COURAGE

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Gheorghe David (b. 1943, Pepeni village, Sângerei district, Moldova; d. 2007, Chișinău) was an intellectual and an engineer by training, who became famous for openly criticising the Soviet regime and was subjected to forced confinement and psychiatric abuse as a reprisal for his oppositional stance. His case became emblematic for the use of punitive psychiatry by the Soviet penal system. In 1970, he graduated from the Moldavian Polytechnic Institute in Chișinău. From 1970 to 1979, David worked as an engineer for various organisations and was highly regarded in his field. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Gheorghe David openly expressed his critical views on the nature of the Communist system. David’s criticism focused on the inefficiency of the Soviet economy, on the Soviet Unions’ hypocritical and aggressive foreign policy (with a particular emphasis on the invasion of Afghanistan), and on national discrimination in the Soviet periphery, notably in his native Moldavia. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, David wrote a number of critical letters to various high-ranking Soviet dignitaries, e.g., Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Gorbachev. As a result of his acts of defiance, in 1986 Gheorghe David was demoted from his job, becoming an ordinary worker. He was eventually arrested on 1 August 1986 during a trip to Tiraspol. While being questioned by the Chişinău-based Prosecutor’s Office, he was warned that psychological pressure would be used against him if he refused to cooperate. David had already been in custody for several months when he was transferred to the criminal psychiatric section of the Chişinău prison, where he was subjected to the “treatment” promised by the authorities. In December 1986, a special psychiatric commission diagnosed Gheorghe David as being “mentally alienated.” Consequently, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, a place that was regularly used for detaining political prisoners in the Soviet Union. David was officially found to be “mentally disturbed” by a special medical commission because of his “dangerous” political opinions. In particular, he asserted that the Soviet Union had violated the sovereignty and independence of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and that of Afghanistan in 1979. He also claimed the identity of the “Moldavian” and Romanian languages. David was released only in the summer of 1988, as a result of reports published by the Soviet press, which was becoming increasingly free, and thanks to protests staged by foreign human rights organisations, among them Amnesty International, as well as broadcasts of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. After his release, he taught at the Technical University of Moldova and was responsible for two technical inventions. David died in 2007, just a few months before the European Court of Human Rights recognised that he was a political victim of Communist repression and that psychiatry had been used illegally against a healthy person. 

Aleš Debeljak was a Slovenian cultural critic, poet, and essayist.

He graduated with a degree in comparative literature from the University of Ljubljana in 1985. He continued his studies in the United States, obtaining a PhD in the sociology of culture from Syracuse University in 1989.

From the mid-1980s onwards, Debeljak was active in civil society movements. He decided to return to Slovenia around the time of Yugoslavia’s dissolution.

Like many others, he had come to accept the idea of Slovenian independence as a second-best option given the lack of better alternatives, as every attempt at reforming Yugoslavia while conceding more autonomy to Slovenia and Croatia had failed. He still retained and cherished his dual identity as a Slovene and Yugoslav, and thought that independence had actually limited Slovenia’s cultural references.

In 1991, he worked as an interpreter for foreign media during the Slovenian Independence War (also known as the Ten-Day War) and was an eyewitness to armed clashes of Yugoslav and Slovene forces at the Austrian border in Gornja Radgona.

He was one of the co-editors of the critical alternative journal Nova revija [New Review]. He also participated in the social liberal thinktank Forum 21, led by the former President of Slovenia, Milan Kučan. He was, until his death, a professor of cultural studies at the Faculty for Social Studies of the University of Ljubljana.

In 2001 he started the journal Sarajevo Notebooks, in order to re-establish communication and develop links between intellectuals and activists throughout former Yugoslavia and create regional public forums for reconciliation.

Deim Péter fotóművész és alkalmazott fotográfus, a MAOE és a Vajda Lajos Stúdió tagja, a Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum fényképésze. Rendszeres résztvevője kiállításoknak, és számos képzőművészeti katalógus, monográfia, illetve néprajzi kiadvány fotóanyaga fűződik a nevéhez.

Réka Deim is an art historian and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). She completed MA studies in art history and English literature between 2005-2011 at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University and earned an MA degree in Cultural Analysis at the UvA in 2013. Her research focuses on cultural memory, memory politics and art history during the Kádár era.