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The founder of the Collection of Political Transition, József Marelyin Kiss, historian and sociologist, was born on the 24^th of February, 1953, in Csepel. He spent his childhood in Tököl where he completed primary school. He graduated from the secondary school in Csepel (1967–1971), worked first as a teacher in Szigethalom, and then after the years of (compulsory) military service he was admitted to the Lajos Kossuth University (KLTE) in Debrecen in 1973. He received his (MA-equivalent) degree in history and geography from the university in 1978. He worked as a teaching assistant for the Department of Scientific Socialism (within the Institute of Marxism-Leninism) at KLTE between 1978 and 1980, then lectured on medical sociology at the Institute of Marxism of the Medical University of Debrecen. He was given permission to leave this position on the condition that he attend an intensive two-year course of the Department of Sociology of Loránd Eötvös University of Budapest, which was an accredited postgraduate educational institution in the Buda Castle. This period of education and activities spiked ​his interest in the opposition and began with the revelation of his discovery of samizdat writings, his further studies in sociology, and his acquaintance with some of the distinguished members of the cultural opposition. In the case of his life career as a sociologist and contemporary historian, his cultural opposition was expressed in the topics he scrutinized, their fact-finding characteristics being contrary to the official ideology of the communist regime. Encouraged personally by István Márkus, in 1983 he joined ​the rural village sociological research project led by Márkus and István Fekete in Homokmégy, and then he took over as head of the project. The early 1980s were a remarkable phase of activity, documented in the Collection of Political Transition, resulting in the rise of oppositional attitudes. Several social scientists who were regarded as opposition personalities contributed to these village research projects. Some of the documents of the Collection are linked to the rural sociology research.

In his courses at the Medical University of Debrecen, he lectured on deviant behavior and poverty and provided research documentation by István Kemény and Zsuzsa Ferge to his students, “asking them not to pass this samizdat stuff to the police who otherwise already were well aware of them.” His career and research activities are related to “cultural opposition” in terms of his work as a sociologist and historian of contemporary Hungarian history. His research that revealed the facts of how Hungarian society functioned in reality under communism were in opposition to the prevailing socialist ideology and the official views of the ruling party.

Alexei Marinat (b. 24 May 1925, Valea Hoțului village, MASSR, currently Dolyn'ske, Odessa region, Ukraine; d. 17 May 2009, Chișinău) was a prominent Moldovan writer active in the Soviet period, best known for his personal diary critical of the Soviet regime and for his novel about life in Siberia, inspired by his experience as an inmate in a labour camp during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He also held consistent pro-Romanian views, which made him suspect in the eyes of Soviet authorities. On 27 May 1947, while a student in Chișinău, Marinat was arrested by the KGB after the discovery of his private diary, Eu și Lumea (I and the World), in which he expressed thoughts critical of the Soviet regime. He was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in a closed labour camp and was deported to Siberia. He was freed on 5 November 1955, by a decision of the Odessa Military Tribunal, and returned to Moldova. However, he was never legally rehabilitated, not even in the late Soviet period. Although his civil rights were reinstated, he was kept under the surveillance of the secret police and was considered a potentially subversive person. During his trial in 1947, he was accused of having collaborated with the “Romanian-Fascist” authorities during the Second World War. He originated from Transnistria, a territory temporarily occupied by Romanian troops in 1941–1944, which aggravated his predicament, because he had held a minor administrative post under Romanian occupation. The inquiry concerning his case was repeated three times (in 1947–48, 1955, and 1989). On each occasion, his collaboration with the Romanian administration during the Second World War was confirmed on the basis of his official position at that time. He was accused not only of persecuting his fellow villagers who were members or sympathisers of the Communist Party, but also of certain hostile acts against the villagers who belonged to the Jewish community. It is not clear to what extent he was indeed involved in the deportations of Jews, although the papers in his file hint at that possibility. This uncertainty also reflects the USSR’s ambiguous policy towards the Holocaust. After his return to Chișinău in 1955, Marinat remained critical of the regime in his literary works and public pronouncements. He was thus regarded with suspicion by the Soviet authorities, in spite of the fact that he was not directly involved in any oppositional activity after his return from Siberia. These suspicions increased after the publication of his 1966 novel Urme pe prag (Footprints on the Threshold), which drew on his earlier experience as a prisoner in Siberia and, according to Marinat’s own assessment, was barely publishable by Soviet standards. The case of Alexei Marinat is a curious example of a person who defied the rules of the regime and did not fit neatly into the antagonistic “camps” struggling for power within the local writers’ milieu. He remained an independent and somewhat marginal figure because of his refusal to exchange his relative personal autonomy for the privileges bestowed by the state on his more loyal colleagues. However, his opposition never turned into open rebellion. This ambiguity defined Marinat’s personality and career both before and after 1990.

Adrian Marino was a Romanian literary historian and critic, who succeeded in gaining a notable international visibility, despite the fact – truly unique in communist Romania – that he had never worked for a state institution. Born in Iaşi on 5 September 1921 in a middle class family, Marino, at his parents’ initiative, attended a military high school, and experience he remembered as traumatizing because of his incapacity to adapt to the principles of military life. His early intellectual formation took place at the end of the 1930s and the mid 1940s, when he attended classes at the universities of Iaşi and Bucharest. His literary debut occurred in 1939, in Jurnalul literar (The Literary Magazine), when he was still a high school student. Professor and literary critic George Călinescu noticed him as a student, and Marino became his teaching assistant at the University of Bucharest in the period 1944–1947. George Călinescu’s option to support the new communist regime for opportunistic reasons, as well as Marino’s criticism of his professor’s vision – which dominated literary history and criticism in communist Romania – led to a separation from Călinescu and the end of his activity at the University of Bucharest in 1947. In 1945, Marino became a member of the youth organization of the National Peasants’ Party (PNŢ), one of the dominant parties in the inter-war Romanian political system. In the context of the repression by the communist regime of the so-called “historical parties,” Marino, along with other young members of PNŢ, tried to continue to publish illegally the party newspaper Dreptatea (Justice), and contributed to drafting certain ideological texts for PNŢ. Because of this youthful political activity he was arrested in 1949, and spent eight years in communist political prisons (1949–1957) and six years of house arrest in the Bărăgan (1957–1963).

In 1965, when political prisoners in Romania were gradually being freed and socially reintegrated, Marino was given the right to publish, and in 1969 he was legally rehabilitated. Consequently, he resumed his editorial activity in 1965 with the volume Viaţa lui Alexandru Macedonski (The life of Alexandru Macedonski). In an attempt to make up for his years of detention, he engaged in intense cultural activity in the period 1964–1989, both in Romania and abroad, publishing in 1980 his first book in France at Gallimard Publishing House under the title L'herméneutique de Mircea Eliade. In order to preserve his intellectual freedom, Marino carried out this intense activity outside the institutional framework of the communist state. In this respect, Marino confessed in his memoirs: “I have been since my release from prison (1963) a complete freelancer, with no ‘employment record,’ not listed on any ‘payroll,’ etc.” (Manuscript, 309; Marino 2010, 255). This special situation was made possible by the high royalties paid by the Romanian and foreign publishing houses. In addition, he carried out a vast correspondence with Romanian intellectuals in Romania and abroad, for example, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, Matei Călinescu, and Mircea Carp. In recognition of his cultural activity, Marino received the Herder award in 1985.

After 1989 he asserted himself as an ideologist of the democratisation process in Romania and as a civic activist. In 1990, he founded in Cluj, together with dissident Doina Cornea, the Anti-totalitarian Democratic Front, and he was a founding member of the Association of Professional Writers of Romania, an alternative to the Writers’ Union of Romania, created during the communist regime. In 2010, five years after his death, his memoirs were published under the title Viaţa unui om singur (The life of a lonely man). The publication of these memoirs, which represent a well-structured and virulent attack against intellectual life in communist and post-communist Romania, generated heated debates in the Romanian cultural press.

The debates also covered the topic of opposition to Romanian intellectuals who collaborated with the regime, and raised the problem of Marino’s relationship with the former Securitate. These controversies were initiated by a series of articles published in one of the most important Romanian newspapers in the first half of 2010. The articles were based on information from a file of the Department of External Information (DIE), one of the Romanian secret services during the Ceauşescu period, which stated that Adrian Marino had been an informer and “influence agent” of the Securitate and subsequently of DIE in its actions concerning the Romanian immigration towards the West, in the period 1970–1980. The file in question contained no documents signed by Marino, only reports and notes of the secret service officers concerning Marino’s activity as an informer. These revelations divided Romanian public intellectuals into Marino’s accusers and his defenders. Among the former, Vladimir Tismăneanu stated his disappointment that such a very active public intellectual as Adrian Marino had collaborated in any way with the Securitate. Among the latter, Gabriel Andreescu, former dissident and civic activist, claimed that, in the absence of a signed pledge or of notes signed by Marino, Marino’s true relationship was with the Securitate cannot be evaluated with certainty (Andreescu 2012, 26-28). Marino himself admitted in his memoirs to having discussed and supplied information to certain secret police officers, without signing a pledge: “I only answered certain imperative questions. As many other political prisoners were forced to do. At least, I gave no written statements, as Corneliu Coposu and many others did. Above all, there was no official ‘pledge,’ written, signed, and dated. It was a very special relationship, specific for my category. I couldn’t refuse to answer one question or another. Only that the ‘answer’ had many possible nuances and interpretations; and, from my point of view and that of my interlocutors, it was without any real ‘political’ information, to which I had no access.” (Manuscript, 291; Marino 2010, 239). Given his notoriety, but also the nature of the documents preserved in the archives of the former Securitate, the Marino case represented one of the most significant controversies in post-communist Romania on the topic of the collaboration with the communist secret police. Beyond these debates, Marino’s memoirs remain a detailed confession and one of the most elaborated criticisms concerning the relationship between the intellectual and the authorities in communist Romania.

During the 1960s, Marković was one of the organizers of the Korčula Summer School in the 1960s, and was a member of the council of the philosophical magazine Praxis, which had a critical outlook on Yugoslav society. As a representative of this school of philosophy, he indirectly became one of the main critics of Josip Broz Tito and the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Marković published his first texts in Polja in the spring of 1964. His articles, such as “Political Alienation and Self-management” (Polja, Issue  76, October 1964) and “Dialectics of Social Direction” (Polja, Issue 74, May 1964) dealt mainly with critique and ideas of communist development of communism within Yugoslavia. He worked as a strategist and participated indemonstrations at Belgrade University in 1968. In January 1975, alongside other colleagues from the Praxis, Marković was suspended from the Faculty of Philosophy  and later became one of the most prominent dissidents of the time.