COURAGE

connecting collections

The collection holds various documents (manuscripts, letters, etc) relating to the Lithuanian historian Ignas Jonynas. His works written in the interwar period laid the foundations for modern Lithuanian national historiography. During Soviet times, Jonynas was a professor of history at Kaunas and Vilnius universities. In 1949, he was severely criticised by Party activists for ‘bourgeois objectivism’ and nationalism. However, Jonynas was still very popular among students, and had a huge influence on the younger generation of Lithuanian historians.

The Igor Cașu Collection represents above all an alternative collection of archival materials about the history of the Soviet Regime in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), originating from major public archives in the Republic of Moldova that preserve such documents without granting free access to them. The founder of this collection had privileged access to the items that are now part of his collection in the short time span when he acted as vice-president of the Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Regime in Moldova in 2010.  In contrast to the public archives, the Igor Cașu Collection, which also includes an oral history interviews section, is shared with fellow researchers.

The Iljko Karaman Collection is an archival collection established in 1949 by the Zagreb Deputy Public Prosecutor, Iljko Karaman (1922-2010), who deposited the collection at the Croatian State Archives in 1992. The collection includes unique material related to state censorship practices in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Independent State of Croatia, the People’s Republic of Croatia and the latter Socialist Republic of Croatia until the 1980s.

The exhibition entitled “A harcoló város/The Fighting City, 1986” was organized by the amateur artist group Inconnu to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The police banned the event on the opening day and destroyed the artworks. However, before that, an agent took photos of the compositions. Thus, the secret police itself created, through the act of destruction, a group of sources which is today the single visual trace of the exhibition. This photo collection is kept in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State  Security Forces (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára – ÁBTL).