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Olbram Zoubek was a Czech sculptor. He was known as the creator of Jan Palach’s death mask. After finishing grammar school, he studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague from 1945–1952, where he met his future wife, the artist Eva Kmentová. Until 1969, Zoubek could publicly present his work, however he did not belong to the group of “pro-regime” artists. In 1958 he became a member of the art group Trasa. He exhibited with this group until the end of the 1970s. His first solo exhibition was held in 1963 in Prague. A major turning point in his life was the death of Jan Palach in January 1969. Zoubek made his death mask and designed Palach’s gravestone at Olšany Cemetery. However, the gravestone was soon removed by the police. It was not returned to the grave until 1990.

Zoubek’s activities supporting anti-regime protests prevented him from officially exhibiting his work for several years. He turned to restoration work. From the 1980s his work gradually began to return to the public space. After the Velvet Revolution, he was acclaimed by professionals and the public, and a number of exhibitions of his works were organized. Zoubek was also the creator of the Monument Dedicated to the Victims of Communism in Prague and the gravestone of Milada Horáková – a politician who was executed in the 1950s.

Miklós Mattyasovszky-Zsolnay (1912–2005) was a member of the famous Hungarian ceramic Zsolnay dynasty, a jurist and lawyer and owner and executive director of the Iris Ceramic Factory during the interwar period. In late 1944, Mattyasovszky-Zsolnay left Hungary for Germany, where he lived for years as a refugee before settling in Canada in 1952. Throughout the rest of his life, Mattyasovszky-Zsolnay participated actively in the organization of the émigré scouting movement and was elected as honorary president of the HSAE.

Marian Zulean is currently Professor in the Faculty of Administration and Business of the University of Bucharest. He teaches courses relating to public policy, national security policy, and military sociology. He has a masters degree in Public and International Affairs (MPIA) from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Bucharest, and he carried out postdoctoral work as a Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Sociology of the University of Maryland. His area of expertise includes the analysis of public policies, international security, and civil–military relations. He is the author of numerous articles about the reform of the national defence and strategic security sectors in the transition to democracy, published in specialised journals and in international collective volumes, and of the books Strategiile de securitate națională (The strategies of national security)(Ed. Tritonic, 2015); Militarul și societatea la începutul mileniului al III-lea (The soldier and society at the start of the third millennium) (Ed. Militară, 2008); and Politica de securitate naţională: Concepte, instituții, procese (National security policy: Concepts, institutions, processes)(Ed. Polirom, 2007)

Marian Zulean worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski as an intern as part of the US–Romania Action Commission in 1999, and was a Brzezinski Scholar in 2004. In the period 2001–2008, he served as an expert in the International Relations and National Security Department of the Romanian Presidential Administration. He is an officer in reserve, specialised in reconnaissance. Apart from his strictly professional concerns, Marian Zulean continues to have a passionate interest in the history of communism and the history of political ideas, just as he had when he began to gather the publications in his collection.

As for what the communist regime meant for him, he confesses: “I never believed strongly in communism. In fact I had several affective sources of non-alignment to what communism in Romania actually was. My family was considerably penalised by communism. My father’s parents were sanctioned by the communists, as my grandfather was an Orthodox priest. At one point, even their books were burned. On my mother’s side, it was the same story: her father, my maternal grandfather, spent a year under political arrest. And my mother was put out of high school, precisely for that reason. Later, my maternal grandfather was released, and told he had been arrested by mistake. But my mother had already been put out of high school… So I had, for reasons of biography, plenty of grounds to be prudent with regard to communism. Against that background came the magazines – with a different type of discourse to the official one – just when I was opening my eyes to the world, in my adolescence.”

Andrii Zvarun was director of the Smoloskyp publishing house during 1972-1992 and member of the Smoloskyp quarterly editorial board in 1978-1989. An activist of Ukrainian human rights movement in the US, he led the Washington Helsinki Guarantees for Ukraine Committee in 1976-1982, which was formed at the initiative of the Information Service of Smoloskyp. After World War II, Zvarun with his family moved from Soviet Ukraine to Germany and later to the US, where he got his degree in microbiology from Ohio University. In 1972, he joined Smoloskyp's human rights activities. He organized a series of protest campaigns against political repression in Soviet Ukraine, prepared Smoloskyp press releases, participated in international human rights conferences, including the first International Sakharov Hearing in Copenhagen. In 1977, he spoke on Ukrainian dissident movement and the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Group at the US Congress. Zvarun managed to receive the majority of documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Group from the Group’s founder, Mykola Rudenko. The documents were later published by Smoloskyp.

Zvarun also took an active role in the campaign for liberating Nina Strokata, a repressed Ukrainian microbiologist and a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. As a result of the campaign, Strokata was accepted for membership in the American Society for Microbiology that later helped her and her husband, Sviatoslav Karavanskyi, to emigrate to the US.