COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

This collection comprises various documents (including trial records) relating to the activities of Alexandru Șoltoianu, a well-known oppositional figure in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) in the late 1960s and 1970s. Closely linked to the Usatiuc–Ghimpu–Graur group, Șoltoianu pursued a parallel project of creating a mass nationally oriented anti-Soviet political party known as National Rebirth of Moldavia (Renașterea Națională a Moldovei), to be based upon a broad network of student associations. Șoltoianu’s case files are currently held in the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova (ANRM). These materials were transferred to the ANRM from the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). 

The collection is a private documentary collection of documents concerning one of the most successful Hungarian American advocacy organizations in the field of minority and human rights. Founded in 1976 by second-generation Hungarian American intellectuals and professionals and referred to until 1984 as the CHRR–Committee for Human Rights in Romania, HHRF addressed the advocacy on behalf of Hungarian minorities in Central and Eastern Europe.

This ad-hoc collection mainly consists of documents separated from the fonds of judicial files concerning persons subject to political repression during the communist regime which is currently stored in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). It focuses on the case of Arsenie Platon, a person of peasant background and an aspiring poet, who was tried and convicted in 1961 for displaying nationalist views and for conducting “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” among his friends and acquaintances. Platon’s “anti-Soviet” opinions were mostly expressed in a series of poems and short proclamations in which he criticised ethnic discrimination against the Moldavians and called for the overthrow of Soviet power. This case is emblematic for less widely known forms of grassroots cultural opposition, falling under the same broad category as the cases of Gheorghe Muruziuc and Zaharia Doncev. Platon’s file includes no further information about his fate after the end of his prison term.

The bequest of Imre Baász is proof of the progressiveness of his thinking, the innovativeness of his artwork, and the dynamic cooperation in which he engaged in times of political, cultural, and intellectual oppression. In the 1980s, the progressive, radical creative work was detached from the capital Bucharest, which served as the perpetual center. In this reversed centrum–periphery relationship, the periphery offered more freedom, and it ensured security and the possibility of invisibility. An important example from Transylvania of the micro-groupings which promoted progressive ideas and Western European styles and methods is the MaMű Association of Târgu-Mureș, which actively encouraged the practice of concept art, mail art, action art, and abstract artistic language in general. Imre Baász, though never an official member of the MaMű, shared their artistic view and language, and his work in the town of Sfântu Gheorghe can be considered as the prolongation of the Association’s work.

The CNSAS Online Collection (CNSAS – Romanian acronym for the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives) illustrates how the communist secret police, the Securitate, conceptualised: (1) oppositional groups and individuals in communist Romania; (2) the forms in which this opposition manifested against the party-state; and (3) the transnational support it received from the exile community and foreign organisations. It also encompasses an impressive amount of invaluable information about the inner mechanisms of the Securitate, its institutional development and relationship with the Communist Party, the use of repression against any form of opposition, and the use of surveillance to avoid the development of oppositional groups and networks during its over forty years of functioning. In brief, this collection offers a comprehensive image of the means and methods used by the communist secret police, the Securitate, to deal with the anti-communist opposition between 1948 and 1989, and the response it received from oppositional groups and individuals.