COURAGE

connecting collections

The collection is held in the Lithuanian Special Archive. The archive was arranged to manage a special collection of material that consists mostly of Soviet Lithuanian KGB, Communist Party and Interior Ministry documents. Documents from these former institutions are recognised by the Lithuanian government as material of special status, and they are separated from other government archive documents. The Lithuanian Special Archive is a governmental institution that supervises, keeps, stores and initiates legislation regarding this special group of documents.
The collection is part of this group. It holds various documents about Lithuania’s anti-Soviet armed resistance in 1944-1953. While the partisan movement is related more to the resistance rather than to cultural opposition issues, the collection includes creative work by partisans, such as poetry, drawings, works of art, cards, and other items. The existence of this kind of work demonstrates the phenomenon of Lithuania’s anti-Soviet resistance and cultural opposition which was not limited only to armed rebellion. Partly because of this, the partisan resistance has a deep influence today on the Lithuanian historical memory.

The former chairman of the Zadar municipal committee, Romano Meštrović, extracted the documents on the mass movement of 1971 in Zadar as an ad hoc collection already in 1990. The archival materials testify to the local communist purges after the quelling of the Croatian national liberal movement known as the Croatian Spring. It mainly consists of different reports, assessments and the minutes of the inquiry panel, which investigated and accused the reformist Party members for nationalist, i.e., anti-socialist activities also in the cultural field. The city of Zadar and its communist leadership was considered one of the epicentres of the Croatian Spring, heavily criticised by Josip Broz Tito at the Karađorđevo meeting at the end of 1971.

The Matica hrvatska Collection is an excellent historical source for Croatia's cultural and political history. It is an archival collection created by the work of Matica hrvatska, a non-profit and non-governmental cultural organisation which became the central Croatian cultural institution in the Croatian national reform movement – the Croatian Spring. Matica gathered the Croatian intelligentsia that was dissatisfied with the status of Croatia within the Yugoslav federation. That is why the communist government began to treat Matica as an oppositional institution, a driver of oppositional political ideas and a rival to the League of Communists.

The Memory of Nations is an extensive online collection of the memories of witnesses, which is being developed throughout Europe by individuals, organizations, schools and institutions. It preserves and makes available the collections of memories of witnesses who have agreed that their testimony should serve to explore modern history and be publicly accessible. The collection includes testimonies of communism resistance, holocaust survival, artists of alternative culture and underground and many others.

The Mihai Moroșanu Private Collection comprises various materials relating to the anti-regime activity of Mihai Moroșanu, one of the most famous Moldovan dissidents of the Soviet period, well-known for his staunch criticism of the regime and for his strong nationally oriented views. The collection consists of a number of personal files, interviews, photos and judicial materials relating to Moroșanu’s case, spanning the period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Due to his uncompromising resistance to the Soviet regime, Moroșanu is one of the very few authentic dissident figures in the Moldovan context.