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Dragoş Petrescu (b. 21 May 1963) is currently Professor of Comparative Politics at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Bucharest. He teaches courses relating to comparative politics, security studies, post-1917 European political and social history, and comparative analysis of communist and post-communist regimes. He graduated from the Faculty of Energetics, Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest (1987) and from the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest (1997). He has an MA in Comparative History (1998) from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, and a PhD in Comparative History (2003) from the same university. During the academic year 2002/2003 he was a Teacher Fellow in Romanian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL). Between July 2003 and March 2006, he was the Director of the Romanian Institute for Recent History (IRIR). From March 2006 to January 2010, he was a member of the Collegium of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) in Bucharest, and between January 2010 and March 2018 he was the President of the same Collegium. In his capacity as President of the CNSAS College, he initiated two important institutional projects: the establishment of the Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu Oral History Centre and the publication of digital resources for research freely accessible on the official website, of which the most significant are “Normative acts concerning the functioning of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1948–1989” and ”Sources for the history of the PCdR/PMR/PCR.” He was also a member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania – CPADCR (2006). His areas of expertise and research interests include: memory of the communist regimes in East-Central Europe; transitional justice in post-1989 Europe; and ethnic conflict and international terrorism. He has authored numerous articles on the communist regime in Romania, the 1989 regime changes in ECE, and transitional justice and the institutionalisation of memory in post-communist Europe, published in specialised international journals and collective volumes. He is the author of Explaining the Romanian Revolution of 1989: Culture, Structure, and Contingency (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2010) and Entangled Revolutions: The Breakdown of the Communist regimes in East-Central Europe (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2014), and co-editor of Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest: Regio Books, 2001).

Dragoş Petrescu’s profound interest in history and the communist past is directly linked to his personal experiences in late communist Romania. As for his attitude towards the regime, he remembers: “I was born in a family which suffered under communism. Both my grandfathers were political prisoners, but until 1989 nobody actually talked about this in our family. Of course, I went through the process of indoctrination in grammar school, and I was very sad when I was not chosen to join the ranks of the Pioneer Organisation with the first group of pupils in my class, but only with the second one after some time. Then I became a member of the Communist Youth Union, but only because everybody was automatically included in the organisation once they reached the right age – you were just given the membership card. However, I must say that I refused to join the ranks of the Romanian Communist Party: that was a decision I made consciously and it was my very modest gesture of defiance to the regime. Looking back, I must add that the terrible earthquake of 4 March 1977 was also a watershed regarding my perception of the communist regime in Romania. It just happened that I had been left alone at home by my parents – we lived in the town of Piteşti – and I was listening to Radio Free Europe waiting for the musical program when the earthquake happened. The terrible experience of the earthquake remained forever linked in my mind with the critical stances of the Romanian desk of RFE towards the Ceauşescu regime. One should also note that for a period after the earthquake, some two or three weeks I believe, listening to RFE was somehow tolerated, you could feel that people did not hide anymore the fact that they were listening to that radio station. Nowadays, we would say that it was a period of political socialisation in which many from my generation developed anti-regime attitudes.”

György Petri (1943–2000) was a poet, translator, and founding member of the Foundation for Aiding the Poor (SZETA) and Beszélő, the prominent Hungarian samizdat journal.

He was a lone child and had a difficult childhood. His father, a traveling agent, died quite early; his mother following WWII worked as an accountant. As a young boy he was a regular churchgoer and brought up in the traditional Catholic spirit. After secondary school, from 1966 he started his university studies at the ELTE Budapest Faculty of Philosophy, studying Hungarian language and literature. His first book of poems published in 1971, Magyarázatok M. számára (Explanations for M.), was a fairly successful one. Three years later he managed to publish another success, with the title Körülírt zuhanás (Euphemisms on a Fall). But then from 1975 to 1988 he became a banned author for a long time in Hungary, and thus he managed to publish his writings only in samizdat or tamizdat papers in the West. His first samizdat book of poetry entitled Örökhétfő (Everlasting Mondays) was published in 1981; its popular masterpieces are still quoted as a memento of an age (the late Kádár era) and an attitude (revolt and desperate desire for liberty). He lived an uttermost self-destructive lifestyle, with the passion of love, alcohol, straightforwardness, and an intransigent moral resistance, and left behind a uniquely strong and sarcastic political poetry.

Olivera Petrović (1952-2012) was a Serbian journalist and newspaper editor. She studied journalism at the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade. She worked for the magazines Zdravo, Intervju, Ana and Bazar. Among other things, she wrote feuilletons about censorship practices in the former Yugoslavia in the magazine Intervju.   

Miloslav Petrusek was a Czech sociologist. He graduated in philosophy and history from the Faculty of Arts at today’s Masaryk University in Brno. In the first half of the 1960s he taught philosophy and formal logic at the Educational Institute in Zlín and published his first writings on sociology. From 1964 to 1967, he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Socio-Political Sciences at Charles University, where he examined the social stratification of Czechoslovak society. From 1967-1979 he worked as a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts, and in the 1980s he worked as an assistant librarian in the Library Centre of the same faculty. During this period he was involved in the development of sociology in the so-called grey zone – for example, he worked with the Brno samizdat group Prameny in the preparation and publication of translations of social-science literature. From 1987, he and Josef Alan published the samizdat journal “Sociological Horizon”. From 1988-1990, he was a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. After 1990, he worked as a university lecturer (he was made a professor in 1992), the dean of Charles University’s Faculty of Social Sciences (1992–1997) and vice-chancellor of Charles University (1997–2000). In 2004, he co-founded the Václav Havel Library. He was one of the most important figures in postwar Czech sociology.

Art historian, curator, head of department at the Contemporary Collection of the Hungarian National Gallery. Head of Art Management department of IBS, Budapest.

He graduated as an elementary school teacher in 1987 from the Budapest Teacher High School. He studied at the art history department of ELTE, Budapest, and received his degree in 1993. Between 1998 and 1999, he studied art management in Kitakyushu, Japan. In 2001, he earned a PhD from ELTE (his thesis: “Art historical questions regarding traditionally oriented painting from the Meiji age”).