COURAGE

connecting collections

The Ivan Aralica Collection of Press Clippings contains articles, documents and letters presenting the heated polemics in the Yugoslav press in 1985 and 1986. Members of the Association of Veterans of the People's Liberation War (SUBNOR) tried to proclaim award-winning author Ivan Aralica as politically unfit for literary work in a socialist society due to his involvement in the "counter-revolutionary" Croatian Spring (1967-71). The collection contains outstanding materials to studying the microhistory of censorship through pressure on public opinion.

The collection testifies to the thirty-six-year activity of Croatian journalist and writer Jakša Kušan (1931), who propagated the idea of a democratic, pluralistic and free Croatia in exile from 1955 to 1990. By editing and publishing the non-partisan magazine Nova Hrvatska, he tried to inform the Croatian and global public about the suppression of human rights and civil liberties in socialist Croatia and Yugoslavia.

The Collection of Croatian-American historian Jere Jareb (PhD) contains over 4,500 books, magazines and various brochures in Croatian, English, German, Italian and Slovenian. Dr Jareb, who began compiling the collection in the 1950s, donated it to the Croatian Institute of History in 1997. A particularly intriguing part of the collection are the numerous editions of books, magazines and brochures published by Croatian emigrants in the USA who were critical of the communist regime in Croatia and Yugoslavia. Some of these editions are not available anywhere else in Croatia.

The collection includes various pieces of documentation about the ‘Phosphorite War’ that took place in Estonia in 1987, and material about the Estonian television programme ‘Panda’ in the second half of the 1980s. The collector of the material is Juhan Aare, the journalist and politician who unleashed the Phosphorite War. The most valuable part of the collection is made up of the letters written by people in Estonia and sent to Juhan Aare or to Estonian Television. These letters refer to the environmental situation and the national question in Estonia.

Justas Paleckis (1899–1980) was a chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Council of Soviet Lithuania from 1940 to 1974. Paleckis’ collection holds his personal papers, various manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence with Lithuanian writers and scholars, and letters from victims of Stalinist repressions. The documents reflect the aspirations and the ambitions of the Lithuanian cultural elite to preserve and develop the Lithuanian cultural heritage.