COURAGE

ryšiai tarp kolekcijų

The “Sixtiers Museum” Collection is located in a small museum in Kyiv, Ukraine in a building belonging to the Ukrainian political party Rukh. Nadia Svitlychna and Mykola Plakhotniuk founded this museum as way of honouring and documenting the struggles of a cohort of Soviet Ukrainian dissidents during the 1960s-1980s. Included in the permanent exhibition are paintings, graphics, sculptures, embroidery and other artworks produced by artists affiliated with the sixtiers movement. The museum also displays the poems, letters and literary works of the writers in their midst, as well as their typewriters, handcrafted items made while in the GULag, or clothes worn while living in exile, like Svitlychna’s own camp uniform. Also figuring prominently are posters for events and exhibitions organized by this group. The guided tour is a moving, concise rendition of their struggle, aimed at the museum’s target audiences, young students, scholars, and the general public.

These materials depict the lives of a dynamic group of Soviet Ukrainians engaged in a principled creative and ideological struggle with the Soviet regime in the 1960s and 1970s. They were poets, artists, graphic designers, historians, doctors, and even a Soviet army official, all of whom became deeply involved in human rights activism under late socialism. Many were members of large Soviet institutions—like the Ukrainian writers and artist unions, the Literary Institute in Kyiv, the Soviet armed forces. The Soviet government’s ideological retrenchment after Khrushchev transformed these dissidents, who had worked hard to try and reform the system and make it more humane, into individuals in open conflict with the authorities.

The Smiljana Rendić Collection is stored at the Archdiocesan Archives in Zagreb. The collection documents the cultural and opposition work of Croatian journalist and intellectual Smiljana Rendić. The collection is particularly important to learning about the existence of the Catholic "underground" in socialist Croatia, which included an entire network of Catholic lay people who gathered around the Catholic Church and were opposed to the regime and its official ideology.

The folder with “The campers” as its cover name is kept in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security forces (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára – ÁBTL). It includes reports on and photographs of the religious group named Christian Community. The camping trips taken by members of the group in 1983 and in 1984 were the focus of the state efforts to keep the group under observation. The photo collection is the result of secrtet observation work and the method of taking photos from a hiding place. Moreover, this is a vestige of the information-collecting practices of the political police which seems, now, a little grotesque. The documentation of the meeting, which was labeled illegal, was followed by intervention by the police.