Stojanović became politically active in the early 1960s, and in 1966, he joined the Communist party from which he was excluded in 1972. He explained his Party membership as stemming from his interest in politics and the fact that many other youth from his millieu joined the Party in the hope that this would be one of the ways societal change could be brought about. Stojanović was active in the Yugoslav student movement and was one of the leaders of the organizational board at the Academy during the protests in 1968. In the interviews with COURAGE, Stojanović considered the broaching of questions of political, sexual and gender rights and freedom, relevant issues to this day, and as the most important legacy of the 1968 student movement. During this period, he was both an active author for and later editor of student magazines “Student” [The Student] and “Vidici” [The Views] (1968-1971). The first controversy he caused while editor of “Student” when he published “The letter to young Gorani: go forth in forestation of the Otok” in the “It will get better” column. This was a satirical critique of the political detention camp “Goli Otok” [Bare Island]. In 1971, Stojanović was again at the heart of a larger scandal, this time while editor of “The Views” when he dedicated one issue to the political, legal and press systems of the Third Reich. The cover of the magazine showed a post stamp depicting Adolf Hitler in a frighteningly similar way to one of Josip Broz Tito. The intention was to compare and highlight the similarities between the two cults of personality and between Nazi German and socialist Yugoslav propaganda. This issue of “The Views” was instantly banned while Stojanović was arrested. In the end, however, he was not put on trial.
At the end of the 1960s, Stojanović dedicated himself to the study of film. He devoted his first student film to a critique of the communist regime. This film, “The Healthy Offspring” [Zdrav podmladak] ridiculed the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ) [Savez komunističke Omladine Jugoslavije] and its labour actions. When Stojanović was later arrested, this film was confiscated and remains lost to this day. His second work, produced for his graduate final project at the Academy, “Plastic Jesus”, was filmed in 1971. Although the film was never screened publicly in Yugoslavia, it was produced at a time in which Party-infighting was calling the regime into question. The subsequent backlash led to supression of artistic liberties. Against this background, Stojanović’s trial and prosecution of his film were used as warnings to other potentially critical artists. Stojanović spent full three years in prison, between 1972 and 1975. He was accused and convicted of the criminal offense of “hostile propaganda”. His verdict (delivered on 14 June 1973) stated that the artist “represented the socio-political situation in the country maliciously and falsely,” that he depreciated the socialist revolution, its fighters and self-governing socialist system, and that he had insulted the figure of the President, Josip Broz Tito, “the most distinguished representative of the Revolution and of the construction of the socialist social relations.” After serving his sentence of three years of prison, Stojanović was released in 1975. His passport was withheld, similarly to other persecuted artists and intellectuals of socialist Yugoslavia. Only a few years later, in 1978, amid mounting international pressure did such artists and intellectuals have their passports returned. Stojanović seized this opportunity to leave the country. He spent the following years in London, Afghanistan, India and Iraq, with several shorter stays in Belgrade.
In 1976, before being able to leave the country, Stojanović took part in the creation of the “Open University”, together with Ilija Mojković, Voja Stojanović and Vlada Mijanović. The “Open University” was a specific form of intellectual oppositional activity, modeled after similar concepts in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and organized as gatherings in private apartments with discussions regarding different topics. Apart from the political issues, discussions of historical and philosophical topics as well as of the sciences were held. The “Open University,” as Stojanović noted in an interview in the weekly “The Time” [VREME] on 16 February 2016, functioned for several years with 750 people passing through it. A police raid in the apartment of Dragomir Olujić in 1984 marked the end of the “Open University”. On that occasion, Lazar Stojanović was also arrested; yet, he was released a few days later without charges being filed. However, the state began proceedings against six other members (Dragomir Olujić, Miodrag Milić, Pavlušk Imširović, Gordan Jovanović, Milan Nikolić i Vlade Mijanović). Nevertheless, since the witnesses refused to testify and owing to public pressure, the charges were dropped.
In the 1980s, Stojanović returned to Yugoslavia and worked as a director in a theatre. He was also one of the founders of “The Time” [VREME] magazine for which he also wrote as a journalist. From the beginning of the 1990s, he was an anti-war activist. He worked as journalist for “Ship” [Brod] radio, and later as a freelancer for “Radio France Internationale”. Afterwards, he left the country and moved to New York City. In the US, he worked as a translator and was a guest lecturer at several American universities. During the conflict in Kosovo at the end of the 1990s, Stojanović worked for the OSCE and UN missions. During this period he also made several documentaries: “Serbian epic” [Srpska epika] in 1993, “Almost Serbs” [Približno Srbi] on the status of Roma population in 1997, “The rise and fall of general Mladić” [Uspon i pad generala Mladića] in 2005, “The life and adventures of Radovan Karadžić” [Život i priključenije Radovana Karadžića] in 2005 and “The Scorpions - A scrapbook” [Škorpioni-Spomenar] on the crimes of Serbian paramilitary formations in 2007. Since 2011, he lived and worked in Belgrade.
Stojanović claimed that his dissident activism was constant. Even after being released from prison, he continued to be active socio-politically. However, after he was expelled from the Party, he was never again a member of any movement or of any official organization. In the interviews with COURAGE, he described the dissident movement as a network of individuals who were friends connected by their shared political views. They were not, however, a structured and organized opposition, but they maintained contact and shared critical attitudes towards the socialist regime. In Stojanović’s opinion, there were at most two hundred active individuals who can be considered dissidents and a cultural opposition. In an interview for the newspaper 24sata on 29 November 2016, he expressed his attitude on repression, stating that it “only shows the real boundaries of civic freedom, especially the freedom of thought and expression.”
He believed that the borders of freedom should always be reconsidered and shifted, and that he dedicated his life to this cause. Stojanović stated his opinion on courage in the same interview: “Courage is a mental attitude, not a part of the character. It neither presupposes education nor talent. It is not made of testosterone but of beliefs and decisions. You are not born with it – you either learn it or you don’t. You choose it or it chooses you. Of course, the authors are brave, when they decide to be. Everybody has to decide for themselves.”
Stojanović believes that studying the dissident movement is of great importance for understanding socialism but also, to a large degree, to understand the present. He considers learning about the culture of resistance crucial, especially for the young and future generations. In the interview with our researcher conducted on 10 December 2016, Stojanović maintained: “Utopia stands for the only solid bridge, the only trodden path which takes you from the past to a future of any kind, because if you do not reflect on utopia, you have no idea of future whatsoever."
Sanda Stolojan (1919–2005) was one of the prominent members of the Romanian exile in Paris, very active in organising public protests against the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and privileged by her position of official translator into Romanian for several presidents of France. She was born on 19 February 1919, in Bucharest, in a family of intellectuals. She was the granddaughter of the writer Duiliu Zamfirescu and daughter of diplomats, which fundamentally influenced her professional career. She received a fine education both in interwar Romania, and especially abroad, because her parents took her with them to the countries where they were sent on diplomatic service: Italy, Germany, Holland, Brazil, Portugal, Poland, Denmark, and France. She graduated from high school in Paris in 1937, after which she returned to Romania, where she enrolled at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Bucharest. In 1943, she married the engineer Vlad Stolojan Filipescu, with whom she tried to flee to the West in 1949. They were captured and sentenced to prison for acts preparatory to illegal emigration. They were political detainees between 1949 and 1950. Later, between 1958 and 1961, he was again arrested for "hooliganism." They were also expelled by the communist authorities from their own house and dispossessed.
In Romania, Sanda Stolojan worked as a translator and as a clerk at a typography co-operative. She emigrated to France with her husband in 1961, where she worked as an official interpreter of Romanian for French presidents. She was also actively involved in the activities of the Romanian exile community. She was a collaborator of Radio Free Europe, coordinated the League for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania (1984–1990), based in Paris, and co-founded a literary magazine, publishing mainly writers from Eastern Europe, Les Cahiers de l'Est. She also published poetry and prose in Romanian journals in the West, including Limite, Ființa Românească, Revista Scriitorilor Români, Ethos, Dialog, Lupta, Cuvântul Românesc, Curentul, Contrapunct, România, and La Nation Roumaine, as well as in such magazines as Revue de Belles-lettres (Geneva), Creation, and Polyphonies (Paris). Some of her volumes of lyrics were published by various foreign publishers. In the same vein, she wrote a number of articles of literary criticism and essays in foreign publications such as Journal de Genève, Esprit, Le Monde, L'Alternative, Lettre Internationale, and ARA Journal. In 1980 she published in English a monograph on her grandfather, the writer Duiliu Zamfirescu, which appeared in the Twaine World Authors collection in Boston, she translated into French Lacrimi și sfinți (Tears and saints) by Emil Cioran in 1986, and poems by Lucian Blaga contained in the anthology L'etoile la plus triste in 1992. In 1989, she was awarded an Honorary Diploma by the American Romanian Academy for her work on human rights. After the collapse of the Communist regime in Romania, she returned to her native country, without establishing herself here definitively. She was involved in a series of actions aimed at helping to rebuild democracy in her country of origin. Since 1994, several books of her have been published in Romania, principally her journals kept between 1961 and 2001, but also a volume about her visit to Romania with President Charles de Gaulle in 1968, as well as her correspondence with Constantin Noica during the Communist regime. From 2003 until her death she was part of the Moral Guarantee Council of the National Institute for the Memory of the Romanian Exile, a body that brought together Romanian personalities in exile. She passed away on 2 August 2005 in Paris.
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Lokalizacja:
- Paris, France
After leaving secondary school in Mažeikiai, Virgilija Stonytė studied the Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius Pedagogical Institute. She graduated from the institute in 1984, and since then she has been a secondary school teacher. Stonytė was familiar with Professor Vanda Zaborskaitė from 1980. She participated in various events as a family member, and was involved in networks the intelligentsia of that time. According to her, there were two main annual events that gathered a close group of intellectuals: the birthday and the anniversary of the death of the Lithuanian writer Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas. At these and other meetings, members of a trusted network discussed freely many important political and cultural issues, shared their opinions, and devised verbal strategies for supporting informal cultural initiatives. Stonytė thinks that Vanda Zaborskaitė was one of the leaders of the cultural opposition at that time for at least three reasons. First of all, she experienced persecution by the regime during the 1950s and early 1960s. Secondly, as a professor of literature, Zaborskaitė promoted the importance of the poet Maironis. Thirdly, she was in touch with some Catholic priests and kept up a correspondence with them.
After the death of Professor Zaborskaitė, Stonytė inherited a huge private archive that holds personal correspondence, manuscripts, and Zaborskaitė's diary. Understanding its great importance to the history of culture, Stonytė started to collaborate with researchers at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, in order to deal with this archive and publish books about Vanda Zaborskaitė.
According to Stonytė, cultural opposition is related to the search for an authentic national culture, preserving and understanding its importance.
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Lokalizacja:
- Vilnius , Lithuania
Dimitar Vasilev Stoyanov (1910-1971) took to anarchism already in his youth. He became a member of the Federation of Anarchists-Communists in Bulgaria (FACB). After the Bulgarian coup d’état of 1934 (Devetnadesetomayski prevrat), all political parties, including the FACB, were banned. In the beginning of 1942, Stoyanov, Hristo Kolev, and other activists of the anarchist federation were arrested; the prosecutor sought death sentences under the State Protection Act. Eventually the anarchists received 10-year terms and were sent to prison in Varna. They were released on September 8, 1944, when the prison was taken by forces of the political resistance movement, the Fatherland Front.
The new government declared war on Germany. Dimitar Stoyanov was mobilized and served in the Bulgarian army until the end of the Second World War. Because of his political opinions, he was again arrested, this time by the communist authorities, in 1945. He was sentenced to forced labor in the Bogdanov Dol labor camp near Pernik. Released after one month, he started to work in a glass factory. However, in 1948 he was declared "an enemy of the Fatherland Front" and a court sentenced him once again to forced labor, first in the Kutsian camp in Pernik, then in Mini Nikolaevo, and ultimately in the infamous Belene camp on Persin Island in the Danube.
Dimitar Stoyanov was released in August 1953 during a partial political amnesty after Stalin's death and the (temporary) closure of the Belene camp, when thousands of prisoners were set free. Stoyanov left the camp in worsening health. His remaining 14 years were leukemia stricken.
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Lokalizacja:
- Pernik, Bulgaria
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Lokalizacja:
- Vranea Stena, Bulgaria 2445