COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Marian Zulean personal collection is an illustration of the fact that any act of cultural opposition is dependent on the societal context that generates it. It implicitly highlights the fundamental difference between Romania and other communist states in the last years of the period 1980–1989. The more than 400 newspapers, magazines, brochures and books, originating especially from the Soviet Union in the Gorbachev period, epitomise a reformist political discourse that had become relatively official in the rest of the Soviet bloc, but was considered dangerous by the Romanian Securitate.

The collection contains documents of the Masaryk Society, citizens' illegal initiatives, which originated in Brno and Prague in 1988. The society organized events for the return of Masaryk's name to the public space and cultivated the regime of suppressed knowledge and awareness of the philosopher and first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.

The former chairman of the Zadar municipal committee, Romano Meštrović, extracted the documents on the mass movement of 1971 in Zadar as an ad hoc collection already in 1990. The archival materials testify to the local communist purges after the quelling of the Croatian national liberal movement known as the Croatian Spring. It mainly consists of different reports, assessments and the minutes of the inquiry panel, which investigated and accused the reformist Party members for nationalist, i.e., anti-socialist activities also in the cultural field. The city of Zadar and its communist leadership was considered one of the epicentres of the Croatian Spring, heavily criticised by Josip Broz Tito at the Karađorđevo meeting at the end of 1971.