COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

In 1988, Ilgūnas presented nine units of documents to the Lithuanian SSR Central State Archive of Literature and Art. Among them was the manuscript of his biography of Vincas Pietaris. It formed the beginning of the collection. Lithuania was still formally a Soviet republic, but society and some state institutions were changing dramatically. Sąjūdis groups were very active in most state institutions, especially those involved in cultural policy. Because of the changing situation, Ilgūnas decided to present his collection to the state archive.

József Marelyin Kiss and his colleagues prepared the almanac series, closely tied to the Collection of Political Transition, as commissioned by the publisher of HVG magazine, which was later published as a special issue of the weekly. Moreover, in the following years, this material was requested and published in a series of volumes elaborating (retrospectively) both on the coalition period (1945–1948) and the 1990s.

The collection of the Cinematography Commission of the Government of People's Republic of Croatia was transferred to the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb on an ex officio basis from the government of the time, the Executive Council of the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, in 1988. Preserved documents testify to control over the motion picture production exercised by the communist regime established in Yugoslavia/Croatia after the Second World War. Such control was manifested through Party and state management of motion picture production companies, approval of screenplays, supervision of the import and distribution of motion pictures for screening in cinemas, and verification of the ideological suitability of qualified personnel (directors, producers, film editors, actors)

The first group of Skuodis’ documents was given to the Lithuanian Central State Archives in March 1988. This means that the collection was created very early, even before Sąjūdis (the Lithuanian Reform Movement) started. This is an interesting fact, especially since Skuodis was an anti-Soviet dissident and ex-political prisoner. From this time onwards, the archive received new material from Skuodis from time to time, almost every year. Thus, the establishment of the collection and the fact that the state archive started to collect material about Skuodis, as well as his agreement to provide the archive with documents from his private papers, allows us to envisage the changing political situation. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika had probably already reached a certain stage, and had started to change the political climate in Soviet Lithuania.