While working on the project, we (as the name of the exhibiton implies) relied primarily on archival documents of former special services in the USSR and Czechoslovakia. Our main goal was to demonstrate how the work of the special services influenced both the life of an individual person and the cultural landscape of an entire country. On exhibition website there are 30 stories of Ukrainian, Georgian and Czechoslovak artists, musicians, writers. Whether you read about the fate of Václav Havel, Marta Kubišová, Sergiy Paradzhanov or Valerian Pidmohylny, one thing will always remain the same: each of these stories depicts the conflict between the individual and the repressive communist system.

This online exhibition is a part of the „Repressed Art. National Culture Through the KGB/StB Eyes: Ukraine, Czech Republic, Georgia” project, supported by the European Union under the House of Europe programme. The project is implemented by the Center for Research on the Liberation Movement (Ukraine) commonly with the our organization Gulag.cz and the Georgian organization SovLab: Soviet Past Research Laboratory. Of course, the partners of the project also are the state archives in Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Georgia.