COURAGE

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Inaugurated on 5 March 1969, Club A (for “Architecture”) was the first student club in Bucharest and remains to this day the most famous club of this kind as a result of the extraordinary impact that it had in the course of two decades on the development of the alternative culture of the younger generation. “Club A was the only student club from 1969 to 1975. Later others appeared, Mathematics, Letters, but they never approached the fame of Club A. It was a very closed structure; a club with an almost private status,” recalls Mirel Leventer. Emil Barbu “Mac” Popescu, who had the idea of founding it after a trip to Poland, characterises the club as follows: “Club A has a mainly musical resonance, but also a professional one! For those outside the trade, it was exclusively a matter of pop, rock, and folk! But we, in Architecture, were less indoctrinated and less inclined to compromise…” Like Mirel Leventer, he emphasises the exclusivism of the club: “Not everyone could go in! Just founder members, ordinary members, and only then other students who each came accompanied by a club member.” In fact the Architecture students founded the club to a large extend by their own efforts: they launched a public appeal and raised the sum of 35,000 lei, half the price of a Dacia car at the time; this was supplemented with money from the Grigore Preoteasa Students’ House of Culture, and they acquired a basement in the historic centre of Bucharest. “In the first year, money had been collected from the students – I missed this because I was still at high school – and [if you contributed] you were a founder member. Well, being a founder member was a great privilege – you had free access. The rest paid – the entrance fee was 2 lei,” recalls Mirel Leventer. The Architecture students also renovated the premises on a voluntary basis, and thanks to their professional expertise in arranging spaces, they made it look very unusual for the Romania of those years, a truly alternative space. Alexandru Andrieş, one of the Architecture students, who launched his career as a composer and performer of jazz, folk, and rock music at Club A, recalls his first encounter with this alternative space: “I entered Club A for the first time before starting classes at Architecture. I was impressed by the way the student architects had arranged it, from the posters on the walls to the wooden furniture and the tables with wheatgrass in the middle. I can’t remember what concert it was, who played, or what happened then in Club A – just the way this space looked, a different world compared with what I had seen previously. Then the special evenings of jazz, rock, and folk music and the theatre evenings started. Even the evenings of discussions on political themes were different from what was officially posted everywhere. It was clear that to be an Architecture student was the big prize!”

Regarding the way in which the club was organised and administered, the music critic Florin Silviu Ursulescu, another figure whose career was linked to Club A, recalls: “The activity of the club was organised by students: the bar, the wardrobe, cleaning, electricity, supplies, the door. Following the elitist British system, the members had membership booklets, and if you didn’t pay your subscription you couldn’t get in any more, and a member could only invite one friend! There was no getting past the Cerberus-students at the door, which was why Securitate or Militiamen couldn’t enter in disguise!” In fact a number of those who passed through Club A tell how this club was basically protected from the intrusion of the Militia and the Securitate. The folk musician Doru Stănculescu recalls an episode of this sort: “It happened, once, that a long-haired colleague with a beard and flared jeans ran in! It was the style most hunted by the Militia. After him came the local police, who froze when they saw more of the same and on one side of the stage a sign saying ‘No Stopping.’ Călin Irimescu, the head of the club at the time, came over and asked for their authorisation to enter. They left accompanied by some guys from the Faculty rugby team. They never came back!” Stories of this kind suggest that the club was allowed to function through the complicity of the communist authorities at a high level, precisely in order to permit an island of freedom and non-conformism that could serve as an escape valve for the younger generation’s potential to revolt. The fact that the Club A Festival was banned in 1971, just when its impact suddenly grew with the shift of its activities from the Students’ House of Culture to the much more spacious Palace Hall, shows that the club was tolerated only as long as it had an exclusivist constitution, based on obtaining membership status and the accompanying booklet after being accepted as an Architecture student.

All the same, Club A remained truly exceptional also because it became the place where a parallel hierarchy of values was created – the hierarchy of the non-conformists. An invitation to play at this club was the supreme professional recognition, much more important that taking part in any other concert in alternative or semi-alternative spaces. “People came who were banned everywhere else. There was also the cinematheque – with a lot of films from the West. There was a jazz evening; at a certain point it was the only jazz club functioning in Romania. When you went down the steps of the club and went in, it was as if you had crossed a border – because in fact you had entered the West,” says Mirel Leventer about the atmosphere in this club before 1989. Club A still functions, but it has a different status from its original one. The premises were restored to their former owners, but the club was saved by a former student who bought them. The club was thus privatised, and its membership no longer consists of students, but the owner maintains the non-conformist spirit that animated it when it was founded almost half a century ago. In 2012, Doru Ionescu, a well-known broadcaster of rock and folk music, dedicated a monographic study to the club, Club A – 42 de ani: Muzica tinereții tale (Club A – 42 years: The music of your youth), a small encyclopedia of the artists and groups whose careers probably would not have been possible without the uninterrupted existence over two decades of this alternative musical space.

Clubul Regilor Liberi (The Club of the Free Kings) was a group of fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds created in Brăila in July 1971. Silviu Puiu Apostolescu was the initiator of this group, which included thirteen other members. Some members, among them Marinică Odagiu, Constantin Vintilă, Georgel Odagiu, Alexandru Cuza, and Eugen Mircea, were close friends of Apostolescu. The club was created with the purpose of hanging out together and listening to the musical broadcasts of Radio Free Europe, especially to Cornel Chiriac’s programme Metronom. The members defined their club as hippy and imitated the hippy subculture in terms of their outfit and opposition to mainstream society and the political regime. Consequently, the initiator of the group, Puiu Apostolescu, created for each member a wooden badge with the name of the group and their English nickname. Besides, all agreed to wear a yellow T-shirt and an insignia with the name of the group and a flower. The cultural opposition of The Free Kings was inspired by the musical programmes, especially Metronom, which the Romanian department of Radio Free Europe (RFE) broadcast. Through listening to foreign music broadcast by a radio station officially banned in Romania, they gradually developed a critical stance towards domestic politics. Accordingly, they began to comment negatively on the economic, political, and cultural-educative problems in communist Romania, to highlight the better living conditions in Western countries, and to praise the freedom and the cultural liberty enjoyed by their peers beyond the Iron Curtain. Their cultural opposition turned into a public act with the letter sent to Cornel Chiriac at RFE. Although it was written by Puiu Apostolescu, alias O’Brien McHarisson, two other members, Marinică Odagiu and Georgel Odagiu, signed it using their English nicknames, “Ghary O’Hara” and “Kenedy O’Hara” (sic!), in order to avoid detection by the Securitate. The letter expressed the discontent of the signatories about the measures taken by the party leadership in July 1971 in the cultural realm. It was sent using the Romanian postal service and thus it was confiscated by the Securitate, who opened a file of informative surveillance against the name of Puiu Apostolescu. The Securitate devised a plan of measures of informative surveillance aimed at collecting as much information as possible about the activity of Puiu Apostolescu and his close friend, Marinică Odagiu. To this end, it used various means, such as recruitment of sources, interception of correspondence, stakeout, monitoring of their personal relations, and the interrogation of those directly involved in the activity of the Club of the Free Kings. This was done in order to get a detailed picture of the group, its members, and its activity. After the Securitate finished its investigation of The Club of the Free Kings in January 1972, it decided to dismantle the group. Thus, in January 1972, most of The Free Kings, including Puiu Apostolescu, were excluded from the local communist youth organisation after their behaviour was incriminated in a public debate involving their colleagues and teachers. Others received warnings from the Securitate (ACNSAS, I 3032 vol. 1).

The theatre company Coccolemocco was founded by the pupils of II e class of the 5^th Gymnasium in Zagreb under the leadership of Branko Brezovec in December, 1971. when they premiered Bertolt Brecht's piece He Said Yes / He Said No. Another Brecht's piece The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent was performed in 1973, and two of Brecht's works, The Exception and the Rule and The Bible in 1974. As of autumn 1976, the group operated under the auspices of the Society of Amateurs in Culture and Arts Vinko Jeđut, as its theatre section. This was also the period when they performed the most significant performances:  One Day in the Life of Ignac Golob, premiered in 1977, dealt with the mythology of the "little man" employing three-meter high puppets and the mega-recital, You Don't Renounce What You Haven't Got! which was performed in 1979. In it more than a hundred performers, members of Vinko Jeđut society, took part divided into a folklore ensemble, choirs and orchestras, using the form of a recital to ironically comment on popular and omnipresent socialist rallies and parades of the time.

In the 1980s Coccolemocco, especially with the performance Ormitha Macarounada and Several Cooks, inaugurated so called patent dramaturgy (combining the incompatible, arbitrariness of meaning, "production of production"). Coccolemocco thus left a pragmatic curtain behind, as well as its engagement in the politically non-conjunctural issues of socialism, in order to redirect its endeavours, echoing the "future of the language”, toward non-ideological theatre and the then opacity of the iconoclasm.

Coccolemocco had organized the Young People’s Theatre Days in Zagreb since 1974, and after its termination in 1977, the festival continued as a part of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival under the name Young People’s Theatre Days of Dubrovnik from 1980 to 1982. After Dubrovnik, there was a festival break until 1987, when Eurokaz was launched. In this context, it is important to emphasize the continuity of the festivals of research theatre in Croatia, to which the International Festival of Student Theatre (IFSK) of the 1960s can be added.

Comenius Museum in Přerov was established by the gradual merging of museum institutions in Přerov. The Comenius Museum was founded in 1888 at the initiative of the director of František Slaměník's bourgeois schools. It is the oldest of its kind in the world. The museum was managed by the Central Union of Teachers' Unions in Moravia and Silesia.

After a successful exhibition in 1902 the City Museum, which focused on regional history, archeology, numismatics, ethnography, art, mineralogy and on ornithology, was founded. In 1955, the museums were merged into one district museum, which was later renamed the Jan Amos Comenius Regional Museum of Přerov. In 1993 it was renamed the Comenius Museum in Přerov. An ornithological station and Helfštýn Castle are also a part of the museum.

The museum includes a permanent exhibition on the archeology of Přerov, examples of classrooms from different periods, the memorial of Jan Amos Comenius, ethnography of Haná, etc. The museum owns rare exhibits from the life of Jan Amos Comenius, an extensive collection of old prints and modern literature on Fraternal Unity and others.

In 22 August 1991 Lithuanian parliament took resolution “On Military-repressive Structures of Soviet Union in Lithuania” that obligated government of Lithuania to take measures in abolishment of former soviet institutions (mainly secret KGB networks and Interior Ministry). In 24 August the Lithuanian parliament took another resolution “On Investigation of KGB Activity in Lithuania. In order to implementing these resolutions was established temporary Commission of parliament. It started to inventory the KGB documents left in Lithuania.