COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

Antanas Miškinis (1905-1983) was a Lithuanian poet and Soviet political prisoner. He started his creative activity in the mid-1920s. In the mid-1940s, he joined the Lithuanian partisan movement, for which he was convicted and sent to Siberia. While serving his sentence, he wrote romantic poems (psalms). Many of them were copied out or learned by heart by other Lithuanian political prisoners at that time in Siberia. The collection holds psalms and poetry written by Miškinis during his imprisonment from 1948 to 1956.

Antanas Sniečkus was the first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party from 1936 till his death in 1974. The collection holds many documents, including correspondence with Lithuanian writers, and transcripts of meetings with the intelligentsia (in 1957) which reflect the aspirations and ambitions of the country’s cultural elite to preserve and develop the cultural heritage of the Lithuanian nation. The most interesting documents for the project cover the period of de-Stalinisation in Soviet Lithuania.

The Ante Ciliga Collection is deposited at the Collection of the Old Books and Manuscripts at the National and University Library in Zagreb. It testifies to cultural opposition activities of the Croatian political émigré Ante Ciliga, who made the transition from high-ranking member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to an anticommunist and critic of the one party system and the totalitarian form of socialism.

The collection illustrates Alojzij Šuštar's theological and pastoral work as a priest and archbishop who led the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Ljubljana despite the restrictions on freedom imposed by institutions under the communist government’s control. The Collection includes books, original manuscripts, Šuštar’s published articles and his correspondence and polemics, which demonstrate his critical stance toward Slovenia’s communist regime in the late years of the regime and in the period of transition to democracy.