Radio România Internațional

Category: The History Show

  • Letters from the Great War

    Letters from the Great War

    The Great War shaped mankind profoundly. The conflict also brought about the largest display of human and material forces, and left behind winners and losers. The trauma was the same on both sides of the conflict, making warring factions connect and amplifying fleeting moments of humanity.



    Letters dating back to the Great War were an important source for historians to ascertain what those in the trenches felt and had to deal with. The National Military Museum in Bucharest hosts a collection of 120 such letters and postal cards, belonging to Romanian military who fought in the First World War. Historian and curator Carla Duta told use more about the feelings, sorrows and hopes of those who died for the ideals they believed in 100 years ago.



    Carla Duta: “Romanian military on the frontline more often than not wrote to their families, to their spouses, their mothers or children. One example is the collection of letters addressed by Col. Alexandru Stoenescu of infantry battalion #10 to his wife, Elena. There’s a series of 12 military post cards, each addressed to ‘Dear Lunca’ and ended with ‘I love you all so much, kisses, Alexandru’. All the 12 letters are dated 1916, at the time when the colonel was deployed on the Dobrogea frontline and was slightly wounded. I will briefly quote from these letters: ‘Dear Lunca. I am in good health, God willing. Our battalion fought well on September 6, 1916 and was awarded the daily reward. This brought great joy to my heart. In another letter I was mentioning that a bullet pierced my left ear. My wound has now almost fully healed. What’s the story with the zeppelins? Here we are under artillery fire every day. Kisses to you all, Alexandru.”



    Overwhelmed by the great hardships they underwent, soldiers on the battlefield had mixed feelings:



    Carla Duta: “The emotions, experiences and hopes of Romanian military on the frontline transpire in the letters and postcards sent to their families. They were all willing to sacrifice themselves for the Romanian ideal which animated their every action, but at the same time they were deeply concerned about their loved ones back home, who more often than not had no support and were living in dire straits. Here is an excerpt from a letter sent by Pascal Radulescu from the 1916 campaign in Flamanda: ‘I will never forget the moment when, wading through the shallow water, my machinegun broken by a bullet, I was carrying my beloved and dedicated sergeant in my arms, whose brains had been pierced by a bullet. I ordered the bugler to sound the attack and charged in, empty-handed and baffled’. The emotion in these lines, the optimism, the faith people placed in God in those times of despair, manage to reach and shake us. Quoting from another letter: ‘The Germans and Bulgarians were fleeing the battlefield, fearing the points of our bayonets. But Romanians showed no mercy for those who stayed behind’.”



    Carla Duta managed to reconstruct episodes from the war based on the letters:



    Carla Duta: “Some letters depict very impressive pictures of the war. The short format of the postcard did not allow the sender to write at great lengths. Still, the collection of letters sent by Alexandru Stoenescu depicts a few such scenes. Quoting from one of his postcards: ‘On September 6, 1916 our regiment entered the battle. I have never seen such atrocious fighting. Our regiment’s numbers were cut to half. God was kind enough to spare me though. We have 20 wounded officers and the battlefield is filled with corpses of Bulgarian soldiers. Our ferocious attacks have sapped their morale and they’re now pulling back. We’ve taken over their positions, now overrun with corpses’. Then there are letters describing scenes from the war in great detail, and the letters are thus more impressive. Here is how a military from Moldova describes an episode from 1917: ‘The Germans are having a hard time, they keep defecting to our sides. They say they have nothing to eat. As soon as they get their heads out of the trenches our soldiers grab them. A couple of shells passed over our heads just now. This is what war is like.”



    How did Romanian military see their presence on the battlefield? Carla Duta quoted a fragment from the letter of a father to his son, private Vasile Florescu. The letter is dated 1917:



    Carla Duta: “Dear son, today Mr. Niculescu brought me your letter. You will win this war, I am sure. Don’t forget who your ancestors are and make your people proud. It has fallen on you to fight so that we should keep our land, bled by the enemy occupation. Have no fear for your life, for you have pledged it to your king and country. May the thought of forging a Greater Romania lift your spirit and cast away your doubts. For dying for your country means dying a hero’s death. So discard any thoughts deterring you from the sacred cause of victory. May your actions be worthy of your words and thus you will have your father’s blessing. Your mother and brothers want to see you return victorious and pray dearly for your safety and for victory. Send my greetings to your brothers in arms and may God give you strength. Vasilica, my son, don’t ever forget that no one in your family has ever been a coward and that honour has always been our family’s motto.”



    Great victories are written in blood, there’s no denying and mail from the Great War fully confirms this indisputable truth.

  • 1989 in Bessarabia

    1989 in Bessarabia

    Bessarabians, just like the Romanians, celebrate a quarter of a century since the fall of communism and the end of the Russification policy that plagued their territory. We spoke to history professor Sergiu Musteata from Chisinau State University, about 1989 in Bessarabia:



    “Between 1985 and 1989, things were changing in the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. It is interesting that the first demands of the people in the capital Chisinau were not just economic and social, they also had to do with the language and alphabet. Of course, the first word was ‘liberty’. If we look closely at the pictures, we notice that in many of them people hold signs with the word ‘liberty’. That was their main concern. People wanted to talk freely, they wanted to tell the truth as it stood. The worst offence for those people was being unable to talk and write in their mother tongue openly. That is why the first demands in Chisinau, which went on for the rest of the year, regarded the language and the alphabet. Starting in January 1989, after discussions started by the Writers’ Union in 1988, people started to join efforts towards having a single language, even though the Politburo of the Communist Party was laying hurdles in their path, even though it was trying to criticize the effort and call it provocation, even though they tried to ban certain public assemblies. People started to assemble in greater and greater numbers, and in the summer of 1989 they numbered several tens of thousands.”



    Chisinau was seething, like the other capitals of republics in the union, under the impact of Perestroika and Glasnost policies promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev. The national demands were the same for all the nations oppressed by the USSR for 70 years. Sergiu Musteata believes that it was the Grand National Assembly in Chisinau of August 27, 1989 that triggered true change in Bessarabia:



    “On August 31, 1989, the law passed for switching to a Latin language and alphabet. Over the course of an entire year, writers demanded that the Soviet imposition of the Cyrillic alphabet be reversed. They challenged those norms that prevented a good knowledge of Romanian and corrupted it. This way, the elections for the Supreme Soviet brought to the forefront a new elite, men of culture, especially writers, who formed a team on behalf of Moldova to attend the meetings of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in Moscow. They had the courage, in 1989, to say that the Hitler-Stalin pact was a crime against humanity. They demanded that a commission be created in the Soviet Parliament to discuss the impact of that document. For the first time in Chisinau, the newspaper called ‘Literature and Art’ published the secret addendum to that treaty, which had that far been considered a myth. That’s when it was published for the first time, and it turned out that based on this document the world got divided.”



    Liberty eventually triumphed in Chisinau, just as it did in Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Kiev, and other capitals across the Soviet Union. Sergiu Musteata:



    “What happened in Chisinau marked the spirit of the national liberation movement. In 1987, things were discussed with no small amount of fear, in 1988 publishing started, and in 1989 freedom of expression and association burst forth. For the first time, in 1989, people started waving the tricolour flag at meetings, saying that the tricolour was their true flag. Also in 1989, later that year, for the first time, a large-scale meeting was held around the idea of uniting Bessarabia with Romania, in the context of condemning the Hitler-Stalin pact. The cultural and historical slogans inclined towards social and economic issues: economic independence, autonomous administration, which in the following years led to the declaration of sovereignty, and, in 1991, to the Declaration of Independence.”



    Sergiu Musteata recalled how the year 1989 led to Bessarabian Romanians re-gaining their identity. He speaks from experience:



    “In 1989 I was a first-year history student, and I remember that I took part in many public manifestations. On November 7, when traditionally there was a military parade to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution, for the first time in Chisinau people had the courage to step in front of the tanks to stop them in their tracks. Since then there have been no more tanks in the marches in the grand national square in Chisinau. People came out with flowers, and the soldiers, no matter their ethnicity, went no further. They stopped, hugged the passers-by, and received their flowers. For the first time, the Communist Party leadership fled the official stand. It was a sign that society was changing, that society wished for a different leadership, that it wanted something else. It was a sign that the time of the totalitarian regime, which had kept millions in fear, was now over.”



    Bessarabia had a much smoother transition to democracy than Romania, despite having a much more traumatic past.

  • Tragedies of the Romanian Revolution: Otopeni

    Tragedies of the Romanian Revolution: Otopeni

    The Romanian anti-Communist Revolution of December 1989 was the most important event in the second half of the 20th century in Romania. Such a genuine outburst of mass energy had never been seen before by most Romanians. Something unique was happening and each and every Romanian felt they had to take part in the renewal of Romania.



    However, the uplifting moments generated by people finally getting the strength to fight and regain their freedom were marred by some tragic events. One such event was the massacre in Otopeni, on December 23rd. Following a terrible misunderstanding, the airport defense unit opened fire on a convoy of three trucks, killing 50 soldiers who were coming to upsize the unit. Taken for terrorists, those soldiers paid with their lives the poor training of the people in charge with defending the airport, the many flaws in communication, contradicting orders, people’s overexcitement and the impact of rumors. 25 years on, we tried to recall that black day in Romania’s history, together with historian Serban Pavelescu.



    Serban Pavelescu: “The incident of December 23rd 1989 should be a textbook lesson for the soldiers undergoing training. 18 years of investigations have shown that there was a combination of factors that led to the tragedy. More precisely, the defense unit in charge of ensuring security at the Otopeni airport was made up of several subunits, some of them subordinated to the National Defense Ministry and others to the Border Police, the Military Aviation Directorate and citizen guards respectively. Many of those people were not properly trained, and others were just about to get that training. The most valuable and best-trained units were seen as conspicuous and disarmed. I’m talking about the subunit belonging to the Special Anti-Terror Unit and the Interior Ministry’s subunits, in charge with regular airport security.”



    Serban Pavelescu also described the security elements deployed at the airport and the facts that eventually triggered the tragedy:



    Serban Pavelescu: “There were chains of shooters both on the first floor of the old terminal and on ground, on the building of the Civil Aviation Division, which was guarding the entry to the terminal. They had light infantry armament, and also heavy armament, such as an amphibious armored vehicles and 14.5-mm caliber heavy machine guns. The unit had been set up 48 hours earlier, people were tired, they had been on permanent alert, and faced with several incidents, which we don’t know whether they were real or not. They were, however, perceived as real by those in charge. People were overexcited and, as the military prosecutors’ investigation would later reveal, they were also badly led. Communication between the defense unit and those supposed to coordinate from the Civil Aviation Division’s building was extremely poor.”



    At dawn, on December 23rd, the Campina brigade, made up of graduates of the School of noncommissioned officers in the town of Campina, was heading for the Otopeni airport.



    Serban Pavelescu: “The Campina brigade had received orders from the commander of the security troops, general Grigore Ghita, to head for the airport. But those at the airport, who had already been alerted through anonymous calls, through the Romanian television and even through the regular chain of command that they were about to be attacked, were expecting the aids to arrive from the other side. What’s sure is that instead of entering the bypath leading to the freight terminal of the airport, which was a parallel road to the one leading to the old terminal, the brigade entered perpendicularly to the defense line.”



    The terrible outcome of that move was the logical effect of these circumstances.



    Serban Pavelescu: “At around 7 o’clock am, it was still dark. It was a spectral sort of light, people were extremely tired, and they had had several alarms during the night. Against that background, captain Zorila was overzealous and opened warning fire to stop the coming trucks. The problem was that, once the fire opened, those who were on the Civil Aviation’s building thought they were being attacked. There was no real communication with those in the terminal and those in the first line. Therefore, they too started shooting. There followed a cannonade that was hard to stop. The surviving soldiers of the Campina brigade shouted they surrendered, got off the trucks and were disarmed, their arms up. Then another gunshot was heard. Nobody could tell whether it was real, but to those in the unit it sounded real. And the effect was just like we saw everything during those days of revolution. It was enough to just hear a gunshot for a cannonade to start right away, without any clear target. So, this is how the second phase of the massacre started, with the Campina soldiers as targets of another fire, this time a longer one, lasting for about 10 minutes. And then, again, when the surviving soldiers were taken over, the bus carrying members of civil services came, and there followed another cannonade, resulting in the death of seven more people.”



    The people who died in Otopeni 25 years ago were heroes, as they did not hesitate to go wherever they were needed, no matter how great the danger was.

  • The Ceausescu Regime and the Uprising Against It

    The Ceausescu Regime and the Uprising Against It

    Of all the communist countries in Europe to undergo regime change in 1989, Romania was the only one where blood was spilled in the process. Commentators say Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime was the most likely to use violence against its own people if need be, as shown by the brutal repression of the workers’ demonstrations in Brasov in November 1987. Unfortunately, the situation was even worse in December 1989. We asked historian Ioan Scurtu, a former director of the Institute of the Romanian Revolution, if the bloodshed of December 1989 could have been avoided considering the nature of Ceausescu’s regime:



    Ioan Scurtu: “In theory, it could. However, if we look at what distinguished Ceausescu from the leaders of Europe’s other socialist countries, we realise he was in fact the only one who rejected Gorbachev’s ideas about Glasnost and Perestroika because he believed they undermined socialism and eventually lead to its downfall. As a result, after 1987, Ceausescu became one of the most rigid political leaders in central and south-eastern Europe, clinging to the ideals of Marx, Engels and Lenin and refusing to accept that societies had evolved and that new times called for new ways of consolidating socialism and communism.”



    In the opinion of historian Ioan Scurtu, the obsession with Romania’s complete independence was another characteristic of the Ceausescu regime:



    Ioan Scurtu: “Ceausescu was the only leader who insisted that his country was to pay back all its foreign debt, saying this was the only means by which it could achieve its economic as well as political independence. This led to massive exports of goods, from industrial to food products, which caused a severe food crisis. The food for the population thus started to be rationed, for the first time in a long while.”



    A prisoner of Marxist clichés about the economy, Nicolae Ceausescu initiated disastrous policies, the burden of which was too heavy for the people:



    Ioan Scurtu: “A third characteristic feature of the Ceausescu regime was the strong development of the petrochemical industry which was a huge energy consumer. Ceausescu thus decided to save energy at the expense of the people, by cutting their heating and electricity, with serious consequences. This generated a general state of discontent, especially after April 1989 when Romania announced it had paid back its entire foreign debt. Having achieved this, Ceausescu wanted Romania to become a lender itself and benefit from the interest on the loans given to other states. In a nutshell, Romania was in a far more vulnerable position than all the other socialist countries, so people were extremely unhappy. This is what prompted millions of people to take to the streets in December 1989 and demand that Ceausescu be removed from power.”



    We asked historian Ioan Scurtu why there was no reformist voice within the Romanian Communist Party to call for Ceausescu’s removal and ensure a peaceful regime change:



    Ioan Scurtu: “Ceausescu was a shrewd man and in a short period of time, in only 6 or 7 years, he managed to rid himself of any potential rivals to the leadership of the party and the country. He promoted instead people who were entirely devoted to him and who didn’t have any backbone. In his memoirs, Dumitru Popescu, who used to be a member of the Executive Political Committee of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, recalled that Nicolae Ceausescu was always the only one speaking during the committee’s meeting, while everybody else sat and listened. He remembered getting terrible headaches during those meetings and having to walk all the way home in a luxury Bucharest district to calm down afterwards. In my opinion, this man never realised that his position also implied some responsibility, so if Ceausescu was doing all the talking while everybody else listened, this is also because the others accepted a situation that I think is humiliating. The most shocking moment was when Ceausescu, outraged that no drastic measures were being taken against protesters in Timisoara in December 1989, said he could no longer work with the Executive Political Committee and told its members to choose another leader. Everybody then just asked him not to leave the committee and assured him of their loyalty. So not even in the 24th hour did anybody have the courage to oppose him and say: ‘ok, we’ll take note of your resignation and tell the people Nicolae Ceausescu has stepped down.’ Perhaps things would have been different and all the bloodshed could have been avoided. The opportunism of these people played a very important role in the dramatic events that followed.”



    Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime did fall in the end, but for this to happen, 1,204 Romanians had to die.

  • Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, King of Romania and Bulgaria

    Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, King of Romania and Bulgaria

    South-eastern Europe in mid 19th century was in turmoil. The Balkan states were trying to get rid of the Ottoman influence and to adopt the western model of economic, political and society modernization. The anti-Ottoman reactions went hand in hand with the local rivalries generated by the idea of nationalism which each nation boasted before the great powers to show their superiority as compared to the other nations, a superiority which was only illusory. There was rapprochement between some of the nations but it eventually failed because of the complicated geopolitical games at European level. Once such failed rapprochement was that between Romania and Bulgaria, two neighbouring countries that were seeking independence.



    The historical relations between Romanians and Bulgarians had their ups and downs. The stronger Ottoman presence in the Balkans starting with the 14th century led to the instatement of the Ottoman peace, which meant control of the Crescent Moon over all the nations in south-eastern Europe. In the first half of the 19th century the Romanian elites had managed to individualize the Romanian space and give it state identity, while the Bulgarians were in full process of getting their own identity. The Bulgarians who emigrated from Romania after 1850 spread the nationalist ideas south of the Danube, in the territory occupied by the Turks, which was to become the nucleus of the future Bulgarian state. The coming to Romania’s throne of Prince Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in 1866 brought stability to Romania and put the country on the path of modernization and Europeanization. After the Russian-Romanian-Turkish war of 1877- 1878, as a result of which Romania became independent, Carol I came to be seen as a responsible and credible sovereign.



    Romanian and Bulgaria had got closer than ever before and the 1877-1878 war was the peak of their rapprochement. It was actually the close friendship established between the Romanian army and the troopes of Bulgarian volunteers who were fighting alongside the Russians and Romanians. Many Bulgarian fighters received Romanian decorations. Besides this friendship among soldiers there was also a cultural component to the relation between Romania and Bulgaria. Historians would talk about the Romanian-Bulgarian medieval state of brothers Petru and Ioan Asan, created through the common fight of Romanians and Bulgarians against the Byzantines.



    The rapprochement between Romania and Bulgaria was also due to the mutual affection shown by Prince Carol I of Romania and the Bulgarian Prince Alexander of Battenberg. Proclaimed prince in 1879, at the age of 22, Alexander, a nephew of the Russian tsar Alexander II, was 18 years younger than Carol I. Alexander’s attempt to govern without Russia’s approval, as he had been talked into by the Bulgarian politicians, led to a crisis that removed him from the throne in 1885. It was in 1885 that the idea of a personal union between Romania and Bulgaria emerged. In June 1886 a group of Bulgarian envoys offered to Carol I of Romania the crown of Bulgaria, which meant a personal union between the two countries. The offer was very tempting, but the geopolitical reasons in the area led to the failure of that project. Historian Sorin Cristescu will speak next about the reasons why the idea of a union between Romania and Bulgaria failed:



    “There was much talk about this personal union between Romania and Bulgaria both in 1878 and in 1886 when Alexander of Battenberg was dethroned. The Russians wanted to control Bulgaria, that is why the war of 1877-1878 occurred. The Russians thought that, if at the border of Europe there was a country sympathizing with France, namely Romania, which considered itself the younger sister of France, why shouldn’t there be a country, in their neighbourhood, that could be their younger sister? The Russians’ involvement in this issue was huge. Bratianu himself realized that any acceptance by the Romanian political elite or by Carol I, any suggestion to accept the crown offered by Bulgaria, would have as a consequence Russia’s firm and categorical retort. So, the representatives of Bulgaria were sent back home. There were discussions about the personal union between the two countries but Bratianu, a cautious politician, cut the talks short.”



    The idea of the personal union between Romania and Bulgaria should be viewed in the context in which federalism was one of the most en vogue projects in the 19th century Europe. The contesters of multinational empires wondered what would have followed after their dismantling. The answer was the formation of state federations or confederations to prevent domination by one single state. The 1848 revolution had seen federalism as a regional alliance principle and a viable policy for what would have followed after the collapse of multinational empires. Consequently the failure of the Romanian- Bulgarian dynasty had two causes: the threat of a Russian invasion and the final victory of nationalism.

  • December 1st, the National Day of Romania

    December 1st, the National Day of Romania

    On December the 1st, 1918, Transylvania joined the Kingdom of Romania into what was to be known as “Greater Romania.” In a National Assembly meeting held in Alba Iulia, thousands of Romanians endorsed the union. The archive of the Oral History Centre of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation preserves a highly valuable document, which gives us an indication of the enthusiasm of that year, seen as a new beginning after the war of 1914-1918. It is a recording of the Greek Catholic Bishop Iuliu Hossu reading out the resolutions of the National Assembly. A martyr and a survivor of communist political persecution, Iuliu Hossu was born in 1885 and died in 1970. The recording is of outstanding importance, not only because it preserves the voice of Iuliu Hossu, but also because it summarises the political, economic, social and civic aspirations of the Romanians in the early 20th century. For Bishop Hossu, the religious aspect was the most important contribution to the union:



    “Brothers! The time set has fully come, when God Almighty makes known through his faithful people the justice for which we have been thirsty for centuries. Today, through our resolve, Greater Romania is built, the one and undivided. The Romanians in Transylvania can now freely join their motherland, Romania! As the bishop of Cluj-Gherla, I also join them in their happiness. I pray to God that his love and grace be with our people and our country, and that he may keep them from all harm. May this country flourish on justice and truth!”



    Iuliu Hossu’s address also had a realistic dimension, related to the aspirations of all those who believed in the founding of Greater Romania:



    “The National Assembly of all Romanians in Transylvania, Banat and the Hungarian Country, whose rightful representatives gathered in Alba Iulia on December the 1st, 1918, pronounce the union of those Romanians and of all the lands they inhabit with Romania. In particular, the National Assembly proclaims the nonnegotiable rights of the Romanian nation on the entire country of Banat, stretching between the rivers Mures, Tisza and the Danube. The National Assembly gives all these territories provisional autonomy until the Constituent Assembly has convened, based on universal vote. In this regard, the National Assembly proclaims the following as the fundamental principles in the establishment of the new Romanian state: complete freedom to all nations living within its borders and education, administration and justice for all different nations, in their own language and by their own people. Each nation will be represented in the country’s lawmaking and governing bodies, proportionately with the number of its members. Equal rights and complete autonomy will be guaranteed for all religious denominations within the state. True democracy will be applied to all aspects of public life. All people starting with the age of 21, of both sexes will have the right to direct, equal and secret vote to elect their representatives in villages, counties and Parliament. Absolute freedom of the press, freedom to assemble and freedom of association and expression will be guaranteed. A radical land reform will be launched, to create a record of all property, in particular large pieces of land. We will help farmers acquire their own property, for their families to be able to work. The core principle of this reform will be rooted on the one hand in the idea of social equality, and on the other hand in the goal of improving productivity. Industrial workers will have the same rights and privileges as are laid down in the laws of the most advanced industrial countries of the West.”



    Iuliu Hossu’s address also illustrates quite clearly the international dimension of the Romanian union project:



    “The National Assembly expresses its wish that the Peace Congress might bring about such concord of the free nations as to ensure justice and freedom for all nations, large or small, and in the future to discard war as a means to settle international relations. The Romanians convened in this National Assembly hail their brothers in Bukovina, who freed themselves from the plight of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and joined Romania, their motherland. The National Assembly hails, with love and enthusiasm, the liberation of the peoples so far subject to the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, namely the Czechoslovakians, Austrians, Germans, Yugoslavians, Poles and Ruthenians, and sends its greetings to all these nations. The National Assembly humbly honours the memory of the brave Romanians who shed their blood for our ideals in this war, who died for the freedom and unity of the Romanian nation. The National Assembly expresses its gratitude and admiration for the allied powers, who fought with determination against an enemy that had prepared for war for many decades and who thus saved civilisation from barbarism.”



    Ninety-six years since the union of December the 1st, 1918, the words of Iuliu Hossu not only tell us about a great accomplishment in the past, but also call on the future generations never to give up their fight for freedom.

  • Prince Karl Anton von Hohenzollern – Sigmaringen

    Prince Karl Anton von Hohenzollern – Sigmaringen

    The second half of the 19th century went down in Romanian history as the time of King Carol 1st of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. However, one of the people who stood behind Carol 1st’s fruitful reign was his father, Karl Anton. We could say that the second Carol 1st of Romania was Karl Anton of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen. He was born on September 7th, 1811 in Krauchenwies, in the current land of Baden-Wurttemberg, and died on June 2nd, 1885. He was married to Josephine Friederike Luise of Baden, daughter of Karl, Duke of Baden, and they had 6 children, the third being the future king of Romania, Carol 1st. Their 5th child, Anton, died in 1866, aged 25, in the battle of Koniggratz, during the Prussian-Austrian war. Karl Anton, a liberal, was head of the House of Hohenzollern-Singmaringen and also Prime Minister of Prussia between November 6th — March 12th 1858.



    Karl Anton played a crucial role in his son’s political career. He was a guide to Carol from the very beginnings of his reign. He stood by him during the hard times he had to go through: the dynastic crisis of 1870, the 1877-1878 War of Independence in Romania, the recognition of Romania’s state sovereignty. He was the one who defended Romania’s cause in Germany, he advised Carol how to manage the interests of the great powers, such as Germany, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and England. In a letter dated August, 1878, Karl Anton wrote to his son: “Reconciling with Russia should be the most urgent matter. A lasting feud with this neighboring state would be an ongoing threat and a barrier in the way of domestic development. No matter how hostile the spirits against Russia, Romania’s honest friends should advise it to seek a bearable modus vivendi”.



    Historian Sorin Cristescu, editor and translator of King Carol 1st’s personal letters and of the Austrian-Hungarian and German reports regarding the king’s activity, told us about the huge role played by Karl Anton:



    “From the very first moment when the idea of his son taking over the reign of the Romanian Principalities emerged, Karl Anton von Hohenzollern guided his son. He had been the Prime Minister of Prussia. It’s true, he was just an honorary Prime Minister, and head of a liberal party that was dreaming of Germany’s unification. To his mind, Prussia should have become a country of democratic freedoms and technical and scientific programs, with the other German states asking for unification. It was not a realistic solution, and proof of that was Karl Anton’s short-lived office. And then Bismark came, offering the solution: ”iron and blood”. Karl Anton guided Carol 1st all these 15 years, and actually up to the very day he died, in 1885. He taught his son a principle of governing, namely that each group of boyars must be brought to power, by rotation. That was the main secret of governing and it didn’t take long for it to be discovered. The Romanian Parliament awarded Karl Anton the title of honorary citizen in January 1867. It was an act of defiance in the face of the foreign powers, which were saying the ruler of Romania had to be of Romanian descent. Well, Carol 1st did, as his father was a Romanian citizen. It is a known fact that Karl Anton ruled alongside his son. But that was not singular in Europe at the time. In 1887, Prince Ferdinand of Saxa-Coburg-Kihary became the king of Bulgaria. His mother, Klementine of Orleans, accompanied and guided her son until her death, in 1910. The parent would always be very attached to the child in cases like that, and the results were good, both in Romania and in Bulgaria”.



    When father and son were reunited after a 14 year separation, in August 1880, the king’s secretary wrote in his memoirs: “Prince Karl Anton is waiting in his wheel-chair to meet with his son. For a while they cannot find the right words to express their feelings. Prince Carol gladly notices that his father has not changed much, that the years have not taken too heavy a toll from him.” At the public meeting on August 20-22, dedicated to the Romanian King, the same secretary wrote about the sober, but warm welcoming that Carol 1st had in his native place: “The native town did not want to miss on the joy of saluting its prince, who, after so many years, returned from a far away country, which he had guided towards independence, through fights and victories. In the Carol 1st Square the king is welcomed with warm words and at the gate of the Castle, Prince Karol Anton, wearing an official suit and the Romanian order, is waiting for his son, who took the glory and fame of his House so far away.”



    Carol 1st was Romania’s providential man, but so was his father, Karl Anton von Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, as the history of Romanians would not have been the same without him.

  • The Asen State

    The Asen State

    In 1185, the taxpayers of the Byzantine Empire were growing less and less patient, following an increase in taxes ahead of the marriage between Emperor Isaac II Angelos to the daughter of the Hungarian King. Two Romanian brothers, the noblemen Peter and Ivan Asen, the leaders of communities in what is today northern Bulgaria, presented the Imperial Court with a formal protest against the tax increases, a protest which was violently rejected. Having returned to their residence in Veliko Tarnovo, the two brothers started an anti-Byzantine uprising that led to the emergence of the Second Bulgarian Empire, also known as the Romanian-Bulgarian state, and led by the Asenids. This state survived until around 1260, when it fell apart, the successor states being later conquered by the Ottomans in 1396.



    A multi-ethnic entity, the Romanian-Bulgarian state comprised at least three different ethnic groups: Romanians, Bulgarians and Cumans. The historian Alexandru Madgearu says it is difficult to create a map of this state based on the available sources:


    Alexandru Madgearu: “The Vlachs, the Bulgarians and the Cumans were mentioned together in a number of documents from the time. These sources made a clear distinction on ethnic grounds between those who took part in a military campaign or a siege and the local population. They also distinguished between territories named Bulgaria and Vlachia, so it appears that there was an entity called Vlachia. However, the name Vlach did not refer to the Romanians, because they never referred to themselves as Vlachs. The source in question, namely a papal document, mentions Vlachia as a territory connected to Bulgaria, which means the state was divided into different entities or territories with certain autonomy. All we know with certainty is that the difference between the Vlachs and the Bulgarians is clear in the Byzantine sources, the writings of Nicetas Choniates in particular.”



    Although the mediaeval concept of “nation” was different from the modern concept, the Asenids were aware of their own origin. However, ethnic divisions did not prevent the different groups to join forces against the central power. Alexandru Madgearu explains:


    Alexandru Madgearu: “Naturally, they were aware of their own ethnic origin, but we have to bear in mind that the idea of ethnic group and nation was different than what we understand by these terms today, starting from the 18th and 19th centuries. At the time, however, we can only talk about membership to a certain group, religion and social category. The only direct source we have, namely the correspondence with the pope, mentions in several places that ‘we are of Romanian blood’. Different ethnic groups participated, for example, in the uprisings. The enemy in these cases were not the Greeks of Greek origin, but the power in Constantinople represented by the tax collectors. All conflicts were generated by fiscal and economic reasons, and it wasn’t the poor who rebelled, but the rich, who were hardest hit by the taxes, and they convinced ordinary people to join their cause.”



    Besides its purely economic purpose, the anti-Byzantine uprising also had a mystic dimension that one might be tempted to overlook. Alexandru Madgearu says it was quite common for the Church in the Middle Ages to rally the population for a certain political purpose:


    Alexandru Madgearu: “This is how the Asen brothers incited the Romanians and the Bulgarians to start an uprising. They made up this whole story, with Saint Demetrius leaving the Norman-conquered Thessalonica, saying that the Saint abandoned the Greeks due to their sins, and chose to settle in Tarnovo. They built a sort of chapel by the entrance of the citadel and they populated it with lunatics, if I may say so, judging by Nicetas Choniates’ account. It was no laughing matter, given that we’re talking about a millennia-old practice. I have often compared this with the events of 1650 in Moldova, which were quite similar, as described by Marco Bandini. A bunch of people in a state of mystical frenzy started chanting and shouting, “St. Demetrius is with us” and “let’s go to war against the damn Greeks”. Such actions, fuelling a psychological war, were instrumental to unleashing the uprising, since Nicetas Choniates says people were reluctant to go to war”.



    Alexandru Madgearu believes the main obstacle to identifying several features of the state created by the Asen brothers was the limited number of historical sources.


    Alexandru Madgearu: “There are no sources telling us how many were Bulgarian or Romanian in a city. There aren’t even cemeteries to allow us to make some assumptions. When the leaders were weaker, separatist movements emerge, such as the one of Borila or later the one led by Constantin Asan. It all depended on the tsar’s leniency. If he was lenient, then certain noblemen would proclaim the territories they held to be autonomous, if not even independent”.



    The first three rulers, Petru, Ioan Asan and Ionita were of Romanian origin, after which point rulership became increasingly Bulgarian. Even with the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Asen State remained a distinctive entity in history, which continued to exert power and influence up to its being conquered by crusaders in 1204. The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the early 14th century marked the advent of a new form of state politics.



  • Comic Books in Socialist Romania

    Comic Books in Socialist Romania

    In Socialist Romania, the widest circulation was enjoyed by the magazine called “Cutezatorii” — “The Valiant”, the propaganda publication of the regime aimed at children under 14, the age ceiling for the Pioneers, the children’s communist organization. As such, it had a severely limited content.



    The one publication that sparked the appetite of several generations of Romanian children for comics was undoubtedly Pif Gadget, as we were told by Ioan Stanomir, comic book historian:“Pif Gadget is one of the strangest and most convoluted stories of the Cold War. It was a magazine that grew out of the ruins of a magazine called Vaillant. Just like ‘The Valiant’ of Romania, it had a twofold purpose: entertainment, as a comic book, but also as a propaganda tool for the French Communist Party. The fact that Pif Gadget penetrated the communist bloc, especially Romania, was made possible by the tight relations that developed between Romania and France, after the 1965-1968 period. It is a relationship that blended on several levels with Gaullist France, as well as with communist subculture and counterculture. That also explains joint film productions. This is how Livre de poche came in from France, how French movies came here, and how this magazine came in, which was probably the most unusual thing in the landscape back then. Through this magazine, you could make contact with French culture; at the same time you made contact with Western culture, as filtered through that magazine. On yet another note, you made contact with a culture that was totally unusual for us, comic book culture. Whole generations of children learned French reading the comics, in a naïve and spontaneous way, and discovered that there was a character called Superman, who came from the planet Krypton. When Superman, played by Christopher Reeve, was seen on the silver screen by Romanian children, they already knew that character from Pif.”



    Another major comic book hero in Romania was Rahan. Ioan Stanomir told us his take on the character: “Rahan is famous among Pif fans. He had a cult following, in the sense used in American and Western popular culture. Rahan is a man living at the beginning of the world. He is a link between humans who are not yet humans, and the humans who are about to become humans. He is very similar to American characters in American movies today, such as ‘10,000 BC’. He fights saber tooth tigers, mammoths, and teaches others how to discover their humanity. He is a sort of Prometheus unaware of his own condition. Rahan is still a cult character, if we look at comic book websites, especially Romanian ones. We can see a host of Rahan fans out there, keeping his memory alive. Rahan is based on Tarzan, which is a character that is alive in the West. He is a white man who ignores his condition in the heart of a black continent. This is a form of paternalism, the white man in relation to the black man who is at the beginnings of civilization. However, Pif was definitely not a racist magazine, because that contravened to Western leftist ideology. From this point of view, fed through a communist platform, the magazine was great for kids back then, because it taught them that there were French speaking children all over the place, Ivory Coast, Morocco, France and Romania. That meant you could have a pen pal in any of those countries. I think that the fight against racism, no matter what its ideological angle, is a noble fight, and it was wonderful for a kid in Romania to be able to talk to a kid from Morocco or Senegal. Pif made this possible.”



    We asked Ioan Stanomir why there are no Romanian comic book heroes: “When they gave us at school ‘The Valiant’, we just rolled it up and hit each other over the head with it, like it was a toy. I didn’t like that magazine. The heroes we found in Pif were so many. There were Pif and Hercules, obviously. And many of them were adopted by us. We had Rahan, Placid and Muzo, Leonard, Doc Justice, these were our heroes. We couldn’t understand all they said, but we knew that there was this place they came from, nicely wrapped, with wonderful gadgets, and these were the magazines that made us happy. The children back then didn’t want to be pioneers. Even if they were made pioneers, like so many of us, that was not their dream. Their dream was to have those gadgets, those Western consumerist toys. You wanted that put-it-together-yourself glider, not the red pioneer scarf. You wanted the candy that actually tasted like candy, not the tasteless stuff in Romania. Western consumer culture gained ground, because, even in its ideological form, it had to do with a world that had color and had taste. Maybe today young people don’t get that. Taste had a huge role in the fall of communism. The fact that there was a cult of Cuban candy, a cult for Turbo chewing gum, which had taste, not like the Romanian chewing gum, which had none, that says it all. We were living in a world of tasteless clones. I couldn’t care less about the struggle of the underground communist movement. We loved the French underground fighters in the Resistance, they were much more likeable. Pif, in a bizarre and unintentional way, served capitalism in Romania, not communism.”



    The history of comic books under socialism ended in 1989, and with it the special status that comic books had.

  • Sporting Events Broadcast by Radio Romania

    Sporting Events Broadcast by Radio Romania

    Sporting events have always been attractive to most people and mass media has along the years tried to cover major sporting competitions in an attempt to increase the audience. Even in difficult times for the printed press, sports publications managed to survive as they continued to churn out profit. Since their early days, sporting events have found their right place in radio broadcasts either under the form of news bulletins or live transmissions.



    Radio Romania aired its first sports broadcast on June 11th 1933, when Romania was thrashing Yugoslavia five-nil in a football game counting towards the Balkans’ Cup before 25 thousand spectators on the ANEF stadium in Bucharest. After the game, historian Nicolae Iorga and writer Mihail Sebastian engaged in polemics over the spectators’ reaction during the game. ‘Why should we be happy for having insulted an opponent?’ the historian kept asking, arguing that any attempt to prove the superiority of a nation on the basis of sporting results was childish. On the other hand, in an article entitled ‘Between the Stadium and the Library’ Mihail Sebastian concluded that just like in theatre performances, athletes are gaining their fame through hard work under the critical eye of an audience.



    One of the long lasting Radio Romania sports journalists was Ion Ghitulescu. In 1951 he got a job at Radio Romania and for 55 years he was one of the best-known commentators of its sports desk. In an interview to Radio Romania News and Current Affairs, Ghitulescu has referred to his special voice.



    “It’s a special voice but I dare say I honed it while working in the radio. I mean I used to read a phrase, listen to it and read it again until it sounded properly. My efforts eventually paid dividends and I was shortly entrusted a complex programme entitled ‘With a Microphone Among the Athletes’, which was established in 1951. It was a 15-minute slot, which included interviews and statements. It could hardly be described as a radio-reportage, but it offered glimpses into the athletes’ lives.”



    In a recording dated 1960 made at the Rome Olympics, Ion Ghitulescu captured the split second when athlete Iolanda Balas became an Olympic champion:



    “Everyone in the Olympic stadium is holding their breath. Iolanda Balas prepares for her third high-jump, with the diagonal rod set at 1 meter 85 centimeters above ground. She makes a run for it, sets her foot in and jumps!….the awarding ceremony has started, for the women’s high jump event. This very moment, stepping onto the winners’ podium is world record holder and sports emeritus master Iolanda Balas. For your performance, for your endeavor, we congratulate you, Iolanda!”



    Ion Ghitulescu recalls the Rome Olympics as being the Golden Age of Romantic spirit in sport.



    ”It was the merit of Italian sound technicians who succeeded in raising the sound level so that in the background my voice could be heard, as well as what was going on the stadium. Athletes knew us all and we knew them quite well. I went to their training sessions, I was there when they competed, and we got to know each other. I sometimes accompanied the Olympic lineup and I even had accommodation with the athletes. At the Rome Olympics, the Press Centre was 1 kilometre away from the Olympic Village. I used to say those were the last romantic Olympic games, as we spent the day in the Olympic Village, together with our athletes. It was there that I interviewed Ioanda Balas and her coach Ioan Söter and many other athletes”.



    Yet it was football that earned Ion Ghitulescu his national reputation.



    “My name became too closely associated with the football team Dinamo Bucharest. To be honest, at first I was affiliated to CCA (the Central House of the Army), as Steaua Bucharest was named backed then, and I used to broadcast their matches abroad. And then I got involved in a conflict with the club’s chairman, so I gave up accompanying the team abroad. Anyways, the rule was to assign people for matches randomly”.



    The “Sports and Music” show was the first live show broadcasting simultaneous football games. Ion Ghitulescu was its initiator, in the early 1960s:



    “At that time, the vice-president of the Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation was George Ionescu, the first head of the Sports Department at the Radio when I was hired. During my trips abroad I had seen that in some countries they did live transmissions from several stadiums. We first did a test, sort of a multiplex simulation, from only 4 stadiums because that was the most the studio could cover at that time. This took several months. Our technicians at the Radio Corporation managed to set up a studio where we could air transmissions from 10 to 12 stadiums. This is how the show we called then ‘Sports and Music’ was born. It was a live programme with transmissions from all the stadiums where games were played. There was a prologue and an epilogue. The epilogue was signed by Conti Barbulescu, a humorist from the Radio team, and starting from the results of the games and with a few lines from some of the songs, he would come up with a funny ending for the show.”



    Thanks to the live shows, Radio Romania won over Romania’s sports fans eager to find out what their favourite teams or athletes did in national and international competitions. In spite of the competition from the television and the internet, sports shows such as “Football by the minute,” first aired in 1965, still enjoy high popularity ratings, thanks to its covering matches from the national football championship. Over the years, teams made up of sports journalists and technical staff travelled to major international sports events such as the Olympic Games, European and world championships and so on, so as to bring the news of Romanian performances to the listeners of the Romanian public broadcaster.


  • The History of Romanian Radio

    The History of Romanian Radio

    The birth of Romanian radio is officially November 1, 1928. Since then, the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation went on to become one of the few Romanian companies with continuity over several decades. As a mass information and culture medium, but also a major propaganda tool for totalitarian regimes between 1938 and 1989, national radio today is still a significant presence on the media market, in spite of the popularity of television and the Internet.



    The late historian Eugen Denize was the first to write a four-volume monograph of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation. It deals with its beginnings and the landmarks in the history of Romania in which national radio played a major role: the tumultuous political life of the 1930s, WWII, the 45 year-long communist period, and the rebirth of democracy after 1989. In 2004, Eugen Denize was telling the story of how he started organizing the archives he used between 1996 and 2001 to write the first complete history of Romanian radio:



    “Seeing the wealth of materials in the archives of the corporation, I set out to write a monograph in several volumes in order to better be able to cover the history of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, a very important phenomenon in our contemporary history. Four volumes have resulted in the end, starting with the first attempts at broadcasting, in early 20th century, and stopping in 1989, at the Revolution. I took 1989 as a historical landmark because I believed that if I went beyond 1989 I would enter a territory that is rather multidisciplinary, at the interface with sociology and political science; the risk was that it would no longer be a pure history of radio, but rather snapshots of its present life. In short, the first volume covers, besides the pioneering years, the first 10 years of the corporation, from 1928 to 1938. I stopped at 1938 because that is when it stopped functioning under a democratic system. Starting in 1939, Romania went under a series of successive dictatorial, totalitarian regimes, so that the national radio started functioning differently. Until 1989 it had to face particular political pressure, and I can say that it managed to hold a balance and fulfill its basic functions. The second volume covers the period I called the right wing dictatorships, namely the personal dictatorship of the king, Carol II, the Legionnaire dictatorship, and the Marshal Antonescu dictatorship. The volume ends on 23 August 1944, when Romania turned to the side of the allies. The third volume is the period of communization in Romania, the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej era, up to his death in 1965, while the last volume deals with the Ceausescu period, 1965 to 1989, the opening that occurred after 1964, and the isolation that occurred 1971 to 1974. These are 4 volumes based strictly on documentary material in the written and sound archives of Romanian Radio. This is an absolute first in terms of historiographic material.”



    Eugen Denize also talked about the functions that national radio had since its inception:



    “Since its beginnings, radio broadcasting, even before the Radio Broadcasting Corporation appeared, was concerned with what its function was, very clearly defined by the pioneers of broadcasting, and they tended to stay the same throughout. We are dealing with a very important cultural function. Radio dealt in the highest level of culture, but brought to everyone’s level, and it contributed to the development of culture in itself, and raising the cultural level of the masses. In addition, we are talking about a national function. Radio has always had a very important role in promoting and defending national values. Then we are talking about an education function, in the very basic sense of the word: many, many broadcasts, right from the beginning, provided medical advice, or how to grow plants or raise animals, how to teach children. A lot of broadcasts were targeted at particular segments of the population, broadcasts for children, students, soldiers or peasants. Radio has always covered its education function very well. One cannot forget the famous programs part of ‘Radio University’, where some of the greatest names in Romanian culture spoke: historian Nicolae Iorga, sociologist Mihai Ralea, aesthetician Tudor Vianu, writers Mihail Sadoveanu and Tudor Arghezi, and many more. Basically, all the representative intellectuals of Romania have lectured on the microphone at Radio Romania. Before television came around, radio was the main means of entertainment available to people.”



    Radio Romania International has been broadcasting for the last 75 years. Foreign language broadcasts started in 1939, when WWII broke out. The first programs in foreign languages, such as news bulletins in English and French, started as early as 1932, broadcast before the end of the day’s broadcast, one quarter of an hour before midnight. Gradually, broadcasts were introduced in Italian and German, alternating with news in English and French.


  • Political Psychiatry in Communist Romania

    Political Psychiatry in Communist Romania

    Political psychiatry is seen as a soft version of communist repression, which apparently appeared for the first time in the Soviet Union after Stalin. Its aim was not to spread mass terror, as standard repression did, but to isolate and neutralize all those who opposed the regime. The procedure was simple: healthy people, but who were dissidents and opponents, were diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia or from serious personality disorders. They were forcefully put into psychiatric units where they were given neuroleptics and then they were placed among real patients. Some were asked to abandon their political principles for them to be declared recovered. Australian psychologist Sidney Bloch, who studied repression in the USSR, says that the idea came up when Moscow decided it was time to get rid of the bad international image left by Stalin’s show-trials.



    Physician Ion Vianu was one of the first Romanians who denounced this form of communist repression abroad. In 1977, after emigrating to Switzerland, Vianu joined an international group called “Geneva Initiative Against Political Psychiatry”, dealing mainly in soviet psychiatry. Ion Vianu:


    Ion Vianu: “ In 1967-1968, when I as an assistant at the Bucharest University Clinic of Psychiatry, I participated in many discussions whose main goal I did not see at first. One day, while in Professor Vasile Predescu’s office, I heard Dr. Angheluta saying that big psychiatric hospitals were about to be built soon, with high barbwire fences and watch dogs, for dangerous patients. It was much later, when I read the files provided by the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, that I found out Dr. Angheluta was both hospital manager and the man of the political police. Although I knew something about Soviet psychiatry and its methods, I did not understand, at that time, what Dr. Angheluta was talking about. I couldn’t understand why the number of dangerous patients had become so high all of a sudden and why they had become so dangerous as to require what was more like a prisoner supervision system.”



    Although the Ceausescu regime liked to define itself as “anti-Soviet”, political psychiatry was very much to the liking of the power in Bucharest, so they borrowed it from Moscow. Ion Vianu again:


    Ion Vianu: “There followed a meeting in University Square in Bucharest, marking the start of the 1969-1970 academic year, which was attended by Nicolae Ceausescu himself. In a very long speech, as his speeches usually were, he said: ‘only crazy people would imagine that socialist order could collapse in Romania. And for such people we have the necessary treatment methods; not just straitjackets, but other means too.’ And that was the moment when I made the connection with what Dr. Angheluta had said. I realized they were getting ready for it. Actually, the nightmare had already started. The files that I saw later were proof of the fact that people opposing the regime were being hospitalized in such facilities. I even met some of them later.”



    Ion Vianu also recalled a case he knew first hand, that of lawyer Haralambie Ionescu from Brasov:


    “There was a lawyer from Brasov, in his late 60s. He had sent a letter to the UN saying that human rights were not being observed in Romania. It was quite crazy to say something like that back then. The Securitate, which was paying extra attention to international correspondence, seized the letter, arrested the lawyer and sent him to the Gh. Marinescu hospital in Bucharest for examination. He was declared mentally ill, held in the hospital for a while and then hospitalized at home, with the obligation of paying a visit to the clinic once a week. After that, I left the country and I later I found out he had died. But while I was abroad, he sent me a message asking me not to mention his case, because he had been warned not to use his case against the regime. In another words, he was being blackmailed, and I felt like I was being blackmailed myself. And indeed, I could not use that case for a while. There were other people in that situation whom I met in person, such as writer Ion Vulcanescu. He was not a prestigious poet at the time. I ran into him once, on the hospital’s alleys, as he was involved in a political case. He was by no means mentally ill. Later he would emigrate and become the manager of a big apartment compound in New York. I don’t think a mentally ill person could do that.”



    Among those who suffered from the consequences of psychiatric treatment was the famous dissident Vasile Paraschiv. It is hard to estimate the real number of people who suffered from this kind of oppression, and researchers are reluctant when it comes to giving numbers. It is also difficult to talks in terms of damages and who should be held accountable. However, it’s a good thing today that we can talk freely about these people who fell victims to a cruel and criminal regime.

  • Early Public Transportation in Romania

    Early Public Transportation in Romania

    In the first half of the 19th century, Bucharest was a city undergoing head-on modernization. The drive of the elites to build a country and a nation mobilized a heterogeneous mass of people of very different social status, in a huge effort that ultimately meant building a mass of citizens. The Western-educated elites quickly realized that some of the things that were sorely needed were urban civilization, economic development and modern political thinking. To this end, Romanian cities had to be turned from Oriental, semi-urban types of dwelling into dynamic and functional Western-like places.



    Bucharest was the foremost location of most modernizing experiments. The most profound change was its reshaping along the lines of modern urban planning, opening up boulevards, drawing up streets and regulating traffic. The city’s modernization brought long a concept that was utterly unknown until then — public transportation. Around mid-19th century, a growing economy and urban infrastructure made public transport a necessity. William Wilkinson, British consul in the principality of Wallachia early in the 19th century, wrote about this issue



    ‘There are no coaches to rent, so that travelers have to walk places. As for transportation outside cities, Wallachia does very well, the postal system and travel between cities is easy.’ That did not mean that Bucharest was very much behind, however, considering that the first horse-drawn buses appeared in the West in 1820 or thereabouts.



    Architect Adrian Craciunescu, professor at the Bucharest School of Architecture and Urban Planning, told us about early public transportation in Bucharest:



    “Public transportation in Bucharest started from an early type of coaches and carriages. At first, only high-ranking individuals could afford private transportation. We had a mixture of coaches, horse-drawn buses, later on tramways and even automobiles, the very picture of Paris in 1900. The beginning of horse-drawn buses in Bucharest is unclear. They were regulated similarly with public transportation by coach, which was introduced patterned on the system in Brussels. Among its regulations, we find under article 31 that it was on obligation for drivers to ride around the streets with the empty coach to show that it was available to the public. The essence of this type of transportation, equivalent to today’s taxis, was that people who owned coaches had to observe a specific contract and stand at fixed points, set by the city, where they waited for customers. It was forbidden to ‘hook’ clients on the move, as is done nowadays.”



    The traffic boom in Bucharest led to the introduction of regulations, and several updates were operated, in 1845, 1847, 1850, and 1851. Adrian Craciunescu spoke to us about the traffic regulations, which back then were very strict, as they attempted to turn Bucharest into a modern city.



    “The police code was very much concerned with regulating traffic. I quote: ‘Streets, with their sidewalks, have to be clear at all times for easing communication. It is entirely forbidden to leave there boxes, barrels, baskets of merchandise, flower tubs, stands, timber, bricks and anything else that hinders public circulation. Nothing should stick out of the line of facades and its environs. On the sidewalk, it is forbidden to run by cart or by horse, or to tie up horses outside of houses. Carriages of all types can only station in the street for dire necessity, and only for a short time, until that necessity is met. On no street is it permitted to have several carts or carriages running without leaving a gap at least a carriage and horses’ worth of length.’ Another aspect related to traffic was article 11, which referred to the transportation of ‘objects with a strong smell, gross or with an ugly appearance, such as ash, hides, and cuts of beef.’ There was an obligation for these carriages to have a cover of canvas. Carts carrying manure had to have their beds well sealed, shaped like a box so that manure would not drop over the sides in the street.”



    Starting in the 1850s, Bucharest public transport started keeping pace with European norms. The horse-drawn bus was followed by a horse-drawn tramway, then by an electric driven tramway. Economic developments, labor mobility and the redefining of public life due to public transport and a new urban identity started an era of progress and a drive for change.


  • Mountain Roads in the Communist Regime

    Mountain Roads in the Communist Regime

    Right at the beginning of national road 7C, in the village of Bascov, Arges County, there starts one of the most spectacular roads in Romania, known as the Transfagarasan. It is 90 km long and it ends in Cartisoara, Sibiu County. The road is the emblem of an idea that dominated dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s economic thinking in the 1970s, regarding strategic mountain roads. In reality, mountain roads, just like many other projects in communist economy, were just good ideas ending in bad results. Their huge costs and small profits turned them into just another part of the burdening legacy of the communist regime.



    The idea of building such a road came to Nicolae Ceausescu in the late 1960s, after the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, and the project was completed in 1974. Ceausescu believed that the access roads already existing in that part of the Carpathians could be easily blocked. Fearing a Soviet invasion, he ordered the building of a road across Fagaras Mountains, whose tallest peak reaches 2,042 meters in the Balea Lake area. The complicated mission of building the Tansfagarasan was assigned to the engineering division of the Romanian army.



    Back then, when the Transfagarasan was planned and then built, Maxim Berghianu was head of the Planning Committee, the centralized institution in charge of drawing up strategic plans for the communist economy. In an interview to the Oral History Centre of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, back in 2002, Berghianu recalled he did not agree with that grandiose project.



    Maxim Berghianu: “I opposed the building of that road for four years, because it was a huge investment, generating no profits to the national budget. I was born in that mountain area and I knew that even in June and July the layer of snow can reach up to 5-6 meters. So, what would have been the point of such a road, always subject to erosion, draining waters and landslides? But they said it was a strategic project, and that was it. ‘You say we should not be able to cross Arges County to Transylvania on tanks?’ they asked me. I tried for about four years to delay that project, without saying anything, but in the end they did it. Vasile Patilinet, the guy in charge of the army, the Securitate, justice and everything that was strategic, convinced Ceausescu it was a must.”



    The ambition to build mountain roads was growing back then. Maxim Berghianu recalled how the communist authorities had planned to also build another mountain road, east of and parallel with Transfagarasan.



    Maxim Berghianu: “He wanted to build another one, starting from Sambata de Sus, also in Arges County. I managed to slow down Patilinet a bit, as we were kind of friends, and I told him, ‘all people in this country curse you for ruining the most beautiful access to Fagaras Moutnains, and for trying to destroy an entire forest on the banks of a splendid mountain river. Isn’t it enough that we have Transfagarasan and we keep it closed? Cool down a little, please!’ So he did not go to Ceausescu with that project. I myself had found out about it accidentally, when I happened to be in the area and I saw people cutting down trees. I wanted to know what was happening and I found out that there was a plan for a road cutting through the mountains to Arges. The Forestry Ministry was felling down the trees, as Patilinet was now working for the Ministry of Forestry and Woods. I knew about Transfagarasan because I had been trying for years to stop it, blaming either the lack of money or something I had forgotten, all sorts of reasons. But Ceausescu never forced me to include it in the investment plan. It was a proposal coming from the Army and the Forestry Ministry.”



    Building those mountain roads, and other strange and useless projects, alongside a general thinking aimed at absolute sovereignty and the early payment of foreign debts, led to the collapse of communist economy in the 1980s. Here is Maxim Berghianu again:



    Maxim Berghianu: “Their decision to no longer give money for imports of equipment and parts, that’s what destroyed the economy. Plus Ceausescu’s obsession with paying the foreign debt before the deadline, which nobody had ever done in the entire world. Important industries such as iron and steel, or the chemical sector, no longer benefited from imports of spare parts for modern equipment. He also limited the import of new technology. And as things go in this field, you cannot keep a piece of equipment more than 4 or 5 years. It’s no longer like in the 18th and 19th centuries. Machines and equipment must be renewed at least every six years. We could not do that because there was no money. He had invested money in those huge, megalomaniac projects, which meant nothing in terms of revenues to the national budget. And without national revenue, there were no funds for extended production, so at the end of the day there was no money left for rollovers.”



    Building mountain roads was one of the failed projects of communist economy, inspired by the grand model of Marxism Leninism, one more stone in the road to hell, always paved with good intentions.

  • The history of press in Romania. Student press in 1970-1980

    The history of press in Romania. Student press in 1970-1980

    Under direct ideological control, the press in the communist years had a sinuous evolution and coincided with the periods of transformation underwent by the regime itself. In the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s, the rigidity and dogmatism of the regime forced the press to use a militant, hysterical and aggressive tone. The ideological relaxation in the mid 1960s helped the press change. Although neither the pressure nor the censorship stopped, publications started using a more moderate language and the importance attached to professionalism grew.



    Student press was only an offspring of the central press and emulated its style. The liberalization that occurred in the 1960s targeted student press in particular, with the aim of observing the trends followed by the new generations. New magazines appeared, characterized by a higher level of professionalism as compared to the previous one, such as Echinox in Cluj or Alma Mater and Opinia studenteasca in Iasi. Constantin Dumitru, editor-in-chief of Opinia Studenteasca, which was established in 1974, recalls how the reform of the student press went.



    “The early days of student press in Romania go back to the year 1968. It’s no coincidence, it’s a wonderful year that meant a lot to Romania. There had been some pieces of student press before, in 1964, but they were very much in the kolkhoz style, like in the communist billboards. The genuine student press started developing in 1968. To tell you the truth, that happened against an approval given by the Central Committee, and actually from dictator Ceausescu himself, who wanted to see how people would think in a free way. It was an experiment Ceausescu’s personal advisors convinced him to carry out. It was a moment of freedom, of freedom of the press, communist as it was, and I got to know it first-hand. But they could not afford to do that experiment with Scanteia, it would have been nonsensical.”



    The new style in communist press also translated into the Press Directorate adopting a more refined way of doing censorship, and journalists had to fight a more subtle battle.



    “The Press Directorate was the main censorship body. It was made up of people specializing in deciphering encrypted messages, in seeing what was in between the lines and also to see whether those texts somehow attacked, directly or indirectly, in a subversive way, the political interests of the communist regime. Unfortunately, most of the people working there, with a few exceptions, were just morons who believed the word ‘subversive itself was a threat to communism. I remember how we used to mock and make fun of them when we were students. For instance, we published a poem by Miron Blaga, ‘Day Newborn of My Ancestors’. The comrade from the Directorate did not know what ‘Day Newborn’ in the title meant. It’s simple, I told him, it’s just a pun referring to Danubius and donaris. So, he exclaimed enlightened, this means Danube! And the poem was greenlighted for publication. Whenever we could, we would trick them. And we did that all the time, because they were stupid and uneducated.”



    One devious measure taken by the regime was to pass censorship responsibilities to editors in chief. Despite that, however, there were serious irregularities occurring from time to time.



    ”The Communist Party took a brilliant measure. When I started working as a journalist, at the age of 18, the system of censorship was already in place but I also lived to see it disappear. Why? Because the Communist Party was clever enough to do away with it as it were. So they called us, editors-in-chief and deputies to editors-in-chief and told us: ‘Comrades, starting today there is no more censorship’. We were so happy to hear that! ‘You are going to be the censors’. And our joy faded. Usually, the editor in chief had the final word with respect to approving articles, nobody would dare challenge him. They would become careful only when something special caught their attention, something like the photo of Ceausescu without an eye, or Ceausescu bald. Even so, there were things like that happening. For instance, the president of France came on a visit to Romania at one point. He was very tall, and he was received at the airport by Ceausescu. And the photo depicting this moment was ridiculous. As the French president was way taller then Ceausescu, and Ceausescu was holding his hat in hand, the comrades decided to put a hat on Ceausescu’s head, but they forgot to eliminate the one he was holding in his hand. So this is how he appeared in the Scanteia newspaper, with two hats. A few people were sacked and that was it. Their stupidity made up for the lack of freedom. The intention was not to run a revolution, many times a stupid thing would just come out.”



    Today Constantin Dumitru believes that despite the rigors of censorship, journalists were able to work in acceptable conditions. But that only depended on the work ethic of those who assumed their role as journalist with decency.



    “We at Opinia Studenteasca did no propaganda at all. I can print those editorials even today, and I’m afraid that they are better written than editorials are today. It also depended on what strategy you adopted. Echinox too had good editorials. To others, an editorial was just a certain façade, behind which they could write what they wanted. Communist editorials would usually pay heed to authorities, it was the kind of publication that worked for the regime. But that did not happen with good student publications. An editorial was something different. We did not do politics. At Opinia studenteasca, the one that I headed between 1974 and 1975, there was no single praising article. Not even one line. So, it was possible.”



    The press in the 1970-1980s was representative for the political, economic, social and cultural reality of those years. It went down in history as a chapter in the life of a despicable regime, where society’s expectations were totally different from what the regime provided.