COURAGE

connecting collections

National Commission of "Solidarity" Trade Union collects, develops, stores, and publishes archival materials of the Independent Self-governing Labour Union "Solidarity”, primarily from the 1976-1990 period. The Archives are located at the National Commission of "Solidarity" head office and serve the purpose of documenting the social phenomenon of democratic opposition in Poland, in particular in the 1980s. Apart from documents it holds audio and video recordings, photographs, and other items. The Archives continuously add and digitise new, both private and institutional, collections from various parts of Poland.

The Weeks of Christian Culture and the Artists’ Priesthood were the very important cultural initiatives of the Polish Catholic Church, organised since the 1970s. They were the first nation-wide platform for artists of various professions, who were given a chance to speak freely and to show their works to the society – regardless of their beliefs. The participants had the opportunity to interact with independent culture, prohibited or absent from the official circulation. The collection includes both the documents on the initiatives’ history and the works of art created by its participants.

The collection of the Archives of the Peace Movement in Ljubljana contains 58 boxes of archival materials accumulated by the activity of the Centre for the Culture of Peace and Non-violence in Ljubljana, as well as the democratic opposition and the forerunner of civil society in the 1980s and 1990s in Slovenia. The collection testifies to peace-making activities of a part of Slovenian society which advocated greater democracy of in Slovene society and citizen involvement in policy-making.

This ad-hoc collection mainly consists of documents separated from the fonds of judicial files concerning persons subject to political repression during the communist regime which is currently stored in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive). It focuses on the case of Arsenie Platon, a person of peasant background and an aspiring poet, who was tried and convicted in 1961 for displaying nationalist views and for conducting “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” among his friends and acquaintances. Platon’s “anti-Soviet” opinions were mostly expressed in a series of poems and short proclamations in which he criticised ethnic discrimination against the Moldavians and called for the overthrow of Soviet power. This case is emblematic for less widely known forms of grassroots cultural opposition, falling under the same broad category as the cases of Gheorghe Muruziuc and Zaharia Doncev. Platon’s file includes no further information about his fate after the end of his prison term.