COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

"Spartakus" was a newspaper of the Federal Trade Union “Freedom” (Zawodowy Związek Federacyjny “Wolność”), founded in Tricity by Zbigniew Stybel – one of the key members of the anarchistic Alternative Society Movement. The Federal Trade Union “Freedom” was founded under state socialism and was the first anarchistic trade union after war. Initially its activity was limited to helping conscientious objectorsdoing civilian service instead of mandatory military training based on conscription. Stybel, who stayed out of the anarchistic centre, noticed that people who managed to get a replacement service, were usual made to do very hard and humiliating jobs. Based on this realization, he had an idea to establish a trade union as an organization which could help people in such situation. With time the activities of FTU “Freedom” were broadened to offering help in other work environments.

Unlike other anarchist magazines (like “A Capella”), the “Spartakus” did not have the typical qualities of alternative youth magazines. The editorial board was not eager to use counter-cultural visual extravaganza, and the thematic scope concerned mostly workers’ situation and broader socio-political issues. The magazine’s main goal was to sustain communication between the union and people needing its intervention. Such profile of a newspaper was exceptional in the third-circuit press at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s.

Sociology was the official periodical of the Sociological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1972–1990). It was the first journal in Hungary devoted entirely to sociology. It opened a new chapter in the history of Hungarian sociology. Although the conservative ideological campaign led by orthodox Communist leaders made some changes in the editorial staff, Sociology was published continuously until 1990. The manuscript of the first issue from 1972, with the archival documents from 1971, inform us of the beginnings of this important journal. The authors of the first issue –included Zsuzsa Ferge (“Social Structure and the School System”), István Kemény (“Stratification of the Hungarian Working Class”), Iván Szelényi (“Housing System and Social Structure”), and others.

Lydia Sklevicky approached the "women’s question" primarily from the scholarly but also from the popular science position, and in a way that she was active in the print media and in public forums held in the Yugoslav centres of the new feminist movement - Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana.

Two photographs of Lydia Sklevicky attending the forum about female/ale relations in the Student Cultural Centre (SKUC) in Belgrade were taken by the photographer Dragan Papić on January 7, 1982, while on January 16, 1982, Belgrade's Omladinski list published an article by Snežana Bogavac, “Satisfied, oppressed women,” which stated that in Yugoslavia there is no serious research into the status of women (because in the scholarly circles this topic is "bypassed and marginalized"), and accordingly forums such as the one in SKUC have no significant impact. Despite the defeatist attitude of the article’s author, Sklevicky continued to advocate, at the forum in Belgrade and in her other work, for the presence of the "women’s question" in the public focus and its concrete resolution in the terms of obtaining the rights guaranteed to the women by the SFRY Constitution.

The two mentioned photographs of Lydia Sklevicky and the article from the Omladinski list are kept in the Sklevicky Feminist Collection. 

The story of acquisition of Iuri Shukhevych’s handwritten diary by Smoloskyp is unknown. This piece of Ukrainian samizdat was among numerous illegal documents smuggled by Smoloskyp couriers from Ukraine. In his diary, Shukhevych gives an account of Stalinist labour camps and ruminates on the destiny of the Ukrainian liberation movement. Smoloskyp and personally Osyp Zinkevych, who was a member of OUN’s leading body, PUN) participated in the campaigns in defence of Iuri Shukhevych, son of OUN-UPA military leader, Shukhevych, who spent over thirty years in Soviet labour camps. This diary along with many other primary source documents (for instance, the full collection of the documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki group) was used by Smoloskyp in their numerous publications on Shukhevych and other repressed Ukrainian nationalists.