COURAGE

Підключення Колекцій

The case against Gheorghe Muruziuc was opened by the district prosecutor on 28 June 1966. Initially he was accused of causing public disorder (“hooliganism”), but later the accusation of undermining the national and racial equality of the peoples of the USSR was added. On 23 July 1966, his file was transferred under the jurisdiction of the KGB. Muruziuc was accused of “nationalist tendencies” and of “systematic agitation aimed at fomenting hatred between persons of different nationalities and at undermining the national equality of the people of the USSR.” According to the act of accusation, it was in March 1966 that Muruziuc began to spread “calumnies and lies” about the “purported discrimination against the Moldavians by other nationalities,” aiming at “rousing feelings of national isolation and separation” among his fellow Moldavians, while “inculcating” them with his “ideas of bourgeois nationalism.” The authorities were especially alarmed by the potential impact of his nationalist views, as exemplified by his conversations with two of his acquaintances: an employee of the police, Trachuk, and a lawyer from the nearby small town of Fălești, Scripcaru, who had served as defence counsel for Muruziuc’s brother. Muruziuc was accused of “distorting the historical development and creation of the Moldavian SSR” and of openly propagating “the secession of the Moldavian SSR from the USSR” and its further development “as an independent nation-state.” The accusation carefully listed all the documented instances of Muruziuc’s nationalist pronouncements, emphasizing his dissatisfaction with the national discrimination against the Moldavians and his conviction of the necessity of the republic’s secession from the Soviet Union. Muruziuc’s intention to display the Romanian flag on 12 June was viewed as “a symbolic demonstration of protest at the alleged discrimination against the Moldavians,” while his defiant act of raising it on the factory’s chimney on 28 June was interpreted as stemming from Muruziuc’s desire to “openly demonstrate his nationalist opinions in front of the masses, intending to foment hatred among Moldavians towards people of other nationalities and to awaken among them… a tendency towards national separation.” Muruziuc’s defiant stance during the party meeting on 30 June clearly aggravated his situation. Beyond the disturbing nature of his message, Muruziuc’s insistence that his views were shared by “the entire Moldavian people” rang an alarm bell for the authorities, as did his slogan of “Moldavia for the Moldavians.” His actions during the factory standoff were qualified as a “grave disturbance of public order.” As a result, Muruziuc was sentenced to two years imprisonment in a labour camp. The act of accusation was issued on 25 October 1966. It is an interesting example of the Soviet authorities’ position toward cases of “local nationalism,” which became more frequent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The correlation between an individual’s opinions and their impact on society was one of the main criteria for the severity of the sentence, as becomes obvious from Muruziuc’s case.  

The State Security Service's collection of intelligence files also includes the files of intellectuals and other participants in the Croatian Spring. A significant number of documents in such files is related to criminal prosecution of these persons which followed the suppression of that reform movement in Croatia at the end of 1971.

This group also included Vlado Gotovac, a prominent Croatian poet, journalist, philosopher and politician (Imotski, 18 September 1930 – Rome, 7 December 2000). From July to December 1971, he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Hrvatski tjednik (Croatian Weekly), the newspaper of the Matrix Croatica, which advocated the programme of the national reform movement. As one of its leaders, together with ten other members of the Croatian spring, Gotovac was arrested on 11 January 1972 on charges of a “counter-revolutionary attack against the state and social order ,” “conspiring against the people and state,” and “other offences against the people and state.”A search of their homes followed. In an annex to the report from 6 February 1972 “based on a review of written, published and other material temporarily sequestered during the search of Vlado Gotovac's home and office,” there is a listed of 158 books (by émigré and other authors), Gotovac's writings, letters, poems, notes, notebooks and other items. On the basis of “friendly or business” correspondence, a list of 76 persons with whom Gotovac was in contact was drawn up. A significant number of the documents in Gotovac's intelligence file pertain to written records of hearings before the District Court in Zagreb and other documents related to proceedings in which, on 26 October 1972, he was sentenced to four years in prison, deprived of civil liberties for three years and the right to employment in the civil service, and his publishing and public activities were restricted. Ignoring the ban on public activities, after granting an interview to foreign journalists in 1977, he was again indicted and, after a trial in 1981, sentenced to two years in prison and loss of civil liberties for four years. He returned to public life at the end of the 1980s, but could only find employment after the restoration of democracy in 1990. The content of the file reveals that Gotovac was under the surveillance of the State Security Service since the mid-1950s. Among other things, the operational notes from that time contain the observation that Gotovac was “noticed as a very active young voice” of writers gathered around the journal Krugovi (Circles), whence a thread of Croatian nationalism began to spread” (HR-HDA-1561. SDS RSUP SRH. Intelligence files, Vlado Gotovac's file, no. 204605, Operational note, 30 July 1963).

Vlado Gotovac was the author of about twenty collections of poems and prose works. Additionally, he published criticism, essays, stories, radio dramas and engaged non-fiction texts in newspapers and magazines. It is interesting to note that Gotovac wrote even during his imprisonment in Stara Gradiška and Lepoglava. Such writings are preserved in his prison file, now also in the CSA in Zagreb. Referring to them at the meeting “Encounter with Gotovac” held in the Petit Local Library in Pula on 7 December 2015 on the 15^th anniversary of Gotovac's death, his daughter Ana Gotovac said that they reflect “the immense efforts of a man, who was thrown into a  place unthinkable to someone who wasn't there, to remain normal and to maintain his spirit and soul” (Angeleski, Z. 2015. “Svog sam oca doživljavala kao tatu, ali i kao heroja.” GlasIstre.hr, 8 December).

The Croatian State Security Service file on Vlado Gotovac is registered under number 204605 and preserved on microfiche. It includes roughly 530 pages of documents. All of them are available for research and copying. So far they have been used by several researchers. It should be noted that  Filip Zoričić from the Institute Mediterran is writing a doctoral thesis on Vlado Gotovac's life and work.

This music-optical experiment is a sort of a proto-video clip.

The black and white visualisations resemble an archaic arcade game played on a hulking machine, only to switch to surrealistic photomontage, which passes on to automatically generated abstract animation However the film, recorded with use of a 35 mm celluloid stock, was created in 1944 in the UK, where Agnieszka and Stefan Themerson emigrated during the World War II.

The soundtrack comprises four songs by Karol Szymanowski, performed in English. What we see in the screen is the interpretation of the songs. Each one is briefly introduced by a speaker who explains the method used to connect the sound with the images.

Some of them are metaphorical images inspired by the lyrics of the songs, some form an analysis of the components of the songs, with different images assigned to different groups of instruments, e.g. one instrument is represented with a simple geometric figure, which fluctuates depending on the tone.

The typewriter in the Ion Monoran Collection is the Olivetti “Studio 44” that the poet and revolutionary used when he transcribed and organised his poems and journalistic writings. It was purchased at a price of 2,000 lei, which at the time was equivalent to a teacher’s monthly salary. Ana Monoran recalls that he bought it in 1984, the year in which their daughter Oana was born. This means that his possession of such an item came under the provisions of Law 23 of 1971 and Decree 93 of 1983. Under the terms of the former, which dealt with the protection of state secrets, typewriters, duplicating machines, and photocopiers had a similar status to weapons, ammunition, and explosive substances. Because duplicating machines and photocopiers had great subversive potential, Decree 93 of 1983 forbade their possession by physical persons. The same decree mentioned that, out of all the means of multiplying texts, “physical persons may only possess typewriters.”

The status of typewriters was severely regulated. Anyone who acquired or inherited a typewriter had to register it within thirty days from the date of acquisition or inheritance. In order to have a typewriter legally in one’s possession, it was necessary to have an authorisation of possession and use, and at the moment of obtaining this authorisation, one had to provide a “writing sample” for the typewriter in question. The “writing sample” had to be renewed each year, so that the communist authorities could have as accurate as possible a record of typewriters and would be able to detect their use for the multiplication of clandestinely disseminated materials.

Ion Monoran’s Olivetti “Studio 44” typewriter was used to put together many of the materials published after December 1989 in the newspaper Timişoara, a paper that is an emblematic for the local mass-media after the fall of communism. Indeed, for many weeks Ion Monoran accommodated the editorial office of this publication in a room in his home.