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Petru Negură (b. 17 May 1974, Chișinău, Republic of Moldova), is a literary scholar and sociologist by training. He received his PhD in Sociology in 2007 from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris with a thesis on the topic of the Moldavian Writers’ Union under Stalinism. The thesis covers the period from 1924 (the creation of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) to 1956 (the beginning of the de-Stalinisation process initiated by Khrushchev). In 2010, Negură was a member of the Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Totalitarian Regime in Moldova, which allowed him to gain privileged access to previously restricted archival collections. Currently, Petru Negură is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Work within the Faculty of Psychology of Ion Creangă State Pedagogical University in Chișinău.  

Petru Negură’s political attitudes were largely determined by his involvement in the emerging movement for national emancipation in the late 1980s. A teenager at the time, he enthusiastically participated in most of the political meetings and demonstrations organised in that period. His youthful enthusiasm also coincided with a series of generalised expectations in Moldova in the context of the Perestroika era: a desire for change, for a more open and more democratic society. This context of various associations, public platforms, and “circles” propagating political messages with a national-cultural orientation was formative for his personality and belief system

Due to his research interests, Negură has contributed to the advancement of knowledge in the field of cultural opposition by identifying and distinguishing between several different forms that were apparent in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR). In his opinion, one of the basic forms of cultural opposition were the “cultural circles” (cenacluri), which propagated a message of national emancipation (e.g. the Alexei Mateevici circle). Emulating the Romanian example of the pseudo-oppositional state-supported Flacăra circle, the Moldovan associations of this type were nonetheless quite different in Negură’s opinion. Their opposition to the communist regime really emerged “from below” and focused on an explicit oppositional message, which was formulated in national-cultural terms. Negură has also highlighted “sub-cultural” phenomena, such as the various forms of “alternative cultures” which emerged in Soviet Moldavia mostly after 1987, and were quite popular throughout the entire USSR during late Perestroika period. As Negură has illustrated, there were several varieties of Western-inspired youth sub-cultures, e.g., rock, hippie, punk, which emerged in more or less explicit opposition to the official cultural norms. Another form of cultural opposition which Negură has identified was expressed through various alternative religious belief systems of a more or less esoteric and mystical character. These tendencies undermined the official secular, atheistic and anti-religious discourse. They were also in opposition to the Orthodox Church, which was quite close to the authorities in that period. Negură has used all these examples to illustrate his definition of “cultural opposition.” In broader terms, he does not identify this notion with only a certain group, such as intellectuals or the cultural elite. His understanding of the term is, as he puts it, “broader, more democratic, encompassing the participation of all kinds of people, from all social strata, not restricted to the educated members of society.” Inasmuch as the various forms of cultural expression were in an explicit oppositional relation to the official discourse, Negură maintains, they testify to a more diffuse but wider participation in the phenomenon of “cultural opposition” than previously envisaged. 

Sándor Nemes was born in Szekszárd-Zomba, a small village in the south of Hungary, where his father was a schoolmaster. In 1956, as a second-year high school student, he was the one who removed and threw the hated “Rákosi crest” of the school out to the street, and after the second Soviet military invasion, together with some friends, he produced flyers calling for resistance by a general strike. At the age of 15, during the Christmas holiday, he fled all alone to Yugoslavia, where he spent several months in the famed refugee camp of Gerovo, before he was taken by a French transport to the West.

After a few years working in the Citroen car factory and other places, he joined the Legion in 1960 at Fort Vincenne. He was taken to Algeria and soon was trained as a signalman with the best qualifications. When Algerian war ended in 1962 he was ordered to Corsica, then to Orange, and Tahiti. With a 16-year long service in the Legion, he transferred to the regular French Army, and was reassigned for another two years to a Paris military base. In 1975 he acquired French citizenship, and one year later he visited his native land for the first time since 1956, still as an active soldier in the French Army. He was discharged in 1978 as an ensign with 18 years of service. Then he got married, settled back in Corsica with his wife of Corsican roots, and built their family home mostly on his own in Borgo, where their two children were soon born.  He restarted his civilian career as a security expert at the Bastia Airport, and the local network of the French National Bank. After becoming a widower, he had to care for their two teenage children for years by himself. From the 1980s he could regularly visit his family left behind in Hungary. He still keeps in close contact with the members of Hungarian veterans’ circle in Provence and elsewhere in France. He is an original character with much vitality and sense of humor, which makes him popular among the much younger Hungarian legionnaires still doing their active service.  

Sándor Nemes was from the start one of the most valuable sources and supporters of the Hungarian legionary historical research project, 2011–2016. The documentary film and book Patria nostra, the twin products of this research, could not have been completed without his devoted contributions. He was the main character with his rich memories and guidance, and was also the main organizer, host, and local guide of the shootings in many sites in Corsica (Bastia, Borgo, Corte, Calvi, etc.). Furthermore, he is an excellent author of a memoir, as proven by his finely written autobiographical manuscript, a valuable item of the archival collection, illustrated with many original sources and documents. His other manuscript, “The Slang Vocabulary of the Legionnaires,” which includes close to 3,000 idioms and proverbs, is a cultural and historical rarity, and another valuable piece of the collection.

Karel Nepraš was a Czech sculptor, painter and graphic designer. He studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts (1952–1957). In the 1950s he co-founded a club which would later be known as the “Šmidrové” – a non-conformist, Dadaist-surrealist group which responded to the social reality and absurdity of the regime with jokes and shock prank events. The club was not only based around art, but also theatre, literature and music. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts, Nepraš first off all turned to drawing – often humorous and tragi-comic. Towards the end of the 1950s, he returned to sculpture – first of all figurative and then based on informalism from the start of the 1960s. In 1963 he co-founded the famous “Křížovnik School of Pure Humour without Jokes”, which brought together artists, theoreticians and representatives from the cultural underground. A year later he married the graphic designer and poet, Naďa Plíšková. Midway through the 1960s, he began making his famous statues from pipes, wire, tubes and other objects which he then added textiles to and painted the surfaces (the Red Heads, Dialogues, Moroa). Over the subsequent decades he then developed the technique of assemblage using different technical materials and objects. He was unable to exhibit his works during Normalization and worked as a restorer. In the words of Maria Klimešová, he was “one of the most banned artists of the Normalization period”. However, he continued to be part of the Křížovnik School, which from the start of the 1970s was linked to the underground, by amongst others, Ivan Martin Jirous. From 1991, Nepraš taught at the Academy of Arts in Prague and he remained in teaching until 2002. At the same time, he continued to create compositions and reliefs. His work has been exhibited in both the Czech Republic and abroad.

Pavel Nicolescu (b.27 April 1936, Ploieşti, Romania) is a Romanian Baptist minister, who graduated the Baptist Theological Institute in 1965. In 1977 he signed the open letter of protest against infringements of human rights in Romania relating to religious freedom entitled: The neo-protestant denominations and human rights in Romania, which was addressed to several Western embassies and to Radio Free Europe. He was also one of the founding members of the Romanian Committee for the Protection of Religious Freedom and Freedom of Conscience, established in April 1978. For these initiatives and for his religious activity he was persecuted by the communist regime. He emigrated to the United States in 1979 (Silveșan and Răduț 2014, 60–61).

Vinko Nikolić was born in Šibenik, in southern Croatia on 2 March 1912. He was a writer, poet, journalist, literary critic and publicist, one of the most prominent Croatian émigré intellectuals. He was raised in a poor and large Catholic family. He attended primary school and the classics gymnasium in Šibenik and studied the Croatian language, Yugoslav literature, Croatian history, and the Russian and Italian languages from 1932 to 1937. Due to his political opposition to the Yugoslav regime, he did not succeeded in finding employment immediately. Initially he worked as the prefect of Archdiocesan convictus in Sarajevo. After the establishment of the Banovina of Croatia, he found employment in Zagreb and he lectured as an assistant professor at the Commerce Academy from 1939 to 1943. He organized the semi-monthly review Life for Croatia in 1942. In the last two years of the war he was a professor at the First Boys’ Classics Gymnasium in Zagreb. After the collapse of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Nikolić became involved in the public life of the Independent State of Croatia, where he dealt with issues of culture and propaganda for the Ustasha regime. He simultaneously advanced in the military hierarchy of the Ustasha movement, where he attained the reserve rank of lieutenant and later captain.

After the downfall of the Independent State of Croatia, he first left for Austria, and later went to Italy. In 1946, he jumped off of a train to avoid deportation to communist Yugoslavia by the Allies in Italy. After that. he began writing a doctorate in Slavic linguistics in Rome on the theme of Croatian modern poetry under the tutelage of Prof. Giovanni Mavere. But he fled from Italy via France to Argentina due to the permanent threat of extradition to Yugoslavia. In Argentina, he began to work as a journalist, so he edited the journal Hrvatska with Franjo Nevistić from 1947 to 1950. In the following year, together with Antun Bonifačić Nikolić initiated the Croatian Review, the core activity of which was the promotion of anticommunism. Later, it became one of the most important and influential Croatian émigré journals, in which many emigrants of different political and ideological orientations collaborated.

During his life in an emigrant, Nikolić distanced himself from Ante Pavelić and the Ustasha regime, and together with his associates Bogdan Radica and Jure Petričević, his writings were critical of the Ustasha movement. In polemics with Vjekoslav Vrančić in 1969, Nikolić clearly stressed his renunciation of Ustashism. "It may be stated that people already today will surely not accept either the Ustasha or any other totalitarian ideology and its leadership as the foundation and support of the future constitution of Croatian state" (Nikolić, Vinko. "The future cannot be built on Ustasha policies ," Croatian Review 1969. no. 1-2, 144). His political vision was an independent and democratic Croatian state, free from every ideology and historical burden. He additionally advocated for the historical reconciliation between communists and nationalists after the experiences of civil war in Croatia (1941-1945). To possess Nikolić's review was illegal, and Nikolić's other works were also forbidden. The reason was his critical stance against communism and the Yugoslav ideology. Nikolić began publishing works as part of the Library of Croatian Review, in which he edited and printed 65 books on different topics, written by Croatian émigré intellectuals.

Nikolić returned to Europe in 1966, to France, where he planned to continue publishing his review in order to exert greater influence on the situation in the homeland. The intervention of the Yugoslav embassy in Paris forced the French government to take action, and the French authorities seized and destroyed an issue of the review and expelled him from France. Nikolić addressed President De Gaulle and Culture Minister Andre Malraux with an appeal to allow his activities in their country. After travelling throughout Europe, from London, Munich, Salzburg to Zurich, he settled in Spain, where he continued his émigré and publishing work in Barcelona from June 1968 onward.

Nikolić and the circle around Hrvatska revija supported the Croatian Spring, a reform movement of the Croatian communists, and especially the Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language in 1967, which opposed the regime's forcible linguistic unitarism. His review was read by the Croatian Marxist intelligentsia in the country at the time of the Croatian Spring. Although a Catholic, Nikolić criticized the Protocol of 1966 which regulated anew the relations between the Holy See and Tito's Yugoslavia after the communist regime had unilaterally terminated them in 1952. He protested when the communist leader visited Vatican for the first time in 1971, when Pope Paul VI met Tito. He considered Vatican's concessions to Yugoslavia as a move against the Croatian national question. In 1973, he was awarded compensation by a French court due to his expulsion in 1966.

Nikolić returned home after 45 years of life in exile, after the communists lost power in the first democratic elections in Croatia in the spring of 1990. In 1991, he definitively moved to Croatia, where he lived until his death in his native city of Šibenik on 12 July 1997. He supported the new president, Franjo Tuđman, and his Croatian Democratic Union and the process of Croatia’s separation from Yugoslavia. In the last years of life Nikolić was a representative of that party in the Croatian Parliament as of 1993, the head of the Croatian Heritage Foundation (1992-1993) and the vice-president of Matica hrvatska.

Nikolić was the author and editor of several books, numerous collections of poems, essays and articles. His most important books were At the Door of the Homeland. Encounters with Croatian Emigration in two volumes in 1965 and 1966, followed by The Tragedy of Bleiburg in 1977 and Stepinac is His Name in 1978. All of these books were banned by the regime because they criticized the circumstances in Croatia and Yugoslavia under communist rule. In his émigré period, Nikolić corresponded with many members of the post-war Croatian emigrant community (Bogdan Radica, Jure Petričević, Jere Jareb, Ante Smith Pavelić, Ivan Meštrović, Mate Meštrović, Karlo Mirth, Vladko Maček, Filip Lukas, Luka Brajnović, Stjepan Buć, Jure Prpić, Tihomil Rađa, Ivo Rojnica, Stjepan Sakač, Gvido Saganić, Bruno Bušić, Ante Ciliga, Lucijan Kordić, Krunoslav Draganović, Tihomil Drezga, Vladimir Ciprin, Rajmund Kupareo, Nikola Čolak, Ante Kadić, Jakša Kušan, Zlatko Markus, Luka Fertilio, Franjo Hijacint Eterović, Marko Čović, Antun Bonifačić, Vinko Grubišić, Milan Blažeković, Hrvoje Lorković and others).

After returning to Croatia in 1991, Nikolić and his wife Štefica handed over his entire manuscript collection and literary legacy to the National and University Library in Zagreb. It consists of numerous books and newspapers printed abroad, his manuscripts, the archives of Croatian Review, his correspondence with many important people of that time. Part of his legacy (manuscripts, correspondence and the archives of Croatian Review) is held in the Manuscript and Old Book Collection.

The newspaper materials became part of the Periodical Reading Room and the books became part of the Foreign Croatica Collection. His stance on the culture of the written word and materials testify to his oppositional activities, which Nikolić confirmed by keeping these materials and storing them in Croatia’s largest library.

Željka Lovrenčić, the head of the Foreign Croatica Collection, notes that all of Nikolić's activities in the diaspora can be described as cultural opposition: “You could say that his life outside of Croatia was genuine cultural opposition. Opposition made evident by the books, words, culture – for you to show, in a particular environment that was not so friendly to Croatians. (...) What these people went through in Argentina – is just horrible. All the while they managed to preserve that spirit and culture – that was the real opposition.”

Irina Margareta Nistor (b. 26 martie 1957, Bucharest) is today known as a film critic and as the unmistakeable voice that under communism dubbed practically all the Western films that circulated (semi)clandestinely on video cassettes and were seen by millions of citizens of Romania. She graduated in French and English from the Faculty of Philology and Letters of the University of Bucharest. Before 1989, she was employed by public television, and since 1989 she has collaborated with an impressive number of television and radio stations and with various publication belonging to the print press.

Before 1989, she translated and dubbed with her own voice approximately 3,000 Western films, which were recorded on video cassette and then distributed throughout the country. In her entire professional activity, both before and since 1989, she has translated and dubbed over 5,000 films and translated over seventy books from English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

She is now convinced that the films that she translated and dubbed for video cassette circulation before 1989 constituted a “window towards the West.” As she herself puts it: “Categorically, yes. Both for me and for those who managed to watch them. For everyone they were, in fact, something of that sort. Even for the communist big shots – because they got their hands on the cassettes too. For me, this “shock of the West” was probably felt less than for other people. In our home, these matters were talked about – sympathetically. We were always anticommunist, always royalist. We talked as openly as was possible about these things. And about the more luminous reference point of our world – namely the West. I know that through these films, many of them “consumer cinema,” so to speak, I was bringing a trickle of the West into Romania. I didn’t believe – there’s no point in exaggerating now – that this would bring them down. But I wanted to see how far it would go. How far and how long they would let me. And it went quite far.”

She does not consider that her translation and dubbing of over 3,000 Western films (semi)clandestinely in communist Romania constituted some kind of noble mission. She does not claim to have been a dissident. “Perhaps I would have liked to have been conscious of something of this sort; I would probably have felt better. I was, as I was saying, convinced that the communist system would last an eternity  – that as my folks used to say, it would last as long as the Middle Ages. So, what I was doing there, translating films, was my way of cutting myself off from that system, of ignoring it as far as I could. When I went in and translated, when I entered into that film, so to speak, I no longer knew what was happening round about: that they were cutting my gas, my electricity, that I didn’t have bread, milk, butter, meat. I no longer knew that it was cold, that they weren’t giving us heating, that they had rationed all foodstuffs, that every year my father had to go with his typewriter to the Militia and declare it, in case anyone thought we were writing some manifesto or other. It was, if you like, my way of arranging a space of freedom for myself.

Regarding communism, she takes a very critical view: “To put it simply: [I considered communism] to be an error of history in which I had been born and, equally, to be endless. I had been born in communism and I was convinced that I would die in communism. Plus that I had been born at the wrong time. I did not feel that it would collapse. I thought of communism that it was stronger than it proved to be.”

At present she is one of the best-loved film critics in Romania, who has managed at the same time to have a notable international career. She comments regularly in the mass-market press in Romania on the major film festivals that take place each year. She is also frequently a member of film festival juries. For a number of years she has organised a Festival of Psychoanalysis and Film. She has been decorated with the Order of Carol I, accorded by the Royal House of Romania.

Božidar (Božo) Novak (Hvar, 18 May 1925 – Zagreb, 26 June 2013) was a Croatian journalist and current affairs writer, also active in other areas of public life. According to the biography in his book Hrvatsko novinarstvo u 20. stoljeću [Croatian journalism in 20^th century], after attending the classics gymnasium in Split and Zagreb, in 1946/1947 he graduated from the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade, majoring in journalism and diplomacy. He studied law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zagreb. He studied journalism in Salzburg (American Studies Training) and specialised during study tours in England, the USA, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the USSR and Japan.     

He began his career in journalism in May 1945 in the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija in Split. He wrote news, features, commentaries, foreign policy reports and travel pieces. He worked as the editor-in-chief of Slobodna Dalmacija, the domestic affairs editor in the Jugopress news agency and for Vjesnik, serving as editor-in-chief of that paper Vjesnik from 1955 to 1963, and as director of the Vjesnik publishing and printing company from 1963 until the end of 1971. After assuming the latter post, he initiated the creation of Vjesnik’s newspaper documentation collection for the operational needs of that newspaper company and its editorial departments. He served two terms as the president of the Croatian Association of Journalists and the Union of Yugoslav Journalists, and in period 1966-1969 he was a delegate in the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Croatia.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, during the Croatian Spring, he criticized the communist regime through his public work. This is why in period 1972-1990 he was banned from engaging in any journalistic or public activity. He wrote about this in his aforementioned book on Croatian journalism in 20^th century, and when it was published, he spoke about it in length in an interview for the newsmagazine Nacional in June 2005. In his own words, the first open confrontation with the regime came in 1962, when at the plenum of Yugoslav journalists in Pristina on 16 and 17 April of that year, on behalf of Croatian Association of Journalists, he requested the breaking up the federal unified information system, abolition of the division into federal, republic and provincial newspapers and media, rejection of the doctrine on the “press as the voice of the communist party” and Moša Pijade’s assertion on the “journalist as an general ignoramus”, as well as the request for abandonment of the party directive stipulating that Yugoslav newspapers should not engage in mutual polemics. As a particular period of crisis for Croatian journalism and the media in general, he further specified 1969, under circumstances of normalisation of relations between Yugoslavia and the USSR, harmed in the preceding year by the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. At the time, Vjesnik wrote critically about the presence of the Soviet fleet in Croatian territorial waters, ports and shipyards. Thereupon, as a condition for normalization of transnational and party relations, the Soviet communist party and government requested control of the press, especially Vjesnik, on the grounds that it was anti-communist. At a meeting with Josip Broz Tito on the Brijuni islands on 16 June 1969, which was also attended by media directors, Novak, as the president of the Union of Yugoslav Journalists, rejected Kardelj’s bill on information which stipulated stronger influence of the communist party on the media, and advocated
the further opening and liberalization of the press. That same year, he refused to print texts  in Vjesnik about the Andrija Hebrang case, which was reviewed and approved for print by Tito himself. He further said that in the spring of 1971 he refused the federal leadership’s request for removal the Vjesnik’s editor-in-chief, Milovan Baletić, because of the “Croatian spy affair”, a ploy  by which the federal intelligence agencies attempted to compromise the Croatian national democratic political leadership on charges of collaboration with Branko Jelić’s Ustasha/émigré centre in Berlin. At the end of 1971, due to the suppression of the Croatian Spring and repression against its participants, Novak was forced to retire, as he pointed out itself, with a “very extensive media slander campaign.” First he resigned from the party, and then as a director of Vjesnik. Condemning his work, the party organization in Vjesnik suggested his arrest on charges that was a “participant in the maspok [mass movement], a counter-revolutionary, a techno-manager, a rotten liberal who defies Tito and Bakarić.”

For a period of 18 years (1972-1990) in which he was banned from engaging in any journalistic or public activity, he recounted that he spent time fishing, reading books and clipping articles from newspapers. With the support of his father’s friend Grga Novak (Hvar, 2 April 1888 – Zagreb, 7 September 1978), a Croatian historian and archaeologist, and then president of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences, he researched and wrote about the history of Hvar’s fisheries in the Middle Ages. Looking back to that, dissident, time, he said he was “professionally killed and then left to live.”

After 1990 he once more began participating is public life, actively standing up for media freedom and democratic values through engagement in civic organisations: the Croatian Association of Journalists, the Civic Initiative for Freedom of Public Speech, the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, the Open Society Institute, Miko Tripalo Centre for Democracy and Law. In 2005, he received the Miko Tripalo Award for his contributions to the development of democracy and press freedom, and in 2010 the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights honoured him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

He has written and published several books and approximately fifty technical papers about the history of journalism and about issues pertaining to journalism and the protection and promotion of press freedoms.

Choreographer, director, and ethnographer Ferenc Novák was born on 27 March 1931 in Aiud, Romania (or Nagyenyed by its Hungarian name).
He did adaptations of folklore and traditional peasant culture for the stage, which at the beginning of his career was extraordinary and shocking. He was one of the imaginative creators of the Hungarian folk dance school and folklore show. He also took part in the organization of the first dance house in Budapest in 1972.
He founded the Bihari Ensemble in 1951.
He was the leader of the Honvéd Ensemble between 1964 and 1975. In 1983, he was made the Art Director of the Honvéd Ensemble. Between 1977 and 1983, he was the choreographer and director of the Dance Theatre in Amsterdam.