Incursiuni biografice în comunismul românesc

Coordonatori: Constantin Vasilescu, Florin S. Soare

Volumul XII / 2017 este disponibil pe site-ul Polirom.

Constantin Vasilescu, Cuvânt-înainte (pp. 9-14)

Partea I – Biografiile proscrişilor

Andrei Avram, Emil Cioran. Eseu biografic (pp. 17-68)

Born on April 8, 1911, Emil Cioran is considered one of the greatest forward thinkers of the twentieth century. He spent his youth in Romania, where he made his debut as a writer, publishing his first five books. Evolving in an age dominated by extreme events, the young thinker was seduced by the European fascism message as well as by the Legionary Movement. Despite the fact that he sympathised with certain aspects of the mentioned movements, he was not part of any political organisations.
In 1941, Cioran moves to France, where he decides to stay for the remainder of his life. He will succeed in becoming a writer, adopting a new language representing a palingenesis, an identity reconstruction: the Romanian biography needed to be „scorched” – and from its ashes, like a Phoenix, a new Cioran, delivered from youth’s insanities and beliefs, would emerge. He is now considered „France’s last great moralist”.

Keywords: The Transfiguration of Romania, intellectual(s), biography, radicalism

Constantin Vasilescu, Asasin, erou, legendă: Pavel Grimalschi (1914‑1960) (pp. 69-112)

Pavel Grimalschi was an idealist student, a policeman and legionary commander‑aid a rebel and an exiled, a member of the „national army” founded by Horia Sima in Vienna, a victim of the Romanian interwar and communist repression, one of those who on the night of November 26‑27, 1940, in Jilava, assassinated the dignitaries and state officials involved in the anti‑legionary repression. Jailed by the communist regime in a special section of the Jilava Penitentiary, he gained a legendary aura due to his unusual behaviour, constantly defying the guards and helping his suffering cellmate. Pavel Grimalschi was, undoubtedly, one of the heroes of his time, incomprehensible from a Manichaean perspective, just like the era he lived in. The stake of this biography lies precisely in grasping the monographic valences of the twentieth century.

Keywords: Pavel Grimalschi, Jilava, The Legionary Movement, anticommunism, Buchenwald, Rostock

Lucian Vasile, Mihail Opran: un destin cu prea multe umbre (pp. 113-154)

The study seeks to explore the biography of Mihail Opran, the mastermind behind the Intelligence Service set up in late 40s by the members of Romanian Military Exile with the support of the French Intelligence Service. After a promising start of career in Romanian Royal Air Forces, Opran was transferred to the Special Services where he served during the Second World War. Forced to flee the country in 1948 due to his activity on the Eastern Front and for his anticommunist views, Mihail Opran was the real director of the Romanian Military Exile`s Intelligence Service (SIMRE) which managed to deal some promising strikes to the espionage of the Romanian communist services. However, after a series of hard defeats from Securitate and critics from within the institution and from its partners, Opran`s career had a strange decline almost to the point of collaborating with his former enemy. However, a doubtless evaluation of his biography is indefinable due to lack of sources and possible deceiving information that had the goal to cover the real activity. Still, Opran`s life path is a perfect example of intriguing story of an intelligence man.

Keywords: biography, Romanian exile, Mihail Opran, intelligence, SDECE, SIMRE

Alin Mureşan, Raul Volcinschi sau refuzul obstinat al resemnării (pp. 155-212)

A noble vine (his family is attested as far back as the XVIth century) and old‑fashioned intellectual (double‑graded and with a PhD in economics), a polyglot (he spoke seven languages) and a sports lover (he both played and ran a sports club – Universitatea Cluj) – this is the very brief profile of one of the most tireless unknown anti‑communists. Horrified by the Leninist precept of violence unrestrained by law, he used his double position of lecturer and sports club president to recruit the best students in Cluj for an organization which aimed to support the armed resistance groups in Făgăraş. Arrested in the fall of 1956, he took part in one of the most spectacular escape attempts from the Securitate. Sentenced to 45 years in prison, he executed nearly eight, up to the 1964 release decrees. In spite of the relentless efforts from the secret police, with which he entangled on several occasions, he always spoke his mind and travelled across the country, engaging with friends and foreign embassies. His activities in the 1970s and 1980s led the Securitate to set him up for no less than four common law convictions. As far as we know, he is the only political prisoner in Romania that spent more time behind bars under Nicolae Ceauşescu rather than under Dej. His conflicting relationship with communism continued in 1983 when he was involved in an assassination attempt against Ceausescu, along with several other academics and workers. A man of action par excellence, a volcanic temper, but also very rational, idealistic to the limit of naivety, charismatic, conceited, fearless and bustling, the destiny of Raul Volcinschi (1923‑2011) is one of the most spectacular unwritten stories of Romanian anticommunist resistance.

Keywords: anticommunism, Raul Volcinschi, Securitate, escape

Cosmin Budeancă, Gheorghe Tarcea (1890‑1963). Povestea unui destin prin vremuri (pp. 221-276)

The purpose of the current study is, on the one hand, to present the biography of the orthodox priest Gheorghe Tarcea from Hunedoara, one of the thousands of priests that had been imprisoned in the communist prisons and did not survive. He was arrested several times and condemned for his affiliation to the Legionary Movement, both in the interwar period and in the communist regime. Gheorghe Tarcea died at the 1st of October 1963 in the prison from Aiud. On the other hand, the study draws attention upon several problems that might occur when reconstituting recent history, especially in the cases of research based exclusively on archival sources which may mislead the historian as they might be erroneous, improbable or discordant to reality. Practically the study is also a plea for using complementary sources, particularly oral history testimonies, by showing that despite their subjectivity they are not qualitatively inferior to archival sources. Additionally, the study presents the effects of his arrests on the members of his family. Therefore this study is grounded both on documents from the Romanian Secret Service during the interwar period and the Securitate (communist political police), and on previous works with general or particular character, press materials or unpublished ones, family documents and seven oral history interviews with persons that met the priest Gheorghe Tarcea.

Keywords: Gheorghe Tarcea, priest, oral history, Securitate, repression

Partea a II‑a – Biografiile puterii

Ştefan Bosomitu, „Puţini am fost, mulţi am rămas”. Preliminarii la o sociobiografie a „ilegaliştilor” comunişti (pp. 279-306)

„We were so few, now we are so many”, stated a witticism during the late 1960’s, referring to the paradoxical growing number of veteran communists – heroes who allegedly fought the interwar „bourgeois” regime within the clandestine communist movement. Around a thousand in 1965, their number climaxed to more than four thousand in only a couple of years. The curios fact was due to a party regulation, which eased the criteria for obtaining
the specific status – which granted important material and social benefits, allowing it also to the former communist movement supporters and sympathizers, and not only to the former official party members. My paper discusses this social‑political group, analyzing its evolution over the years, and assessing the manner in which this party employed, manipulated and exploited the concept. In the same time, I am also interested in the manner in which
the subjects of this group identified themselves, and how they forged their militant and political identity, in correspondence with the party propagandistic narratives.

Keywords: Romanian Communist Party, interwar Communism, clandestine history, illegalized militants, propaganda narratives, militant identity

Ionuţ Mircea Marcu, Ion Popescu‑Puţuri (1906‑1993). O biografie (pp. 307-330)

The aim of this study is to propose a biographic analysis of Ion Popescu‑Puţuri, who`s life is overlapping with the history of the Romanian communism. A member of the communist movement since the interwar period, he has held various positions after the Second World War, especially related to the propaganda apparatus. He was as well the ambassador of Romania in Hungary during the 1956 Revolution and for almost three decades the director of the Party History Institute, having an important contribution to the transition from a stalinist historiography to a nationalistic metanarrative. Our research has used mainly the documents kept at the National Archives of Romania, in the fund of Popescu‑Puţuri family. This approach had some methodological difficulties, but had the important advantage of presenting a much closer and personal interpretation of our subject`s life. Our bigger objective was to use the case study of Popescu‑Puţuri in order to better understand how the communist regime in Romania changed during its history and how individuals, in this case an old member of the communist movement, adapted to these ever‑changing political conditions. Therefor, this paper is not a final, definitive, biography of Ion Popescu‑Puţuri, but one of the many possible.

Keywords: biography, interwar communism, propaganda, history‑writing

Florin S. Soare, Voinea Marinescu: biografia unui „tehnocrat” comunist (pp. 331-358)

 

Oana Purice, Legitimarea biografiei prin discurs autobiografic. Mihai Novicov (pp. 359-)

The aim of my paper is to present the manner in which autobiographical texts published during Communism could shape the officialized biographies of ones of the most prominent literary intellectuals in post‑War Romania. The central figure I will organize my research on is Mihai Novicov, writer and literary critic whose involvement in the ’50s’ cultural revolution was conspicuous and highly appreciated by the new authorities, offering him key‑positions in several political and cultural institutions. In order to strengthen my argumentation, I will also discuss other three important writers’ autobiographical writings, whose public images were also framed by means of personal narrative. As their general personal and professional development could be easily traced in literary dictionaries, my focus is on the biographies they intended to create themselves during their activity and which have been approved and confirmed by the regime through the Censorship’s green light for printing. Being offered the approval for publication, these texts turn from untrustworthy subjective discourses into objectified portraits; their inherent mystification is a trait the readers are to discover, but these texts are, nonetheless, official biographies confined to a specific period and functioning between its boundaries. Organizing their memoirs and diaries so that they could meet the regime’s requirements, these intellectuals pay much attention to the their precocious communist devotion, to their participation in the regime’s take‑over
of power, to the way they illustrate their familial and sentimental relationships and also to the social and political context of their evolution. These are essential landmarks in the biographies they build for themselves and which guarantee their strategic positions in the cultural field.

Keywords: Mihai Novicov, biography, communism, autobiographical writings