Radio România Internațional

Category: The History Show

  • Radio drama for children

    Radio drama for children

    A priority mission of the Radio was to educate and bring culture to everyone. Children are a generous audience and shows for them have always been the focus of the management and journalists. Radio drama has enjoyed a real success, being supported by the efforts of those who wrote scripts or adapted classic texts, of actors and directors and of the technical teams. All of them wrote the history of the radio drama for children, they left those memories that future adults have. In Radio Romania’s audio library one can find reference works from the history of radio drama for children, created by important authors.

     

    The writer Silvia Kerim was also a radio journalist and devotedly worked on dramatizations for children. She started her job in 1961 and joined a department with quality people who were trying to escape the political ideology of the time. In 1998, Radio Romania’s Oral History Center interviewed Silvia Kerim and found out how the journalists with the children’s radio drama department were able to maintain the quality of their product: “I was assigned to work in a very pleasant place for me, it was called Theater for Children on the Microphone. I was lucky because most of the plays that made up the children’s radio drama repertoire were stories. They were derived from classical literature, so the ideological lie did not really fit in there. The actors were big names of Romanian theater, the directors were also very good so that compromise and lies didn’t really fit.”

     

    As in any place, people are the ones who make things work and Silvia Kerim had open-minded colleagues: “In the Theater for Children on the Microphone department, I had Eduard Jurist as my boss, from him I learned what it means to be a modest boss, not to boss people around, and to pay equal attention to younger and older editors alike. In that department I had colleagues such as Vasile Mănuceanu, a gifted writer called Călin Gruia, Mioara Paler who, at one time, was the head of the children’s shows section and to whom I owe the joy of writing for children. They had an intuition of my love for children, they felt my desire to write for children.”

     

    Silvia Kerim wrote scripts for children’s radio dramas and remembered how important the childhood stories told by her parents were for her: “I was given the task of processing some stories that were poorly translated from Chinese or Japanese literature. I worked on such stories and short stories that had a meaning of their own. Retelling them, I realized that I put a lot of my imagination in them, and that, at a certain moment, I could write the stories that were running through my head and which, in turn, had a magical root. My mother used to tell my brother and I stories every night when we were very small, night after night. In general, the first part was “Snow White”, I think that for an entire year I listened to “Snow White”, either in episodes or shortened. And if my mother somehow messed up on a detail, we would both hurry to contradict her and remind her that, in fact, it was not character x that had done and said this or that. The second story was, in general, about animals that my mother loved very much, as did my father for that matter. Both parents passed on to us this love for animals.”

     

    During the years when Silvia Kerim was giving life to children’s stories on the airwaves, the communist regime was forcefully indoctrinating the audience. But the journalist chose to oppose the ideological rudeness in a subtle way: “I definitely want to say that such an attempt, in the case of my texts, was quite difficult. I never wrote the word “pioneer”, the words “party”, “pioneer”, “hawk” never appeared in my scripts. My scenarios and stories are sad stories with poor people, with grandparents dying, with the most expensive pie being apple pie or with the most pleasant dessert being toast with plum jam. I have always thought that there are many more unhappy and orphaned children than rich and spoiled children. And that these stories should reach them. At a time when we had to write only about happy children, who, in the name of the party, were growing up healthy and without worries, when they had to deal with writings in which the reality appeared quite sad and hopeless, it was not too easy for a text to pass censorship.”

     

    Radio drama for children was a miracle through which radio reached innocent minds. And the people who made it possible passed on what they had received. (LS)

  • The Romanian Institute of Technical Documentation  

    The Romanian Institute of Technical Documentation  

     

    Institutional history is not always as interesting as the biography of a personality, or as the story of a breakthrough that changed everything that mankind used to know. Institutions are generally perceived as cold, depersonalized spaces, where an authority imposes its order on citizens. But the history of institutions is of great importance in knowing the past, because they also involve human creativity and daily routine for the people who work there.

     

    In Romania, after 1945, the communist regime was established, with the direct support of the Soviet occupation army. This meant the destruction of old institutions considered repressive of the working class, the distortion of others, as well as the establishment of new ones. One of the major problems faced by the communist regime in Romania was finding specialists, engineers in particular, to help restart the new centralized economy headed by the communist party. While part of Romania’s old technical elite had been thrown into prison on ideological grounds, the new elite was trying to make up for what had been lost and adapt to the new ideology. Thus, an institution that assumed the task of collecting information and drawing up syntheses related to the state of technological development was Romania’s Technical Documentation Institute, established in 1949.

     

    Engineer Gheorghe Anghel was the general director of the institution and in 2003 he recalled, at the microphone of Radio Romania’s Oral History Center, the beginnings: “The Technical Documentation Institute of Romania became appreciated as one of the best documentation and information institutes of the socialist bloc. Specialists from many countries came to learn how the information and documentation activity was organized in Romania. Apart from the National Institute of Information and Documentation, there were a number of 24 information-documentation offices, by branch and field, which in turn were specialized in promoting technical innovations in the field they represented.”

     

    Located in the center of Bucharest, on the Victory Boulevard, the Technical Documentation Institute was the main information and documentation entity for engineers. The institution was copied after a similar one in the Soviet Union, a huge institute, focused on this activity. The Romanian institute was equipped with an impressive technical book fund and substantial collections of specialized magazines from all technical fields. A generous reading room accommodated everyone who wanted to stay connected to the latest news in their field. The institute centralized technical knowledge, but at the level of each branch and field of activity it was also supported by information and documentation offices.

     

    Gheorghe Anghel talked about the activity of the institute: “The activity of the Institute and the offices was very complex. It was not limited only to the reception of books and magazines, but, in particular, to the promotion of content. Within the Institute there was a whole series of departments that processed the existing information in the pages of the magazines: from simply signaling the existence of the content of the existing magazines, by photocopying their summaries and organizing them into several collections, which were distributed on a subscription basis to those interested , to the actual processing of the content of specialized articles. The respective novelties were extracted from them and they were reported to the specialists in the national economy.”

     

    But although the institute was intended for engineers and technical documentation, the famous censorship was in place there too. Gheorghe Anghel: “We did not have the right to send all magazines to the reading hall. Some of them contained various articles that were not in tune with the party policy. So, there was a special stamp applied on the banned ones. They were registered at an office of secret documents and deposited there. The access was prohibited. I remember that there was an elaborate book in English that dealt with a certain mysterious phenomenon that had happened in the Urals. On the basis of documents published in the Soviet Union in specialized magazines, an English researcher had demonstrated that an atomic catastrophe had occurred in the Urals in which many people had perished. At that time these things were not public and were shrouded in mystery. It was not a fantasy, they were accurate documents published in the Soviet Union, in their magazines.”

     

    The institute held symposia and conferences, and by 1974 several hundred foreign-language people were working there. However, in 1974, Elena Ceaușescu, the wife of Nicolae Ceaușescu, head of the National Council for Science and Technology, decided to streamline the activity and reduced the number of employees to 160. However, in the 1980s, the general crisis of Romanian society also hit the institute. Due to the lack of foreign currency, the purchase of magazines and books had been drastically reduced. Those seeking to document themselves, could still read publications from the Soviet Union. The crisis of the institution was the crisis of the system that ended in 1989. (EE)

     

  • Slavery and emancipation of the Roma in Romania

    Slavery and emancipation of the Roma in Romania

    One of the constant presences in the history of the Romanian space until the 19th century was slavery. In the first half of the 19th century, in the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, the abolitionist movement appeared as a materialization of the ideas brought from the West by the Romanian elites educated there. The goal of the Romanian abolitionists was the liberation of slaves, most of them of Roma origin, slaves held by the state, the Church and phisical persons.

     

    Viorel Achim is one of the most important specialists in the history of Roma in the Romanian area. He wanted to clarify the term used in specialized studies. Viorel Achim: “What we call robie, in Romanian, was slavery. The essence of this word is the definition of slavery in any historical or legal dictionary. It was about people without legal personality and who were the property of another. In the Romanian Principalities, slavery by all old and new standards, was definitely present.”

     

    Strating the 14th century, when the oldest chancellery documents date back to, slaves were present on the territory of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The Romanian society was one with slaves, but not a slave society like some states in the south of the US. Slaves did not have such a big role in the economy. For a society to be considered a slave society, a third of the population must have been slaves, and in the Romanian Principalities only 7% of them were.

     

    Viorel Achim: “Slavery, in the Romanian space, is long lasting. It is attested from the beginnings of the states of Wallachia and Moldavia. The first slaves were Tatars. The Romanian states were born with slavery and left history without slavery. The 1848 generation, the one that thought about the future of Romania through the union of Wallachia and Moldavia and the creation of the Romanian nation, was obsessed with the idea of not being caught, at the unification moment, with slavery still in force, with that social shame, as they called it. The 1848 generation did this, it was an extraordinary administrative and political effort. But they succeeded in liquidating the last vestiges of slavery on February 20, 1856,.”

     

    The emancipation of the slaves, or disenslavement, as it was called at the time, was the biggest social reform in the history of Romania in the 19th century. The result was that approximately 250,000 Roma slaves became free people. Viorel Achim: “Slaves of Roma origin somehow monopolized the institution of slavery in the sense that, starting from a certain moment in history, the great, huge majority of the members of this legal category, later called Gypsies, were of Roma origin. But this category also includes ethnic Romanians and people of other ethnicities, in quite large numbers in some historical periods.”

     

    What was the status of slaves and how were they recruited? Viorel Achim: “Slavery was hereditary in the Romanian space. There were areas in the world where it was not hereditary. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, Muslim law required that after 7 years, a slave be freed and emancipated. And so it happened, they came out of the category of slaves. Regarding the recruitment of slaves, although in the Romanian space the slave condition was passed on by birth, to a certain extent, slavery was an open status, including in the 19th century. There were free people who entered this status, ethnic Romanians or free Roma who legally were not Gypsies, and nomadic Roma, subjects of other countries who entered the territory of the principalities. The latter automatically became, by law, slaves of the state.”

     

    However, abolition of slavery was not a simple process, there were steps forward and steps back. Six emancipation laws and 100 pieces of legislation dealing with slavery were given. The partial modification of the slave state began in 1817 in Moldova through the Calimach Code. The slave was seen as a person in relation to people other than his master. Once considered a person, he or she was under the protection of the law. Slaves could go to court to defend their rights against anyone other than their master. They could sign contracts, give statements, do business, be the owner of any kind of property. There were amazing situations for us today when slaves owned other slaves.

     

    Viorel Achim detailed the manner in which emancipation became possible, namely through the direct involvement of the state: “The state interfered in the relations between masters and slaves, something unthinkable for centuries. The state limited the level of exploitation for monastic slaves, again something unthinkable. The state also limited the right of owners to move their slaves wherever they wanted. It was a massive intrusion into the rights of slave owners.”

     

    On February 20, 1856, the history of slavery in Romania came to an end. It was a reminiscence of the past, a disappearance that has never been regretted

  • Communism and linguistics

    Communism and linguistics

    The communist regime tried to change not only people’s deepest convictions, but also the way they expressed their thoughts, ideas and feelings. The language of communism was commonly known as “wooden language” and Joseph Stalin contributed to its creation. In the summer of 1950, he penned three articles in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under the title “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics”. In these articles, he outlined new research directions in linguistics that cancelled everything that had been written before. In Romania, which had been under the occupation of the Soviet troops since 1944, Stalin’s views were immediately adopted by the academic and research community, which was under the strict and brutal control of the ideological activists.

    The translator and philologist Micaela Ghițescu, who also served time as a political prisoner under the communist regime, went to university in 1949, one year after the education reform of 1948. The new education system introduced political education courses and favoured children coming from working-class backgrounds. In an interview for Radio Romania’s Oral History Centre she gave in 2002, Micaela Ghițescu recalled how politics affected education in two ways:

    “On the one hand, they would teach us Marxism-Leninism, which was a year-long course. But then, during the French class, we would talk about what they called ‘topical issues’. The French were at war in Indochina at the time, and we would discuss about this during our French class. I remember they used to tell us that the French soldiers were cannibals and that they ate Vietnamese prisoners. And we were supposed to accept this without asking any questions.”

    In 1948, Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr became the new star in linguistics, with his theory that all languages evolved from one original language gaining a lot of traction with linguists. Micaela Ghițescu recalls how she first got acquainted with some of Marr’s ideas that were turning upside down everything she and her generation had learnt in high school:

    “Marr’s theory, which was taught in the general linguistics course, raised all kind of question marks. Marr used to say that language is a superstructure and that changes to the social structure and organisation will lead to a change in language. Another theory was that language adopts the character of the latest conquering people, of the people that are the last to occupy a given land. So, as the Slavs were the last to arrive in these parts, it meant that the Romanian language had a Slavic character and was no longer to be considered a Romance language.”

    Marr’s linguistic theory, however, would be denounced by Stalin, who put the national language back in its pride of place. The national language was now no longer believed to have evolved out of a single original language and no longer an expression of superstructure, but the language of the working people. Micaela Ghițescu explains:

    “With the publication of Stalin’s views on linguistics, Marr’s theories fell out of favour. Stalin’s theory focuses on the quality of a people’s culture, and that’s what gives the language of a given land its specific nature. The Latin culture being prevalent in Romania, Romanian again became a Romance language, overnight. It was just before an exam, and I didn’t know what was going on. The exam was on the same day as the publication of what they described as ‘comrade Stalin’s outstanding contribution to linguistics’ and which overturned everything we had learnt at the course of Prof. Graur. We were to give the written exam in the morning and the oral text in the afternoon. So, for the morning exam, the professor was late, and when he arrived he told us to write whatever we wanted. And for the oral exam in the afternoon he told us to read the newspaper carrying Stalin’s views spread over several pages.”

    Stalin’s text also sparked reactions among historians. In an interview from 1993, the archaeologist Petre Diaconu recounted how a colleague ended up in prison:

    “In 1953, when ‘Marxism and Linguistics’ was published, everyone, from party educators to university professors would now say that everything that had been written on the subject of language before was to be discarded. The work of reference was now Stalin’s publication. During a public meeting at the History Institute, the then deputy director and also a party activist called Chereșteș got up and started telling us what comrade Stalin had said. It was at this point that an archaeologist called Vladimir Dumitrescu also got up and said we’d had enough of Stalin’s theories. This was sometime in spring and he was arrested in July, but it was only later that I realised the connection.”

    Stalin’s ambitions as a thinker on language lasted until his death in 1953. Although the language of communism continued to exist after his death and ideology to act as a straitjacket for free thought, a certain sense of relief was felt everywhere.

  • The merger of the Romanian Communist Party with the Social Democratic Party

    The merger of the Romanian Communist Party with the Social Democratic Party

    The start of the communist regime in Romania on the 6th March 1945 meant the beginning of the party’s control not only on the political scene, but also on all aspects of people’s lives. The communist regime brought about the most brutal disruption in the history of the societies that have faced it.

    The Romanian Communist Party, following the Soviet model, moved with extreme ruthlessness against all the other political parties. The parties that resisted it were dismantled, and their leaders imprisoned; others were forced into submission and brutally discarded when no longer useful. And the parties that were the closest to the communist ideas were simply taken over, as was the case with the Social Democratic Party.

    Set up in 1893, the Romanian Workers’ Social Democratic Party was the first political party representing the Romanian working class. Its successor, the Romanian Social-Democratic Party, was founded it 1910. It actively supported the union of Transylvania with the Romanian Principalities, and in 1918 it was renamed the Socialist Party.

    A break came in 1921, when its radical members embraced the principles of the Comintern and set up the Romanian Communist Party, while the moderates reformed the party in 1927, resuming the old name, of Social-Democrats.

    In the inter-war years, the divide between the two was complete, with the Social-Democrats advocating democracy and the integrity of the Romanian state in the face of the terrorism employed by the Communists.

    After the Red Army entered Romania on the 30th August 1944, the Romanian Communist Party became the main instrument of the occupation and launched the communisation campaign that lasted until 1947. And taking out the Social-Democratic Party was part of the plan. In February 1948, the Communists implemented the plan, in a congress centered on the forced merger of the two parties.

    The journalist Elena Gugian joined the Social-Democratic Party in 1944, at the age of 19. Her beliefs made her follow in the footsteps of her father, a member of the SDP since 1927. Elena joined the women’s organisation and worked as a press officer for the party, as well as for the “Femeia muncitoare” magazine, founded in 1930.

     

    In an interview she gave to Radio Romania’s Oral History Centre in 2000, she said the fusion of the Social Democratic Party with the Romanian Communist Party was part of a wider plan masterminded by Moscow to destroy the Social-Democratic movement in all Soviet-occupied countries:

    “The unification process began in April 1946 with the strongest Social-Democratic party of the day, the German one, after Moscow secured for itself the eastern part of the country by dividing it in two. It immediately moved to unite the Social-Democratic Party in Eastern Germany with the Communist Party. It took another two years before Moscow got rid of all social-democratic parties. The Romanian one was gone in February 1948, followed in June by that from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, in August by that from Bulgaria and in December by that from Poland. And that was the end of social democracy.”

    The merger through absorption was imposed by the communists without any negotiations. Elena Gugian recalls the person sent by the communist youth organisation to meet the Social Democratic youth and announce the conditions of the merger:

    “The unification process began here with the youth organisation, continued with the women’s organisation and then the whole party. As a journalist, I witnessed the discussions held by the two youth organisations on the merger. They were held at the headquarters of the Union of the Social-Democratic Youth and the person appointed by the communist youth organisation to lead the discussions was none other than Nicolae Ceauşescu.”

    Elena Gugian also recalls the unpleasant impression left on her and her fellow party members by the envoy sent by the communists, who would go on to become Romania’s dictator in 1965:

    “Nicolae Ceauşescu would attend every one of these meetings and recite the same text. This would be followed by questions and answers, but he would not give any clarifications, would just repeat what he had said before, over and over again. Anton Manea, the general secretary of the Social-Democratic Youth, would sometimes interrupt him and ask if something different couldn’t perhaps be done in a certain matter, Ceaușescu would again not answer, but deliver the same text. It would drive you mad.”

    The fusion resulted in the Romanian Workers’ Party. Constantin Titel-Petrescu and other important Social Democratic leaders who had opposed collaboration with the communists as early as 1945 would be thrown in jail, sharing the same fate as the Liberals and the Christian Democrats. Others, like Elena Gugian, refused to enter the new party and preferred to resign rather than go against their principles.

  • Slavery and emancipation of the Roma in Romania

    Slavery and emancipation of the Roma in Romania

    After WWI, the victorious states part of the Entente, that is France, Britain, Italy, Japan, the US and Romania, wanted to preserve peace through peace treaties, the League of Nations, which later became the UN, and regional alliances. Thus, regional alliances appeared in Central and South-Eastern Europe that sought to block the policy of the revisionist states. One of the alliances was the Balkan Pact or the Balkan Entente signed in the Greek capital, Athens, 90 years ago, on February 9, 1934, between Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey and Greece. It had been preceded by the Balkan Bloc 10 years earlier, in 1924.

     

    From Romania’s viewpoint, the Balkan Pact was part of a system of alliances designed to defend its borders on the north, east, south and west. Romania’s national defense doctrine saw the Soviet Union as the main danger to its security, so the signing of the alliance with Poland in 1921 secured defense for the north and the east. To the west, Romania had secured its border by signing the Little Entente, a mutual defense arrangement with Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in 1921. To the south, security was to be guaranteed by the Balkan Pact. The main inspirer and guardian of the alliances in Central and South-East Europe was France.

     

    Why do states forge military alliances? It is a question to which experts in international relations have given answers such as economic interests, the similarity of political systems, values, ideologies, cultural and linguistic affinities, the pressures of the Great Powers and so on. American political scientist Randall Schweller has identified two major reasons for states to form military alliances. The first motivation is to balance the threat, which is usually defensive and tries to block the aggression of other states. The second motivation is alignment, which is offensive and whose main determinant is the compatibility of political goals. From this point of view, the Balkan Entente was meant to balance the threat, it was a defensive military alliance aimed at isolating Bulgaria, which was promoting an aggressive policy in the area, actively supported by the Soviet Union.

     

    Military historian Petre Otu outlined the geopolitical and geostrategic features of the Balkan Entente: “It is a regional alliance. The actors are four states and it is based on the principles of balancing the threat, with the aim of protecting its status quo in the region, as established by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and 1920. Some say it was against Bulgaria and I do not deny such an intention of the initiators. But there is another important reason, as Nicolae Titulescu said: the Balkans were known as the powder keg of Europe. I think that what Titulescu said is relevant. He was right, as we had to end this endemic warlike attitude of the Balkans, reach and agreement and establish an area of ​​peace and cooperation.”

     

    Although driven by common interests, the states of the Balkan Entente put their own interests first. Petre Otu explains: “Three of the partners were Mediterranean states, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey, and their security efforts were oriented to this direction. They were not aimed at what particularly interested Romania. Greece had reservations about a possible Italian aggression in the Balkan Peninsula. Likewise, Italy was a danger to Yugoslavia. Romania and Turkey were two Pontic countries and there should have been a greater solidity. But there was the so-called Turkish reserve here. According to the understandings between Kemal Pasha and Lenin in the early 1920s, the two countries would be allies and Turkey was committed not to have a conflict with Moscow.”

    Laudable in theory, the Balkan Pact was one that lacked cohesion in practice. Petre Otu: “Another problem of this regional alliance was the lack of a sponsor state, a hegemonic state. The Balkan Entente faced control attitudes from France, Italy and Britain, among which there were strong contradictions. In 1931, Italy and Britain encouraged the creation of a Bulgaria-Turkey-Greece Union. But France opposed it and bet on a Yugoslavia-Romania-Bulgaria deal.”

     

    Regional alliances were useful in diplomatic terms but useless in military terms. For reasons of its own, within the framework of the Little Entente, Czechoslovakia did not clearly undertake to support Romania in the event of an attack. For the same reasons, neither Greece nor Turkey committed to support Romania in the event of an attack from the east. In conclusion, Petre Otu said that regional alliances only work if big players are also involved: “The Balkan Pact was an alliance of small actors and did not resist the conflicting interests of the Great Powers. In general, regional alliances of smaller actors have little viability in the system of international relations. They can be played by the big international actors, so the Little Entante, the Balkan Pact and the Romanian-Polish understanding did not withstand the extraordinary pressure of the Great Powers and the tensions in international relations.”

     

    By the late 1940s, regional alliance systems were collapsing and World War II was breaking out. A long and bloody conflict followed, from which humanity emerged in 1945, struck by other tragedies and unfulfilled goals. (EE)

  • 90 years since the signing of the Balkan Pact

    90 years since the signing of the Balkan Pact

    After WWI, the victorious states part of the Entente, that is France, Britain, Italy, Japan, the US and Romania, wanted to preserve peace through peace treaties, the League of Nations, which later became the UN, and regional alliances. Thus, regional alliances appeared in Central and South-Eastern Europe that sought to block the policy of the revisionist states. One of the alliances was the Balkan Pact or the Balkan Entente signed in the Greek capital, Athens, 90 years ago, on February 9, 1934, between Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey and Greece. It had been preceded by the Balkan Bloc 10 years earlier, in 1924.

    From Romania’s viewpoint, the Balkan Pact was part of a system of alliances designed to defend its borders on the north, east, south and west. Romania’s national defense doctrine saw the Soviet Union as the main danger to its security, so the signing of the alliance with Poland in 1921 secured defense for the north and the east. To the west, Romania had secured its border by signing the Little Entente, a mutual defense arrangement with Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in 1921. To the south, security was to be guaranteed by the Balkan Pact. The main inspirer and guardian of the alliances in Central and South-East Europe was France.

    Why do states forge military alliances? It is a question to which experts in international relations have given answers such as economic interests, the similarity of political systems, values, ideologies, cultural and linguistic affinities, the pressures of the Great Powers and so on. American political scientist Randall Schweller has identified two major reasons for states to form military alliances. The first motivation is to balance the threat, which is usually defensive and tries to block the aggression of other states. The second motivation is alignment, which is offensive and whose main determinant is the compatibility of political goals. From this point of view, the Balkan Entente was meant to balance the threat, it was a defensive military alliance aimed at isolating Bulgaria, which was promoting an aggressive policy in the area, actively supported by the Soviet Union.

    Military historian Petre Otu outlined the geopolitical and geostrategic features of the Balkan Entente: “It is a regional alliance. The actors are four states and it is based on the principles of balancing the threat, with the aim of protecting its status quo in the region, as established by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and 1920. Some say it was against Bulgaria and I do not deny such an intention of the initiators. But there is another important reason, as Nicolae Titulescu said: the Balkans were known as the powder keg of Europe. I think that what Titulescu said is relevant. He was right, as we had to end this endemic warlike attitude of the Balkans, reach and agreement and establish an area of ​​peace and cooperation.”

    Although driven by common interests, the states of the Balkan Entente put their own interests first. Petre Otu explains: “Three of the partners were Mediterranean states, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey, and their security efforts were oriented to this direction. They were not aimed at what particularly interested Romania. Greece had reservations about a possible Italian aggression in the Balkan Peninsula. Likewise, Italy was a danger to Yugoslavia. Romania and Turkey were two Pontic countries and there should have been a greater solidity. But there was the so-called Turkish reserve here. According to the understandings between Kemal Pasha and Lenin in the early 1920s, the two countries would be allies and Turkey was committed not to have a conflict with Moscow.”

    Laudable in theory, the Balkan Pact was one that lacked cohesion in practice. Petre Otu: “Another problem of this regional alliance was the lack of a sponsor state, a hegemonic state. The Balkan Entente faced control attitudes from France, Italy and Britain, among which there were strong contradictions. In 1931, Italy and Britain encouraged the creation of a Bulgaria-Turkey-Greece Union. But France opposed it and bet on a Yugoslavia-Romania-Bulgaria deal.”

    Regional alliances were useful in diplomatic terms but useless in military terms. For reasons of its own, within the framework of the Little Entente, Czechoslovakia did not clearly undertake to support Romania in the event of an attack. For the same reasons, neither Greece nor Turkey committed to support Romania in the event of an attack from the east. In conclusion, Petre Otu said that regional alliances only work if big players are also involved: “The Balkan Pact was an alliance of small actors and did not resist the conflicting interests of the Great Powers. In general, regional alliances of smaller actors have little viability in the system of international relations. They can be played by the big international actors, so the Little Entante, the Balkan Pact and the Romanian-Polish understanding did not withstand the extraordinary pressure of the Great Powers and the tensions in international relations.”

    By the late 1940s, regional alliance systems were collapsing and World War II was breaking out. A long and bloody conflict followed, from which humanity emerged in 1945, struck by other tragedies and unfulfilled goals. (EE)

  • Ottomans and Romanians

    Ottomans and Romanians

    One of the most important actors that influenced the history of Romanians in the extra-Carpathian space was the Ottoman Empire. It is considered one of the great empires in history and for more than half a millennium it dominated the world on three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa. Ottomans and Romanians met, clashed and coexisted closely from the second half of the 15th century to the last quarter of the 19th century. In their history in the proximity of the Ottoman world, the Romanian Principalities enjoyed autonomy compared to other Balkan states that were conquered and turned into pashaliks.

     

    The British historian Marc David Baer, ​​author of a bestseller on the history of the Ottoman Empire, noted that status: “The interesting thing about these three provinces of the Ottomans, Transylvania and Wallachia and Moldova, which today form Romania, is that they were conquered at different times, they were treated in different ways, and more importantly, they were treated very differently than other core provinces of the Ottoman Empire. So, if we compare what is today Romania with Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, it’s very, very different because Romania, I don’t know, maybe the resistance was too strong, I don’t know. The Ottomans did not completely subject this region, what is today Romania, instead allowing it a great amount of autonomy, which is similar in some ways to the way the Ottomans treated Kurdistan in the southeast, allowing the Kurds a great measure of autonomy so long as they gave the right amount of troops and defended the empire against the external enemies.”

     

    Being a part of the Ottoman world, Romanians had both gains and losses, historian Marc David Baer believes: “What are the benefits of the Ottoman Empire? When Mehmet II conquered Wallachia in, I think, the 1460s, he connected this part of the world to world commerce, to a world flow of ideas, the Ottoman Empire would become one of the greatest, strongest, wealthiest empires in the world at the time, and being part of that gave a lot of benefits to the subjects. Now, of course, from the point of view of people in this region, there were a lot of negatives. For example, the Ottomans had a tax, a levy on boys, so one out of every 40 Christian boys in an Ottoman province or newly conquered territory would be brought back to the capital, would be circumcised, converted, and trained to be either in the leading military corps, the Janissaries, or become ministers of government.”

     

    The historians of the Ottoman Empire have often written about the tolerance the Ottomans had for the diversity they ruled on. Marc David Baer believes that these statements need to be explained: “We have to, first of all, define what we mean by tolerance and toleration. So, in European history, we talk about tolerance beginning at the… the end of the 30 years war in 1648. But if we think about tolerance just being something that’s brought to Europe by whoever rules it, then we can go back all the way to the eighth century and talk about the Arabs who entered Spain. And in Muslim Spain, you had religious tolerance. You had Christians, Jews, and Muslims living in Muslim kingdoms. The Ottomans introduced religious tolerance to Eastern Europe when they move into Europe in the 14th century. Now, tolerance is not the same as coexistence. It’s not the same as saying, your religion is equal to mine. We’re the same. Let’s respect each other. Tolerance in pre-modern times was about hierarchies. There was a group in the Ottoman case, Muslim and men, and also free people, had more rights than Christians, Jews, women, and slaves.”

     

    In the 19th century, the Balkan nations removed the Ottoman model, gained independence, and adopted the European model of modern state and society. Mark David Baer is back at the microphone: “The Ottoman Empire was this empire that lasted 600 years. And the Ottomans themselves were a new class made up of these converted Christian men and women. And they were the minority in their own empire, on purpose. And they created this Ottoman language which was only understandable for this Ottoman elite, not for everybody. The majority of Ottoman subjects for the first four centuries were Christian in the empire. But as we move into the 19th century, we have a different empire, we have a different world. When the Russians begin to defeat the Ottomans again and again, and when the Ottomans begin to lose territory from the 17th century through the 19th century, then intellectuals and statesmen and sultans begin to ask, how can we save the empire? What can we do? Now we’re being defeated militarily, what is it that we need to do? And what they don’t turn to is nationalism, which is the idea that this land is for one people only. But for the Ottomans, there wasn’t that aim until very, very late. The aim was always to save the empire, territorially, and to find a way, which ultimately failed, to gain the loyalty of all their subjects.”

     

    The Ottoman Empire formally disappeared in 1918, more than a century ago. Traces of what it meant remained mostly in written documents and less as defining features today. (LS)

  • Germans and Soviets in Romania, in the Second World War

    Germans and Soviets in Romania, in the Second World War

    Wars are some of the most horrendous forms of human degradation. During the Second World War, the war hit limits that are hard to imagine. It was the war where civilians had a lot to suffer, it was the war at the end of which international law was changed and recreated, significantly, in a bid to cover all the atrocities that were perpetrated. Notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of the abuses and killings civilians had been subjected to, have remained unpunished. The civilians’ memory regarding the occupation armies has been significantly influenced by every individual’s experience and by the intensity of their own suffering.

     

    Just like other Central and Eastern European states, Romania had the misfortune of going through both types of occupation during the Second World War. The Romanians and the other Central-European citizen drew a comparison between the German and then the Soviet patterns of behavior. All things considered, the German behavior was perceived as being positive, while the Soviet type of behavior was described as negative. With respect to the Germans, the memories of the Romanians who lived back then, quite a few of them confirmed by archive documents, speak about some friendly, honest and dependable people. About the Soviets, the memories are, on the contrary, negative: they were aggressive people, irrational selfish and dominated by animalistic impulses. Radio Romania’s Oral History Center had the opportunity to record testimonies of those who witnessed how people from the two armies behaved, which prompted them to have the aforementioned perceptions of them.

     

    In 1999, nurse Petre Radu Damian reminisced how he was dispatched to Campina in 1939, where the first German transmission troops had been stationed Apart from the military technique, the Germans arrived there with sanitary vehicles and facilities that amazed Damian.

     

    Petre Damian: “And we went to the other side, to them, in front of the barracks there was the colonel commander of the Panzer unit. It was for the first time when I saw some big jars, then the trend in the treatment of blennorrhagia, as well as many other things I hadn’t seen before. I was accepted among them, it was a great joy for them and I was quick to make friends with a physician hailing from Banat, but their chief was a captain. The collaboration was great. The medical stuff they were researching had to do with interpretation and tests, they made extensive use of laboratories. ”

     

    Trader Aristide Ionescu in 2000 reminisced how the German military behaved, who lived in his parents’ house, in a commune in Valcea county.

     

    Aristide Ionescu: “In 1940, it was winter, the German troops arrived in the country, those who were about to attack Russia; in our commune, they were accommodated in the school building, in some barracks. The behavior the Germans had was very disciplined, not a single thing was taken from a peasant without paying back, and in our house there were the headquarters, in our study there were the headquarters. We had two adjoining passage rooms; I was living in the room at the back, while in the first room a German lieutenant was accommodated. As I was passing through his room, I saw he left his watch there, he left some of his other things there as well. I always locked my room, and then I got the hang of it and I didn’t lock my room any more. One night they simply vanished. The German unit moved on and the whole village found out about it. At about 10 a motorcycle stops in front of our gate and the motorcyclist tells me, in a French language which was quitter fluent, that the lieutenant whom I accommodated took a little pillow by mistake and was handing it back.”

     

    The war changed after 1944 and the Soviets came as liberators. But they weren’t like that at all. Here is Petre Radu Damian.

     

    Track:” When the Russians came, there were groups of raiders, you know.  On command or not, I don’t know, some of them entered our street. I remember one particular time, there was only one of these troops on a horse, which he had probably stolen from somewhere. He had with him that famous Russian assault rifle, which we called Balalaika. He entered our courtyard and told me to catch him two geese and bind their legs. He wanted me to carry those geese for him to their residence. Our dog attacked him and he shot the gun against the dog wounding it. He was also drunk, which was quite common, because back then we were seeing lots of Russian soldiers drunk, as they use to drink everywhere. I remember them shooting their rifles against them wine barrels and did a lot of bad things at that time.”

     

    But more serious than those raids were the murders and rapes the Soviet troops committed. Aristide Ionescu recalled the case of such a rape.

     

    Aristide Ionescu:” On September 20th 1944 the first Russians carrying their assault rifles entered our commune. They came from Drăgăşani and entered the house of one of our relatives named Trican, who had the first house in our commune. There the Russians were given food and drinks and after eating and drinking, they got drunk and raped a woman who was over 60 years old.”

     

    The recollections of the Romanians regarding the behaviours of the Russian and German troops on the Romanian territory are polarized and will remain the same because history can be neither forgotten nor erased.

  • Children in the tumult of history

    Children in the tumult of history

    Tyrannical political regimes, wars, genocides, displacements, pandemics, natural disasters have been the greatest trials that history has subjected individuals to, and with them, the society. The history of the 20th century is a champion in abusing the individual in all ways. In the confrontation with the ravages of time, children, the most sensitive and helpless beings, suffered the most. Romania’s history is no exception to the rule, as, in the 20th century, it recorded all the mentioned types of brutality. Innocent children in Romania, like all the children all over the world, paid too high a price for the tyrannical history.



    The Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation has recorded disturbing testimonies of children’s suffering in times of austerity. During the Second World War, in Northern Transylvania occupied by Hungary, the Jewish population was sent to concentration camps.



    Grigore Balea, a Greek-Catholic priest, in 1997 remembered how he witnessed terrible scenes when Jews were put on trains. His mother tried to offer a bucket of water to a Jewish family of 9 children awaiting deportation: One of the Hungarian soldiers who were guarding the Jews punched my mother in the back of the head. I will never forget my mother’s pain when she saw a population taken without any fault. Neither I nor my mother were present in Vişeu, but I found out that they were separated there. They put the little children on one side, on the platform, and the mothers on the other aside, and that’s where the tragedy started! The children were crying on the platform and screaming, the mothers on the other side were also crying.



    Ileana Covaci was from Moisei, the place where the Hungarian army massacred several dozen innocent ethnic Romanians in October 1944. She recalled being deported to Austria by the Hungarian authorities, following a criminal investigation which she had nothing to do with: The Hungarian gendarmes came at night and took us out of the bed. We were minors, me and my younger sister, and they took us against our will to the Council and locked us up until morning! And I cried. They did not tell us why they did that. My father and mother also cried, they said that the girls were taken to work, that they don’t steal. After they released us, they told us that they would take us to Austria for three months.



    Ana Darie from Săliștea de Sus, Maramureș, told how her daughters suffered because their father was an opponent of the communist regime, instated on March 6, 1945: They threw the girls out of school, only one of them could study. The girl kicked out of school befriended a Romanian teacher from Baia Mare, and she taught her outside the school system until she finished secondary school. And I had quite a lot of difficulties. When she went to high school, those from the Peoples Council threatened her, told her that if her father was a political prisoner, she could not study. But the school principal helped us, and the girl could study until she finished high school.



    Imprisoned for 13 years in the communist prison in Aiud, Sima Dimcică had left three minor children at home. Upon returning, the reunion was mutually awkward: I arrived home where I had left three small children: one was only 6 months old, the middle one was 3 years old and the oldest was 5 and a half, almost 6 years old. When I was released and went home, the older one was 19-20, the middle one was 16 years, the youngest 13-14 years. I was ashamed, I was ashamed of them, they were ashamed of me. Where’s mom? I ask them. In Aiud! Yesterday, the police chief from the village came with a telegram and told mom to urgently report to the Aiud penitentiary. At nightfall we went to bed. I couldnt sleep a wink. All night I was thinking what to do? When I arrived home in Sinoe, my wife arrived in Aiud. For what reason I don’t know even now. They did that on purpose, to make us worry, they sent us on a fools errand.



    Ion Preda helped a group of anti-communist partisans led by Toma Arnăuțoiu. Imprisoned and harassed for the rest of his life by the political police of the communist regime, in 2000 he assessed the consequences of his own decisions: I’m sorry that the children suffered because of me for years. The younger girl was taken to the orphanage, she stayed there for several years. When I came home they sent her back home, she continued high school and later married an aviator. I’m sorry that I lost the years of my youth, the most beautiful years of anyone’s life. But, on the other hand, Im proud of my creed for the country as it was: free, honest, democratic, not a dictatorship, with its citizens enslaved. (LS)

  • Romania and Turkey in the interwar period

    Romania and Turkey in the interwar period

    Romanians and Turks have known each other for hundreds of years, the first contact being established in the second half of the 14th century. Following the expansion of the Ottoman Turks, who laid the foundations of a vast empire, the first Romanian-Turkish military conflicts date back to 1369. At that time, an army of the Romanian prince Vladislav Vlaicu participated alongside the army of King Ludovic I of Hungary in a battle against the army of the Ottoman sultan Murad I. For half a millennium, until 1878, the Romanian Principalities were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, being influenced by Turkish culture and civilization. After the conflict of 1877-1878 that led to Romania’s independence, the two countries restored normal relations. Today, Romania and Turkey have a military and economic alliance strengthened by the strategic partnership signed in 2011. In the interwar period, Romania and Turkey were partners in the Balkan Entente alongside Yugoslavia and Greece, an anti-revisionist security architecture.



    At the launch of the second volume of Romania-Turkey diplomatic relations documents, 1938-1944, Özgür Kâvanci Altan, the Turkish ambassador in Bucharest, spoke about the importance of the historical tradition of relations between the Turkish-Ottoman and Romanian worlds and about the good diplomatic ties between Romania and Turkey in the interwar period.



    Özgür Kâvanci Altan: Turkey and Romania have always been very close, they have been neighbors and allies just like today. It is about a time when we were allies, there were very strong relations between our countries, our leaders were very close, the foreign ministers were good friends. I must say that I was surprised by the finesse of the diplomacy of that period, of its manners of expression. But, at the same time, I am not surprised by the depth of relations because it is 146 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Romania and Turkey. I think it’s a unique relationship because we have a history that goes back 146 years. When Romania gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire, the latter recognized it almost immediately, it was the second country to do so. From that moment on, it was a relationship that was based on the understanding of cooperation.



    There is no doubt that one of the most important achievements of the two diplomatics, Romanian and Turkish, was the establishment of the Balkan Entente in the years between the two World Wars. All of Europe and the Balkans in particular continued to be a hot spot, despite the terrible carnage of the WWI years. This led countries that wanted to preserve the Versailles Peace Treaty system to form an alliance and make security commitments.



    Historian Ionuț Cojocaru outlined the process that led to the establishment of the Entente or the Balkan Entente in the mid-1930s: It has been 90 years since the establishment of the Balkan Entente. It was a project designed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to establish a Balkan union, which was not a bad project. In 1930, the Balkan conferences took place: the first was in Athens, the second in Istanbul in 1931, another one in Bucharest in 1932, one in Thessaloniki in 1933, and in 1934 the Balkan Understanding was established in which Turkey also participated. There were agreements with the Soviet Union and Turkey informed the Soviet Union about this project. The relations between Romania and the Soviet Union were frozen at that time and Romania was trying to get closer to the Soviet Union, through Turkey.



    The foreign policy of anti-revisionism and regional security alliances was well thought out, but the Balkan Entente did not have time to create the necessary mechanisms for operation and reaction. Ionut Cojocaru: Both Romania and Turkey were newly established states, they followed a defensive, anti-revisionist policy. In the third decade, anti-revisionism grew a lot, and with the outbreak of WW2, alliances and relations shifted somehow. This brings us the certainty that alliances work during peace and are redefined when a conflict begins.



    The Munich Agreement of 1938 and the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 concluded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Europes two totalitarian systems, shattered regional alliances and caused Romania and Turkey to find themselves in opposite camps in during WW2. Ionut Cojocaru: Turkey’s advantage during WW2 was that it had a certain stability and Mustafa Kemal was followed at the helm of the country by Ismet Inönü. He is the one who negotiated in Lausanne the treaty that legally recognized the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. The Lausanne negotiations gave Ismet Inönü a clear perspective regarding negotiations and the understanding of how much Turkey had fought and how many people it had lost to enter WW2. This path has placed Romania in one sphere of interests, and Turkey in another.



    Being in opposite camps even after WW2, Romania and Turkey have maintained friendly relations.

  • The condition of workers in interwar Romania

    The condition of workers in interwar Romania

    Anyone who reads pages of the history of Romanian workers learns, in general, that this social class was always persecuted and that it had a hard time. The press of the time, politicians, written documents, photos and videos describe difficult living conditions, with extreme cases of poverty. Quite often, observers tend to generalize about a particular case and neglect the details. But the oral history restores the details and contradicts the often-gross generalizations, especially the propaganda that the communist regime made between 1945 and 1989.



    The Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporations Oral History Center has interviews with witnesses of the interwar period, the best period of economic development in Romania’s history, about the working conditions of the workers. Before 1945, the year when the communist regime was established, Manole Filitti was the director of the Phoenix oil factory. In 1996, he remembered the conditions the workers enjoyed in the enterprise he ran. Apart from salary rights, the employer offered facilities such as locker rooms, showers, protective equipment and eateries.



    Manole Filitti: On Sunday mornings, I spent two or three hours going to visit three or four workers. I would take the names of the workers who were facing difficulties from the personnel department, for instance workers with more children and things like that, and I would fill the car with various food stuffs, with soaps, detergent and other things and I would go to these people’s homes. I would ring the bell or knock on the door, go in there and leave them these gifts. I exchanged a few words with them, they also told me about the needs they had, for clothing, children’s shoes and others, and we, the factory, covered their expenses and helped these people.



    The lawyer Ionel Mociornița was the son of industrialist Dumitru Mociornița, one of the creators of the Romanian leather and footwear industry. In 1997, he was talking about the attention his father paid to the standard of living of his workers: The existence of the unions was somewhat more formal than effective, but that did not stop the employers, and I’m talking about myself, I don’t know about the others, having very good social and medical assistance inside the factory. There was social insurance, by the way, my father built the Social Insurance House with his own money in Piaţa Asan – Asan Market, as he built the Regina Maria- Queen Marie high school, part of the Gheorghe Şincai high school, the Bucur hospital. My father also set up the summer camps of many high schools. There was no collective bargaining agreement, the labor agreement consisted in the individual employment and the worker left when he wanted to or when he was proved at fault. There were two sections of the Court on Calomfirescu street where I can say that very few employers were able to win a case against the workers.



    The attention paid to the condition of workers was due to the legislation as well as to a humanitarian rationale that was above legal obligations. Ionel Mociornița recollects his father’s lifestyle: His concept was: everything that is extra should be put into the development of the industry, into its improvement and into charity works. He led a very strict life, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he didn’t know how to hold playing cards in his hand, just like myself, he didn’t dance, I mean we led a life of real serious people and creators, and if the wrong times had not come, I am convinced that three or four generations later we would have had factories and industries in Romania of the same importance as those abroad that are centuries-old and that form the strength and foundation of developed countries.



    Teofil Totezan was a shoemaker and in 2000 he told how he learned the trade from a craftsman. He went to a vocational school and in 1929 he got a job at the Dermata factory in Cluj, but he learned practical lessons from a craftsman at his home.



    Teofil Totezan: You were in the owner’s house, you fed the pigs, you went to pick weeds. The craftsman I learned the craft from was a very handsome boy, he learned his trade and married the daughter of a rich shoemaker. That man had three daughters and gave each girl a house. And so, my master had a house from his father-in-law, he was a very good man. He used to say, curse me now, not when you grow up! And I was thinking to myself God, help me get rid of him! All his disciples were afraid of him. And he assumed the role of an educator. There were wonderful working conditions at the factory. Because a worker like me, in the city, at that time earned 600 lei a week. When you went to the factory, the first salary when you entered the factory was 600 lei. I was earning 1,500 lei a week, and my teacher friend had 1,800 lei.



    Workers in interwar Romania benefited from the working conditions of a developing society. It was a society that had a lot to improve, but real societies, not utopian ones, always have something to improve. (LS)

  • Romania and the Warsaw Pact

    Romania and the Warsaw Pact

    The end of WWII led to a split of Europe into two halves, Central and Eastern Europe, which was under the control of the Soviet Union and the communist tyranny, and Western Europe, the democratic Europe. Symbolically, the division of Germany by the Berlin Wall brutally separated the two totally different worlds which viewed each other with hostility, something that would lead to the formation of two opposing military blocs, the Warsaw Pact and NATO.



    Occupied by the Soviet troops and turned into a communist country, Romania was also part of the treaty signed in the Polish capital in 1955 together with seven other communist states: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and the USSR. Like the other socialist countries, Romania also signed the Warsaw Pact under duress. The example of the 1956 invasion of Hungary, who wanted to leave the alliance signed a year earlier, clearly showed the implications of any possible opposition. In 1968, Albania withdrew from the alliance when, following the conflict between the USSR and China, it adopted the latters tough position.



    In 1968, the Warsaw Pact saw one of its most shameful moments. The USSR, Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland and Hungary invaded Czechoslovakia to put an end to the reforms initiated by president Alexander Dubček and which were considered much too liberal. Romania refused to take part in the invasion and that action earned its leader Nicolae Ceaușescu immense prestige. The Brezhnev doctrine governed the actions of the Warsaw Pact, but in reality it defended the interests of the USSR. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia caused great fears that the same action may be taken against Yugoslavia and Romania. In 2002, Radio Romanias Oral History Centre recorded an interview with the intelligence general Neagu Cosma. He recounted how Romania was prepared for the invasion because it had an agent infiltrated into the command of the Warsaw Pact, a Polish colonel who was providing intelligence to Bucharest:



    “The Polish colonel had first come to Romania in 1939 when he was a child, together with his family, and even went to school here, learnt Romanian well and considered himself part Romanian. He saw Romania as his second country. Around 20th July 1968, he asked to meet the Romanian colonel Bichel and told him that Brezhnev himself, together with Andropov, the head of the KGB, and the leadership of the army prepared an invasion of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania as they were unhappy with the politics pursued by Dubcek, Tito and Ceauşescu. A small group from the Chief of State of the Warsaw Pact Command was working on the details of the plan. Bichel was stunned by the information. The Polish colonel also told him that the invasion was to take place in three stages. First Czechoslovakia, followed by Romania 2-3 weeks later, and then Yugoslavia after another 2-3 weeks. He also said that Soviet troops and forces were already moving towards Czechoslovakia.”



    Just like an army or a military alliance show the level of development of the respective countries, the armies of the Warsaw Pact were representative of the socialist regimes. In terms of size, the two opposing military blocs boasted about the same number of troops and equipment, but the quality of NATOs equipment was far better. The history of the Warsaw Pact was one of the bankruptcy of the communist regimes, its collapse in 1991 being the logical consequence of the political transformations that occurred in 1989. The diplomat Vasile Șandru recalled in 1994 the last meeting of the leaders of the former Socialist countries to discuss what was to be done:



    “The first meeting was chaired by Jozsef Antall, the prime minister of Hungary. The first point on the agenda was the future of the general European process, European security and the creation of European security structures and cooperation, therefore general issues. The second point involved an exchange of views on the revision of the nature of the Warsaw Pact, its functions, activities and possible restructuring. Gorbachev spoke at length, focusing on 3-4 issues. He made a series of comments, first of all his views on the situation in Europe at the time and the future of the Warsaw Pact in the circumstances. He dwelled in particular on the German issue. A provisional government committee was created tasked with assessing the role and activity of the Warsaw Pact and it was proposed that the committee met in Prague. As we all know, it was agreed in the end that the meeting of the Political Consultative Committee would no longer take place. The foreign ministers met instead and signed the death certificate of the Warsaw Pact.”



    The Warsaw Pact was dismantled in 1991 in Prague. This was, metaphorically speaking, the death of an entity that no one regretted.


  • Historian David Prodan

    Historian David Prodan

    Romania had a string of top-notch historians in the 20th century. Academician David Prodan is among them. As a man and as a historian, when still alive, Prodan witnessed the great events of his century. We can even say he was fortunate enough to have been an eyewitness to such events, assessing them with the acumen of a historian. Academician David Prodan witnessed the seminal changes in Romanian history, in 1918, 1945 and 1989.




    Historian David Prodan was born in southern Transylvanias Alba County, in 1902. He died in Cluj, at the age of 90, in 1992. He was the elder child of a peasant family. He attended high-school at the Kocsárd Kún Hungarian-language college in Orăștie. David Prodan read history at Cluj University. He developed a keen interest in social history, mainly for the history of Romanian peasant class, a majority population in Transylvania before 1918. David Prodan defended his doctoral dissertation in 1938. His research topic was Horeas uprising, a large-scale protest movement of the peasant class that flared up over 1784 and 1785. Historian David Prodan further expanded his doctoral research work, turning it into a two-volume book,1,370 pages long. The historian was fluent in Hungarian and Latin, the languages of Transylvanias medieval and modern history documents. Academician David Prodan became an authority in his field of research.




    In 1991, at the age of 89, academician David Prodan gave an interview that was later stored in the archives of Radio Romanias Oral History Centre. Specifically, the historian spoke about the topic of his bulky doctoral dissertation, stating the topic could be rewritten, again and again.


    “The history of Horeas uprising is a historical topic, always open, inexhaustible, this stuff is tremendous, and no one can venture so far as to say they encompassed everything, that they reached the end of it. There is a Horea Uprising of the 19th century by Densusianu, there is an uprising of Horea of the 20th century, which is mine, and tomorrow were sure to have another uprising of Horea at the level of tomorrow and at the standards of tomorrows research. It is something tremendous, there are tens of volumes, and theres the documentation. No one can say they exhausted this research topic. “




    Through his entire existence and through everything he wrote, academician David Prodan was deeply tied to Transylvania. In 1991, at the age of 89, academician David Prodan gave an interview that was later stored in the archives of Radio Romanias Oral History Center. Here is how he answered to the interviewer, when the latter asked him to define himself.


    “I am a Transylvanian and a peasant, and thats pretty much it. I am a man of my birthplace, what else can I say? And the son of this people, the Romanian people, which incidentally is not Transylvanian alone. Transylvania is the root of the Romanian people. It is from here that the entire founding began, in all directions, in Wallachia, in Moldavia, it is from here that the Dacian-Romanian-ness started from. It is something that cannot be denied. Transylvania is the key. Transylvania opened the doors of Romaniannes to us, Trajan’s bridge is next to it, the Danube is next to it, practically all of them are related to the history of our people, regardless of whether we are from here or beyond. We are Eastern Romans, which is not something that happened yesterday.




    The attention paid to social history gave him an advantage in his career after the establishment of the communist political regime after 1945. Prodan became a university professor in 1948, head of the department of the Institute of Archeology in Cluj, and in 1955 the Academy of the Romanian People’s Republic welcomed him into its ranks. He continued to write about the social condition of the Romanian serfs in Transylvania, about the political rights of the Romanian nation in Transylvania, about important names in the history of Romanians in Transylvania. Although a sympathizer of leftist ideas, of socialism and communism, Prodan somehow managed to keep a distance from the militant, abusive history practiced by some overzealous historians of the party. Any nation justifies its existence by appealing to the past and through history, but the abuse of history in those years was also felt by Prodan.


    History has not yet been defined by anyone. History defines itself, she tells you, ask her, don’t ask the historian, because the historian only knows what he knows. That’s all the historian is. History stands by itself. The historian can do what any man can do: collect the material, swear that this is the truth when no one can find out the historical truth, that this is the humanly possible truth to find out, and that’s it. But what the historian can do is not the truth.




    Prodan was a passionate historian, but the profession was not his only passion. Like any intellectual, he was open to the arts in general, and music was one of them.


    Music was, I would say, compared to history, which was an intellectual profession, a psychic profession. Music is of a different nature, it penetrates into other areas of the human soul. I was very passionate about classical music, art, painting. Our generation wanted us not only to be specialists, but to be as good as possible at everything, to have a complete life that is combined. Our God was Bach, an ideology of all kinds.




    David Prodan was the historian who wrote the most consistent texts of the social history of the Romanian nation in Transylvania up to the year 1800. Although he is less known to the public, the importance of his work is the opposite of the notoriety he enjoys.


  • 35 years since the Romanian Revolution

    35 years since the Romanian Revolution

    We often talk about major resets when a certain type of leader wins the elections in a country with a major global influence, as was Donald Trump’s victory in the American  presidential elections of in 2024.  But major resets are those that occur when significant changes take place in large and important geopolitical areas, as was the year 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. At that time, the communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania gave up power or were removed with bloodshed . The Romanian case is that of the change of a regime through violent means, the most violent of all the changes since 1989.

     

    Long commented on since 1989, although less visible than in other years, the Romanian Revolution continues to be, at 35 years on, the main reference point for everything that connects Romanians to their daily lives. Its legacy is indisputably positive and the changes that have occurred since then have brought a significant increase in the living standards, a consistent presence in the most important military and civil alliances that are NATO, the European Union and the Schengen area. All of this was possible thanks to the sacrifice of protesters in December 1989 and the constant effort made by the several tens of millions of Romanians over the past 35 years.

     

    Historians analyze the past and from them we learn what has happened to humanity up to the present. Historian Virgiliu Țârău, professor with Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, talked about the change 35 years ago and the difficult path, the so-called “transition”: “Although we still have a little time, about a decade, until we equal and exceed, in terms of time frame, the East European communism, let us note that the transition from this regime to the democratic one was both short and long. The time of change was short, intense, revolutionary, the time of transformation and, especially, of metabolizing the transformation was a long, diverse and complex one. It had distinct trajectories in the transition at regional and national levels. As such, if the change was apparently rapid, the transition was a long process, one in which the transplantation of a new system on the social, political, economic, cultural and mentality roots of communism, proved laborious and sometimes contradictory. “

    The Romanian revolution can only be understood in the spirit of the European time that produced it. It is nothing more than a particular case of the big reset that led to today’s reality. Virgiliu Țârău: “The cumulative events of 1989 took the world in a new direction. It has been said that it was a Eurocentric, democratic, liberal and integrative one, one in which Eastern Europe transformed itself, peacefully or not, giving up the political order and the communist regimes. It was one that led to the unification of Germany and then Europe, in an ambitious project: from Portugal to the Baltic states. The windows that opened then, created the premises of another globalization, but also of a world that seemed to have overcome the realities of the Cold War.”

     

    In the analysis made in 1989 by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash, the ways in which communist power in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe was removed were peaceful, through elections, or through revolutionary violence. Virgiliu Țârău spoke about the one specific to Romania, the revolution: “This was associated with the events that took place in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania in the last months of 1989. This difference underlined by Timothy Garton Ash was made taking into account especially the contestation of communist power in the street, the pressure from bottom to top, which germinated and led to the removal of communist elites from power. The opacity and project stagnation of the elders Honecker, Husak and Ceaușescu, the blindness and violence of their reactions, the lack of dialogue within the communist power circles, but also of dialogue with the opposition structures, were other ingredients of this second type of change in Garton Ash’s opinion. Protest, contestation and political removal were associated with the fall of the Wall, the velvet or bloody takeover of power that accompanied the change in 1989.”

    Regardless of the manner in which they emerged from the stage of history, peaceful or violent, communist regimes were rotten. Virgiliu Țârău: “Beyond external influences, strategic games, historical evidence shows us that communist systems succumbed from within, that those guilty of this implosion were the communist leaders themselves, incapable of managing an increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional system. In essence, no longer viable and legitimate, communism was abandoned precisely by those who managed its destiny, members of the system and technocrats alike. In conclusion, by transforming the Iron Continent into a nylon one, subversion from within became increasingly consistent. The lack of resources to solve the debt problem put them in a position to negotiate and, finally, to hand over power, when the street protests could no longer be managed.”

    The Romanian Revolution of 1989 is part of the big reset of Central and Eastern Europe. It produced positive effects in all aspects of the life of societies that 35 years ago were desperately struggling with economic misery and closed horizons.