COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

Meilutė Julija Lukšienė originates from a famous family that were active in Lithuanian culture. She obtained her formal education in Lithuania in the interwar period: in 1931 she graduated from the Vytautas Magnus Gymnasium in Vilnius, and in 1942 she graduated from the Humanities Faculty at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, with a degree in the history of Lithuanian literature (main speciality), with Lithuanian language criticism, French literature, and pedagogy (subsidiary subjects).
Lukšienė was employed as a teacher and as a university lecturer, and from 1951 to 1958 was head of the Department of Lithuanian Literature at Vilnius University. In 1958, she was dismissed from the Department of Lithuanian Literature, accused by Party activists and the Party Committee of anti-Marxism, ‘bourgeois approaches’ to Lithuanian literature, and the idealisation of Lithuania’s past. After she was dismissed from the university, Lukšienė continued her research work. She was involved in non-Soviet networks among the Lithuanian intelligentsia that tried to save the architectural heritage from Soviet industrial and construction projects, and to protect Lithuanian history, culture and literature in Lithuanian society against the so-called internationalism promoted by the regime.

In 1988, as an outstanding authority among Lithuanian scholars, Meilė Lukšienė was elected a member of the Initiative Group of Sąjūdis, the emerging Reform Movement of Lithuania, which was to become the most important force in Lithuania to restore independent statehood in 1990. She rallied the Lithuanian Republic Educational Reform Group, and acted as one of the most important creators of the first independent Concept of Lithuanian Education and the related educational documents.

Meilė Lukšienė was the first person in Lithuania to base the methodology of democratic education scientifically on aspects of both historical and contemporary development. Her research works are characterised by the principle of integrating humanitarian and social sciences, which continues to have an immense impact on the development of the science of educational theory.

Her research works were conducted across three areas of research, pedagogy, literature and culturology, and excelled over the prevailing investigations of those times, which concentrated on specific narrow issues in the school system and didactics. Meilė Lukšienė raised essential questions about the orientation of the Lithuanian education system, namely the ratio of nationality to universality, education in the cultural identity, the continuation of the cultural tradition and the modernisation of education, and social justice.

Meilė Lukšienė achieved a lot, because Lithuanian education had a conceptual Europe-orientated future educational model when independence was restored in 1990. It was used as a basis to create the General Concept of Education in Lithuania (1992), which delineated the directions for the development of the national education system. The essential principles for education chosen were humanism, democracy, national identity and renewal.

Andrei Lupan (b. 15 February 1912, Mihuleni, Orhei county, then in Romania – d. 24 August 1992, Chișinău) was a poet, playwright, essayist, columnist, and well-known public figure in the Moldavian SSR. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Moldavian SSR in 1961. He was a graduate of the Agricultural School in Cucuruzeni (1929) and of the Viticulture School in Chișinău (1934). In 1935 he became a student of the Faculty of Agronomy of Al. I. Cuza University of Iasi, which was based in Chișinău. He graduated from the Agricultural Institute in Chișinău in 1941, under Soviet rule. During the interwar period, he made his literary debut as a poet, writing in a style close to that of the Romanian poets Tudor Arghezi and Ion Barbu. He became a militant in the Communist movement and, later, a member of the Romanian Communist Party. During World War II, he collaborated with the Moldavian Radio Broadcasting Committee of the MSSR, evacuated to Moscow. After 1945, he served as Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Moldavian Writers' Union. (1946–1955, 1958–1961), as secretary of the Steering Committee of the Writers’ Union of the USSR (1954–1971), as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the MSSR (1963–1967), and, finally, as deputy chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the MSSR (1967–1971). His irreproachable political loyalty and militant political activity before 1940 were doubled by solid literary credentials, mostly due to his education in interwar Romania. Lupan thus became one of the most trusted collaborators of the regime. At the same time, however, he advocated the rehabilitation of the classic heritage (i.e., the inclusion of the most remarkable Romanian literary and cultural figures in the cultural “pantheon” of the Moldavian SSR and the publication of their works in the MSSR) and a return to Romanian literary standards, allying himself with the “Bessarabian” faction within the MWU. This constant ambiguity was typical of his entire career and caused a number of attacks against him in the late 1980s, mostly coming from the younger “generation of the 1960s.” His open conflict with his younger colleague, Grigore Vieru, which erupted in the late 1980s, reflected the shifting ideological context of Perestroika, as well as deep generational differences. Despite tackling similar issues concerning the language situation and the cultural heritage, the contrasting interpretation of the late 1980s, advocated by Vieru, symbolised a distancing from the regime and from the earlier legacy of the MWU, personified by Lupan. After 1945, Lupan published a number of volumes of poetry, plays, and literary criticism, which mostly followed the Party line or were tolerated by the authorities. In 1988 and 1989, despite his earlier pro-regime views, he came closer to the emerging national movement and supported the initial moderate national-cultural demands of the Popular Front. In August 1989, he delivered a speech in the Supreme Soviet of the MSSR concerning the status of the official language of the MSSR and its shift to the Latin script, supporting the language laws adopted on 31 August 1989. Lupan died in Chișinău on 24 August 1992. He was the recipient of numerous awards during the communist period (notably the USSR State Prize for Literature in 1975 and the titles of Hero of Socialist Labour and People’s Writer of the MSSR in 1982). Lupan’s ambiguous legacy was reflected in the renaming of the Library of the Moldovan Academy of Sciences in his honour in 2007.  

Nicolae Lupan (1921–2017) was a Moldavian journalist, a high-ranking official of Moldavian State Television, a prominent dissident and, after his forced emigration in 1974, an employee of Radio Free Europe. He was born on 16 March 1921 in the village of Cepeleuți, in the county of Hotin, which at that time was part of the Romanian province of Bessarabia, later annexed in 1940 by the USSR. This village is currently in the Edineț district of the Republic of Moldova. The last of ten children, he attended school in the neighbouring village of Grinăuți, in Soroca, and then graduated from a high school in Cernăuţi. He then enrolled into the School of Reserve Non-Commissioned Officers in Botoşani, reaching the rank of sergeant major in the 30^th Cavalry Regiment in Câmpulung Muscel. He initially fought against the Soviet army near Iași and then, after Romania switched sides in World War II, took part in military operations in Transylvania and Hungary. Eventually, he was removed from the front and forcibly “repatriated”. After the war, Lupan worked as a mathematics teacher in his native village. In 1961, he graduated from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Cernăuți. At the same time, he worked as a journalist in the regional newspaper Bucovina sovietică and as an editor at the regional radio station in Cernăuţi. Starting from 1958, he began collaborating with a number of journals and newspapers in Chișinău. He then moved permanently to the city, becoming an editor at the Luceafărul radio station. After the inauguration of Moldavian State Television, he moved there to become editor-in-chief at the Moldavian Radio, where he also presented the show Morning Star. He also had an intense and rich publishing activity. He was fired in 1970 for “spreading bourgeois Romanian nationalism and propagating Western culture.” More ominously, he was also accused of being a member of the “anti-Soviet” organisation National Patriotic Front. In March 1974, he was expelled with his family from the Soviet Union. He initially came to France and then settled in Belgium, where he acquired Belgian citizenship. There, in the early years, he earned his living as a factory worker, after which he continued his studies at the Free University of Brussels, receiving a degree in journalism (1978). Later, he was a teacher of Russian at a Belgian school. In 1987 he permanently moved with his family to Paris. Abroad, he engaged in systematic dissident activity, campaigning for Romania’s right to the territories occupied by the USSR. In 1975, he reorganised and became the leader of the émigré Pro Basarabia și Bucovina World Association (1975–2008), which claimed to have over 100,000 members representing Romanian exile communities from twenty-four countries around the world. Between 1974 and 1987, he collaborated with Radio Free Europe, where he had a weekly ten-minute show reporting news about the ”territory between the Prut and the Dniester.” He also wrote for some newspapers and magazines published in exile (e.g., for twenty years he had a column in the newspaper Cuvântul Românesc (Romanian Word) in Hamilton, Canada). Moreover, he founded and published two magazines, Basarabia și Bucovina and Întregirea și Reîntregirea (Unification and reunification). He also created the Nistru Publishing House, under whose aegis a series of books on the two Romanian provinces, Bessarabia and Bukovina, were published. He organised a number of conferences and public events concerning Bessarabia. He published several books, including: Plânsul Basarabiei (The weeping of Bessarabia, 1981); Pământuri românești: Schițe, studii și versuri (Romanian lands: Sketches, studies, and poems, 1984); Scrisoare fratelui meu (Letter to my brother, 1984); Imagini nistrene (Images from the Dniester, 2 volumes (1986–1990); Pământul Basarabiei (The land of Bessarabia, 1989); Însemnări de desțărat (Notes of an exile, 2001). He died on 25 January 2017, in Paris.

László Szentirmay (b. 1953) is an economist and journalist. As a former student at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences (Marx Károly Közgazdaságtudományi Egyetem, or MKKE), he actively participated in the organization of programs at the Közgáz-klub, including the political debates known collectively as Polvax, which represented an alternative forum for students vis-à-vis the Hungarian Communist Youth League (Magyar Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetség, or KISZ). Furthermore, Szentirmay was one of the editors of the club’s bulletin Klub Közlöny (Club Gazette) and a member of the rock band Neoprimitív, which was well-known for its provocative lyrics. The secret police found the activity of club members to be dangerous due to their role in the shaping of opinion and the opportunity they had to initiate conspiratorial activity with students at other universities.

Szentirmay was raised in a middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and worked as a statistician within the Budapest municipal administration. After Szentirmay’s father was fired from his job in 1945, he bought a stationery shop that was eventually nationalized in 1951. Before Szentirmay’s birth, his parents and sisters were expelled from Budapest to a small town in eastern Hungary. They later they moved to the village of Ősagárd in northern Hungary, where László was born in 1953.

At the time of Imre Nagy’s government, the expulsions from Budapest were annulled, although the families that had been forced to leave the city were not permitted to return to their original homes. Szentirmay’s family was finally permitted to move back to Budapest in 1959.

Because of these experiences, the Szentirmay family maintained a deep opposition to the communist system. László Szentirmay attended the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences between 1972 and 1976. Before beginning his university studies, he did not deal with political issues. At MKKE, he joined the left-wing circle of reform-minded students. Moreover, Szentirmay’s rebellion against the conservative family atmosphere in which he had been raised also motivated the formation and expression of his political opinions.

Szentirmay was a very active organizer of club life at the university, primarily beginning in 1976, when Gyula Jobbágy became the leader of the Közgáz-klub. As Szentirmay recalled, there were programs almost every night: concerts, films, political debates, and discos. This eventful period ended in 1981, when the political leadership of the university and the political police suppressed the activism of the students because they had come to regard it as an opposition movement.

According to Szentirmay, the Közgáz-klub was the best club at the university. A large number of students from other universities attended club programs at MKKE. Club members coalesced around Gyula Jobbágy, who was a good organizer and had an enthusiastic and impressive personality. Initially 40 to 50 members, later 100 to 150 members participated in the preparation of club programs.

Szentirmay and other members organized the so-called Polvax club in order to provide them with a venue for discussing issues in which they were interested and which the official information policy suppressed because they were regarded as taboo. It was clear for students in the club that the Kádár régime had taken an insincere stance with regard to many issues. Szentirmay in particular knew a lot about this. He worked during this time as an intern at Hungarian State Radio and thus had access to more information about Hungary, including foreign news, than his peers had.

Furthermore, Szentirmay was the member of the rock band Neoprimitív that had been established at MKKE. The band wrote comical lyrics to well-known songs. These parodies were full of provocative sexual and political connotations. Neoprimitív performed a new repertoire every year. The band was invited to clubs at other universities in Budapest and in the countryside as well. The cultural-political leadership of Hungary had information about the band. In 1980, Dezső Tóth, the deputy minister of cultural policy, used lyrics from a Neoprimitív song to illustrate the adversarial role of rock music. Tóth pointed out the relation between the cited lyrics and the Polish Solidarity movement. However, the parody had no connection to the latter movement at all, as it already had been written and performed two years earlier.

Szentirmay recalled in his interview that at Hungarian Radio his associates once made a remark about the “oppositional songs” that the Neoprimitív band sang, but that he felt that this represented no danger to him. This changed in 1981, when Gyula Jobbágy tried to organize an alternative, independent students’ organization. This was the so-called Meeting of Students from Budapest Universities and Colleges (Budapesti Egyetemisták és Főiskolások Találkozója, or BEFŐT). The political police judged this organization to be a dangerous institutionalization and unifier of the dissident student groups at the universities. The events in Poland also prompted the party to take quick and firm action against the organization. The resulting threats had an impact on the organizers. The activities surrounding Polvax were suspended for a time.

After Gyula Jobbágy was forced to emigrate and BEFŐT was suppressed, the Közgáz-klub began to decline. Szentirmay attempted to restart the political debate club in 1983 under the name Poltár. By this time, he had become more experienced and more exciting issues had emerged, but meanwhile the former group of activists and the contentious audience disappeared. According to Szentirmay, the party extinguished such activism among the young students through its chastening of the BEFŐT organization.

Szentirmay recalled that they were not afraid of the consequences. However, he was subjected to retaliation. Because of the prior Polvax debates, Szentirmay was forced to leave his job at the domestic news department of Hungarian Radio in 1978 and was transferred to the foreign news department, where he worked for 15 years.

According to Szentirmay, neither he nor Jobbágy were opposition figures and they never regarded themselves as such. They wanted to make reforms within the system, notably to KISZ, which they regarded as an autocratic and dogmatic organization. Szentirmay and Jobbágy belonged to the so-called “secondary movements” that stood between the official KISZ and the very small opposition groups. Szentirmay said during his interview with the Courage project that these groups attempted to operate “within the established frameworks, though at the same time to push the envelope.”

Szentirmay said with regard to his role that he was inspired by the “left-wing, reformist” atmosphere at the university, but he made the rational decision not to become an opposition figure. He did not participate in the actions of the democratic opposition. As a journalist, he could not sign Charter 77. At the same time, he sympathized with the opposition groups and read samizdat literature

László Lékai (né Lung) was born in Zalalövő as the first child of a religious family. His father was a potter. He changed his surname to Lékai in 1940. His person and his church leadership activities, his connection with the socialist political era, and his “small steps” policy towards the state are remembered as controversial. He pursued studies in Nagykanizsa and Veszprém. He was a novice at the Veszprém bishopric. In 1928, he began studying in Rome at the Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum. He started his priestly service in Ukk (a village in Veszprém County, Hungary) and later became a prefect at Davidicum in Veszprém. In 1944–1945, he was imprisoned in Sopronkőhida (a village in northwestern Hungary) with József Mindszenty. He was a priest in the villages of Balatonlelle, Zalaszentiván, and Badacsonytomaj. In 1972, he was ordained. His legacy is very controversial. In 1976, he was nominated bishop of Esztergom by Pope Paul VI, but with the endorsement of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. During this period, when religious life was persecuted by the communist authorities, Lékai was not in an easy situation. He had to cooperate with the political leaders, but this was difficult because any sign of cooperation damaged relationships with believers. The Állami Egyházügyi Hivatal [State Church Office] pressed the Church elite to cooperate, which was, in fact, in accordance with the policy of the Vatican.

Lékai followed a “small steps” policy, and he supported Christian publishing, theological education, and the construction of churches. He also recognized the close relationship between elite religion and folk religion, and he supported research endeavors on religious folklore. He also supported Zsuzsanna Erdélyi in her efforts to create a collection of religious objects.

Ödön Lénárd (1911–2003) was a Piarist monk and church historian. He was born in 1911 in Budapest. He joined the Piarist Order in 1926, and he made a simple solemn (1929) and a ceremonial solemn (1933). He studied theology at the university in Budapest (1931–1936), and he obtained a degree as a teacher of history and Latin. After hacing completed his studies, he was ordained as a priest by József Grősz, Archbishop of Kalocsa, on 14 June 1936. He taught at the Piarist Grammar School in Kecskemét, and in 1938, he became a teacher at the Piarist Grammar School in Szeged, where he became vice-director in 1939.