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Jiří Rambousek was a Czech historian of literature. During the 1950s, he taught at several elementary and high schools in Czechoslovakia. Between 1962 and 1964, he worked at the Pedagogical Institute in Jihlava. From 1964, he taught Czech language and literature at the Pedagogical Faculty of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Brno. However, after 1970, he was forbidden to teach and in 1973 he was dismissed for political reasons. Then, he could be employed only as a manual worker. Despite his dismissal, Rambousek managed to save Ivan Blatný’s papers that were located at the university and hide them in his flat. In the 1990s, Rambousek taught at the University in Brno again, and Ivan Blatný’s manuscripts, hidden in Rambousek’s flat, finally became a part of the Ivan Blatný collection at the Museum of Czech Literature in the 1990s.

Ainė Ramonaitė is a professor of political science at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University. Her main research areas are political elections and political sociology, and (non)Soviet society and its legacy and impact on today’s democratic system. Professor Ramonaitė is the organiser of the academic discussion social platform Socforumas, which holds annual conferences for young researchers. She is the author of several books and many articles on the process of democratic elections in Lithuania. After 2009, she initiated and headed two research projects on ‘non-Soviet’ society. The main aims of these projects were to look at networks of people who were not involved in either the anti-Soviet dissident movement or pro-Soviet activism, but rather stood between the two.

Although Ramonaitė was not involved in the anti-Soviet movement, her parents, who worked in academia (her father was a physics professor, and her mother was a Lithuanian literature and language professor), were involved in the non-Soviet ethnographic movement. This kind of activity inspired Ramonaitė as well, and carrying out research on this theme in history became a kind of personal moral determination. Contrary to the prevailing statements in Lithuania about the weak opposition to Soviet rule at that time, Ramonaitė thinks that this ‘invisible’ society was larger and more closely interconnected than is usually imagined.

Stjepan Razum, a priest, Catholic theologian and Church historian, was born on 16 December, 1960 in Konšćica, Samobor Municipality, Croatia. He attended primary school in Sveti Martin pod Okićem, while he attended the archdiocesan classical gymnasium attended in Zagreb from 1975 to 1979. He graduated from the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Zagreb in 1986. He also earned a degree in diplomatics and palaeography at the Vatican Archives in 1994, and he earned a doctorate in Church history at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1995. Since 1995, he has been employed in the Croatian State Archives, with an office at the Archdiocesan Archives of Zagreb, which is a department of the former.

He has been the head of the Archdiocesan Archives of Zagreb since 1996. In 2008 he gained the title of a senior archivist, and later he was appointed archival consultant in 2010. He is a member of the editorial office of several scholarly and cultural journals, and a number of initiatives involved in the promotion of historical and cultural research. He did not engage in politics in life, but on a personal level he opposed to the then communist regime as a divinity student and then young priest.