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Václav Sisel was a Czech printer. In the 1950s, Sisel was employed as a technical chief in the Pankrác Prison print shop. It was there, in 1953, that he met convicted writers Josef Knap, František Křelina, and Jan Zahradníček. According to Zdeněk Kalista, Czech historian, poet, and former prisoner, Václav Sisel was “very decent and significantly different from the other guards at Pankrác Prison”. Sisel concealed Jan Zahradníčekʼs poetry manuscripts, written illegally in the print shop. In 1955, when Sisel was dismissed from the print shop, he smuggled Zahradníčekʼs poems out and buried them, first in his fatherʼs garden and later in the garden of his own cottage. Sisel dug them out in March 1968 and gave them to František Křelina and Josef Knap.

Krzysztof Skiba (1964) was born in Gdańsk as a son of a high in ranks sailor and an architect. In 1983 he co-founded the Alternative Society Movement – the first anarchist organization in Poland after the World War II. In the same year, he finished high school education in Gdańsk and moved to Łódź, where he became a student of cultural studies at Łódź University and joined the team of student theatre Pstrąg. Next years he spent traveling between Gdańsk where he had still participated in anarchist activities and Łódź where he acquired knowledge about avant-garde art, alternative theatres, and culture theories. In 1985 he got arrested and consequently imprisoned for three months for spreading the anarchist leaflets on a rock festival in Jarocin. After that Skiba could no longer take part in secret, anonymous operations of anarchists, so he entered the anti-militarist and mostly pacifist Freedom and Peace movement, proclaimed in 1986 as an illegal and unofficial, but open and public opposition. He became also a student culture animator in student club Balbina, where he organized rock concerts, neo-avant-garde exhibitions, poetry performances, and theatre plays. For example, in 1988 he was a curator of an international art mail show in Balbina. Together with his colleagues from cultural studies, as well as Independent Students’ Union in Łódź, in 1988 Skiba established two groups: punk cabaret Big Cyc and the Gallery of Maniacal Activities specializing in street happenings and inspired by Wrocław’s Orange Alternative movement. Till the year 1990, when Gallery of Maniacal Activities came to an end, the radical group performed a few outrageous happenings, harshly critical about both the government and the opposition’s elites gathered around the Round Table. In 1989-1990 Skiba turned into a popular musician, showman, and satirist, while his younger colleagues from the Gallery of Maniacal Activities formed performance group Wspólnota Leeeżeć. Nowadays Skiba still performs on a stage with Big Cyc, as well as writes opinion pieces, small stories, and memoirs.

As an anarchist Krzysztof Skiba did not think too much about collecting items related to the underground and oppositional activities. He insisted in the interview that the anarchists had been focused on direct action, here and now, with negligence of any documentation and archiving. In fact it was unsafe to collect such materials in one’s home or in a student house, as in Skiba’s case. Moreover, after Skiba had been exposed as a dissent activist, he was under the systematic control of the secret police. But when he became a student culture animator in club Balbina, he created there a quiet place for alternative culture projects, even unofficial and illegal ones (like street happenings). Skiba participated in mail art exchange and the third circuit, and his address in the student house was well-known among other artists, activists, animators, promoters. Consequently, Skiba became an owner of a huge archive of art zines, fanzines, papers, leaflets, letters, and other items sent to or shared with him.

After the transition to capitalism Skiba did not care much about his archive, keeping it in cardboard boxes in his house in Gdańsk. Although in the recent years Skiba donated one part of the collection to the European Solidarity Centre and the other part to the KARTA Centre Foundation, he has got still about one thousand items.

Krzysztof Skiba was far from participating in strikes organized by ‘Solidarity’ union or in patriotic masses in churches. Indeed, happenings carried on by Gallery of Maniacal Activities were strongly sarcastic about the union’s leaders who sat together with the government around the Round Table. But in spite of this criticism, ‘Solidarity’ printers released Skiba’s zine ‘Przegięcie Pały’ and a few times the union paid the fees for arrested participants of the happenings.

Source:

Krzysztof Skiba, ‘Komisariat naszym domem. Pomarańczowa historia’, Warsaw: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2015.

An important Canadian historian, political scientist, and Slavist, H. Gordon Skilling was born in Toronto on 28^th February 1912. His life and works are closely and intensely linked with the dramatic twists and turns of Czechoslovak (and Czech and Slovak) history from the late 1930s to just over a decade after the democratic revolution of late 1989.

His works included Czechoslovak events into the history of contemporary Europe and the world, and importantly helped the rest of the world to understand what was really happening in this central European country. After the Soviet-led military intervention in August 1968, Skilling was in touch with important figures in the movement for human rights and democracy in Czechoslovakia. He tirelessly informed the world about the situation there. He wrote about the consequences of the intellectual, spiritual, and moral shocks that had devastated the country after the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’, and he often raised his voice in defence of the persecuted.

Skilling made sure that the results of independent thinking and writing in Czechoslovakia were preserved. He provided the impetus for a collection of Czechoslovak samizdat at the University of Toronto Library and he himself contributed a vast number of items that he had gathered. He was important in the establishment of the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre of Independent Literature in West Germany, and was made Chairman of its Academic Council in 1986. He helped to establish and run the Jan Hus Fund in the USA and in Canada, and was Chairman of the Board of Zdena and Josef Škvorecký’s Sixty-Eight Publishers from 1981 to 1990.

From the free institutions of democratic Czechoslovakia, Skilling received well-earned recognition and appreciation in the form of commemorative medals and awards from universities and learned societies in Prague and Bratislava, an honorary doctorate from Charles University (1992), and the highest Czechoslovak decoration ─ the Order of the White Lion – directly from President Václav Havel.

Lydia Sklevicky was born in Zagreb in 1952 and tragically died in Delnice in 1990. Sklevicky graduated with a degree in sociology and ethnology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 1976 and earned her master's degree in the sociology of culture with the dissertation "Women and Power - the Historical Genesis of an Interest" in 1984. Her unfinished doctoral thesis "Emancipation and Organization: The Antifascist Women’s Front and Post-revolutionary Social Change. (People’s Republic of Croatia 1945–1953)" was published as part of the book Horses, Women, Wars prepared by Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. She began working at the Institute for the History of the Labour Movement (today's Croatian Institute of History) in 1976, then moved to the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research at the end of 1988, where he worked until her death.

Croatian scholar and intellectual Lydia Sklevicky, in the opinion of Anamarija Štambuk Starčević, belongs among those people who are considered ahead of their time by contemporaries. Lydia was also a person of exceptional vigour and intellectual strength, who covered more topics in one decade of professional activity than numerous colleagues do throughout their entire careers. At the same time, she had a greater impact on society (Starčević Štambuk, interview March 1, 2018). Her research work encompassed social history, women's studies, gender anthropology and political rituals, but she made her greatest contribution to the study of the social history of women. Sklevicky was an active member of the professional associations of the Croatian Sociological Association and especially its section "Women and Society," the Croatian Ethnological Society, and the Nada Klaić Women's History Research Section at the Historical Society of Zagreb.

What Lydia Sklevicky meant to feminism in Croatia, especially in its beginnings, is reflected in Rada Iveković's words – “in the first years of our generation’s feminism, when we were exposed to criticism by the whole public, all political structures, our parents' generation, the media, most of our male colleagues (with a perplexing attitude and doubts only by those who wanted to rectify our thought) and many of our life companions – we had crazy fun and Lydia was one of the centres of our small mixed society” (Iveković 1995, 26).

The motives underlying Lydia Sklevicky’s feminist activity is evident in the text by Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, who said that for her it was not “a personal motive that inspired feminist thought about life and society, but the possibility that the anthropology of women offered to overturn our deteriorated knowledge of that same life and order in society (and not just in the former, socialist society)” (Rihtman Auguštin 1995, 21). 

Otakar Slavík was a Czech painter. He studied for a professorship in painting at Charles University’s College of Education in Prague and afterwards made a living doing manual labour. He was one of the artists connected to the UB 12 group. His first solo exhibition was in Prague in 1964 and from the mid-1960s Slavík began to devote himself to painting and drawing. He met with the artists from the Křížovnik School. During Normalization he was banned from exhibiting his work and he turned once more to manual labour. He signed Charter 77 and decided to leave Czechoslovakia in 1980. He moved to Vienna and became a member of the Künstlerhaus art association. His works were exhibited abroad and in Czechoslovakia after 1990. Colour and the human figure were at the centre of Slavík’s work (which is why he is sometimes associated with the “new figuration”).