COURAGE

Підключення Колекцій

The Marian Zulean personal collection is an illustration of the fact that any act of cultural opposition is dependent on the societal context that generates it. It implicitly highlights the fundamental difference between Romania and other communist states in the last years of the period 1980–1989. The more than 400 newspapers, magazines, brochures and books, originating especially from the Soviet Union in the Gorbachev period, epitomise a reformist political discourse that had become relatively official in the rest of the Soviet bloc, but was considered dangerous by the Romanian Securitate.

The collection contains documents of the Masaryk Society, citizens' illegal initiatives, which originated in Brno and Prague in 1988. The society organized events for the return of Masaryk's name to the public space and cultivated the regime of suppressed knowledge and awareness of the philosopher and first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.

The former chairman of the Zadar municipal committee, Romano Meštrović, extracted the documents on the mass movement of 1971 in Zadar as an ad hoc collection already in 1990. The archival materials testify to the local communist purges after the quelling of the Croatian national liberal movement known as the Croatian Spring. It mainly consists of different reports, assessments and the minutes of the inquiry panel, which investigated and accused the reformist Party members for nationalist, i.e., anti-socialist activities also in the cultural field. The city of Zadar and its communist leadership was considered one of the epicentres of the Croatian Spring, heavily criticised by Josip Broz Tito at the Karađorđevo meeting at the end of 1971.

The Matica hrvatska Collection is an excellent historical source for Croatia's cultural and political history. It is an archival collection created by the work of Matica hrvatska, a non-profit and non-governmental cultural organisation which became the central Croatian cultural institution in the Croatian national reform movement – the Croatian Spring. Matica gathered the Croatian intelligentsia that was dissatisfied with the status of Croatia within the Yugoslav federation. That is why the communist government began to treat Matica as an oppositional institution, a driver of oppositional political ideas and a rival to the League of Communists.