COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Igor Cașu Collection represents above all an alternative collection of archival materials about the history of the Soviet Regime in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), originating from major public archives in the Republic of Moldova that preserve such documents without granting free access to them. The founder of this collection had privileged access to the items that are now part of his collection in the short time span when he acted as vice-president of the Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Regime in Moldova in 2010.  In contrast to the public archives, the Igor Cașu Collection, which also includes an oral history interviews section, is shared with fellow researchers.

The Istrian Fighter Digital Collection is available at the University Library of Pula website. It is the collection of the first Croatian youth journal Istrian Fighter/IBOR, which was published in Pula from 1953 to 1979 (with two minor interruptions). The journal was published by the Istrian Fighter Literary Club  with the objective of preserving the Croatian language in Istria. The journal developed a reputation as a critical media in the 1970s, covering more and more cultural, local and social themes whose tone was not well-received by the socialist authorities, so the financing of the journal was cancelled in 1979 after which it ceased publication.

The Ivan Aralica Collection of Press Clippings contains articles, documents and letters presenting the heated polemics in the Yugoslav press in 1985 and 1986. Members of the Association of Veterans of the People's Liberation War (SUBNOR) tried to proclaim award-winning author Ivan Aralica as politically unfit for literary work in a socialist society due to his involvement in the "counter-revolutionary" Croatian Spring (1967-71). The collection contains outstanding materials to studying the microhistory of censorship through pressure on public opinion.

Ivan Blatný (1919–1990), an important Czech poet, lived and died in exile in the United Kingdom after 1948. Upon arrival in the UK, he applied for political asylum and became a “banned” poet in Czechoslovakia as a result of his emigration and openly talking on BBC radio about political pressure against artists in Czechoslovakia. Despite being banned, his work circulated in Czechoslovakia through both samizdat and official printings.