COURAGE

connecting collections

The Free Europe University in Exile (FEUE) was founded by the National Committee for Free Europe in New York in 1951 as a specific type of academic organisation. The purpose of the organisation was to enable academic education in a democratic spirit to a large number of immigrants who left the states ruled by communist regimes. Émigrés from Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Hungary could apply to this university. The University's goals were to train young émigrés to find jobs and fit into the democratic world as teachers, professors, engineers, doctors, scientists, economists, lawyers, historians, and so forth. They were supposed to become the drivers of a liberal-democratic system in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. Since 1952, the University has conferred scholarships for its summer seminars held in the Château de Pourtalèâs in Strasbourg. The seminars were focused on contemporary focal political and cultural issues. Lecturers at the Summer Seminar were prominent members of the academic community and experts from Western Europe and the United States.

Jakša Kušan was a FEUE student. He believes that the FEUE lecturers were elite members of the liberal academic community from the United States as well as numerous prominent European intellectuals and émigrés. What Kušan considered even more important was that students/refugees from the countries under communist rule could meet there and exchange ideas. There he began his cooperation with Tihomil Rađa and Branko Salaj, with whom he later founded and edited the magazine Nova Hrvatska. These summer seminars were, according to Kušan, an arena of ideas and cultural contacts. He thinks that the Poles and Estonians used these scholarships very well because their new liberal intelligentsia was forged there.

The Yugoslav communists wrote that the FEUE was a school for CIA collaborators. According to Kušan, the United States intended to gather people who would return to Europe one day and on whom they could rely when communist rule collapsed (Interview with Kušan Jakša_2). Of all the organisations that the USA funded, only Radio Free Europe survives to this day. Financing of the rest ceased when the US saw that there were no significant results from them (Interview with Kušan, Jakša_2).

The Jakša Kušan Personal Papers contain materials from some of the FEUE seminars, such as a brochure on a seminar held in 1957. According to the brochure, the seminar in 1957 continued the tradition of a one-month seminar that was held from 6 August to 7 September. It was devoted primarily to international relations and the political, economic and social problems of Central European satellite states. The 1957 seminar featured intellectuals such as Czesław Miłosz and Bogdan Radica as lecturers.

During the summer period there were various festivals at Costineşti: festivals of theatre, film, rock, folk, jazz, caricature. All these were given generous space in the broadcasts of Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti.

“The festivals had many moments that were subversive towards the communist regime, and some of these can be glimpsed in the ‘news-sheets’ of the festivals. These were true newspapers – truer, I dare to claim, and more playful, freer, more natural that the official newspapers,” says Andrei Partoş. He mentions also that the articles in these papers – not least because they were already approved by the regime – provided a sort of substantial “raw material” that was very precious for his radio broadcasts: “They were given out free on the beach. All the big names who came there on vacation wrote in them. They set up a ‘press unit’ and brought out various news-sheets, generally of four pages. They were distributed in large print-runs for the public there. The following year, I would reuse what had been printed on the radio – and the stuff was exceptional, because it had been approved.” Andrei Partoş is one of the most informed connoisseurs of these publications, and probably one of the few people in Romania who still keeps copies of them.

The print-runs in which these publications appeared varied from a few thousand copies to tens of thousands of copies. Written in an alert and fresh language, totally different from the general tone of the communist press in Romania, they were conceived and edited in the Costineşti resort. Many well-known names from central publications appear in them, especially those who signed articles in the youth sections of the newspapers of the day. The then dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu is only mentioned very rarely in them, in contrast to the official press, where mention of the name and “achievements” of the communist supreme leader was obligatory.

In contrast with what was produced in the summers in Costineşti – radio transmitting “with no holds barred” and publications through which there breathed an air of normality and even freedom – , the rest of the time in Romania the mass media felt to the full the constraints of the communist regime. The period 1980–1989, in which most of these publications appeared as “festival news-sheets,” was named the “satanic decade” by Mircea Zaciu, a respected literary critic (Zaciu 1993, 7). It was precisely the period in which the personality cult of the Ceauşescu couple reached its apogee. Moreover, in 1985 regional radio stations in Romania were closed down, officially on the grounds that the Romanian state had to save energy in order to pay its accumulated international debt faster. The broadcasting schedule of public television, which was indeed the only television channel in that period, was drastically cut back. The broadcasts, which were entirely controlled by the party apparatus, were reduced to two hours per day, from 8 pm to 10 pm. The official reason for this decision was that people ought to go to bed early, in order to be well-rested and ready for work the next day. Printed publications were likewise strictly controlled, with the language used in published articles being homogenised in the light of directives received from the Romanian Communist Party.

Among the publications printed in the course of numerous summers at Costineşti as “festival news-sheets” may be mentioned: Spectator (news-sheet of the Amphitheatre Galas), Secvenţa (The sequence, subtitled “The paper that gave in its resignation”, a news-sheet of the Film Festival), Stop-cadru (“Freeze frame”, also a news-sheet of the Film Festival), and Consecvenţa (The consequence). There has not yet been a systematic study of these publications, which provided little islands of normality in a media landscape which, like Romanian communism as a whole, was very dark at the time.

The full title of this central document in the Marian Zulean collection is Întîlnire la nivel înalt: Moscova, 29 mai – 2 iunie 1988. Documente și materiale (Summit meeting: Moscow, 29 May – 2 June 1988: Documents and materials). The book documents in detail the content of the visit to the USSR made by US President Ronald Reagan in the early summer of 1988, at the invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev.

The volume consists of a series of transcriptions of the public moments of the meetings of the leaders of the two states, four speeches by each of them, press statements and addresses by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, transcriptions of question and answer sessions in front of the press, and the answers given by the Soviet leader in an extensive interview granted to the newspaper The Washington Post and the magazine Newsweek prior to the visit. The book also gives details of the ceremony of exchanging instruments of ratification with the reference to the coming into force of the treaty eliminating medium-and shorter-range missiles, and the text of the joint statement made at the Moscow summit. Not least among the interesting features of the book is a substantial photographic archive of the state visit.

In order to understand why such a book constituted an alternative source of information, it must be recalled that, in comparison, the reflection of this visit in the Romanian press was minimal. Marian Zulean remarks: “I remember that it was just mentioned briefly in short news items. Because in fact what was happening then between the USSR and the USA did not suit the leaders of the communist regime here at all. Once I read this book, to which I added what I heard on Radio Free Europe, I really understood what had happened during those days in the USSR.”

The book is preserved in good condition in the Marian Zulean collection. It has 128 pages and was published, directly translated into Romanian, by Novosti Press Agency in 1988. The book was purchased at the International Trade Fair for Consumer Goods (TIBCO), where the USSR had a very large stand.

Croatian scholars made important contributions to the work of the Pugwash Movement by gathering primarily around the Institute for the Philosophy of Science and Peace of the Yugoslav (after 1991 Croatian) Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU/HAZU). In 1966, a group of Croatian intellectuals from the Institute, led by Ivan Supek, in 1966 launched the journal Encyclopaedia moderna: časopis za sintezu znanosti, umjetnosti i društvene prakse. It was published in all Yugoslav languages and dialects, but there were also articles in English. In addition to the central editorial office in Zagreb, it had editorial staffs in Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skopje and Titograd. It was issued quarterly, although occasionally deviated from this schedule. The editor in chief was Ivan Supek (except in 1975, when the editor was Eugen Pusić). Since the mid-1980s, Supek was assisted by Nikola Zovko and Bojan Marotti (interview with Marotti, Bojan).

As a multidisciplinary journal, it promoted universalism and a humanistic orientation for science and the arts, as well as the complete disarmament and the creation of world peace. The first issue began with the “A Word from the Editors,” in which they stress: “we stand between military, economic and ideological blocs, and it is clear that in the event of a [global] conflict there can be no victory, but only a general disaster” (p. 1). They insisted on the universality of humankind: “Although the world is so fatally disunited, in every corner of it peaceful, humane and progressive thought is smouldering" (p. 3).

The goals of the journal were almost identical to the goals of the Pugwash Movement, and Supek insisted that every issue must contain something about the movement. “Pugwash” or “Peace Studies” or some column with a similar name was published in almost every issue. It would usually convey information, documents, declarations, or reports from Pugwash Conferences and other meetings. All of the contributions in the column were in English, in attempt to make the journal accessible to international scientific currents.

In the 1960s, Encyclopaedia moderna was relatively popular due to the prominent intellectuals who contributed articles to it. The journal strived for academic freedom and was even open to topics that the communist government considered undesirable, as was the case with religion (Kolarić 1973). The Yugoslav communist authorities did not like such intellectual independence, and the government reduced the funding for all of Yugoslavia's Pugwash organisations and publications. In 1976, Encyclopaedia moderna was forced to shut down because the government completely severed its funding (Knapp 2013, 99). In the 1980s, the very existence of the Pugwash organisation in Yugoslavia was questionable, mainly because Supek was out of favour with the communist regime. Still, the movement survived those trying years.

The journal was re-launched after the fall of communism in 1991, with Nikola Zovko as editor-in-chief, but its scope was oriented more towards Central Europe. It was published until 1998, and Marotti believes the journal was "naturally extinguished" because the themes of the journal were no longer as current as during the Cold War (interview with Marotti, Bojan).

Upon receiving the highest French order of merit for military and civil merits – the National Order of the Legion of Honour (Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur) in 1989, Croatian sociologist Rudi Supek (1913-1993) granted an interview to Radio Zagreb in which he talked about his life and, among other things, about his opposition activities. He was awarded due to his activities as one of the organisers of resistance in the Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald and due to his contribution to the development of sociology as a science and his cultural work with France. In the interview, he said that five years earlier (1984), he was awarded for his scholarly work, which was, in his opinion, even more important. But that fact was ignored in Yugoslavia at the time. He stated that the authorities did not like him because he insisted on the stance that there is no socialism without democracy. He said that he was a sympathiser and a member of communist parties (CP of Yugoslavia and CP of France) from the mid-1930s to 1948, but that he later did not want to be involved in Stalinist and Comintern-type of parties.
He stated that he returned from France to Yugoslavia because for patriotic reasons, although he had much better conditions to continue his academic career abroad, in France, the USA or Canada. He also spoke about the problems of socialist systems in which there is a negative selection of personnel, stating that the monopoly of a single party promotes careerists and mediocrity. According to Supek, the advancement of society, especially in the economy, requires a free democratic political system. He also talked about his engagement in the environmental movement and his book, which had just been published in its third edition. He said that the crisis of socialism was a result of the fact that socialism had remained wedded to the concept of industrial society. He felt it necessary, globally, to transition to a post-industrial society that would not be based on exploitation of nature and humanity itself, to enter into a new type of socialism.