszló, Hungary – 21 March, Budapest (Hungary)

Ethnographer and folk dance teacher Jolán Borbély and her twin sister were born in Hajdúszoboszló to a peasant family. Her stepparents and grandparents were also peasants. In 1938, she began studying in Debrecen at the Calvinist Dóczi Grammer School, from which she graduated in 1946. At the High School, she became fond of the world of folk songs and folklife. Between 1947 and 1956, she studied Hungarian, Museology, and Ethnography at the Eötvös Lorand University. At the university, she learned about István Molnár’s collection on folk dance. She started to dance with the Csokonai Dance Group, where she met Ernő Pesovár and György Martin, whom she married in 1961.

Michael Bourdeaux, an Anglican priest, was the founder of the forerunner of the Keston Center, the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism. In 1959-1960, Bourdeaux was one of the first British exchange students to the Soviet Union and it was then when he learned of the repression of the Russian Orthodox Church during Nikita Krushchev’s term. He purchased a copy of the first issue of Science and Religion (Nauka i Religiia) initiating the decades-long accumulation of primary sources on religion and state in the Soviet Union and other communist societies. With his commitment to being a “voice of the voiceless” and to scholarly research, Bourdeaux worked with two scholars, Leonard Schaprio and Peter Reddaway, to establish the Keston Institute in 1969.

In 1984, one year after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Bourdeaux won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion “for helping keep religion alive in East Europe.” In addition to providing leadership to the Keston Institute, Bourdeaux travelled to the Soviet Union, published prolifically, and taught lectures and seminars. Even after the relocation of the Keston archive and library to Baylor University, Bourdeaux remains on the Keston Advisory Board. In 2013, Bourdeaux delivered a keynote address at the first Keston Symposium titled “Religion and Political Culture in Communist Countries: Past, Present, and Future.” Although Bourdeaux was not directly involved in anti-communist or opposition movements in the Soviet Union, his career and life work aided the underground movements of religious dissent through various support, dissemination of information to the West, and various other means.