Radio România Internațional

Category: The History Show

  • The Americans in Romania in the second half of the 1940s

    The Americans in Romania in the second half of the 1940s


    Romanian-American
    relations deteriorated at great speed during WWII. Fighting on
    opposite sides, they were adversaries owing rather to circumstance.
    Romania had joined Germany in the war to protect itself from the
    aggression of the USSR, while the United States were allies with the
    USSR because they were fighting together against Germany. Despite
    this, Romania and the United States maintained minimal contacts,
    which eventually helped them re-establish closer ties. One example
    was the camp for American prisoners injured in Romania. Gheorghe M.
    Ionescu, who was a member of the National Peasant Party and a
    pro-American, was interviewed in 2004 for Radio Romania’s Oral
    History Centre about his WWII experience. He described how German
    planes from a German military aerodrome in Geamăna, Arges county, in
    the centre-south of Romania, intercepted the US aircraft when the
    latter began bombing the area:





    They
    fought in the air above
    the village. When the
    American
    aircraft was hit, eight Americans from the
    8-crew
    B-26 bomber parachuted themselves. Four died when hitting the ground
    and four were injured. The wind had blown them into a forest towards
    Cireşu. The civilian defence, the town hall and army troops were all
    mobilised and the alarm sounded. We were sent to look for them, but I
    didn’t go. The Americans eventually came out of the forest and
    turned themselves in. They were
    put
    on two carts and taken
    to the
    hospital in Piteşti where they received treatment and recovered.





    Showing
    lots of fair-play, the Americans thanked the locals for the humane
    treatment they had shown to the prisoners. Gheorghe
    M. Ionescu:


    About
    a month later, we heard an announcement on Radio London: Many thanks
    to doctor Nelecu, surgeon and the head of the hospital, for the care
    and attention he gave to the American soldiers. After they recovered,
    the American soldiers were of course sent to the prisoner’s camp in
    Predeal, where it must be said that the Romanians treated them well.
    They even played tennis there, it was more like a resort than a
    prisoner camp, and certainly nothing like those run by the Russians.
    The four soldiers who died parachuting themselves were buried in the
    cemetery in Lăceni. Each had identification tags with their name,
    regiment, age and their civilian data. The Americans had their own
    exact records and it couldn’t have been more than a week or ten
    days after 23rd
    August 1944 that they showed up in the village and exhumed the
    soldiers and took them back to Oklahoma where they had their home and
    families.





    Gheorghe
    Barbul, the
    personal secretary to marshal Ion Antonescu told the historian Vlad
    Georgescu in a talk hosted in 1984 by Radio Free Europe that although
    enemies in the war, Romania and the United States were engaged in
    negotiation:





    The
    first direct contact with the Americans was made in Stockholm by
    Rădulescu, Mihai Antonescu’s chief of staff. His interlocutor was
    a personal observer of Roosevelt in Europe who did have any official
    capacity. The US president used this system in order to circumvent
    the regular diplomatic channels and not be reproached by allies that
    he was conducting separate talks. The result of the Stockholm meeting
    was summed up by Mihai Antonescu like this: president Roosevelt is
    worried about the line of intersection in Europe between American and
    Soviet armies. The news brought back by Rădulescu
    had a profound effect in Bucharest. Marshall Antonescu felt he had
    been right in believing that by resisting the Russians militarily and
    preventing them from entering Europe, he was doing a service not only
    to Romania, but also to the Anglo-Americans.





    After
    Germany’s defeat in 1945 and Romania’s occupation by the Soviet
    army, Romania could only hope that the American diplomacy would save
    it from the prospect of communism. The myth of the Americans’
    landing in the Balkans dates to this time and was, naturally, an
    illusion. The Liberal leader Radu Câmpeanu said in an interview in
    2000 that the American envoys told Romanian politicians that the US
    had very little influence in Romania:





    Nicolae
    Penescu recounted to me the following episode that took place at the
    end of 1944. The National Peasant Party kept its files containing
    certain secret records and information with a certain Mr Melbourne.
    He was an officer from the American mission who had connections with
    the political parties. Melbourne lived in a flat somewhere near
    Grădina Icoanei. One time the party needed a document kept by
    Melbourne and sent someone to look for it. After consulting the
    document, Melbourne invited him to stay for a chat and told him ‘I
    must tell you that we have no power here, it’s Moscow who has all
    the power. You should try and reach and understanding with them, to
    talk to them.’ So he goes back and tells his leader Maniu what
    Melbourne had advised. And Maniu put his hand on his and said: we
    will do what we believe in’.





    Although
    history separated them from 1945 until 1989, Romania and the United
    States maintained their mutual affinities and after 1989 bilateral
    relations returned to their normal course, as was to be expected.

  • Radio Cairo

    Radio Cairo

    War is a permanent threat to each and every one of us, whether closer or further afield. Whether we recall personal experiences or were told the experiences of others, or we watched documentaries or heard it on the news, war was never gone from the collective imagination. Although the current structures of collective defence such as NATO provide enhanced security guarantee for its members, war is a possibility for mankind to fall into darker its side. WWII is still a living memory, 78 years after its completion. During wars, not just the battles themselves are important, but also the information that circulates. Experts say it is as important as the military equipment.



    This is why the media that existed during WWII waged their own battle against the enemy. Radio was no exception, with fierce battles of information and disinformation being waged on the wavelengths. During WWII, Romania was part of the alliance with Germany, Italy and Japan against the US, Great Britain and the USSR. The two military blocs used the radio to confuse their enemy in the latters own language. One radio station that also had a Romanian-language service was Radio Cairo, a station founded by the British government.



    The Romanian national Livia Deakin-Nasta began working for this station in 1941, translating and writing news in the Romanian language. Her father was the journalist Liviu Nasta, who was close to the British embassy in Bucharest and who had provided information to the British ambassador to the Romanian capital, Burton Berry. Born in Bucharest in 1916, she had graduated from the Faculty of Romance Languages. In an interview to Radio Romanias Oral History Centre in 1998, Livia Deakin-Nasta remembered how her adventure as a radio journalist began:



    “I left Romania in February 1941. My father had just been arrested and I managed to leave the country with the help of the French and the Americans. I first went to Budapest and from there to Belgrade. When the Germans invaded, I went to Greece and from there I could only go to Cairo, where the second allied military command was stationed. One was in London and the second in Cairo.”



    In Egypt, Livia Deakin-Nasta ardently devoted her activity to serve those whom her father had informed in relation to the movements of the German and Soviet armies. She lived in an apartment with another 4 young women of other nationalities. Radio Cairo had been established in April 1941, shortly after Livia had reached North Africa, the head of the radio station being Lord Runciman. She was given the rank of lieutenant and introduced herself on the shortwaves under the code name Lieutenant Jane Wilson. She remembered that Radio Cairo also had an Italian service, a Bulgarian service and a Greek one, besides the Romanian service.



    “I was on air at half past 11 in the evening, the Italians were after me, as they were too lazy to write the text. I had 10 minutes of war news and 5 minutes of general news. The Italians would come into the office and sit with me and would draft their texts in Italian after my own texts in Romanian. Sometimes they encountered words they didn’t understand, but eventually they managed to speak Romanian better than everyone else. A woman came later, because I got very sick and could no longer stand on my feet, whose name was Elena. She had Romanian and Swiss origins. She was a very nice woman, I cant remember her full name. When the Germans came very close to Cairo in 1942, we were all evacuated to Lebanon, and I went on air from there. And I also went on air from Jerusalem where I went later in the spring of 1943.”



    Livia Deakin-Nasta remembered quite clearly how she put together her news bulletins as they came from the British Armys press office: “The Military Headquarters gave us the news, we wrote it, they cut everything that could be dangerous for the troop movements, and after that we sat in a summer cinema, that is outside, and, on our knees, we translated the text from English to Romanian. I didnt even have time to type. The materials were then burnt on the spot. And especially in 1942 when the Germans came, we almost burned all the archives. There were crazy times back then because war is never easy.”



    But the job of an officer who also worked as a journalist was not just to translate and read news, according to her. Her duties also included sending Morse coded messages to groups of agents from Romania. The evolution of the war, however, led to the disappearance of Radio Cairo in 1944, but the war on the airwaves entered a different era. (CM, LS)

  • The Uranus district

    The Uranus district


    The area in Bucharest which today comprises the Parliament Palace, the vast Constitution Square and the extensive headquarters of various state institutions emerged in the form we see today in the early 1980s. Almost 40 years ago, this was one of the most picturesque parts of the city, with relatively hilly geography and home to the Army Arsenal building, a stadium, churches and monasteries, private homes, and parks and was known as the Uranus district. 90% of this area was demolished, however, as part of the systematisation policy launched by Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1977.



    The historian Speranța Diaconescu, who was working at the time for the Bureau for the National Cultural Heritage of the City of Bucharest, witnessed first-hand the way in which this policy was implemented and how it led to the destruction of many heritage structures and of the entire Uranus district. In an interview to Radio Romanias Oral History Centre from 1997, she remembers that all they were left to do was to archive what was to be demolished:



    “The Uranus area in particular, where massive demolitions were conducted, was an old historical area. The Bucharest History Museum wanted to chart it. It was its right and its obligation to chart that old area so wed know what was lost and to retain some trace of it in this way. Later, we extended the mapping beyond Uranus, to all the areas that were demolished. The History Museum of Bucharest has records of the demolished houses, whether poor, shabby houses or palaces. There are records not only of the houses themselves, but of the social and professional situation of their occupants. While not the most detailed of records, they help us form a big picture of the situation at that time.”



    Aware of what systematisation really meant, the specialists were making superhuman efforts to rescue what could still be rescued of what was going to be lost. Historian Speranța Diaconescu:



    “When the demolition of those areas began, we made lists, under Decree no. 120 from 1981, with proposals about what was to be salvaged from the structures that we going to be pulled down, for example, door knobs, doors or stained windows, or various components of the structure that were of great value. I witnessed some really absurd scenes. We were told that demolition work would begin on a certain street and we were to go there and make an inventory of what needed to be preserved. And we would have done that, except the demolition would begin the next or second day and we didnt even have time to draw up the papers requesting permission to go to the demolition site. We didnt even have a week to decide what should be preserved.”




    In fact, the authorities demolition campaign meant destroying what experts recommended to be actually saved, Speranța Diaconescu says.




    “I happened to visit various homes that had beautiful parts, windows, crystal-glazed doors, stained-glass doors or mirror doors. As the previous day I had stopped at number 15 and was supposed to continue, the next day I noticed that at numbers 1, 3 and 5 where I had made the suggestion to save the beautiful doors, they were being thrown out in the street. They had started bringing them down, the demolition teams were in a hurry, and all the crystal, all those doors and beautiful windows I recommended for salvaging were broken to smithereens on the curb. I went through other similar experiences, which strengthened my conviction that many of these procedures were just for show”.




    After 1989, the main culprit for the destruction of Uranus district was Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who will remain the man people commonly hold accountable. But he was not the only one, Speranța Diaconescu explains.


    “Im sorry to have to say it, but the blame for everything that happened fell not just on the head of state. Although everyone thought he was a simpleton, he was clever enough not to sign any demolition orders until after they had been carried out. The demolition decree targeted large areas, then the teams would return to the sites to pull down any remaining monuments under a specially signed order, which the president always signed until after the demolition proper. Therefore, any demolition was carried out only through third parties who were usually threatened with something or wanted to make a name for themselves – and we have plenty of examples in that respect”.


    Whatever remains of the Uranus district today is perhaps one of the most beautiful parts of Bucharest. The old district can still be admired in collectors pictures, exhibitions, press articles and social media and in certain documentary and feature films. “Angela moves on”, a 1982 production, is a good example in this respect. (CM & VP)






  • World War One in Romania

    World War One in Romania


    Much has been written and, surely, more will still be written about World War One, the Great War as it had been dubbed at that time, and that, because the deflagration was something the world had not seen up to that moment. It was a tremendous mobilization of resources and people, made for the ideas of the age, for convictions and for utopias. And that, because the most eccentric ideas, before they are materialized, are oddities people get enthused with, when they deal with such ideas, yet being at once overcautious about them and rating them as forms of utopia. Everything that occurred in the aftermath of World War One, in 1918, would have been considered, before 1914, the year of the outbreak of the war, unachievable.



    In the great conflict, Romania took sides with the English-French-Russian Entente, in 1916. The Romanian army, in 1916, fought on World War Ones longest front line, stretching north of the Carpathian ridge to the south of the Danube and the shores of the Black Sea. The Romanian army eventually conceded defeat, in 1916. With the support of the Russian army and the French military mission lead by general Berthelot, the Romanian army put up a successful resistance to the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, in 1917, who were advancing on the front line, in 1917. In 1918, in the wake of the Entente emerging as winner, the Old Romanian Kingdoms unification was possible, with the territories of the neighboring empires, with a predominantly Romanian-speaking population. For posterity, the year 1918 went down as a year of triumph, a year of celebration and the commemoration of all Romanians sacrifice for Greater Romania.


    Savoring the victory of 1918 left little, if any, room for commiserating with the defeated, who lost almost everything. Austro-Hungary was dismantled and reduced to the territories where the ethnic populations of the two successor states, Austria and Hungary, were predominant. However, the real winners are those who find the time and the willingness to consider their opponents sufferance, to look, through the eyes of the losers, at how much they themselves had to suffer for victory. To that end, the volume edited by the Hungarian historians Nándor Bárdi and Judit Pál and titled “Over the Trenches. How the Hungarians of Transylvania experienced the Great War and the Trianon.” is a collection of documents of the time.



    The historian Daniel Cain told us that, for the Romanians, the beginning of the war that led to the final victory was a much too optimistic one, with very little doubt as regards the real situation,



    “I shall make reference, if I may, to an article that was a singular voice in the Old Kingdom press in late 1914 and early into 1915. It is an editorial published in a business magazine and also an attempted answer to those who were dead set on Romanias entering the war: fine, we advance into Transylvania, we make Greater Romania. What would our administrative model be, for those living in Transylvania? Do we have the required administrative experience to replace, for instance, the elite of the Transylvanian towns? It was a one-of-a-kind article, at that time, as there were extremely boisterous other articles targeting the necessity and the light-mindedness of a decision to be taken, for the Romanian Army to cross the Carpathians. “



    The light-mindedness with which people cause real tragedies is typical for our minds and motivated by our good intentions. Human beings are self-delusional, believing, for instance, that a war ends up quickly, without much effort. It was the mindset of that particular generation and, as history has revealed, it was also the mindset of the generations to come.



    Historian Daniel Cain:



    “In order to illustrate that light-mindedness with which people viewed the war in the summer of 1916, in Bucharest there were two major incidents that occurred prior to Romanias entering into the war: an explosion at the armys Arsenal and another explosion at the ammunition storage in the Dudesti district. The following day, the press and mainly the Adevarul daily said measures had to be taken, because there were the spies who did it and 300 people were sacrificed, it was exactly the number of people who had to be sacrificed for the accomplishment of the national ideal, once the Carpathians had been crossed. So, in 1916, a great part of the public in the Old Kingdom was firmly convinced that Romanias entering into the war would be no more difficult than a walk.”



    Here is historian Daniel Cain once again, this time highlighting the good points of a thought-provoking volume, a book where we can find the same experiences that are typical for wartime. Its just that theyre being viewed from the other side.



    “It practically offers several answers to several questions, it provides an extremely varied image of what, first and foremost the experience of the war mean, for the ordinary people who fatefully felt the pressure of those trying times. Here we have testimonies of experiences that mainly boil down to uncertainty, to the uncertainty of tomorrow, to fear. Just put yourselves in the shoes of those living in the border localities, where, all of a sudden, the next day they see another army marching into their locality. And what they see is a change, a withdrawal of the local administration, a replacement of the local administration, only to see that, in a couple of days or in a few weeks time, the former state of things would again be put in place.”



    The volume “Over the trenches… is more than an invitation to reading. It is an urge to view a glorious year, such as 1918 was for the Romanians, from the other side, the side of the defeated ones, it is an urge, for winner and losers alike, to share the sufferance. (EN)


  • From the history of the Romanian press

    From the history of the Romanian press

    The daily press
    has an almost 200-year long history in Romania, with the first newspapers
    appearing at the end of the 1820s. However, the earliest Romanian publication
    is considered Courier de la Moldavie,
    which first appeared in Iași in 1790, was published in French, and contained
    domestic news from Moldavia, as well as foreign news.




    We find this
    from an exhibition hosted by the Romanian Academy Library called The Romanian
    press between tradition and modernity and which looks back at the beginning of
    the press in these parts. The Romanian Academy Library has in fact the biggest
    collection of newspapers and periodicals published on Romanian territory or from
    abroad. Out of a total of 14 million items evaluated at 3 billion euros that
    are currently in the Library’s possession, more than a half, namely around 8.5
    million, are newspapers and periodicals.




    The curator of
    the exhibition Daniela Stanciu told the opening of the exhibition that the
    press is one of the best ways to find out what the people who lived before us
    experienced:




    When we speak
    of the press in general, we don’t speak only of newspapers and magazines, but
    also of other publications appearing regularly, including annuals, specialist
    journals from various fields and even conference papers. So, the journalistic
    heritage of a nation is in fact its most extensive history: a history that was
    being written at the very moment the events were taking place. The reporters’
    accounts reflect the events as they took place, providing first-hand
    information to the public. The witness accounts of important events in the
    history of the world are also important because they provide aspects that may
    escape the historians’ retrospective and analytical gaze. Moreover, the news
    reports capture the ineffable thrill of the daily lives of the people living in
    those days, with their mentalities, habits, beliefs and values. When we reread
    them decades or even centuries later, they provide a quite clear image of what
    the French call l’air du temps, the spirit of the times.




    The emergence and development of the press is
    connected to the development of technology. The printing press played a
    decisive role in the dissemination of information. Daniela Stanciu explains:




    The development of the printing press led to
    the development of the press and the fast spread of information through
    newspapers. Before that, leaflets were the only means of informing the
    population. Apart from newspapers and magazines published in the Romanian lands
    in the 19th century, the exhibition also features a number of
    leaflets. One announces the publication of Curierul Bucureștilor, later
    to become Curierul românesc, and the leaflet with the Proclamation of
    Izlaz, the manifesto of the 1848 movement which is considered the first modern
    constitution. The proclamation was read by Ioan
    Heliade Rădulescu on 9th June 1848 in Izlaz, a small port
    town on the Danube that was not under Turkish control, which is why it was
    chosen. The exhibition also features a leaflet about the establishment of the
    printing house of the Metropolitan Church in 1859 and a leaflet containing the
    speech given by Alexandru Ioan Cuza before the Elective Assembly in 1860, and
    another in which King Carol I urges Romanians to cross the Danube.




    What else can we
    see in this exhibition? Curator Daniela Stanciu tells us more:




    The newspapers
    on display are part of the so-called Sărindar press, like Adevărul and Dimineața,
    which are well-known. The 1836 issue of the magazine Muzeul Național. Gazetă
    literară și industrială is the first to include a section about the
    weather, on the last page. This paper also published the letters between Constantin Negruzzi and Heliade Rădulescu
    under the heading ‘Correspondence between two Romanians’, one from Wallachia
    and the other from Moldavia. Also on
    show is a copy of the magazine Claponul. Foiță hazlie și populară, which
    was written entirely by Ion Luca Caragiale and of which only six copies appeared
    in 1877, but which contains sections such as ‘Doughnuts’ and ‘The final hot
    doughnuts’, which provide commentary on current political events in typical
    humorous Caragiale fashion. We also have the newspaper Adevărul, which
    first appeared in 1871 in Iași and was moved to Bucharest in 1872. Very few
    people in Romania know it, but this is the first paper to publish caricature;
    the first to publish telegrams from abroad and the first Romanian paper to have
    its own building, its own library, publishing house and archive. As shown by
    records, it was also the first paper whose employees benefited from secure, and
    also quite big, wages.




  • Romanian-North Korean relations

    Romanian-North Korean relations

    The relation Socialist Romania had with North Korea,
    from the 1970s to 1989, was quite good. There are two explanations for the
    positive trend of the relations between two countries that were so far away
    from one another. The first explanation has to do with the two communist
    leaders, Nicolae Ceaușescu and Kim Ir Sen, being in mutual harmony in terms of
    opinions and personality. The second explanation pertains to the two communist
    countries’ economic interest. Romania had to expand its economic relations beyond
    Europe, while North Korea sought to approach a European country.


    Colonel Emil
    Burghelea was appointed military attaché in 1970 and spent a couple of years
    in North Korea. In 2000, Colonel Burghelea was interviewed by Radio Romania’s
    Oral History Centre. Back then he gave an account of what the level had been,
    of the economic exchange between Romania and North Korea, prior to the departure to his position in North Korea. In the Asian country, Romania mainly exported Bucegi
    trucks, made in the Steagul Rosu/The Red Flag plants in Brasov, spare parts and
    information on the service. North Korea was hungry for any kind of technology
    and intended to set up a national industry. Colonel Burghelea reminisced Koreans’
    performances, carried in primitive conditions, but also their unfair commercial
    practices.     Emil Burghelea:




    They made special steels for their heavy
    weaponry, and we were taken aback because of that: how in God’s name something
    like that could come along, while we, back home, were required expertise from
    the West, all the time, which meant investments and a lot of money. The second
    issue was about the Koreans’ mobilization, they were caught fourfold between a
    rock and a hard place, they were caught between the four empires: the Russian,
    the Chinese, the Japanese and the American one. From us, they received
    automatic lathes, made in Arad or Brasov. And we saw them removing the
    Romanian-language labels from the lathe, reading Made in…., they replaced
    them with other labels, in Korean, they shipped them to South Korea saying they
    had been made by them. And we didn’t object to that in any way. They were
    trying to mobilize their forces, to create. There they had many cement lines,
    made by us.




    North Koreans’ interest was largely in the military and
    the military capabilities, while their economy was subordinated to the doctrine
    of militarization. Emil Burghelea:




    They took an interest in anything, they even
    visited our shipyards in Mangalia. In aviation, in tanks, artillery, they were
    very interested in that. They structured their coastal artillery and your hair stood
    on end as to when and how they took it out. You couldn’t see anything from the
    shore, neither could you see where it was hidden. They managed to put up a very
    advanced defense system, which was even nuke-proof. At a certain time, we,
    Romanians, were a step ahead so to say. We had a tradition in terms of military
    technology and equipment that we were building at our Plants in Resita, such as
    the formidable 75 anti-tank gun or the device made by inventor Bungescu. We had
    the aircraft plant in Brasov, which was building helicopters and ran a contract
    with the USSR for building a Katyusha-type rocket launcher. For this reason,
    they used to visit us a lot back then and whenever they went to Ceausescu they
    usually asked for another type of weapon. And Ceausescu gave them everything
    they asked for. We took them on tours around our weapon factories and whenever
    they get there, officers would pull out their notebooks and start taking notes.
    They came to study the Army House in Brasov, and when they started building
    their own, we sent them experts.




    But you need more than weapons to build a strong army,
    you also need training. North Koreans started training their troops at a very
    early age. Emil Burghelea:




    They took the training of their soldiers very
    seriously, under the motto ‘One against one hundred’. They believed their
    enemies had more troops and they wanted their soldiers to be able to stand up
    to more enemy soldiers. They laid emphasis on martial arts and trained their
    troops extensively. They provided weapon training to children with ages between
    12 and 14, like boy-scouts, you know. Their boy scouts were called pioneers at
    that time and the Pioneer House in Pyong Yang as well as in other cities were
    fitted with special classes and workshops providing military training, teaching
    children how to use infantry weapons like machine guns and rocket
    launchers.

    The high level of mutual trust was benefitting both sides and
    Romania gained access to North Korea’s raw materials. Emil Burghelea:




    We didn’t give them technology for free, you
    know. Their country had great deposits of anthracite and we needed their
    anthracite. They exported many things to Romania, like tobacco, anthracite,
    fish and Ceausescu wasn’t that generous without a purpose, apart from the
    political ones. We even imported iron ore from them, because we had developed
    our plants and we were in need of iron ore. So, it wasn’t only the military
    field.




    The bilateral relations diminished considerably after
    the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime back in 1989, when Romania
    discarded communism to embrace democracy. (EN&bill)

  • The February 16, 1933, railway workers’ strikes in Bucharest

    The February 16, 1933, railway workers’ strikes in Bucharest

    A deep economic crisis hit the whole world between
    1929-1933. Also known as the Great economic Crash, the crisis, among other
    things, translated into violence, an increasingly poor living standard, strikes
    and protest rallies. Romania was also marred by this crisis, having its dismal share
    of the aftermath and the ensuing social unrest. Strikes and protest rallies
    flared up countrywide, especially in the industrial regions. Illustrative of such
    a situation was the 1929 miners’ strike in Lupeni. Back then workers were
    protesting against the so-called sacrifice curbs, meaning salary cuts and price
    hikes. During the aforementioned four-year span, another strong protest
    movement was the strike staged over January-February 1933 by the railway
    workers employed by Bucharest’s Grivita Repair workshops. However, the strike
    was equally politicized by the communist regime that held Romania under its
    grip between 1945 and 1989.


    If we take some time to examine documents of that
    time, we can detect two stages in the unfolding of events. The first stage was
    the legitimate strike staged by the railway workers’ unions, who negotiated
    some of the claims employers even complied with. Over January 31st
    and February 2nd, 1922, the Grivita trade unions obtained an increase
    in wages as well as other benefits, for their members. The second stage unfolded
    after the communist and Comintern-controlled unions were a lot more focused on their political claims. We
    recall the Comintern used any form of social unrest to cause instability.


    Negotiations were brought to a standstill
    for a couple of days, while immediately afterwards, on the morning of February
    16, 1933, the government took forceful action against the 4,000 workers who had
    barricaded themselves on the premises of the repair workshops. The gendarmes’
    intervention claimed the lives of seven workers, while 15 others were wounded. 160 workers were arrested.


    The communist regime that was instated in Romania after
    1945 had been constantly using that strike as a propaganda tool and for the particular
    reason whereby communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had been employed by
    Grivita, where he was one of the instigators and where he was imprisoned. Notwithstanding,
    after 1989, archive research and the interviewing of the very few surviving
    witnesses have revealed a different kind of reality. In 1998, Radio Romania’s Oral
    History Centre interviewed engineer Constantin
    Negrea, who in 1927 was a young employee with the Romanian Railway Repair Workshops.
    Negrea reminisced the 1931 protest rallies he joined himself with the 800
    workers, and which claimed the lives of two people.

    Constantin Negrea:


    In 1931, certain
    problems occurred. We had been threatened with the sacrifice curb. And we, on
    January 29, 1931, we staged a protest rally against the implementation of the
    sacrifice curb. We were deprived of our dues, bit by bit. And then, we took to the
    streets after 4 pm, heading towards the Grant Bridge, to the Repair workshops,
    we wanted to get there. We also had a couple of sergeants in tow, they were
    accompanying us. We were shouting we did not want the sacrifice curb. When
    we hit the Grant Bridge, we got shot at! One man, Craciun, died, he was a carpenter,
    and a Jew, Schwartz, who came from
    Oradea to get married. So there were two people dead!


    Two years later, the 1933 strikes began with staging
    protest rallies, just like their predecessors, yet they changed the tactics, so
    their voice could be better heard.


    Instead of moving about and shouting in the street we
    didn’t want the sacrifice curb, we replaced that with the activation of the siren
    every thirty minutes, many times. We replaced taking to the streets in protest
    rallies. We began to organize ourselves in union groups and everyone knew on
    the day of 15 we were supposed to rally, all of us, even though the frost was
    so harsh. We intended to get out in the repair workshops’ courtyard where there
    was some kind of a little park set up on the premises. Constructions works for
    the park were not completed, so a couple of sand loads had been unloaded, and
    there was a sand bank there. Well, several cauldrons were brought there, 5,
    maybe 6, where we warmed ourselves lighting a fire. After that, a plank
    barricade was erected at the back entrance of the Locomotives Division, it was
    an entrance there and there also was a roof.


    Despite strikers’ radicalism, among
    them there were people who were talking sense and the fears they voiced turned out
    to be real, in the long run.


    Evening set in and,
    logically, the people there, there was a one Mogos who worked at the plant and there
    was another one, they stepped aside, they kind of dodged, and said: We get
    fired and we won’t be able to earn our keep anymore! They were older, more sensible,
    more well-advised, quite unlike us, who were younger. The last time we rallied
    was around 5 pm, at five past I’d already made for the siren, and in ten
    minutes I walked back to the gates. At 5.45am sharp, live rounds were fired. They
    shot on sight and six people died, that’s how many were shot dead.


    The dead and the communist
    organizers, who were sentenced to prison, saw their worst when the strike of
    February 1933 ended. The events in Grivita that happened 90 years ago were the events
    of a generation that firmly opposed the deterioration of their lives. Sadly,
    the February 1933 strikes were partially hijacked by the radical communists, the advocates of
    a criminal regime.(EN)


    .

  • 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 people’s expansion bouts. Technically, archaeologists
    labelled the oldest frontier in the Romanian space using the phrase limes dacicus.
    It runs in the western half of Romania’s 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 Romania’s 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 Trajan’s 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, we’re 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, it’s 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, let’s 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 we’re 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. We’re now eastward bound, we cross the mountains through the Rucăr-Bran corridor and we’re hitting the course of
    the Danube, along a route which has been more or less materialized on the
    ground, on the territory of today’s 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 Hadrian’s
    reigns, to Antoninus Pius’s 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 we’re 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 Trajan’s 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)

  • Mircea Carp turns 100

    Mircea Carp turns 100


    We
    dedicate this edition of the History Show to radio journalist Mircea
    Carp, who used to work for the Romanian service of Radio Free Europe
    and contributed to the huge prestige enjoyed by that station. Carp
    turned 100 on 28th
    January 2023, having lived through one of the most problematic
    centuries in the history of mankind, including Romania: the century
    of two world wars, fascism and communism. After fighting on the front
    in the second world war, where he was wounded and decorated, Mircea
    Carp emigrated to the West when the war was over. He was one of the
    most recognizable voices on the radio and worked with the most
    important free media institutions in the Romanian language after
    1945, namely The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Together
    with his colleagues, he stood by the Romanian people in all the
    difficult moments they went through, both before 1989 and after. Those
    who were around at the time will never forget the opening Radio Free
    Europe’s broadcast, which played George Enescu’s First Romanian
    Rhapsody and Mircea Carp’s announcement This is Radio Free
    Europe, which was repeated four times.




    In
    1997, the Oral History Centre of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting
    Corporation recorded Mircea Carp’s experience working for The Voice
    of America. He was asked if the station knew about the tragedy of
    political prisoners in Romania and how it covered this issue for the
    Romanian public:





    We covered the subject, but we had to be careful with the
    information we would broadcast. In fact, the news broadcast by The
    Voice of America, then and today, had to be verified by at least two
    sources in order to be confirmed. You can imagine that we got all
    sorts of information from Romania and had to consider if it was true.
    We were very aware of the horrors taking place in the Romanian
    prisons, at the Canal and in other places, but we had to be careful
    when we named names, dates and places, because things might have been
    exaggerated, or some people couldn’t remember exactly when the
    events occurred or when exactly they met a certain person. So, in
    this respect we were very, very careful not to make mistakes. Of
    course, after we got the confirmation we needed, we would broadcast
    the information, including interviews. In most cases, the persons we
    interviewed wanted to remain anonymous, and rightly so, because they
    still had families back in Romania and didn’t want to make their
    situation unpleasant.





    Carp
    began working for Radio Free Europe in 1951 before moving to The
    Voice of America where he became known to Romanian-language listeners
    for the quality of his programmes. In 1978, he returned to Radio Free
    Europe, where he infused more energy into the station’s Romanian
    language broadcasts and where his foreign policy show called The
    Political Programme was very popular with the public. Mircea Carp
    explains:





    Before
    I joined Radio Free Europe, their broadcasts were a bit flat. Without
    wanting to blow my own trumpet, I brought some American energy to
    these broadcasts – shorter reports and interviews with people from
    all corners of the world, including well-known Romanians living in
    exile, in the free world. But apart from my own contribution, the
    station itself, perhaps sensing that the collapse of the Iron Curtain
    was near, intensified its campaign. The Romanian language department
    increased its focus on programmes that scrutinised the situation in
    Romania and revealed everything that was intolerable about this
    situation. I’m speaking of the things that were not visible on the
    surface, but which many people knew about, although not all in any
    case. The fact that a foreign radio station shed light on the real
    political, economic, cultural and military situation in Romania was
    much appreciated by our listeners, who were themselves unable to
    speak openly, to say what they were thinking or what they had heard
    and who found their feelings echoed in the programmes of Radio Free
    Europe.





    The
    Romanian radio journalist Mircea Carp turned 100. He is an integral
    part of the history of free audiovisual media in Romania, alongside
    the likes of Noel
    Bernard, Monica
    Lovinescu, Virgil Ierunca, Vlad Georgescu and
    Neculai
    Constantin Munteanu.

  • The anniversary of Dimitrie Cantemir

    The anniversary of Dimitrie Cantemir

    The archetype of the
    intellectual politician in European history dates back to Roman antiquity, the
    first example being Emperor Marcus Aurelius during the second century AD. In
    his famous book about the ideal form of government, The Prince, Niccolo
    Machiavelli writes that an intellectual prince will always find the right
    solutions for political leadership. One example of intellectual prince in
    Romanian history is the ruler of Wallachia, Neagoe Basarab, from the beginning
    of the 16th century. However, the most famous was the Ruler of
    Moldavia, Dimitrie Cantemir, who authored a vast number of books in different
    fields, such as history, geography, morality, political science and music.




    Dimitrie Cantemir was
    born in 1673 as the son of Moldavian ruler Constantin Cantemir and was schooled
    in the manner befitting the son of a ruler of the day. He was educated in the
    capital of the Ottoman Empire, living and studying on the banks of the
    Bosphorus between the age of 14 and 37. His works include the classic texts The
    Divan or the Sage’s Dispute with the World, A Description of Moldavia, The
    Hieroglific History and The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman
    Empire. Other equally important books are The Chronicle of the Romanian-Moldavian-Vlachs,
    The Oriental Collection, Little Compendium on All Lesson of Logic, A Study
    into the Nature of Monarchy, The Life of Constantin Cantemir known as The
    Old, the Ruler of Moldavia, System of Muhammad Religion and The Book of the
    Science of Music. In recognition of his extraordinary contributions to human
    knowledge, in 1714, aged 41, Cantemir was elected as a member of the Royal Prussian
    Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He was mentioned by the famous English historian
    Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his book The History of the Decline and Fall of
    the Roman Empire, as well as by the American historian of science Alan G.
    Debus in a book about the 16th-century Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont.


    As a political
    leader, the career of Dimitrie Cantemir was not as impressive as that of him as
    a scholar. He became the ruler of Moldavia in 1693, at the age of 20, after the
    death of his father. 17 years later, in 1710, he became ruler for the second
    time, but only for one year. He joined Peter the Great in the Russian-Turkish
    war, but the Russians’ defeat at Stănileşti, in 1711, led to his losing the
    throne. He went into exile at the court of Peter the Great, where he served as
    his advisor. Cantemir died in 1723, aged 50.




    2023 was declared the
    Year of Cantemir in Romania because it’s the 350th anniversary of his death and the 300th
    anniversary of his birth. To mark this, the Romanian Academy Library opened an
    exhibition of manuscripts and books dedicated to Cantemir. Academy member Răzvan
    Theodorescu spoke about how Cantemir was a European figure typical of his day,
    who brought together two cultural worlds, the West and the East.




    Track: A lot is known about Cantemir, but many
    other things are yet to be discovered. I remember that a few years ago at Belgium’s
    National Academy in Brussels, a conference was organised on Cantemir’s European
    identity. In this case, we gave the world a great European. We should never
    forget that A Description of Moldavia was commissioned by the Academy in Berlin,
    which at the time was commissioning various descriptions of Eastern territories.
    This interest in the Levant, particularly in Prussia, was quite notable, hence
    the work commissioned to Cantemir. In spite of the current political
    circumstances, we should not shy away from saying that Dimitrie Cantemir became
    a member of the Berlin Academy in his capacity as a Russian prince. When the
    Prussian royalty thought of giving Peter the Great an accolade, and they chose
    the most educated man in the Russian Empire, it was Cantemir, the former ruler
    of Moldavia, that they suggested. Cantemir brought together the traditional
    culture of this region, the Ottoman culture and the Russian one. In this
    respect, he was a forerunner of the European identity, at a time when a new
    Europe, the pre-modern Europe, was taking shape.




    Constantin Barbu, an editor
    of Dimitrie Cantemir’s works, discussed the manuscripts included in the
    exhibition dedicated to the scholar:




    Constantin Barbu:Around 200 volumes have survived of Cantemir’s
    works, and so far we have printed 104 of them. I managed to compile two
    manuscripts by Cantemir, they are now complete Cantemir works, and they can be
    found in Moscow and here in Bucharest. We also brought several previously
    unknown manuscripts by Cantemir. We also have, among others, two chapters from
    A Description of Moldavia handwritten by the German Sinologist Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer, a professor at the
    University of Petersburg. But Cantemir’s manuscripts are not only to be
    found in Russia, but also at the Academy in Berlin, and we brought here the 15
    manuscripts that they have.




    The Year of Cantemir brings back to the
    forefront an outstanding cultural personality, and, just as much, a remarkable
    European. (CM, AMP)

  • Romania’s political icons of the mid 20th century

    Romania’s political icons of the mid 20th century

    Politics has always fueled endless discussion
    topics, while for their most part, political discussions translate into stark
    disagreements. Very few politicians of those whom we today take for figureheads
    are squeaky clean, and that because human beings make mistakes. Nonetheless, that
    does not mean there were not truly remarkable politicians who became landmarks
    for posterity. Their exceptionality was provided by the manner in which they
    acted under extremely difficult circumstances, for themselves and for their communities.
    One such exceptional politician, here, in Romania, was Iuliu Maniu. We recall
    that on January 8th we commemorated 150 years since his birthday.


    Iuliu Maniu was born in 1873 in the locality of Șimleul Silvaniei, in
    today’s north-western Romania. Iuliu Maniu followed his father’s footsteps and
    had a similar career path, that of a lawyer. Iuliu Maniu earned his Doctor’s degree
    in Law from the University of Vienna, in 1896. Maniu embraced the political
    career, first being an activist with the National Romanian Party. In 1906 he was
    elected deputy in the Hungarian parliament. In 1915 he was drafted into the Austrian-Hungarian
    army and dispatched on the Italian front. At the end of the war, in 1918 Maniu
    participated in the Alba Iulia Assembly which ruled the unification with
    Romanian of the then Austrian-Hungarian territories predominantly inhabited by Romanians.
    In Greater Romania, jointly with Ion Mihalache, Maniu founded the National
    Peasant party in 1926. Between 1918 and 1945 Maniu was three times Prime
    Minister of Romania. An out-and-out democrat, Maniu turned down collaborations of
    all sorts, with the fascist dictatorship but especially with the communist one.
    On February 5, 1953, at the age of 75, Maniu was sentenced to prison. He later died because of the detention conditions
    in the Sighet prison.


    Iuliu Maniu was one of the strongest and most polarizing personalities
    of the Romanian society in the first half of the 20t century. Incorruptible, charismatic,
    tenacious, Maniu was, indeed, the figurehead the Romanians needed in the most
    trying times of their history. Maniu is unanimously remembered as a role model but
    also as a special man. Radio Romania’s Oral History Center Archive has loads of
    audio testimonials about Maniu. We
    have selected two of them. Ioana Berindei is the daughter of Ioan Hudita, a National
    Peasant Party prominent member. In 2000, Ioana recalled Iuliu Maniu, sir,
    just like she used to call him. Ioana told us Maniu was a man of great modestly
    and kindness.

    Maniu had the rare
    quality of being modest! A very nice man, with a warm voice. He used to join us
    for lunch, I can still remember once I went out to welcome him to our home and
    he used to tell us, me and my sister, Good afternoon, my dear young ladies And
    he had a spot on his lapel and I asked him would he allow me to clean it. Oh,
    I’m so ashamed! says he. And I told him such things happened and would he allow
    me to clean it, so he doesn’t pay another visit with the spot uncleaned. And
    mister Maniu was ill, back then, whenever he got himself seated his knees ached,
    he walked with difficulty, but I never saw him nervous or irritated by
    something. His being calm was so very soothing for everybody around. As a politician
    he was uncompromising. That’s what my father most loved about him. He never
    gave an inch! His detractors used to say Maniu was so very slow in taking a
    decision. This is sheer mean malice, all politicians have their enemies, you cannot
    be perfect or you cannot possibly work without somebody opposing you. But then
    again, it was not because my father loved him or because I met him, but let me
    tell you, there wasn’t a single flaw I found about him.


    Sergiu Macarie used to be active in the National-Peasant youth. In
    2000 he confessed that the Soviets’ arrival in Romania was an alarm signal for
    the Romanian society which mobilized against its enemies. Maniu defied his old
    age and, fighting his illness, got actively involved in that.


    Less than two, maybe three days passed before we
    had our clashes with the communist gangs. We staged larger meetings and we knew
    straight away they would turn up. Of the party’s prominent members who always
    joined us there was Ilie Lazar. In
    the Palace Square we all gathered and acclaimed the king and the king would
    show up in the balcony, standing ovations followed, and our moments of heaven.
    And, as soon as that happened, trucks with workers always turned up, they had
    clubs. For instance, on May 15, 1946, we were celebrating 98 years from the
    speech Simion Barnutiu delivered on the Freedom Plain in Blaj, and Maniu came
    too. On our way out, all around the Romanian Atheneum and on the opposite side we
    saw cars teeming with workers with clubs. We really hard a hard time trying to
    get the president out of there, there was a door at the far end of the building, which was
    never used, we forced it open so we could get him out of there.


    Iuliu Maniu was more than an honest politician; he was an icon of democracy
    itself. Between 1944 and 1947,
    when the implementation of the communist regime in Romania occurred at its fiercest,
    Maniu was considered the West’s most important dialogue partner. His sacrifice
    in Sighet turned Maniu into one of Romania’s major political landmarks in the
    20th century. (EN)

  • The Romanian aviation industry at the end of WW2

    The Romanian aviation industry at the end of WW2

    In the interwar period, Romania built its own aircraft industry, an industry that continued a tradition that had taken shape at the beginning of the 20th century. On November 1st, 1925, the Romanian Aviation Industry (IAR), the most important Romanian aircraft producer, was founded in Brașov. It was a joint venture whose shareholders were the French aircraft producer Blériot-Spad, the French car manufacturer Lorraine-Dietrich, the Romanian rolling stock factory Astra Arad and the Romanian state. On September 1, 1938, the Romanian state purchased all other stakes and became the sole owner. IAR was divided into two large units: the aircraft unit and the engine unit.



    In its 23 years of activity, until 1948, the Romanian manufacturer had built a variety of civil aviation devices for training, sports, leisure, as well as military aircraft for monitoring missions and fighter jets. The engines were French licensed at first, after which the engineers at IAR started building their own engines. The most famous Romanian aircraft were IAR 80 and IAR 81, fighter jets and fighter-bomber jets. During WW2, Romanian military pilots on IAR planes wrote glorious history pages, as they successfully fought against both Soviet and American aviation.



    The fate of the Romanian Aviation Industry dramatically changed after 1944. The Soviet occupation army forced the suspension of aircraft production. The factory would only be used for repairing works. The final blow was give in 1948, when the aircraft factory was turned into a Soviet-Romanian joint venture for the production of tractors. It was only in 1968, that the tradition of building aircraft was slowly resumed. In 1995, the Radio Romania Oral History Center interviewed engineer Teodor Gârnet, who worked at IAR Brașov during the interwar period. He explained how the Romanian side had to give back to the Soviets new, perfectly functioning machine-tools, in exchange for used ones, captured in Odessa, which were not working. The machine-tools were taken from IAR: Six machine-tools were captured from the Russians, in Odessa. They didn’t actually work because they needed repairing works. They were kept in reserve for a while until the situation changed and we had to give them back. A Russian military commission came, that included a colonel and a captain. To be more persuasive, they even pounded the factory manager’s table with a pistol and ordered him to repair the machine-tools, make them like new, in an extremely short time. After they were repaired, somebody had to deliver them. Nobody really wanted to take over this responsibility. I was eventually tasked with it myself. The transport was a real adventure. We even wanted to get rid of the task and bribe the captain who was accompanying us, but it did not work. So we took the devices to Iaşi, were they were loaded on a Russian train. The Russians took advantage of the situation and also took the best devices that we had, a foreign one and others from the ones of the engine factory. They took everything they wanted, saying we damaged their devices and they must take something good in return. The engineers at IAR also created new engines, so they did not just used the licensed ones.



    One such innovation was the 7M engine, designed, alongside others, by engineer Teodor Gârneț: The engine s design data was 350 horsepower because it was intended for lighter aircraft, and could also be used in utility and sports aviation. It was used for pilot training at the time. During the first tests, the engine produced 370 horsepower, in good operating conditions, without trepidation, without any problem. However, because of a bombing we did not have all the necessary equipment to test the engine properly. So we only had a few data. This IAR 7M engine was made in only two copies, of which only one copy was assembled and one was kept disassembled. The IAR aircraft factory, in site of being poorly equipped, had some exceptional results. After the its reopening, in 1971, IAR Brașov diversified its product range, and also started producing helicopters at the Ghimbav factory, under French license. Production was also supplemented by utility aircraft, gliders and motor gliders. After 1989, IAR was reequipped. (EE)


  • The Romanian Revolution Seen From Abroad

    The Romanian Revolution Seen From Abroad

    In 1989, for an interval of nine days, between December 16 and 25, the Romanian world went through some of the worst turmoil in its 20th century history. It was a return to the freedom that had been lost for 45 years, starting with the arrival of the Soviet armed forces in 1944. On the evening of December 16, 1989, in Timisoara, protests against the forced evacuation of pastor Laszlo Tokes from his own home were soon to turn into a tidal wave that swept from power the criminal communist regime.




    Journalist Mircea Carp was a senior editor with Radio Free Europe, and in 1997 he told Radio Romania’s Center for Oral History the tension he felt in front of the microphone at that time. He believed it was more than his professional duty to keep his listeners in the country informed about the great deeds of courage in Timisoara. Carp confessed that, in spite of the feeling in the air, the conflagration that was the revolution took everyone by surprise:


    “December 1989 came around, and with it the first spark, the events in Timisoara. I have to say that it took us by surprise in terms of the moment they occurred. We had steeled ourselves personally, but also in terms of preparation of programs, around a possible change of regime in Romania. However, the day of 16th, and the following day, December 17th 1989, came upon us unawares.




    However, once it was sparked, the euphoria was unbridled. Free Europe journalists were the more stoked as they could not be in the fulcrum of events in order to broadcast as eye witnesses. Here Mircea Carp:


    “The first to broadcast what was happening in Timisoara was my colleague, Sorin Ciunea. After two or three days, starting on December 18, we gathered our wits about us and started working in shifts, 24 hours a day. We worked around the clock in teams of 3 or 4, preparing these broadcasts in a big hurry, based solely on information that we had from foreign press agencies and some travelers to and from Romania. Of course, we didn’t have solid, hard information at that point, we only did so after the explosion on December 21 and 22. Up until then we were working furiously.




    In 1999, Hungarian journalist Peter Marvanyi from Radio Budapest told Radio Romania’s Center for Oral History how he got caught up in the fever of news of the Romanian revolution. One year before, Marvanyi had covered the grand rally in Hungary’s capital, demanding freedom and democracy:


    “In 1988 I had participated in Budapest in the rally that had gathered 80 to 100 thousand people, demanding democracy for both countries, Romania and Hungary. Things got interesting when, on December 16, the Hungarian public broadcaster started shifting its attention and getting informed on events going on in Romania. I was the editor for news broadcasts the days after the 16th, and we started telling our listeners all around Hungary what was happening in Romania. We had very contradictory information, we knew absolutely nothing about it. We only knew one thing for sure, that something extremely important was happening.




    In 2003, Radio Romania’s Center for Oral History asked civic activist Dinu Zamfirescu, who was in France in 1989, how he spent the days around the Romanian revolution:


    “First of all, I was informed by French radio and TV stations. I was called upon by two of them, especially France 3, where I was on the air every day. I was the token Romanian, I was with the two anchors commenting the Romanian situation. I remember that there were two monitors on the set that the viewers could not see, and on them I could see the news as they streamed in. On December 25, we got the news of Ceausescu’s execution. This was very hot news. When this hot piece of news came in, I was asked to comment on it. I had to say that it was the first big mistake of the new regime coming to power in Romania. I said back then that Ceausescu should be kept alive and interrogated, in order to provide more information. I said then that it was likely that some of those who were coming to power were afraid to have some things known about themselves. So that, when a former French foreign minister said that the execution was a good thing, I retorted, and said that this maybe gentleman himself had some things to hide. Which was not outside the realm of possibility. However, today I would not say the same thing, and maybe it is better that things happened like that.




    Up until December 22, 1989, Romanians, their neighbors, and the whole civilized world were getting informed by foreign media. Fortunately, on that fateful day the media in Romania were getting free of their shackles, and started obeying the will of the people.

  • 35 years since the death of philosopher Constantin Noica

    35 years since the death of philosopher Constantin Noica

    Constantin Noica, one
    of the leading Romanian philosophers of the 20th Century, was born
    in 1909 in Teleorman County, in the south of Romania, and died on December 4, 1987
    in Sibiu.




    He attended the School
    of Philosophy and Letters of the Bucharest University, where he graduated in 1931
    with a paper on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He was drawn to the views
    of Romanian existentialism, whose main promoter was Nae Ionescu, one of Noica’s
    professors.

    In the 1930s, Noica was close to the Criterion philosophy
    society. In 1940, after a one-year residency in France, he returned to Romania
    to present his Ph.D. thesis in philosophy. That same year, he left for Berlin,
    to work with the Romanian-German Institute, and stayed there until 1944, when
    Romania left its alliance with Nazi Germany. During his stay in Germany, Noica
    attended Martin Heidegger’s philosophy seminar.




    After the war and
    after the communists seized power in Romania, in 1949 Noica was placed by the
    authorities of the time in a forced residence in Câmpulung-Muscel. In 1958 he
    was arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to 25 years of forced labour together
    with the other participants in the informal meetings of the so-called Noica-Pillat
    group.




    Released in 1964, he
    was employed by the Logic Centre of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. This is
    where he became friends with acclaimed Romanian intellectuals like the
    philosophers Gabriel Liiceanu, Sorin Vieru, Andrei Pleșu, Andrei Cornea. In
    1975 he moved to Păltiniș, a mountain resort 15 km from the city of Sibiu, where
    he received the visits of those seeking answers to the philosophical questions
    of the time.




    Noica’s work
    comprises 32 volumes of philosophy, literary and art criticism, journalism articles,
    of which 20 published during his lifetime and 12 after his death.


    The philosopher and essayist
    Andrei Pleșu was one of Noica’s disciples. Pleșu made it quite clear that he
    owes his intellectual growth to the jailbirds, as the Romanian intellectual elite
    sent to prison by the communists were dubbed. One of the jailbirds was
    Constantin Noica.




    Andrei Peşu: I was lucky to get my training next to a
    number of jailbirds. They were of decisive help to me, they shaped me, they
    made me rebuild an intellectual continuity with the previous generations, and
    this was tremendously important for the young man that I was. I was lucky to
    meet early on Alexandru Paleologu, Sergiu Al-George, Remus Nicolescu, Teodor
    Enescu, I. D. Sârbu even, although not in his capacity as a teacher. As a
    student, I was colleagues with a gentleman 10 years my senior, who had graduated
    from the theology institute, had also served some time in prison, and now he
    was an art history freshman. His name was Marin Tarangul and I had a lot of
    respect for him, because he was a gentleman and he had an extraordinary
    library, for those times. One day he came to me and said, Listen, there is
    someone writing for România literară now, you certainly didn’t hear about it.
    His name is Constantin Noica. Read him, Marin said, to see what the true
    language of philosophy sounds like.




    For Andrei Pleșu, meeting
    Noica’s philosophy, and then meeting Noica himself, meant the opening of an new
    existential and cultural horizon.




    Andrei Pleşu: I read it, I was in awe, it was a completely
    different sound from what I had heard before. It so happened that I was
    studying English with a lady Meri Polihroniade, the widow of a right-wing
    professor who had died in prison, but whose second husband had served time in
    prison with Mr. Noica. And this is how I was able to get to Mr. Noica. He was
    living in Berceni, in a two-room flat in a new apartment building. He was quite
    properly dressed, I remember I was surprised with his elegance. After talking
    with him, together with Marin, he offered us 10 ancient Greek lessons. And he
    was also the one who told me, if you want to take up philosophy, you absolutely
    need German, so start learning the language. And he also gave me 3 books to
    read.




    Constantin Noica remains
    a great name in Romanian 20th Century philosophy, not only thanks to
    his scholarly works and translations from ancient Greek philosophers, but also
    as a model of professionalism and academic integrity. (AMP)

  • Tudor Vladimirescu and the Romanian national idea

    Tudor Vladimirescu and the Romanian national idea


    In January 1821, several thousand men from Oltenia, today a province in south-western Romania, led by Tudor Vladimirescu, a former officer in the tsarist army, were marching towards Bucharest. That was the Romanian response to the national movement of freeing the Greeks of Eteria, a Greek national organization seeking to free Greece from the Ottoman rule and build a nation state. Vladimirescu thus answered the aspirations of the nationalist Wallachian boyars, who wanted, just like the Greeks, to free their country from the Ottomans. Personalities like Dinicu Golescu, Eufrosin Poteca and others made up the first generation of Romanian nationalist elites, who started to separate themselves from the Greeks in terms of ideas, attitude and language, in spite of their profoundly Greek education. The Greek and Romanian national ideas at the beginning of the 19th century had common roots. The Phanariot period, which had started a century before, had formed a Greek-Romanian symbiosis at the level of the elites.



    The rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia were selected especially from among the Greek elite in Phanar. Through rulers, the Orthodox Church, the education system, mixed marriages and the circulation of capital and property, the Greeks and Romanians committed themselves to getting free from the rule of the Ottoman Empire and to forming nation states.



    However, the Greek-Romanian solidarity eroded progressively and two different national movements emerged — the Greek and the Romanian ones. The 1821 moment of the insurrection led by Tudor Vldimirescu is regarded as the peak of the tesnse relations between Greeks and Romanians. Tudor Dinu is the author of a recent research book on Tudor Vladimirescu: “Tudor Vladimirescu was an overwhelming personality, quite different from the one we know from old history books. I would say he was the most important self-made man in Romania’s history. He was a simple person, driven by extraordinary ambition, which can be positive up to a point, who tried everything to make a brilliant career. He fought in the Russian-Turkish war of 1806-1812, when he met the future members of the Eteria organization, Iordache Olimpiotul and Iane Farmache. He worked for a famous boyard, Glogoveanu, in whose house he learned how to read, in Craiova. He was not very educated, as his family could not afford it. At the officials meetings with Greek personalities, such as Ipsilanti, he was always accompanied by a translator. His translator was the archbishop of Arges, Ilarios, who adviced Vladimirescu to kill Ipsilanti. So there were not always amicable feelings on both sides.”



    Having left his native Oltenia, Vladimirescu settled in Bucharest, in the spring of 1821, where he ruled Wallachia without having formally invested to do so. The Greek army, led by Ipsilanti, who was a general in the tsarist army, was to be supported by the Russians to cross the Danube and take part in battles against the Turks. Not having received any support from Russia and faced with the Turkish danger, the suspicion of treason emerged between the two, following which Vladimirescu was assassinated by Ipsilanti’s men.



    Vladimirescu was potraied as a hero in Romanian history books, in particular between 1945-1989, during the communist rule, when he was even described as a hero of the fight of the poor against the rich. According to Tudor Dinu, Vladimirescu was not quite the one described by historians during communism: “Tudor Vladimirescu saved money as administrator of the Gloveanu estate, opened his own businesses with everything that would make him money during those times, from cattle and fish to meat and alcohol. He had inns and wind mills and even tried to become rich by taking advantage of the corrupt administration. He was administrator of a mountain province, a position that he use to buy, just like all other positions were bought at the time. This was the only rule back then. Public positions were auctioned, just like the leadership of monasteries. He even managed to become, before 1808, supplier of the Princely Court and of the army, in the turbulent period of the Russian-Turkish war, and he did not stop there. This was his great quality, he believed in himself.”


    The main practical effect of Vladimirescu’s actions was that the princes appointed by the Ottomans at the helm of the Romanian principalities were no longer Greek.