Traversând comunismul: conviețuire, conformism, compromis
Coordonatori: Lucian Vasile, Constantin Vasilescu, Alina Urs
Alina Urs, Cuvânt-înainte (pp. 11-17)
Partea I – Ideologie şi profesie
Liliana Corobca, Profilul cenzorilor din Direcţia Generală pentru Presă şi Tipărituri (pp. 21-45)
The General Department for Press and Publications was founded in Bucharest in 1949, after the dissolution of the Ministry of Arts and Information (the former Ministry of Propaganda). As very little has been published so far about the internal life of the institution, this paper aims to answer the following questions, while relying mainly on archival documents: Who were the censors, how were they recruited and by whom? What did their daily work consist of, what training methods were used on them? What duties did a censor have? What was the internal policy in terms of rewards and sanctions? Moreover, we wish to understand the psychological profile of a censor during the communist regime. As censorship in communist Romania began by imitating the Soviet system, we will also discuss a couple of instances that allow for a comparison between the two institutions. In 1975, the General Department for Press and Publications was turned into the Committee for Press and Publications, while two years later, this committee was dissolved and its most important censorship tasks were transferred to the Council of Culture and Socialist Education (established in 1971), where many censors continued with their work.
Keywords: censor, recruitment, censorship institution
Cosmina Cristescu, Cristina Pipoş, Funcţia politică a literaturii studiate în şcoală (1948‑1989) (pp. 47-66)
The establishment of the totalitarian communist regime in Romania brings major changes in the way the educational system is conceived. Its informative and propagandist character overshadows the formative nature of education in schools. The politicization of teaching is reflected on the content of the literary texts published in the Romanian textbooks. The role of studying literature in schools is mainly to form the political consciousness of the pupils, not the literary one. Correlating the literature published in the Romanian textbooks with the single party policy, we can distinguish two periods of time: 1948‑1964 and 1965‑1989. Although between the two phases there are differences regarding the topic of the texts (issues approved in the first period are replaced later with themes in the socialist spirit) or the published writers (from party’s favorites, some authors will entirely disappear), a common element remains very much alive in these works – the party spirit.
The literary creations chosen for textbooks reflect the intention of the communist regime to change reality according to its ideological claims. Some of the propaganda objectives aimed by these texts are: strengthening of the class consciousness, deepening the faith in communism, education in the party spirit, formation of the new man, building a secular communist iconography, mirroring the beautiful republic, illustrating the great achievements of the times, promotion of nationalism, labor valorization and idealization of the working class hero. Communism lacks aesthetic assessment of the writers; the only important rule for publication and presence in the Romanian textbooks is the reflection of communist values in their works.
The literary text subordinated to the propaganda machine has the functions of embellishingthe reality and educating young minds in the communist spirit. Through the message it sends, literature is effective in achieving propaganda objectives, thereby legitimizing the totalitarian regime.
Keywords: textbooks, ideology, literature, propaganda, educational system
The aim of this paper is to analyze the control mechanism implemented by the communist regime in order to impose a certain historical discourse in the period between 1971 and 1989. It is a well‑known fact that all communist regimes used (or are still using) history in their endeavor to legitimize themselves and in order to achieve this, the production of historical knowledge must be directed in a specific manner. In our study, we will discuss several actions taken by the Communist Party in Romania, in its attempt to suppress any manifestation of a non‑official historical narrative. To this end, we will focus on the institutional, economic and political methods that have been used by the regime. However, we aim to explain the production of history not as a unidirectional phenomenon, but as a result of a „negotiation” process between the state and the intelligentsia. We will show how the communist state tried to impose certain limits in the field of historical research, while also keeping in mind that it was never able to exert its full control over historians. Consequently, while a certain freedom did exist, the regime made incessant efforts to limit further more the intellectual liberty of historians. Methodologically, the study, which relies mainly on archival and official documents, is a qualitative research, though some quantitative data has also been used. Though the available sources are vast in number, only several case studies, selected for their relevance, are presented. Our aim is not to exhaustively discuss the topic, but solely to illustrate several aspects of the complicated relation between history, historians and the communist regime.
Keywords: historiography, control, communist propaganda, intellectuals
Even though the subject of political repression in communist Romania has been studied intensively in the past decades, there are certain aspects that need further investigation, such as the issue of psychiatric abuse, a form of oppression that was especially practiced during Ceauşescu’s regime. Psychiatric repression (the misuse of a psychiatric diagnosis in order to allow the imprisonment of political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals) was facilitated by the official discourse, which argued that those who opposed the regime were mentally ill. This meant that the psychiatric discourse, as such, became politically instrumentalized and that psychiatrists, a few of whom willingly became participants in the political abuse of their profession, turned into instruments of the regime. Considering the fact that the repression phenomenon during the Ceauşescu years has often been underestimated, the present research aims to study the methods used in Romanian psychiatric hospitals, as well as the effects that these methods had on the victims of such an abuse. Another aspect that this paper will focus on is the extent of the psychiatrists’ engagement in such an oppressive practice, emphasizing the complexity of a phenomenon in which people suffered on all sides.
Keywords: abuse, discourse, dissent, ideology, psychiatrist, psychiatric repression, political prisoners
Partea a II‑a. Studii de caz
Nicoleta Valeria‑Grossu is seen today in the Romanian society as a victim of the communist regime, as a symbol of resistance and anticommunist fight, as well as a model of morality and spirituality. This image is a result of her being a political prisoner (august 1945; 1949‑1953) and a voice of the postwar Romanian exile. The aim of this study is to reconstruct the biography of Nicoleta‑Valeria Grossu, by bringing into attention an unknown side of it: the fact that she worked for the political police, the Securitate. The paper is mainly based on files from the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives
(ACNSAS) about her, documents that debunk her existing biography and remove ambiguities and exaggerations about her life and work. The impact of these sources is significant, creating a different image of her, other than the idealized one that she has today.
Keywords: Nicoleta Valeria Grossu, informant, collaboration, Securitate, exile, espionage
Lucian Vasile, Legendă şi dilemă istorică. Biografia agentului dublu Mihail Ţanţu (pp. 163-214)
November 1948. Bucharest, the capital of the Romanian Popular Republic. Mihail Ţanţu was led to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, across from the former royal palace, by a single guard. Ţanţu was the son of a member of Sfatul Ţării, the institution that had voted the union of Bessarabia with Romania in 1918. Moreover, he was one of the founders of the first Romanian paratroops, but for his involvement in the National Resistance Movement he was sentenced in 1946 to 20 years of hard imprisonment. The man who brought him left, and Ţanţu was left alone in the room with just an officer to guard him from the next room where the guardsman was busy carrying out bureaucracy tasks. Taking advantage of the fact that his clothing was similar to that of the workers who were moving on the corridor, the inmate mingled with them, took a box and got out of the building. He stopped in front of the entrance, unloaded his package in the truck and then continued to walk away unhindered by anyone. Mihail Ţanţu managed to perform perhaps the most courageous and daring
escape from a political prison in Communist Romania. He was to flee the country, reach Paris and join the other officers within the Romanian exile in order to continue the fight against the communist regime in Romania.
But almost nothing of the things above is true, rather a legend created with the approval of Securitate in order to hide the true path of Mihail Ţanţu to Paris. His destiny was to remain an enigma: who was he betraying and who was he working for? When was he telling the truth and when was he misleading? When was he acting according to his ideas and when as he was commanded to? Was he an anti‑communist fighter, a spy, a double agent or a
bit of everything at the same time?
Keywords: Mihail Ţanţu, SSI, SIMRE, Securitate, espionage, Romanian exile, military exile, collaboration
Constantin Vasilescu, Împovăratul drum al delaţiunii sau apăsătoarea biografie a unui intelectual: Paul „Popescu” Găleşanu (pp. 215-280)
The informers were perceived as one of the most reprehensible categories of collaborators of the communist regime in Romania. After 1989, the Reţea (Network) files belonging to the Archive of the Securitate played a significant role in compromising public figures and putting an end to political careers. The most surprising and highly commented such files have been those belonging to former political prisoners, who were usually recruited in the network of informants as a result of the physical and psychological brutality to which they were subjected during detention. Frequently, their public image has been shaped by these disclosures; the respect for them intensified if there was no evidence of collaboration or was obliterated when infamous files were exposed. In the frantic search for an infallible role model, the historical context was often neglected by the collective judgement, a fault that the present study aims to avert. This paper analyses the collaboration of an intellectual, former political prisoner, while taking into account how the Securitate used his biography as means of pressure and blackmail.
Keywords: informer, intellectual, political prisoner, compromise, biography, collaboration
The paper discusses the articles published by former political prisoners in Glasul Patriei (The Voice of the Motherland), a propaganda newspaper controlled by the communist regime, which targeted readers in the Diaspora. Published between 1955 and 1972, Glasul Patriei, „a body of the Romanian Committee for Repatriation”, was, in itself, a showcase aimed at convincing exiled Romanians that inside the country, freedom of speech is not a mere catchphrase, but a reality; to this end, many of the well‑known personalities of the Romanian cultural life published here: George Călinescu, Tudor Arghezi, Virgil Cândea, Şerban Cioculescu, Ion Vinea, Romulus Dianu, Cezar Petrescu, P.P. Panaitescu or Nicolae Labiş.
On the other hand, in the case of former political prisoners such as Radu Gyr, Nichifor Crainic, Păstorel Teodoreanu, Constantin Noica, Dumitru Stăniloae, Constantin C. Giurescu, Vladimir Streinu, Radu Budişteanu, Ion Dumitrescu‑Borşa, Victor Biriş or Victor Vojen, collaborating with the regime was, beyond an obvious compromise, a strategy of adaptation to the new social and political circumstances, fuelled by the illusion of a cultural come‑back – a desire for social and professional (re)integration. The articles published in Glasul Patriei, in which the „errors” of the past were „unmasked” and loyalty towards the regime was openly declared, were, in fact, a public extension of the Aiud re‑education. The Operative Group wanted to publicly promote the re‑education it had coordinated and, also, to send a clear message of capitulation from the former political prisoners, to the Diaspora.
Using archival sources (ACNSAS), volumes of memoirs as well as secondary literature, approaching a re‑constitutive method, the present research explores the events that unfolded, as well as the impact of this particular adaptation strategy to which the survivors of the Aiud re‑education appealed.
Keywords: Aiud, re‑education, Glasul Patriei, Radu Gyr, Nichifor Crainic, Ion Dumitrescu-Borşa, Gheorghe Parpalac, Cristofor Dancu
The advent of the Communist regime in Romania seriously altered the conditions that licensed discourse production in the literary field. Concurrently, silence acquired new meanings in the sphere of culture (ranging from what one might call „dissidence through absence” to the suppression of one’s right to publish or to passive conformity to circumstances). From a moral standpoint, the decision to produce or not to produce language became a fundamentally ambiguous gesture. An explanation for this phenomenon lies in the „exhortative criticism” employed by Party activists against writers – especially against those who had already acquired considerable symbolic capital. Such criticism was twofold: on one hand, it condemned what passed for reactionary discourse, while on the other, it encouraged the authors to adopt the new (and only) type of discourse approved by the regime. During the first years of Dej’s rule, literary critic and historian G. Călinescu was one of the targets of such practices, which took the form of a vicious press campaign. The result was a shift in Călinescu’s activity from the monumental to the incidental – from bold, seminal works of grand design, such as Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent [The History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present Day] or the monographs dedicated to Mihai Eminescu and Ion Creangă, to the contingency of press articles. In what follows, I aim to discuss some of the oblique strategies that enabled G. Călinescu to both approach and distance himself from the Marxist‑Leninist dogma, by staging and negotiating his moments of silence and engagement with discourse.
Keywords: G. Călinescu, Gheorghe Gheorghiu‑Dej, Communism, literary criticism, literary press
Oana Purice, Posterităţi jucate. Miron Radu Paraschivescu şi Ion Caraion prin jurnale (pp. 339-360)
In the present paper I will analyze the biographical and professional trajectories of two Romanian writers who published their works mainly under Communism: Miron Radu Paraschivescu and Ion Caraion. Focusing on their relationship with the totalitarian regime, I will take into consideration their autobiographical writings, dwelling on the one hand on the images (or postures) they intend to create themselves through the autobiographical
discourse, and on the other hand on the reaction the regime had to their behavior in general, and to their diaries and memoirs in particular (including censorship, rejection, marginalization, and imprisonment). As it will be emphasized below, the selection of events the two writers make in their diaries is relevant for their position inside the cultural field of Communist Romania; these cuts which are contained by both the anthumous and posthumous autobiographical writings reveal the image the two writers wanted to secure in the readers’ collective memory. Nevertheless, their biographies, as shown by the historical documents or personal records, seem to often contradict these postures, bringing into question the autobiographical writings’ manipulative dimension. Therefore, I will stress these discrepancies and outline the manner in which Miron Radu Paraschivescu’s and Ion Caraion’s diaries are means of posthumous negotiation of their cultural portraits.
Keywords: Miron Radu Paraschivescu, Ion Caraion, autobiographical writings, Communism, posture
Manuela Marin, „Un prieten devotat nouă”: Ion Cioabă şi Securitatea comunistă (pp. 361-383)
This paper focuses on how the relation between the leader („bulibaşa”) of the Corturari Gypsies in Sibiu, Ion Cioabă, and the Romanian authorities, namely the Securitate and the Miliţie, evolved during the 1980s. Thus, the analysis is structured on three pillars. Firstly, we will discuss elements of Ion Cioabă’s biography, which illustrate his position within the local and national Gypsy community and the reasons for which the Securitate decided to recruite him as an informant. In this regard, we will demonstrate that the collaboration which ensued was particularly strong, so much so, that the Romanian secret police and its officials were very interested in keeping him as a „source”. This is evident in the second and third part of this paper, where we focus on two episodes which show that the Securitate directly intervened to help Cioabă not only to marginalize his opponents, but also to be released from prison, where he was serving a sentence as a result of his illegal endeavours. In this context, it is worth mentioning that the Securitate’s support for the „bulibaşa” was not endorsed by the local Militia who prosecuted Cioabă and, moreover, disclosed his collaboration with the political police. Lastly, we will exemplify how Cioabă used the special relation he had with the Security in order to argue for the granting by the Romanian authorities of the status of „co‑inhabiting nationality” to the Gypsy population.
Keywords: Gypsy, Cioabă, informer, collaboration, Securitate