COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

The collection of Ilona Liskó is the legacy of the oeuvre of a sociologist who tried to shed light on the problems in Hungarian society which, according to the official stance of the regime, did not exist. Liskó felt a sense of solidarity with the poor and marginalized in part thanks to her family upbringing, and her desire to shed light on their sufferings came from her deep sense of social obligation.

The collection holds much valuable information on the policy of Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee towards various manifestations of cultural opposition. The documents also reflect the situation of the Lithuanian intelligentsia, whose main goal was to preserve the Lithuanian cultural heritage. The documents cover the period of liberalisation, i.e. de-Stalinisation, in Soviet Lithuania.

The Mihnea Berindei Collection stored at the library of the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iași comprises the founder’s personal library. It consists of two major parts. First, it includes almost two thousand books, of which over a hundred are directly relevant for the history of the communist regimes in Romania and the neighbouring countries. These publications also reflect Berindei’s interest in human rights issues in communist Eastern Europe and the USSR. Second, it features a substantial sample of periodicals (magazines and journals), mostly published in exile and dealing with Eastern and Central Europe during the communist era. Mihnea Berindei donated his library to the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History in Iași shortly before his death, in 2016. This collection is significant due to its focus on the publications and activities of the Romanian exile community in the West. It also emphasises its founder’s abiding interest in the history and political trajectories of the East European communist regimes.

A small group of devoted researchers began to do interviews in 1981 with people who had been active in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The aim of people who did the interviews was to reveal, by giving people chances to share personal memories, the real story of this decisive set of events, which were taboo under the Kádár regime, which had violently suppressed the revolution and which was eager to make up for its lack legitimacy in the eyes of the population by spreading false propaganda. These early interviews later served as the core collection of the Oral History Archives, which was founded in Budapest in 1985.