COURAGE

Підключення Колекцій

Sergei Soldatov (1933-2003) was a well-known dissident in Estonia. Although he was of Russian origin, he was born and lived in Estonia until the mid-1970s, and later in exile. He was an engineer by profession, and until 1970 he worked in different positions in his field. He began his dissident activities in 1967, when he formed the underground Democratic Group with several others. He was persecuted by the KGB from 1968. Despite this, in 1969 he formed the Democratic Movement of the Soviet Union with Artem Juskevich and Oleg Tyutryumov, and others. He concentrated on publishing the journal Luch Svobody (Ray of Liberty), while waiting at the same time to be arrested. He also cooperated with Estonian democratic movements, such as the Estonian National Front (Eesti Rahvusrinne) and the Estonian Democratic Movement (Eesti Demokraatlik Liikumine). 
He was arrested and tried in 1975, and sentenced to six years in a hard labour prison camp in Mordovia. He was freed in 1981 and forced to emigrate. After that, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty until 1993. In addition, he was an active publicist, writing several books about Estonian history and about his life. In 1987, he founded his own publishers, Ost-West Renaissance, and in 1998 the independent research centre for history and philosophy Katharsis. Soldatov returned to Estonia in 2000, and continued his writing activities. 
After his death in 2003, a 15-volume collection of his works, edited by his wife Ludmilla Grünberg-Soldatova, was published.

Ottília Solt (1944–1997) was a Hungarian sociologist, journalist, educator, a member of the democratic opposition, and an MP of the first freely elected Hungarian Parliament in the term of 1990–1994.

She was born in Budapest into an intellectual family: her father was a doctor and her mother a teacher. In 1967 she graduated with a degree in Hungarian philology and Philosophy and started to work at the Institute of Economic Studies. She took part in research conducted by István Kemény on the living conditions of the poor and helped organize the social science and economics lectures that Kemény gave, initially at the university and then in his own home. In 1972 she left the Institute of Economic Studies and took up a position at the Institute of Education, where she continued her sociological research. Kemény participated in this research illegally and under a false name, because he had been dismissed and was banned from publishing the results of his own work. In the summer of 1977, Ottília set out for Paris, where Kemény was then living in exile, in order to hand him several articles and publications forbidden in Hungary. At the border the material was confiscated and she was arrested. Her trial ended with a warning from the police, the loss of her job, the withdrawal of her passport, rigorous surveillance, and the risk of a penal trial if she committed the same offence again.

Despite the dangers, Ottília was not deterred: she took part in numerous initiatives organized by opposition circles and in acts of solidarity with the signatories of Charter ’77 in Czechoslovakia. She worked in a primary school and then as a librarian. In 1979, along with other members of the Kemény circle, she set up the “Fund for Aiding the Poor.” In 1981 she lost her job definitively and suffered constant threats of house searches, arrests, and fines from the police, but she refused to be intimidated: she joined the editorial staff of the underground magazine Beszélő (Speaker), where she published the most important programmatic documents of the democratic opposition, especially in the field of social and political analysis. She was signatory to all the protests against human rights violations and joined the main opposition initiatives organized to mark the anniversary of the 1956 revolution and Hungary’s National Day of the 15^th of March.

Despite constant surveillance by the police, tapping of her telephone, and repeated searches of her home, in 1988 she played a decisive role in setting up the “Network of Free Initiatives.” She also helped draw up the programmatic declaration entitled “There Is a Way Out,” published in the same year in Beszélő, in order to turn the network into a political party with the name “Association of Free Democrats” (SzDSz). She was a member of the party’s National Council right from its inception. On 15 March 1988, she was stopped by the police and interrogated at length. In 1989 she took up a research post at the Budapest University’s Institute of Sociology and helped the samizdat Beszélő emerge as a legal weekly. She remained a member of its editorial staff until 1995. In 1990 she was elected a member of parliament and joined the social commission, acting as vice president until 1994, the year in which she withdrew from political life.

Katalin Somlai (1968–) is a historian. She graduated with a degree in Italian and History, and after a short teaching career, she began to work at the 1956 Institute in 1993. She joined the interviewing project, and she has taken part in the editing of numerous publications. She is the main editor of the webpage: visszaemlékezések.hu – Személyes törénetek a XX. századból (Remembrance.hu – Personal Stories from the Twentieth  Century).

Mária Somogyi grew up in Sárbogárd, a rural town to the south of Budapest. She graduated from the local high school in 1954 and studied literature, history, and philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (ELTE). She took a teaching position in the city of Székesfehérvár, but she moved to Budapest with her husband, biologist Pál Somogyi, in 1968. She started to work at the Library for Historical Studies (Történeti Könyvtár) at ELTE, and she did work towards a dissertation on the politics of education in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. She never completed her doctorate, however, as she gave birth to their first child and then found a permanent job to help her husband to make a living. Her friend, historian László Márkus, let her know about an open position at the National Széchényi Library (OSZK). In 1973, he joined the exclusive staff of the Closed Stacks Department (Zárt Kiadványok Tára), led by literary historian György Markovits.

Somogyi joined the Party’s branch organization (alapszervezet) at the National Széchényi Library, and as a new member, she was persuaded by the fellow party members to take the position of party secretary. She agreed, even though she admitted in retrospect that she was not a committed communist. She had a leftist inclination, but she did not identify with the ruling Party, and she was aware of the crimes committed by the Party and the lies it told. Criticism of the Party was an everyday experience in the household in which she grew up. As Somogyi recalled, her family listened to the Rajk trial on the radio and discussed the case within the family, and it was clear to at the time that Rajk’s trial was a political show trial. Accordingly, the first book Somogyi read in the Closed Stacks was Béla Szász’s Without Any Compulsion, a prison memoir by an author who was sentenced in the same series of trials as Rajk.

Somogyi’s family was then directly involved in the 1956 revolution. Her father had been elected (against his will) to serve as president of the Revolutionary Council in Sárbogárd, and he was subsequently sentenced to prison, though the sentence was suspended. It was always obvious to her that the official discourse on 1956 was untrue, and the uprising should best be regarded as a revolution, not a counterrevolution. Somogyi developed a good relationship with Miklós Vásárhelyi, one of the most significant figures of the political opposition and a former prisoner himself (because of his involvement in the revolution). She had regular discussions about 1956 with Vásárhelyi which were also formative for her. But Somogyi also learned to see the drawbacks to the revolution. In Sárbogárd, there was a Russian village in the neighborhood where people who were stationed at the military headquarters lived, and she witnessed that it was not safe for innocent Russian citizens during the uprising.

All in all, her personal experiences prompted her gradually to develop a very critical approach to all political movements or parties, but in the 1970s, she still clung to the hope that she could do more by taking an active role within the Party. Accordingly, she participated in discussions of professional issues at Party branch meetings, which was against the rules. She resigned as a party secretary in spring 1988, when Zoltán Bíró and three other prominent intellectuals were expelled from the Party, and since Bíró was an employee of the National Széchényi Library, the higher Party officials wanted Somogyi to lead the proceedings as the party secretary at Bíró’s workplace. She refused, and she gave up her position.

Somogyi began to play a key role in the late 1970s in introducing the practice of collecting samizdat. This initiative was tolerated by the directorate of the Library and the political police. As Somogyi revealed, she was never approached by the secret police to report to them, and her name does not appear in the reports, as she discovered when the relevant archives were opened. She remembered, however, that Markovits regularly had to consult with officers of the political police. When Markovits retired in 1983, Somogyi became the head of the Closed Stacks Department, and she gradually rose in the institutional hierarchy, ending up as a vice-director of the National Széchényi Library. Since 1982, the collection of samizdat became semi-official, since she acquired the materials using monies from the Library budget, and this required administration. She managed to build up arguably the largest samizdat collection in Hungary, comparable to the one located in the Petőfi Literary Museum.