COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

In the 1970s, the first representatives of the political and cultural opposition to the Soviet Union came to the West and, above all, to France. Most of them went through communist jails, labour camps, were abused psychologically, subjected to persecution or bullying from the police. Their endeavour in exile was to continue with the struggle against totalitarianism, repression and the constant violations of human rights. It was their determination that brought them to be amongst the members of the Czechoslovak emigration, and Pavel Tigrid paid them great attention and gave them a background in their Redaction Testimonies.

Pavel Tigrid and his wife prepared to cooperate with their Russian friends in Paris in November 1974 at a Russian-Czechoslovakian conference. At the meeting, Ivana Tigridová initiated the establishment of an organisation that would coordinate human rights activities in different parts of the world and cooperate with international human rights and civil liberty organisations in Eastern Europe. The ten-member committee was elected and Ivana Tigridová became the committee's honorary secretary. The organisation, named Help and Action, was headquartered in Paris's Testimonies Redaction. The Committee Secretariat was managed by volunteers and funded by private donations.

 Since then, members of the Help and Action Coordination Committee have been planning and coordinating activities to defend human and civil rights in their countries. Ivana Tigridova, in cooperation with her husband, had been functioning since the establishment of the committee.

 The purpose of the committee's work was to mobilise the public and, with its help, to reach out to governments and international organisations in the West, and then to exert pressure on the representatives of the Communist countries, where the rights and freedoms of their citizens were suppressed. In support of persecuted Czechoslovak and Soviet citizens, the Help and Action organised demonstrations, petitions, public debates and press conferences. The main objective of these campaigns was to achieve the release of political prisoners or at least to mitigate their prison conditions. Moral support was also provided to the prisoners, which was very important to them. They knew that their activities, despite the numerous repressions of the regime, made sense. At the same time, help was also organised for their families. Ivana Tigridová published a bulletin of the same name, which informed the public about the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern Bloc countries.

Help and Action was active until the fall of the Iron Curtain, which meant the defeat of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet bloc countries.

The Historical Archives of Belgrade (IAB) was founded in 1945 as a city archive to preserve the history of Belgrade from the eighteenth century through modern times. It has had its current name, Historical Archives of Belgrade, since 1958. Collections related to all 17 municipalities of Belgrade are kept at IAB. In addition to the public collections, the Archives also holds a variety of estates and private collections important for the study of Yugoslav history.

The existence of the Historical Office (today the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security) was due to two preconditions: first, it was created as a site for the documents which were produced by the state security police of the socialist regime between 1945 and 1990 and, second, it was only possible to create it following the change of the system in 1989/1990, which made it possible to move the documents to the archive relatively quickly. The idea of the establishment of an independent institution emerged at the beginning of 1990, connected to the so-called Duna-gate political scandal (which was about a case of wiretapping and which got its name from the American Watergate affair). This scandal made the transformation of the state security organs to national security organs faster, but nonetheless, the documents of the Office Division III of the Ministry of the Interior, which was responsible for the Duna-gate case, remained in the property of the Ministry of the Interior.

In 1990, Gábor Demszky and Péter Hack, who were members of the parliamentary opposition, submitted a bill to limit the political activity of the officers of the Office Division III. In 1994, the parliament modified the law about the lustration of certain persons in important public positions (they investigated whether they were members of the state security office or were in possession of information about it). The law forbade the examination of the documents for 30 years.

In 1994, the Constitutional Court considered whether or not the law met the criteria set by the Constitution. The Court established that the law had to respect the right of access to personal information and allowed individuals concerned to see the documents about themselves. Following this decision, the Minister of the Interior set up an expert committee to investigate the documents and suggested the transmission of the folders to the state archives. But this did not apply to the all of the materials. For some special files, the committee recommended establishing an independent institution. It was important that the committee listed more than the documents of the Office Division III. It included other important folders which were also preserved by the national security organs.

In 1996, the Parliament set up the Historical Office (Történeti Hivatal, TH), which was an archive despite its name. Because special rules had to be established concerning the preservation and treatment of these documents, it was necessary to set up an independent institution for this duty. In 1997, the President of the Republic appointed György Markó to serve as the first chairmen of the Historical Office. The transmission of the documents could begin. At this early time, the structure and rules of the institute were established. Scholarly researchers and private individuals began to visit the archive from 1 of September of that year. The TH soon became the most visited archive, taking into account the amount of materials it held.

The ordering of the documents meant a huge task for the associates of the archive. It had to develop a special database which was easy to search, because there were no guides or catalogues. This work began in 2000. Meanwhile, the issues of lustration, compensation, and historical research were separated, and the archive was responsible only for the latter. A 2001 law expanded the opportunities for academic research and qualified the TH as a specialized state archive which had to receive future documents of the working security services as well. However, the national security services could decide what kinds of folders they wanted to submit to the archive.

The Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, ÁBTL), as the successor to the TH, was officially established in 2003 under the supervision of director general György Gyarmati. Between 2003 and 2005, more than 800 linear meters of materials were transferred to the ÁBTL. In 2017, the collection included 4,000 linear meters of documents. The register was created in 2003, and in 2009 an important preservation and digitalization project was launched.

In 2005, the ÁBTL law was modified again and more data became accessible to researchers and individuals affected, but the Constitutional Court nullified the law. Two years later, an expert committee was set up led by János Kenedi to formulate recommendations about the accessibility of documents which were held by the secret services. The committee suggested detaching the issue of the documents and that of the agents in this proposal. The latter one followed the method of lustration and made it more difficult to recognize information about the members of the agent network. Furthermore, the committee drew attention to the data which had been preserved on magnetic tapes by the officers of state security. The digitalization of the tapes has been completed, but researchers have not yet been granted access to them. The tapes were encrypted in 2015.

History Meeting House in Warsaw is a municipal institution which concentrates on the education about the history of XX century Poland and Warsaw. It addresses its activities to different groups: children, teenagers, elderly people and general public and organizes exhibitions (both in-door and out-door), lectures, film screenings, festivals, and city games. 
The Oral History Archive is a research part of the HMH and serves not only as an archival institution, but also as a source of knowledge to be published and disseminated.