Radio România Internațional

Tag: communism

  • Gift-offering as an exercise in power, in communist Romania

    Gift-offering as an exercise in power, in communist Romania


    Personality cult in the case of political
    leaders is a common trait in all historical ages. Flattering the leaders is part
    and parcel of a deeply-engrained human psychological mechanism. On one hand, it
    has something to do with the human being’s wish to receive over-the-top recognition
    as a sign of their power. On the other hand, it has something to do with the
    human being’s wish to climb up the social ladder, undeservedly, more often than
    not. However, over and above such an old practice, dating from time immemorial,
    we find the political leaders’ personality cult as a hallmark of fascism and communism. In Romania,
    the communist regime was no exception to the rule. Between 1965 and 1989, the
    communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu was the figure head around whom a blatantly
    wanton personality cult revolved.


    Such an exaggerated praise
    of the political leader was in fact an outgrowth of the regime’s brutality. In effect, praising the leader translated into hyper-eulogizing
    newspaper articles, grandiose shows on stadiums, parades, television and radio
    shows, official birthday ceremonies. Offering presents was a significant part of
    the personality cult. Presents were offered by economic entities, by craftsmen,
    by people from all walks of life or by foreign cultural and scientific personalities.
    Throughout the years, the presents received by Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu made a special
    collection, as their diversity was literally spectacular. Paintings and
    sculptures alone make a nonesuch collection of works, whereby painters and
    sculptors were elbowing each other out, in their bid to pay their respects to
    the two communist leaders.


    Thirty years were marked
    in 2019 from the December 1989 revolution, when the Ceausescu regime was
    toppled. On that occasion, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest brought out
    a small-sized, 440-page album. The work included reproductions of paintings and
    various other works of art, dedicated to Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu. The album
    is somehow a sequel to Cornel Ilie’s A Portrait for the comrade, including reproductions
    of objects in the collection of Romania’s National Museum of History The latter
    album was published a year earlier, in 2018.

    Calina Barzu is a museographer with
    the National Contemporary Art Museum’s Photography Archive. Calina is also a
    curator of the tribute art exhibition. Ms Barzu didn’t fail to mention the parallel
    exhibition mounted on the premises, including items that were part of the then
    the automobile owners, members of the Retromobil club. Integrating day-to-day
    objects into the tribute exhibition is a way of understanding the spirit of the
    time when two generations of Romanians lead their lives, between 1945 and 1989.


    The
    exhibition was put together based on the 2019 catalogue that marked 30 years
    from the Revolution. It is a selection of the tribute works from the collection
    of the museum. The exhibition brings together works authored by well-established
    artists, in front of the onlookers and visitors, but also works made by ordinary
    people or working teams, works that were part of the heritage of the museum’s
    collection. The exhibition was initiated in December 2019, it had several
    episodes or series where the collections objects were on display. We initiated
    a collaboration with Retromobil Romania, they joined us along this theme and
    came up with several items belonging to their members’ collections, with automotive-related
    exhibits. The Retromobil items on
    display range from driving licences, automobile publications, maps, magazines
    and board notebooks. We also have a fridge that could be encased in the trunk
    and a TV set which could also be encased in the car’s accumulator. We have several
    registration plates and each of them has a story of its own, how they were
    rated according to the social class. We also have automobile objects that could
    be included in the travel kit. We also have a selection of archive images
    featuring pictures of cars.


    Small-sized though it is, the
    catalogue of tribute items at the National Museum of Contemporary Art quite aptly
    highlights the propagandistic charge of the tribute works of art. Sabin Balasa (1932-2008), was one of the most highly acclaimed painters of the Ceausescu
    regime. In the album, he was included with The Ceausescu Era, a painting he made
    in 1988, oil on canvas, 120
    x 150 centimetres. The work depicts four miners looking forward, against a
    half-dark, blue background. Here is Călina Bârzu once again, this time telling
    us what special items has the museum exhibited, which were part of the Ceausescus’
    presents collection.


    The special items in our collection include scale models
    of the presents sent by the people or by the enterprises that offered those
    presents. One such object, which is rather more special, showing a lot of
    creativity, performance and quality, is this present received from the Aeronautic
    Enterprise in Bacau, which also has a dedication for the two. It is a scale
    model of an airplane, symbolizing the work of the factory staff. Part of our items
    come from the original collection of then the Museum of the Romanian Communist
    Party and the Art Museum. It is a similar manner to place
    the leader centre-stage. The objects were supposed to illustrate the achievements
    of the factory, on one hand, but also his own achievements, on the other hand, they
    spoke about how he succeeded to bring the entire technological process and
    about the fact that it was entirely thanks to him that all the economic achievements
    were possible, thanks to him and to the work of the people. Everything was possible thanks
    to him, since he succeeded to contribute to the people’s progress and well-being.
    Most of the objects are in a good preservation condition.


    The tribute exhibition
    of presents received by Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu, hosted by the Museum of
    Contemporary Art, has a plain message for today’s generation: under a dictatorship,
    valuable as it may be, fine art falls outside the scope of a free spirit.

    (Translation by Eugen Nasta)



  • Political prisoners in Ploiesti between 1948 and 1964

    Political prisoners in Ploiesti between 1948 and 1964

    About 350 political detainees, mentioned in official documents, appear in the archives of the town of Ploieşti, an important industrial and oil center, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of these people were arrested, imprisoned, tried and tortured in the citys iconic buildings, which ordinary people passed by every day without suspecting anything. Starting from the history of the place, but also from the need to know the tragedies that his hometown went through, historian Lucian Vasile wrote the book “The ones we forgot. The communist repression in Ploieşti (1948 – 1964).“



    The detainees presented in the book were selected based on their connection with the town of Ploiesti. At the time of their arrest they either lived in Ploiești and belonged to that community, or were investigated by the local political police and imprisoned there. But regardless of that, their tragedy is the same as that of all victims of the communist regime, a regime eager to annihilate real or imagined enemies, based on accusations that were most times invented. Historian Lucian Vasile tells us more about the political prisoners in Ploiesti: ”They were from all social categories. This seemed to me the most interesting thing because almost half of the political prisoners were from the working class or were poor or middle-class peasants, that is, exactly the categories that the regime claimed to represent. This shows, in fact, the degree of rejection or attachment of the Romanian community to the regime imposed after the Second World War. Most of the detainees were young because they were seen as the most open to doing what they were asked. They had no family obligations and no children, something that usually influences the way people respond to pressure.”



    Unfounded accusations, abusive arrests, no official indictment or trial, but most of all, torture and inhumane conditions of detention have made many prison survivors reluctant to talk about what happened to them. For some of the survivors in Ploieşti, Lucian Vasile was the one who took on the writing of their story. One of the most impressive people was Martha Koppes who, in the early 1950s, had an extremely interesting meeting with the Securitate, the former political police. Lucian Vasile: ”Martha Koppes was, in my opinion, the bravest woman I met in my research. She was not the only one with an impressive story, but she had a great personality. She did not go to prison, but she came from a mixed Romanian-Dutch family, her father being an important industrialist from Ploiești. In the 1940s, while living in Bucharest with her husband, she was contacted by the Securitate and her collaboration was discussed. She was forced to collabotare, for the sake of her parents, who were already old, wanted to leave the country and had already been harassed by the political police. Martha, in particular, was supposed to keep everything a secret. She was supposed to provide information from the Dutch Embassy where she had been working for two years, but she managed to make it look like she was playing the Securitate game without actually doing it, in order to get her parents out of the country. Some unusual circumstances pushed her into the arms of the Securitate and she had to sign a very atypical commitment, which she later denied. She eventually managed to leave the country and so have her parents. Unfortunately, she could not win the whole game, as her husband remained captive in Romania and they eventually got separated because of the distance.”



    Given that many of the political detainees in Ploieşti, in the first years of communism, were young people or students, they could not escape the hardest experience of that time: the re-education that started at the Pitesti penitentiary and later spread to other detention centers. The detainees were forced to torture each other, to denounce all their previous beliefs and the people close to them. This also happened in the late 1940s to some students from Ploieşti who had printed anti-communist manifestos. Lucian Vasile tells us what happened to them once they were imprisoned in Pitesti: ”Everything turns upside down so many times that you dont know what is normal and what is abnormal, who is the victim and who is the aggressor. But this is also a story of survival and trust because even in those absolutely terrible conditions the four friends still trusted each other and refused to hit each other.”



    Released under a pardon decree in 1964, most of the detainees in Ploieşti and other prisons, continued to be monitored and harassed by the Securitate until the fall of the communist regime. (EE)




  • Fake Maps

    Fake Maps

    The communist regime used all possible means to silence its opponents. The passive ones, who, exasperated, were trying to leave and settle in the western free world, were also discouraged in every possible way: from being shot on the spot, to receiving life sentences and being manipulated and blackmailed. The communist border, symbolised by the Berlin wall, literally killed people, in cold blood. But besides the border as such, another means was used, subtler than physical violence: the fake map.

    In September 1964, at a consultative conference of the Socialist states, held in Moscow, a decision was made for those countries’ maps to be falsified, distorted and printed inaccurately. The regime thought that tricking those who wanted to flee by having them use fake maps, which would take them straight into the arms of the repressive apparatus, was preferable to physical liquidation. East Germany was in direst need of such maps. And taking care of that particular aspect was the job of the dreaded intelligence service, the Stasi. The Romanian political police, the Securitate, liked the method and took it over.

    The German Cultural Centre in Bucharest has organizedan exhibition titled Fake Maps, bringing together maps from the Stasi and Securitate archives. Facsimile of the fake maps used by the former German Democratic Republic and the former Socialist Republic of Romania were exhibited to show visitors one of the methods used by the communists to hinder any attempt at fleeing the country by those who could no longer endure the oppression of the regime.

    Curator Adrian Buga was the one that organized the exhibition. As he told us, a fake map drawn up before 1989 was aimed first and foremost at depriving people of the freedom of movement:

    I would put the sign of equality between a map and knowledge. Once you reach a new territory, whether we are talking about this planet or an extraterrestrial space, that knowledge can be used. And then, who has that knowledge, who has that plan, who has that map is also in control. At the same time, if you know how to control that information and you don’t want it to fall into the hands of your enemies, you falsify it. Another aspect of fake maps is that they are misleading when you want to escape from a space and need guidance. A map equals orientation, the information must come from a source that we consider credible. But in this case, that source we trust is falsified and used to our detriment.

    The fake map of the regime had to change the inner map of the individual. It falsified not only topography but also perceptions and beliefs about the outside world.

    Adrian Buga: From certain points of view we can say that the falsified map is specific to closed, totalitarian regimes. Once the regime controls and wants to oppress and pressure the citizens in a certain place, it must falsify the borders and it must falsify the way people perceive the place and other places from the outside. The information must be falsified to show how bad it is outside the matrix in which the regime wants to keep people and how good it is inside the matrix.

    What was the mechanism by which a map was faked? Adrian Buga says that the fake map was a deliberate alteration of an accurately drawn map.

    There were standard maps, topographic maps, providing information about cities, buildings, streets, about the type of soil, about rivers and so on. The standard maps were secret, no one had access to them except with certain approvals that were quite difficult to obtain. In the public space there were only tourist maps, on which certain places had been deleted or falsified. So, one would arrive at a place with the map in hand and discover that the place was completely different: either there were areas of uneven ground that did not appear on the map, or the rivers had been drawn differently in case a foreign army would want invade the territory, or just to make it difficult for the people who would try to escape and flee the country.

    The Romanian security did not draw up fake maps in the true sense of the word but resorted to something much simpler: interrogations of those captured.

    Adrian Buga explains: We do not have fake maps but the maps with the routes used by people to flee Romania. Those caught had to draw exactly the place where they had attempted to escape. The Securitate had to know the topography very well, mislead and discourage escape attempts. We are talking about the western border, the border with Hungary and the Yugoslav border on the Danube. There were many places there used by people to escape. There are many testimonies, and I am thinking of the book about the famous gymnast Nadia Comăneci and the Securitate. It is very interesting how Nadia describes that route and that guide, a shepherd of the place, who did not know the topography of the place.

    Researching the archives revealed, in addition to fake topographic maps, another type of map: the personal map of the individual and his private space. Tens of thousands of opponents were tracked with the help of sketch maps, which included everything, from domicile to the routine of every member of the family and visitors. (MI)

  • Anti-communist resistance in Romania after 1946

    Anti-communist resistance in Romania after 1946

    Lieutenant Toma Arnautoiu was one of the heroes of the
    anti-communist resistance in Romania. He was born on February 14, 1921.
    Arnautoiu was one of the leaders of the longest-lasting groups of partisans in
    Muscel area, in central Romania, actually on the southern slope of Fagaras Mountains.


    We recall that Muscel is arguably the core area where
    the literary variety of standard Romanian was formed. Throughout the centuries,
    Muscel was inhabited by free, acceptably well-to-do peasants, while its seat,
    the town of Campulung, has a remarkable multicultural history. People from
    Muscel have always benefitted from administrative autonomy. They also had close
    connections with the principality of Transylvania, lying over the Carpathians.


    Lieutenant Toma Arnautoiu was a member of the cultural
    elite of the commune of Nucsoara. Toma was the third child of a primary school
    teacher. His elder brother, Ion, a cavalry officer, was killed in action in
    Crimea, in 1943. In 2000, Toma Arnautoiu’s sister, Elena Florea Ioan, gave an
    interview to Radio Romania’s Oral History Center. That’s how we found out
    primary school teacher Arnautoiu’s family was one of the most respected
    families in the commune of Nucsoara. The family had strong values and
    principles.

    Elena Florea Ioan:


    My heartfelt, very special gratitude goes to my mother, who brought us up
    harmoniously, guiding me and teaching me everything, so that I , when I would
    be completely on my own later in life, could be able to cope with all the hardships
    that occurred. As for father, with his tender-heartedness and kindness, I could
    never annoy him. I couldn’t possibly upset them and proof of that stands the
    fact that everything they advised me I had no problem complying with that. They
    sort of denied me furthering my own education so that the lads could push
    themselves forward, go to university, and suchlike. And when it was about time
    for me to marry, that’s true, there were also my parents who chose my would-be
    husband for me and I could never say they made a mistake. They always guided me
    to take the right path, teaching me to be honest, hardworking, respectful and
    behave in society so that I could not embarrass myself in front of anybody.


    Toma Arnautoiu was wounded on the frontline. He got
    admitted to the Royal Guard Battalion, an elite military unit. After August 23,
    1944, yet another fateful page would be written in Romanian history, the
    military occupation and the instatement of a pro-communist government on march
    6, 1946. Arnautoiu got fired from the army in 1947. In 1948 he left for
    Bucharest to pursue a study program with the Business Academy. It was there
    that young Toma and 30, 40 other colleagues got to know colonel Arsenescu.
    Together they drew up a plan to mount a group of partisans capable of fighting
    in the mountains against the government. The group implemented the plan in
    1949. Also joining the group was Toma’s younger brother, Petre. Elena
    Florea Ioan gave her own account of how the partisans, lead by her
    brother, got help from the locals in Nucsoara. But soon the skirmishes began,
    with the troops of the Interior Ministry.


    They were being sent food, there, in
    the mountains, they got whatever else they needed, but the Securitate began to
    guard the commune and there was no leeway for them to go feed them any longer.
    And despair seized them, there, in the mountains, they had no food, they had
    nothing of what they needed. One night they climbed down into the village, came
    to our home, and someone who was around, an informer, Ileana and I don’t know
    what her other name was, announced the Securitate. The informer was a
    scrubwoman working on a dairy farm. And then an entire regiment came after
    them. They had a clash with the Securitate, a Securitate non-commissioned
    officer even died there.


    As soon as the Arnautoiu brothers went up in the
    mountains, the Securitate arrested the whole family, the parents, their sister,
    her husband, Petre’s wife. She was investigated many times, and from what she
    could recall, Elena Florea Ioan reminisced about an episode that occurred in
    the Pitesti prison.


    For the second time around I got
    sentenced to five years in prison, an administrative sentence on the grounds of
    omission to inform the authorities in right. The reason was that I had got wind
    of my brothers being in the mountains, that I did not help the Securitate
    apprehend them. Time and again they arrested me, they summoned me telling me to
    go search them, to go there as their sister. I kept telling them I had not
    helped them and they were astounded, during the interrogation, because I had
    not helped them. When I was in prison in Pitesti, one night a colonel came from
    Bucharest and interrogated me, it was 1 or 2 in the dead of night. He pulled my
    shirt so hard my buttons snapped, asking me why as their sister did not offer
    them my help, whereas other 100 or more wretches helped them?


    In 1958, in the wake of 9 years of harassing, the
    Muscel resistance group was apprehended. The Securitate framed them, promising
    them passports so they could leave Romania. The passports were offered through
    a friend of Toma’s and the heads of the group were seized in a shepherd’s
    house. Back then Arnautoiu was caught and with him, his two-year old daughter
    and her mother, Maria Plop.

    Elena Florea Ioan:


    That friend of theirs, he went there
    with some plum brandy and with narcotics poured in the drink, he was also
    carrying their passports. And while they were chatting, he poured them a cup of
    the plum brandy. Toma refused the drink, Petrica drank a cup of that plum
    brandy. And while they were having their chat and planning their way out of the
    country the Securitate people were right outside, they came and seized Toma. He
    fought back, they knew he had a little poison envelope sewn into the lapel so
    he couldn’t be caught alive if they ever got seized. They darted at him
    straight away and took the poison envelope as Toma was still fighting. Petrica
    had the time to escape while Toma was still fighting them. He crossed over a
    watercourse and as he was climbing up a hill somebody saw him and denounced
    him. They chased him with a sniffer dog and they found him too, with the
    belt strapped around his neck, trying to commit suicide.


    The investigation for the members of the group lasted
    over a year. They were caught on May 20, 1958. On the night of July 18 to July
    19, 1959, Toma Arnăuțoiu, his brother Petre and 14 other people who for nine
    years helped them were shot.






  • Marriage and Divorce in present-day Romania

    Marriage and Divorce in present-day Romania


    30 years on from the demise of the communist regime in Romania, the country has been through a lot of economic, political and social changes. The private sphere of family relations, including the institution of marriage, has not remained unchanged. Back in the time of the communist regime, the institution of marriage kept its traditional form and young people used to get married at an early age. Marriage was seen as proof of maturity back in the day, and for this reason, shortly after having graduated from high-school or university young people were encouraged to build their own families. The institution of marriage was being encouraged by the communist authorities as well and they resorted to all kinds of measures to discourage the single status. One suchlike measure was to prevent single persons from getting access to state housing. This mentality of getting married at an early age outlived the communist regimes and in 1990 men got married around the age of 25 on an average, while women at 22. A survey recently conducted by Frames Agency shows that major changes have occurred ever since. Not only has the average marriage age for Romanians increased, but the number of those willing to take this step has dropped sharply.



    In 1990, the Register Office reported some 192,652 marriages. In 2018 the number of marriages dropped by some 50,000, to 143,292. Right now marriage is no longer a priority for Romanians, as it was during communism, Frames analyst Adrian Negrescu believes:



    “In 2018 the situation changed. Right now Romanians marry only when their financial situation allows them to purchase a house and settle down. Now people are more interested in their careers. Women too seem to observe this trend, preferring a stable job first and foremost, that would secure them a stable income. Women are rather interested in everything that can empower them and other topics linked to the dynamic society we live in. In the early 1990s, men married at the age of 25 on average, while women at a little over 22. In the rural area, the marriage age for women was even lower, 21 years. In 2018 men usually marry at around 31 years, and women at 28. Its a significant increase, telling of the changes society has undergone, which make us more mindful about our personal development, family no longer being the top priority”.



    In spite of all these, at European level, Romania is among the countries with a high rate of marriages, namely 7.3‰ alongside Lithuania (7.5‰), Cyprus and Latvia (6.8‰) and Malta (6.3‰). Furthermore, although the traditional marriage does not seem to be fashionable any more, longstanding relationships have not disappeared but have taken different, less official forms. Here is analyst Adrian Negrescu with details:



    “Nothing has changed, though, on the sentimental side of relationships. There are many couples who decide to live together, in the same house, and with shared money, but they keep postponing the official marriage. They may think that they do not have enough money for a wedding party or are pressed for other economic aspects. Having a family and children requires a lot of expenses. Everybody wants a child, but not everybody has the necessary amount of money to obtain the needed safety. This level of safety, of decent living standards was different in the early 1990s. Now, in the 2000s, economic requirements are different. A child needs more to have a decent living, parents spend more for their childs education and healthcare. All these economic aspects do have an impact on the perception of marriage.”



    Economic aspects are not the only factors that change peoples perception of marriage, there is also the vision one has about ones personal happiness. We have become more demanding both of ourselves and of those around us. We are more demanding in relation to our partners behavior, because we have other standards for our own happiness and contentment. We keep postponing the moment of marriage until we find the right person that should comply both with our personal needs and our economic and social status. Once we find that person and make the relationship official, separation seems to be a rare option, because divorce statistics show that Romanians find it even harder to get a divorce than getting married. Here is Adrian Negrescu back at the microphone with more:



    “If back in 1990 the number of divorces reported was 32 thousand, in 2018 the figure dropped to 30 thousand. It is not a significant drop, but it shows that people have become more mature. We pay more attention to our relationship and to the ways of managing the problems that may appear. We have learnt or are learning how to build a longstanding relationship. And this means more than sharing a house. It means more attention granted to the partner and to his or her expectations, it means learning to build together. Another interesting aspect is the age at which Romanians get a divorce. In 2018, the average age of men who were getting a divorce was 43 and 39 for women. So, Romanians get a divorce at a mature age. In the case of men, this age somehow coincides with the so-called midlife crisis, between 40 and 50 years. In my opinion, women have different reasons to get a divorce. Whats important for them is their contentment or discontentment with the relationship per se. In general, young women are more mature than young men, they pay more attention to aspects that men often miss. Women want more from a relationship, when they get engrossed in the traditional marriage pattern, career women try to get out of that relationship, because they want more. The age of 39 is not accidental, because, at that age, many women will have obtained economic independence, and their expectations from life come to differ from those of the man they married when young.”



    Within the EU, with a divorce rate of 1.5‰ Romania is halfway in a classification in which Latvia and Lithuania (with 3.1‰) and Denmark (3.0‰) report the highest divorce rates. The lowest divorce rates at European level are registered in Malta (0.8 ‰) and Greece (1,0‰).




  • The communist regime and its literacy campaign

    The communist regime and its literacy campaign

    Education was of one of the obsessions of a regime
    that wanted to enlighten and emancipate the people. Communism saw illiteracy as
    a major disadvantage of the lower classes compared with the middle and upper
    classes.




    On 23rd August 1944, Romania withdrew from
    its alliance with Germany and Italy and joined the United Nations. One week
    later, on 31st August, the Soviet army entered Bucharest, an event
    that would be a turning point in Romania’s contemporary history. The communist
    and pro-communist press began speaking of the need to eradicate illiteracy.
    According to Scânteia, the official newspaper of the Romanian Communist
    Party, illiteracy levels in the rural area and in small towns stood at 49%. The
    authors of these articles and, later, the communist leaders presented this
    situation in a tendentious manner, making it sound as if there were no earlier
    efforts to fight illiteracy. The communists used to accuse the former
    democratic governments of intentionally discriminating against the lower
    classes and of blocking education in the rural areas.




    Historian Cristian Vasile from the Nicolae Iorga
    Institute of History in Bucharest has been studying the literacy programme
    carried out by the communist regime in its early years:






    Beginning at the end of 1947, the campaign to combat
    illiteracy became for the communist leadership an important component of the
    Cultural Revolution of Soviet extraction. The Stalinist propaganda claimed that
    in its wake no one was illiterate any more in the USSR, something also claimed
    to be true in Romania. Mihail Roller was not only a leading historian, but also
    a theoretician of education after the Soviet model. He even wrote a book about
    Soviet pedagogy and how it can be implemented in Romania.




    Illiteracy is an immense obstacle to the proletariat’s
    achieving leading positions in the country and to the building of socialism and
    communism. An illiterate person is one who is excluded from political life,
    read a manifesto of cultural propaganda, using oversimplifying and misleading
    rhetoric. The installation of Petru Groza’s communist government on 6th
    March 1945 paved the way for a widespread literacy campaign in Romanian
    villages. The education ministry and the culture ministry were put in charge of
    expanding the school network in the countryside and giving all children access
    to education.




    Literacy was also promoted through films, visual
    propaganda and works of art that encouraged people to get an education. An
    extremely efficient way of achieving literacy was the military service. The
    army also carried out education programmes and many people from the countryside
    learnt to read and write during their military service. The members of ethnic
    minorities also learnt the Romanian language in the army. Communist literacy
    programmes were a means of promoting communist ideology and spreading
    Marxist-Leninist teachings. When it came to implementation, however, things
    were a bit different, says historian Cristian Vasile:




    The efforts to intensify the literacy campaign as it
    was designed by the education ministry were met with reserve and even hostility
    by some teachers. Not because they were opposed in principle, but out of the
    most banal considerations. Many teachers were being sent from the city to the
    countryside, which they saw as a demotion in a way. They were being posted for
    political reasons to villages and small towns where there were many people who
    couldn’t read and write. The teachers who had been abusively posted to these
    places naturally didn’t have a home and the same comforts they had been used
    to, and found it difficult to do their job.




    Young and inexperienced teachers were sent to the
    countryside based on a job posting scheme aimed at implementing the policies of
    the communist party. Many, however, refused to take up their new jobs so they
    were declared saboteurs and punished. Historian Cristian Vasile tells us more:




    A report from November 1948 drawn up by the school
    inspectorate in Cluj recommended that teachers be paid extra hours for these
    classes. It also mentioned a series of resignations in the education system
    over the allocation of posts. People who were attached to Cluj wanted to stay
    in Cluj, not go somewhere else. The report also wrote about the big differences
    between the city of Cluj and the county of Cluj, where villages were scattered and
    there were few roads between them. 600 teachers from the city who worked in the
    countryside resigned after a while. The report noted that the inspectorate
    decided that teachers who refuse to remain in their posts in the countryside
    would not find a job somewhere else but be sacked.




    The communist literacy campaign disrupted the job
    allocation system in education and amounted to a lot of unpaid voluntary work,
    abusive transfers and layoffs. Historians believe, however, that the level of
    education did increase as a result of the communist literacy campaign. There
    were also schools where teachers did not follow the school curriculum to the
    letter.




    The student riots of 1956 in solidarity with the
    Hungarian anti-communist revolution, with many of the students being from a
    rural background, were proof that the literacy and education campaign also worked
    against the regime itself and its ideology. (Tr.: CM)

  • Ion Ratiu and the Rebirth of Romanian Democracy

    Ion Ratiu and the Rebirth of Romanian Democracy

    Politician Ion Ratiu was one of the role models for Romanian society as it was beginning to rebuild democracy in 1990, after 45 years of communism. He was a descendant of a family that was instrumental in fighting for the national rights of Romanians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ion Ratiu had a considerable contribution to the improvement of the Romanian political climate after December 1989. He stood out by his signature bow tie, by his supremely polite way of expressing himself, and the slight English accent he had when speaking Romanian. Ratiu was one of the most important democratic Romanian politicians after 1990, one who had previously militated against both the Fascist and Communist dictatorships. Upon his return to Romania in 1990, he was instrumental in rebuilding the Christian-Democratic National Peasant Party, and got deeply involved in rebuilding a democratic climate.

    Ion Ratiu was born to a family of intellectuals on June 6, 1917, in Turda, in what is now western Romania. He had a degree in law from Cluj, and one in economy from Cambridge. He was active in the youth organization of the National Peasant Party. In 1940 he was appointed as a diplomat with the Foreign Ministry, and was sent to London right away, in February of that year, before the fall of France. After France was occupied, a country which used to be one of Romanias most important allies, Ratiu continued to work at the Romanian legation to the UK until early September 1940, when power in Romania was grabbed by General Antonescu and the Iron Guard. As an anglophile and francophile, Ratiu refused to accept his countrys joining the alliance with Nazi Germany.

    In 1985, in an interview with Radio Free Europe for the Romanian Current Events feature, preserved in the archives of the Center for Oral History by Radio Romania, Ion Ratiu described how he got to remain in the UK:

    “After King Carol II departed, and the Legionnaire state was set up, I resigned, in September 1940. I went to the British Foreign Secretary and asked for political asylum, which they granted me right away. I had the great luck to get a scholarship at Cambridge, and I studied there for three years and got a Master of Arts degree in economic sciences. While I was at Cambridge I made several radio broadcasts on patriotic topics with regard to Transylvania, especially after Northern Transylvania got taken away in 1940, and I was active in student life in the association of Romanian students in Great Britain.”

    Ion Ratiu got involved in the propaganda to get Romania out of the Axis and have it join the Allied side. He deeply wished for CEE, Romania included, to remain under the influence of Western democracies after the end of the war:

    “I worked on the International Student Council, where they made me vice-president during the war, and in the World Youth Executive Committee. Because we were all concerned about the future of Europe after the war, as exiles in England, we set up an organization we called Central East European Students for a New Society. Also, even though I was young, I was co-opted into the movement of free Romanians who opposed Romanias falling in line with Nazi Germany policy, and who said that Romanias place was next to the great democratic powers in the West who had created Greater Romania. During that time I wrote articles, I held conferences, and I spoke on the radio, as I said, at the BBC, of course.”

    As the prosperous businessman he became, Ion Ratiu did not watch passively from afar as Romania was being turned communist. He set up an anti-Communist organization, the World Union of Free Romanians, and printed democratic leaning publications, such as The Free Romanian, one of the most influential publications for Romanian exiles. In 1985, Ion Ratiu was convinced that only the unity of all Romanians could make democracy return. The organization welcomed all who wanted to help in the effort of restoring democracy:

    “In 1980, together with Professor Brutus Coste from America, we launched an appeal telling everyone that it would be the time to do something for this country to be represented in a dignified manner in the West. Until 1975 we had had the Romanian National Committee, which ceased its activities that year. We believed that this struggle needs to continue, and so we launched the appeal and we set up in 1984. We said from the beginning that this cannot be done around parties, we said that all Romanians who want to make an effort for the national cause should join us, irrespective of party, past or present. This did not mean that parties should not function. Quite the opposite, parties have to function, because there is no democracy without parties.”

    On January 3, 1990, the National Salvation Front issued a law decree on the creation and official registration of political parties in Romania. This act meant the renaissance of political parties and political pluralism in Romania, after 45 years of absence. Returning to Romania in 1990, right after the decree was issued, Ion Ratiu continued to display the same firm democratic beliefs, as a true moral compass. He passed away in London on January 17, 2000, and, as per his wishes, was laid to rest in his native Romanian town of Turda.

  • May 17, 2019

    May 17, 2019

    WEATHER More than 3,000 fire fighters were deployed on Thursday and Friday to support the authorities and citizens in 22 villages and towns, pumping water out of the houses following the heavy rainfalls and flash floods of recent days. The most affected counties were Bistriţa Năsăud and Mures, in the centre, Gorj and Teleorman in the south, Hunedoara in the south-west and Maramureş in the north. Scores of people have been evacuated in Bistriţa-Năsăud County over the past few days, hundreds of households, company offices and public institution headquarters have been flooded, and hail damaged the farms. The National Meteorology Agency has extended the alert for unstable weather across the country until Sunday.




    INFLATION The Governor of the National Bank of Romania, Mugur Isărescu, has presented today the institutions quarterly inflation report. The Central Bank updated its year-end inflation forecast to 4.2% and estimates an inflation rate of 3.3% for 2020. Inflation has reversed the downward trend reported in the last quarter of 2018, and prices went up in the first 3 months of this year more than the National Bank had expected, Mugur Isărescu said. He also warned that the demand for products and services is still in excess of what the domestic economy can produce, leading to a rise in imports and a trade imbalance. Inflation in Romania is in fact among the highest in the European Union, alongside the rate in Hungary. According to the central bank governor, in the coming 3 quarters inflation will remain above target, and is expected to go down later on to around 3.5%.




    CEREMONY The President of Romania Klaus Iohannis decided to postpone the May 20 ceremony at Cotroceni Palace, when the year 2019 was scheduled to be declared the “Year of Gratitude honouring the victims of communism, 30 years after the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. The Presidency announced on Friday that the head of state wants to remove any suspicions that the event may be used for electoral purposes. According to the same source, ever since taking over his office, the President has constantly worked to condemn the crimes and abuse committed by the communist repression system, and to pay tribute to the victims of totalitarianism.





    ECOFIN The Romanian Finance Minister Eugen Teodorovici is chairing on Friday in Brussels the EU Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN), as part of Romanias presidency of the Council of the EU. According to a news release from the Finance Ministry in Bucharest, the agenda of the meeting includes the Directive on the structure of excise duty on alcohol and alcoholic beverages, the Directive on general arrangements for excise duties, the digital services tax, and a review of the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions. Also on Friday, the Romanian Finance Minister attends the Economic and Financial Dialogue between the EU and the Western Balkans and Turkey.




    SWINE FEVER African swine fever is still present in Romania, in 84 villages in 16 counties, the National Veterinary and Food Safety Authority announced. Of the around 400 active outbreaks, 10 are in agricultural holdings. More than 365,000 pigs have been slaughtered so far because of this disease, which was first reported in 2017, in Satu Mare County. African swine fever does not affect humans, but has a major negative economic and social impact.




    EUROVISION Ester Peony, representing Romania in the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest with a piece called On a Sunday, failed to qualify to Saturdays finals in Tel Aviv, where the second semi-final was held on Thursday night. Romanias best performances in this competition were 2 third places, won by Luminiţa Anghel & Sistem in Kiev in 2005, and by Paula Seling and Ovi in Oslo in 2010, and a 4th place won by Mihai Trăistariu, in Athens, 2006.



    (translated by: Ana-Maria Popescu)

  • Remembering the victims of communism

    Remembering the victims of communism

    President Klaus Iohannis has signed
    a decree to decorate the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and Resistance in
    Sighet and the Memorial of the Revolution of 16-22 December Timisoara
    Association. The decision is intended to mark the 30th anniversary
    of the Romanian Revolution this year, as appreciation and
    recognition for their important research into the phenomenon of totalitarianism
    and for the promotion of national and European values. Sighet and Timisoara,
    in the north-west and west, respectively, are essential landmarks on the map of
    communist terror. Founded, under the aegis of the Council of Europe, by the
    poet and dissident Ana Blandiana, the Memorial is located in a former prison where
    dozens of people were held and killed, including democrats, generals and church
    officials from the inter-war period. As for the association from Timisoara, it
    brings together many of those who, in December 1989, sparked the fire of the
    Revolution that led to the flight of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.




    President Klaus Iohannis has also
    announced plans to declare 2019 the Year of Gratitude, an announcement he will
    make on 20th of May, the date when the first free elections in
    post-communist Romania were held back in 1990. Klaus Iohannis:




    It’s the year when I want us to
    show our gratitude for those who made possible the great change that took place
    in December 1989. More critical voices have asked me why, then, start in May?
    It’s simple: I want to declare 2019 the Year of Gratitude, ending in December
    with a big celebration in honour of the 1989 Revolution and beginning when
    democratic vote began in Romania. The first free elections in Romania were held
    on 20th of May 1990.




    The president’s announcement has
    been hailed by many voices from the political scene, civil society and the
    media, but has also been severely criticised. Given that he has already announced plans to
    run for a second term, president Iohannis is accused of turning the homage to
    the anticommunist resistance into a campaign theme. A possible rival in the
    presidential race, Senate speaker Calin Popescu-Tariceanu says the initiative
    seeks to use for election purposes a number of emotional elements, the ousting
    of communism, the sacrifice of the martyrs and the rediscovery of freedom.
    Leontin Iuhas, the son of Ceausescu’s most famous opponent, Doina Cornea, who
    was himself arrested by the secret police (the Securitate), says he will not
    take part in the events held under the patronage of the president. Some
    commentators are disappointed that petty electoral considerations risk
    overshadow a tragic theme.


    Instated, at the end of WWII by the
    occupying Soviet troops, the communist dictatorship filled Romania with camps
    and prisons where at least 600,000 people were interned in the space of fifty
    years according to historians. In 2006 in fact, Romania’s previous president
    Traian Basescu issued an official declaration condemning the communist regime
    as criminal and illegitimate. (Trans: C. Mateescu)

  • The fight for peace

    The fight for peace


    Peace has always been a favourite theme in communist propaganda, which often described it in stark contrast to the “war-mongering” capitalism. The champions of Marxism and Leninism often postulated that the oppressed proletariat was peaceful, while the oppressing bourgeoisie favoured conflict in all its forms. The underpinning tenets of Marxism were simple and yet confusing. Even when it fostered the global revolution of the working class that would change the world, the proletariat used violent means to take out the bourgeoisie with the purpose of instating ever-lasting peace once they seized power. The Bolshevik victory of 1917 did not bring peace, quite the contrary. The Soviet Union did everything in its power to stir violent uprisings and chaos both in its vicinity and worldwide. In fact, communism thrived from conflict as much as any other regime and used peace as a means to deceive the people more easily. Therefore Soviet propaganda coined the so-called “fight for peace” slogan, which was not just a blatant nonsense, but also a gross disregard for reality.



    In Romania, the concept of the fight for peace entered the collective consciousness starting with the Soviet occupation of 1944 and became irrelevant with the demise of communism in 1989. In the 1950s, the widespread joke was “we will fight for peace until we tear the whole world down, brick by brick”. The joke was indicative of the slogans inconsistence and was a sign that everyone using the slogan was doing it to obtain personal benefits and climb the party ladder. Peace was one of the main pillars of communist propaganda, even bordering on the grotesque during the regime of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was portrayed as a “hero of peace”.



    Engineer Stefan Barlea was an important communist activist for the youth rights over 1950-1960. In an interview for the Oral History Centre of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation he gave in 2002, he recalled the year 1955 and what it meant for the people:



    “Practically, 1955 was significant in several ways. First of all, Patriarch Justinian published a pastoral letter which we knew of and received very positively. It was the first and only manifesto, at least as far as I know within the Orthodox Church, calling for nuclear disarmament. It was an act of political participation from the Orthodox Church, probably ordered by the state, I dont know for sure. The Lords ways are higher and more mysterious. Everything resulted in a powerful pacifist movement, encouraged and led by the Soviet Union. It started in 1949 and the movement gradually evolved until the World Assembly for Peace was staged in 1955”.



    After the Second World War, it was logical for mankind to want peace. But the Soviet Union had other interests and was promoting ideological peace. Stefan Barlea said his task was to hold public events to this effect:



    “I used to organise youth rallies, two or three every month. In 1950 the second peace congress was held in Warsaw, a world council was established, and, among the official participants, apart from the delegations of the different countries, there were also two youth organisations, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students. Both had their own councils, one in Prague and the other somewhere in Poland. These organisations, which represented the pacifist movement as rightful members of the World Peace Council, asked national youth and student organisations to organise youth events in the spirit of peace. Thats how we ended up organising a series of very large rallies here in Herastrau, in Pavilion H, in the Floreasca Hall. A rally was also held at some point outdoors.”



    Mobilising speeches were held at these rallies. Stefan Barlea remembers how these public events used to be organised:



    “The agenda was set by the Central Committee of the Youth Workers Union and later the Council of Student Associations in keeping with the recommendations of the international councils of these organisations. The speeches were held either by a representative of international youth organisations, in which case this would be a big event and attended by our leadership as well, or by someone local. We held these events in all university centres and all cities, and the only speakers were the activists of the organisation. Maurer, for example, once gave a speech about peace when he was the juridical director of the Academy. The propaganda machine, which was the main instrument by which the new ideology spread across the country, saw to it that there were always materials available to help you write your own speech, and such materials were in high demand among the people. Like all performances, because these were all in effect political performances, these events were staged, and their staging had to respect a few elements. If, for example, the party leadership attended the events, we had someone who choreographed the whole event. There were a few with whom we worked most frequently, such as Hero Lupescu, who used to stage performances for the opera, and also others.”



    The fight for peace disappeared with communism. In order to be achieved, an ideal like peace must not only be invoked, but embraced and applied by everyone and all political regimes.




  • Television and the society between 1960-1970

    Television and the society between 1960-1970





    Between 1945 and 1989 the Romanian mass media was controlled by the Communist power. The process of gaining power over the media was gradual and took place at a fast pace. In mid-1940s the communists took control over the print media and the national radiobroadcaster, and when television emerged, everything was already controlled by the party-state. The Romanian press was mostly propaganda press but television, set up in 1957, was focusing more on social subjects and programs from the West. Journalist Ion Bucheru was the vice-president of the Romanian Radio and Television Corporation in the early 1970s. He had previously worked in the print media and he took his new appointment as a challenge.



    In a 2003 interview to the Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, Ion Bucheru explained that television was an investment that attempted to connect Romania to the world: “It so happened that in 1970 I was asked to work in the Romanian Television. It was the moment when the new television center in Calea Dorobanti had been finished. At the time, it was one of the most modern television centers in this part of Europe, equipped with state-of-the-art technology and the best quality equipment for that time. Unfortunately, the television center was not designed to meet future requirements. When it was designed and built, they envisaged a volume of about 50-55 hours per week for editing, production and broadcasting. The television center was ideal for this amount of work as it had been designed to be functional. It had large production studios, there were three of them and, at that moment, they seemed sufficient. But quite soon, the investment showed its limitations, given the television boom. I was assigned to take over the periodicals, the periodical programs, the social investigation programs, everything that was related to reporting, outside the News and Current Affairs department and the economic news and programs.”



    Of course, the state television’s main mission was propaganda in favor of the regime. And Bucheru admitted to that reality: “A vice-president was expected to coordinate and set the guidelines for certain sectors, and of course to provide the political and ideological orientation of the programs. At that time, between 1969 and 1970, only strictly necessary cultural elements were included in the programs. Subsequently, the whole process started to collapse, at a fast and intense pace. When I started working in television, I was aware of the institution’s general orientation, it was the propaganda press for the party, just as the entire press was. The first item in the Constitution stipulated that all sectors of activity shall be managed by the party, especially the sectors dealing with the spiritual, cultural, political and ideological life. Everybody who worked in the Romanian press before 1989 actually worked for the party press, and that’s a fact! Of course, there was a big difference in the way in which this principle was applied at such publications as “20th Century” and “Literary Romania”, with the latter being a little bit more important as the magazine of the Writers’ Union.”



    VF In the 1970s, the Romanian television was producing 117 programs per week, which was an impressive figure given its capabilities. However, its production was modest in comparison with that of the western public televisions. Even so, the Romanian television assumed a cultural and educational role. Here is Ion Bucheru back at the microphone: “The television’s film repertoire was quite good, although films accounted for a smaller percentage in the Romanian television’s programming than in the western televisions. It included quality films. The selection of film series was good, so Romanians were among the first big consumers of BBC-type TV series. What’s interesting is that Forsyte Saga was broadcast in Bucharest before it was broadcast in Paris. The French had not yet bought Forsyte Saga from the English when the Romanian television was already broadcasting it. The foreign languages program was set up in the 1970s, when I had a mandate to implement a program of teaching foreign languages by means of television.”



    Social programs were very popular in the 1970s, when there was still some freedom of expression, which unfortunately vanished into thin air in the next decade. Ion Bucheru talked about two highly appreciated social programs “Spotlight” and “Social investigation’: “I was in charge of the Spotlight program, as representative of the institution’s leadership. At that time, this was a 20-minute or sometimes 25-minute program aired twice a week while Social Investigation was a 50-minute or even one-hour program at least once every two weeks. These two shows had become a social institution and the five people who were regularly producing the show Spotlight were like prosecutors who were doing their job on a public mandate. They used to receive personal letters, they were called by people who had lost all hope or by institutions that had exhausted all legal methods for solving their conflicts with private persons or other institutions.”



    But, in the late 1970s, the Romanian television stated losing its popularity, its programs becoming more and more boring and focusing more on Nicolae Ceausescu’s cult of personality.


  • The Church and Communism

    The Church and Communism

    However, upon its consolidation, the regime started allowing religious practices as they were no longer considered a threat but a method of currying favour with the population.



    In theory, the communist ideology made a clear distinction between religion and church, although it was blaming both to a certain extent. While religion was considered the primitive mans way of seeing the world, the church was believed to be an instrument for exploiting people. And for this reason, in the communist society, religion was benefitting from mitigating circumstances, something which was denied to the church.



    Once in power, the Communist Party reconsidered its attitude towards religion and Church, which it later included in its cultural policy as elements of national identity. In fact a similar mechanism was in place, with local particularities of course, in all Central and East European Countries, occupied by the USSR after 1945, and Romania was no exception to the rule.



    Engineer Stefan Barlea used to be one of the dignitaries in the communist chain of command and began his activity in the mid 1940s. In an interview to the Oral History Centre of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, back in 2002, he admitted that although he wasnt a practising Christian he had nothing against religion and the Church and hadnt opposed the religious baptism of his two sons, but he hadnt married his wife in church.



    Stefan Barlea: “I didnt have a particular stance on that matter, but my mother, mother-in-law and my grandmother decided to take the situation in their own hands. I realized they had gone to church because I sensed a certain scent of basil in the house. ‘May they live long! we all said about the kids and that was all. I know that one of them was baptized in the Church of Casin Monastery, the second was baptized as well but I dont know where. I let the women know I wouldnt attend the religious service but didnt oppose them either. My wife and I didnt have a wedding ceremony in church. We thought of getting one in secret but we eventually gave up the idea. I wasnt particularly against churches, even visited some with family and got some religious education as a child. I recall my grandpa taking me to a church in Prahova and I still carry in my pocket a small icon I got when I was ten or twelve. I wasnt exactly what they called a freethinker.



    Barlea admitted that even before 1989, together with two of his colleagues he conceived a theory combining science and religious representations: “At a certain point, while doing scientific research in the field of cybernetics, I was talking to several prominent figures of Romanias scientific life, engineer Edmond Nicolau and Balaceanu-Stolnici (…) I did some scientific research together with Balaceanu and we came to the conclusion that from a cybernetic viewpoint, intelligent beings on other planets should be very similar to humans because one must have a vertical position to be able to process a wide range of visual information. Why are all the senses located so high in our bodies? Because nature tends to simplify things and there should be a grain of truth in the Bible saying that ‘God created man in His image. I remember I was working at the time with the National Council for Science and Technology and wasnt reluctant to say that.



    Although religion wasnt encouraged, people avoided going to church because there was some sort of mild persecution against those showing a keen interest in religious issues.



    Stefan Barlea: “I dont remember any cases of people being criticized for having their children baptized or for attending a certain religious service in a church or another. I dont remember these people being criticized either in our party meetings or during any of the meetings staged by the Communist Youth Organisation. I dont want to say there werent abuses, but I personally heard of none. Ceausescu was tolerant of these things but his wife was against them. I understand that she was angry that their children, Nicu and Zoe, had visited some famous monasteries in Romania.



    The relationship between the communist regime, on the one hand, and Church and religion, on the other, was a difficult one. Back in the day, the two tried to get along with each other but the social, economic and political deadlock the regime was in made of peoples refuge in religion an acceptable compromise.

  • The Museum of the Communist Consumer

    The Museum of the Communist Consumer

    It is an interactive museum where visitors can see, hear and touch wardrobes, shelves and drawers from a typically communist house. Young people and foreigners who have not experienced the communist times and also those over 30 who might want to remember those times could find the museum experience exciting.



    The museum was set up in 2015 and ever since it has attracted many people from Timisoara as well as tourists. Even if the entry is free, donations in money or objects are accepted.



    Ovidiu Mihaita, one of the museum founders, will tell us how the idea emerged: “I and several friends felt the need to preserve objects typical of a world that was slightly disappearing. As a child, I used to collect stuff, I was a fan of flee markets, I would rummage through the attics and basements of my relatives’ and acquaintances’ houses, as I realized that a whole world was disappearing. You know, people throw away the relics of the past, so it became very clear to me that I had to do something to save them. I decided together with my friends to do that. We simply opened the door to our apartment. We moved away and turned the apartment in what is known today as the Museum of the Communist Consumer.”



    After 5 years of organized collecting, the apartment became crammed with objects. Ovidiu Mihaita: “The apartment is located in the basement of an old German house from the 1930s which also hosts the shows of the theater troupe ‘Aoleu’ as well as the establishment ‘Scârţ-loc lejer’. The place is a hot spot with tourists, it can be easily found, as it is located downtown. The apartment is a typically Romanian apartment from the communist regime, with the children’s room, a dining room, a kitchen and hallways. Each room displays specific objects. In the children’s room visitors can see game cases, toys, copybooks, books, school supplies, satchels, a desk and dolls. The number of exhibits is larger than what Romanians did have in their homes at that time. We’ve been collecting staff for 5 years and we also receive objects from visitors or donations by post. People come over with wardrobes, TV and radio sets and leave them in the courtyard, things are crammed everywhere, but I like that. It’s not a regular museum where you have a white wall and objects on display with a tag on them. We have no captions or tags explaining what the objects represent. People are allowed to touch the exhibits, to rummage through the drawers, shelves and wardrobes, and they do like it.”



    It is an interactive museum, so to say, and visitors have a wide range of reactions. “Young people don’t really know what this museum represents, they are used to living in houses with colored walls, with double-glazed windows and plasma-display TV sets. Many visitors don’t know that there existed rotary dial telephones, which for us is something banal. Those who had the experience of Communism immediately identify the objects. People have different reactions, be they Romanians or foreigners. Those who show more empathy are the people from the countries of the former eastern communist bloc, the Czechs, Poles and Russians, and to our surprise, there are many people from China who come to visit, and some of them start crying when visiting the museum. Also, there are French and German tourists who look at the exhibits in an unsympathetic way, as they don’t understand their symbolism. It’s very interesting to see how people relate to history, depending on their life experiences.”



    In the Museum of the Communist Consumer Romanians who had the experience of Communism will identify such objects as glass milk bottles, glass fish ornaments that used to be placed on the black and white TV telly, books, china figurines, school supplies, toys and furniture typical of that epoch, polyvinyl pencil cases, Chinese fountain pens, herbariums, fairytale books, tin piggy banks with key, chimney sweeper and doctor dolls, ‘Don’t fuss brother’ cardboard games, Aradeanca dolls, Pegas bicycles as well as wall carpets with an ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ design.



    Online statistics show that the Museum of the Communist Consumer is the most visited museum in Timisoara, although it is quite small.



    Ovidiu Mihaita with more: “Many people come to visit, some stay in the museum for 8 hours, others for just 5 minutes. Some listen to music, read, browse through catalogues or play with the toys. Others simply scan the exhibits and leave.”



    The Museum of the Communist Consumer in Timisoara invites you to get an insight into another time and reality.

  • Political opposition in the 1980s – Doina Cornea

    Political opposition in the 1980s – Doina Cornea

    A political figurehead of the Romanian
    anti-communist opposition, 88-year old Doina Cornea passed away in Cluj on May
    4, 2018. In Romania but also in the European civic activism circles, Doina
    Cornea’s name needs no introduction. She was one the intellectuals who put up
    the staunchest opposition against the communist regime in the 1980s Romania.
    Doina Cornea openly expressed her opinions in a country that at that time was
    fearful because of the violence of the then communist regime and the long
    period of time when rights and freedoms had been brutally trampled on.


    Between 1945
    and 1989, in Romania, women paid dearly because of the way the country had been
    led immediately after the end of World War Two. Intellectuals or workers,
    country girls or city dwellers, women in Romania fought and died in the armed
    resistance, alongside their husbands, others had to do time in prison for a
    great many years, with some of them even dying while serving their sentence.
    Famous or unknown, such heroines as Marina Chirca, Ana Simion, Maria Plop,
    Arlette Coposu, Ecaterina Bălăcioiu proudly include the name of dissenter Doina
    Cornea among them. Those figure heads refused to be accomplices to the
    instatement of an utterly inhuman regime in Romania.


    In 1982,
    52-year old teacher Doina Cornea decided she could no longer go hush-hush about
    what was going on in Romania at that time. She wrote a letter to Radio Free
    Europe denouncing the abuse and the way the country was being led by the then
    communist party. In 1996, Doina Cornea gave an interview to Radio Romania’s
    Oral History Center. Back then she recalled how her relationship with the
    communist regime began.


    Doina Cornea: The first text, titled ‘An open letter addressed to all those who have
    never stopped thinking’ primarily targeted teachers, whose moral obligation was
    to always say the truth to those they educate. It was a great lesson l also
    learned during the Stalinist regime, from my former professor at the Faculty of
    French Philology, Mr Henri Chaquier. I was very much impressed with that idea
    he tried to instill in our souls and our minds, since that was the age of the
    most horrendous Stalinist regime, it was in the 1950s, or thereabouts. All the
    time I felt there was something urging me to write it, even against my will.
    But I did not want to sign that letter. I wrote it, my daughter dispatched it,
    she came to the country for the first time after she had left, and I went
    something like, ‘I am not going to sign the letter, they should present it just
    as they want to.’ I drew a line at the end of the text, but, in order for them
    to be certain it was an authentic text and not a ‘fabricated’ one, written on
    somebody else’s behalf, I wrote the following: ‘For Radio Free Europe, Doina
    Cornea, a teaching assistant with the Faculty of Philology’.


    Doina Cornea
    was afraid to cry out her revolt, and she confessed so many times. Yet a new revelation of her existence was
    honor, which made Doina Cornea regain her strength, having heard her name on
    air at the then most strongly blamed foreign radio station.

    Doina Cornea: I was in Vama Veche with my husband, who
    did not know anything about the text, neither that it was written nor that it
    was snail-mailed, and I brought my radio receiver with me. I didn’t listen to
    Free Europe too often, but this time I insisted to take the receiver with me.
    ‘But what’s got into you?’ he asked. And I told him I wanted to listen to Free
    Europe. There were two beds in those peasant rooms, I was sitting in the near
    bed, my husband in the second one, and the radio receiver was on the window
    sill. And when I heard the voice on the radio going ‘let’s just say , my blood curdled. I’m telling you, I was more afraid of my husband
    than I was of the political repercussions. There followed a moment of silence,
    and I was waiting for him to start shouting at me. But he did not say anything,
    as if we could no longer breathe. And then I said: ‘What are we going to do
    now?’ And he grabbed my arm and said: let’s go for a walk.


    There followed the meeting, at the workplace, aimed to
    judge and sentence her. Her colleagues, with just a very few exceptions, showed
    no solidarity with her, although some of them tried to find ways to keep her
    away from the rage of the regime.


    Doina Cornea: It was a terrible meeting, I remember rector
    Vlad, whom I love dearly, he was my colleague, and I did not hate him. I
    understood the way in which the system worked. Still, there was something else
    they could have done. But they wanted to hear self-criticism from me, at that
    meeting, and I did not do anything of the sort. They kept asking: ‘What is your
    problem with Mircea Eliade? Why are you saying that intellectuals are liars,
    that economists provide false statistics? I was telling students those things,
    stressing that no society, even a socialist or communist one, cannot be built
    on lies. ‘Why do you say that intellectuals are cowards?’ they’d ask. ‘Because
    they are’, I would respond. At a certain time, I burst into tears, when the
    head of department told me to get a medical certificate and get hospitalized,
    in the psychiatric ward. That’s all I need, to get hospitalized for mental
    problems! That offended me a lot. I cried then, but I said nothing that would
    incriminate me.


    Eventually, Doinea Cornea was fired, but she didn’t let
    them beat her down. She kept writing letters to Free Europe and supported the
    workers’ strike in Brasov, in November 1987. In August 1988 she was placed under
    house arrest, until December 1989, when she faced the bullets of the
    revolution. In 2016, Doina Cornea got one final struck from destiny: the death
    of her daughter Ariadna Combes, who carried the words of her mother to the free
    world.















  • The Goma Movement

    The Goma Movement

    The Ellenpontok (Counterpoints) samizdat, written by a group of Hungarian intellectuals in the 1970s, the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a protest movement of German language writers also from the 1970s, and the Goma Movement, were the most important forms of protest by Romanian society against the communist regime. The Goma Movement is named after novelist Paul Goma, the initiator of the protest.



    Paul Goma was born in 1935 in the Republic of Moldova in a family of teachers, who came to Romania as refugees after Bessarabia was occupied by the USSR in 1944. He published 30 volumes of fiction and memoirs. He was also a political detainee. Cristina Predescu, a professor of political science at the Bucharest University, has explained that there is a difference between the initiator of the protest and the people who supported it.



    Cristina Predescu: “We have this phrase, the Goma Movement, circulating in historical writings, which is the way in which this protest movement is known. In fact, this unfortunate phrase is the name that the Securitate gave the group. In this case, the situation is a bit more complicated, because it is a larger group than Ellenpontok and Aktionsgruppe Banat. I will try to make something of a reinterpretation of this movement. First of all, I will make a difference between who Goma was, as a cultural opponent of the communist regime, and the Goma movement, which is something completely different.



    The relationship between Goma and the regime was sinuous, going from radical opposition to support, especially in 1968, when the new leader in Bucharest, Nicolae Ceausescu, spoke openly against the communist regime in Moscow. Cristina Petrescu: “We look at the opponents of the regime always following the dynamic of the relationship between the opponents and the regime. Goma has the privilege of being one of the longest standing opponents, the most resilient of them, which is a performance even among the people known as being the initiators of movements against the regime. He started by taking part in the student revolt in Bucharest, which coincided with those in Budapest in 1956. He became a political detainee, he was then placed under house arrest, and later reintegrated in the University system. There was an attempt to recruit him as an informer, but that failed. In 1968, he enrolled voluntarily in the Communist Party, in support of the Ceausescu regime, as he himself confessed.



    In spite of all this, Goma remained an unpredictable and uncomfortable interlocutor for the authorities. Cristina Petrescu explains that the leader of the Romanian human rights movement continued to annoy the regime: “Goma stood out by the fact that in the 1970s he was a peak of non-conformism among Romanian writers, because he was the first among Romanian writers to publish outside Romania two volumes, which had been turned down by the censors. One of them was clearly against the regime and spoke about prisoners obsessed with freedom. They were very successful because they were published at a time when Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago when was being translated into other languages, whch is why Goma is referred to as the Romanian Solzhenitsyn.



    Goma again came into open conflict with the communist authorities in 1977 when he signed a joint protest letter that was sent to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe hosted by Belgrade that year, a letter that was read out by Radio Free Europe. The letter denounced the violation of human rights in Romania.



    Professor Cristina Petrescu: “Its a known fact that Goma was the initiator of the human rights movement modelled on Charter 77 from Czechoslovakia, after which he tried to be co-opted by the regime, which he partly succeeded if we look at the articles he published before he was arrested. While in prison, he recanted many of the views he had voiced earlier and was released following international pressure before being expelled and becoming a leading member of the democratic exile until 1989. He remained a controversial figure after 1989 as well, in particular because of the views he held in respect of the Sovietisation of Bassarabia. In conclusion, I would say that Paul Goma is, to a great extent, a forgotten hero of our recent history, in which he hasnt yet found a suitable place.



    This is how the Goma Movement emerged. It included a total number of 430 people who were related, in one way or another, to “The Bearded Man, the code name given by the Securitate (the former political police) to Goma. Some of the best-known figures who endorsed Gomas movement were literary critic Ion Negoiţescu, psychiatrist Ion Vianu and worker Vasile Paraschiv. 186 of them got a passport to emigrate, after the movement was stifled.



    Cristina Petrescu: The Goma Movement is being described as one of the peak moments of mobilization against the former communist regime. It was a movement that numbered some 200 supporters, a figure comparable to the number of supporters of Charter 77. However, the two movements followed completely different paths. While the Goma Movement ended with his arrest, Charter 77 survived the communist regime and gave Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic a president, after the fall of communism.



    On April 1, 1977, Paul Goma was arrested and that same year, on November 20, the line authorities withdrew his, his wifes and his child s Romanian citizenship and they were expelled from Romania. They reached Paris where they sought political asylum, but Goma did not want to apply for the French citizenship. As moral reparation, Goma was given back his Romanian citizenship after 1989.