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The manuscript of the book was written by Bogdan Radica during his time in exile. It was finally published in 1974 in Barcelona and Munich, by the emigrant publishing house Hrvatska revija. He also collected his own articles published in the American press, his memoirs from Croatia and Yugoslavia covering the period from November 1944 to May 1946, and his notes from Izgnanički dnevnik (Exile Diary) in which he had made note on his journey from Italy and America. After the Croatian Spring in 1971, following conversations between the editor-in-chief, Vinko Nikolić and Radica in New York, they both decided to print the book. Radica decided to do that in order to explain what are the roots of “the newest Croatian catastrophe” in Tito’s Yugoslavia. In the book, he pointed out the fear and repression of the Communist revolution in Croatia.

Croatia survived the strongest level of repression because it demonstrated much more resistance than the other Yugoslav regions. In the book, Radica describes the situation during those revolutionary days in Zagreb and his hometown Split. He described the killings and jailing of people in those cities, among whom there were many respectable people from public life. Hence, he coined the phrase “great fear in Croatia” to describe the revolutionary terror. When he decided to flee Croatia and Yugoslavia, he sent his wife a telegram importantly titled “I have left Tito's paradise forever.”

Radica wrote this article in October 1946 in New York, after his escape from Yugoslavia, in which he described the terror of the revolution carried out by the Yugoslav communists. It was later published in a review called Reader’s Digest. On account this and other articles published in the American press, the Yugoslav regime banned all his works. In this article printed in the newspaper that had a large readership and reach, he was the first person who revealed this information on revolutionary events in Yugoslavia to North America and the West. The article was translated into numerous other languages, and was published in Japan in the Japanese language. He received a writer’s fee of $5,000 for the article.

Radica introduced the term “useful innocents”, a phrase unknown in the American political culture. He considered himself and other democrats from Croatia and Yugoslavia useful innocents who had an illusion that communists would not succeed to seize absolute power in Yugoslavia. They believed naively that postwar Yugoslavia would be a democratic and federal state, not a communist dictatorship. In the beginning, the communists gathered various political representatives to get the support of wider population.This kind of political organization was called the Popular Front in the postwar communist world and in Yugoslavia (Narodna fronta).

The manuscript of the book was written by Bogdan Radica during his time in exile. It was finally published in 1974 in Barcelona and Munich, by the emigrant publishing house Hrvatska revija. He also collected his own articles published in the American press, his memoirs from Croatia and Yugoslavia covering the period from November 1944 to May 1946, and his notes from Izgnanički dnevnik in which he had made note on his journey from Italy and America. After the Croatian Spring in 1971, following conversations between the editor-in-chief, Vinko Nikolić and Radica in New York, they both decided to print the book. Radica decided to do that in order to explain what are the roots of “the newest Croatian catastrophe” in Tito’s Yugoslavia. In the book, he pointed out the fear and repression of the Communist revolution in Croatia.

Croatia survived the strongest level of repression because it demonstrated much more resistance than the other Yugoslav regions. In the book, Radica describes the situation during those revolutionary days in Zagreb and his hometown Split. He described the killings and jailing of people in those cities, among whom there were many respectable people from public life. Hence, he coined the phrase “great fear in Croatia” to describe the revolutionary terror. When he decided to flee Croatia and Yugoslavia, he sent his wife a telegram importantly titled “I have left Tito's paradise forever.”

In the article “The Point of the Disputes Between Historians about Sources on Old Montenegrin History”, Danilo Radojević criticized interpretations of medieval Byzantine historians’ texts on Dioclea [Serbian: Duklja] by contemporary Serbian and Croatian historians. Dioclea was a medieval state, which roughly encompassed the territories of present-day south-eastern Montenegro. Radojević claims that the interpretations of medieval Byzantine historical texts had been “conveniently” incomplete, imprecise, and in some cases tendentious. He further stated that contemporary Serbian and Croatian historians were taking into account only the parts of those texts that they found suitable for confirming certain preconceived theories, which always supported Serbian and Croatian nationalist agendas. In order to explain why Dioclea was the focus of disputes among historians, Radojević asserted the following:

Although criticizing other historians’ interpretations of historical texts on Dioclea and Diocleans, Radojević in this text does not provide evidence for his allegations about the equivalence of Diocleans and Montenegrins, which is still considered a rather contentious statement.

The work is a video recording of one of a series of performances entitled ‘Was ist Kunst?’ (What is Art?) conducted by Todosijević between 1976 and 1981 in various cities, situations and surroundings. In each performance, the artist addresses a female model, repeating the same question in German: ‘Was ist Kunst?’ The artist’s raised voice is commanding and recalls repressive techniques of police interrogation, evoking the traumatic experience of those members of the Yugoslav public who at that time still remembered scenes of Gestapo torture and the brutality of German occupation in the Second World War. The artist repeats the same question until he reaches a point of total exhaustion and loses his voice. The passive female model stoically enduring the torture triggers associations with the passive and masochistic attitude of citizens in a totalitarian order who lose their will, thus aiding the unimpeded operation of the repressive apparatus. This kind of aggressive behaviour and provocation of the public appears in other works by the artist. ‘Was ist Kunst?’ is an emblematic work by Raša Todosijević and at the same time represents one of the most significant works of Serbian art in the twentieth century.

“The performances entitled ‘Was ist Kunst?’ are political performances in the broadest sense of the word. Not art in the service of politics but rather art that sublimates the social performance into an artistic performance, emphasising in that sublimation some of the characteristics of social occurrences, the phenomenon of mass psychology, of the demagogy of language, of continual repetition – through cathartic emphasis.” (Published in 'New Art in Serbia 1970–1980’, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983).   

The work ‘Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj?’ was purchased and integrated into the Museum’s Collection of New Art Media in 1988.

The manuscript entitled Memorii: 1944–1954 (Memoirs: 1944–1954) is a typewritten document of 140 pages that in fact consists of notes from the period mentioned in the title about the political situation in Romania. The manuscript has not yet been published. The fact that the document was written in English suggests that it was meant for a Western audience. The author inserted handwritten corrections and comments into the original text. These notes are organised chronologically and include for each year a short presentation of political events in Romania, rumours and jokes about these events, and the economic difficulties of the first decade of the post-war period. Due to the fact that in communist Romania during the 1950s, political humour was not preserved in written form in private collections in view of the political risks that such an action would have entailed, these pieces of oral culture are a valuable source of documentation. These rumours and jokes were passed on by Romanians who had fled the country and by Western journalists who had attended various events, such as the fourth World Youth Festival that took place in Bucharest in 1953. As a journalist working for various Western news agencies and radio stations, Ion Raţiu had the opportunity during 1950s to collect these pieces of political humour and contextualise them within these notes.

The text includes a lot of critical remarks about communist politics in Romania, the discrepancy between state propaganda and the real situation, the mass repression and censorship, and the industrialisation drive that produced shortages of basic consumer goods, many of them expressed in an ironic manner and illustrated by various jokes. For example, when speaking about random purges within the Romanian communist elite, Raţiu recounts a joke that had as main character the communist leader Vasile Luca, a former minister of finance who was purged and sentenced to death in 1954 for “undermining the national economy.” According to this joke, there were three political prisoners in a cell in communist Romania. When they asked each other the reason for their being arrested, the first answered that he had criticised Vasile Luca, the second that he had praised him, and the third that he was Vasile Luca himself (Fond Raţiu–Tilea/92, 109). The joke epitomises the general feeling that the Stalinist mass repression was absurd, a feeling that was also depicted by former political prisoners in their post-89 interviews. It also illustrates how people living under Stalinism developed practices of voicing their discontent through political humour, although these jokes could also have offered to the repressive state institutions a reason for arresting a person. These notes are also a valuable source for documenting how rumours and political humour circulated across the Iron Curtain, in spite of the communist regime’s efforts to block these transfers, and what meanings they received in exile milieus in the West.