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Born in 1956, in Esztergom, Hungary, Peternák lives and works in Budapest. He studied history and art history, receiving his PhD in 1994 with a dissertation entitled, New Media – Art and Science. He was a member of the Béla Balázs Studio, Budapest (1981–87), the Indigo Group, and worked at the Hungarian National Gallery (1981–83) as well as at the Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1983–87).

Peternák has served as Head of the Intermedia Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts since its foundation in 1990, and as director of C³: Center for Culture and Communication since 1997.

Ștefan Petrache (b. 8 May 1949, Vânători, Nisporeni district, Moldavian SSR) is a prominent Moldovan singer and musical manager. After studying at the ”Eugen Coca” musical school in Chișinău and a brief stint as a student at the Electro-Mechanical College in the same city, in 1967 Petrache became one of the lead singers of the band Noroc, remaining part of the group during its entire existence. Following Noroc’s demise, Petrache pursued his musical studies at the Gavriil Musicescu Arts Institute in Chișinău, from which he graduated in 1974. He became a lead singer of the Orchestra of Moldavian Radio and Television (1974–75) and then continued his singing career in various local bands, including Orizont (1977) and Mihai Dolgan’s Contemporanul (1978–1981). In 1982, he founded and became the manager of an important musical group that dominated much of the Moldavian musical landscape in the 1980s – Plai (Homeland, 1982–1987). The style of this band combined national and folkloric motives with modern-sounding rhythms, having a certain similarity to the Noroc phenomenon, but focusing and building on local musical traditions. In the late 1980s, Petrache returned for a brief period to the Moldavian Philharmonic Orchestra (1988–1990), During the peak of his musical career, he recorded a number of hits that became rather popular with the Moldovan public (e.g., În august (In August), Chemarea casei părintești (The Call of My Parents’ House), Adevăruri (Truths) etc.). After 1991, Petrache quit the stage and pursued a successful business career in real estate. After being diagnosed with a serious illness in 2009, he withdrew from public view, but gave numerous interviews about his Noroc experience. Petrache’s interview focuses on his integration into the band, on some creative disagreements with Dolgan in the initial period of Noroc’s existence, and particularly on the reception of their music by the public. Although Petrache claims that Noroc had no overt political agenda, he admits that its popularity was due to certain elements of “social protest”, albeit not directly linked to the personal experiences of the band’s members. However, Petrache emphasises that Noroc’s music had an essential feature resonating with its fans: “There was something very natural coming from the stage, something true, unaltered, uncontrolled, unpolished, everything was extraordinarily natural. We were radiating purity and... innocence.” Petrache belonged to the stiliaga (the closest equivalent to ”Soviet hippy”) culture, but he confessed that he did not sympathise with its radical wing and was amused by the extremes to which some Soviet youths went in order to “outdo” their Western models. For him, the Noroc phenomenon was first and foremost linked to a feeling of “inner freedom” and unlimited creativity. In a certain sense, although careful about censorship from above, Petrache and his colleagues pretended that the regime did not exist.  

Dan Petrescu (b. 26 February 1949, Bucharest) is a writer, essayist, editor, translator, journalist, and one of the most well-known Romanian dissidents of the communist period. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Philology of A.I. Cuza University of Iaşi. In the years 1981–1983, he published extensively in the Iaşi student magazines Dialog and Opinia Studenţească, which strove at the time to publish as many nonconformist articles as possible. According to an evaluation made for the Securitate, these magazines had two parts: the first “of conventional aspect,” and the second “totally opposite in both style and content, including articles – essays, reviews, studies – of a certain implied orientation.” Through his articles published in these magazines, which were remarked on by Virgil Ierunca on Radio Free Europe, he made his mark as a very representative figure for the intellectual nonconformism of the Iaşi Group. Following a house search in May 1983, his activity to the magazines was interrupted. The documents about him issued by the Securitate in that period record the following: he has entered “through the intermediary of his wife, into the entourage of the French assistants, visiting one another, participating together in various events,” he has "received numerous books from the French assistants with content that is denigratory towards our country, which he has read, and as a consequence of this fact, he has initiated a grouping made up of a number of young writers, namely Sorin Antohi, Luca Piţu, and George Pruteanu, writing together the novel Furrows Across the Baulks, in which they mock the policy of the Party regarding co-operativisation,” he has sung “together with Alexandru Călinescu, in a derisive manner, songs such as The Party, Ceauşescu, Romania, The Five-Year Plan in Four and a Half Years, etc., joking and commenting negatively on these songs”; he has maintained “connections with the runaway Ion Petru Culianu, his brother-in-law,” to whom he sends “letters and magazines that end up at the radio station Free Europe” and he has listened to the same radio station, "which highly praised him for his essays published in the Iaşi student magazines, mentioning that his writing is ‘under the insolent sign of freedom’.”

Dragoş Petrescu (b. 21 May 1963) is currently Professor of Comparative Politics at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Bucharest. He teaches courses relating to comparative politics, security studies, post-1917 European political and social history, and comparative analysis of communist and post-communist regimes. He graduated from the Faculty of Energetics, Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest (1987) and from the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest (1997). He has an MA in Comparative History (1998) from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, and a PhD in Comparative History (2003) from the same university. During the academic year 2002/2003 he was a Teacher Fellow in Romanian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL). Between July 2003 and March 2006, he was the Director of the Romanian Institute for Recent History (IRIR). From March 2006 to January 2010, he was a member of the Collegium of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) in Bucharest, and between January 2010 and March 2018 he was the President of the same Collegium. In his capacity as President of the CNSAS College, he initiated two important institutional projects: the establishment of the Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu Oral History Centre and the publication of digital resources for research freely accessible on the official website, of which the most significant are “Normative acts concerning the functioning of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1948–1989” and ”Sources for the history of the PCdR/PMR/PCR.” He was also a member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania – CPADCR (2006). His areas of expertise and research interests include: memory of the communist regimes in East-Central Europe; transitional justice in post-1989 Europe; and ethnic conflict and international terrorism. He has authored numerous articles on the communist regime in Romania, the 1989 regime changes in ECE, and transitional justice and the institutionalisation of memory in post-communist Europe, published in specialised international journals and collective volumes. He is the author of Explaining the Romanian Revolution of 1989: Culture, Structure, and Contingency (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2010) and Entangled Revolutions: The Breakdown of the Communist regimes in East-Central Europe (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2014), and co-editor of Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest: Regio Books, 2001).

Dragoş Petrescu’s profound interest in history and the communist past is directly linked to his personal experiences in late communist Romania. As for his attitude towards the regime, he remembers: “I was born in a family which suffered under communism. Both my grandfathers were political prisoners, but until 1989 nobody actually talked about this in our family. Of course, I went through the process of indoctrination in grammar school, and I was very sad when I was not chosen to join the ranks of the Pioneer Organisation with the first group of pupils in my class, but only with the second one after some time. Then I became a member of the Communist Youth Union, but only because everybody was automatically included in the organisation once they reached the right age – you were just given the membership card. However, I must say that I refused to join the ranks of the Romanian Communist Party: that was a decision I made consciously and it was my very modest gesture of defiance to the regime. Looking back, I must add that the terrible earthquake of 4 March 1977 was also a watershed regarding my perception of the communist regime in Romania. It just happened that I had been left alone at home by my parents – we lived in the town of Piteşti – and I was listening to Radio Free Europe waiting for the musical program when the earthquake happened. The terrible experience of the earthquake remained forever linked in my mind with the critical stances of the Romanian desk of RFE towards the Ceauşescu regime. One should also note that for a period after the earthquake, some two or three weeks I believe, listening to RFE was somehow tolerated, you could feel that people did not hide anymore the fact that they were listening to that radio station. Nowadays, we would say that it was a period of political socialisation in which many from my generation developed anti-regime attitudes.”

György Petri (1943–2000) was a poet, translator, and founding member of the Foundation for Aiding the Poor (SZETA) and Beszélő, the prominent Hungarian samizdat journal.

He was a lone child and had a difficult childhood. His father, a traveling agent, died quite early; his mother following WWII worked as an accountant. As a young boy he was a regular churchgoer and brought up in the traditional Catholic spirit. After secondary school, from 1966 he started his university studies at the ELTE Budapest Faculty of Philosophy, studying Hungarian language and literature. His first book of poems published in 1971, Magyarázatok M. számára (Explanations for M.), was a fairly successful one. Three years later he managed to publish another success, with the title Körülírt zuhanás (Euphemisms on a Fall). But then from 1975 to 1988 he became a banned author for a long time in Hungary, and thus he managed to publish his writings only in samizdat or tamizdat papers in the West. His first samizdat book of poetry entitled Örökhétfő (Everlasting Mondays) was published in 1981; its popular masterpieces are still quoted as a memento of an age (the late Kádár era) and an attitude (revolt and desperate desire for liberty). He lived an uttermost self-destructive lifestyle, with the passion of love, alcohol, straightforwardness, and an intransigent moral resistance, and left behind a uniquely strong and sarcastic political poetry.