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Ivan Medek (1925-2010) was a prominent Czech music publicist, theorist and critic. He was one of the first signatories of Charter 77 and founding members of VONS - The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. In 1978 he went into exile, where he worked with Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. After returning, he worked in President Vaclav Havel's Office.

Ivan Medek was born on 13 July 1925 in Prague to the son of the legionary general and writer Rudolf Medek and his wife Eva, the daughter of the famous impressionist painter Antonín Slavíček. Ivan’s great-grandmother Slavíčková, had married Herbert Masaryk, who was a step-grandson of the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Masaryk, after the death of her first husband. And Ivan’s brother, Mikuláš Medek, was one of the most notable Czech painters of the twentieth century, Ivan Medek graduated from Grammar School and did not finish his Conservatory studies for political reasons. Immediately after February 1948, Ivan Medek was expelled from the conservatory because of his family background. After that, he was under the constant supervision of the State Security and in the mid-fifties was imprisoned for three months. He was constantly forced to change his job; on the basis of professional knowledge and advice he was hired, but for political reasons he was often fired. In 1968, he actively participated in the reforms of the Prague Spring. He worked as a music critic and music organizer for conductor Václav Talich, as a concert executive and playwright of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, journalist for Czechoslovak radio and Czechoslovak television and as an editor at Supraphon. In 1970 he was fired from the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra when he enlisted the cantatas “Jeanne d´Arc” on the first anniversary of the self-immolation of Jan Palach. Ivan Medek was one of the first signatories of Charter 77 and in 1978 he was among the 17 founding members of VONS. After signing Charter 77, he was given immediate notice to leave his job at Supraphon, where he was employed at the time. Then he worked as a medical orderly, cloakroom attendant and dishwasher. For his work with Charter 77 and VONS, he was included in the Asanace campaign to force unwanted dissidents to emigrate from the country. He was constantly pursued, repeatedly interrogated and detained by the State Security, and after a brutal assault in 1978, he finally decided to leave Czechoslovakia and settled in Vienna. He worked as a consultant at AFCR (American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees) at the Traiskirchen Refugee Camp, was a permanent collaborator of the Voice of America radio station in Vienna, and also collaborated with Radio Free Europe, BBC, Radio Vaticana and Deutschlandfunk. His Press Service provided information and documents on the situation in Czechoslovakia, independent initiatives and the persecution of opponents of the regime. He was a supporter and collaborator of CDUP (Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted) - British VONS. He was among the founders of the Czechoslovak Documentation Center of Independent Literature. He joined the Opus Bonum Catholic Organization. After returning to Prague, he gradually became an adviser to the Czech Philharmonic, adviser to the Minister of Culture, chairman of the Federal Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting, director of the internal policy department and head of the Office of the President of the Republic.

Since 1991, he was the holder of the Order of TG Masaryk for obtaining, disseminating and publishing information on the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, about the activities of the domestic opposition and persecuted citizens. In 1999, he was awarded the Merit Medal. In 2008 he received the Ferdinand Peroutka Journalist Award.

 Ivan Medek left for exile in Vienna with the intention of keeping close contact with his friends in Czechoslovakia and informing the world about what was happening in Czechoslovakia. As a way to defend himself against opposition from home, he founded the Press Service, through which he forwarded Charter 77 documents, VONS, open letters, information on persecuted Czechoslovak citizens, persecution of religious people, and other independent reports he received from Czechoslovakia. Through international radio, in particular Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, this information conveyed listeners in Czechoslovakia. Following a change in the regime, when it was no longer necessary to transport documents illegally across borders, he ceased these activities. Ivan Medek was interested in preserving the testimony of the independent cultural, political and religious activities of Czechoslovak citizens working in dissent and exile. For this reason, he decided to donate materials from his exile activity to the archive, the Czechoslovak Documentation Center, whose collections were transferred to the collections of the National Museum in 2003.

Mikuláš Medek was a Czech artist and the grandson of the impressionist painter Antonín Slavíček. After the Second World War he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and at the Academy of Applied Arts. However, during the purges after February 1948 he was forbidden from studying as he was the son of the Czechoslovak legionnaire, First Republic general and writer Rudolf Medek. In the 1950s he worked as an auxiliary labourer. He was able to become a member of the Union of Czechoslovak Artists with the liberalization of the regime in the 1960s. During this period he began to exhibit both at home and abroad, and worked on public commissions. He became a banned artist once more after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. His work was inspired by surrealism, existentialism and informalism (structural abstraction). His brother was the well-known journalist Ivan Medek (1925–2010). His wife was the photographer Emila Medková (1928–1985).

Vytautas Merkys is a well-known Lithuanian historian. He wrote several books about the socio-economic development of 19th-century Lithuania, and about the Lithuanian national movement. He graduated from Vilnius University in 1951. (Ignas Jonynas taught him.) He applied to the Lithuanian Institute of History the same year, but because of ‘political unreliability' he did not get the job. Merkys was invited to join the institute in 1953, and made his professional career there. At the end of 1987, he became the director of the institute. In 1990, he became a full member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

Merkys persuaded the relatives of Jonynas to give the historian's writings to the Manuscript Department of the Wroblewski Library in 1959. He also edited a volume of Jonynas’ writings, which was published in 1984. The volume has a few previously unpublished pieces: Jonynas’ autobiography, and his article ‘Lithuanian historiography'. Several of Jonynas’ letters from the interwar period to various non-Lithuanian historians were published, too. All the documents are from the Jonynas collection.

Jaroslav Mezník was born 31. 12. 1928 in Bratislava in the family of Moravian-Silesian State President Jaroslav Mezník st. Due to his father's post, the family moved to Uzhgorod and then to Brno, where the son Jaroslav Mezník also spent the rest of his life. After graduation in 1948, he studied history and archives at the Faculty of Arts in Brno. In 1967 he presented a habilitation theses at Charles University, and he received his title of professor in Brno twenty-five years later. He found his first job in the State Archive in Janovice, and in the period 1956-1972 he worked at the Institute of History (later Czechoslovak and World History) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. During the normalisation period, he worked as a manual labourer in a panel factory, later in a lift factory. In January 1990 he became a member of the Federal Assembly for several months, then returned to the Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Arts. In 1994-1995 he became the dean of this faculty. His scholar interest was medieval history and his major works included Praha před husitskou revolucí and Lucemburská Morava 1310–1423.  

Problems with the Communist regime had already manifested themselves during Meznik´s military service. Because of his "bourgeois origin", he served at the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. At the time of the Prague Spring, he participated in the transformation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party into a democratic left party. In January 1971, he was arrested for three years; he also spent two shorter periods between 1977 and 1989 in prison. He was one of the first signatories to Charter 77. In the period of normalisation, he continued his research and published under the names of other authors or in samizdats. Mezník also strongly influenced a debate on the character of Czechoslovak historiography within Charter 77.

Jaroslav Mezník received many awards, including the Gold Medal of Masaryk University in 1995, the Order of T. G. Masaryk in 1998 and the City of Brno Award in 2000.

Romano Meštrović earned his BA in history at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb. In 1990 he was the chairman of the Municipal Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia in the municipality of Zadar, and in this capacity he deposited the Party materials with the Historical Archives in Zadar. In independent Croatia he was a member of the Croatian Parliament representing the Social Democratic Party from 2000 to 2003. He was also chairman of the Zadar branch of the Social Democratic Party.

After retiring, he devoted himself to the study of Zadar’s history. In 2017, he published his first book, U Zadar putovi vode (Iz života srednjovjekovnoga Grada) [Roads lead to Zadar. From the life of the medieval city].

Jiří Michálek is a Czech philosopher and former pupil of Jan Patočka. In 1964, he graduated with a degree in chemistry from Charles University in Prague. In 1965, he began his doctoral studies at the Department of Philosophy within the Faculty of Science at Charles University, focusing on the philosophical problems of the natural sciences. As this department was dissolved in August 1968, Michálek could not defend his dissertation. In 1975, a special commission that investigated Michálekʼs political views was created. As a result, he was forbidden to teach and was forced to leave the University in 1977. The main reason was his long-term close relationship with Jan Patočka and other Charter 77 signatories. Michálek attended Patočkaʼs underground seminars and also participated in the rescue of Patočkaʼs documents after his death in 1977. After his dismissal from the university, Michálek worked as a labourer in a wrapping shop, and later as a specialist in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the National Health Institute. In 1984, he finished his distance study of Psychopedy at Palacký University in Olomouc. In April 1990 he was admitted to the newly created Department of Philosophy of the Natural Sciences at Charles University. In October 1994, he defended his dissertation in philosophy at Charles University. After the restoration of the Czechoslovak Philosophical Union in 1990, Jiří Michálek became a member of its presidium. He focuses on phenomenology and the thinking of Martin Heidegger after the “turnover” and the question of co-existence and philosophy of education of E. Fink.

Dragoslav Mihailović (1930) is a Serbian writer and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU). As a student, he was arrested for banned political activity during the severe break between Tito and Stalin. Commenting what happened, he said: ‘At that time I was a member of the League of Young Communists, disappointed because a lot of people I knew were arrested without reason. I said that openly and was subsequently punished.’

In other interviews, he spoke in more detail. ‘I was punished by the Offences Commission of the second district of the city of Belgrade. At the time I was eighteen years old and was in the first year of literature studies. They pronounced me an adherent of the Informbiro [Cominform] because I had defended two arrested comrades from Ćuprija. Their ‘crime’ was that they had said that after the five-year plan, heavy industry would be producing wooden combs'.

Subsequently, Mihailović was interned in several Yugoslav prisons in Ćuprija, Kragujevac and Belgrade, while he spent a total fifteen months on Goli Otok  (1951–52). At the end of the 1960s, he again found himself targeted by the Party because of his play, ‘When Pumpkins Blossomed’ (1969), which dealt critically with the legacy of Goli Otok, the largest Yugoslav labour and punishment camp (1949–1989). The play was based on the 1968 novel of the same name. Although the novel's publication did not draw much attention, the play proved controversial due to changes introduced with the aim to intensify criticism. After several performances, the play was banned through the direct intervention of Yugoslav President Tito. In the following years, Mihailović came under pressure for his literary work – he was accused of plagiarism for his book ‘Petrijin Venac’ (Petria’s wreath), similarly to Danilo Kiš –though he was not arrested. ‘Actually, I heard somewhere that Tito had said that I would not be arrested again while he was alive, so I was not afraid of prison. However, today it appears that people do not understand what it means to go through Goli Otok as a young man of nineteen, twenty. If it does not break you, you become resistant, insolent. And, if you like, courageous’, said Mihailović, talking about his need, beside his experience of Goli Otok, to continue with his literary work that was not in line with the dominant political paradigm.  For a long time, his work was banned from school reading lists.

Mihajlo Mihajlov was born in Pančevo on 26 September 1934 to a family of Russian émigrés, Nikolai and Vera (née Danilov), who settled in this small town near Belgrade in the decade after the October Revolution. His father, despite being a member of the Russian Tsarist emigration, participated in the Partisan movement under the leadership of the Tito’s communists, so that the path to the newly formed communist elite was wide open to the young Mihajlov. He graduated from the real gymnasium for boys in Sarajevo in 1953. After that, he attended the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, where he studied world literature and English for five semesters (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 1).

After a short interruption of his studies, he worked as a journalist for the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje for a time. He continued his studies in Zagreb in 1957 at the Department of Comparative Literature. In 1959, he successfully graduated from the Faculty of the Humanities in Zagreb. He then worked as a translator and writer in Zagreb at the beginning of the 1960s. In 1960, he received a scholarship from the Croatian Cultural and Research Council for Postgraduate Studies at the Slavic Institute of the Faculty of Humanities in Zagreb under the mentorship of Prof. Aleksandar Flaker with a thesis on “Russian Prose in the Period of Disintegration of Russian Realism.” From January to March 1963, he was employed as the honorary director of the Grič Gornji Grad National University in Zagreb. In 1962, he was earned his doctorate under Prof. Flaker with a dissertation on "Causes of Motivations in the Treatment of Figures in the Works of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky" (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 1).

He spent the period from 1963 to 1966 in Zadar as an assistant lecturer on Russian modern literature, where he confronted with the regime and its ideology. In 1964, he went on a study leave in the Soviet Union, after which he published two essays under the headline “Moscow Summer” in the Belgrade magazine Delo in January and February 1965. These texts were soon criticized by President Tito himself, due to the literary description of the contemporary circumstances in the Soviet Union. Namely, the fall of Nikita Khrushchev occurred just before the publication of these controversial essays, which made Mihajlov's “Moscow Summer” politically sensitive to the Yugoslav authorities, which at the time were investing intensive efforts to stabilize relations with the Soviets (Mihajlov Mihajlov Papers, box 1).

Mihajlov was incarcerated a second time as a result of his initiative in December 1965 together with a group of Zadar intellectuals to establish the first publication outside of Party control called Slobodni glas (Free Voice), which would advocate for the democratization of the socialist regime and the introduction of intellectual and political pluralism in Yugoslavia. Mihajlov advocated for multiparty democracy based on the Western model, because he had concluded that every single-party system, even as liberal as the “Yugoslav example,” was ultimately a “sub-type of Stalinism.” Mihajlov repeatedly demanded that “socialist democracy” in Yugoslavia be abolished and replaced by "democratic socialism" that would allow the political organization of other parties and the limited development of private property. In terms of political pluralism, he emphasized that only "sick societies" had political emigration, while “healthy societies” have their own political opposition (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 1).

He opposed the revolutionary transformation of society, so he therefore proposed a gradual evolutionary process to change Yugoslav socialism. Religion, above all Orthodox Christianity, was on his mind in particular, so he thought that the teaching of Christ and Paul opposed Tolstoy's pacifism, for unlike them he did not inspire him to fight against the evil, as Mihajlov characterized his own struggle against the totalitarian regime in Yugoslavia. Based on this, Mihajlov approached the idea of Christian Socialism, clearly opposing the atheistic socialism that prevailed in the countries under the dictatorship of communists throughout Eastern Europe. That was why he believed that a fundamental critique of this type of socialism had to begin with criticism of atheism (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 3).

The culmination of the efforts of Mihajlov’s Zadar group was the Declaration of the Steering Committee of the Socialist and Democratic Free Voice in August 1966. Mihajlov was first attacked by the Belgrade daily Politika, which labelled him a “religious fanatic,” “a Djilas adherent” (Đilasovac) and a Western agent after he was arrested and the establishment of his magazine was barred. In the trial in Belgrade in 1967, he was accused of calling into question the one-party system, advocating democratic socialism, establishing a Christian socialist party and trying to initiate a free non-party publication.

His initiatives were indicted as “enemy propaganda,” for which the Belgrade court sentenced him to four and a half years in prison. Later, it was reduced to three and a half years on April 19, 1967. In Mihajlov’s case, the abuse of the psychiatric profession was also involved, so that the verdict included this allegation: “the psychopathic personality was insufficiently prepared for social adaptation.” His defence attorneys at the trial, Ivo Glowatzky and Veljko Kovačević, were from Zagreb and Belgrade (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 3).

He was in prison from November 15, 1966 to March 4, 1970, naturally losing a professorship at the Faculty in Zadar. Immediately after leaving prison on May 14, 1970, he applied for a passport which was subsequently rejected by the authorities. On May 7, 1971, the authorities in Novi Sad officially refused his application for a passport, which he appealed on May 12, 1971 before the Provincial Secretariat for Internal Affairs in Novi Sad. In that period, he lived in Belgrade and wrote for the Western press, whence he received financial support (Mihajlov Mihajlov Papers, box 3).

After leaving prison, he continued his own interrupted research work for his doctoral dissertation on Dostoyevsky. Due to the regime’s repression against Croatia after 1971, Mihajlov decided to pursue his doctoral work in the somewhat “more liberal” Slovenia at the University of Ljubljana under the mentorship of Dušan Pirjevac Ahac. Since the authorities prohibited him from writing publicly for four years, Mihajlov was later sentenced to 30 days in prison in 1972 because he had published the article “The Artist as the Enemy” in The New York Times (February 1, 1971) and two letters to the Herald Tribune (October 1970 and February 1971) (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 3).

Mihajlov discussed Marx's idea of alienation with Djilas in the article “Djilas versus Marx. A Theory of Alienation” in 1972 (Djilas and Marx, Theory of Alienation), Survey 18 No. 2 (1972): 1-13. In it, Mihajlov noted that despite the fact that Djilas distanced himself from official Marxism he remained an heir of Marxist thought when he said freedom is the consequence of historical development, not its precondition and cause. Therefore, in Mihajlov’s letter from the summer of 1973, he criticized Djilas' critique of Christianity and his lack of understanding of the relationship between religion and atheism in the future epoch (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 3).

Such a view of Djilas rested on the fact that Mihajlov was not at all a Marxist thinker, but rather a Christian-inspired modern intellectual who, under neoclassical socialism and democracy, sought inspiration in the Christian philosophy of the world. Seeing himself as belonging to the Russian people and culture, in 1974 he debated the famous Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn about his Letter to the Soviet Leaders. Solzhenitsyn reasoned that the Russian alternative was not to accept the Western European model of democracy, which diverged from to Mihajlov’s view, who said it had Christian origins. On the contrary, Solzhenitsyn believed that it would result in anarchism and materialism, which were foreign to Russian traditions. In this regard, Mihajlov was very critical of Solzhenitsyn's concept of the “altruistic authoritarianism” that would be established after the fall of the Soviet communist dictatorship (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 3). In these discussions, Serbian political émigrés saw Solzhenitsyn and Mihajlov as two opposing representatives of anti-communism, with the former believing that communism could only be overthrown by national revival, while the former advocated for a process of internal democratization and liberalization of communism, seeing the menace of nationalism in a national revival (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 30).

Regarding internal Yugoslav circumstances, while in exile Mihajlov later advocated for the unconditional preservation of the integrity of the Yugoslav state, thinking that Yugoslavia as a country was a favourable solution, primarily to the Serb and Croat national question, but also to its democratization and the introduction of political and economic freedoms. In the 1970s, Mihajlov predicted that far-reaching changes in Yugoslavia would come only after Tito's death, when the inevitable de-Titoization had to proceed, as in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. Mihajlov realized that the support of Western democracies for Tito's dictatorship, which was still associated with the positive connotations of Yugoslav “liberalization” in the 1960s, would be an obstacle to such processes. By contrast, in the period after 1972 and the quashing of Croatian and Serbian “liberals,” this support became a negative feature that prevented necessary changes to the Yugoslav system. It is noteworthy that his thought on this was influenced by the main representatives of the Russian inter-war emigration, such as Nikolai Berdyaev, while he was inspired by Djilas’ model in the Yugoslavian context (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 3).

Between his releasing from prison in 1970 and his departure into exile in 1978, Mihajlov clearly pointed out in correspondence with Djilas that he had no political ambitions, but rather solely fought for the freedom of thought and expression in the intellectual and cultural spheres of life: “I have no ambition toward any kind of participation in power in the territory of Yugoslavia, although I have, of course, some demands for freedom to act in the intellectual, ideological and religious spheres” (Letter from Mihajlov to Djilas, July 1973, Novi Sad, Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, Box 3).

He published his second work, “Russian Theme,” in 1968, two years before leaving prison in 1970. After settling down in Novi Sad, he contributed to the Western and Russian émigré press (Seedtime and Russian Thought). In October 1974 he was arrested again and sentenced to seven years in prison. Mihajlov observed his trial from prison, which was an evident violation of the legal standards of civilized countries. Numerous human rights groups from the West appealed to President Tito to grant him amnesty. He spent three years and two months in the prison in Srijemska Mitrovica, from which he released on November 25, 1977, along with 218 other political prisoners. This was the result of pressure from the international public and the human rights movement, as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was being held in Belgrade at the time.

After leaving for the USA in 1978, where his mother and sister were already residing, he received the annual award of the International Human Rights League in that same year. He lectured on Russian philosophy and literature at several Western colleges until 1985. He also lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and Asia, speaking about his dissident experience and similar issues from the field of Russian cultural history at Columbia, Berkeley, Cornell, McGill and the London School of Economics. In 1981 he was a visiting professor at Yale University as an expert on Russian literature and philosophy, and he taught at the University of Virginia in the academic year 1982-1983. He was also a visiting professor at Ohio University in 1983-1984, then at Siegen University in 1984, and finally at the Glasgow School of Science in 1985. He wrote for the New York Times, New Review of Books, New Leader, Reader's Digest, and other Western journals and reviews (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 9).

During the 1980s, he played an extraordinary role in strengthening the dissident movement in Yugoslavia when, together with Milovan Djilas and Franjo Tudjman in 1980, he founded the Committee to Aid Democratic Dissidents in Yugoslavia (CADDY) under the patronage of the Democratic International in New York. As a founder of the bi-monthly CADDY bulletin, which was edited in English until 1992, he continually testified to the status of dissidents, political prisoners and human rights in Yugoslavia. Apart from the Yugoslav scene, Mihajlov also participated on Russian émigré and dissident scene, publishing essays and papers in the Russian émigré press and communicating with Soviet dissidents. In all of these public appearances, he expressed his Christian and social democratic worldviews. While the Soviet Union considered restoring Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship in 1988, in the same year Mihajlov was deprived of citizenship by the Republican Secretariat for Internal Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was accused of disseminating enemy propaganda against Yugoslavia in the West (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 3). Only two years later, the Yugoslav government restored his citizenship just before the democratic elections in Serbia in 1990.

After his university career, he worked as a commentator and analyst on intellectual and ideological issues for Radio Free Europe from 1985 to 1994. In the following year and until the end of the 1990s, he lectured in a program on the transition of former communist regimes to democracy at the Elliot School, Georgetown University. He was a sharp critic of Serbia's role in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Mihajlov hoped for the survival of the Yugoslav state and opposed separatism in the Yugoslav republics. In that sense, he condemned his colleagues, former Belgrade dissidents who supported Milošević's “anti-bureaucratic revolution” and his efforts to resolve the Yugoslav crisis by force. He lived in exile for a rather long period, until the fall of reformed communist regime of Slobodan Milošević in October 2001, when he finally returned to the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During the Milošević era, he supported the Serbian opposition and the founders of the Democratic Party (Zoran Djindjic, Vojislav Koštunica, Kosta Čavoški, Slobodan Inić, Borislav Pekić, Miodrag Perišić) during his very short visit to Yugoslavia in October and November 1990 (Mihajlo Mihajlov Papers, box 8). After the fall of Milošević’s regime in October 2000, he permanently returned to Belgrade, where he was actively engaged in public life until his death. He died in Belgrade on March 7, 2010 at the age of 76.