Bálint Modor, Ádám Modor’s son, was born on 2 July 1988 in Budapest. He completed secondary school in the Budapest University Catholic Grammar School in 2007, then graduated at the Hungarian and Aesthetics Departments of Péter Pázmány Catholic University (in 2013 and 2017 respectively). He has been publishing since 2010, mostly fiction and he has also been active as an editor and an artist.
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Lokalizacja:
- Budapest Pinty utca 22, Hungary 1121
Ádám Modor, the owner of a publishing company and a printing press and the leader of Katalizátor Iroda (Catalyst Office), was a journalist and historian. He was born on 9 November 1958 in Debrecen to a family of professionals. His father was a General Practitioner and was, in Ádám Modor’s words, “a cultural manager with a great professional calling in the best sense of the term. His main source of inspiration was the oeuvre of Dezső Szabó [a populist writer of the 1930s].” Ádám Modor attended secondary school and ELTE University in Budapest. At the latter, he studied history and cultural management (andragogy). He completed his MA-equivalent degree in 1984 after defending his thesis about movies, which examined the 1950s and the age of Stalinism. As early as his years in grammar school (he attended the Radnóti Grammar School), he showed an interest in works printed as samizdat. At this time, he met people who later became his colleagues. As a university student, he met members of the democratic opposition, and he then became an active participant in the activities which were part of the cultural resistance. In his memoires and his family stories (narrated in the interview), he identified his relationship with István Orosz, one of his teachers at the Radnóti Grammar School in 1976, as the starting point of his intellectual dissidence. (Orosz showed movies directed by Tarkovsky to his students during his Russian language classes.) This sparked Modor’s later interest in movies, and his connection to Orosz did not end even in the period of underground and samizdat publishing. He regularly read books published as samizdat while he was a university student: “it was at some point in 1979 when, for the first time, I was given a prohibited book, handed to me by László Földes, one of my university teachers, who held lectures on political economics at ELTE. It was the first issues of Magyar Füzetek. When works published as samizdat started to spread at the Faculty of Arts, I increasingly got my hands on typed books. As far as I can remember, this was how I read Darabbér by Haraszti.” After graduating, he worked for the Film Institute until 1985, and he then worked at the Rákosrendező railway station between 1986 and 1989. His notes about this period contain the following recollection: “I got a job at the Hungarian State Railway (MÁV) on 24 January 1986 as a lamp-operator in Rákosrendező. [...] At the HR office of MÁV, a somewhat corpulent women in her 40s was surprised when she learned that I had a university degree and asked me why I decided to work there. I gave her some explanation. Suddenly, her face lit up, and she asked me to give her reports from time to time on the mood among the staff: what were they talking about, and what sorts of problems did they have.
- You know, we did a psychological survey last year, but it was somewhat formal.
- I know – I replied, and I promised to come to her and snitch on the others, and then I turned and walked out of her office.
At Rákosrendező, he worked as a lamp-operator in the so-called “Aladdin-brigade” with some of his samizdat colleagues, “including an accountant with a secondary school degree, a future teacher of Hungarian literature in his last year at the university, a would-be English teacher, and, of course, me, and at the time I was doing the final stages in the programs in the departments of history and cultural management and had spent one year in the Film Institute. There was also a mason with a secondary school degree who was in fact the originator. This man, named Zoli Illés, along with his wife, Vera Fogarasi, was to be a key figure in the activities of the Katalizátor Iroda.” Thus, the Aladdin-brigade was a stage for personal relationships which evolved into the publication of samizdat. In addition to Zoltán Illés, Modor made friends with Vlagyimir Németh (Vova) here.
In 1983, Ádám Modor was first involved in samizdat publishing after a 1982 incident (the requisition of the “Rajk-boutique” and an intensive campaign of suppression against the places of distribution of samizdat printings). He took over the printing of Beszélő (with the support of István Orosz), and he started to work for the Áramlat Publishing House as a sub-editor (as Lajos Jakab suggested he do this). Gábor Demszky asked him to participate in the distribution of samizdat in his (Modor’s) flat (from 1983 onwards). In his memoirs, István Orosz offers the following recollections of their work related to samizdat in its initial stages:
“I got to know Ádám Modor as a practicing teacher, and we have kept in touch since then. Ádám organized samizdat publishing at Katalizátor Iroda, and he asked me if I had an interest in taking part in this. At first, I tried to ignore this question, but then I told him that I already worked with a stencil machine (mimeograph) [to produce Beszélő] and I needed help putting it together and procuring raw materials. So Zoli Illés and Ádám Modor also helped me get paper and ink.” He also met the associates of Katalizátor Iroda at this time, including József Gehér, Zoltán Kurdi, Gábor Rózsa, Erika Laczik, and Róza Hodosán. As one of the leaders of Katalizátor Iroda, alongside his civil work, he dealt with publishing and distribution of books between 1985 and 1995, contributing to the publication of a number of historical and social scientific works and also works of fiction. After the political transition, Katalizátor Iroda had difficulty publishing and selling, and in 1995, it closed.
After Katalizátor Iroda closed, he worked as a journalist for Fővárosi Közmű (in 1996–1999), and he also published in various other newspapers, including Holmi, Napi Magyarország, Népszabadság, Beszélő, Kalligram, Bécsi Napló, and Nemzetőr (in Munich). He was employed on a permanent basis at Magyar Nemzet (2001–2003). He was an assistant researcher at ORTT (National Radio and Television Administration) between June and September 2000. He also carried out historical research (chiefly from 1997) concerning the history of samizdat and the democratic opposition. He published three books in these years: A titok meg a nyitja (On Secrets and the Way They can be Revealed), Célkeresztben Krassó (The Target: György Krassó), and the first volume of Ellenségből ellenzék (From Enemy to Opposition). A closer look at his work on film reveals that his interest in movies can be traced to his secondary school years. He showed a strong interest in film as a university student and, later, as a researcher (e.g. István Gál, the director of Talpalatnyi föld, István Szőcs) and filmmaker. While working as a journalist, he also took part in research concerning the media (with the Magyar Gallup Intézet [Hungarian Gallup Institute]). He began working on documentaries with János Gulyás in 1997, producing films on various periods of the Kádár era and on underground groups. Movies on which they worked together include Szamizdatos évek (The Samizdat Years), a portrait of Tibor Pákh, and the documentary Katalizátorok (Catalysts). His movies emphasize the important role of the “foot soldiers” (to use Modor’s words) of samizdat production, i.e. people other than the well-known hero figures who also made major contributions.-
Lokalizacja:
- Budapest Pinty utca 22, Hungary 1121
Marijan Molnar was born in Reka near Koprivnica on November 10, 1951. He graduated with a major in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1976. For four years, he was an associate in the Master Workshops of painters Ljubo Ivančić and Nikola Reiser, and also collaborated with the artists gathered around the Podroom Gallery and Extended Media Gallery in Zagreb. He participated in about 100 group exhibitions and about 40 solo exhibitions, carried out a number of actions and performances, most notably "For the Democratization of Art," " Burning Paper on Snow," "Three Square on the Earth," "Memory on Three of Square," and "Do you like it...?"
Art historians and museum scholars emphasize that Molnar was one of the pioneers of conceptual art in Zagreb in the 1970s. Although initially relying on painting as a medium, very early he began to practice art based on the experiences of the "New Artistic Practice". Igor Loinjak states that since the beginning of his career, Molnar has shown a broad range of interests, and followed world trends and approached art from the processual point of view. He differs from other conceptual and post-conceptual colleagues by his pronounced socially based activism, which is particularly reflected in the "For the Democratization of Art" cycle, where Molnar, using the language and methods of the socialist ideology such as state symbols (the five-pointed star), pointed out the link between art and the broader social context of that time." (˝Izložbom ‘O prvom i drugom’ Marijana Molnara otvorena nova sezona u Galeriji Kazamat˝. Osijek031.com, September 26, 2016. http://www.osijek031.com/osijek.php?topic_id=64086)
He established intense cooperation with the artists gathered in the Podroom Gallery in Zagreb in the period from 1977 until 1983, where he was involved in many events and exhibitions. He was also involved in the activities of the Extended Media Gallery in Zagreb, where he staged a solo exhibition in 1981. Besides his subversive artistic work "For the Democratization of Art," he was not involved in any direct opposition to the socialist regime.
Today, Molnar continues his work through the PLEH artist collective, founded in 2007. Apart from Molnar, the group includes Kata Mijatović, Vlatko Vincek and Zoran Pavelić. PLEH wants to revitalize and actualize the meaning of Molnar's slogan "For the Democratization of Art," which it has done through exhibitions in Koprivnica in 2008, Subotica in 2009, Sarajevo in 2010 and in Ljubljana in 2014. (Jasmin Duraković. ˝Korak za demokratizaciju umjetnosti!˝ Depo Portal, June 26, 2010. http://depo.ba/clanak/10097/korak-za-demokratizaciju-umjetnosti#17)
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Lokalizacja:
- Zagreb, Croatia
Gergely Molnár is a founding member and frontman of the short-lived cultic band Spions. This was one of the bands that started the new wave in Hungary in 1977 and was a source of inspiration for an entire generation of alternative musicians. Besides music, he worked on movies, experimental theatre productions, and literature. His diverse interests naturally sprang from each other, and of course had a strong influence on one another.
Molnár first appeared in the first half of the 1970s at the artist György Galántai’s chapel exhibition venue in Balatonboglár. At this time, his ambitions were primarily literary: he was a member of various underground literary salons, writing essays and poems, and he was part of a number of anthology initiatives. As his writings became more and more theatrical, he naturally turned towards theatre: he participated in the work of the Kassák Studio, the Kovács István Studio, and started the Donauer Vedio Familie with László Najmányi and Kati Örsi, a direct prelude for Spions. Between 1975 and 77, he gave a number of lectures about movies and rock culture at the film club of the Ganz-MÁVAG House of Culture, as well as in the Kossuth Club and the Club of Young Artists (Fiatal Művészek Klubka, FMK). Among others, Lou Reed and David Bowie was a favourite subject of these lectures. The latter also served as an inspiration for short stories, essays, and even screenplays. His interest in films went even further: besides the critiques and analyzes, he made a number of video films with László Najmányi at the time. But Molnár also wrote and edited a “one-person diary journal”. The monthly journal with only a few a copies contained studies, photographs, poems and private documents of his.
In 1977, from this community, the band Spions was formed by Gergely Molnár, Péter Hegedűs, György Kurtág jr., and with the contribution of László Najmányi. This also meant the start of the Hungarian art-punk and new wave. Despite the relatively scant repertoire and the fact that they only had a total of three concerts, their impact on the Hungarian alternative music scene was enormous: they were followed a whole generation of underground bands. Molnár and Najményi were already well-known figures of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde scene, which bond was determinative for how Spions operated. They turned towards music with to hope to break out from the narrow circle of the neo-avantgarde scene and reach a bigger audience. From this point of view they were not making music with the goal of making music: what was attractive and inspiring about the genre was its ‘interdisciplinary’ nature, the possibility to connect the various branches of art. As a result, their concerts were more like performances rather than concerts: they were interwoven with elements used in experimental theatre, provocation techniques specific to avantagarde, literary experience and media awareness from their past with movies.
Their provocative, sarcastic lyrics, scandalous performances, and the general attitude of having no regards to anything was something that the cultural politics of the 1970s could not tolerate. Playing in the band Spions came at a high price: Molnár was beaten up several times, his apartment was vandalized. Finally, as many artists at the time, the members of Spions - except for Tibor Zátonyi - left the country. The transformed Spions continued to play in Paris, where they eventually released a TP (Russian Way of Life, 1979) and an EP (The Party). Shortly after they disbanded: Molnár and Najmányi went to Canada, while Hegedűs moved to the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, the legacy of Spions survived: their songs, along with other documents and texts by Molnár were collected and published in the samizdat journal Sznob International in Budapest in 1982, and their impact on Hungarian alternative music was profound.
Gergely Molnár still lives in Montreal, and refuses to speak Hungarian. “ Hungary does not exist to me anymore” - said after emigrating, and he seems to keep himself to this since then. Over the years he worked and performed in English, under the names Gregory Miller, Anton Ello, Gregor Davidow, and Helmut Spiel!. According to the latest news, today, he works on a radio show, records a video diary, dances using the name Charlotte Bonaparte, meditates, and writes a book about the history of rock. He is also a member of the Supranational Social Party, a movement developed by him and László Najmányi.
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Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
- Montreal, Montreal, Canada
- Paris, France
- Toronto, Canada
The historian János Molnár was born in Budapest in 1969. He specialized in 20th-century history, and has been a freelance researcher as well as oral historian for more than fifteen years. His main research interests are the internal affairs of post-war Hungary and the democratic opposition of the Kádár era.
Molnár received his MA degree in History from the Loránd Eötvös University of Budapest in 2003. Afterward, he started his career, while taking PhD courses from the University of Debrecen, as a research assistant for János Kornai, Professor of Economics, for two years, researching at archives for Kornai’s memoir By Force of Thought. From 2005 to 2010 he worked as a freelance researcher for the 1956 Institute Budapest and conducted interviews for its Oral History Archives (OHA). He interviewed dissident intellectuals who had signed the Czechoslovakian Charter ’77 protest in 1979, foreign journalists, and Hungarian emigres who had returned from the Soviet Union. Fourteen of his full-length, life history interviews can be assessed at OHA (transcribed over more than 5,000 thousand pages).
After the 1956 Institution was annexed by the National Széchényi Library in 2011, Molnár created the website “Memory of the 20th Century” (http://www.hsze.hu/en), publishing a series of his oral history interviews. Since February 2012, the website shares interviews, pictures, and other documents. So far, this is the only collection in Hungary offering free access online to life history interviews, with background documents in Hungarian as well as English.
In 2012, to the website he created called “Memory of the 20th Century” (http://hsze.hu/da/en), he added a digital archive that includes Gabriella Lengyel’s Collection on the history of SZETA (Hungarian dissidents’ Fund for Aiding the Poor). This website aims to process and publish smaller, unknown private collections of documents, with summaries and notes also in English.-
Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Tamás Molnár (1955–) is a graphic artist. He was a member of the Inconnu group.
In the late 1970s, he worked in Szolnok in as a librarian and organizer of cultural events. In 1978, he was one of the founding members of Inconnu. He participated in the actions of the group and in the actions, performances, and demonstrations of the democratic opposition. In 1985, he moved to Budapest because of the harassment he endured at the hands of the police, as the other members did too. He ran a private gallery named Arteria Geléria, where artistic and political events were organized.
In the 1990s, he began to become active in politics as a supporter of right-wing tendencies. He wrote articles in national-conservative journals, and he served as the deputy chairman of the far-right party Jobbik. In 2005, he published a list of agents who had reported on the members of Inconnu. In 2006, he was one of the leaders of a huge demonstration against the government in the Kossuth Square. Until roughly 2005, he actively participated in political life. He then went into retirement and organized a workshop of artists.-
Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Ion Monoran (b. 18 January 1953, Ciacova, Timiș county – d. 2 December 1993, Timișoara) was not only a representative personality for the culture circles in the Banat that were unaligned to the official line of the communist regime, but was also the demonstrator who was able to catalyse the spontaneous protest in Timișoara on 16 December 1989 and transform it into what is known as the Romanian Revolution.
A rebellious poet, an awkward figure for the official cultural canons of the communist period, Ion Monoran was “a Bohemian apparition in the paralytic landscape of committed literature, a poet with long hair, undomesticated by the Ceauşescuist theses, tolerated but rarely published, a problem-writer for the censors of the magazines [intended for young people] Forum Studențesc, Amfiteatru and Orizont. A leader of one of these magazines expressed at one point his concern regarding the sort of unaligned poetry that Ion Monoran was writing with a question that was to remain famous in Timișoara cultural circles: ‘What’s this, mate? You want to put the boot into poetry?’”(Armanca 2011, 55)
As far as the official communist cultural canons were concerned, the appreciation could not have been more just: Ion Monoran’s poetry was not only nonconformist, but also ironic and contestational towards the communist regime. Consequently, prior to 1989 Ion Monoran was very seldom published in the press, and his first volume of poems would appear only after the fall of communism, but also, unfortunately, after his own early death.
In spite of the fact that he was practically without a body of published work, Ion Monoran was one of the most well-known representatives of the cultural Bohemia of Timişoara before 1989. This cultural grouping of professional writers and non-professionals with literary aspirations constituted a form of resistance in the face of official communist propaganda. The representatives of this grouping, who numbered no more than fourteen or fifteen, had a number of meeting places: either the Pavel Dan Literary Circle, or the Cina restaurant, or the cemetery of Timișoara’s Rusu-Șirianu district. Timişoara’s cultural Bohemians also regularly met in the basement boiler-room of a four-storey apartment block, where Ion Monoran had his place of work. Obliged to find employment as an unskilled worker due to his expulsion from high school following his failed attempt to flee the country, Monoran was all his life downgraded in the social order. This did not prevent him from being recognised in the unofficial hierarchy of Timişoara’s Bohemians as a charismatic poet and member with equal rights, even a leader, of a group of writers who met at intervals. In addition to Monoran, the group was made up of: Traian Dorgoșan, Valeriu Drumeș, Ioan Crăciun, Rodion Vasilache, Nicu Stoia, Viorel Marineasa, Daniel Vighi, Gheorghe Pruncuț, Eugen Bunaru, Șerban Foarță, and Petru Ilieșu. These Timişoara Bohemians were perceived in local and national cultural circles as being unaligned to the official canons of the communist regime.
Ion Monoran already had a reputation as a rebel before he began to participate regularly in the informal meetings of the Timişoara cultural Bohemians. Basically, his option for a nonconformist career had its origin in his attempt in 1971 to cross the border illicitly. He was then in his final year of high school, and as a result of his “attempted flight” he was expelled. In the declaration that he gave to the investigators, which has been recovered by his family in the CNSAS Archive, Monoran mentioned that he wanted to leave the country in order to travel and to write poetry. For this reason, he only finished high school seven years later, by taking evening classes. In the meantime, he was employed as a worker and carried out his military service in construction, in conditions dangerous to his health, in a military unit where he worked alongside many common-law prisoners.
In the 1980s, Monoran became a well-known name in the alternative cultural world of the Banat, and especially Timişoara. He wrote a lot, although he hardly published anything. His work has a strong note of contestation of the communist regime, as would later be noted in the General Dictionary of Romanian Literature, published under the aegis of the Romanian Academy: “A component of the eighties generation, refusing any compromise, Monoran postponed his debut beyond the limits of his own life. His impulsive, abrupt, and often contradictory poetry, as well as his essentially contestational writing, maintain a permanent state of conflict, fitting the experience of a free, misunderstood mind” (Dicționarul general al literaturii române 2006, Vol. 4, 436-37).
In December 1989, Ion Monoran behaved in an extraordinary way during the first days of the Romanian Revolution. Retrospectively, in an interview for Radio Timișoara, he gave his perspective on those crucial moments for the transformation of an unorganised demonstration into an anti-regime protest: “When I got to Maria Square, there were no more than twenty-five people around Pastor Tőkés’s house. I went in among them and I said to them: ‘We’ve got to do something, but for that we need leaders, otherwise we’ll have the same fate as those in Braşov, in 1987! [...] The first thing we need to do is to stop the trams, so we can be as many as possible, and then all of us to go to the Party County Committee!’ I stopped the tram that was coming from the North Railway Station. The driver, a young man of twenty-five to thirty dressed in a denim suit, was scared and started crying and begging us to let him go. I told him to get into the car and we took down the pantograph, calling the people in the tram to join us. As if by a miracle, not one passenger protested, and they all joined us. [...] In a few minutes, 800 to 1,000 people had gathered in the square, and their number was growing at a dizzying rate. The crowd started to shout out slogans like: ‘Freedom!’, ‘We want heat!’, or ‘We want food for our children!’” Monoran’s recollection for the local radio station was replayed posthumously on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of communism in Romania (Both 2014).
In recognition of his crucial contribution to the outbreak of the Revolution of 1989, Ion Monoran was made, post-mortem, an Honoured Citizen of the city of Timişoara. A bust cast in bronze of the rebellious poet and revolutionary Monoran has been erected very close to the place where he stopped the tram in December 1989, and his name is now borne by the reading room of the Revolution Memorial in Timişoara and by a street in the city.
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Lokalizacja:
- Timișoara, Romania
Ana Monoranu (née Fechete, b. 21 October 1953, Gherla, Cluj county) bears the family name of her husband, as this was registered in official documents, not as publicly mentioned and remembered. After finishing high school in Dej, she moved to Timişoara, where she worked as an electronician. She met Ion Monoran in the late 1970s and they were married in 1983. They had two children. After her husband’s death, she organised all his remaining documents, such as manuscripts, personal objects, and his articles in the newspaper Timişoara or published posthumously, into an archive. After 1990, she was employed in the National Theatre of Timişoara. She has a degree in Social Work from the Faculty of Sociology and Psychology of West University of Timişoara.
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Lokalizacja:
- Timișoara, Romania
Mihai Moroşanu (born 22 November 1939, Drepcăuţi, currently Briceni District, Republic of Moldova) is one of the most famous Moldovan dissidents of the Soviet period, well-known for his staunch criticism of the regime and for his strong nationally oriented views. In 1949, he and his family (his mother, father, two sisters, a brother, and grandmother) were deported to Siberia, Kurgan Region, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The deportation of Moroșanu’s entire family, who were labelled as “kulaks,” was part of the second massive wave of deportations, organised by the Soviet authorities in order to break peasant resistance to the process of collectivisation. The main target of the 1949 wave of forced resettlement was the “class enemy” in the countryside, i.e. the relatively prosperous and middling peasants, identified as “kulak elements.” This traumatic experience left a lasting impression on Moroșanu. In 1953, when he was only fourteen, he was forced to get a job, because his family was facing serious material problems and his parents had become ill. On 12 March 1955, he lost his right arm in the wake of a labour accident, becoming partially disabled at the age of seventeen, which entitled him to a monthly disability pension of 17 roubles and 80 kopeks. He nonetheless attended a seven-grade school in Siberia. In 1958, his family returned to Drepcăuţi and Moroșanu resumed his education. He graduated from a local secondary school in 1961, and the same year became a student at the Faculty of Engineering and Construction of the Moldavian Polytechnic Institute in Chişinău. After completing three years of study, Moroșanu was expelled at the beginning of the fourth year for organising a wreath-laying ceremony at a monument dedicated to the medieval ruler Stephen the Great. This historical figure successfully reigned over historical Moldavia for forty-seven years and thus represents one of the most prominent personalities in Romanian national history. The event took place on 11 October 1964, as Chişinău was celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR), which had been established on 12 October 1924 in order to substantiate the creation of a Moldavian identity among the Romanian-speaking population of the Soviet Union. It was rumoured that the monument to Stephen the Great would be moved to another, less central, location. Moroșanu thus collected signatures from students who wanted to express their opposition to the plan (he managed to collect over three thousand signatures from several educational institutions in Chișinău) and money for a floral wreath with the inscription “from the youth of Moldavia,” which he laid at the statue. As a punishment, he was suspended from the institute and forced to work at a Chişinău-based reinforced-concrete plant for two years. Only after that could he resume his studies. However, he was arrested on 28 July 1966 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on 2 November 1966, on the basis of Article 71 (undermining the national and racial equality of Soviet citizens) and Article 218 part 1 (hooliganism with aggravating circumstances) of the Penal Code of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR). His arrest was due to his involvement in another incident, during which he insisted on speaking Romanian to a Russian shopkeeper in a central Chișinău shop. Thus, Moroșanu was accused of “nationalism.” The irony is that his demand was in line with Soviet legislation, since the federal constitution stipulated that the Moldavians had the right to use their language as the “national” language of the republic. However, the accusation of “nationalism” entailed serious consequences in this period. Moroșanu was amnestied in 1967, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917, but he was released only in September 1968, ten months before the end of his three-year sentence. Starting from January 1969, he was employed by a construction company in Chişinău, where he did his best to prove that he was a highly skilled specialist and thus frequently received bonuses for fulfilling the plan. Immediately after his release, on 30 September 1968, Moroșanu submitted a request to be readmitted to the Faculty of Engineering and Construction of the Polytechnic Institute. His request was denied on a technicality, but the real reason was political: as a person convicted for nationalism, he was a liability for the leadership of the MSSR. During the following year, however, Moroșanu filed a number of petitions to higher Soviet authorities, pleading his case. With the support of Construction Trust No. 13 in Chişinău, where he was working at the time, Moroşanu left for Moscow in July 1969, where he asked for an audience with the minister of higher education. As a result, the minister approved his request in August and he was readmitted as a part-time distance-learning student.
At that time, Mihai Moroşanu was well-known among Chişinău residents due to his courage in defending the Moldavians’ national rights. He did not hesitate to discuss nationally sensitive issues with the employees of the construction trust where he worked after 1968, emphasising the need for Russian-language speakers to learn Romanian. Moreover, while a student in 1963, and then again after 1968, Moroşanu openly talked about the fact that the Ismail region had historically been part of Bessarabia but had been forcibly attached by the Russians to Ukraine. For these ideas, Moroşanu was repeatedly called to the KGB headquarters, harassed, and threatened with incarceration. He avoided further convictions because he fought against the regime with the weapons that it tacitly approved of. In particular, he read carefully and knew thoroughly everything that Marx, Engels, and Lenin had written about Bessarabia, the tsarist regime in the region, and the Soviet nationalities policy. Moroșanu also attentively studied the Soviet laws that were defied in the MSSR. Regarding the issue of southern Bessarabia, he referred to a book by Artyom Lazarev, one of the most visible local dignitaries and a trusted party intellectual. The book, written in 1974, openly criticised the redrawing of the Bessarabian borders in 1940, when the northern and southern districts of this region were transferred to Ukraine, while the rest of Bessarabia was merged with the MASSR to form the new MSSR. However, the KGB and a special commission of the Institute of History of the Moldavian Academy of Sciences concluded that these ideas were dangerous and that they fomented interethnic hatred. Moroşanu’s case proves his perseverance and his constant struggle for the protection of national rights and symbols in the MSSR. His uncompromising stance earned him the respect of certain KGB officers. In the late 1980s, Moroșanu, together with a group of other descendants of former deportees, filed a lawsuit for defamation against the infamous second secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party and Moscow’s unofficial envoy, Viktor Smirnov, who had insulted the “offspring of the former kulaks” during a plenary meeting of the Central Committee on 30 May 1987. Moroșanu finally won the case in April 1990, when the Moldavian Supreme Court forced Smirnov to pay Moroșanu damages and to publicly apologise. Moroșanu also took an active part in the movement for national emancipation in the late 1980s. For example, he was one of the organisers of the famous meeting on 7 November 1989, which became the most massive anti-regime demonstration hitherto organised in the MSSR and culminated in the blocking of a column of tanks by the angry crowd. In the early 1990s, Moroșanu was a member of the Council of the Moldavian Popular Front and was directly engaged in politics. He became less visible in the public sphere in the late 1990s, but remained closely involved in public initiatives related to preserving the memory of Soviet repressive policies. He still remains a symbolic figure for his uncompromising and constant resistance to the Soviet regime.
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Lokalizacja:
- Chișinău, Moldova
Nurie Muratova, PhD, Assistant Professor at Neofit Rilski South-West University (SWU) - Blagoevgrad. With research interests in the field of archival policies, the archives of women and minorities, Nurie Muratova analyzes in detail the policies of the socialist government in Bulgaria towards Muslim women, revealing insufficiently explored aspects of the history of the so-called revival process among the Pomak population and following the development of censorship mechanisms of the communist regime. Respecting the "right to memory" of all, Nurie Muratova enriches the collection of the Balkan Society for Autobiography and Social Communication (BSASC) with scattered, forgotten and publicly unknown documents, as well as autobiographical and family oral histories, photos and other personal documents of people from different social strata with different ethnic and religious background.
N. Muratova participates in a number of regional, national and international projects (Digital Archives - Science and Information Complex, Shared Memory Places - Digital Map of Monuments - projects of the Science Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science, To Come Out of the Shadow Supporting the Social Integration of People Threatened with Marginalisation Caused by Their Nationality (2011-2013, Grundtvig Program), Politics of Memory Cultures of the Russian-Ottoman War 1877-1878: From Divergence to Dialogue 7th Marie Curie Framework Program (2012-2016, FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Marie Curie Action International Research Staff Exchange Scheme), Knowledge Exchange and Academic Cultures in Humanities: Europe and the Black Sea Region, late 18th - 21st Centuries (2017-2020, Horizon2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Rise), among others.
Nurie Muratova has made significant contributions in the creation of and digitization for the digital archives at SWU. As a member of BSASC, of the International University Seminar for Balkan Studies and Specializations and of the Multimedia Center for Computer Archives, Digital Archives and History of Local Self-Government, N. Muratova contributes significantly to the digitization of materials, actively participating in the maintenance and completion of the archive collection as well as in helping in its establishment as a scientific and educational dialogue center, which through numerous exhibitions, lectures, meetings, etc., are deepening the public debate on the recent past.
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Lokalizacja:
- Blagoevgrad, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria 2700