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Pavel Doronin (born in 1905, Bukhedu Railway Station of the Eastern Chinese Railway, Manchuria, now Boketu, Nei Mongol Province, China) was a railway worker and engineer who came to Chișinău in 1960 after working for over three decades in various positions within the railway system throughout the Soviet Union. Doronin was of Russian ethnic background and had a “healthy” social origin from the perspective of the Soviet authorities. In his youth he was a worker at various branches of the Soviet railway network in the Far East, first in Blagoveshchensk on the Amur River and then in the Khabarovsk region. In 1934 he graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Railroad Transport Engineering and subsequently worked in the railway system in various regions of the Soviet Union. In the late 1930s he married and settled in Vladivostok for several years. In February 1941 Doronin was transferred to Lviv, in Western Ukraine, where he arrived later that spring. The initial phase of the Soviet-German War caught him there. He was drafted into the Red Army in the summer of 1941 and sent to the front as a military engineer. His family, who had stayed behind in Vladivostok, was subsequently evacuated to the Altai region. In late 1942 and 1943 his unit operated in the Kursk region. He became commander of a railway engineering battalion. In November 1943 he was arrested and convicted by a special military tribunal to ten years of hard labour as a result of purportedly conducting ”anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” among the soldiers and officers of his unit. He was sent to a forced labour camp in the Russian Far North, in the Pechora region, where he served his sentence while also being employed as a railway worker starting from the late 1940s. He was reunited with his family in 1953, after his release from the labour camp, and was rehabilitated in 1955 by a special military court of the Voronezh military district. In the late 1950s he worked as a railway engineer in Kotlas, in the Russian Far North, building a successful professional career. In 1960 he came to Chişinău, where he was first employed at the city’s railway station and then moved to the Luch factory in late 1963. Doronin retired in 1965. His opposition to the regime becomes less surprising if his earlier prison experience is taken into account. During the preliminary investigation carried out by the Stalinist penal system in 1943, it was revealed that Doronin exhibited ”anti-Soviet” opinions as early as the late 1920s, when he was denied party membership, and relapsed into his earlier anti-Soviet stance after graduation, in 1934. However, it is not clear if his condemnation in 1943 had any substance. Although he was denounced by several fellow-officers for ”anti-Soviet propaganda,” this charge seemed highly dubious given the context and the practices of the time, as well as his later rehabilitation in 1955. It is obvious, however, that Doronin resented his conviction and thought he had been punished unjustly. After his retirement, around 1967, Doronin became even more disenchanted with the Soviet state. During the preliminary investigation, it transpired that his discontent toward the regime was also fuelled by his listening to Western radio stations (mainly Voice of America and the BBC), as well as by his earlier conviction. His criticism of the regime was exacerbated by his precarious living conditions, as well as by a series of personal and family crises that he suffered after his retirement. All these factors resulted in the active phase of his ”anti-Soviet” behaviour, which he displayed from late 1967 to early 1971. His psychiatric assessment concluded that, while completely sane, he displayed a ”heightened sense of social justice,” which might also explain the gradual radicalization of his views. Doronin was also a voracious reader and a highly articulate person, a fact which is proven by the content of his letters and petitions. This probably enhanced the apprehension of the Soviet authorities, despite the isolated character of his actions and the lack of any hint at the propagation of his views. His criticism of the hypocrisy and corruption of the Communist Party and of the hollowness of Soviet official ideology was enough for him to be regarded as potentially dangerous. After the preliminary investigation, which lasted for three months – from 6 December 1971 to 6 March 1972, followed by the trial, held on 24-27 March 1972 – Doronin was sentenced to one and a half years in a high-security prison, according to article 67, part 1, of the Criminal Code of the Moldavian SSR (“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda aimed at undermining Soviet power”). Doronin’s fate after his sentence and arrest is unknown. 

Lidija Doroņina-Lasmane is a well-known Latvian anti-communist dissident. Born into a Baptist family, she was imprisoned for the first time at the age of 21 for five years in 1946 for taking medication to national partisans. Her father was detained for ten years, but her mother was handed a three-year suspended sentence. In 1951, Lidija was forced to stay at the settlement in Vorkuta, and only returned to Latvia after the death of Stalin. In 1970, she was detained for two years for reading and disseminating forbidden literature. The third time she was detained was for five years in 1983, for participating in the 'Action of Light', but she was released in 1987. Returning to Latvia, she became one of the publishers of the Auseklis review. In 1994, Doroņina-Lasmane was awarded one of the highest decorations of Latvia, the Order of Three Stars, but she refused to accept it, because, according to her, several former KGB informers had also been awarded the Order.

Krunoslav (Stjepan) Draganović, priest, historian and politician, was born on in Brčko on October 30, 1903. He finished primary school in Travnik and secondary school in Sarajevo. He completed five semesters at the Polytechnic in Vienna, but in 1925 he changed colleges and began to study theology in Sarajevo. He was ordained in 1928 as a priest of the Archdiocese of Vrhbosna. From 1932 to 1935, he studied ecclesiastical sciences at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, where he defended his doctoral thesis, which was published in German in 1937 (Draganović, Stjepan. Massenübertritte von zur Katholiken ortodoxiathem kroatischen Sprachgebit zur Zeit der Türkenherrschaft, Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum,  1937). After his studies, he held various ecclesiastical posts, and since 1940 he was a professor of church history at the Theological Faculty in Zagreb. As a historian, he was an expert in statistics and cartography (See Draganović, Krunoslav, Opći šematizam Katoličke crkve u Jugoslaviji (General Schematism of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia), Sarajevo: Academy Regina Apostolorum, 1939).

After the establishment of the Ustasha regime and their Independent State of Croatia (NDH), as of May 1941, he became a member of the Colonisation Office. He founded the Committee for Slovenian refugees with the task of organising aid for around 14,500 refugees from Slovenia who fled in fear of the German occupiers. In late 1941, he was appointed a member of the Commission on Religious Conversions to the Catholic Faith. From the end of August 1943, he worked in Rome as a representative of the Church, assisting the Caritas of the Zagreb Archdiocese and the Croatian Red Cross in care for Croatian prisoners and detainees in Italy after that country’s capitulation. In the last two years of World War II, Draganović established contacts with US and British diplomats and military officials in Rome, and he sought the preservation of an independent Croatian state and tried to arrange the withdrawal of the Croatian armed forces and refugees from the NDH. With approval from Vatican, he visited prison camps in Italy and Austria in which Croatian refugees were held and assisted efforts to provide humanitarian aid, but also helped them to emigrate to other countries. In these actions, he also helped many lower officials of the Ustasha regime. At that time, he began collecting valuable documentation and testimonies on the Bleiburg tragedy and crimes committed against the Croatian people at the end of World War II and immediately thereafter.

He stayed in exile and became actively involved in political work. In 1950, he participated in the establishment of the Croatian National Committee in Munich. Since 1953, he mainly worked in the Pontifical Croatian College of St. Jerome in Rome, which he had to leave in 1958 due to the pressure by the Yugoslav authorities on Catholic bishops in Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav state had set a condition that Catholic priests from Yugoslavia could study at the Pontifical Croatian College only if Draganović left it. The Yugoslav communist authorities considered the Croatian clergy one of its main enemies, which influenced the development of church-state relations in Yugoslavia. Since Krunoslav Draganović was particularly active in the anti-communist activism, he was often a point of contention in the church-state relations (Akmadža, Sarajevo 2014). In the first half of the 1960s, negotiations between the Holy See and Yugoslavia on the normalisation of relations were conducted, and in this context in 1963 Draganović was forced to leave Italy. He soon moved to Austria. Negotiations between the Holy See and Yugoslavia on the normalisation of relations were completed by the signing of a special protocol in 1966.

From 1964 Draganović lived in Pressbaum near Vienna, where he intensified his research into the Bleiburg tragedy, and he began to write the post-war history of the Croatian people. During this period, the communist government in Yugoslavia attacked him, claiming that he was not only an Ustasha but even one of that regime’s ideologues, a war criminal and Pavelic's intimate, also accusing him of aiding a number of Ustasha and Nazi war criminals escape justice. Such unsubstantiated claims are present even today (see Aarons and Loftus 1998, Škoro 2000, Levenda 2012, Rašeta, 2014). Miroslav Akmadža (historical controversy, 2016) argues that such claims are not justified, as Draganović himself proved this during his life. The famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005) in 1965 called Draganović a war criminal, and in 1967 he accused him of saving Nazi criminals, including the infamous Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), so that Drganović threatened Wiesenthal with a lawsuit and Wiesenthal withdrew his libel (Akmadža 2010, 40, Jareb 2014, 292, Akmadža 2016). According to Akmadža, Draganović did not save anybody who was subject to prosecution for war crimes by international arrest warrants, especially those who were associated with the trial in Nuremberg. Certainly, he helped some lower officials and officers from various regimes and militaries who came to seek his help. He helped people from countries where communist parties seized power without any special criteria. He did so because he did not believe that these people would be objectively prosecuted by  the communist authorities. Mostly these people came from Yugoslavia, but there was also a range of people from various other Eastern Bloc countries (Akmadža 2016). The claims that he organised the escape of Ante Pavelić were never proven (Jareb 2014, Akmadža, 2016).

In September 1967, Draganović appeared in Yugoslavia under mysterious circumstances. For some time he was in police custody and interrogated, but soon thereafter he was released and not prosecuted. War crimes charges were dropped. He spent several years in a monastery near Sarajevo, then he was in Zagreb briefly, and then in the Vrhbosna Theological Seminary in Sarajevo, where he lived and worked as a professor (under constant police surveillance) also engaging in research into church history at the Faculty of Theology until his death on July 5, 1983.

Draganović’s political actions and the rescue of people who were persecuted by the communist government in Yugoslavia were not the only reason why he was considered an enemy of the regime. As a historian, he was collecting information and documentation in order to write a book on the mass crimes of the Yugoslav Army in 1945. He deliberately accumulated his private archive, which is today scattered across multiple locations (Rome, Sarajevo, Zagreb). Copies of this part of his archive are today held as a collection at the Croatian State Archives.

In 1946, the Dragila couple were sent to Washington, D.C., to work in the Yugoslav diplomatic mission. When the Cominform Resolution was made in 1948, Dušanka and Pero Dragila took a pro-Soviet stance and thus were forced to resign their diplomatic positions. Soon after, they emigrated to Prague together with other Yugoslav diplomats who supported the resolution.

Dušanka Dragila was active from the very beginning of the formation of the Yugoslav Cominformist emigrant group in Prague. While her husband Pero had more organisational role within the group, Dušanka was involved in its propaganda activities. Dušanka Dragila was a member of editorial staff of the emigrant newspaper Nova Borba until 1954 and worked for a Yugoslav emigrant radio in Prague until 1953.

When the Yugoslav Cominformist emigrants from across Europe became more active again in the 1970s, leading to the formation of the new illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1974, Dušanka and Pero Dragila, together with Ivan Sinanovič, operated the party’s Prague cell. Their small group became a centre for the production and distribution of illegal propagandistic leaflets sent to Yugoslavia. Dušanka and Pero Dragila were the main authors of these leaflets, which were illegally printed and sent to Yugoslavia up until 1976. These leaflets now form the Yugoslav Cominformists in Prague collection.

In 1946, the Dragila couple was sent to Washington, D.C., to work within the Yugoslav diplomatic mission. Pero Dragila officially worked as the secretary of the Yugoslav Embassy in Washington. Unofficially, he was involved in espionage as Deputy Chief of the State Security Service (in Serbo-Croatian Uprava državne bezbednosti or UDBA) in order to monitor organisations of Yugoslav emigrants in the USA and Canada.

The Cominform Resolution of 1948 came as a surprise for Dragila. However, he decided to support the Internationalists and their policy in line with the Cominform and the Soviet Union. Since his position in the Yugoslav state administration was political, he was forced to resign. In August 1948, he arrived in Prague together with other Yugoslav diplomats who had taken a pro-Soviet stance.

Pero Dragila was one of the organisers of the Yugoslav Cominformist emigrant group in Prague. Up until 1954, Dragila was one of the leading and most influential members of this group, as well as the editor of the newspaper Nova Borba and directed Yugoslav emigrant radio broadcasting in Prague. However, given his previous work in UDBA, his main role among the Yugoslav Cominformists became intelligence activities, ensuring that spies did not infiltrate the organisation.

When the activities of the Yugoslav Cominformist emigrants restarted in the 1970s, leading to the formation of the new illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), Dragila became a member of the party’s Central Committee. Together with his wife Dušanka and Ivan Sinanovič, Dragila operated the so-called Prague cell of the new CPY, which became the centre for the production and distribution of illegal propaganda intended for Yugoslavia. Pero and Dušanka Dragila were the main authors of such leaflets, which were illegally printed and sent to Yugoslavia up until 1976. These leaflets now make up the Yugoslav Cominformists in Prague collection.