COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

Under several different names, the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Croatia functioned continually from 1945 to 1990. According to formal constitutional provisions, it was the central legislative and highest governing institution in Croatia. Yet, in practice, it was a channel of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Communist Party of Croatia, which wielded actual political power and held a monopoly over political decision-making.

Until 1953, the Parliament was unicameral, while from 1953 to1963, it was bicameral (Republic Council, Council of Producers), from 1963 to 1974 it consisted of five councils (Republic Council, Economic Council, Education and Culture Council, Social and Health Council, Organisational and Political Council), and from 1974 to 1990 it consisted of three councils (Council of Associated Labour, Council of Municipalities, Socio-political Council).

During the entire period of its activity, Parliament received various petitions and appeals from citizens and organisations pertaining to the exercise of their rights. Such an example is a petition from several thousand citizens of Omiš against construction of a sintered magnesia factory in that area. Parliament received the petition on 12 April 1979, and placed it ad acta ten days later, on 24 April. It was preserved among the files of the Office of the President of the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Croatia in the period 1978-1982, which were handed over to the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb on an ex officio basis by the Croatian Parliament in 2010. These documents are important to the history of the environmental movement in Croatia, containing information on environmentally motivated protests by citizens against official decisions.

The Croatian Parliament has its own record office.

The People's Youth of Croatia (PYC) was a so-called socio-political organization, and up to 1946 it bore the designation United Alliance of Anti-Fascist Youth of Croatia (UAAYC) and then after 1946 the People's Youth of Croatia (PYC). It was one of the components of the People's Youth of Yugoslavia (PYY). In 1948, the organization merged with another youth organization that worked with it, and which together with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) was one of its founders and leaders; the Alliance of the Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (ACYY). Since then, there was a single youth organization called the People's Youth of Yugoslavia. Both organizations acted under the aegis of the CPY and adhered to its program, and were at the same time members of the United People's Liberation Front (JNOF), later the People's Front (PF). The CPY used mass organizations as its intermediaries since it operated covertly until 1948, thus organizing and controlling any public manifestations of mass organizations.

The main tasks of the youth organizations at that time were: to fortify their organizations and to increase their membership, to strengthen 'the people's government', to implement government measures in building socialism and to activate the youth regarding these tasks. At that time there were several important processes in Yugoslavia in which young people were involved within youth organizations. One very important task of the organization was to assure that the ideological guidelines from the Communist Party were implemented and to monitor all oppositional activities among the youth. This was conducted through its many working bodies and was especially vital in the fields of culture, education and ideology. The PYC was a mass organization of the youth and most of the youth were its members. Still, not everybody agreed with its ideological positions but were nonetheless members of the organization because that was just easier. They, as well as the part of the youth outside of the organization, were active in opposition activities.

"The Petőfi Literary Museum was established in 1954. As the legal successor of Petőfi House, which operated as an exhibition and research centre between 1909 and 1945, the newly founded museum inherited a considerable collection.

The founding of Petőfi House in 1909 was encouraged not only by the institutionalization of the Petőfi cult, but also the realisation that at the time writers’ documents, although part of the national heritage, were not included in the collections of libraries, museums and archives. Alongside the undertaking to preserve the valuable documents launched by the Petőfi Society, the activity of Petőfi House not only included the collection of Petőfi manuscripts, books and relics available at that time, but also the purchase of the house on Bajza Street, which was owned jointly by Mór Jókai and his son-in-law, Árpád Feszty. Thus Petőfi House began keeping and conserving Jókai relics and maintaining his cult. In 1945 Petőfi House was struck by a bomb, so management of the collection was handed over to the Budapest History Museum. From the beginning of the 1950s, Petőfi House collected documents of Attila József and Endre Ady, besides those of Petőfi and Jókai, and as a consequence it outgrew its domain and the situation required the establishment of an independent Museum of Literature. In 1954 the collection moved to 7 József nádor Square, then to the Károlyi Mansion in 1957, where the museum took off with a large-scale exhibition about János Arany.

The task of the new, national museum was not only to process the inherited estates in an up-to-date manner, but also to persistently collect valuable items of contemporary Hungarian literature. Thus the Literary Museum’s scale of collecting became rather broad. It extended to literature written in Hungarian in Hungary and across the country’s borders, correspondence and collections of writers’ libraries, objects and artworks with a literary theme, as well as sound recordings. Later the collection of emigré newspapers, books and manuscripts was established and expanded. The present structure of the museum, which was divided into departments and is specialised in receiving comprehensive writers’ and literary estates, their professional processing and restoring, as well as holding exhibitions and publishing its collections, was formed in 1970. The Jókai Memorial Room, the Kassák Museum and the Ady Endre Museum became affiliated to the PLM in 1968 and 1976. The PLM was a founding member of the International Council of Literary Museums (ICOM-ICLM) and has been an active member ever since.

Right from the time of its establishment, the museum’s tasks included mentoring literary collections and exhibitions in the provinces. The PLM has become an institution of literary museology with nationwide authority, which not only assists staging exhibitions in provincial memorial houses and rooms, but also has contacts with Hungarian literary memorial sights abroad. In 2008, the Association of Hungarian Literary Memorial Houses was established on the initiative of the Petőfi Literary Museum in the spirit of professional cooperation.

Up to 1998, the PLM shared storage capacity and workshops with the Hungarian National Museum and the Budapest History Museum. Two years before moving out, the reconstruction of the listed Károlyi Mansion began (1997-2000), which served the three basic activities of the PLM – exhibitions, scientific collecting and processing, and organisation of events. To enable the collections to settle in, an underground book storeroom and ground-floor storage units were constructed for the Archive of Manuscripts and the storerooms of furniture, sculpture and paintings of the Art Department. The Henszlmann Street loft was converted and a new sound and video recording studio was built. The furniture of the Károlyi Archives in the eastern wing of the building was restored. As part of the interior renovation, suitable spaces for the reception of visitors and public relations were created. Thus a café for 80 people and a bookshop opened. By the end of the 1990s, the museum’s public relations further expanded and due to that process the Centre of Contemporary Literature (CCL) as part of the museum was formed on 1 January 1998, though its name was subsequently modified. The CCL together with the Hungarian Literary Museum were jointly named the House of Hungarian Literature.

From December 1998 the literary museum, again bearing Petőfi’s name, became a part of the Károlyi Mansion Cultural Centre after the cessation of the Centre of Contemporary Literature in 2000. In 2003 the Petőfi Literary Museum was given a new organisational structure, which was extended with the Béla Hamvas Culture Research Institute in the same year. Then the PLM was joined by the Academy of Digital Literature in 2007, the Hungarian Books and Translations Office in 2012, the Museum of Hungarian Language and the Ferenc Kazinczy Museum in 2013."

Source: official hompage

The Institute for the Philosophy of Science and Peace of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU) was founded at the initiative of Ivan Supek in Zagreb in 1965. In 1992, the Institute became the Philosophy of Science Division of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU).
The establishment of this Institute was directly tied to the Pugwash movement or the Pugwash Conference, and the word "peace" in the name of the Institute indicated this peace movement. The mission of the Institute was to contribute to the worldwide cooperation between scholars and their endeavours for total disarmament and lasting peace in the world (Juras 1966, 91-92). The Institute's mission was to become the centre for gathering Pugwash groups in Yugoslavia. The Institute was relatively small, consisting of three to five people, mostly Supek's assistants. Supek insisted that there must be at least one physicist and one biologist, and a philosopher. By the end of the 20^th century there were several distinguished scientists employed by the Institute, and among Supek's first collaborators were Jasmina Lelas, Srdjan Lelas, Miroslav Radman, Zdravko Radman, Zlatko Klanac, Bojan Marotti, Tihomir Vukelja and others (interview with Bojan Marotti).

One of the main activities of the Institute was the publication of the multidisciplinary journal Encyclopaedia moderna since 1966. Ivan Supek served as its editor-in-chief. The Institute was also a critical factor in the establishment of the Yugoslav Pugwash Society in 1967, which was also headed by Supek until 1985 (Knapp 2013, 86). However, the close connection with the Pugwash movement was lost by the beginning of the 1990s, which is evident from the fact that the word "peace" was removed from the name of the institution (Division for the Philosophy of Science). Today, the Division focuses on a multidisciplinary approach to scientific research as a general phenomenon, primarily in the natural and technical sciences, and their relation to the broader spiritual and historical context. Therefore, in 1992 the Division merged with the newly established Institute of the History and Philosophy of Science as one of its divisions. Interdisciplinary research in the fields of physics, philosophy of language and ethics is conducted in the Division today, and the ultimate goal is to contribute to the foundation of a new theory of scientific knowledge.

Phoenix was not only among the most popular rock bands in communist Romania, but also one of the most original, as it pioneered the style called ethno-rock. Established in 1961 in Timișoara as a truly multicultural band comprising members from different ethno-cultural groups, in 1962 the band took the name Phoenix and turned it into a legend of rock in communist Romania. After competing for years with the Bucharest-based band Sfinx to win contests of popularity among the public interested in alternative musical genres, Phoenix put an abrupt end to its Romanian career in 1977, when the members of the band (except for one) clandestinely left the country. The emigration not only provoked their immediate official banning, but also conferred on Phoenix a privileged status in the (semi-)clandestine world of Romanian rock: while their albums could be found only at very high prices on the black market, merely listening to their music became an act of implicit cultural opposition and the band itself an icon above any competition. 

According to Béla Kamocsa, one of the founding members, Phoenix took inspiration initially from the subculture of the younger generation on the other side of the Iron Curtain: “The entire generation of young people, intellectuals of the new wave, looked towards the West, towards the artistic world that existed there. (…) It was a time when even in our country there circulated all sorts of books and all those cinematic narratives – Blowup, Z, The Day the Fish Came Out, This Sporting Life – which had as main characters young people who were not at all obedient, but furious, protesting, quite roughly; it is from them that we claimed our roots.”  After a first beat period in the 1960s, when the band mostly sang adaptations of musical pieces from the repertories of famous Western bands, such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Phoenix tried to experiment with new styles, pushed partially by the loss of its popular soloist Moni (Florin) Bordeianu, who emigrated to the United States and thus triggered the temporary banning of the band. His farewell concert took place in December 1969, on the occasion of the first Festival of Club A, at that time a recently-founded club of Bucharest-based students of architecture, which would go on function during the entire communist period as a veritable platform for underground concerts. After a short blues period in the early 1970s, Phoenix stabilised its membership and definitively changed its musical identity by the end of 1971.  

Paradoxically enough, the members of the band, in particular the leader Nicu Covaci, were able to seize the opportunity to turn to their advantage the hostile new context announced by Ceaușescu’s Theses of July 1971, which reinforced the ideological control of the Party over culture and reoriented all cultural creations in communist Romania towards local sources of inspiration. After 1971, Phoenix created the so-called ethno-rock style by collaborating with the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore and the University of Timișoara with the purpose of discovering genuinely old traditions. Rejecting the kitsch peasant music which was heavily promoted by the official mass media, Phoenix went back to pre-Christian mythology and archaic folklore to find inspiration. Moreover, they created an original synthesis between old music related to ancestral rituals and the modern instrumentation typical of rock music.

This new style was promoted all across the country in series of very successful concerts in student clubs. Eventually, after censorship had eliminated approximately half of the pieces, Phoenix managed to record their first LP, which Electrecord, the only recording company in communist Romania, issued in 1972 under the title Cei ce ne-au dat nume (Those who gave us a name). This vinyl disc changed the status of the band, which was allowed to travel to international festivals in other communist countries and to participate in important national rock concerts. Famous to this day is the joint concert of 19 November 1973 that united the two rival bands Phoenix and Sfinx in the main concert hall of Bucharest, the Palace Hall. Those who could not find a ticket had to face the violence of the Militia, which tried to stop their desperate attempt to enter the concert hall. On this occasion, Phoenix presented some new pieces, which were performed with the help of traditional musical instruments, such as recorder, flute, pipe, and dulcimer, and were based on texts written by arguably the most gifted poets in Timișoara, Andrei Ujică and Şerban Foarță. The concert was so successful that Electrecord immediately invited them to record a new LP, which was issued in 1974 under the name Muguri de Fluier (Flute buds) and instantly became a hit.

In 1973–1975, Phoenix was rated the best band in almost all the opinion polls organised by the Romanian magazines which were popular with the fans of alternative music. The band continued to have an ambiguous position in relation to the communist authorities, in spite of apparently adapting to the official policies in the field of culture and adopting local sources of inspiration. For instance, in 1974, a major Phoenix concert took place at the site of a Dacian mountain fortress, in a highly inaccessible place, which is today a UNESCO protected site as it represents the remains of a disappeared civilisation, but was hardly a tourist attraction at that time, when no guide mentioned it. However, Ceaușescu’s regime heavily promoted the myth of origins according to which the Romanians are direct descendants of the ancient Dacians, because this proved their continuity since Antiquity on the territory of the modern state and their prior claim as inhabitants of this geographical space as compared to the ethno-cultural groups which arrived later, in particular the Hungarians, with whom Romanian historical primacy in Transylvania has been disputed since the nineteenth century. No other band organised such a concert in a place that should have been considered by the communist regime an exceptional lieu de mémoire (site of memory), given the importance conferred on the Dacians in the national historical narrative. Nevertheless, this concert was never broadcast by the Romanian TV, although it was recorded. The climax of Phoenix’s career in communist Romania occurred with the release of the 1975 double LP (the first ever in Romania), which was issued under the erroneous title Cantofabule (instead of Cantafabule). This album represented their work of artistic maturity and registered an enormous success: according to their own estimations, 500,000 copies were sold.

The more popular the band became, the more problems some of its members had with the secret police, the Securitate. Thus, the leader of the band, Nicu Covaci, decided to emigrate, and he accomplished this goal in 1976 by marrying a Dutch national. A year later, he returned with aid for the people in need after the devastating earthquake of 4 March 1977, and took advantage of this visit to help other members of the band to clandestinely cross the border, hidden in loudspeaker boxes. With difficulty, Phoenix continued an artistic career in the Federal Republic of Germany under the name Transylvania Phoenix. After 1990, the band returned to Romania, where it released new albums and gave a number of memorable concerts.