COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

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.

The collection of files of political prisoners contains the criminal cases against people who were charged by Soviet security institutions (NKVD/MGB/KGB) of real or imaginary crimes against the Soviet state from 1940 to 1986, including many intellectuals and religious activists. The files of visual artist Kurts Fridrihsons and poet Knuts Skujenieks, participants in the Action of Light, and many others, are in this collection.

The collection of books on Goli Otok is kept in the library of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) and is the most significant collection dedicated to this topic. The collection was created through the activities of the Yugoslav and Serbian writer and dissident, Dragoslav Mihailović, who himself served a sentence of fifteen months on the Goli Otok (1951–52). The collection is held in the SANU library as a separate resource and is accessible to researchers.  

The Goma Movement Ad-Hoc Collection at CNSAS reflects the activity of an ephemeral collective protest for human rights, which emerged under the influence of Charter 77, gathered rapidly about the same number of supporters, but unlike its model, succumbed only a few months later. It bears the name of the main proponent of this movement because this corresponds not only to its canonisation in post-1989 historical writings, but also to the pre-1989 interpretation of the secret police, which focused on identifying the network linking Goma to the other supporters and collecting complex data about all these individuals.