COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

Travel reports of lecturers and members of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation are embodied in six volumes. In terms of time, they cover the period from 1983 to December 1989, mainly from Prague, Brno and Bratislava. The reports include the length and main purpose of the stay, a description of the trip including possible complications in crossing borders, meetings with other people and subjects of their interviews, information on specific activities of the state police, etc. Visitors of Czechoslovakia also proposed other forms of cooperation in their reports. There are unique and very specific documents mapping the concrete forms of the Czechoslovak dissent linked with underground universities, efforts of the foreign organisation and important Western representatives of science to support the unofficial educational environment, and documents describing the contemporary social and political conditions in Czechoslovakia including the activities of the state police.  

The Hidden Galleries collection features a number of so-called network schemes created by the secret police and offers the unique possibility to compare examples from a number of different national contexts and time periods. Network schemes were created by the secret police as visual tools developed to envision underground religious communities as centralized and hierarchical organizations. Such schemes, which were devised by the Soviet secret police but were also used in Romania, Hungary and elsewhere, depict the network of insurgent religious and political organizations from bottom to top and include complex sets of social links and hierarchical relations as perceived by the secret police. Local religious groups are routinely represented as interconnected and subordinated ‘cells’ of highly organized vertical networks with groups made to fit the same organizational logic whether this reflected reality or not. At the same time, the schemes were also used to show the results in progress of secret police operations against the targeted groups. The schemes sometimes indicate which individuals had been arrested within the network and the number of arrested believers in the repressed group as well as showing which groups and individuals remained free or under surveillance. The network schemes were either printed using photo-printing technology, sometimes including collections of photographic images of those represented, or were hand-drawn. 

http://hiddengalleries.eu/digitalarchive/s/en/item/16

The twelfth issue of the “Sci-fi magazine” was published in Teplice in 1983 and was the last to be published by the sci-fi club in Teplice. In this issue, a religious story was published that caused the founder to prohibit further publishing of the magazine, which in the short term led to the club being closed. It was probably due to the story of Eva Novakova, which she called "How It Was with the Whale" and refers to the Old Testament story of Jonah and the Whale. This event did not slow the activity of others, rather the fanzines grew throughout the country.

Gojko Đogo was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for publishing a collection of poems entitled Vunena vremena [Woollen Times] in which he “metaphorically alluded to Tito’s rule as one of tyranny, indolence and ignorance” (Dragović-Soso 2002, 54). It was the first time that “poetry was being tried” and thus support for Đogo was considered to be a principled defence of the freedom of literary and artistic creation and brought together intellectuals from across the political spectrum (nationalists, the “New Left”, and liberals).

The Đogo case was significant in that it led to the first institutional base of intellectual activism since the crackdowns of the early 1970s. This is reflected in the formation of the Committee for the Protection of Artistic Freedom at the Association of Serbian Writers in May 1982.

In their smuggling operations, the Smoloskyp couriers used various ways to obtain and to transport samizdat and other materials of the Ukrainian cultural opposition from Soviet Ukraine. Manuscripts were usually copied as microfilms, hidden in luggages or parcels (in souvenir dolls, busts of Lenin or Shevchenko, etc.). In order to smuggle materials, Smoloskyp agents sometimes used official Canadian Communist delegations that visited Ukraine, as their luggage was checked less thoroughly on the border. Unbeknown to them, Smoloskyp agents attached microfilms to their luggage or talked them into carrying some souvenirs (with microfilms hidden inside).

Nowadays, two doll-containers are displayed on the Smoloskyp permanent exhibition in Kyiv as a symbol of the creative agency of both Ukrainian cultural opposition and Ukrainian diaspora in building hidden communication channels and making the case of the Ukrainian oppositional movement internationally known.