ABSTRACT
In 2007, the Esti Kunstimuuseum in Tallinn, Estonia, held the exhibition Archives in Translation: Biennale of Dissent ’77, which was a spin-off of the festival held in Venice in 1977, dedicated to the cultural dissidence in Eastern Europe. Conferences, seminars, concerts, exhibitions, and film sessions were held to determine the position of dissidents in the Eastern Bloc countries in those days. This year, 1977—sixty years after the Russian Revolution—was the moment when the topics of dissidence and human rights were most prominent on the East–West axis due to the Helsinki Accords. From the very first days, the “Biennale of Dissent” became a problem for both foreign and domestic policy force fields. Today, those tensions are as fascinating as the festival itself.
