COURAGE

connecting collections

Kęstutis Remeika is the deputy director of the Lithuanian Special Archive. He has been working at the archive since 1995, when the archive was founded. Before that, in 1993 he joined the group of archivists established by the Lithuanian government that took charge of the files left in Lithuania by the KGB (the Working Group on Special Archive Files of the Lithuanian Archive Department). Remeika is a key figure in providing archive policy towards the structure of the collection.

As deputy director, Remeika is involved in taking decisions about the structure of the collection. He was not involved in any anti-Soviet activity or opposition to Soviet rule. According to Remeika, it is hard to define what ‘cultural opposition’ means. The notion could include a wide range of activities: from talking in the kitchen while listening to Western radio programmes to participation in anti-Soviet activities. There were only a few people in Lithuania who stood up openly against the regime. The Lithuanian Special Archive does not make any further efforts to find material about cultural opposition: writers and members of the intelligentsia are not subjects of the archive. The work of archives in Lithuania is divided according to the subjects (authors) of documents, and for this reason the Lithuanian Special Archive holds only files on KGB activity.

Smiljana Rendić was a Catholic journalist, writer and poet, born in Split on 27 August 1926. From 1933 to 1940, she attended primary school and after that the gymnasium in Split, where she joined the Croatian Catholic Movement before the outbreak of World War II. In 1948, the communist authorities in Split expelled her and her widowed mother from their flat because of the family's opposition to the new regime. In the 1950s, she worked in the factory Jugoplastika in Split and in 1960 moved to Rijeka. There she was employed in the administration of the maritime affairs magazine Pomorstvo, where she worked until forced retirement in 1972.

In Rijeka she also worked for the magazine La voce del popolo. However, after being discovered as a practical believer, she was dismissed from the magazine, as it was under the control of the Communist Party. In 1963, she began collaborating with the bi-weekly newspaper Glas Koncila, the most prominent Catholic publication in socialist Yugoslavia. In the beginning, she published stories with an autobiographical character under the pseudonym Berith (Heb. covenant), in which she narrated her personal life and the lives of her contemporaries at a time of overall atheisation and the erasure of national identity. Also in 1963, she began working as a journalist for the periodical Glasnik sv. Antuna Padovanskog, writing under the pseudonym Vjera Marini.

Due to the article “Izlazak iz genitiva ili drugi hrvatski preporod“ (‘Departure from the genitive or the second Croatian national revival’) published in 1971 in the journal Kritika, she was prosecuted by the communist authorities under Article 118 of the Criminal Code. During her trial in 1972, she was prohibited from appearing in public and writing for a year, and was sentenced to one year in prison. The next year, after an appeal process, Rendić's verdict was commuted by the Supreme Court to a conditional sentence of one year in prison, but she was still punished by a one-year ban on writing and public activity, with mandatory retirement.

As of 1973 she lived as a retired person in Rijeka, but continued her journalistic and literary work primarily in Glas Koncila. Interestingly, at the time of the emergence of the Polish Solidarity Movement at the beginning of the 1980s she was the first journalist who reported on Poland in Croatia and Yugoslavia, where such processes did not suit either the regime or the media under its control.

In 1988 she was granted a special prize by Glas koncila, the   ‘Golden Quill’. Although not formally educated, Rendić acquired deep theological knowledge through her intellectual work. It may be said that Rendić was among the most important Croatian Catholic journalists in the second half of the 20^th century.

She died in Rijeka on 26 May 1994  at the age of 68.

Andriy Richytsky was the pseudonym for Anatoliy Andriyovych Pisotsky, a Ukrainian politician, journalist, and literary scholar. He was born into a family of comparatively well off peasants, and studied at the Petrovsky agricultural academy in Moscow though he did not finish his fourth year. In the early days of the revolution of 1917, he joined the ranks of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers Party and became the organization's representative in the Ukrainian Central Rada. He maintained key positions despite the vicissitudes of the civil war period and in 1919 helped found the Ukrainian Communist Party, which acted independently of Ukrainian SDWP and also Russian communists. 

In 1924, along with other members of the UCP, Richytsky joined the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolshevik faction), finding common cause with Mykola Skrypnyk and vocally criticizing not only historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevsky but also the writer Mykola Khvylyovy. From 1925 onward, Richytsky held a variety of editorial positions, taught at the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and in 1930 began work on the Soviet Ukrainian encyclopaedia. In 1931, he edited what would become a controversial edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, illustrated by the artist Vasyl Sedliar. The images included alongside Shevchenko’s poems drew on universal existential issues of the human condition under oppression. Nevertheless it would seem that both Sedliar and Richytsky were keenly aware of the famine raging in the Ukrainian countryside, making the content of the images politically problematic if not subversive. Richytsky was directly involved in grain procurement in Odessa in 1932-1933 and would have seen the crisis unfolding first hand. In June 1933, he was severely reprimanded by the party and he was removed from working on the Soviet Ukrainian encyclopaedia and his post on the editorial board of the paper Bilshovyk Ukrainy. In September 1933, he was arrested for alleged involvment in a Ukrainian military organization and active counterrevolutionary work aimed at toppling Soviet rule in Ukraine. In March 1934, Richytsky and seven others were tried in the same village in Odessa where he had been involved with grain procurement. He was sentenced to death and executed after a failed appeal, while the others were given long sentences in hard labour camps.

Józef Robakowski (1939) is one of the most significant neo-avant-garde figures in Poland. He was born in a gentry family. In the 1960s he studied history of art and museology on Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, then he moved to Łódź, where he graduated from Direction of Photography and Television Production Department in The National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre. He found art groups Oko (1960), Zero-61 (1961-1969), and Krąg (1965-1967) in Toruń. From 1960 to 1966 he was also a member of the Students' Creative Film Club ‘Pętla’. But his essential group – Workshop of Film Form (1970-1977), affiliated with the film school – was established in Łódź. He has also been a lecturer in the film school, from 1970 till nowadays, with a break in the period of 1981-1995. In 1978, together with his wife Małgorzata Potocka, in their private flat he launched the Exchange Gallery. In the 1980s he participated in Going Dutch Culture activities.

Robakowski from the very beginning of his career endeavoured to set his creativeness in outputs of Polish pre-war and post-war avant-garde, in particular groups Jung Jidysz, a.r., Tytus Czyżewski, Stefan and Franciszka Themersons, Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, Henryk Stażewski, Witkacy, but also soviet constructivism. He referred equally strong to contemporary international neo-avant-garde, especially Fluxus movement, and other post-conceptual artists who explored new media. His early experiments with the medium of photography with the Zero-61 group in the 1960s unfolded to the inquiry in materiality and structure of film image, which resulted in the conception of the ‘expanded cinema’. At the same time Robakowski studied relations between  film and a cameraman’s body, observed traffic outside his window, and documented his own private life: on this basis, the ‘personal cinema’ conception has emerged and was developed in the 1980s. After the martial law Robakowski got interested in the alternative culture, punk bands, street happenings. His attitude during this period was called ‘positive nihilism’. In the 1990s and later Robakowski unwound his conception of ‘energetic art’. Apart from the changes in aesthetic ideas, he was known for an absurd, neo-dadaist sense of humour, a pressure on art and an artist’s autonomy, and astute observation of social phenomena, or even interventions close to the applied art practices. His attitude was shaped by his aversion towards conceptual avant-garde rather than resistance to the socialist authorities. Wiesław Borowski, the influential conceptual theoretician, in his famous essay from 1975 called Robakowski and his colleagues the ‘pseudo-avant-garde’. This pejorative nickname became popular as a synonym of post-conceptual neo-avant-garde movement, which preferred to call itself  ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ artists. Robakowski is still active as an artist, teacher, collector, and commentator of cultural events.