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Ivan Blatný was a Czech poet and translator. His first poems were published in 1933 in Studentský časopis (Student’s Journal). Later, he contributed to the Catholic journal Akord, artistic-literary review Kritický měsíčník (Critical Monthly), philosophic-artistic quarterly Listy and daily newspaper Lidové noviny. Ivan Blatný left Czechoslovakia for the UK in 1948 as an official delegation member of the Czech Journalists’ Syndicate where he, upon his arrival in the UK, announced on BBC radio that he decided to emigrate from Czechoslovakia because of the political pressure against artists. He applied for political asylum in the UK, and as a consequence, he was deprived of citizenship and property and became a banned poet in Czechoslovakia. He endured life in exile with great difficulties, became ill with paranoid schizophrenia and he was hospitalized for the first time in London in the autumn of 1948. Between 1948 and 1954 Blatný cooperated with the BBC and Radio Free Europe. However, he was permanently hospitalized in a various psychiatric hospital in England from 1954. Despite his hospitalization, Blatný continued to write poems. Nevertheless, Blatný became almost “forgotten” in Czechoslovakia. According to Czech poet and dissident Zbyněk Hejda, only Blatný’s four books published in Czechoslovakia before 1948 were known in Czechoslovakia until the 1970s as there was no information about Blatný’s life and works in exile. However, Blatný’s emigration poetry was published in Canada by the Czechoslovak exile publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers. In the 1980s, it was also published in Czechoslovakia as a samizdat. Blatný’s life story became internationally known mainly thanks to the German magazine Stern, which published an article about Blatný by Jürgen Serke in 1981. A year later, the BBC and the Norwegian television broadcasted a documentary film about this Czech poet. Blatný’s work could be published in Czechoslovakia again after 1989. Nowadays, Ivan Blatný is considered an important personality of Czechoslovak literature, his name appears in school books and is regularly a topic of students’ theses. In 2007, Miloš Orson Štědron’s music revue “Ivan Blatný Cabaret” was performed in the Comedy Theater in Prague. However, as stated recently by Czech journalist Aleš Palán, Blatný is “one of the last important poets of the twentieth-century not fully discovered by the reading audience.”

Petr Blažek is a historian specializing in 20th century Czechoslovak history, specifically the opposition and resistance against the communist regime, as well as Polish-Czech-Slovak relations. He studied history at the Institute of Czech History at the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, and he received a doctorate from the same faculty for the dissertation thesis, "History of Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity. Relations of the Czechoslovak and Polish Opposition 1976-1989 ". Currently, he works as a specialist at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. He was the operator of the grant project "Committee on the Defense of Unjustly Prosecuted. The History of the Opposition Group (1078-1989) ", within which the website vons.cz was created.

Petr Blažek is also one of the volunteers who are part of the Center for Documentation of Totalitarian Regimes (CDTR).

Līvija Blūmfelde (1929-2016) was a department head at the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation from 1955. In 1961, she became the deputy director, and in 1970 the director of the museum. In these roles, she had an impact on the museum’s policy on the formation of collections. Although she was loyal to the regime, she understood the historical importance of artefacts that represented values incompatible with Soviet ones.

Ferenc Bodor (1941–1994) was a Hungarian librarian, cultural historian, publicist, architecture and applied-arts critic and a unique figure within the Hungarian intelligentsia during the Kádár period. Between 1959 and 1961, he studied at the Library Science and Methodological Center of the National Széchényi Library. Bodor graduated as an intermediate librarian in 1961. In 1961–1962, he worked as a laborer. From 1961, he studied at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, though he abandoned his studies in 1964. He worked from 1964 to 1967 as a walk-on and made engineering translations. Between 1967 and 1972, he was a newspaper conveyor at the 114th Post Office in Budapest. Beginning in 1973, he worked as a librarian at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts. Bodor wrote several studies about modern and contemporary applied arts and Hungarian environmental culture. He organized the Oak Gallery for the open spiritual workshop of the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts and was the director of the gallery from 1986 until his death. He directed many exhibitions, discussion groups and art evenings. Bodor served as the leader of the Center for Visual Education of the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts beginning in 1986. In 1988, he graduated from the academy’s Educational School of Special Design Management, writing his thesis about the relationship between everyday culture and design. Bodor wanted to write the history of old hotels in Budapest, but was not able to complete this project due to illness.  

Bodor thought that conserving the legacy of disappearing folk culture was important. He took part in the events of the Studio of the Young Folk Artists. His book Nomad Generation shows the interest of young Hungarian intellectuals in folk culture. From 1992 until his death, he was one of the editors of the periodical Ökotáj (Ecological Landscape). Bodor was interested in civic culture too. Mainly he wrote about material culture, everyday life and its locations. The perpetuation of alternative forms and the propagation of an alternative way of life indirectly positioned Bodor against the official ideology of the régime. Most parts of Ferenc Bodor’s collections moved to public collections. In 1995–1996, his letters, postcards and photos were placed at the National Museum and his nineteenth-century photo collection at the Museum of Ethnology, while the tools which represent contemporary design went to the National Technical Museum and most of his books were taken to the Lónyai Street Calvinist High School in Budapest. Most of Bodor’s pictures and manuscripts of the coffee houses were moved to the Foundation of Hungarian Coffee Houses.

Oleksandr Bohomazov was born on March 27, 1880 in the village of Yampol, in the Kharkiv guberniia of the Russian Empire (now Sumy oblast in Ukraine). He studied at the agricultural school in Kherson (1896–1902), then at Kyiv Art School (1902–05). Due to his participation in a student strike, Bohomazov was expelled from the school in 1905-1907. In the summer of 1906, he painted “en plein air in the Crimea, then he worked in Moscow in the studios of Fyodor Rerberg and Konstantin Yuon (1907–08). Initially, his art was influenced by Symbolism, particularly by the work of Viktor Borisov-Musatov.”  In 1908, Bohomazov participated in an exhibition in Kyiv titled “Zveno” (or “section” in Russian), along with David Burliuk, Mikhail Larionov and Aleksandra Ekster. While studying at Kyiv Art School, he became fascinated by impressionism and some of his later works were influenced by Scandinavian modernism. By 1912, Bohomazov became involved in Futurist pictorial theory and practice, participating in an exhibition called “Kil’tse” (or “ring”) in Kyiv in 1913. This same year he married Vanda Monastyrska, who would be his companion for the rest of his life.

The following year, there was a palpable shift in Bohomazov’s perspective, as reflected in the treatise he wrote on painting and its elements. Prof. Myroslava Mudrak notes “constituted his formulations of the new Futurist art.” During 1922-1930, he taught “fortech” (formal-technical) subjects at the Kyiv Art Institute, known then as the Institute of Plastic Arts. In his theoretical treatise “Painting and Elements” (1914), Bohomazov foreshadowed ideas concerning objectless art, later formulated by Kazimir Malevich and Vasilii Kandinsky. In 1915-1917, he taught in a provincial school at Heriusy (today Nagorno Karabakh). It was there that his "expressionist sensibilities were aroused by the mountainous surroundings and blended with his Futurist focus on quantitative and qualitative rhythms," the core idea of his 1914 treatise.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Bohomazov played an active role in newly formed artistic organizations. In 1919, he worked alongside fellow artists, like Oleksandra Exter and others, to decorate streets and trains in Kyiv with Futurist designs. In 1920, Bohomazov helped create an agitprop hospital train as well as the steamer “Pushkin” for the 12th Army. He became seriously ill at the front and battled tuberculosis until the end of his life. In 1922, Bohomazov became a professor of easel painting at the newly formed Institute of Plastic Arts in Kyiv, but in the years 1923-1926 spent long periods in Crimea to combat tuberculosis. By 1927, his work became more figurative, culminating in the work "Sawyers," a triptych in which he strove to synthesize figurative and Futurist art. One of the paintings from this series was displayed at the retrospective Ten Years of October 1917-1927, the same year his treatise of 1914 became part of the curriculum at the Kyiv Art Institute, where Bohomazov worked until his death in 1930. The institute was the "last bastion of modern art before the onslaught of Socialist Realism," and afterward Bohomazov's work was critiqued as too "formalist."  Only in 1966 was a retrospective of his life's work held in Kyiv.