COURAGE

Mbledhje koleksionesh

The document is a comprehensive analysis drafted by the People's Youth of Croatia (PYC) which emphasises phenomena considered to be the result of Western culture’s influence on young people. All of the youth activities that the PYC deemed to have been created under the influence of the West were also considered oppositional because they were at odds with the prevailing ideology. The paper lists and analyses the flight of young people to the West as a result of idolatry of the West; dissatisfaction with the regime or economic problems (since legal migration was largely prohibited until the early 1960s); debates about freedom and free initiative that, to the extent they proceeded, especially in Zagreb, were not desirable because they surpassed of the accepted framework; coverage of events in the West by the youth press, especially movie columns (Vie Giovanilli, Horizon, The Revue, The Film Journal), which in the opinion of the PYC was too exaggerated and idealized the Western way of life versus that under socialism; the reading of works by authors who considered the notion of freedom (Camus, Sartre) at the philosophical level; the spread of comics as a typical form of creative expression by Western cultures; the "hip" behaviour of young people (Western clothing and hairstyles, establishing “gangs“), the obsession of the youth with the Wild West and similar phenomena.

This PYC document, along with the records of other so-called socio-political organizations, was until 1995 a part of the Archives of the Institute of History of the Croatian Workers' Movement/Institute of Contemporary History. In July of that year, the archives were handed over to the Croatian State Archives (CSA), where they are kept today.

The archives are regularly used by the researchers for scholarly publications, which was the case for this report as well.

After his first attempt at sewing and displaying a Romanian flag was thwarted by his wife, on 12 June 1966, Muruziuc planned his next action more carefully, endowing it with a powerful symbolic significance. He made the flag himself, in his own shed, on 27 June 1966. He bought 2m of red cloth in the village shop on 26 June, while the blue material (1m) was acquired at the shop in the neighbouring village of Alexăndreni. Muruziuc used an old bed-sheet for the yellow portion of the flag. According to a later examination carried out by the KGB, the flag was 2m 57cm long and 78cm cm wide. Muruziuc claimed that nobody witnessed his work on the flag. Early the next day, he entered the territory of the factory, climbed the chimney, and fixed the flag on the building’s lightning rod, so that it was visible throughout the village. After Muruziuc’s arrest, the flag was confiscated by the KGB, and served as an essential piece of incriminating evidence during the trial. This was apparently the first case of the public display of a Romanian flag on the territory of the MSSR after 28 June 1940. The flag was destroyed by the KGB staff on 13 January 1967. This photo is the only remaining record of the flag made by Muruziuc.

Keston’s information about this image is somewhat limited. The original photo was taken by Friedensstimme, most probably in the year 1974, when a hand-made printing machine like this one was discovered in a house in Latvia and confiscated by the authorities. Four women, workers of the Initsiativniki Publishing House “Christian”, were arrested on October 24, 1974 for being in possession of this printing machine. According to an article published in the Russian journal Vestnik Istiny (No. 2-3, 1977), this kind of printing press could print 400 copies of the gospels during one working day. These Latvian women were Initsiativniki, a dissident wing of the Soviet Baptist community that emerged after a split in the church’s ranks in 1961. According to scholar Julian Birch, this movement was “an interesting and indeed unusual example of cross-national, or State-wide, dissent within the USSR. 

The distinctly unique group identity of the Hungarian veterans’ circle in Provence is visible in the fact that their members took an active part in both of the hottest armed conflicts of the Cold War: as teenage insurrectionists in 1956 Hungary, and a few years later as volunteers of the French Foreign Legion in the final phase of the devastating Algerian war. Due to much more powerful counter-forces, finally they lost both their fights; however, as the lucky survivors,  they managed to win the peace. Thus today they are among the few witnesses who have been given the chance to recall those troubling events that took many of their generational fellows, who died young or disappeared worldwide some 60 years ago.

A conservative estimate of these youngest recruits of the Legion, a few of them still underage at that time, is 500 among well over of 3,000 Hungarian volunteers total, who, following 1956 served in Algeria under the French tricolor and the red-green banners of the Legion. As a result of five years of archival and oral history research both in Hungary and France, more than the half of them, 269 members of the younger age group, have been identified by name and personal data. Finally, some two dozen Hungarian veterans were found in Provence and Corsica, and nine of them volunteered to share their memories with the wider public as the main characters of a feature length documentary film and a 500-page documentary book. (See Béla Nóvé’s film and book of the same title and subject, Patria nostra, published in late 2016.)

Even the first interviews and questionnaires of the veterans proved with shocking evidence how deeply and decisively their 1956 experience was etched in their memories. For various personal, biographical reasons, in the autumn of 1956 they all joined the protest demonstrations and the revolutionary unrest with great enthusiasm. Now nearing the age of 80, they still remember this time as their “baptism by fire.” The then thirteen-year-old János Spátay volunteered as a courier, passing secret messages sewed in a football from the isolated revolutionary troops across the bridges of Budapest that were blocked by Russian tanks. Fourteen-year-old Béla Huber from Sopron was the first to throw a hand grenade at the local headquarters of the ÁVH (the communist secret police); he continued to hide out in the woods along the Western border with other teenage boys for a month after the adult insurgents had all fled to Austria. Sixteen-year-old Gyula Sorbán took up arms on the first night at the siege of the Radio headquarters and for days was busy producing Molotov cocktails until he was gravely injured in the leg by a Russian tank grenade. Sándor Soós, a 17-year-old apprentice miner in Oroszlány protected the entrance of the New York Palace, a hotel and press center in downtown Budapest, with a light machine gun and only fled to the West with the last groups of insurgents one week after the second Soviet invasion.