COURAGE

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Mariana Piskova graduated in 1977 in History with a specialization in Archivistics at the Sofia University. Between 1978 and 2000, she worked as a research fellow at the Archives and Documentation Research Center at the Archives Administration (today's Archives State Agency), as Senior Specialist and Deputy Director of the Central State Technical Archives. Meanwhile, she defended her dissertation at the Moscow State Historical Archives Institute (in 1984). M. Piskova has undertaken specializations at the Potsdam State Archive, the Berlin Film Archive, the Dresden Phototheque, the Austrian State Archive, the North Caucasian Federal University, Stavropol, Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia and Batumi State University of Georgia. Since 2000 she has been Associate Professor of Archival Studies at Neofit Rilski South-West University - Blagoevgrad and a lecturer at Kliment Ohridski Sofia University.

As a leading archivist and documentary researcher, M. Piskova enriches the history of archival work, with a particular interest in audiovisual documents and special (technical) archives. Piskova has made important contributions to the analysis of visual propaganda through socialism; the detailed presentation of weekly movie reviews as propaganda materials; the viewing of specific films from the socialist period such as the Soviet-Bulgarian co-production The Heroes of Shipka in a wide international context. Piskova’s research also focuses on the policy of the Bulgarian archives regarding the documentation of women and minorities, looking for answers to the following questions, among others: is there special treatment for them? are the acceptance criteria different? are there thematic guides for facilitating the work with such archival documents? have archive documents for women / minorities been published in specialized periodicals?
M. Piskova leads and/or participates in numerous regional, national and international scientific projects such as Digital Archives - Science and Information Complex, Places of Shared Memory - Digital Map of Monuments - Projects to the Science Research Fund (NSF) to the Ministry of Education and Science; Building a Digital Roma Archives for Southwestern Bulgaria - Sofia, To Come Out of the Shadow, Supporting the Social Integration of People Threatened with Marginalisation Caused by Their Nationality (2011-2013, Grundtvig Program), Politics of Memory Cultures of the Russian-Ottoman War 1877-1878: From Divergence to Dialogue - Marie Curie 7th Framework Program Project (2012-2016, FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Marie Curie Action International Research Staff Exchange Scheme), Knowledge Exchange and Academic Cultures in the Humanities: Europe and the Black Sea Region, End of 18th - 21st Centuries (2017-2020), Horizon2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Rise (Research and Innovation Staff Exchange, among others.

Having achieved much herself in archive theory, Piskova applies this knowledge to her teaching - leading  thematic courses in Culture Studies, History, Archivists Studies as a lecturer at the North Caucasian Federal University in Visual Memory and History.

Stanislav Pitaš is a Czech signatory of Charter 77, political activist, organiser of concerts and representative of the East Bohemian underground. He has worked as a blue-collar worker for most of his life. He maintained contact with the dissidents around Václav Havel and with the underground community in Vísca near Chomutov, East Bohemia. He distributed the samizdat periodicals “Vokno” and “Voknoviny”. During his travels in Poland, he collaborated with Solidarity and actively supported the movement. In the 1980s, he moved to Broumov, North Bohemia, where he organised underground concerts and happenings. As a signatory of Charter 77, he was under supervision and was the target of intimidation by the State Security (StB). He was imprisoned three times between 1985 and 1989. In 1985 this was for allegedly ridiculing the president of Czechoslovakia when he and his friends created a satirical collage of Gustav Husák. On his way to a demonstration in Prague on 28 October 1988, he refused to follow the orders of StB officers, and instead passively lay down and was arrested. His subsequent complaint served as a pretext for the StB to accuse Pitaš of assaulting an officer. In 1989 he was imprisoned for the alleged theft of socialist property. He requested that his sentence be suspended because his mother was seriously ill; his request was not granted, despite Pitaš’s hunger strike. His mother died without Pitaš being able to pay his last respects. Before her death, she sent a letter to the prosecution office in Náchod, where she wrote that she was proud of how she had raised her son. All Pitaš’s trials were followed and reported by the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). Pitaš was released following a general amnesty in December 1989. After the Velvet Revolution, he was active within prison and police vetting committees. He organises concerts and other events in Šonov and Broumov.

Petr Pithart was born on 2 January 1941 in Kladno. His father, Vilém Pithart, was a lawyer and a member of the pre-war Communist Party, imprisoned by the Nazis in Theresienstadt in 1944 and later in Dachau. The Pithart family moved to Prague in 1946. Petr Pithart studied at grammar school and Charles University’s Law Faculty. He became a member of the Communist Party during his studies. He worked as an assistant professor at the faculty between 1962 and 1971 and published in Literární noviny from the middle of the 1960s. He resigned his membership of the Communist Party in September 1968. In 1969, Pithart and his family relocated to Oxford, where he had been granted a scholarship, but returned to Czechoslovakia in autumn the same year, having been called upon by the Czechoslovak government. He was dismissed from the university in 1971 and worked on hydraulic structures in South Bohemia. Between 1973 and 1977, while working as a business lawyer in Prague, he co-organised the smuggling of samizdat and exile literature together with Jan Kavan, who lived in London. After signing Charter 77 in 1977, he handed the organisation over to Jiřina Šiklová. As a signatory of Charter 77, he was immediately dismissed from his job. He worked as a night guard, packaging controller and librarian. His writings were published as samizdat volumes, and some of them were signed under his pen name J. Sládeček.

Petr Placák is a Czech journalist, historian and significant political activist before 1989. He is the son of Bedřich Placák, a spokesman for Charter 77. He played clarinet in the underground music group “The Plastic People of the Universe” (PPU) between 1982 and 1986. He was kept under surveillance by the State Security (StB), worked as a blue-collar worker and published samizdat volumes. In 1988, he founded the opposition initiative “České děti” (Czech Children) – the initiative presented a monarchist programme, shocking at that time, and various forms of humorous protests. Placák was one of the organisers of the demonstrations commemorating the 20th anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was sentenced to a suspended sentence because of his activities during “Palach’s week” in January 1989 (a week-long succession of demonstrations to commemorate Jan Palach’s self-immolation in 1969). Between 1989 and 1990, he was active in the Coordination Centre of the Civic Forum. Placák co-founded the monarchist movement “Koruna česká” (Czech Crown) after 1989. He works as a journalist and is editor-in-chief of the cultural and social revue “Babylon”. His essay “Fízl” (2007) reflects on his personal experience of StB repression and examines the psychological aspects of life under a dictatorship, which was awarded the Czech “Magnesia Litera” book prize in 2008. He has published some of his works under his pen name Petr Zmrzlík.

Mykola Plakhotniuk was born in the Kursk region of Russia in 1936, after his parents fled the village of Tykhyj Khutir near Kyiv with their large family, in order to escape the famine of 1932-1933. He was a medical doctor, a member of the sixtiers movement, a human rights activist, and member of the Kyiv Club of Creative Youth. He was arrested in 1972 and held for nine years in maximum security psychiatric facilities in Dnipropetrovsk and Kazan, institutions created by the KGB and known for practices of extreme isolation and near complete lack of prisoner rights. In 1978, Plakhotniuk was relocated to a regular psychiatric clinic in Smila in the Cherkassy region of Ukraine, where he was held alongside other patients who were committed against their will. There he was able to see family and friends, like Nadia Svitlychna, who visited him there before she left the Soviet Union for New Jersey, USA. After being released in March 1981, he was rearrested in September and sentenced in 1982 to four years in hard labor camps. 

Plakhotniuk enrolled in medical school in Kyiv in 1959 (which he completed in 1966) and quickly branched out into civic engagement, attending literary studios in 1962-63, where he was exposed to a number of young poets. In the dorms, a group of like-minded medical students formed, where they talked about language issues and other social problems. In 1963, he sent a letter to the Ministry of Education, requesting instruction in Ukrainian. Later that year, he organized a poetry reading at the institute, attended by Vasyl Symonenko, Mykola Vingranovskyi, and others. Shortly thereafter, Symonenko succumbed to injuries to his kidneys, suffered during beatings at the hand of the KGB. When Plakhotniuk organized an evening of poetry in Symonenko’s honour, he attracted attention to himself. He was called to a Komsomol meeting, where he received a warning but continued with his activism. In 1965 until his arrest in 1972, Plakhotniuk organized evenings of carolling, drawing in students from universities throughout Kyiv. During the first wave of arrests in 1965, he defended Ivan Svitlychny and Ya. Hevrych in an open letter to the editor titled “Behind them stands Truth.” He wrote several other letters in defense of others that had been persecuted by the state security services.

In 1970-1971, Plakhotniuk helped Chornovil edit the Journal “Ukrainsky Visnyk,” which chronicled these repressions. He also helped establish the tradition of gathering in front of the statue of Taras Shevchenko in the centre of Kyiv on May 22, the anniversary of the return of Shevchenko's remains to Kyiv, where a funeral mass was held prior to his repatriation to Kaniv. This tradition is maintained in activist circles to this day. In 1967, six attendees were seized and taken away with no explanation, prompting Plakhotniuk and several others to go to the Central Committee’s office building and demand answers. Because of this activism, he was arrested in 1972, along with many others. Plakhotniuk was sent to psychiatric wards twice, the first time to a maximum security facility. After refusing to sign a confession upon his release, he was sent to less punitive ward, which was even more psychologically taxing given the mixing of political prisoners with individuals suffering from psychiatric conditions. He was released in 1984, after which he worked as a doctor until his retirement in 1998.