COURAGE

connecting collections

The National Museum-Memorial to the Victims of Occupation “Prison on Lonskogo Street” has a small, but growing, archival collection. A detention facility used by the Polish police, the Nazi and Soviet occupational regimes, and lastly the KGB, this museum-memorial has a storied past. The building was used by regional state security services (SBU) as a prison until 1996. After the local community caught wind of a plan to allow developers to build on the site in 2006, activists mobilized to transform the prison into a site commemorating the thousands of prisoners executed by the NKVD in 1941 as the Red Army fled from advancing Nazi forces, and those incarcerated here in the decades that followed.

Curators have amassed 2,000 items since the museum’s opening in 2009. In addition to World War II propaganda from Nazi and Soviet forces, it holds the personal belongings of political prisoners and detainees—letters, personal documents, and samizdat publications used to prosecute dissidents, artists, and human rights activists in Lviv and its surrounding environs in the 1960s and 1970s. The latter is an ad hoc collection of about 50 items described in the rest of this entry, which includes embroidery, rosaries made out of bread, and other materials created by prisoners serving out lengthy sentences in Siberian labour camps under Brezhnev. Situated within the larger context of the museum-memorial’s holdings, these materials about Lviv’s dissidents is important for understanding the Soviet Union’s treatment of its most intransigent opponents well into the Brezhnev era.

Located at the Józef Piłsudski Institute in London, the Prometheus Collection contains records related to the Promethean movement, the Polish-led alliance of nationalist movements of non-Russian nations and ethnic groups that inhabited the Soviet Union. The origins of the movement go back to Prometheism, Józef Piłsudski's project of weakening imperial and later Bolshevik Russia by supporting the struggle for independence of the peoples of the Baltic, Black and Caspian Sea regions. The Promethean movement encompassed mostly representatives of Ukrainians, Kuban Cossacks, Georgians, Azeris, and north Caucasus nations and relied on the support of the Polish military. After World War II, the movement continued in exile under the leadership of Polish émigrés, mostly Piłsudski's followers. The collection consists of twelve files and contains memoranda, correspondence, newsletters, and photographs of various Promethean activists.