Ivars Žukovskis and Lidija Doroņina-Lasmane were editors and publishers of the periodical Auseklis. Ivars Žukovskis (b. 1936) was a journalist by profession. In 1968, during a trip to Yugoslavia, he condemned the Soviet invasion of Czehoslovakia in an interview with a local newspaper, and for this 'offence' he was sentenced to five years‘ imprisonment in a labour camp in Mordovia. Soon after his return from the camp, the KGB confiscated a letter from political prisoners at the camp to the United Nations that he had brought out with him, and he was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison in 1974. In 1979, he was one of 45 Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian dissidents who signed a protest document, the Baltic Charter or the Baltic Memorandum.