Radio România Internațional

Category: The History Show

  • The Communist Party, banned

    The Communist Party, banned

     

    The end of WW1, far from clearing the air, fuelled new anger and obsessions, and extreme solutions were considered the most appropriate. Thus, left-wing and right-wing extremism, communism and fascism, monstrous creations of the war, came to dominate the minds of many people. A particularity of the Great War was that neither the victors could enjoy their victory nor the losers could give up thoughts of revenge. It took WW2 for the destructive energies to be consumed.

     

    The new states resulting after 1918 took measures against extremism and for securing their borders. The Kingdom of Greater Romania, also a creation of the Versailles system, took harsh measures to liquidate extremist behaviours that endangered its existence and functioning.

     

    On February 6, 1924, more than 100 years ago, the Liberal government headed by Ion I. C. Brătianu passed the law on legal entities, which made extremist organizations illegal. The two main organizations targeted were the far-right National Christian Defense League, founded in 1923, and the far-left Romanian Communist Party, founded in 1921. The architect of the law, from which the document took its name, was the Minister of Justice Gheorghe Gh. Mârzescu, a law expert and mayor of the city of Iași during the war years.

     

    If the far right reinvented itself in 1927 under the form of the Legionary Movement and was able to operate legally and successfully in public in the late 1930s, the far left, an agent of Moscow in Romania, remained banned until 1944. At the end of WW2, after the Soviet Union occupied Romania and brought the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) to power, the few members of the party made a title of glory out of the fact that they had been members of a banned organization. They were called “illegals” and among them were both those who were in prison and those who, not in prison but out of sight, followed instructions from Moscow.

     

    One of the ‘illegals’ was Ion Bică. The archive of the Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation has an interview with him from 1971 in which he explained how from the camp in Târgu Jiu, where some of the communist militants were detained, they escaped in April 1944 with the help of some people from the administration: “The party had managed to establish a close connection between the militants outside and the militants in prisons and camps. It was going to face a difficult situation. As Hitler’s armies were receiving blow after blow, the party’s activity intensified in the country. The connection between the communists inside and those outside was made through simple people who performed certain jobs in the administrative system of the camp. For example, there were women who, with the dissolution of the camp, left for various localities in the country and to Bucharest. There were women who enjoyed the trust of the communists, they carried notes, correspondence between the communists outside and those inside.”

     

    Anton Moisescu was also an ‘illegal’ and in 1995 he explained what his activity consisted of before the war and during it: “I was still doing the party activity illegally before, but working in a factory and with my real name, known to everyone, but unknown as a party activist or activist with the Union of the Communist Youth (UTC) . This time, however, I had to change my name and not show myself anywhere, so that none of the agents would spot, or they would have arrested me immediately. And then, I lived in a secret house, I carried out my activity at night, I went out to meetings and sessions only at night. I was searched for, but I was not found anywhere by the Security.”

     

    Anton Moisescu also referred to the means of subsistence that an ‘illegals’ had: “We lived off the aid of the group in the Capital. People would collect some money for us because there were only a few of us. There were not many in this situation. The other party members and sympathizers collected for the political prisoners, I also took care of that, with the Red Aid: clothing, food, provisions, money. I would give them what we collected through their relatives, I would send them to prisons. They would also collect for us. We had a secret house where we could live, usually we had nothing to rent, we didn’t have any house in our name. It was the house of a sympathizer where we would stay for a period of time. When something seemed suspicious to us, we would go to another house of another sympathizer and so on. All the time we were in secret houses unknown to the Securitate, to people who were not known as activists either, but only as sympathizers.”

     

    The period of illegality when the Romanian Communist party operated, between 1924 and 1944, was one in which the Romanian state consolidated in terms of legislation administration and economy. The Mârzescu Law was the instrument through which extremism, both right-wing and left-wing, was prevented from hijacking the development of a state that had paid with heavy sacrifice for what it had achieved.

  • The Spark(Scanteia) communist newspaper

    The Spark(Scanteia) communist newspaper

    The press was one of the communist regime’s most powerful weapons regarding propaganda. The freedom of expression and of the press was a right that was gained in the 18th century. It was officially adopted as a universal right as stipulated in Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued in 1789. Notwithstanding, the communist and fascist totalitarian regimes have crippled such a right, turning it into a means of silencing the grassroots.

    In the regimes of the communist parties in Central and Eastern-European countries the entire press revolved around ideology. Yet the parties had their own newspapers, their official voices by means of which the essence of the regime expressed itself.

    In the Soviet Union, there used to be the newspaper Pravda or The Truth of 1912. Pravda still exists in the Russian Federation of today. In communist Bulgaria, until 1990, ”Rabotnichesko Delo” ” Workers’ acts “ was edited. In former Czechoslovakia, the party expressed itself through ”Rudé Právo” or “The Red Justice “, edited until 1995. In the former German Democratic Republic, ” Neues Deutschland” or ” The New Germany” has been issued since 1946 and is brought out to this day.

    In former Yugoslavia “Borba” or “Fight” was edited until 2009 and sparsely reissued ever since. In Poland, ”Trybuna Ludu” Or People’s Tribune could be read from 1948 to 1990. And in Hungary, the press market was dominated by ”Szabad Nép”, ”The Free People “ from 1942 to 1946, and ”Népszabadság” sau ”People’s Freedom” from 1956 to 2016.

    In Romania, the Romanian Communist Party spoke to society through The Spark, Scanteia, in Romanian.
    Founded in 1931, at a time when the Romanian Communist Party was illegal in Romania because it took affirmative action for the dismemberment of the country, The Spak was on and off issued until 1940. It took its name from Iskra or The Spark, Lenin’s newspaper in exile, edited between 1900 and 1905.

    « The Spark » was officially brought out for the first time on September 21st, 1944, as on August 30th The Red Army had occupied Bucharest, imposing the communist regime on the entire Romanian territory, until 1947. Art critic Radu Bogdan was interviewed by Radio Romania’s Oral History Centre in 1995. Born in 1920, the young Bogdan was a sympathizer of the communists and he had sporadic contacts with Romanian Communist party members in the war years. He became active immediately after the Soviets entered the country. Here he is, reminiscing, in 1995, how he contributed to the re-editing of the party newspaper.

    ”How did The Spark start? There were five of them, whom the party tasked with the editing of the first issue. Matei Socor headed the five: they Pavel Chirtoacă, engineer Solomon, Radu Mănescu and Iosif Ardelean, who later on had a job with the censorship.

    So it started with these five, with engineer Solomon having administrative duties. Then, in my head, I wanted to do journalism, I didn’t know how to start. Hearing that Radu Mănescu was going to publish a newspaper, I introduced myself and asked if I could join as well, that I wanted to do journalism. As a result, I was invited to take a seat and do volunteer work. It was the so-called romantic period; we were dealing in ideals! I can tell you that I have done proofreading. My colleague was Mirel Ilieșiu, a film director. So, I got a foothold there since the first issue of The Spark.”

    In the pages of the newspaper, idealistic communist intellectuals, older or newer opportunists, expressed themselves with extreme violence against democracy. One of them, Silviu Brucan, who survived the entire history of the regime and also had a public career after 1989, was among the most active. Radu Bogdan remembered the alert activity of the press in those years, especially that of The Spark, led by the sociologist Miron Constantinescu.

    “Matei Socor was at the head of The Spark only one day. After that, Matei Socor was moved to the national radio station, and became general manager. A few days after the first issues of Spark, Miron Constantinescu came, he came fresh from prison. We often did night work at The Spark. I slept next to him on the same mattress in the first days, on the floor, there were no beds there.

    The first editorial office of the newspaper Spark operated in the building of the former newspaper Curentul, headed by Pamfil Şeicaru. I was also Miron Constantinescu’s bodyguard during that period. But that’s just like those scarecrows in the field that aren’t real, because we weren’t walking around armed. But he went to the General Confederation of Labor every day and didn’t want to seem like he was walking the street alone, so he always took me with him. I looked like that, quite strong, I was tall. I didn’t have to face any attack. But for a few months I was like a kind of shadow for him.”

    In the following 40 years, The Spark was what her peers were, a simple propaganda rag that hid the material shortages and the brutal violations of rights faced by Romanians. Over the years, important names in Romanian science and culture published articles in the newspaper, the list of collaborators being a long one. For posterity, The Spark case is an example of how the press should not be.

  • Securitate and the KGB parting ways

    Securitate and the KGB parting ways

    The most feared institution of the Romanian communist state was the political police known as Securitate, created on the model of the NKVD, which would later become the KGB. A structure with a double role, informative and repressive, the Securitate was until the end of the 1950s under the total control of the KBG, as was the whole of Romania. But from the beginning of the 1960s, the so-called “policy of Romania’s independence from the USSR” meant a divorce of the Securitate from the KGB, and therefore its emancipation. The Romanian leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was the one who started the divorce procedure with great tact.

    General Neagu Cosma was an officer in the Counterespionage Directorate of the State Security Department, which he also led. In 2002, interviewed by Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, he recalled how the Securitate broke up with the KGB.

    Neagu Cosma: “When the Soviets were here and they were powerful, they had advisors and they had their people in command, both in politics and in the line of special services, so things were solved easily. They would solve everything Kremlin style. Massive arrests were conducted, for well-grounded or no so well ground reasons, many times for minor things. The role of the advisor, who was a KGB officer, was to advise the unit commander. There was a head advisor, at ministry level, and then unit advisors. The head advisor was supposed to advise at the request of the commander, respectively at the request of the minister. If I had a problem of orientation, of technique, of work methodology, I would give him the task and he, , so it was said, was supposed to come up with a solution. You would use it or not. This was his theoretical role. Basically, he would interfere in everything. In reality, the Soviet advisors were also heads of spy networks, of their own networks, which existed in the Securitate structures as well.”

    Suffocated by the omnipresence of the Soviets, the Romanians were trying to find a solution.

    Neagu Cosma: “At one point, Minister Drăghici, desperate that they were getting in everywhere, called us and said: And because the Soviets were very aggressive after the events in Hungary, we suddenly found ourselves with 6 advisors in the Directorate. I didn’t really know what they were doing. They were gathering information, there was actually had no explanation for their presence. According to a governmental convention, there had to be an adviser to the commander. The explanation was that they had to take the pulse of the place, they were afraid that something was happening here and they were sent to watch closely”.

    In the early 1960s, Dej decided that a limit had been crossed in the Romanian-Soviet relations. The Securitate Information and Documentation Center was used to eliminate the presence of the KGB agency. A team of 5-6 serious and discreet officers coordinated by Neagu Cosma started drawing up a table.

    Neagu Cosma: “By ’62, I think we had reconstituted a large proportion, maybe 80%, of their network on the territory of our country. We had no other kind of mission but only to reenact it, to know it. Some tables were made from top to bottom, that was the network, with short comments and notes. The tables included the old network that was active around here, the network that had come with the Tudor Vladimirescu division, with the Horia Cloşca and Crişan division, those who had been parachuted during the war around the country, men of the Russians. And these tables were presented to Gheorghiu-Dej.”

    The Romanians’ strategy was simple. The Soviet spies were told that all their activity was known, they were offered pardon and asked to stop collaborating with the KGB. Otherwise, they would be prosecuted. Most accepted the offer of the Securitate. Neagu Cosma spoke about the first criterion that was the basis of the inclusion on the table.

    Neagu Cosma: “In the first phase, I think I had about 180 spies on the table, from all over the country. To these were added those with less certain situations, but with solid indications that they could be Soviet spies. For example, they came from schools in the Soviet Union married to Russian women. Apparently, it was nothing, it was normal in a normal regime. But with the Russians it didn’t work like that, I knew the rule. Those who came with Russian girls for us were suspects. And then, the Russian women, first of all, we registered them all, and they were quite a few. They were married to soldiers who held high positions in the army and at the Ministry of the Interior. In the political apparatus there were a lot of those married to Russian women. Of course there were exceptional people who were affected, but the general measure was that in the end we evacuated all of them from the main institutions.”

    The Securitate and the KGB parted ways in the early 1960s. But both institutions retained, until 1989, the same character as repressive institutions of a repressive political regime. (MI)

  • Vasile Luca

    Vasile Luca

    From the end of World War II in 1945 until 1989, the Red Army imposed communist party regimes in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. They were led by leaders obedient to Moscow who did not hesitate to remove their comrades when they became competitors. Especially until Stalin’s death in 1953, the pattern of behavior was the same in all communist countries: democracy in the party meant settling personal disputes with a bullet in the back of the head or throwing in prison. It was also the case of Vasile Luca, illegal communist activist and important leader after 1945. After a dispute with Gheorghiu-Dej and his group, Vasile Luca would end up in Aiud prison in 1963.

    Vasile Luca was born in 1898 in Covasna, a county with a majority Hungarian population that was then in Austria-Hungary. Regarding his ethnicity there are disputes, some historians and memorialists state that he was ethnically Hungarian, others that he was ethnically Magyarized Romanian. It is certain that Luca was a fluent Hungarian speaker and in 1919, during the Hungarian Soviet Republic led by Bela Kun, he was already a communist and an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union. After the Hungarian communist revolution was liquidated by the Romanian army, Luca became a railway worker and became involved in the illegal activities of the Communist Party in Romania and in the organization of labor strikes, such as the Lupeni miners’ strike of 1929, and Valea Jiului in 1933. He also held positions in the party hierarchy, secretary of the organizations in Brașov and Iasi. For his subversive actions he was arrested several times, but released after serving small sentences. After the Soviet Union occupies Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in June 1940, he is released, receives Soviet citizenship, and even becomes a deputy in the Supreme Soviet during the war years. He received the rank of major in the Red Army and had an intense activity among the Romanian prisoners in the USSR, urging them to enroll in the “Tudor Vladimirescu” division, a division with an essential role in the sovietization of the Romanian army after 1945.

    After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Romania was occupied by the Soviets, like the other East-Central European countries, and the Romanian Communist Party became the agent of profound changes in Romania. Vasile Luca, part of the so-called Muscovite group, together with Ana Pauker and other communists from the USSR, will be the favorite to occupy a high position in the state. It would happen on November 5, 1947 when he is appointed Minister of Finance in the government led by Petru Groza. In the speech held on New Year’s Eve 1947-1948, Petru Groza himself wanted to note the co-optation of the Pauker-Luca couple in the new government team. “The arrival of Mrs. Ana Pauker at the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of Mr. Vasile Luca at that of Finance and, recently, of Mr. Emil Bodnăraş at National Defense, allowed the faster development of our popular democracy. The changes in the government contributed to the conclusion of a fair economic-financial policy of the democratic regime, and to the consolidation of the national currency.”

    But the group led by Dej, of communists who had served many years in prison in Romania, opens hostilities against the “Muscovites”. In May 1952, following the typical Stalinist trials, at the plenary of the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers’ Party, Luca is accused of right-wing deviationism and anti-party activities, and excluded. In August 1952, he was arrested and tried, and in 1954 he was sentenced to death for treason. Later, his sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. Vlăduț Nisipeanu was, at that time, a young communist. In 1999, interviewed by the Oral History Center of Romanian Broadcasting, Nisipeanu remembered the famous plenary.

    “I remember very well that plenary in 1952 when Vasile Luca and Ana Pauker were exposed, removed from the leadership of the party, and arrested. I didn’t go to the plenary, I was young then, I was 19 years old. I was too young, but I was interested in this work. I was also curious what was happening that we had to take down the portraits from the walls. One would pick them up and another would put them down. I didn’t throw them, I turned them to face the wall, because maybe I may need them again. One of them asked me what I was doing with the paintings and I answered that I had taken them to the attic. I was told to be careful with them, I still kept them. Then the first secretary made us a processing. He told us that it was the plenary session of the party leadership that had exposed the deviation to the right, or to the left in other cases, of this group that wanted to remove Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, our dear leader. But the truth, if you somehow looked for it, you found in the middle, in the center. But who was looking for the center? No one was looking for this thing. Their portraits were thrown away, their arrest and punishment followed.”

    In 1968, Nicolae Ceaușescu, in his intention to resolve former intra-party disputes, also rehabilitated Vasile Luca, along with the other communists liquidated by Dej. But history took its deserved revenge on one of those who had put their full efforts towards crime and lawlessness.

  • The Romanian Communist Party and the Agrarian Reform

    The Romanian Communist Party and the Agrarian Reform

    According to the Marxist-Leninist theses about means of production, property had to be common, owned by all those who used it and created added value. Private property was demonized and considered the source of all evil and the “exploitation of man by man,” as the official propaganda put it. In the countryside, where land was the main means of production, private property had to be liquidated. This was the case in the Soviet Union after 1918 and in all countries militarily occupied by it after 1945, although the New Economic Policy inaugurated by Lenin in 1921 allowed some form of private ownership in agriculture. After Lenin’s death in 1924, private property in agriculture was liquidated, the former middle-class owners, the so-called kulaks, being considered class enemies and deported to the camps of the Gulag system.

    The liquidation of private property in agriculture, euphemistically called “agrarian reform”, began in Romania on March 6, 1945, after the installation of the communist government led by Petru Groza. As early as January 1945, the National Democratic Front, the alliance of political factions led by the RCP, encouraged peasants to forcibly occupy areas of arable land larger than 50 hectares. One of the first laws promoted by the Groza government was Law no. 187 of March 23, 1945 for the implementation of agrarian reform. The intention was to appropriate the landless peasants by expropriating without compensation some properties larger than 50 hectares. Along with the arable land, the agricultural machinery was also confiscated from the owners. The measure was part of the arsenal of communist propaganda announcing the liquidation of the exploitation of the peasantry and was to be intensively used propagandistically in the elections of November 19, 1946.

    In practice, however, the abolition of private property meant the beginning of a whole series of gross violations of human rights and brutality up to homicide. It meant encouraging tensions between peasant classes and resorting to terrorizing the population by armed gangs of the Communist Party against those who refused to give up their property. The climate of violence and instability created by the government was later recognized even by communist activists such as Ion Paicu. In 1971, in a recording from the archives of Radio Romania’s Oral History Center. Paicu recollected how the so-called agrarian reform took place in Mehedinți county, in southwest Romania, in which he had personally participated.

    “For the agrarian reform, we had to make serious efforts because we had enough trouble with the former landlords who opposed the division of the land with guns in hand. We had cases, Istrătescu from Bâcleş, Bumbaru from Malovaţ, Ionică Ionescu, who even shot a Soviet when the Soviet armies were coming. They received their reward. Against such landlords we sent comrades, groups of workers, who managed to mobilize the people because the peasants were scared. I want to say that, without the support of the working class led by the Romanian Communist Party, the peasantry would not have been able to defeat the tyranny of the landlords, their opposition to the agrarian reform. I want to highlight that the working class led by the Romanian Communist Party and having as an ally the poor peasantry succeeded in defeating the resistance of the landlords, the kulaks.”

    The ruling of the communist party began with an unprecedented populist measure. Land was of great value in the countryside and its redistribution was thought to appeal to those who did not own it. But the communist theory was far from encouraging or helping the formation of private property, on the contrary. Tudor Constantin, active in the trade union movement since 1947, interviewed in 2003 by the Oral History Center of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation, recalled the agrarian reform of the communist party, through which he became the owner of agricultural land near Oltenita, a town located 60 kilometers south- east of Bucharest.

    “They gave me land in ’45. They gave me a plot of land for participating in the war and, after that, when the land was taken from everyone, they said that I was not from the village and they took my land as they did with everyone else. An organization appeared called the Plowmen’s Front, there were two or three who were communists. What communists, they were simple peasants! What did they know about the Communist Manifesto? They went to divide the estate of the boyar. And they went there, 30-40 of them, with stakes. And they marked it and said ! And they started to work it until collectivization.”

    The communist party’s land reform of 1945 lasted until 1949. In fact, there was never for a moment the intention of making a real reform. After King Michael I was forced to abdicate on December 30, 1947 and expelled, the RCP remained the absolute master of Romania and prepared the real reform: forcing all owners of arable land to give up their property and form collective households, in the great process of “socialist transformation of agriculture”. (MI)

  • The Romanian military fleet in WWII

    The Romanian military fleet in WWII

    The history of the Romanian military fleet begins in the middle of the 19th century, when, after the union of the two principalities of Moldova and Muntenia, the commercial river fleets of the two are also united. Until then, the Romanian principalities had not had fluvial and maritime military fleets because they did not have this right, being under the control of the Ottoman Empire, nor did they have access to the sea. With the year 1878, after Dobrogea became part of the Romanian state and it opened up to the seas and oceans, the history of the Romanian maritime fleet also began.

    The Romanian fluvial military fleet participated in the Russo-Romanian-Turkish war of 1877-1878 through military operations on the Danube. The Romanian ships commanded by Nicolae Dumitrescu-Maican and Ioan Murgescu installed dams on the river, attacked Ottoman ships, bombarded the Ottoman positions on the southern bank of the Danube, and even managed to sink two Turkish monitors.

    Over the following period, the Romanian Navy continues to develop and benefit from programs to equip it with combat ships. In 1907, four monitors and eight river patrol boats entered service for the monitoring and defense of the Danube. In the campaign of the First World War, the military fleet on the Danube was engaged in the battle of Turtucaia in 1916, and in the withdrawal of the Romanian army from Dobrogea. The following year, 1917, the Romanian military ships on the Danube commanded by Constantin Bălescu bombarded the German artillery positions in the city of Tulcea, and supressed the rebellion of the Russian ships in the Danube Delta.

    After 1918, the upgrade of the Romanian military fleet continued. New types of military ships entered service for the maritime fleet, such as the destroyers Mărășești, Mărăști, King Ferdinand and Regina Maria, the first Romanian submarine, Delfinul, and the second generation training ship Mircea.

    In the Second World War, the Romanian military navy engaged with two large units, the Sea Division and the Danube Division. The Sea Division had 4 destroyers, 3 torpedo boats, 3 minesweepers, one submarine, 3 torpedo boats, 8 , and a flotilla of seaplanes. The Danube division consisted of 7 monitors and 6 patrol boats. The Romanian Black Sea coastline was defended by a barrage of mines 12 nautical miles away and coastal artillery. Due to the disproportion in favor of the Soviet navy, the Romanian navy had a defensive attitude in the first phase of the war. On June 26, 1941, a few days after Romania entered the war for the liberation of Bessarabia and Bucovina annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, the destroyers Mărăști and Regina Maria and the Dobrogean coastal batteries sank the Moskva, the flagship of the Soviet flotilla that was approaching the Romanian shore, and damaged the destroyer Kharkov. With the movement of the front to the east, the Romanian military navy moves to actions supporting the land troops who were fighting in Odessa and Sevastopol. Until August 23, 1944, Soviet ships no longer approached the Romanian shore, but Soviet submarines were real dangers. A large-scale operation in which the Romanian military navy was involved was the evacuation of Romanian and German troops from the Crimean peninsula, called “Operation 60,000”. Sources show that approximately 36,000 Romanian soldiers, 584,000 German soldiers, 720 Slovak soldiers and 25,000 Soviet prisoners and citizens were rescued as a result of that operation.

    After August 23, 1944, when Romania went over to the Allied side, the Romanian navy came under Soviet control, and their ships and personnel were arrested. In 1999, the officer Nicolae Koslinski, the son of Admiral Gheorghe Koslinski, who died as a political prisoner in the Aiud prison in 1950, told the Oral History Center of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation how he was on the torpedo boat Vulcanul on the night of September 4 to 5, 1944.

    “Around 4:30 in the morning, hearing some noises outside, I jumped out of bed, took my gun and put it in my pants pocket. I went to the door where the phone operator on duty informed me that some Russians were coming. And indeed, in the larger bedroom where I was sleeping, a Russian entered with a balalaika [Russian submachine gun] pointed at me, followed by others, who asked me to give them my pistol. First I told them dobrîi vecer and they looked a little surprised, then they asked me for the gun. I raised my hands and said nyet pistol. A Russian non-commissioned officer came to me, felt my pocket. But probably, the pistol being a small Beretta type, and with my handkerchief over it, he didn’t realize it was there. He looked at my hand that held my belt rolled up, and he threw that away, he thought it was a gun. He said to get dressed, said that we were going to a meeting at the maritime station.”

    The Romanian ships are taken to the USSR. On the way, for unknown reasons, the gunboat Dumitrescu and the submarine Porpoise sink. After a few years, the Soviet authorities returned to the Romanian government 23 ships, most of them old and non-functional, including two destroyers, several torpedo boats, and several gunboats. But it should be noted that men from among the ranks of the Romanian navy also participated in the anti-communist resistance movement, such as Admiral Horia Macellariu.

  • Ana Pauker

    Ana Pauker

    Ana Pauker is one of the most conspicuous figureheads in the history of the communist regime in Romania. Ana Pauker played a crucial part in the team that instated the regime of the Communist Party in Romania, between 1947 and 1952. She was also a member of the Petru Groza government, the Communist Party’s first government in Romania. Ana Pauker also held positions in the Romanian Communist Party’s top-notch hierarchy, as well as in the hierarchy of then the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.

    Ana Pauker was born in the eastern Romanian county of Vaslui, in 1893. Her name was Hana Rabinsohn and she was born into a Jewish family: her grandfather was a rabbi. In France, in 1920, Hana met her future husband, Marcel Pauker, also a Jew. The Bucharest-born Marcel Pauker was a radical communist, and his wife Ana joined him in then the Comintern’s activities.

    Ana Pauker became a Soviet agent; she was arrested in 1922 and 1935. In 1941 she was released from prison and went to the then USSR. While still in prison, in 1938 Stalin had her husband executed on the grounds of Marcel Pauker’s being a Western spy. During the war, in Moscow, Ana Pauker was the head of the exiled Romanian group of communists, known as the Moscow faction.

    In 1994, Radio Romania’s Oral History Centre interviewed Ana Pauker’s son-in-law, Gheorghe Brătescu. He took the liberty to quote from a Soviet document, whereby his mother-in-law was appreciated for her qualities but also criticized for her inabilities:

    ”Her characterization, dated 1946, among other things, included the following: ‘among the RCP leaders, comrade Ana Pauker is the best prepared, theoretically, having a great influence among party members. That is why she is the one who, in fact and in all respects, leads the activity of the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee. She is very popular with the Romanian people as a result of her illegal communist activities of the past. Apart from her activity in the position of Central Committee Secretary, she heads the parliament’s communist group. She ensures the RCP’s collaboration with the other parties of the Democratic Bloc. She plays an active part in the activity of Women’s International Anti-Fascist Federation. Nevertheless, comrade Ana Pauker has a major weakness as an organizer. She does not use her influence hard enough, but also her authority, for the strengthening of the party ideologically and in terms of its organization’. “

    For Ana Pauker, the end of World War Two and the presence of the Soviet Army in Romania acted as a true launching pad, giving her access to then the political power’s top level. Ana Pauker was elected Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee. After the forced abdication of King Mihai I on December 30, 1947, she was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.

    The early 1950s meant her downfall. In 1952, then the communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej began the elimination of the competing groups. Ana Pauker was a member of such a group, which also included her comrade Vasile Luca. Charged with right-wing deviationism and sabotage, the members of the group were given a prison sentence. Lucretiu Patrascu, one of Gheorghiu Dej’s avowed opponents, was executed. In 1953, Ana Pauker received a home confinement sentence. In 1954, she was expelled from the Communist Party. She lived until 1960 and earned her keep working as a translator of French and German with the Political Publishing House, yet officially she did not have the right to sign her work. She was a member of the translators’ team that created the first complete Romanian-language edition of Marx and Engels’ works.

    After 1965, then the new leader Nicolae Ceaușescu tried to rehabilitate some of the victims of Dej. Gheorghe Brătescu said Ana Pauker was not among them. Gheorghe Bratescu gave us details about her life.

    ”Never ever has there been an attempt to do that. Moreover, she did her work at the Political Publishing House in quite abnormal circumstances. She didn’t even get her salary from there; it was sent to her through the cleaning woman. The latter dispatched the materials the former was supposed to write, and on that occasion, the salary was being sent to her.

    As long as Gheorghiu-Dej lived, she was considered the most dangerous person, especially after the killing of Patrascanu. Which explains why, as regards her political activity, it was not until 1968 since her political activity had been spoken of. Moreover, in 1961, one year after she died, all her decorations were withdrawn from her. In other words, even her memory was somehow rated as being dangerous, so there was no such thing as a possible attempt of recovering. “

    1953 and 1960, paying visits to Ana Pauker were several people, among whom lawyer Radu Olteanu, defender of the communists and anti-fascists in the 1930 trials. But Ana Pauker also had another visitor, a former inmate. With details on that, here is Gheorghe Brătescu once again.

    ” She had no problem paying a visit, she was someone who did time with Ana Pauker, her name was Maria Andreescu, she was known as the Little Old Woman. As far as we could see, she also maintained contact with some of the old acquaintances, friends, comrades, admirers of Ana Pauker. When Ana was admitted to the Colentina hospital, then Maria Sarbu came and paid her a visit. And at the funeral, perhaps spurred by this Little Old Woman, that treacherous, opportunistic old man Gheorghe Cristescu participated, he somehow represented the old socialist movement. “

    Ana Pauker was, just like many others, an individual bedazzled by the ideals of a perfect society which, in practice, translated into terror. And she left this world defeated by its harsh reality.

  • Nicolae Titulescu and the Romanian diplomacy in Europe in the 1930s

    Nicolae Titulescu and the Romanian diplomacy in Europe in the 1930s

     

    The diplomacies of countries that gravitate around the powerful ones, always have the mission of being one step ahead of events. They must decipher trends and intentions, if possible even before they occur. Diplomacies of the satellite countries are present in the capital cities and in all the places where important decisions are made. Some of them, even reach privileged positions. That was also the case of the Romanian diplomacy in the interwar period, under the leadership of Nicolae Titulescu (1882-1941).

    The end of  WWI had left behind a tense context and complicated European relations, marked by resentment. The defeated countries from the bloc of Central Powers led by Germany did not come to terms with the provisions of the peace treaties generically called the “Versailles system”. That would have meant legalizing their territorial losses and paying war damages. The emergence of the League of Nations in 1919, that would later be today’s UN, was an attempt to bring representatives of all nations together, at one table, and discuss de-escalation. Romania was a defender of the Versailles System and the League of Nations, through which the status quo would be maintained. One of the most active diplomats for that was Nicolae Titulescu.

    A lawyer by training, Titulescu was born in Craiova, in southern Romania. He was part of the Conservative Party and a supporter of Romania’s entry into  WWI alongside France. After the war, he was minister plenipotentiary in Britain, and between 1928-1936 he served as foreign minister in several governments. As of 1921, he was Romania’s permanent delegate at the League of Nations, being elected twice, in 1930 and 1931, as its president.

    Iosif Igiroșianu was a diplomat discovered by Nicolae Titulescu. In 1997, the Radio Romania Oral History Center interviewed Igiroșianu, who explained why Romania enjoyed a privileged position at the League of Nations and the role Nicolae Titulescu played in obtaining it: “Romania was the only country in the world that had a legation with the League of Nations. That was accepted by the Swiss government to please Titulescu. Titulescu had done many things for the Swiss, he organized most of the gatherings and conferences in Switzerland because he was interested in them as well. And then, of course, all these things were of interest to the Swiss because he suddenly put Geneva in an extraordinary light.”

    Thus, in the structure of Romanian diplomacy, the representative in Geneva, with the League of nations, became even more relevant than the minister in Bern. Titulescu was regarded as a negotiator with important countries, while the one in Bern was considered only an official with ties to the country by which he was sent. Titulescu was the one expected to make friends from among the most important politicians and the most influential diplomats and to create connections that would benefit Romania.

    Titulescu himself was more than a permanent representative of Romania in Geneva. At one point, he was requested to mediate a reconciliation between the French and British governments. A friend of the French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, he was considered a very nice man, with a lot of distinction and a lot of tact.

    The dispute between the French and British governments emerged over how Germany should be treated. France and Britain had generally gone hand in hand on security guarantees in Europe after WWI. The two had forced the signing of the Treaty of Locarno in 1925 which guaranteed France’s eastern borders. But at the beginning of the 1930s, Britain had proposed France a taming of the policy towards Germany, a proposal that France did not take kindly to due to the fear of the revival of German militarism. British suspicions went further, to the idea that France was trying to dominate Europe more than Germany was capable of. In that context, Titulescu was asked to come in. His role is explained by Iosif Igiroșianu: “The high profile diplomats, out of vanity, did not want to request meetings with the other side. Contacts were not being made through ministries, they were made through the heads of governments or major political figures. So they needed Titulescu. He had been a minister in England for a long time, he had many friends, and then the French did not want to ask the English to meet, and the English did not want to ask the French to meet. They wanted everything to be arranged through a third person who would probe the mentalities, the attitudes, and discuss with every party.”

    In 1936, Titulescu was removed from public office in Romania because of he was against fascism and went into exile to Switzerland and then to France. He died in Cannes in 1941, disappointed by the course that history had taken.

  • The early days of BBC’s Romanian-language broadcasting

    The early days of BBC’s Romanian-language broadcasting

    In the world of radio broadcasting, the BBC needs no introduction. The BBC is one of the landmarks without which the history of radio broadcasting cannot be written. In its centenary existence, holding a special place is the BBC’s Romanian-language service.

    The early days of the BBC’s Romanian-language broadcasting are linked to the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939, so in September 2024 we celebrate the service’s 85 years of broadcasting. We should emphasize, at this point, Great Britain’s extremely important influence which justified the very existence of the BBC, given that after 1945, at the end of the war, the world’s geopolitical stage became even more complicated that it had been before.

    In 1997, Radio Romania’s Oral History Canter interviewed one of the first journalists who used to work for the BBC’s Romanian-language Service, Liviu Cristea. He was a BBC anchorman from 1939 to 1971.

    Liviu Cristea reminisced the beginnings of the service and the tests that were made to that effect

    ”At this radio station trials were made like some sort of test time, carried by people who had been recommended by the Romanian Legation. Some of the Brits’ radio stations where thereby checking if the broadcast was audible in Romania, at once checking whether the voices behind the mic were suitable or not. However, the first team that took over the editing work was made of four people: a Finance Ministry official, Niculae Gheorghiu, who was in London on a training stage, a history professor, Ion Podrea, who was sent by the Iorga Institute to do his research, a legal expert furthering his comparative law studies, that was me, and a young student of the London Polytechnic, Jose Campus.”

    In the beginning, the Romanian-language broadcast was a 15-minute news bulletin. It kept Romanian listeners informed with news from the international and British press. The war had broken out and the Poles, officials or ordinary people, were withdrawing to Romania, in a bid to reach the West. The slot was broadcast from the Broadcasting House in Portland Place lying in central London, it was from there that, for the first time ever in Romanian, the announcement was heard: “This is Radio London.”

    When the German bombs damaged the building, the service was relocated to a hotel and from there to a skating rink. Liviu Cristea also said that fairly rapidly he and his colleagues adapted to the demands of the job. Here he is once again, giving us details on how the editorial work was organized.

    ”Shortly afterwards, the anchormen’s voices had become a reliable and identifiable source of information that also provided a gleam of hope in the grim days. At the same microphone science specialists offered their opinions, but also columnists, professors, trade union members, writers, army people, underground frontline fighters, refugees and prisoners who had escaped from the labour camps, or prisoners of war. The materials received by the editors of the Romanian section had already been processed in a central editorial office. The stuff had to be translated and commented upon by the Romanian editors so that it could become as accessible as possible to the average listener. The pieces of news after the outbreak of the war were checked but not censored by diplomatic and military bodies. The press commentaries were selected for each zone the broadcasts targeted, the talks given by prominent journalists sought to place the event or the news of the day against the backdrop that appeared at that particular moment. “

    The state of war demanded that the BBC broadcasts in Romanian, just like in the other foreign languages, be closely monitored. Liviu Cristea:

    ”Available for us from the very beginning was a so-called monitoring service, that is a service listening to the broadcasts from the country and from other parts. Those who closely monitored the broadcasts proper in front of the mic were supposed to monitor closely that, behind the mic, we should not read something different than what was written in the news bulletins, we should not improvise anything even with one single word, we should not stray away from the text that had been approved of by the section head prior to going to the mic. And those gentlemen who kept an eye on us were George Campbell, doctor Morrison and a gentleman who back in the day used to be a high-ranking employee of an oil company in Romania and whose command of Romanian was excellent. “

    In the building of the BBC, Liviu Cristea also recalled his seminal encounter with a character that would make history in the troubled 20th century.

    “ As I was passing by the janitor’s desk, there was a French officer there who was somehow embarrassed because he and the janitor could not understand each other. The man was a French army officer, wearing a French uniform so offered him my help right away and I asked him to tell me what it was all about. He was extremely blunt and kind of vexed as he answered me: ‘ I am colonel de Gaulle, I come from the front line and I have a meeting. I am already 5 minutes late and I don’t understand why I am being kept here and why nobody welcomed me at the reception’. I was deeply touched when later on I discovered that the one-star colonel was general de Gaulle who, as we know, led the French resistance and then he was the one who created the first post-war political structure in France.”

    The BBC’s Romanian-language service is now 85 years old. All along, the BBC was one of the citadels defending human rights, until 1989. It still is, to this day.

  • Restored Romanian monuments in Bessarabia

    Restored Romanian monuments in Bessarabia

     

    On March 27, 1918, Bessarabia, stretching between rivers Prut and Dniester, united with Romania after it had been annexed by Russia in 1812 following the Russo-Ottoman war. Thus, after more than 100 years, a territorial theft that had torn Bessarabia from its state tradition, was being repaired. The Russian occupation of Bessarabia meant, especially after 1830, a policy of promoting Russians in an area of ​​conflict with the Ottoman Empire. After 22 years, in June 1940, following the agreement between Hitler and Stalin in the summer of 1939, the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia. In 1941, Romania would liberate it and by 1944 the life of the Bessarabians would resume its natural course.

     

    But at the end of World War II, that started in 1944, the Soviet Union would reoccupy Bessarabia, as well as the entire Central and Eastern Europe, and would impose regimes copied after its own image. Between 1945 and 1989, Soviet brutality was unleashed on the inhabitants of Bessarabia in all imaginable forms: deportations to camps and prisons, population transfers, Stalinist education, other systematic violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms. The extensive process of sovietization meant the creation of the new Soviet man by forgetting one’s origins and erasing the memory of past deeds.

     

    Romania was the main enemy used in the sovietization process of Bessarabia. The phrase “Romanian fascists” was present in every reference to the area west of the Prut river. Among the first victims of sovietization were the public monuments that expressed the will and feelings of the Bessarabian population representing the adherence of most Bessarabian Romanians to their identity as citizens of the Kingdom of Greater Romania. Statues and symbols of personalities of the Romanian history and culture were demolished, destroyed and replaced with statues and symbols of the Soviet occupier. The Soviet monuments expressed strength and aggression to the highest degree, as were some monuments represented by tanks with guns pointing west, towards Romania.

     

    However, as of 1991, when the Soviet Union, a true evil empire as the American President Ronald Reagan called it, collapsed, the Republic of Moldova became independent. Since then, Bessarabians are searching for their origins and are trying to return to the forms of identity of their parents and grandparents. One of the steps taken in this regard is the removal of Soviet monuments and the relocation of monuments from the times when Bessarabia was part of Romania. An exhibition of 28 restored Romanian monuments of Romanian sovereigns, heroes, soldiers and clerics, but also of contemporary cultural personalities such as the singers Doina and Ion Aldea Teodorovici, was inaugurated in Bucharest. The exhibition was also attended by Iuliana Gorea-Costin, the ambassador of the Republic of Moldova in Bucharest.

     

    Iuliana Gorea-Costin: “On the left of the Prut River, the war between light and dark is quite intense and a permanent battle is actually under way for the affirmation of our identity. It is a battle for history, for the Romanian language and literature. The square of the Great National Assembly has been occupied even for months on end. Being at the crossroads of civilizations, we, those within the same nation, need to know each other better. And at the same time, we must join our efforts to survive in this space as wise people.”

     

    Ever since 1991, civic organizations from the Republic of Moldova have undertaken actions to replace the original Romanian monuments and monuments to tell the public about the atrocities committed during the Soviet barbarism. For example, a monument relocated and consecrated in 2016, a copy of the one from the interwar period, is the “Monument of the Three Martyrs” in the capital Chisinau. It is dedicated to fighters for national identity such as the priest and writer Alexei Mateevici (1888-1917), the lawyer, journalist and singer Simion Murafa (1887-1917) and the topographic engineer Andrei Hodorogea (1878-1917). The three died in the terrible year 1917, Mateevici, 29 years old, killed by typhus, and friends Murafa, 30, and Hodorogea, 39, killed by a gang of Bolshevik criminals.

     

    After the war, the Bessarabian politician Pantelimon Halippa established a committee to erect monuments to all Unionist fighters, the three being among them. In 1923, the monument erected in memory of Mateevici, Murafa and Hodorogea was inaugurated at the initiative of the “Tombs of Fallen Heroes” Society, attended also by the French general Henri Berthelot. The three-meter high monument was crowned with the coat of arms of Romania, between an oak and a laurel branch, made of bronze. The monument was 4.35 meters long and 1.92 meters wide at the base. On the eve of the annexation of Bessarabia, in June 1940, the Romanian army detached the bas-reliefs with the faces of Alexei Mateevici and Simon Murafa and sent them to Bucharest. In 1962, the rest of the monument and the bell tower in front of the “Nativity” cathedral where it was located were blown up by the Soviet army. (EE)

  • Desertions in the Romanian Army in WWI

    Desertions in the Romanian Army in WWI

    In a state of war, conscripted into a strict institutional form like the army, the military man is under great pressure. It’s about being alive or not, about the unknown, about consciousness. In the extreme experience of war there is also desertion, a practice that has always been encountered in human history. And, during the first world war or the Great War, soldiers of all armies deserted, and so did those of the Romanian army.

    Historian Gabriela Dristaru from the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History in Bucharest researches the phenomenon of desertion from the Romanian army during the First World War. She looks at her research comparatively and, in doing so, has shown what is the attitude of British society today towards its own cases of deserters.

    “In the English space, research on the subject began in the 1980s, with the declassification of documents subject to a longer classification regime in order to not affect the private lives of the accused and their families. Early texts argued that desertion during the Great War was not based on cowardice, as was believed at the time, but was the result of post-traumatic stress. Therefore, the 321 executions within the army of the British Empire were acts of injustice for which moral reparation was absolutely necessary.”

    The Romanian army entered the First World War in August 1916. After a successful first offensive phase in the north and east, along the Carpathians, it was stopped by the German-Austro-Hungarian armies. In the south, the defeat of the Romanian army facing the Bulgarian-German one put the capital Bucharest in great danger. Following the battles for the defense of the capital, the city was occupied in December 1916, and the Romanian authorities took refuge in Moldavia, to the northeast. In 1917, the Romanian army, with the support of the French military mission led by General Henri Berthelot and the Russian army on the ground, managed to resist the German offensive in the battles of Mărăști, Mărășești and Oituz. The Bolshevik revolution in the fall of 1917 and the disintegration of the Russian army meant that Romania could no longer resist, and concluded peace in March 1918 with Germany and its allies.

    Desertions appeared in the Romanian army after the fall of Bucharest and the retreat to Moldavia. It was a hasty retreat, chaotic at times, as we read in memoir sources. Romanian historians researched the army archives and compiled statistics. Until June 1, 1918, of the trials judged by the courts-martial of the various units of the Romanian army, two-thirds were about desertion and related crimes. Romanian military justice had been organized on the basis of the French Military Justice Code of 1857. In the law, desertion was of several types: desertion within the country, desertion within the country during wartime, desertion facing the enemy, desertion to the enemy, desertion in a foreign country. Disobedience to conscription and mobilization, insubordination, insulting superiors, and self-mutilation were also considered desertions in wartime. To better observe the phenomenon of desertion, Gabriela Dristaru read the court-martial archives of two large units, the 5th and 13th Divisions. Although the punishments for desertion were severe, ranging from death and stripping of rank, those who judged deserters were not hasty, and were lenient, as was the case with the 13th Division.

    “Despite the fact that deserting within the country during wartime was punishable by hard labor for life or even the death penalty, only 3 sentences for hard labor for life and another 3 sentences for the death penalty were pronounced. The 6 who had received the maximum sentences had other charges: murder, robbery, forgery in public documents, insulting a superior. Percentage-wise, most sentences handed down for the crime of wartime desertion were acquittals.”

    The reasons for the desertions were not escape from responsibility or fear, as one would think, but mostly emotional: longing for home, family, the desire to tell their loved ones that they were alive, the fear of leaving them under the occupation of the enemy. The vast majority of deserters returned to their units on their own after an absence of several weeks. Another reason for desertion was dissatisfaction with military and political leaders. Desertions were also numerous in 1917, encouraged by the defeatism of the Russian military and Austro-German propaganda. Here Gabriela Dristaru.

    “Marcel Fontaine, a member of the French military mission, recalled that the opinion of the Romanian commanders was that the deserters were already too numerous to be executed, and the punishments would only have led to the worsening of the situation. In general, nothing could be done to change or improve the state of affairs. It was an assumed defeatism of the commanders, who felt and saw daily around them the disintegration of the Russian army and the imminent end of the war. The propaganda of the Central Powers had diversified and matured, and certainly contributed to the increase in the number of desertions from the Romanian army. The Romanian military authorities found a more pragmatic and effective solution: they replaced the mostly Wallachian divisions on the front line with divisions composed mostly of Moldavians, who had no interest in deserting to the enemy.”

    Desertions from the Romanian army during the First World War were a typical phenomenon for those times. And the defectors of that time are left both with the judgment of their contemporaries and with the clemency of posterity.

  • Radio NOREA

    Radio NOREA

    Between 1945 and 1990, a number of international radio stations used to broadcast in Romanian. These were mainly stations from Western Europe and were targeted at the Romanian public in Romania in an attempt to make up for the failure of domestic stations to cover subjects of interest. One such international station broadcasting in Romanian was that belonging to NOREA, the Nordic Radio Evangelistic Association, a church mission society. NOREA began its first Romanian broadcast in 1971, but it was in fact one man who did it all, namely pastor and journalist Duțu Moscovici.

    The beginnings of Radio NOREA can be traced back to Norway, a country with a majority Christian Lutheran population. The station broadcast from Monte Carlo, in the south of Europe. In time, the association’s station expanded to Denmark, where it set up its first recording studios. In 2000, Radio Romania’s Oral History Centre recorded an interview with Duțu Moscovici in which the latter recounted how he began his career as a radio journalist:

    “I was in Lubeck, in Germany, with my wife, visiting a very famous church. While we were admiring a painting, someone approached us and asked me if I was pastor Moscovici from Romania. I said yet and it turns out I knew the man, he was a Hungarian pastor. At that time, he was working for the Hungarian section of Radio NOREA, in Oslo. I told him I was going to think about it and then after a while I said I agreed to do the Romanian broadcast. That was the beginning.”

    Duțu Moscovici began recording at NOREA’s studio in Oslo. Denmark, which supported the project, built studios in Denmark, and Duțu Moscovici and the Romanian service grew attached to the new location. The pastor would travel once a month from Hamburg, where he lived, to Denmark and do all the recordings for the entire month. The tapes would then be sent to Monte Carlo by post, and Moscovici would always listen to the broadcasts when they were aired to make sure they got the order right. Radio NOREA’s Romanian language broadcast was aired once a week, on Friday, and lasted 15 minutes. Later, it grew to 30 minutes, to be followed by two broadcasts a day, 15 minutes each. It eventually began to broadcast every Saturday and Sunday at 6.30 pm Romania time.

    Duțu Moscovici remembers what the broadcast consisted of:

    “The broadcast began with the words: ‘From Radio Transmondial in Monte Carlo, you are listening to Radio NOREA’s evangelical broadcast in the Romanian language’. This was followed by a short intermezzo of instrumental music, the tune of the German hymn A Mighty Fortress is our God, the traditional song of the Lutheran Church around the world. We would begin with a short presentation of the programme. We would say that we are broadcasting a biblical study, a text about the Bible, or the biography of a missionary. The programme needed to be diverse, but the core was the presentation of a biblical text. We also had ‘words of the week’, a short quotation from the words of some important person, for example Blaise Pascal. We would also have a guest in the programme. I had such interviews with the bishops of Oslo; over 30 years there were a number of bishops and we hosted all of them. Even Norway’s prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik was once a guest.”

    Duțu Moscovici was also asked if he had full freedom with respect to the content of the broadcast:

    “I had absolute freedom. However, there was one condition that we had to observe, but no one ever checked. The condition was not to interfere into political matters and not to have a critical attitude towards other religious denominations. We had to stick exclusively to the preaching of the gospel. The programme in Romanian was written by one person, me. Undoubtedly, many others contributed to the programme, but in fact everything was in the hands of a single person who had absolute power. No one was imposing anything on me, no one was controlling anything. It was a matter of trust.”

    How did Radio NOREA correspond with its listeners in Romanian? Duțu Moscovici is back with details:

    “At one point, we had to deal with the issue of letters from listeners. There was a time when the letters, if they were addressed to the radio station NOREA, were likely to be stopped by censorship in Romania, and their author could be in trouble. We had different approaches. For example, from our address we excluded the word ‘radio’, we kept only NOREA. I used to tell listeners that if they wanted to write to us, they should write NOREA, followed by the address in Denmark.”

    Radio NOREA’s Romanian language programme had the mission of spreading Christian principles and values ​and encourage people to hope that better times would come. And for its listeners this effort mattered a lot.

  • From the history of the women’s press in Romania

    From the history of the women’s press in Romania

    Individual rights and freedoms, enunciated since the 18th century, focused on the promotion of equality, beyond any criteria of religion, race, ethnicity, and gender. Women’s emancipation was a theme that attracted more and more followers starting with the second half of the 19th century, and socialism and feminism aimed at militating mostly for women’s rights in modern society. The most persistent efforts were made for women’s wage rights and political rights, the right to vote being a gain they obtained since the 20th century. The press also campaigned for granting equal rights to women, being among the most powerful means by which the goals of the feminist movement were achieved.

    In Romania as well, women’s emancipation and feminism appeared in the second half of the 19th century, the struggle for obtaining rights also being fought through the press. Articles of different sizes and on different topics of interest to women usually appeared in all publications. But the magazines that assumed the role of women’s emancipation began to have a constant audience, among those that committed to the project of female emancipation being “Femeia” (The Woman) magazine. Magazines with the word “woman” in the title appeared starting in 1868, “Woman. Non-political journal” being the first. Other magazines such as “Romanian Woman”, “Village Woman”, “Woman and Home”, “Orthodox Woman”, “Elegant Woman”, “Woman from Dâmbovița”, “Working Woman” appeared for shorter or longer periods and, from the title, one could guess their profile. The longest period during which a women’s magazine was published was between 1946 and 1989, entitled just like that, “Woman”, which continues to be issued today.

    Women’s magazines were not written only by women, as one might think. One could say that, on the contrary, women entered the world of journalism that defended their rights later. The social democrat Elena Gugian was one of them. In 2000, when the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation’s Oral History Center interviewed her, Gugian remembered that, at 19 years old, in 1944, when she had joined the Social Democratic Party, her career followed the working-class environments that she had joined and from where she drew inspiration for the texts that she published in the magazine she worked for.

    Elena Gugian: “There were many women from factories in the party organizations. They were from the APACA textile factory, with mostly female employees. There were women also from the Anghelescu Sweets Factory, on Şoseaua Viilor street, from the Flora can factory also on Şoseaua Viilor, from the Medicines Factory, and from the Cigarette Factory. Where the employees were mostly women, we had organizations and held meetings with them there, at the workplace. I met women, I talked with women, as I was a journalist and I recorded what was discussed there for the magazine of the women’s organization, which was called the ‘Working Woman’.”

    The “Working Woman” magazine, put out by the Romanian Social Democracy, tried to be very involved in the issues facing working-class women. Elena Gugian remembers the first issues of the magazine, and its revival after the war: “It was known under this name ever since 1930, when it was still multiplied by mimeograph as a small, 2-3-page flyer, and it died at the same time with the old democratic parties in 1938. It was reissued in 1946 as a magazine, taking over the original name. On 32 pages, originally only in black and white and later on in red and combinations of red and black or red and blue, depending on the ink we were able to find each particular time.”

    Elena Gugian did field work and was literally in love with her profession: “Because I was the youngest in the team, I would run around like crazy, together with the photographer, we would take photos, do reports, collect data. I would also liaise with the press services of the diplomatic offices set up in Bucharest, to get photos and articles about the Social-Democratic women in those countries.”

    After 1945, when WWII ended, everything had to be rebuilt, especially peace. And Elena Gugian and her fellow workers contributed to the general effort: :”We were interested in women’s issues, for a number of reasons. After the war, many women found themselves to be head of their households, with children to raise, after their husbands had either died in the war or returned with disabilities. So women had to find jobs. Most of them were illiterate, and our biggest concern was how to help them learn to read and write. We organised basic literacy classes, to help them at least sign their salary stubs. But some of them grew to like reading, and got ahead.”

    Between 1945 and 1948, the “Working Woman” magazine followed its goal, and continued to promote the principles of equality. Renamed “The Woman” in 1948, with the rise of the communist regime, the magazine saw another chapter in its history, one in which it served as a means of propaganda for a repressive regime. (LS, AMP)

  • Romania’s relations with the Vatican

    Romania’s relations with the Vatican

    The Romanian space, today inhabited by a mostly Christian-Orthodox population, was one of spiritual and religious confluence. The multi-confessional coexistence of Christians is attested since the Middle Ages, the sources recording information about the presence of minorities alongside the majorities: Catholics alongside Orthodox, Reformed and Evangelicals alongside Catholics and Orthodox, Greek Catholics and Roman Catholics together with Reformed and Orthodox, Neo-Protestants and the other denominations. The oldest Catholic presence in the Romanian space is in the intra-Carpathian territory, namely the archdiocese of Alba Iulia, which dates back to the 11th century. The ruler of Transylvania and the regent of Hungary Iancu of Hunedoara is buried in the Roman Catholic cathedral in the city of Alba Iulia. He was the father of the king of Hungary Matei Corvin, was of Catholic religion and Romanian origin, and died of the plague in 1456.

     

    The early Catholic presence in the Romanian extra Carpathian space is due to the kingdoms of Hungary and Poland. There were Catholic bishoprics on the eastern and southern slopes of the Carpathians, namely the one from Siret, in the north, founded in the 13th century, the one from Milcov, at the bend of the Carpathians, also from the 13th century, and the one from Severin, where the Carpathians meet the Danube, from the 14th century. Until the rise of the Ottoman Empire in Southeastern Europe in the late 14th century, Catholics and Orthodox, although often divided by political ideas, were part of the same Christian world. The late Crusades were alliances between Catholic and Orthodox kings and princes, and the anti-Ottoman coalitions of the 17th and 18th centuries co-opted armies from all Christian denominations.

     

    As the Ottoman influence north of the Danube declines starting from the 18th century and Western ideas of modernization penetrate the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (Muntenia), the Catholic presence also increases. The first two kings of Romania from the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty, Carol I and Ferdinand I, under whose rule the modern Romanian state was formed and expanded, were Catholic. In 1883, the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Bucharest was established, during the reign of Pope Leo XIII. And the apostolic letter “Praecipuum munus” of April 27, 1883, by which the Holy See raised the vicariate apostolic of Wallachia (Muntenia) to the rank of archbishopric, meant the recognition of the importance of the Romanian state, which became a kingdom in 1881.

     

    At the end of the First World War, Romania and the Vatican formalize bilateral relations. If the Catholic presence in the Romanian space had been the historical bases on which the relations between the two states had been established, the opening of embassies began in 1920. In 1927, through the Concordat signed by the two parties, the practice of Catholic worship in Romania was guaranteed. The concordat stipulated, among other things, the recognition of the legal personality of the Catholic Church in Romania, the religious leaders had to be Romanian citizens, the Church could open schools, hospitals, orphanages and other social and educational institutions.

     

    At the end of the Second World War, defeated and occupied by the Soviet army, Romania was completely subjugated by the new communist regime. The anti-Western policy of the pro-Soviet regime in Bucharest reached its harshest forms. In the relationship with the Vatican, it meant the denunciation of the concordat of 1927, on July 17, 1948. The unilateral break of diplomatic relations with the Vatican meant the abolition of the Catholic churches in Romania and the persecution of the faithful. While the Catholic foreigners were simply expelled from Romania, the Romanian citizens of Catholic faith were made political prisoners. Mother Clara, by her lay name Ecaterina Laszlo, entered the monastery at the age of 13 and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, of which she served 14. In 2003, she recollected in an interview for the Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation how she witnessed, as administrator of the building of the Apostolic Nunciature in Bucharest, its evacuation immediately after the decision of the Romanian authorities to break ties with the Holy See.

     

    Mother Clara: “His Excellency O’Hara, the regent of the nunciature, was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was informed that he and his collaborators had to leave the country within 48 hours, but that he had the right to leave the building in the custody of an embassy which he could choose. Since the Swiss embassy was neutral, he chose this country. O’Hara was accused of espionage, that he was a spy for the Pope. And in 48 hours he had to leave. And there was this custom, when an embassy was leaving, to have a farewell dinner with the other ambassadors who were still in the country. And there was a dinner that evening, and at midnight, when it was over, the whole building was sealed, only one door was left in the basement for the sisters, for us who lived there, and there was a smaller house in the courtyard where three monks lived. We went out with lit candles at the main door, that’s where all the diplomats came out and that’s where the key was given to the Swiss embassy.”

     

    Non-existent between 1948 and 1989, Romania’s relations with the Vatican were restored on the last day of 1989, on December 31, nine days after the fall of the communist dictatorship on December 22. And relations have developed, the first visit of a pope to an Orthodox country taking place 25 years ago, in 1999, when Pope John Paul II arrived in Romania. (LS)

  • Plan Z

    Plan Z

    Occupied after 1945 and having communist party regimes imposed on them, the countries in Central and Eastern Europe practically had no national defense strategies, left at the mercy of the Soviet Union, which did not hesitate to occupy Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and remove the reformist leaderships there. Also threatened by the Soviet aggression, Romania, which had condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia, sought to put together a plan to protect itself. After 1968, the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu conceived the military doctrine of the “entire people’s war” for the defense of the homeland. General Neagu Cosma worked in the information structures before 1989.

    Interviewed in 2002 by the Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, he gave details about what was called Plan Z in the post-Revolution press. Cosma stressed that, originally, the plan was designed according to the logic of any national security strategy.

    “There were many talks regarding the deployment of the state, the command of military operations and the supreme commander respectively. Some say that, out of cowardice, Ceausescu wanted to escape at any cost and created a special structure for him and his family to disappear from the invader’s path and save his skin. `I can provide concrete information that the evacuation of Ceausescu was part of the rules of war, he was the supreme commander of the army. In any army and in any country, the commander and command staff must have a place of retreat, if it doesn’t work there, there is another one as a backup and so on.”

    Known as Rovine IS 70, Plan Z was meant to ensure the survival of the Romanian state in extreme circumstances. Neagu Cosma:

    “The plan received, along the way, the code name Rovine IS 70, and after December ’89 the press called it plan Z. The Rovine IS 70 plan stipulated that it should be implemented when, as a result of an act of aggression directed against the Romanian state, there was an imminent danger of temporary occupation of the capital and part of the territory. That would have made it difficult or even impossible to exercise the leadership of the resistance struggle of the entire people from the same headquarters where the command was located. In the plan, the methods of removing the commander from the CC building were clear, and according to the plan Nicolae Ceauşescu was to be removed from the CC headquarters through the tunnel that connects the CC building to the former Royal Palace across the road.”

    The plan included, among other things, in the event of a Soviet invasion and occupation, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, the withdrawal of the army to the border with Yugoslavia and the safekeeping of Ceaușescu and the army leadership. Designed in 8 points, it had been improved over the years. Neagu Cosma.

    “The means of radio communication and the TV station were already functional, they were operational. Diversion teams were also ready to act, some had already been placed in the field. Regarding the defense of the headquarters and the supreme commander, the following measures were taken. One: the removal of Ceauşescu from the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in case it had been surrounded. This was a first point in the plan, how do we get him out of the CC headquarters. Two: to build a small dosimeter for the control of nuclear radiation at the Institute of Atomic Physics in Măgurele. Three: to study the road routes south of the Southern Carpathians for their use in case of a hasty retreat. Four: the same operation had to be carried out for all the passes to the Carpathians. Five: to establish the place of deployment of some institutions and headquarters and the ways of travel to each new establishment. Six: the establishment of mixed commissions made up of the Minister of Transport, the head of the organizational department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, transport specialists to study and present proposals for streamlining rail and road traffic from Bucharest to Timisoara. Seven: the documents from the Securitate archive were microfilmed, they were easy to transport and hide so as not to fall into the hands of the invaders. Eight: changing the state code.”

    But the increasing unpopularity of the regime, the harshness of the leadership and the cynicism of the Ceaușescu couple made plan Z to be customized and lose its purpose. In 1989, the national resistance plan that also provided for the protection of Ceaușescu was useless. We asked Neagu Cosma why plan Z didn’t work in 1989?

    “It didn’t work because there were no people to apply it. Back in 1968, there were people who would apply it to the point of sacrifice. Now there’s no one willing to implement the plan, not even one, because they were all fed up. Among the officers of the guard, there were I don’t know how many attempts, at least theoretically, to annihilate the Ceausescus. They were there, they saw what was happening. That’s why Plan Z was no longer implemented. There was nobody left willing to apply it.

    The abandonment of Plan Z and of the Ceaușescu couple in December 1989 was the first important move to save Romania. And state security has returned to what it should have been in a normal, free climate. (MI)