Radio România Internațional

Category: The History Show

  • The 100th anniversary of Rapid Bucharest

    The 100th anniversary of Rapid Bucharest

    Rapid Bucharest is the oldest Romanian football First League club. Founded 100 years ago, in 1923, this is an immensely popular club in Romania, for a number of reasons: it is considered a workers club, it brought together fans of other clubs dismantled after 1945 by the newly instated communist regime, and was persecuted during Nicolae Ceaușescus regime, between 1965 and 1989. Rapid Bucharest won three national titles, 13 Romanian Cup titles and 4 Romanian Supercup titles; internationally, the clubs biggest achievements are a UEFA Cup quarter-final in the 2005-2006 season and two Balkan Cup titles.



    In June 1923, the workers of the Atelierele Grivița factory eventually managed to convince the management of the Romanian Railways to fund a football team. According to the historian Pompiliu Constantin, the author of a book about the history of the club entitled “Rapid and rapidism” (Rapid și rapidismul), the club has in fact two birth dates: 11th and 25th June 1923. Supported by railway workers and the Giulești area of Bucharest, CFR Bucharest became by the mid-1930s a serious competitor for the strong teams Venus Bucharest and Ripensia Timișoara. Thats also when the club changed its name to Rapid Bucharest and its colours from purple to white and cherry red. The matches were played on ONEF stadium, later the Republic, and from 1936, on their own stadium, Giulești. In 1944, following political pressure from the communist party, Rapid went back to its original name as CFR, and later changed it to Locomotiva. It wasnt until 1958 that it went back to Rapid.



    The club was popular for many years, being loved by many different generations of fans. Historian Pompiliu Constantin explains the reasons for this enduring popularity:



    “In essence, this happened in the latter part of the 1930s, but especially after the dismantling of the inter-war clubs of Carmen, Macabi and Venus. Many of these clubs fans went to Rapid in the 1940s and 50s because it was one of the few clubs this surviving from the inter-war period. I even found articles about the estimated number of Rapid fans and it was clear it was the most popular club in the 1950s. It hadnt been the most popular in the inter-war years, Venus and Ripensia were more popular. The 1950s press estimated the number of Rapid fans at 1 million.”



    After 1945 and the installation of the communist regime, Rapid became one of the regimes favourites. Pompiliu Constantin explains:



    “It was undoubtedly one of the favourites. Thats because the regime needed to promote the image of the team as one of workers who were also good athletes. From the documents Ive studied, Dej did not intervene, but Gheorghe Apostol, who was much more of a fan, tried to help the club in the 1950s when Rapid were demoted for the first time. Apostol, who was the leader of the workers in Romania at the time, sent a letter asking the Union for Physical Education and Sport, the leaders of Romanian sport, to agree that Rapid stay in the first league because they were the most popular team. His request was naturally rejected and Rapid were demoted to the second league, before joining the first league again.”


  • Radio Deutsche Welle

    Radio Deutsche Welle


    The German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle has a special chapter in the history of Romanian-language radio stations. The station aired its first broadcast on May 3, 1953 in Bonn. Deutsche Welle was Germanys apologetic voice in the wake of WWII. In his inaugural speech in the opening broadcast, the president of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Heuss, said the mission of the German public radio station is best summarized by the French word deténte. The relaxation and reconciliation policy was a complex process, of which peace was an inherent component.



    10 years after its inauguration, the Romanian-language department was set up at Deutsche Welle. Historian Tatiana Korn worked for ten years here, from 1963 to 1993. In 1962, Tatiana Korn left Romania after marrying a German national from Romania, and moved to West Germany to work as a journalist. In a 1998 interview for the Center of Oral History of Radio Romania, Tatiana Korn briefly outlined the history of Deutsche Welle:




    “Deutsche Welle was created with the purpose of promoting Germany and everything German worldwide. Obviously, the foreign-language departments came later, first addressing countries in Africa, then in Asia, North America and Latin America. It was only later, when the Cold War intensified, that Deutsche Welle opened up to Eastern Europe, first in the Soviet Union. Then the station created Yugoslav and Hungarian departments, and finally, in 1963, the Romanian and Bulgarian services.”



    As expected, the early days of the Romanian Service were difficult. Staff that would meet the appropriate requirements was scarce, Tatiana Korn says:



    “Romanian-language editors were in great demand. We started out with a half-hour broadcast. We had two challenges to deal with. First, the possibility of broadcasting on shortwave to Eastern Europe, which was a difficult task for a relay station. Second, finding the suitable staff for our team, proficient in both German and Romanian. Their mastery of the Romanian language had to be flawless. Similarly, Germans who spoke with a Bavarian accent were not accepted, as newly hired staff had to speak perfect German. The same was required of foreign-language departments. Romanian staff had to speak without German or Hungarian accents, which was very hard to find. Besides, they also had to have a good radio voice. Not everyone can be a radio host or produce radio content.”




    Efforts to find competent journalists paid off. At first, the Romanian language broadcasts also benefited from the voluntary support of people who offered their services as translators specialised in technology, medicine, culture, politics. The Romanian language department also got its information from Romanian publications, taking out subscriptions for various magazines for it was interested in the language used. The first editorial teams included names such as Nadia Șerban, Ioana Exarhu, Elisabeta Panaitescu, Mihai Negulescu and Virgil Velescu. It was the stations policy not to hire people who had supported fascism or communism. In the beginning, the programmes were shorter and then they bacame longer and increased in number. The Deutsche Welle used to broadcast in the Romanian language one hour three times a day. A broadcast featured 10 minutes of news, followed by a press review, topical issues, reviews from the world of science, technology, medicine and culture. Tatiana Korn explains:



    “In the beginning, the broadcast started at 12 noon here, so 1 pm in Romania. We knew it wasnt the best time in terms of ratings, meaning the people we were interested in would not have been at home. Pensioners, however, did listen to us and they promoted us to others. And that was important, they passed on our messages to others. We couldnt broadcast at a different time, it was a matter of how frequencies were distributed. Secondly, short wave conditions were better in the day than during the night. And the technical means we have today, with satellites, etc, did not exist back then.”



    Many compared the Deutsche Welle with Radio Free Europe. The difference was that the latter was an American radio station that reflected the politics of the Romanian emigrates in Europe, while the Deutsche Welle was Germanys radio station – indeed, a station with its own identity and personality that fulfilled its ethical and professional mission at the highest standards.





  • Limes dacicus

    Limes dacicus

    The frontiers are physical or mental limits people have set for themselves, by their own free will or which nature raised, to withstand peoples expansion bouts. Technically, archaeologists labelled the oldest frontier in the Romanian space using the phrase limes dacicus. It runs in the western half of Romanias territory, along a distance of 1,000 kilometers. It is the frontier that Rome, conquering Dacia, traced, also physically, and which stood the test of time, even to this day.



    Ovidiu Țentea is a historian and an archaeologist with Romanias National History Museum and with him, we made our attempt to retrace the direction of that limit of the ancient world.



    “The phrase limes dacicus encapsulates the frontiers of the Roman province Dacia, the province which, during Emperor Trajans reign, was embedded into the Roman Empire for 160 years. The limits are physical but also administrative, for a province that was part of the Roman Empire. Physically, were speaking about the limits made of what has survived on the ground, traces of the frontiers, more or less visible. It is an extremely diverse and complex frontier, the most complex frontier that has been documented for the Roman Empire which exists on the territory of a state, but also the longest one. On the other hand, it is an administrative limit, since the Romans, well, its simply pointless for us to cling to the Latin word limes, back then hey did not believe their Empire had any ending or any limitation on the ground. It is a materialization, if you will, a tactical and a military one, in certain areas, being more of a mental frontier, material evidence of the then concluded agreements. All agreements they had with their neighbours had to be materialized on the ground through a frontier, through what today is, lets just say, a ploughed strip of land.”



    With the map of Romania in hand, and heading from the west to the east, clock-wise, we tried to mark the most important points of the limes. Ovidiu Tentea:



    “There are two defence lines that were operational in different timeframes. We have the inclusion of the Apuseni Mountains and of the gold mining areas, on the ground were quite familiar with the legionnaire castra of Apulum (Alba Iulia) and Potaissa (Turda), yet their emergence was tardier. The frontier was materialized somewhere further to the west, the data we have about that are not quite clear. Then it crosses the counties of Cluj and Salaj, through the area of the Meses Gate, where it is better known and here we are, on the inner area of the Carpathian Arc, towards the north. Were now eastward bound, we cross the mountains through the Rucăr-Bran corridor and were hitting the course of the Danube, along a route which has been more or less materialized on the ground, on the territory of todays Arges and Teleorman counties. Here we have the cross-alutan line, the so-called limes transalutanus, which ran concurrently, or in different timeframes, with the line of the Olt river. “



    But how was a ground frontier materialized, which was so long? Ovidiu Țentea:



    “In antiquity, the frontiers were rather routes the army was marching along. According to the enemy or the climate conditions, or even in keeping with the political circumstances, if you will, they were materialized on the ground, or not. For instance, in Banat, we have two roads with no fortifications proper, yet we have two lines of fortifications, which point to certain moments: to Trajan or Hadrians reigns, to Antoninus Piuss reign. Then there is the late 2nd century, the crisis of the 3rd, therefore the frontier changes, being well or less well-known. The most spectacular part of that segment can be found in north-western Transylvania, in the Cluj-Sălaj-Bistrița area, where very many towers are materialized, networks of towers defending certain areas, where the troops were stationed, in fortifications. Signalling rules were very well-known, the earth walls, the fortified moats. The system was very complex, and also very well documented. “



    The observation of the limes dacicus reveals the dynamics of a certain organization pattern, also telling us the existing limit was not set once and for all. Ovidiu Țentea:



    “As were heading towards the north east and east the traces are not that well documented, but they close the Carpathian Arc on the inside, then, via the Southern Carpathian gorges, the connection was provided with the alutanian and the cross-alutanian line, respectively, so the frontier could be closed to the east. Of course, there were enough troops, at least in the first half of the 2nd century and until the crisis caused by the Marcomannic wars, when troops decreased in numbers and large-scale operations were unfolding, so we get to know the major wars of that time. After that, historical sources do not materialize them anymore, but we do know that in time, the number of troops decreased, which happened all throughout the empire, so we can only discuss that episodically. Early into the 2nd century, there is the first organization, during Trajans reign, when the administrative aspect of that is rather less conspicuous, it is more like a military matter, it is a military district. After the first conflict of 117-118 AD, Hadrian is the first to organize that space administratively, naming it Dacia Superior, Dacia Inferior and subsequently, Dacia Porolisensis. So there were three provinces, with three governors. Which were reorganized, after Marcus Aurelius.”



    Limes dacicus was the first civilization frontier of the Romanian space. Now it has become part of the universal heritage. (EN)


  • The Latin heritage of the Romanian people

    The Latin heritage of the Romanian people

    The Romanian people and language are of Latin origin, something historians and linguists have been researching for the last 200 years. One should also not forget, however, the contributions of other populations and ethnic groups to what is today the Romanian nation, because there is no such thing as a pure nation. More than establishing the ethnic origins of the Romanians, researchers have investigated the awareness of these origins in the minds of the Romanians throughout time. The ideas and social structures of a given period are both inherited and newly established and they influence what we know about ourselves. The tendency now is to look at nations critically and to disprove knowledge that was the product of its time. Critique has often led to criticism, but a more balanced view is necessary.



    Historian Ioan-Aurel Pop is the president of the Romanian Academy and a specialist in the Middle Ages and mediaeval ethnic identities. Pop believes a critical look of the idea of nationhood is useful in order to better understand who the Romanians are today:


    “We must study ourselves and see what makes us Romanian, what we inherited from our ancestors and what we did right and what we did wrong. We must admit, however, that we must have done something right because if we didn’t we would have fused into others, as was the case with the Huns, the Gepids, the Avars, the Pechenegs and the Cumans. For all our being split into little states that no one paid attention to, we have endured.”



    Who are the Romanians? Pop has an answer based on the findings of researchers so far:


    “If someone asks me who Romanians are, I will say that based on language, name and form of Christianization we are westerners. However, based on church organization, the use of Old Church Slavonic in church and the administration, the use of the Cyrillic alphabet and the influence of the East we are under Byzantine-Slavic influence. However, Latinity defines us, because in my opinion, in this part of Europe, language is the most striking proof of nationality.”



    The core value of what it means to be Romanian today is the language, based on the most general definitions. The linguistic value given to the Romanian nation is not unique, as most nations around the world define themselves in this way. Ioan-Aurel Pop says that in the past, foreign travelers to these parts explicitly mentioned the Latin consciousness of their inhabitants.



    “Sources must be taken as they are and we shouldn’t’ be bothered by that. The idea is not to choose the sources. If I want to have an image of the 16th century, I take all the sources and build the puzzle. I won’t be able to fill all the gaps, I will still need to use hypotheses, because that’s what a historian does. But I will try and include as many ‘full’ points as I can. If Francesco della Valle says he was hosted one night by the monks at Dealu monastery, in 1536, and there he learnt about the coming of emperor Trajan, the emperor of Rome, I have no reason not to believe him. But let’s ay I don’t believe it, and then I go and check other authors, who maybe put it differently. But many, in their Latin texts, say the same thing: “I’ve heard from Romanians that they are Roman”.



    Latinity was the central idea of ​​the birth of the modern Romanian state, but Pop says it was an old component of Romanian consciousness.


    “The educated Moldavian boyars who arrived at the Jesuit schools in Poland found out that we are from Rome and went back and created the consciousness of Latinity. Intellectuals augmented this awareness, worked on it, because some peasant on top of the mountain wouldn’t know about the origin or that there was a first and a second founding. As the Cantacuzine chronicles say about medieval consciousness: the second founder was Negru-vodă, the first was Trajan. Im talking about a certain elite, but I doubt that those Orthodox monks from the Dealu monastery in the Reformation era had the opportunity to attend higher education. The Italian soldiers and Francesco della Valle were treated to good food and great wine, and they left with a great impression. A Swedish delegation, in the 17th century, came here and tried to speak Latin with the Hungarian nobles in Oradea and Cluj. Nothing, they only spoke Hungarian. And as they were crossing the mountain to Rucăr, they were amazed that ordinary people spoke Latin, even the peasants. Its true it was a spoiled Latin, they said. For “lactis” they said “lapte”, for “noctis” they said “noapte”, but they managed to understand each other. When they asked for “aqua” they were given “apa”.



    Long history can reaffirm a truth or, on the contrary, deny it. The Latinity of the Romanians, criticized in various periods of time, however, resisted and has been periodically reconfirmed.


  • War veterans, orphans and widows in Greater Romania

    War veterans, orphans and widows in Greater Romania


    The end of World War I left Romania on the victors side, with double its previous territory and population. But the price paid for this triumph was dire, both during and after the war. Among the most challenging post-conflict realities were the veterans, orphans and widows the war had left behind. Collectively referred to under the acronym IOVR, the World War I veterans, orphans and widows accounted for around 12% of the population of Greater Romania. Public institutions worked to introduce reparations for them, and in spite of various dysfunctions, the new government managed to compensate, as much as possible, the losses these people had suffered.



    Our guest today is Maria Bucur, a history and gender studies professor with Indiana University, in Bloomington, USA. She wrote about the history of eugenics, about war and memory, modernisation and citizenship. She argues that the IOVR population shaped new attitudes and radically transformed the concept of citizenship in Greater Romania:



    Maria Bucur: “The Romanian state was transformed radically by the decisions made with respect to the war veterans, widows and orphans, both in terms of new institutions or new responsibilities for some institutions, of new local and national policies, and, more importantly, in terms of the citizenship rights that a major proportion of Romanias population obtained after 1919. These forces, working together, generated a new public rhetoric on citizenship, new expectations among Romanian citizens, and new responsibilities undertaken by the state. The success or failures of the new policies generated new dynamics in the political and civic field.”



    Unfortunately, the exact number of war veterans, orphans and widows remains unknown to this day. Maria Bucur offers an explanation:



    Maria Bucur: “Since the country had almost doubled after the war, the veterans in the territories that were now part of Romania by virtue of the peace treaties became veterans of the Romanian state. We dont have an exact number for them, because the countries to which the territories in question belonged prior to the war did not necessarily count the veterans, as Romania did, and they did not release official statistics on the veterans, widows and orphans in those territories. The figures we have today are early 1920s estimates. In the mid-1930s, when a central committee was finally set up to check these figures, its members concluded that the statistics were incomplete. My own estimate is that Romania had around 1.5 million veterans, over 200,000 of whom were war invalids according to the definition used in those times, and that adding to these were 700,000 widows and orphans.”



    How did Greater Romania show its appreciation for its WWI veterans, orphans and widows? Maria Bucur says reperation policies were, overall, adequate:



    Maria Bucur: “We should emphasise that Romania was in fact more generous than any other country involved in WWI. Apart from pension benefits, the law offered free public education, free healthcare, free railway transportation, free firewood and priority positions in the distribution of land following the land ownership reform. In addition, veterans were given priority access to certain government monopoly areas, such as newsstands in train stations, and priority access to certain positions in public institutions. For instance, the staff in the IOVR offices were mainly war veterans and widows. All these benefits together amounted to a lot more than the ones provided by the French government, for instance, which was always a major model for Romania.”



    The law concerning the IOVR population was known as the “Gratitude Law,” and it applied without discrimination to both the old and the new citizens of the country:



    Maria Bucur: “First of all, the country was grateful not only to the soldiers who had fought for Romania on the home front. Those who had fought against Romania were given exactly the same rights, provided that they explicitly embraced their Romanian citizenship and loyalty to the Romanian state. And I would like to emphasise that such policies were not applied for instance in Yugoslavia, where Croatians were not given the same rights as the Serbian veterans.”



    Maria Bucur believes there are additional explanations for Romanias generosity to former enemies:



    Maria Bucur: “This generosity on the part of the Romanian government may also be viewed in pragmatic and aspirational terms. On the one hand, many Romanian ethnics had fought in the Austrian-Hungarian army out of necessity. Not integrating these veterans in the IOVR policies would have created a radical division between the new territories and the Old Kingdom, which all politicians understood would be a mistake. Another pragmatic aspect had to do with the treaty on minorities, which Romania had to comply with. In aspirational terms, I see the IOVR legislation as a framework as well, one through which the Parliament of Romania sought to outlike a new type of engaged citizenship, a lot closer to public institutions through the benefits offered to the IOVR population.”



    The Romanian WWI veteran reparation model was designed to compensate for losses and to secure peace. And in spite of some failures, this ambitious enterprise was successful. (AMP)




  • Racial hygiene and its symbolic condemnation in Romania

    Racial hygiene and its symbolic condemnation in Romania

    People’s attitude towards their peers throughout history is a very sensitive subject in today’s historiography. Many demand justice for the crimes and abuses committed in the past, even though this act of justice comes too late for the victims and has no consequences for the guilty. Nazism and communism were both regimes of a strong repressive and genocidal nature, while different in the groups they targeted, and they shared many of the ideas and methods of causing harm. They were inspired by the emergence and reckless dissemination, within democratic societies, of criminal ideas and practices such as eliminating the possibility of people with disabilities to be born through the use of sterilisation, as was the case of systematic policies, or through physical liquidation, as was the case of concentration camps.



    In many European and North-American countries there existed proposals and even applications of policies to sterilise people with disabilities, and Romania was no exception. However, sterilisation policies were not restricted to people with disabilities, but were also proposed for other categories of people, such as Jews, Roma and gay people. Responsible for these ideas and practices were both scientists like doctors, biologists and anthropologists and political activists. Eugenics was the science that promoted the elimination of people with defects, believing this would ensure the health of the human species.



    The Parliament Palace in Bucharest was the venue of a mock trial for one of the leading eugenists of the Nazi regime in Germany. This was a re-enactment of a similar trial held at the headquarters of the United Nations Organisation on 31st January 2023 organised by the Social Excellence Forum for a group of young people aged between 15 and 22, from several countries, including Romania. The actions and responsibilitiesof Ernst Rüdin, a German-language Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist and eugenist who lived between 1874 and 1952 and who is considered the father of the Nazi racial hygiene, were interrogated. It was a symbolic trial for educational purposes of ideas that led to people being killed, a trial that was also attended by pupils from several high schools from Romania.



    Marius Turda, who teaches the history of medicine at Oxford Brookes University, in the UK, and one of the most reputed historians of eugenics, was asked if Nazi Germany was the first and only country in the world to conduct a sterilisation policy for those it considered defective: Sterilisation laws existed in many countries at that time. The United States was the country with the most numerous compulsory sterilisations, ahead of Adolf Hitter’s Germany. Certainly, the difference is that there was no federal law in the United States. Each state applied the law the way it wanted. By 1933 there were 30 states that had introduced compulsory sterilisation. It is estimated that between 1910 and 1980, nearly 80,000 people were sterilized in the United States.



    Marius Turda was asked if Romanian physicians played a role in the world eugenics movement and what their contributions to the sterilisation policies were: Yes, they played a role indeed. In 1935, the Romanian Society of Eugenics and the Study of Heredity, founded and led by the famous scientist Gheorghe Marinescu, was one of the founding members of the International Eugenics Federation of Latin Societies. They also promoted sterilisation. Already in 1912, the gynecologist Constatin Andronescu suggested the introduction of prenuptial certificates and the sterilisation of the mentally ill. In 1921, Ioan Manliu, another physician, highly influenced by the German and American model of eugenic sterilisation, suggested the sterilisation of all degenerate persons in Romania. In 1931, the same physician suggested that we had to sterilize five or six million Romanians for the improvement of the race to have an effect. In 1931, the Neurological, Psychological, Psychiatric and Endocrinological Congress, which was led by Dr. Constantin Parhon, proposed to the Health Minister to introduce a law on voluntary sterilisation. Finally, at the beginning of 1940, the Roma minority was attacked, and they proposed its sterilisation.



    The court within the Romanian Parliament plenary symbolically sentenced Ernst Rüdin to life imprisonment, as he was found guilty of three of the four charges. Besides Rüdins condemnation they also condemned the ideas that caused so much suffering to many hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities. (CM, LS)


  • 30 years of oral history

    30 years of oral history

    The history of
    the last 100 years can also be discovered through oral history, which is based
    on the memories and recollections of eye-witnesses interviewed and recorded on
    tape or on a digital format. Between 1945 and 1989, the practice of oral
    history was deeply corrupted by the ideological pressure exerted by the
    communist regime, as was the case with the science of history in general. After
    1989, under its first manager Eugen Preda, Radio Romania made it its goal to
    capture recent memory. So the foundations of the oral history archive were laid
    in March 1993.




    The historian
    and journalist Mariana Conovici was entrusted with creating the team of
    historians who established the archive. They conducted interviews about wars,
    communism and fascism, daily life and the science of history. In an oral
    history interview, she recalled the beginnings of the oral history archive of
    the public radio:




    Eugen Preda,
    the director of the station at the time, who was a historian and had a PhD in
    history, was abreast with everything that was going on in the world in the
    field of historiography. He had taken part in the International Congress of
    Historians in 1980 hosted by Bucharest, where they had discussed the subject of
    oral history. So he had a clear idea about what it meant and its value. A
    meeting was held in Sinaia in 1992 with international participation, and he
    attended that as well, and it became a challenge to create the voice archive.




    The book by the
    British historian and sociologist Paul Thomson called The Voice of the Past
    provided the guidelines based on which the bibliography was established.
    Mariana Conovici said that after 1989, once this method of discovering the past
    became allowed, she began to understand the world, her profession and herself
    much better:






    For me, freedom
    meant having access to a history different from the conservative discourse I
    had learnt and read about. I was now discovering that history had more nuance,
    that what I had learnt and sometimes got good grades in school for was not
    true. It was an immersion in real history, getting close to the people and
    their stories. For me it was wonderful also because, by having access to the
    lives of the people I was interviewing, I was understanding my world better, I
    was understanding myself better, in the sense that I was realising what my
    place was more clearly. More precisely, I was comparing myself to them and not
    always to my advantage.




    Mariana Conovici
    and her team made up of Octavian Silivestru, Silvia Iliescu, Virginia Călin and
    Lavinia Ivașcu managed to combine oral history with radio journalism:




    An oral history
    interview performs a historical investigation. Its goal is to study, to
    research, but this direction we didn’t pursue. We never had the time, nor,
    perhaps, the inclination. But we did something else which I think is important:
    we shared with our listeners, through weekly broadcasts, what we received from
    our interviewees. Oral history always has a civic dimension. We fulfilled this
    role through our radio shows. I always insisted on these shows. It was very
    important. I sometimes wondered if Romanian society was actually ready for
    those things. I don’t know whether it was or not, but in any case, if ten
    people were able to relate and sympathise with the people speaking from the
    heart about their lives, it would have been enough.




    Lived history was what Romanian and foreign
    listeners wanted from journalists in their letters. And it was something the
    journalists made an effort to deliver:




    Oral history
    interviews don’t necessarily bring rich historical information, they provide
    details, the atmosphere, emotion. It’s unbelievable how strong the message sent
    by the interviewee can be. I remember a 20-minute interview with a woman who
    had been taken, at the end of the war, when she wasn’t yet 14. A large group of
    young people were taken by the Germans and taken to Austria to work. She was
    still a child when that happened. She told me how she arrived in Vienna, how
    scared she was, how there was a bombardment and she was in a field, and hid
    from the bombs under a tree. The fear and the drama of this 14-year-old child
    expressed some of the horrors of the war.




    Radio Romania’s
    oral history archive turned 30. And the archive of the Oral History Centre is
    becoming more and more valuable with time.

  • Mental health legislation and reforms in the Romanian space

    Mental health legislation and reforms in the Romanian space

    Mental illnesses have always been a source of pain for patients and their relatives, and in some situations even the cause of many tragedies, such as homicides committed by those who suffered from a mental illness. In time, societies and legislators have taken measures to prevent and punish such acts, codified according to the level of understanding of each and every historical time. In the Romanian space as well, cases of insanity, as they were generically called, were treated, and the crimes committed by those ill-fated people were punished. Codes of laws explicitly stated the measures that the justice representatives had to take to prevent the causes and remove the effects.



    Throughout its history, jurisprudence has moved in the direction of decriminalizing offenders with a mental illness. In the Romanian Principalities, the first codes of laws in this sense were the ‘Romanian Book of Learning or ‘The Code of Vasile Lupu, in Moldavia in 1646 and ‘Making the law right with the help of God or ‘The Code of Matei Basarab, in Wallachia in 1652.



    Psychiatrist Octavian Buda, professor of the history of medicine at the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, summed up their content from the point of view of humanizing the treatment of criminals with a mental illness. I cannot say that they are either constitutional laws or criminal codes, they are very similar to some codes that regulate various activities, including those of a legal nature. What I find remarkable is that these books theorize the fact that the presence of a mental illness means that a criminal can only be punished after an evaluation of those symptoms. And the sentences that refer to this aspect are the paragraphs that are called ‘glave translated as headings. One of these headings goes as follows: ‘when one is unaware of ones madness and out of ones mind, and consequently the father kills the son, one shall not be scolded because there is no bigger punishment than being mad and out of ones mind. It is a conceptualization of a medical aspect that is the subject of a medical safety measure.



    The 18th century was a century of modern reforms in the West. The Romanian Principalities were under the Phanariot rule, and the wave of reforms also reached the principalities: There were Phanariot leaders that put together specific legislation. Alexandru Ipsilanti made a ‘Pravilnicească Condică – Code of Rules in 1780. At the beginning of the 19th century, Callimachi and Caragea had already issued their codes of 1817. The Phanariotes had a practice of bringing doctors from abroad to get involved in medical activities. Those were the dawns of Romanian modernity, with the first period 1800-1850 still being a period with challenges from the point of view of knowledge.



    Modernization was advancing by leaps and bounds, and the Organic Law of the early 1830s continued what had been previously begun: The Organic Law did at least two things. First of all, it created an entity called the Doctors Commission, which later became the College of Physicians, and organized those aspects related to the standardization of medical practice. A kind of unrestricted practice license was created. In the sense that not any doctor was allowed to mess around, to come with a couple of tins and bones and produce a holistic treatment. There were expatriate doctors of Italian and Greek origin who had also traveled a lot during the Phanariot era. And the main idea was for this ‘imported elite to be able to communicate at least acceptably with a rural population that was rather reticent about these professional categories that they did not understand.



    After laws and regulations, treatment facilities also appeared. One of the first such facilities or institutions was the Mărcuța mental institution.



    Octavian Buda is back at the microphone with details: In 1838, during the time of Alexandru Ghica, something interesting from an institutional point of view happened. The Mărcuța facility appeared under the following circumstances: a part of the monastery came out of the church jurisdiction and became part of the then Home Affairs Ministry or the Interior Ministry. That’s where they started treating the psychiatric patients, in the modern sense that we still have today. The first doctor at Mărcuța institution was Dr. Minis, of Greek origin, who had studied in Leipzig. He was followed by Nicolae Gănescu who had studied in Kharkiv. He reorganized the psychiatric activity in the modern sense, as it was around the year 1850. He was concerned not so much with occupational therapy as with humane treatments because physical restraint methods such as tying were used at the time. He used woolen straps that did not hurt the patient. He also brought an electromagnetic device, but we don’t know what he did with it. Then followed the era of Alexandru Suțu, from the Phanariot family, who had studied in Athens and Paris. He took over the management of the Mărcuța hospital and remained at the helm of the institution for many years. He is the doctor who published in 1877 the book called ‘The Alienated before medicine and society, which is practically the first treatise on social and judicial psychiatry.



    After Romania became an independent state in 1878, it developed appropriate health and legal policies. And psychiatry will be an expanding medical specialty. (LS)

  • Sex and espionage in post-war Romania

    Sex and espionage in post-war Romania


    Intelligence is a world where cynicism thrives. This has always been the case, irrespective of countries and times. Secret services stopped at nothing to achieve their goals. Obviously, sex and romance were methods used to obtain classified information. The Romanian intelligence services made no exception to this rule. After 1945, with the installation of communist authorities, intelligence services were also used as an instrument to apply political pressure, outside their original design. As such, they became known as the Securitate. It planned and carried out operations focusing on sex and romance in order to recruit persons of interests from the point of view of intelligence.




    General Neagu Cosma was the director of Romanias counterespionage agency over 1950-1974. In a 2002 interview for the Center of Oral History of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, the general talked about intimate and emotional relations used to recruit assets as one of the practices used by the Securitate. The communist regime had imposed a certain moral conduct for officers, which in this respect often turned out to be an obstacle.




    “I recall one particular case, when one of our agents was trying to seduce an American. She was an extraordinary woman, with powerful connections abroad. After a couple of days our boy reports General, this is as far as I go! Either you let me sleep with her or I will go no further! This womans crazy, shes infatuated with me. What should I do? How do I proceed? The special intelligence service had no qualms about this approach, it would have otherwise told him go get her! So I talk to Drăghici, the Interior Minister, and tell him Minister, weve reached this point, the case is very promising considering who this woman is and her connections. She had this uncle, some wealthy senator. Look, Drăghici tells me, this means overlooking the moral conduct. I told him this would mean letting her go. I asked for an exemption from rules of moral conduct, which we were given. They got married, our boy moved abroad and a made a fortune”.




    At the end of the 1960s, the Securitate tried to recruit the cipher decoder of the British embassy in Bucharest, also opting for the method of seduction. Neagu Cosma recalls.




    “We had a whole army of women at our disposal which we would use, its not an exaggeration. For instance, this Englishman worked as an encrypter, a high-profile position at the embassy. He was single, so I assigned his case to a highly experienced agent. He would go out for a beer at night, and slowly he fell crazy in love with our agent. He was 55, she was 25, he had taken a shine to her. So we followed standard procedure, the works – pictures, recordings, wiretaps, until we asked her to tell him the Securitate had gotten to her, asking for information about him. Go ahead, darling, tell them everything he would sing-song to her. And it worked, he was a promising asset”.




    Yet the Securitate wanted to get its hands on the British cipher at all costs, and ordered its agent to ask the diplomat to marry her.




    “She talked him into marrying here, having both civil and religious services in Romania. They couldnt perform the religious service at the city hall, so I brought in another agent acting as a priest, as he was a very religious man himself. One evening we invited them to our home, and we had a service proper, veil and everything. We videotaped the whole thing. And we were sure he was ours. After a while, our girl told him the Securitate was asking about him again and wanted to talk to him. We set up a meeting. He was reluctant at first, saying Do you know what would happen to me if they found out? They wont, we said. He kept it a secret for three days before reporting everything to his superiors. He was on the next flight out of Romania”.




    Another example was the operation to recruit the cypher decoder of the Austrian embassy, this time a female diplomat.




    “She wasnt a person of particular interest to us, but obtaining the Austrian cipher was a big deal. The woman was unmarried. We conducted a similar operation, we introduced her to one of our agents, and he managed to seduce the woman. We had set up a surveillance kit in venues where they met to have their fun, and we recorded everything. They were into deviant sexual behavior as well, and we had amassed quite a collection. Later, we confronted her. It was a mistake on our behalf. She examined the photos and said Gentlemen, can I have a copy please? I dont have any such pictures of myself. So we realized blackmail wont work. We offered her to work for us, and she said she would think it over. Two days later, she left her post”.




    The Romanian Securitate tried to secure access to classified information using sex and romance, commonplace instruments used all over the world. While some of its attempts were successful, others failed. (VP)




  • Operation Villages Roumains

    Operation Villages Roumains

    The communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted to transform Romania from an urbanistic point of view, a project it described as “the systematisation of cities, towns and villages”. This involved the demolition of entire areas of cities, including the capital Bucharest, most often for no use at all. Also implemented in villages, Ceaușescus systematisation was just as useless: his ambition was to demolish 7-8,000 villages of the countrys 13,000, the official explanation being so as to provide more farmland for agriculture. What sounded good in theory, namely a balanced development of the land, was a disaster in practice. The regime had already shown that it was incapable of managing a hypercentralised economy, which was making huge losses. No wonder then that it was incapable of carrying through such a daring project.



    While the Romanians did not react to the systematisation because they were afraid of repression, those in the Diaspora did everything they could to hinder the project. In the final weeks of 1988, an association called Operation Villages Roumains was set up in Belgium, its aim being to save the countrys more than 13,000 villages. Soon, the association would see new branches being established in France, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Britain, Italy, Spain, Norway and Denmark. It was an extraordinary example of European solidarity struggling to defend tradition and human rights.



    The lawyer and political prisoner Dinu Zamfirescu, the journalist, translator and human rights activist Ariadna Combes, the daughter of the communist dissident Doina Cornea, and the historian Mihnea Berindei were the most active personalities involved in the association, but they were constantly supported by a very active group made up of Belgian and French journalists, photographers, lawyers, architects and graphic artists who laid the foundation of Operation Villages Roumains.




    Radio Romanias Oral History Centre contains an interview with Dinu Zamfirescu dating from 2003. A former member of the National Liberal Party and journalist of the Romanian section of the BBC, he had fled communist Romania to live in France in 1975. The interview also covered his involvement in Operation Villages Roumains:



    “We were involved for two years in the operation to save the Romanian villages. We would meet within the free Romanians group and make petitions and complaints, which is the only thing we could do. The three of us, together with Mihnea Berindei and Ariadna Combes, we travelled all over France and Europe for two years to advance our cause. We even travelled to Hungary in June 1989 to attend the re-interment of Imre Nagy and his friends, who were assassinated by the communists. There were cities in France where we would even hold up to six talks a day, in all kinds of venues: in schools, in public, everywhere. We also travelled to Britain, to Belgium, to Italy. We promoted our cause everywhere we went. Ariadna also travelled to Norway, and I went to Denmark. We were asked to go everywhere. There was a centre in Paris created around a French body, Médecins du Monde, and which was supported by people in Frances then Socialist government. They supported us and we were thus able to travel and represent the League for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania.”



    Dinu Zamfirescu was dedicated to the movement to fight the destruction of Romanian villages until the very final moments of the communist regime, in December 1989. He went even further, coming to Romania in the very first days of freedom and bringing aid:



    “As part of Operation Villages Roumain, we immediately took measures to help the Romanians in Romania. Together with Ariadna Combes and Mihnea Berindei, we accompanied a first batch of aid on board a French military plane that landed in Bulgaria on 26th or 27th December. I arrived on 28th or 29th, with the first Air France plane that was able to land at Otopeni, as the airport had been closed. I was with a French journalist who was herself involved in the League for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania and was specialised in Romanian affairs. My father was still living in Romania and I called and told him I would arrive, I didnt want to catch him by surprise, I could have given him a heart attack. So, I went with the journalist straight to his house. I knew nothing, having left Romania so many years before. I had a French passport and dual citizenship. This would open many doors for me at the time. People were ecstatic, everyone was waxing lyrical about the Romanian-French friendship.”



    Operation Villages Roumain was an example of European solidarity in front of the abuse of a political regime that was abusive in every sense. Romanian villages were defended in the final years of the communist dictatorship by a handful of very determined people, who would eventually see their dream come true.

  • Romania and Aid for Emerging Countries

    Romania and Aid for Emerging Countries

    One of the great processes after the Second World War was the decolonization of the world. The colonizers had to recognize the status of independence to the former colonies, and relations between them continued to exist from new positions. However, even in socialist countries, willingness to support the countries of what today is called the Global South, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, in the name of a new humanism, began to emerge. In the relations between the old states and the new ones formed by the former colonies, humanitarian aid was among the most extensive forms of support. But it was no less true that aid and support tacitly represented the interests of those who offered it. Socialist Romania also got involved the Third World, as the Global South was called, starting in the 1970s. Nicolae Ceaușescus policy of openness towards the African continent, to socialist countries or socialist-sympathetic countries in Asia, and to the communist movements in Latin America. Historian Mia Jinga from the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and Romanian Exile is part of a larger project studying Romanias global politics from the 1960s to the 1980s.


    “What did the humanitarian aid offered by Romania consist of? We used a method to see all possible levels of humanitarian aid starting with the classic one, emergency humanitarian aid. Originally, thats what its all about, emergency aid in case of natural calamity: drought, floods, earthquakes and others. Its just that, not only Romania, but also the other states in the eastern bloc and the western states also applied other forms of aid: that for the population in conflict zones or in refugee camps, material and military aid offered to various liberation movements and some communist parties. Most of the money went there, in reality. Granting scholarships for pre-university education, university and specialization internships, granting specialized expertise and equipment, supporting development projects.”




    In 1979, Romania helped emerging countries on three continents: Peru, Martinique, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico in North America, Central and South America; Benin, Ethiopia, Sudan, Burundi, Mozambique, Senegal, Central African Republic, Mauritania, Republic of Cape Verde, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau in Africa; Yemen and Lebanon in Asia. Mia Jinga pointed out that humanitarian aid and support that pursued political interests often combined. For example, Romania actively supported the Marxist-Leninist group Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) which took part in the civil war in Rhodesia between 1964 and 1979.


    “On each such level, if we look carefully, there are other specific types of actions. For example, for natural calamities, aid is primarily in the form of basic foodstuffs, clothing, medicine and medical aid. After that, depending on what is needed, it diversifies for the others. From the multitude of actions, I chose the ZAPU activists, who seemed the most interesting to me. About 9.5 million lei went to this organization in 1979, while the average amount for other actions was 250,000 lei. The discrepancy was very big.”




    Mia Jinga also explained the mechanism by which Romania granted aid to emerging countries.


    “I looked at how this humanitarian aid project was going, where it started and where it ended. Was it an initiative of the Romanian state or, on the contrary, was the beneficiary the state who asked for the aid? In all cases, at least in the ones I have found so far, the aid was granted following a formal request sent at a high level. The request came from a known leader of the respective party or movement, possibly following a meeting with Nicolae Ceaușescu, either after a visit or a meeting abroad. After receiving this request, the External Relations Section of the RCP Central Committee drew up a note justifying whether it approved or rejected that request. The justification also included a brief history of humanitarian aid relations to the respective beneficiary, the amounts for each year, if there had been previous aid, how well or badly the aid had been used, and any diplomatic problems that would arise as a result of the granting of said aid. There were many situations in which Romania would have helped, but the international political context at that time was such that the answer was no. In all cases, Nicolae Ceaușescu had the last word. There are cases which, like Vietnam, were given the green light. Regardless of the amount requested, it was given to them. At some point, however, Nicolae Ceaușescu said that Romania had been helping Vietnam for 10 years, and asked the Vietnamese to start getting to work for themselves for a change.”




    Socialist Romania, like the other socialist states, had a differentiated aid policy depending on the emerging country. Archives reveal both successes and failures of various projects, the privileged continent for the global policy vision of Ceaușescus Romania being Africa, which he visited numerous times.


  • The centenary of the 1923 Constitution

    The centenary of the 1923 Constitution

    The
    WWI victory of the Entente, a coalition of nations that Romania joined in 1916,
    led to the union with the Kingdom of Romania of territories with a majority
    Romanian population in Tsarist Russia and Austro-Hungary. In March 1918,
    Bessarabia or the eastern Moldavian land between the rivers Prut
    and Dniester that had been annexed by Russia in 1812 joined Romania, followed
    in November and December by Banat, Bukovina and Transylvania. The Kingdom of
    Greater Romania thus created was a brand new and much more diverse
    entity than what had existed before.


    Romania’s 125-year-old
    constitutional history began in 1866, with the coronation of Carol
    of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and the adoption of the first founding
    act of the Romanian state. To date, Romania has had no fewer than seven
    constitutions, each reflecting a different type of political regime. The 1866 Constitution
    was the founding constitution, that of 1923 was the constitution of the unification,
    that of 1938 was the expression of Carol II’s authoritarian regime, while the
    next three constitutions were adopted during the communist regime, in 1948,
    1952 and 1965. The final one, which is still in force today, was adopted in 1991
    and reinstated the values of democracy after the overthrow of the communist
    regime in 1989.


    The
    Constitution of 1923, which was published in the Official Gazette on 29th March,
    represented the most refined expression of Romanian constitutional law.
    The anniversary of 100 years since its adoption is an opportunity to remember
    the biggest Romanian democratic state that was created in the aftermath of WWI
    and for which around half a million Romanians sacrificed their lives, at a time
    when the country was led by King Ferdinand and Queen Marie.

    The Romanian
    Academy and the Italian Embassy in Bucharest celebrated together the
    anniversary of the 100 years that have since passed. The president of the
    Romanian Academy, the historian Ioan-Aurel Pop, outlined the most important
    moments in Romania’s constitutional history and discussed the 19th century
    Romanian legislation that helped lay the foundations of the future Romanian
    state:


    Romania had already had a
    constitution from 1866, but the general view was that it was no longer fit for
    purpose after 1918. Many said the Romanians drafted their constitution very
    late. In fact, they did so at the right time, together with most modern states
    in Europe. Italy had its own constitution in 1861 after the unification,
    incorporating the 1848 constitution created after the revolution in Palermo.



    The history of the period prior to the Romanian
    Constitution in the 19th century is fascinating. We can see the old
    customs disappearing, only to make room for other modern values replacing them.
    One such value was the importance of the popular vote.


    The historian Ioan-Aurel Pop:


    Just as we learned in school, the
    Constitution was the fundamental law of the states. I should add of the modern
    states, there were no constitutions in the Middle Ages, much as some pundits
    would like to push things back in the past. In the Romanian space, the Organic
    Regulations of 1831-1832 for Wallachia and Moldavia or the Leopoldine Diploma
    of 1691 for Transylvania had been imposed under foreign domination, having a mere
    constitutional value, without, however, being the democratic expressions of the
    Romanian people’s elected personalities. The Constitution of 1866 was the first such genuine act, written following an advanced European model, the Belgian
    model, and tailored to suit the Romanian realities, in a state that had barely
    become a constitutional monarchy.

    The 19th
    century ended properly in the 1920s of the 20th century, after
    the great world clash of the 1914 -1918. Everything changed yet again, while the
    new circumstances of the newly-emerging state of Greater Romania lead up to the
    birth of a new Constitution.


    Ioan-Aurel Pop:


    In 1918, Romania doubled its population and enlarged its territory, to
    be optimistic, not twice but almost three times as much. Therefore, a
    unification was needed and a uniformization, primarily a legislative one. And
    that, only the Constitution could accomplish. Our Constitution of 1923, adopted
    by Parliament, was a democratic one, considering the level of democracy at that
    time, and I’d like to add, the level of democracy in the South-east European
    states. The document declared Romania a national, unitary and indivisible
    state, with an inalienable territory. It was dubbed the Constitution of the
    union and was rather short-lived.


    Unfortunately, the Constitution of 1923 fell
    prey to both totalitarian regimes, fascism and communism. In 1938, it fell
    apart under the blows of fascist ideas, while in 1948, when it was barely
    reinstated, it was dismantled by the regime of the Communist Party.

    The historian Ioan-Aurel
    Pop:


    After less than two decades of being in force, in 1938, Romania had another constitution. Then,
    after World War Two, the one of 1923 had been officially reinstated and was in force until the official instatement of the communist regime in 1947. A little over four decades of communism followed, while the present constitution of
    Romania, adopted after 1989, with all the ensuing changes, owes a lot to the
    content of the old constitution of 1923. It was a document that was elaborated
    after a long period of reflection, it symbolized the formation, from a domestic
    legislative point of view, of unified Romania, also proving its perennial dimension.


    The Constitution of 1923 re-emerged in 1989 as a
    re-founding document of democracy. Its centenary today proves it still is a
    landmark of the heritage of Romanian judicial thought.






  • Youth, Tourism, and Education in Socialist Romania

    Youth, Tourism, and Education in Socialist Romania

    On March 6, 1945, the government led by Petru Groza, government of an alliance led by the communist party, which put Romania in the orbit of the USSR, was installed in Bucharest. Thus, educating the youth in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist ideology became the only national project and it was systematically implemented. Between 1945 and 1965, there was a period of post-war recovery and peace treaty reparations in Romania, so tourism and leisure were restricted. Starting in the mid-1960s, economic revival has also led to the revitalization of tourism. But the emergence of tourism under the tutelage of the youth organizations of the Communist Party, in which ideology and the acquisition of knowledge were combined, was a loan from the Soviet Union. It was about the so-called purpose tourism, so named to distinguish it from tourism in the West. In this sense, the ‘Cutezătorii’ expeditions excelled after the name of the magazine of the same name published in 1967. The name means The Audacious Ones. Started in 1969, the ‘Cutezătorii’ expeditions for primary and secondary school children were organized until 1989.




    Diana Georgescu teaches Southeast European studies at University College London, and described the organizational framework of the ‘Cutezătorii’ expeditions.


    The ’60s, when the competition was initiated, were generally years of reforms and changes, and this can also be seen in the case of the Pioneers’ organization. It goes through a series of reforms that more or less institutionally removes it from the tutelage of the Communist Youth Organization, and becomes an independent organization with a president, vice president, and all kinds of commissions on sports and tourism, art, and science .




    In order to give them a tradition and to mobilize the participants in the ‘Cutezătorii’ expeditions, references were made to similar organizations from the past such as the Scouts of Romania. The most reproduced exhortation appeared truncated in almost all Pioneer journals [the communist version of the Scouts]. It was a fragment from historian Nicolae Iorga’s speech entitled On the purpose of scouting: ‘The purpose of scouting is to make you go beyond the words of books to see the true and beautiful thing that is found in nature itself.’ The expeditions took place in the Carpathian Mountains, along the rivers, in the Danube Delta, etc. The camps entailed displacement from the house and resettlement in the collective, and aimed to form life experience, to promote knowledge of the country and culture, to teach the children the relationship with the state and with socialist society. For the ‘Cutezătorii’ expeditions, teams of teachers and students were formed, and patriotic education was carried out within them, but knowledge of anthropology, history, ethnography, folklore, botany, zoology, geography, environment, ecology was also provided. Expedition journals were also kept. Prizes were awarded to participating teams who submitted their expedition logs and collections of objects to judges. Diana Georgescu:


    The ‘Cutezătorii’ expeditions were not a mandatory activity, but Pioneer activities were encouraged, and were something that had to be done. They were being popularized, and I was surprised to learn that people were putting in so much effort, both financially and physically. The expeditions lasted 3-4 weeks, they had strict rules, you were only allowed to use means of public transportation to reach the initial point of the route. You had to walk, you had to live in a tent in a self-service regime. Members had to cook for themselves, get their own food.




    It is estimated that, for more than 20 years, 30,000 teams, with a workforce of approximately 500,000 pioneers, participated in the ‘Cutezătorii’ expeditions. Diana Georgescu talked with one of those who participated and found out what he thinks today about what it was then.


    In an interview with a guy who wrote about the experience on his blog, an expedition to Ceahlău in 1978, I asked him what was the impact of the expedition on him. He said the expedition had created a drug atmosphere. After they returned from the expedition, the entire vacation had been just them, the gang. They would see each other in the afternoon and evening, and tell the same stories. They had practically relived the entire expedition on vacation and remained friends. And the teachers, most of them, similarly started recounting their memories with I was young, I liked children. I liked the answer of a Romanian language teacher from Satu Mare who led a mixed Romanian-Hungarian crew. She said that back then there were teachers with a soul, who did their job with devotion and, in general, one can see an attempt to recover a kind of pride, professional dignity. Not because it was imposed on them, during the imposed hours of political indoctrination that no one did with any heart. But on an expedition, on a trip, there were no politics. It was life, as it was, food had to be made, the road had to be walked, it was real life. Here is a political project. The moment the project’s values are internalized, when people resonate with its values, it no longer seems political. The ‘Cutezătorii’ expeditions, even if they continued out of inertia for a few years after 1989, disappeared. What remains are the memories of generations printed on paper, photography, and film.

  • The Pro Transylvania Association

    The Pro Transylvania Association


    Under
    the Vienna Award of August 30 1940,
    Germany and Italy forced Romania to cede Northern Transylvania to
    Hungary. This was Romania’s second loss of territory that year,
    following that of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which had been
    annexed by the USSR in June. Yet a third territorial loss would occur
    in September, when Southern Dobruja was awarded to Bulgaria under the
    Treaty of Craiova. Northern Transylvania had almost 43,500 square km
    and some 2.4 million inhabitants according to a population census
    from 1930, with ethnic Romanians making up around 50% of the ceded
    territory and ethnic Hungarians 38%. The Vienna Award was the result
    of Hungary’s revisionist policy after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon
    between the Entente and Hungary, which concluded WWI.





    The
    forced cessation of Northern Transylvania was not without
    consequences, including persecutions against the Romanian and Jewish
    population, as well as expulsions and displacement, with around
    500,000 Romanians, people from the administration and the elites,
    having to leave the area. Those who fled Northern Transylvania did
    not however, resign to the new state of affairs. On 15th
    November 1940, a group of young intellectuals established the Pro
    Transylvania association, which also had its own radio station, with
    the leader of the National Peasant Party Iuliu Maniu as honorary
    president. The aim of the association was primarily to condemn the
    loss of territory. Although the association was clandestine, its
    members did get hold of a military radio station which they used to
    broadcast for 2-3 hours a day from Brașov.


    Professor
    Victor Marian was a member of the Pro Transylvania association and in
    1997 he gave an interview to Radio Romania’s Oral History Centre:





    It
    was a pirate station and we were constantly followed, so we kept
    moving from one place to another. After 41 Castelului street, we
    moved the station to Mount Tâmpa, in the hut of an abandoned
    sheepfold. The key figure of the station was Leon
    Bochiş, and he was joined by Lucian Valea, Iustin Ilieş and myself.
    I worked with them until mid 1942, when I got an appointment in the
    education system in Braşov, which made it harder for me to continue
    with the station.



    The
    broadcasting station in question was called Free Romania, it used
    portable equipment and covered around 100 km. Victor Marian said the
    station had a good location and the information it broadcast into the
    occupied territory came via courier and even from the army:





    The
    station was well organised because broadcasting from Braşov it could
    be received easily, especially in the Szekler region and Târgu
    Mureş. I knew people from Cluj, which is 230 km away, who said they
    could often pick up this clandestine station. From Tâmpa, the
    station moved to Postăvarul Peak, and from Postăvarul to Piatra
    Mare mountain, but I’d already stopped working with them by that
    time. I heard about it from Leon Bochiş, who was a very good friend.
    From Piatra Mare they moved the station to Făgăraş mountains, and
    that was the final move, because they were tracked down and had to
    flee. They had to leave their equipment behind and the station
    no longer broadcast after that.





    Victor
    Marian also spoke about the newspaper published by the Pro
    Transylvania Association, called Ardealul,
    and which had an equally important contribution to maintaining hope
    in the Romanian media:





    This
    newspaper, Ardealul,
    which was led by Anton Ionel Mureşanu, carried lots of reports about
    the movement of the frontline and other international events. So we
    knew about all the efforts made by Iuliu Maniu at an international
    level, in Stockholm, Ankara, Cairo, etc. We were up to date, so we
    were able to provide accurate information about these diplomatic
    efforts. When these reports appeared, we felt we were being followed,
    we could tell the station was being tracked, and would move
    immediately. We simply had to pack up and leave because as soon as we
    broadcast these reports about Romania wanting to leave the war, the
    Germans, who had much more sophisticated equipment, would have caught
    us in no time.





    As
    the front line was advancing into the Soviet Union, the activity of
    the Pro Transylvania association was becoming more and more
    difficult, and it eventually closed in 1942. On the advice of Iuliu
    Maniu, the members of the broadcasting team fled, and the
    broadcasting equipment was abandoned in the mountains. Two years
    later, in 1944, the fate of history changed, and in 1947, Northern
    Transylvania, for which a lot of compromises that been made, was
    returned to Romania.

  • Death and Succession in the CPR

    Death and Succession in the CPR

    Power has always been a temptation, and people have resorted a their whole arsenal of means in order to obtain it. History tells us about wars for power, assassination, bribery, forgery of documents and genealogies, manipulation, and overthrowing of the popular vote. In the process of taking power under the communist regime, the main actors used everything that humanity had invented that far. Set up on May 8, 1921, the Communist Party of Romania, the CPR, was promptly declared illegal. It followed the tradition of other communist parties in choosing their leaders. When Soviet troops gave them the power in March 1945, some communists eliminated their fellow party members in order to grab power within the ranks. Others were removed on orders from Moscow, which was controlling communist parties through the Komintern. Three of the seven CPR leaders before 1945, Elek Köblőș, Vitalyi Kholostenko și Alexander Shtefansky, were killed during the grand Stalin purges of the 1930’s. Another notorious case was that of CPR president Stefan Foris, killed with a crowbar to the head in 1946 upon orders from his rival, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.




    After 1945, for Romanian communists at least, death became the only possibility for ascending to power within the party, while the position holder had the possibility of naming a successor. In 1965, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Romania’s Stalin, passed away, and the appointment was contested between Nicolae Ceausescu, his eventual successor, and Gheorghe Apostol, who at the time was in fact the favorite. Janos Fazekas, was a former communist dignitary, and, in a 1997 interview with Radio Romania’s Center for Oral History, he spoke about the impact that Dej’s demise had:


    “We felt it like a national tragedy, a tragedy for the party, the whole party. I, personally, had had very good relations with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, even though I criticized him often, but he didn’t kick me out, he had an affinity for young cadre. When he died, Lica, his daughter, with whom I was on good terms, helped me get to their house. He died at home, not the hospital, in his bed, and in attendance were all the members of the Political Bureau and the secondary members. Ceausescu had ruled that I wasn’t allowed in, because I was merely the minister in charge of the food industry, I was not a member of the Central Committee. There was a list, but I was on good terms with Lica, who helped me get in and attend the wake for Dej.




    Dej’s death and succession for the CPR’s leadership became a big problem for those still standing. As the younger man, Ceausescu took his destiny into his own hands. Here is Janos Fazekas:


    “At the side of Dej’s deathbed, Ceausescu takes the floor and takes an oath that he would fight for party unity, for the construction of socialism, would fight for increasing the people’s standard of living, culture, and civilization. Meaning that he himself, by doing that, was already telling us what he wanted to be. I was right there. Ceausescu knew that we didn’t want him, meaning that he knew Maurer, Apostol, Fazekas, we all were in favor of comrade Apostol’s candidacy. Initially, Dej had proposed Maurer for first secretary, and Maurer did not accept, he said that the first secretary had to be a Romanian, a citizen of Romanian nationality. He said that his mother was French, and his father German. And then Dej proposed Gheorghe Apostol, and Maurer said that Apostol was great.




    As he was in a weaker position for succession, Ceausescu finally managed to turn the opinion of the others in his favor, as Janos Fazekas told us:


    “After Dej’s funeral, Maurer and Bodnaras summoned the Political Bureau, which in turn could call for a plenary session of the Central Committee. Maurer arrived, we were already in the plenary room, and he called on the members of the Political Bureau to decide on electing Gheorghe Apostol. That is when Ceausescu jumped out of his chair, and started yelling that he didn’t agree it should be Apostol, even though before the funeral he had agreed. Comrade Maurer lost his patience, became furious at these lies perpetrated by Ceausescu, and told him he just wanted to be first secretary himself. ‘Then you be first secretary’, said Maurer. Of course, a politician doesn’t need much to lose his temper. He shouldn’t have lost his temper at Ceausescu’s trick, but for this there should have been a democratic tradition within the party. And, unfortunately, there was no such thing, not in our party, not in others either.




    With Dej’s demise, an apparent liberal, with new and ambitious projects, namely Ceausescu, became the uncontested leader of Romania, the last leader of Socialist Romania. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for Romanians, his death, as a means of accessing political power, was the last in a long chain, bringing his criminal regime to an end.