COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

Halyna Sevruk was born in 1929 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. She was a sculptor, graphic artist, ceramicist, and member of the sixtiers movement (shestydesiatnyky) of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Sevruk family moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine shortly after Halyna’s birth, a city where she spent much of her childhood. In 1945, they moved to Kyiv, where her father Silvester, had found work as an architect. Two years later, Sevruk began studying at a local art school, which she finished in 1949. Ten years later, she completed her studies at the Kyiv Art Institute, where she befriended the artist Alla Horska, a fellow sixtier. Together with Horska, Opanas Zalyvakha, Liudmila Semykina, and Halyna Zubchenko created the stained glass window at Kyiv University known as “Shevchenko. Mother” in 1964 to commemorate the centenary of the Ukrainian poet bard Taras Shevchenko’s birth. Censors destroyed the window, due to its unconventional style and use of national themes. Sevruk also created the ceramic painting that is one of the Sixtier’s Museum’s featured items, which depicts Ivan Svitlychny, Vasyl Stus and other writers as martyrs, persecuted for their words and the pursuit of truth.

Michael Shafir (born 1944) is a Romanian political scientist and journalist of Jewish origin. During the periods 1965–1967 and 1985–2005 he held various positions at Radio Free Europe and gradually asserted himself as an emblematic figure of the Romanian section of RFE. Born in Bucharest in a middle class Jewish family, Shafir emigrated legally to Israel in September 1961. Although his family was not politically persecuted, his father held strong beliefs that conflicted with the values promoted by the communist regime in Romania and thus distanced himself from the official propaganda from the early days of the new regime. Shafir confesses that his perception of the communist regime was definitely influenced by his early “anti-communist socialisation through jokes.” In this vein, he claims that his father mocked the official significance of such an event as Stalin’s death and even applied a lasting lesson to his son, who arrived home in tears because “our beloved father” had died. After dragging him to the bathroom and running the water tap, so that no-one would hear, he slapped the nine-year-old Michael and told him: “This is to remind you that your old man is still alive.” He also recalls that his family used to talk after the communist takeover about “how it was before [the Second World War],” and that “this before was idealised.”

In Israel, Shafir studied English philology, but chose political science as a second field of study. This decision marked his career, as well as his personal collection. While a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he worked for two years as analyst for the Audience and Public Opinion Research Department at Radio Free Europe (1965–1967). His activity consisted of analyzing letters received from Romania. Subsequently, he worked for the Israeli press and was employed as a junior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where in 1981 he defended his doctoral dissertation on intellectuals under the Ceaușescu regime. Shafir returned to RFE in 1985, to occupy the position of deputy director of the Audience and Public Opinion Research Department, which he held until 1988. Most of his activity consisted of evaluating the audience of RFE in Eastern Europe on the basis of questionnaires answered by individuals coming from communist countries. Between 1988 and 1991, Shafir was head of the Romanian Research Unit of RFE. While working for RFE, he also published studies and books about Eastern Europe. After the fall of communism, he moved from Munich to Prague in 1997 and continued to work for RFE until 2005. Between October 2003 and November 2004 he was also a member of the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, headed by the Romanian-born American Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Between 2006 and 2012, Shafir was professor at the Faculty of European Studies of Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

According to his own assessment, Shafir would place himself in the category of an opponent to the communist regime in Romania, albeit one who manifested his opposition from exile through his activity at RFE. In fact, the most significant part of the Michael Shafir Collection originates from the period 1988–1991, when Shafir was head of the Romanian Research Unit of RFE. In this position, he was responsible for collecting, selecting, and analysing the information on Romania on which RFE programmes were based. This broadcasting agency played at that time an instrumental role in disseminating the messages of Romanian dissidents, and such messages reached it in various ways. Shafir thus had the chance to monitor an enormous amount of materials relating to Romania at a time when one of the most important topics of RFE broadcasts was the opposition to the Ceaușescu regime, however weak that might have been. This makes his collection an invaluable assembly of documents about Romanian dissent.

As for the concept of “cultural opposition,” Michael Shafir argued: “Here we have to make a distinction between dissidence and opposition. Things became confused because opposition in the Soviet Union started gradually to be called dissidence. Both dissidence and opposition are pre-conditioned by the willingness to make one’s voice heard. I have no idea how dissidence and, even more so, opposition can speak against the regime in a whisper. This is not opposition. Opposition must be [publicly] expressed.” In this respect, Shafir’s opinion mirrors that of the most notable dissidents in the Soviet bloc. On the other hand, Shafir has expressed his discontent with the term cultural opposition, “because in the Romanian case there is much talk about ‘opposition through culture,’” as he put it. This type of opposition, actually labelled “resistance through culture” by its practitioners in Romania, was no opposition at all according to Shafir. “Although among these cultural opponents I also found very respectable people, cultural opposition was a type of opposition […] which never assumed the risk of outspoken opposition. For me, Doina Cornea and few others like her, they were the opposition. Not a cultural opposition, but a perilous opposition, which took chances, courageous and, at the same time, modest […]. This is opposition,” concludes Shafir.

Yuriy Shukhevych is a Ukrainian politician, member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, repeatedly convicted for long terms in prison during the Soviet period.

Yuriy Shukhevych was born in 1933 in the family of the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Roman Shukhevych. In 1944, Yuriy Shukhevych with his mother was deported to Siberia as a family of a Ukrainian nationalist. Later, in 1946, as a child of “the enemy of the people” he was taken away from his mother and spent his childhood in orphanage. At the age of 15, Yuriy Shukhevych was sentenced for 10 years in prison for his connections with the Ukrainian nationalist underground as he tried to get in touch with his father. In 1958, before the end of his first sentence, he was sentenced for another 10 years of labour camps for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. After his release from prison, he joined shestidesiatniki movement. In 1972 he was imprisoned again for 10 years with subsequent 5 years of exile in Siberia for his active participation in the Ukrainian liberation movement as well as for his memoirs “Rozdumy vholos”, in which he gave an account of Stalinist labour camps. He was released from his third imprisonment as a disabled person with the complete loss of eyesight. In the 1980s and the 1990s he continued his political activities and was head of the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self-Defence.

Andrei Siniavskii was born on October 8, 1925 in Moscow. His father Donat Evgeniyevych Siniavskii was a former noble turned professional revolutionary and left SR. Donat Evgeniyevych also had a talent for writing poems, plays, stories and novels. He was arrested in 1924 and again in 1950, like many others he was  pardoned and rehabilitated after Stalin's death in 1953. 

Andrei Siniavskii came of age during the Second World War and the last years of Josef Stalin’s rule. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Siniavskii was evacuated with his mother to Syzran. He was drafted into the army in 1943 at the age of 17, undergoing a year and a half of training at the Moscow Aviation School, which had also been relocated to Syzran. Siniavskii returned to Moscow when the aviation school was moved back to the capital, serving as a radio technician at an airfield outside Moscow during the last year of the war. After demobilization, Siniavskii enrolled in Moscow University to study literature during the heyday of Socialist Realism, experiencing firsthand the cultural crackdown initiated by Andrei Zhdanov in 1946.

As a student of literature at Moscow University, Siniavskii became acquainted with Hélène Peltier-Zamoyska. whose father was a French Naval attaché. Beginning in 1956, Zamoyska brought the first works written under the pseudonym Abram Tertz out of the Soviet Union and arranged for their publication abroad. De-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev's leadership had a significant impact on Siniavskii and other writers of his generation. Siniavskii, in particular, believed Soviet society could return to the creative rigor initially unleashed by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which had been stymied by the introduction of Socialist Realism in 1934. Siniavski’s On Socialist Realism criticized the very foundations of this doctrine, which attempted to apply the artistic and literary styles of 19^th Century Russian realism in order to propagate the ideology and political and social aims of the Soviet Union’s ruling party. Russian realism was inward looking, full of skepticism, doubt and irony. As Max Hayward wrote in his introduction to the transcripts of the trial of Siniavskii and Yuli Daniel from 1966, “the great realist writers—who the socialist realists of the Soviet Union were supposed to emulate—had no sense of purpose, but were engaged rather in an anguished quest for the answer to apparently unanswerable ontological questions—not to speak of the more mundane social and political ones.” As such, socialist realism was a literary vehicle entirely unsuited for the Soviet Union, a teleological polity driven by revolutionary purpose.

Siniavskii’s early works written under the pseudonym of Abram Terts—On Socialist Realism and its companion piece The Trial Begins—challenged the hegemony of Socialist Realism by exposing this "formal incoherence." Tertz repudiates the basic idea that art and literature should be handmaidens of social activism, by denying literature’s ability, and vocation, to define reality or transform it. Catherine Nepomnyashchy notes that these texts were "the writer's declaration of independence, his escape from the Soviet canon." In both texts, Siniavskii/Tertz subverts the conventions of Socialist Realism "by calling into question the existence of a single defining center and this the authority of authorial voice."

Siniavskii insisted that his quarrel with the regime was never political, but aesthetic. Nonetheless, he and his fellow artists and writers fell out of favor soon after Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster as General Secretary in 1964. He was arrested in 1965 for the dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda in 1965 and was imprisoned in the Lubianka and Lefortovo prisons. His 1966 trial highlighted the faulty premises of his conflict with the authorities. He was charged with Article 70 of the Russian Criminal Code, or “the dissemination of slanderous fabrication which defame the Soviet government and social system for the purposes if undermining or weakening Soviet power.” Throughout the trial Siniavskii maintained that it was impossible to conduct a legal investigation of an artistic text as one could not “define the meaning of an artistic work juridically and unequivocally.” Even so,  Siniavskii was sentenced to seven years of hard labor. He served part of that sentence in Potma (Mordovia) labor camps, but was released early, returning to Moscow in 1973 and emigrating shortly thereafter to Paris, France.

András Sipos is the main archivist and head of department of the Budapest City Archives (BCA). He studied history, archival studies, and modern and contemporary historical museology at the Faculty of humanities of Eötvös Loránd University. He completed his PhD in 1995. He started his career in 1988 at his current workplace as an archivist. Since 2006, he was worked as the head of the Documentation Department No. 1. His research on the turn of the century and the first half of 20^th century is of decisive importance. Thanks his efforts, an agreement was reached between the online photo collection Fortepan and BCA: the photographs received by Fortepan are sent to the BCA collection after digitization, thus ensuring the long-term survival of the material.

Václav Sisel was a Czech printer. In the 1950s, Sisel was employed as a technical chief in the Pankrác Prison print shop. It was there, in 1953, that he met convicted writers Josef Knap, František Křelina, and Jan Zahradníček. According to Zdeněk Kalista, Czech historian, poet, and former prisoner, Václav Sisel was “very decent and significantly different from the other guards at Pankrác Prison”. Sisel concealed Jan Zahradníčekʼs poetry manuscripts, written illegally in the print shop. In 1955, when Sisel was dismissed from the print shop, he smuggled Zahradníčekʼs poems out and buried them, first in his fatherʼs garden and later in the garden of his own cottage. Sisel dug them out in March 1968 and gave them to František Křelina and Josef Knap.

An important Canadian historian, political scientist, and Slavist, H. Gordon Skilling was born in Toronto on 28^th February 1912. His life and works are closely and intensely linked with the dramatic twists and turns of Czechoslovak (and Czech and Slovak) history from the late 1930s to just over a decade after the democratic revolution of late 1989.

His works included Czechoslovak events into the history of contemporary Europe and the world, and importantly helped the rest of the world to understand what was really happening in this central European country. After the Soviet-led military intervention in August 1968, Skilling was in touch with important figures in the movement for human rights and democracy in Czechoslovakia. He tirelessly informed the world about the situation there. He wrote about the consequences of the intellectual, spiritual, and moral shocks that had devastated the country after the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’, and he often raised his voice in defence of the persecuted.

Skilling made sure that the results of independent thinking and writing in Czechoslovakia were preserved. He provided the impetus for a collection of Czechoslovak samizdat at the University of Toronto Library and he himself contributed a vast number of items that he had gathered. He was important in the establishment of the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre of Independent Literature in West Germany, and was made Chairman of its Academic Council in 1986. He helped to establish and run the Jan Hus Fund in the USA and in Canada, and was Chairman of the Board of Zdena and Josef Škvorecký’s Sixty-Eight Publishers from 1981 to 1990.

From the free institutions of democratic Czechoslovakia, Skilling received well-earned recognition and appreciation in the form of commemorative medals and awards from universities and learned societies in Prague and Bratislava, an honorary doctorate from Charles University (1992), and the highest Czechoslovak decoration ─ the Order of the White Lion – directly from President Václav Havel.