Gediminas Ilgūnas was a well-known Lithuanian writer, journalist, ethnographer and traveller. In the 1950s, he was accused of anti-Soviet activity and imprisoned. On being released from prison, he and his close friends started to organise ethnographic expeditions, collecting material about important personalities in Lithuanian national history. The collection holds various manuscripts, including documents relating to his activities in the Sąjūdis movement and his political activities as a member of the Supreme Council, short memories about the Stalinist period, and material collected for a biography of Vincas Pietaris. The collection shows the actions of a Soviet-period cultural activist who tried to collect and preserve Lithuania's past culture.
This collection focuses on the case of Gheorghe Muruziuc, a person of working-class background who expressed his opposition to the Soviet regime by raising the Romanian flag on the factory where he worked, in June 1966. This was the first instance when the Romanian flag was displayed in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) after June 1940.
The private collection contains materials documenting the celebration of the Grand Jubilee, when 100,000 pilgrims gathered in Solin in Dalmatia on 12 September 1976. The Grand Jubilee celebrated the thirteen centuries of the first contacts of the Croats with the Holy See and 1,000 years of the construction of the first known Croatian Marian shrine. By commemorating the Croatian Catholic medieval rulers and statehood, the Church articulated a collective identity rooted in the past and tradition. As such, it was inherently opposed to the socialist imagery offered by the Yugoslav state. Some Communist Party members saw in the massive mobilisation of believers the “escalation of nationalism” as a follow-up to the Croatian Spring.
The collection commemorates the life and oeuvre of the deeply religious Catholic poet of peasant origin, Gáspár Nagy. His works were repeatedly subject to censorship from the 1970s on, and he became a significant figure of the opposition by the 1980s.
