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Velid Đekić was born in 1960. Since 1970 he has lived in Rijeka, where he completed primary and secondary school. He graduated with a degree in Croatian language and literature at the Faculty of Pedagogy in Rijeka. He earned his master’s degree in philology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb. He worked as a journalist for the Radio Rijeka youth program Bura, and then became a member of the editorial board of the newsletter Val published by the League of Socialist Youth of Croatia. He also collaborated with the Zagreb-based youth magazine Polet. From 1986 to 2016, he was employed in the national oil corporation, INA, specifically its information centre at the Rijeka oil refinery.

He was the co-author and the editor-in-chief of Rijeka's European Capital of Culture 2020 application, which secured Rijeka’s selection as European Capital of Culture. He is a member of the Board of Directors the Pro Torpedo Rijeka Association for the Study and Promotion of Industrial Heritage and participates in the work of international conferences in Rijeka dedicated to the industrial heritage.

He was a long-serving selector of the Croatian Biennale of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean, a member of the jury and supervisory board of Rijeka’s Drago Gervais Literary Award, and president of the Rijeka City Council of Culture and Publishing.

Although he took part in the youth counter-culture he did not consider himself a part of the cultural opposition during the period of socialism.

Aleksa Djilas is the son of the late dissident Milovan Djilas. He donated his father’s records to the Hoover Institution in 2014. From 1987 to 1994, he was a research associate at the Russian Research Center, Harvard University. He has lived as an independent intellectual in Belgrade since 1993. He is the author of The Contested Country.

Politician, writer Milovan Djilas was born in a small village named Podbišće near Mojkovac in Kingdom of Montenegro on June 12, 1911. His father, Nikola, was the commander of the Montenegrin Army in the First World War and later an advocate of unconditional unification of the kingdoms of Montenegro and Serbia. For this reason, young Djilas came from a pan-Serbian “white” (bjelaš) family with respect to the internal struggle between Montenegrins before and after 1918. At the end of the 1920s he attended gymnasium at Berane and Kolašin, when he encountered the ideas of the worker movement for the first time in his life. His arrival at the Faculty of Humanities, Yugoslav Literature Department, in Belgrade at the beginning of the 1930s was an opportunity for young Djilas to actively engage in the illegal communist movement through student organizations at the University of Belgrade. He was already involved in political work during the dictatorship of King Alexander when he helped organize student demonstrations in Belgrade's streets against the 1931 election, in which the regime party of General Petar Živković was the only option (A. Djilas, 2011).

After participating as an active member of the Yugoslav Communist Youth League (SKOJ), he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) in October 1932. Only two years later, Djilas was imprisoned in Srijemska Mitrovica under the law governing the protection of public safety and order (known as the State Protection Act). After his release three years later, he joined Tito on the consolidation of the Yugoslav party, which was riven by fractional strife on the eve of the Second World War. Together with Aleksandar Ranković, he established party organizations throughout Serbia before the war. Apart from a tendency toward political activism, Djilas was also engaged in literary work. Since he had  literary ambitions, in the pre-war years he wrote  numerous literary criticisms, prose pieces, poems, stories, novels and essays as well as political-ideological essays. Along with Jovan Popović and Radovan Zogović, he favoured the ideological tendency in the field of literature which opposed Miroslav Krleža in the so-called “Conflict on the Yugoslav Literary Left” during the 1930s (Lasić 1970: 33-34).

At the secret Fifth Territorial Conference in Zagreb in October 1940, Djilas was elected to the highest body of the Yugoslav Party. As a communist activist, he took part in the uprising on July 13, 1941 against Italian occupation in Montenegro in the summer of 1941. Following the split between Tito and Draža Mihailović over leadership of the anti-fascist movement in south-western Serbia in the autumn of 1941, Djilas became the main party leader for Montenegro at the end of 1941 and early 1942, where he dealt harshly with the pro-monarchist Chetniks. In that period, Djilas, as a radical adherent of Stalinism, launched so-called “class terror” against Montenegrin peasants with anti-communist attitudes. During the war, he served as a high official of the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army (FNRJ), the Antifascist Council of People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), as the highest body of the Yugoslav Partisan movement, and he was also the member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CK KPJ). In 1942, Djilas became editor of the Party bulletin called Borba (Struggle), and from that post he dictated the ideological orientation of the entire Partisan movement. Djilas, together with Tito, Aleksandar Rankovic and Edvard Kardelj, was one of the most important figures in the Yugoslav communist movement during the war and immediate post-war years.

Djilas played the most prominent role in the party leadership by criticizing the Soviet model after the collapse of the relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union in 1948. A former radical Stalinist, in the early 1950s he gathered the party intelligentsia around the journal Nova misao (New Thought) to elaborate a model for a separate Yugoslav path to socialism. The most prominent writers of Yugoslav cultural life at the time gathered around him and the journal, such as Miroslav Krleža, Vladimir Dedijer, Petar Šegedin, Ivan Dončević, Dobrica Ćosić, Mihailo Lalić, Skender Kulenović, Milan Bogdanović, Joža Vilfan, Oskar Davičo and others. Djilas gradually imagined that Yugoslavia could produce a different form of socialism that would allow the opposition to act and introduce freedom into public and cultural life. The culmination of Djilas' influence was expressed most strongly at the sixth  congress of the Yugoslav party in Zagreb in 1952, when its name was changed from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ). Djilas' thought was expressed in the following crucial assessment of the congress: “In its work, the League of Communists is neither nor can it be the immediate operational leader and director in economic, state and social life.” Soon this process of liberalization driven by Djilas was blocked. Although Djilas had numerous adherents in the party elite and intelligentsia, as the leader of “liberalization” of Tito’s regime, after publishing eighteen articles and the essay “Anatomy of a Moral” in the Borba and Nova misao from October 1953 to January 1954, in which he called for “democratization” of the Yugoslav regime, he was expelled from the party in January 1954 at the Third Plenum of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ). He was stripped of all Party and wartime decorations, as he was accused of undermining Party unity and of taking a “revisionist” turning from official doctrine. The Djilas case should certainly be viewed in the context of Stalin's death and Tito's announcement in June 1953 that he would be ready to normalize Yugoslav relations with the Soviet Union, which restricted any room for further “democratization” invoked by Djilas (Banac 2009, 19-20).

After abandoning the Yugoslav Party in April 1954, he granted an interview for the New York Times in which he attacked Tito's policy of maintaining a rigid dictatorship and preventing allowing further liberalization of his regime. In January 1955, he was first sentenced to one and a half years in prison. During this trial, Djilas stated before the court that his “democratic socialism” did not mean the restoration of the old capitalist regime from the pre-war period, but rather reform of existing socialism (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 11). In 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution, Djilas condemned Tito's support for the Soviet invasion of that country, for which he was again, in December 1956, arrested and sentenced to 3 years in prison in Srijemska Mitrovica. Later, when his first book, The New Class, was published in the West in 1957, he was again sentenced to seven years in prison. He was released in 1961 but was re-imprisoned in 1962 after the publication of his book Conversations With Stalin in the US in 1962. He was finally released on December 31, 1966. In all judgments, Djilas was charged under Art. 118 of the Criminal Code governing “Enemy Propaganda” (A. Djilas, 2011). The sanctions for the book about Stalin were imposed, according to Djilas, as a concession to maintain good relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union (Djilas, 1984: 24).

After leaving prison, Djilas became active as a writer and commentator, which had significant impact on the Cold War dissident movement. His fame and reputation as a dissident by his first work written in a prison cell and published as The New Class: an Analysis of the Communist System by the publishing company Frederick Praeger in New York in 1957. In it, he accused the new communist elite of failing the communist project and readily assuming bourgeois morality and its value system. Besides this work, he continued to maintain his stances on reform and democratic socialism, so he was very critical of actual communist regimes and wrote about their wartime and post-war conduct and other topics in the following years: Conversations with Stalin (1962), Of Prisons and Ideas (1979), Memoir of a Revolutionary (1973) and Wartime (1980), all published in the USA. Apart from the dissident literature, Djilas dedicated much of his work in this period to his country of origin in the novel Montenegro in 1963. The break with the party and with official Marxism brought Djilas back to traditional themes related to Montenegrin national and religious traditions. In that sense, he dismissed the Marxist theory of nationhood and nationalism, pointing out that the nation was formed far before the emergence of capitalism: “I want to say that nations go deep into the past and that what we call the nation today is only one form, one step in the development of peoples related by way of life, culture and language” (Milovan Djilas Papers, Box 37).

During his prison days, Djilas turned from Marx to Petar I. Petrović Njegoš, the greatest Montenegrin poet and writer of all time, examining his thought about God and the problem of good and evil, confessing that the ideal of justice is what led him to a political religion such as communism. In addition to dealing with Njegoš, he was translated John Milton's epic Paradise Lost into what was then called the Serbo-Croatian language, which indicated that Djilas tended to think about religious issues in prison. In his manuscript ‘Prison Notes,’ written at the time of his imprisonment in the 1960s, he demonstrated that was also interested in the Orthodox Saint Basil of Ostrog, about whom he planned to write the book “The Passion of St. Basil,” although it remained incomplete (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 37). This was more of an examination of the traditional heritage than a spiritual tract on Orthodox Christianity, which later he also emphasized himself: “No wonder so many oppositionists in communist countries turn to religions. To traditional or current  religious teachings. As far as I am concerned, my thinking does not tend toward any specific religion” (Djilas 1984, 47). He was particularly preoccupied with Montenegrin issues and relations from his youth from 1911 to 1929 in the book Land Without Justice (1958), and Njegoš's complete body of political, religious, literary and poetic works, as he expressed in a study also printed abroad: Njegoš: Poet-Prince-Bishop (1966).

Since Djilas concluded that the Soviet Union was an ossified bureaucratic structure and that it had betrayed the idea of international communism with its imperialist project, the solution to the crisis of Eastern socialism was found in the West in the 1950s, in British Labourism and in Nordic Social Democracy. The result of such thoughts were his links to Labour movement leader Aneuvin Bevan and his manuscript in this collection entitled “The Nordic Dream.” When it comes to his relationship with Bevan, Djilas rejected the notion that this British Labourist had an initial influence on his ideas. Namely, after the conflict with Stalin in 1948, while he was still a member of the Yugoslav communist leadership, Djilas had formed links with Western leftist circles. In his controversial articles in 1953 and 1954, he was delighted by social democracy and Western left reformist movements, saying that “the Bolsheviks (Lenin) and the Social Democrats (Plehanov) are right: the first is that revolution is possible and inevitable (albeit in backward countries), others - that democracy and socialism will not come through it (though in these same countries). In fact, these differences and the dissipation of the labour movement in these two streams were increasingly becoming – independent of scattered actors and ideologues – the main rift in the modern world. At the moment, the bourgeoisie are being ‘social-democratized’ in the West, and the peasant East are being ‘Bolshevized’” (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 11). The introduction of worker self-management as Yugoslavia’s separate path to socialism was assessed by Djilas in a single entry in his prison journal of February 18, 1960, that it cannot survive without political freedom and the democratization of Yugoslav society. Because of this attitude, Djilas was considered the most dangerous enemy of Tito's regime as the bearer of “rotten liberalism” (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 37). In the 1980s, due to the severe economic crisis that beset Yugoslavia after Tito's death, he warned about the “illusion of social property” and the fact that “self-management could not only democratize political life in Yugoslavia by itself.” The inability of the Yugoslav type of socialism to solve the economic crisis and to “democratize” socialism itself led Djilas to the conclusion that “the ultimate result of Yugoslav self-management is economic and legal chaos,” whose maintenance is only of interest of the party elite to maintain its monopoly over the management of the Yugoslav state’s resources (Djilas, 1984: 117-118.)

After leaving prison, he was under constant police surveillance until the late 1980s. In 1968 his passport was returned and he could then travel to the United Kingdom and the United States. During his visit in the autumn of 1968, Djilas  mostly attracted the attention of the American liberal and leftist public, especially at universities, with his view that democratic socialism was possible through reform, and not just by revolution and radical social change. In a way, Djilas morally rehabilitated socialism by laying all of the historical blame on its Stalinist episode (Milovan Djilas Papers, Box 36). After returning from the United States, he was commonly perceived by the Western public as the most famous Yugoslav dissident, granting numerous interviews and writing various essays and reviews, distinguishing himself as a critical analyst of the development of socialist regimes in Yugoslavia and the East Bloc. His renewed attempt to visit the US in 1970 failed because the Yugoslav authorities refused to give him a passport. Tito considered imprisoning him again in 1977, but abandoned the idea at the suggestion of then British conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, who thought that Djilas would further damage the reputation of Yugoslavia both domestically and internationally (A. Djilas, 2011).

After Tito's death, Djilas called for the democratization of Yugoslav politics and the necessary economic reforms in order to overcome the forces of ideological dogmatism and salvage the socialist economy. He therefore fully supported the Perestroika reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He was very active in Belgrade's dissident circles in the 1980s when he lectured at the “Free University” at secret meetings of dissidents, so that the authorities threatened him with prison again in 1984 (A. Djilas, 2011). In domestic politics, he wanted to maintain the Yugoslav federation. Djilas granted his first interview after 33 years of being banned from the public scene to the student magazine Katedra from Maribor in 1987. After Milošević's rise to power in the second half of the 1980s, Djilas opposed him and participated in the opposition against him, as he believed that Milošević’s aggressive centralist policy would lead to the collapse of the Yugoslav union. He died in Belgrade on 20 April 1995 and, in compliance with his personal wishes, he was buried in his native village in Montenegro (A. Djilas, 2011).

Zoran Đinđić was an intellectual and dissident, who became prime minister of Serbia after the fall of Slobodan Milošević. Đinđić was born in 1952 in Bosanski Šamac (today part of Bosnia and Herzegovina). He grew up in Travnik and Belgrade, where he finished both primary and secondary school. Đinđić’s first conflict with the law happened when, as high school student, he proposed to erase the name of Josip Broz Tito from the Constitution of SFR Yugoslavia. He was taken to the police and his typewriter was taken away.

Fascinated with the Black Wave in Yugoslav cinematography, he wanted to study directing. However, he did not succeed in enrolling at the Academy for Theatre, Film, Radio and Television. He subsequently began studying civil engineering but soon dropped out. Finally, he dedicated himself to philosophy and graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1974. During and immediately after his studies, he was active in the Student Union of the Faculty of Philosophy and in informal groups of the radical left. Because of his engagement at the gathering of students at the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana in 1974, where a draft resolution of a leftist critique of the socio-political conditions in the country was debated, Đinđić was arrested. Six people were put on trial. Đinđić was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, but never served. Under pressure from the international public, but also due to the agenda of the Yugoslav state to preserve the reputation of Tito, who was at the time a Nobel Peace Prize candidate, none of the six sentenced served time in prison. The conviction, nonetheless, influenced Đinđić’s search for a new job afterwards, and it impacted his decision to leave Yugoslavia at the beginning of 1977, to pursue postgraduate studies in Germany under Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt.

Jaroslav Šabata was born on November 2, 1927 in Dolenice, near Znojmo. At the time of the war, Šabata studied at grammar school in Brno. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at Masaryk University in Brno, where he obtained a doctorate in 1952. From 1951 he worked as an assistant in the Department of Psychology, which was gradually transformed into the Marxist-Leninist Institute. In 1968 he became the head of the Marxist-Leninist Institute. He attempted to form an oppositional anti-Stalinist orientation in the Communist Party from the outset of his political activities.

In July 1968 he became the secretary of the Regional Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in Brno. At the Vysočany Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, on August 31, 1968, he expressed his positive opinion on the capitulating attitude of Czechoslovak political representation. In 1969, after his suspension from the Communist Party, he began to work in a manual labour position on the railway. In November 1971, he was arrested and accused of subverting the Republic and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. When the Chairman of the British Communist Party arrived in Czechoslovakia, Jaroslav Šabata wrote open letters to both him and Gustav Husák. The letters were smuggled from prison and published in foreign journals. Even for this Šabata was prosecuted, but the prosecution was halted after half a year. The purpose of these letters was to show that the opposition was not silenced nor stopped by being sent to prison. He was released in December 1976. Šabata and others were released without having apologized for their actions. Šabata demanded that the court put on record that he did not apply for mercy because he was unlawfully sentenced and that he would continue to fight for his inalienable right to express himself freely. The judge replied that he would do that better while at liberty. Šabata claimed that his half-amnesty was a political gesture made by the regime to improve its reputation.

Shortly after the release, he signed Charter 77, which had just begun to spread, and in 1978 he became its spokesman after Jiří Hájek. After signing Charter 77, he started collecting signatures from his prison friends and other contacts in Brno. He was arrested again on October 1, 1978, when he tried to meet Polish dissidents at the Czech-Polish border. He was imprisoned until December 1980. He actively entered politics after 1989. He was among the first members of the Civic Forum, then joined the ODS (Civic Democratic Party) and later he joined Social Democracy. He was active in politics until the end of the 20th century. In 2002 and 2003, he taught at the Faculty of Social Studies - the Department of Psychology of Masaryk University in Brno and then worked for two years as an external teacher.

Jaroslav Šabata remains a controversial figure even today; his opponents claim that he was always a Communist, and his activity under Charter 77 was simply to save himself in a collapsing regime. However, the fact remains that Šabata did a great deal of work for Charter 77 and its dissemination.

Tatjana Šaric has been employed at the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb since 2000. She graduated with degrees in history and Czech language and literature, and then while working as a research assistant at the CSA she earned her master's degree (2008) and Ph.D. (2011) on topics related to twentieth-century Croatian history. She is employed as an archivist and researcher at the Political Parties and Associations Division of the CSA’s Department for Preservation and Arrangement of Archival Records. Besides professional archival work, she has also worked on scholarly projects. She is the author of several professional and scholarly papers covering topics in modern and contemporary Croatian history. She also deals with cultural history (her master’s thesis was on "Cultural Policies of the Authorities, 1945-1953: The Example of Matica hrvatska") and with the history of different social groups (PhD thesis: "The Status and Role of Youth and Youth Organizations in Federal Croatia/People’s Republic of Croatia, 1945-1953") through which she became familiar with cultural opposition to the communist system. She did not take part in any opposition activities during the socialist period. In 2003, she organized the Krunoslav Draganović Collection at the Croatian State Archives (CSA) and devised a search aid. 

Jaromír Šavrda was a Czech journalist, writer, political prisoner and significant representative of dissent in Ostrava. He graduated with a degree in Czech studies from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague in 1957 and later worked as a librarian in Ostrava. After the end of 1950s, he taught at a high school; from 1963 he worked as a full-time writer and journalist. He was expelled from the distance studies of law shortly before graduation in 1972. He worked as a warehouse keeper in a geological research between 1972 and 1975 when he was forced to retire due to ill health. Šavrda, who was not allowed to officially publish after 1968, published his texts as samizdat in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in his own edition Libri prohibiti founded in 1972, as well as exile magazines (e.g. Svědectví or Listy). He also collaborated with a branch of a samizdat edition Petlice in Brno. He was sentenced to two and half years of imprisonment because of the production of Libri prohibiti and for possession of forbidden printed materials in 1978. After his release from prison, he signed Charter 77 in 1981. In September 1982, he was taken into custody again for alleged sedition and possession of forbidden printed materials and sentenced to twenty-five months. Even after his second release, Šavrda continued in his samizdat activities, for example, he printed his translations of Anna Achmatova poems (Requiem, 1987). The flat of Šavrda and his wife was a place of regular meetings of dissidents from Ostrava and the surrounding area, even during the time when Šavrda was in prison. His prison experiences were depicted in his book Přechodné adresy (The Temporary Addresses), first published as samizdat in 1987 and officially published in 1991. Jaromír Šavrda died in May 1988 as a consequence of his imprisonment. In 1993, he became a honorary citizen of Ostrava, and he was in memoriam awarded the Class IV Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk by the president Václav Havel in 1998. “Cena Jaromíra Šavrdy za svědectví o totalitě” (the Prize of Jaromír Šavrda for Witnessing of Totalitarism), awarded by the association PANT since 2008 on the Human Rights Day, now bears his name. The name of the library Libri prohibiti, founded by Jiří Gruntorád in 1990, refers to the name of Šavrda’s samizdat edition.

Dolores Šavrdová was a wife of Jaromír Šavrda (a Czech journalist, writer, political prisoner, significant representative of dissent in Ostrava and signatory to Charter 77, who died in May 1988 after years of imprisonment). She met Šavrda at the beginning of the 1970s in Ostrava and lived with him until his death. Dolores Šavrdová also signed Charter 77 in 1987 and had to face Communist bullying, eavesdropping and being followed. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Šavrdas’ apartment in Ostrava-Zábřeh was a northern-Moravian centre of anti-regime opposition and a place of regular meetings of dissidents from Ostrava and the region; some of them were, as was proven later, agents of the State Security (StB). After the death of her husband, she took care of his legacy and, for example, attended the ceremony of “Cena Jaromíra Šavrdy za svědectví o totalitě” (the Prize of Jaromír Šavrda for Witnessing of Totalitarism), awarded by the association PANT on Human Rights Day since 2008. After the death of Dolores Šavrdová in 2012, her heirs gave the written estate of the spouses to the Ostrava City Archive.

Jiřina Šiklová is a Czech sociologist and journalist and is one of the most significant figures from the resistance against the communist regime. She was born on 17 June 1935 in Prague, her father worked as a physician and her mother as a teacher. After her graduation from the Charlotte Masaryk Grammar School, she went on to study history and philosophy at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in Prague. She married in 1956 and has two children – a son and a daughter. In 1956, after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and criticism of the personality cult of Joseph Stalin, she joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In the mid-1960s, Šiklová co-founded the Department of Sociology at Charles University Faculty of Arts in Prague; she studied youth and the student movements. She actively participated in the Prague Spring and supported the reformist tendencies within the Communist Party. In 1968, Šiklová signed the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto and left the Communist Party the following year. In the same year, 1969, she was one of the first academics to be dismissed from Charles University. During the period of Normalization, she was unable to find a professional job due to her political involvement and, therefore, worked as a cleaning lady and later as a social worker in the geriatric ward of the Thomayer Hospital in Prague. From the beginning of the 1970s, she co-operated with Petr Pithart in smuggling samizdat and exile literature. She continued to organise this smuggling herself from 1977 until May 1981, when the operation was exposed and Šiklová and other people were accused of subverting the republic. All the accused were discharged without a trial after a year, however, the prosecution of the group “Šiklová a spol.” (Šiklová et al) did not end until December 1989. After her return from prison in spring 1982, Šiklová (together with Vilém Prečan and Wolfgang Scheur) re-established the smuggling of banned literature, which she continued to do until November 1989. Jiřina Šiklová signed Charter 77.