COURAGE

Свързване на колекции

The diary describes the everyday life of the intelligentsia of that time. It chronicles everyday events that were observed by Jasas. Much of it is not relevant to the question of cultural opposition, because of its descriptions of ordinary daily routine. But it has many interesting insights, and even allegorical expressions, that could be used to describe and understand the social, ethnic and political situation in Soviet Lithuania at that time.

Jerzy Regulski was one of the most significant creators of the Polish local political system after 1989. He participated on Rountable Talks where he chaired the local government group. In 1989 he was elected a member of the Senate, in which he continued working on the local government reform and the relations between the different levels of authority.

Materials of Jerzy Regulski, donated to the Archives of Transition, map the reflection of the democratic opposition on the state of the Polish politics and society. In his notes, memoirs, and letters, Regulski started the discussion reaching beyond party interests and ambitions, and tried to envisage the potential future of Polish democracy in statu nascendi. The heritage of Regulski remains a unique source on the history of the parliament and the local democracy.

Regulski’s materials were donated to Archives of Transition in 2009. They contain 5 meters of document (92 files and 668 scanned documents). 

John I. (Ivan) Pintar was an American citizen and entrepreneur who lived and worked in Zagreb since the mid-1930s. After World War Two, the communist regime in Yugoslavia arrested him in the autumn of 1946 and sentenced him to death in early 1947 after a show trial under charges of being an American spy. Thanks to the mediation of US authorities and the US embassy in Belgrade, his sentence was reduced to 20 years in prison with forced labour.

After four years spent in jail in Lepoglava and Srijemska Mitrovica, and after the persistent efforts of the US Department of State and US Ambassador to Belgrade George V. Allen, he was released at the end of 1950 and returned to the United States (New York). He wrote a book on the communist regime and his prison experience. He could not publish the book in Yugoslavia, nor in the United States, as officials in the Yugoslav embassy in Washington obstructed him in his efforts to do so. Certain Yugoslav diplomats even offered him money to hand over the manuscript to prevent its publication. Ljeposav Peranić, a pre-war Croatian immigrant in Argentina, provided help to Pintar and he published his book in Buenos Aires with a print run of 3,000 copies. Pintar dedicated the book to all victims of communism. He served his sentence in Lepoglava prison in 1947, when Zagreb Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac was also imprisoned there. Pintar testified about Stepinac’s imprisonment. In the conclusion of his book, Pintar said: “What I experienced in Tito's Communist State has been repeated in every country which has had the misfortune to come under Communist control” (Pintar 1954, 295). In 1995, the book was also published in Croatian.