COURAGE

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This sheepskin coat is one of the featured items of the Hnatiuk Collection at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) in Cleveland, OH. The collection consists of more than 450 examples of Ukrainian textiles, which were produced for ritual ceremonies, for home use and as garments worn in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Myroslav and Anna Hnatiuk compiled this vast collection of textiles over a number of decades. The first items were brought with them as they fled to the West along with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots toward the end of WWII. Though not classically representative of cultural opposition or resistance to communism, the motivations of the Hnatiuks make clear that their intention was to preserve pieces of Ukrainian culture until they were able to return home. As with other collections described in the COURAGE registry, folk art anchored Ukrainian resistance to communism within certain communities, more traditional forms of expression and clothing pushing back against the internationalism and uniformity that underpinned Soviet socialism.

Myroslav and Anna grew up in Galicia, part of the Western Ukrainian territories clandestinely annexed by the Soviets in 1939 as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The war disrupted his medical studies, which he resumed in Austria, eventually becoming a physician. He worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation in Germany before moving with his wife Anna and their sons to the US in 1949. They kept in touch with family and friends living in Soviet Ukraine, sending packages of food and clothing and receiving in return textiles and costumes. In the 1980s, they began traveling regularly to Ukraine, continuing to augment their collection with authentic leather, textiles, ceramics, and other folk items from Galicia and the Hutsul mountain regions.

The UMA published a volume about the Hnatiuk Collection (financed with a generous grant from the Ohio Humanities Council), which not only demonstrates the value of the Hnatiuk Collection as a whole, but also reveals a lot about the priorities of the museum’s leadership. When it came time for the Hnatiuks to find a new home for their collection, they invited (with help from Congresswoman Marci Kaptur) interested parties from Ukrainian museums and archives throughout North America. Many of those institutions tried to pick and choose the very best pieces for their own collections, while Andrew Fedynsky and Aniza Kraus of the UMA argued “the collection is an artifact in itself, a monument to a family’s dedication to Ukrainian culture.” As with many émigré communities, cultural preservation was an important part of life in the new world, nearly impossible to disentangle from the larger mission of diaspora institutions, which for a long time was to inculcate future generations with a sense of mission that contributes to the eventual liberation of Ukraine. The preservation of cultural heritage was part of a larger sphere of activism that included attending benefit concerts, church services, parades and demonstrations that both marked important turning points in history and supported Ukrainian independence.

The feature film Ciguli Miguli (1952) by director Branko Marjanović and screenwriter Jože Horvat was the first banned film in socialist Croatia. The film was supposed to be the first post-war socio-political satire. It ridiculed bureaucracies of the Soviet type. However, Party leaders read this satire as antisocialist opposition defying civil traditions. The public viewing license was granted only on April 30, 1977, and in 1989 it was first shown on television. It then attracted great media attention. In 1989, Igor Krtalić wrote a feuilleton on the case of Ciguli MIguli for the newspaper Vjesnik.

This essay about the situation at the University of Zagreb after the Second World War is deposited in the Dinko Tomašić Collection. Tomašić consulted it in his research into Yugoslav communism. Stjepan Kuhar, a medical student, escaped from Croatia, and on that occasion wrote a short essay in Graz on events and circumstances at the University of Zagreb in 1952. Kuhar was convinced that the communist revolution was not only a simple change of elites at the top of society, but also an attempt to forge a “new man,” which was supposed to be one of the centrepieces of education “according to the law of dialectical and historical materialism,” i.e., in line with the new ideology of communism.

In the process of converting the universities into communist universities, Kuhar highlighted three obstacles that stood in the way of the communist government:  the lack of teaching staff and textbook materials to promote communist doctrine, and resistance by students and professors themselves to the ideologization of university courses and university life. Something that intensely characterized life at the post-war universities was the “dictatorship of Partisan students” who tended to abuse their privileges, not respecting the standard university hierarchy and internal rules. Their “purges” of political opponents affected not only students but some professors from the Faculty of Medicine (Rikard Hauptfeld, Zvonimir Kušević), which entailed their withdrawal from the university.