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Ivan Supek was a Croatian physicist and writer and one of the most prominent Croatian engaged intellectuals in the latter half of the 20^th century. He was born in Zagreb in 1915, where he graduated with degrees in mathematics and physics from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in 1939. At the end of 1940, he obtained his doctorate in physics in Leipzig, after which he became an assistant to Werner Heisenberg and worked on research into superconductivity and quantum electrodynamics. As a young man in the early 1930s, he joined the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ), and then the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). However, at the end of the same decade, during the so-called “conflict on the left,” he refused to “inherit the dogmatically understood dialectical materialism which he considered incompatible with modern knowledge, freedom and creativity,” and when he refused to accept Stalin's infallibility, “he was excluded from the KPJ in 1940” (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015).

In March 1941, because of his anti-fascist attitudes and activities, he was arrested by the Gestapo, but after several months he was released at Heisenberg's intervention. Instead of continuing his work with Heisenberg, Supek returned to Zagreb and joined the anti-fascist movement in Croatia. As a member of the Presidency of the First Congress of Croatian cultural workers in Topusko in June 1944, he held the only speech on science, emphasising the potential danger of developing nuclear weapons (http://info.hazu.hr/en/clanovi_akademije/osobne_stranice/ivan_supek).

After the Second World War, he was the first professor of theoretical physics at the Faculty of Science and Mathematics (University of Zagreb), where he founded the school of theoretical physics. He was also the founder and the first director of the Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB), founded in 1950 for research in the field of atomic physics. Supek was “the most prominent opponent of the political drive in Yugoslavia aimed at the development of nuclear weapons” (Ilakovac 2013, 37). That is why he was forced to resign from the IRB in 1958 (Ilakovac 2013, 16).

Besides his work in the field of physics, he made a significant contribution to the philosophy of science, striving to link the natural sciences with philosophy, art, humanism, religion and ethics. He was the first professor of philosophy of science at the University of Zagreb. In the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU, today the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, HAZU), of which he was a full member since 1961 (he became a corresponding member in 1948), he founded the Institute for the Philosophy of Science and Peace in 1965. The foundation of this institute was a part of his efforts in the struggle for the principles of peace, prosperity and disarmament, which was then most actively promoted at the global level by the Pugwash Movement. He joined the movement in 1961 and initiated the formation of its Yugoslav branch. On this agenda, Supek developed intense international cooperation and initiated and edited the journal Encyclopaedia moderna, which was also based on the principles of the Pugwash Movement.

During the Croatian Spring, he was the chancellor of the University of Zagreb (1968-1972) and encouraged the establishment of the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik (1970). Because of his disapproval of the conclusions of the twenty-first session of the Presidency of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in December 1971, which condemned the goals of Croatian Spring, and because he expressed solidarity with the persecuted Croatian intellectuals after the fall of the Croatian Spring, he came under attack by the regime and in the 1970s he was marginalized as politically unfit. Then he turned to the literary work that had preoccupied him since his youth.

He wrote mostly novels and plays. In 1959, he wrote his first novel Dvoje između ratnih linija (Two Between the Firing Lines), inspired by the so-called “conflict on the left” before the Second World War and concerned with the fate of an individual caught between conflicting collectives. In the same year, he published the play Na atomskom otoku (On the Atomic Island), which was soon banned, because the censors realised that it was a critique of the secret nuclear bomb project in Yugoslavia (http://info.hazu.hr/hr/clanovi_akademije/osobne_stranice/ivan_supek).

In the 1960s, he wrote several historical novels and dramas, some of which may be seen as expressions of disagreement with the social and political system in Yugoslavia. The biographical-historical drama Heretik (The Heretic, 1968) was the only of his plays that was well received by audiences and critics. While telling the story of the Renaissance heretic Mark Antun de Dominis, Supek alluded to the status of dissidents in the latter half of the 20^th century. In this drama, he also alluded to his own position as a man acting against the dominant social streams (Senker 2015, 45), although at that time (in the 1960s) he still had a distinguished position in public life (interview with Marotti, Bojan). After the fall of the Croatian Spring, his works became undesirable to the authorities. The first edition of his novel Opstati usprkos (Surviving in Spite, 1971), was burned at the beginning of government’s clash with the Croatian Spring, and his novel Extraordinarius was withdrawn from sale in 1974 because of content that alluded to the Croatian Spring, (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015).

In the 1980s he fell into even greater disfavour due to his writing. The book Krivovjernik na ljevici (Heretic on the Left) had a significant impact. The book was published in Bristol in 1980. It depicted the most recent history of Croatia from Suepk’s perspective and criticised the repressive methods by which the Communist Party built its totalitarian rule in Yugoslavia. That is was why he found himself in the line of fire by dogmatic communists. These attacks intensified after 1983, when a portion of Supek’s memoirs was published in the book So Speak Croatian Dissidents (Norval: Ziral), and especially when he published his book Krunski svjedok protiv Hebranga (Crown Witness against Hebrang) in Chicago (in English and Croatian). Supek described the circumstances of Andrija Hebrang's murder and the role of the UDBA (State Security Service) in that act. The regime unjustifiably began to label Supek as an “Ustasha” and a “leader of hostile émigré communities.” He was called for interrogations by the police, and his passport was confiscated, which was particularly difficult for him as an internationally renowned scientist.

As the crisis of the communist system in Yugoslavia escalated, Supek renewed his public activity and welcomed the introduction of the multiparty system (Ilakovac 2013, 21). In 1991 he was elected president of the JAZU (which was soon renamed HAZU) and remained at its head until 1997. He was a vocal opponent of the military aggression against the Republic of Croatia in the early 1990s and sought support from the global public for Croatia's struggle for independence. He was also a harsh critic of all democratically elected Croatian governments, stressing certain negative social phenomena (Ilakovac 2013, 40-41).

According to some of his associates, Supek liked to act outside of institutions. Though he was a left-wing intellectual, the militant aspect of socialist regimes deterred him from fostering closer co-operation with communist rulers (interview with Marotti, Bojan). Bojan Marotti describes him in an interview for COURAGE as an individual who liked his heretical position, as a man who always walked in the opposite direction, who opposed the state and the prevailing currents in everything. Even after the collapse of communism, when Croatian patriotism became the dominant paradigm, he soon moved to a specific heretical position, although he was a Croatian patriot (interview with Bojan Marotti). Supek received the Ruđer Bošković Award for Science (1960) and the Republic of Croatia Lifetime Achievement Award (1970), and the Croatian Post Office issued a stamp bearing his image in 2015 (Kutleša & Hameršak 2015). He died in Zagreb in 2007. He was the brother of sociologist and philosopher Rudi Supek.

Croatian ethnographer Olga Supek was born in Paris on January 3, 1949. She graduated with a degree in ethnography and sociology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in 1973 and earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1982. She worked at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb (1976-1988) and the Department of Ethnography at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb (1988-1991). From 1991 to 2008, she lectured on cultural anthropology at the University of Texas, where from 1999 until 2006 she was the head of the College of Arts and Sciences Advising Center. Since 2009, she has taught ethnography and cultural anthropology at the University of Zadar. She is the daughter of renowned Croatian sociologist Rudi Supek, and one of his legitimate heirs. When arranging the Rudi Supek Personal Papers in the Croatian State Archives, and during the preparation of the collection’s analytical inventory, she helped to identify the persons in the photographs.

Rudi Supek (Zagreb, April 8, 1913 - Zagreb, January 2, 1993), a Croatian sociologist, philosopher and psychologist. As a student from 1933 to 1936, he was close to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) (Galić 1990). He graduated with a degree in philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1937 and until 1938 he was a member of the leadership of the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia. At the end of 1939, he went to Paris, where he studied psychology. There he had a party mission to maintain a connection with the International Brigade Centre in Paris which organised the transport of fighters to the Spanish Civil War. He graduated from the Institute of Psychology of the University of Paris in 1940 and received the certificate of the National de l'Orientation professionnelle in the same year. During the Second World War, he was a member of the French resistance movement and a member of the Communist Party of France (CPF) since 1939. In 1942, he was arrested in Paris and detained in several prisons in the city. From January 1944 until the spring of 1945, he was interned in the Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald, where he, as a representative of the Yugoslav prisoners, was a member of the camp’s illegal International Board. Buchenwald was the only Nazi camp where the detainees liberated themselves before the Allies arrived (Bosnar 2011). After his liberation, he was a delegate of the Red Cross on repatriation issues, organised a series of repatriation centres in Germany, and then returned to Paris to study psychology in 1946.

In 1948, after the Cominform Resolution against Yugoslavia, the leadership of the CPF demanded that Supek attack the CPY and its leader Josip Broz Tito. He refused, and as the editor of the two magazines, Nova Jugoslavija (New Yugoslavia) and Bratstvo i jedinstvo (Fraternity and Unity), he tried to reduce the impact of the Resolution on Yugoslav emigrants in France. In 1950, he returned to Yugoslavia. However, he received a Ph.D. in psychology from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1952. He worked at the Psychology Department at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb (FHSS) (1951-1958) and the Institute for Social Research in Belgrade (1958-1961). He was a professor of sociology at the FHSS in Zagreb from 1960 to 1979, where he founded the Sociology Department in 1963. He also lectured at other foreign and Yugoslav universities and colleges. Supek is considered the founder of Croatian, and also one of the founders of Yugoslav, sociology. One of the world’s most renowned sociologists, Jürgen Habermas, called Supek “the father of modern sociology.”

He is the author of over twenty scholarly books, primarily in the fields of sociology and psychology, but also the author of one of the first books on ecology in Yugoslavia (Supek 1989a). His works were translated into English, German, Italian, Czech, Hebrew and Japanese. He was the president of the Sociological Society of Croatia and the Yugoslav Society of Sociology.

Although he was a Marxist and a member of the CPF for a decade, after 1948 he never again joined another communist party. Although he requested the membership in the CPY in 1950, his application was rejected because he was considered politically unsuitable as a survivor of the notorious Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald. Namely, to the Yugoslav authorities, the survivors of that terrible camp were unreliable precisely because they had survived, implying that they were collaborators (Bosnar 2011).

In his youth, Supek advocated Bolshevik policies. However, his post-war experiences, primarily his aspirations towards free academic research and his negative experience with the party bureaucracy, put him at odds with the Party (Interview with Marijan Bosnar, 18 Jul. 2017). His disagreement with the communist regime was based on his understanding of the position of intellectuals in society. He believed sociologists should be a critical counterbalance to the ruling system of power and that is why he moved away from dogmatism and uncritical idealism. He remained a Marxist but replaced dogmatism with the conviction that socialism cannot be achieved without democracy (Supek 1989b).

Supek's critical thinking was most visible in his editing of two respected philosophical journals, Pogledi (1952-1955) and Praxis (1964-1975), and through his leading role in the Korčula Summer School (1963-1974). In 1953, Supek published the article “Why is there no conflict of opinions in Yugoslavia?” in Pogledi, which provoked considerable criticism from many pro-regime intellectuals. Supek argued that there was no conflict of opinions because one group (the LCY) monopolised the entirety of social life. In 1954, Supek resigned as editor-in-chief, and after the next issue (1955/1), the LCY banned the journal (Interview with Marijan Bosnar, 18 7. 2017.). As a member of the intellectual circle gathered around Praxis and the Korčula Summer School, he criticised, from a radical leftist position, certain elements of the socialist system of the time. That is why the communist rulers obstructed the publication of Praxis and the work of the Korčula Summer School.

On the other hand, with his book Ova jedina zemlja: idemo li u katastrofu ili u Treću revoluciju? (This only Earth: Are we heading for disaster or the Third Revolution?), published in 1973, he was one of the first intellectuals in Yugoslavia to warn society of the environmental problems of modern civilisation. With this book, he moved from the then Marxist mainstream in Yugoslavia, which maintained that environmental issues were, in fact, a capitalist ploy to decrease the revolutionary potential of the working class. After the democratic changes in Croatia and Yugoslavia after 1990, he was critical of the new government.

He was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Honorary Doctorate of the University in Uppsala (1976), the French Prize for Achievements in the Field of Science (1984), and the National Order of the Legion of Honour (Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur) in 1989 (Supek 1989a). Since 2004, the Croatian Sociological Society has annually conferred the Rudi Supek Prize for achievements in the field of sociology. Since he was popular among students, every year the students of the Sociology Department of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Zagreb)organise a freshman party called Rudi Supek Night. In 2013, a scholarly conference marked the hundredth anniversary of Supek's birth and fifty years since the establishment of the Sociology Department. The papers from that conference were also published (Cifirić et al., 2016).

Yevhen Sverstiuk was an essayist, historian of literature, writer, philosopher, psychologist and president of Ukrainian PEN-club. He was one of the most active members of the Club of Creative Youth in Ukraine (founded in 1960) alongside many other well-known sixtiers like Alla Horska, Ivan Svitlychny, Ivan Dziuba, Vasyl Stus, Liudmyla Semykina, and Halyna Sevruk.

He did graduate work at the Institute of Psychology in Kyiv and Odesa University, where he received his candidate's degree in 1965. After that, Sverstiuk worked as a teacher in Ternopil oblast and the Poltava Pedagogical Institute, while also publishing articles and reviews in Soviet literary periodicals. Due to his criticism of Russification and other injustices, he was blacklisted by the authorities and dismissed in 1965 from his job at the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute. Even so, Sverstiuk was a prolific writer, his texts published as samizdat and also in émigré periodicals. Sverstiuk authored one of the most popular and important samizdat texts written to come out of Ukraine “Regarding the court process over Pohruzhalsky.” Together with Horska, Lina Kostenko, and Ivan Dziuba and Viktor Nekrasov wrote an open letter criticizing the regime’s treatment of the journalist Viacheslav Chornovil. He also signed the “letter of 139” sent to General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in April 1968 protesting trials of young Ukrainian artists.

Sverstiuk was fired from his job at the Ukrainian Botanical Journal in December 1970 for his eulogy at Alla Horska's funeral. Like many of his friends and colleagues, Sverstiuk was arrested during the sweep conducted in mid-January 1972, sentenced by a Kyiv court to seven years hard labour in the camp Perm-36 and five years in exile in the Buriat ASSR, in Siberia. He was released in 1983 and returned to Kyiv where he found work as a carpenter, a job he lost after traveling to Moscow to meet with other dissidents at the US Embassy. He was a defender of human rights until his last days, joining his fellow dissidents and other demonstrators at the Euromaidan protests that erupted in the winter of 2013-2014, just months before his death in December 2014. 

Nadiya Svitlychna was one of the founders of the Sixtiers Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine, which opened in 2012. She was also an active member of the sixtiers movement, a human rights activist, member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and teacher of Ukrainian. She was born in what is now the Lugansk region and was educated in Kharkiv. She taught Ukrainian, then became director of a school for working youth in the city of Bokovo-Antratsyt. In 1963, Svitlychna moved to Kyiv, where she taught evening classes and then courses at the pedagogical institute until her arrest in 1968. In Kyiv, she befriended the artist Alla Horska and taught her Ukrainian. Together they began exploring native traditions and religious holidays. She was an active distributor of samizdat literature, edited and republished works by Viacheslav Chornovil, Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Sverstiuk, the banned poetry of Vasyl Symonenko and Vasyl Stus, as well as the memoirs of Danylo Shumuk. 

Following an encounter with the police at a gathering in front of the statue of Taras Shevchenko on May 22, 1967, she became a person of interest for the KGB. Together with Ivan Dziuba, Lina Kostenko, and Ivan Svitlychny they wrote a letter protesting the arrest of Chornovil in 1967. She was also present at his hearing. She and Yevhen Sverstiuk found the body of Alla Horska in the basement of her father-in-law’s house in 1970, and then organized her funeral, burial, and the placing of the headstone. After the wave of arrests in 1972 she was called into KGB headquarters almost daily for interrogations about her brother’s activities. Her own home was searched, where the authorities found 1800 pieces of samizdat, for which she was arrested. Her son was nearly taken to an orphanage, but through the efforts of her sister-in-law the child was taken to his grandmother in Lugansk oblast. She spent nearly a year in the solitary at KGB headquarters before being sentenced in a Kyiv court to 4 years of hard labour at the camp ZhKh-385/3-4 along with several other women from this circle—K. Zaytska, I. Senyk, Iryna Kalynets, and N. Strokata. While there, she organized resistance in the camp, mainly protests, and hunger strikes. She and her fellow inmates also embroidered collars to adorn their drab prison uniforms for which she was punished.

After she was released in 1976, her registration was revoked, and she couldn’t find a job. She was continuously threatened with arrests. She and her two sons lived with her sister-in-law. These restrictions prompted her to write the Ukrainian Central Committee in order to renounce her Soviet citizenship. She wrote, “it is impossible to be a citizen of the world’s largest concentration camp. Called to be a witness at the trial of M. Matusevych and M. Marynovych, the KGB noted that Svitlychna used “her time at the podium to propagate anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” This likely persuaded the authorities to allow Svitlychna and her sons to leave for the United States, where she remained an active participant in anti-Soviet oppositionist movements. She contributed regularly to journals documenting repressions in Ukraine, and even had her own radio show ‘Nadia’ where she talked about the “heroes” of this era: Zalyvakha, Horska, Stus, Svitlychny, Sverstiuk, Chornovil. She testified before Congress, and after independence she committed her efforts to creating the museum which unfortunately did not open until after her death in 2006.