COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The CNSAS Online Collection (CNSAS – Romanian acronym for the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives) illustrates how the communist secret police, the Securitate, conceptualised: (1) oppositional groups and individuals in communist Romania; (2) the forms in which this opposition manifested against the party-state; and (3) the transnational support it received from the exile community and foreign organisations. It also encompasses an impressive amount of invaluable information about the inner mechanisms of the Securitate, its institutional development and relationship with the Communist Party, the use of repression against any form of opposition, and the use of surveillance to avoid the development of oppositional groups and networks during its over forty years of functioning. In brief, this collection offers a comprehensive image of the means and methods used by the communist secret police, the Securitate, to deal with the anti-communist opposition between 1948 and 1989, and the response it received from oppositional groups and individuals.

The collection of completed investigative files at the National Archives of Estonia is an extensive set of investigative files about people who were persecuted during the Soviet period. A significant part of the collection is made up of files about persecuted cultural figures. The files in this collection are complete, which means that the interest of the authorities towards a person (or persons) had ended, due to death, rehabilitation or other reasons, and the cases were closed. 

The Confiscated Manuscripts Collection at CNSAS was not assembled by the creators of content or by collectors who valued the works they preserved, but by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate. It includes items confiscated from their rightful owners. More precisely, the collection contains unpublished manuscripts of literary works, diaries, memoirs, correspondence, forbidden books and publications, and open letters of protest, which the Securitate confiscated from 105 persons, survivors of the Stalinist persecution, human rights activists, priests and religious thinkers, non-conformist writers, or generally complying individuals who nonetheless attracted the attention of the secret police. These items are archived in 330 volumes, which include 50,000 pages.

This collection contains lectures and papers prepared and organized by the Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), a prominent organization in exile which brought together scientists and artists originally from Czechoslovakia. It contains unique manuscripts and publications from 1957 to 1977, including the series entitled “The Czechoslovak State Idea 1938-1948”. The authors of these papers were important representatives from the Czech and Slovak community in exile –  former politicians and diplomats from before the Communist coup of 1948.