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Lydia Sklevicky was born in Zagreb in 1952 and tragically died in Delnice in 1990. Sklevicky graduated with a degree in sociology and ethnology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 1976 and earned her master's degree in the sociology of culture with the dissertation "Women and Power - the Historical Genesis of an Interest" in 1984. Her unfinished doctoral thesis "Emancipation and Organization: The Antifascist Women’s Front and Post-revolutionary Social Change. (People’s Republic of Croatia 1945–1953)" was published as part of the book Horses, Women, Wars prepared by Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. She began working at the Institute for the History of the Labour Movement (today's Croatian Institute of History) in 1976, then moved to the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research at the end of 1988, where he worked until her death.

Croatian scholar and intellectual Lydia Sklevicky, in the opinion of Anamarija Štambuk Starčević, belongs among those people who are considered ahead of their time by contemporaries. Lydia was also a person of exceptional vigour and intellectual strength, who covered more topics in one decade of professional activity than numerous colleagues do throughout their entire careers. At the same time, she had a greater impact on society (Starčević Štambuk, interview March 1, 2018). Her research work encompassed social history, women's studies, gender anthropology and political rituals, but she made her greatest contribution to the study of the social history of women. Sklevicky was an active member of the professional associations of the Croatian Sociological Association and especially its section "Women and Society," the Croatian Ethnological Society, and the Nada Klaić Women's History Research Section at the Historical Society of Zagreb.

What Lydia Sklevicky meant to feminism in Croatia, especially in its beginnings, is reflected in Rada Iveković's words – “in the first years of our generation’s feminism, when we were exposed to criticism by the whole public, all political structures, our parents' generation, the media, most of our male colleagues (with a perplexing attitude and doubts only by those who wanted to rectify our thought) and many of our life companions – we had crazy fun and Lydia was one of the centres of our small mixed society” (Iveković 1995, 26).

The motives underlying Lydia Sklevicky’s feminist activity is evident in the text by Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, who said that for her it was not “a personal motive that inspired feminist thought about life and society, but the possibility that the anthropology of women offered to overturn our deteriorated knowledge of that same life and order in society (and not just in the former, socialist society)” (Rihtman Auguštin 1995, 21). 

Vytautas Skuodis (1929-2016) was born in Chicago. His family moved to Lithuania in 1930. In 1948, he graduated from a gymnasium in Panevėžys, and in 1948-1953 he studied geology at Vilnius University. In 1953-1969, he worked as a researcher and manager in the all-union institute Hidroproekt, organising geological investigations for building various power stations in Latvia, Russia and Belorussia. In 1964-1968, he was a PhD student in Moscow, and obtained his PhD degree (in the Soviet research system, he was a ‘candidate of science’) in geology and mineralogy in 1969. In 1969-1979, he was a lecturer and associate professor at Vilnius University. He published 30 research articles. In 1972, he started his dissident activities.
In 1979, Skuodis joined the dissident organisation the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, which aimed to register violations by the Soviet regime, to inform society and Western countries about the condition of human rights in Soviet Lithuania, and to make written protests about violations of human rights. At the end of 1979, he was dismissed from his position at Vilnius University because of his anti-Soviet attitudes and activities. In 1980, he was arrested and sentenced to prison. KGB investigators used Skuodis’ collaboration with the underground publication Alma Mater, and initiating and editing the underground intellectual journal Perspektyvos, as criminal evidence against him. During its search of Skuodis’ flat, the KGB found the manuscript of his book Dvasinis genocidas Lietuvoje (Spiritual Genocide in Lithuania), which was added to the evidence against him. 
At that time, Perspektyvos was the most sought-after underground publication among the Lithuanian intelligentsia.
The KGB monitored Skuodis, and he remained in jail until 1987. After that, he went to the USA, where he joined Lithuanian and international organisations involved in promoting the freedom and democracy movement in Eastern Europe. He gave a number of public lectures in the USA, Canada, South America, Australia and Europe. In 1987-1988, he met Pope John Paul II, and the US president Ronald Reagan.

Antanas Sniečkus was the first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party from 1936 till his death in 1974. After the First World War, he returned with his family from Russia to Lithuania. By 1920, he was already a member of the Bolshevik Party, and started his anti-government activities, for which he was arrested. After his release from prison, he fled to Moscow, where he became an agent of the Comintern, and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania. From 1926 to 1930, he engaged in subversive activities in Lithuania, and was again arrested and held in prison in Kaunas in 1930. In 1933, Sniečkus was released in exchange for Lithuanian political prisoners held in the Soviet Union.

After the 1940 Soviet ultimatum to Lithuania and the subsequent military occupation, Sniečkus became head of the Department of National Security. As the first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, he was the initiator of the mass deportations of Lithuanians during the first and the second occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union. In 1948, Sniečkus started the collectivisation of agriculture. Most peasants were collectivised by 1952, through terror, killings and deportations.