Records of the Union of Free Hungarian Students – Julius Várallyay’s collection, 1957-1967

The Union of Free Hungarian Students, UFHS (also referred to using the Hungarian acronym, MEFESZ), was a worldwide association of Hungarian refugee students who had fled to the West after the revolution in Hungary had been brutally suppressed by Soviet tanks in late 1956. For a decade after the revolution, the UFHS represented some 8,000 Hungarian students in sixteen countries on three continents. It held yearly congresses, self-organized study and cultural programs, international press campaigns, protest demonstrations, and solidarity actions in order to ensure that the democratic and patriotic spirit of the revolution survived. In the Fall of 1956, Julius Várallyay, a second-year student at the Technical University in Budapest, was one of the most active and devoted leaders of the émigré student movement. He was elected president of UFHS in 1959. Sixty years after the defeat of the revolution, he donated his collection of UFHS records, until then had been stored in his Washington home, to the 1956 Research Institute, Budapest.

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Romualdas Ozolas and Lithuanian Philosophers' Opposition

Since there were no underground organisations or networks of Soviet Lithuanian philosophers, Lithuanian lecturers and scholars of philosophy accommodated Soviet ideology, and used legal forms of activity in order to pursue the aims of cultural opposition. Philosophers played an important role in Sąjūdis (the Lithuanian national movement) in 1988-1990. One of the key figures among Lithuanian philosophers was Romualdas Ozolas. During Soviet times, he occupied nomenklatura positions, such as adviser to the deputy chair of the Council of Ministers, but at the same time he was deeply involved in various cultural initiatives that went far beyond the Soviet ideological line. Being a very scrupulous collector, Ozolas left extensive papers that are still waiting for investigation by researchers.

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Lokacija:
- 10102 Vilnius O. Milašiaus gatvė 19 , Lithuania
Teme:
Datum osnivanja:
- 2008
Reprezentativni primjerci:
- Minutes of Problemos (the Problems) editorial board's meeting in the Ministry of High Education

Samizdat Collection at Petőfi Literary Museum (PLM)

This collection is one of the most important samizdat collections in Hungary. The Museum's Library and Archive started systematically to collect samizdat materials in the 1980s. The materials were kept in closed stacks not available to the public until 1989. The Museum held one of the first exhibitions on samizdat in Hungary after the change of regimes.

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Lokacija:
- Budapest Károlyi utca 16, Hungary 1053
Teme:
Datum osnivanja:
- 1981
Reprezentativni primjerci:

Sighet Memorial - Oral History Collection

The Oral History Collection of the Sighet Memorial contains several thousand testimonies of great relevance for what the Romanian communist regime meant in general and especially for the prison experience of thousands of former political detainees. The distinctiveness of this oral history collection is strictly connected to the recovery and systematic conservation of the memory of those who went through significant traumatic experiences during the communist regime, with the aim of saving from oblivion that part of history which was officially suppressed until 1989, but which emerged spontaneously to the surface immediately after the change of regime.

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Lokacija:
- București Calea Moșilor 132, Romania 030167
Teme:
Datum osnivanja:
- 1993
Reprezentativni primjerci:
- Paraschiv, Vasile, interview by Mihai Chiru, 2005. Transcript, Sighet Memorial – Oral History Collection
- Pop-Săileanu, Aristina, interview by Liana Petrescu, 1994. Transcript, Sighet Memorial – Oral History Collection

Sirje Kiin Private Archive

The Sirje Kiin private archive was formed as the result of the professional and creative activities of the journalist, literary scholar and critic Sirje Kiin (b. 1949). It includes material from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. Its most valuable parts are the very extensive correspondence with many cultural figures of the day, and diaries in which, among other things, the cultural and political climate of the 'hot' autumn of 1980 is described. Starting with protests by youth against the russification policies, and the suppression of these protests by the security forces, it led to the writing of a famous letter by 40 intellectuals, an open letter from Soviet Estonian cultural figures protesting against the increasing russification.

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Lokacija:
- Tartu Vanemuise 42, Estonia 51003
Teme:
- književnost i književna kritika
- nacionalni pokreti (domoljubna opozicija)
Datum osnivanja:
- 2003
Reprezentativni primjerci:
- Diary about the Letter of 40 Intellectuals