romania revealed

Herta Muller on her Securitate file.

Suddenly I found my file, too, under the name of Cristina. Three volumes, 914 pages. It was allegedly opened on 8 March, 1983 – although it contains documents from earlier years. The reason given for opening the file: "Tendentious distortions of realities in the country, particularly in the village environment" in my book "Nadirs". Textual analysis by spies corroborate this. And the fact that I belong to a "circle of German-language poets", which is "renowned for its hostile works".

The file is a botched job by the SRI on behalf of the old Securitate. For ten years they had all the time in the world to "work" on it. You could not call this cooking the books, the file has simply been emptied of all substance.

(Excerpted from a great interview at sign and sight)

Ghita Ionescu's legacy to Romanian history.

One of Ghita Ionescu's most critical contributions to Romanian and post-communist studies  was his emphasis on the academic study of "opposition" to political regimes. He founded a journal at LSE, Government and Opposition, which explored this topic in many countries which were communist-led at the time. He also wrote a book, Opposition: Past and Present of a Political Institution, with Isabel de Madariaga, emphasizing his view of opposition as a civil institution. 

At the time, the field of "Soviet Studies" still focused on analysis of formal government institutions under communist regimes, including the COMECON. Content analysis of party documents was all the rage. Professor Ghita ameliorated the study of communist regimes by introducing the test posed by opposition and its role in the evaluation and popular legitimacy of a political regime.

Certainly his association with Radio Free Europe played a role in his interest in the social phenomenon of political dissidence. In fact, Radio Free Europe would have been a pointless endeavor without the assumption that popular legitimacy remained critical to a communist regime's long-term hold on political power.

In fact, Ionescu believed that popular movements, as opposed to internal government reform, would eventually bring an end to the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. 

More links, information, and works influenced by Professor Ghita Ionescu:

• His obituary by John C. Campbell in The Independent
• Ionescu's books are available in Romanian from Humanitas
• Hlavacek, Petr and Holzer, Jan (2009) "Opposition in Non-Democratic Regimes: Notes on Possibilities and Limits of Current Theory," World Political Science Review: Vol. 5 : Iss. 1, Article 5.
• Cas Mudde, "Populism in Eastern Europe", Radio Free Europe, 8 March 2000.
• Robert Cutler, "Soviet Dissent Under Khruschev: An Analytical Study", utilizes Ionescu's opposition paradigm.
• Laura Radulescu, "An Intellectual Cleansing Which Never Took Place, Or How We Became What We Are"

The strange attractions of socialism: A roundtable worth re-visiting.

In October 2006, Horia Roman Patapievici moderated a roundtable on "Intellectuals and Socialism", which explored the attraction posed by socialist ideology to Western intellectuals and academics in the 20th century. Over one hundred invitees attended this event at the Institute for Romanian Culture, and the vitality of the discussion can be appreciated in the video below.  

Why did the traditionally skeptical intellectual class find itself seduced by promises of government's power to work for that lovely abstraction otherwise known as the Common Good? Why do we assume that the state can provide better solutions to human problems than the marketplace of goods and ideas? What did the experience of communism teach us about the effectiveness of the state in working for the Common Good? Among other interesting explorations at this event: the relationship between culture and the state, the meaningfulness of left-right distinctions, the possibility of libertarianism as a credible alternative, the unspoken etatism of the EU, and more.... Don't take my word for it. See for yourself. 

A word of thanks to my comrades at Liberalism.ro for keeping the fires burning.

The half-hearted study of communist archives in Romania.

The National Council for the Study of the Archives of the Securitate was founded by a law passed in the Romanian parliament in 1999. It has nine members, who are proposed by the political parties, and a few researchers who deal with the archives. When it began, one could find among the nine councillors former dissidents and important intellectuals, including the poet Mircea Dinescu (who had been placed under house arrest in 1988 after he gave an interview to Libération, in which he protested against Ceausescu's policies); the philosopher Andrei Plesu (who during the Ceausescu regime had been removed from the Institute of Art History in Bucharest and exiled to rural Romania to work as an administrator of a regional museum after signing a letter criticizing Ceausescu); and the essayist Horia-Roman Patapievici (who became a public figure after 1990 and is currently the president of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Bucharest). 

From the start, the functioning of the Council encountered a major obstacle: a clause in its constitution (inserted by a senator later unmasked as having collaborated with the Securitate) mentioned the "political police". Accordingly, the Council could reveal only the cases of collaboration with the communist secret services with a "political police" connection, as opposed to cases that were about "defending the national interest". We are in a land of metaphors: in practice, it was very difficult to distinguish "political" from other forms of collaboration with the Securitate.

Mircea Vasilescu has more on the "fairy tale" aspects of Romania's self-reckoning with its communist past in this excellent essay. 

Remembering the Romanian anti-communist resistance in memory of a few newly-recovered heroes.

A mass grave containing the bodies of three members of the Romanian anti-communist resistance group, White Guard, turned up on April 27th near the village of Nepos in northern Romania. The grave contained bones and a boot that will undergo forensic analysis, said experts from the Romanian Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes.

The resistance members were identified as Ioan Leonida Bodiu, Ioan Burdet and Toader Dumitru. They were executed and buried by the Securitate, the Communist secret police, in 1949, and will be exhumed at the request of their relatives.

Two years ago, on April 24 and 25, 2007, the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, in co-operation with the Military Prosecutor’s Office, unearthed the remains of nine men shot on March 9, 1950. They had also been buried in a mass grave near Bistrita-Nasaud. Following inquiries, it was discovered the men were shot by a group of soldiers with the Securitate, sent to capture and punish people for their refusal to be conscripted, which was considered dissention by the Communist regime.

In the postcommunist re-reckoning of Romanian history, the native resistance to communism has received limited attention. In fact, details about what was called “anti-communist armed resistance” were not made public until after Ceausescu's overthrow in 1989. It was only then that the public learnt about the numerous small groups of "haiducs" who had taken refuge in the Carpathian Mountains, where some resisted for ten years against the troops of the Securitate. The last “haiduc” was killed in the mountains of Banat in 1962.

The Romanian resistance was one of the longest lasting armed movement in the former Soviet bloc. Its continued relegation to the realm of historical shadows is partly due to the tendency to conflate resistance to communism and statements of fascist sympathy. Scholars are reluctant to provide historical accounts of Romanian communist resistance for fear of being considered fascist revisionists. The end result is a significant, lamentable lack of scholarly work on the Romanian resistance to communism.

If young Romanians are not educated about this non-fascist resistance to communism, they will be vulnerable to cultural determinists and demagogues who argue that Romanians are not fit for democracy, that their traditions require strong leaders, that their history is a testament of fatalism and defeat, that only a Romanian Putin or a local nationalist can preside over a secure Romanian nation. With the coming presidential election, there is reason to be concerned about the Social Democratic candidate, Mircea Geoana, and his condescending view of Romanian citizens. Needless to say, the confusion in Molodva also provides an excellent political distraction to the current economic crisis-- a distraction which could be mobilized as a resurgent Romanian nationalism should unemployment and social discontent increase. The history of the Romanian resistance to communism offers an empowering, alternate narrative to the helplessness and victimhood emphasized by extremists lining the halls of the Greater Romania Party.

In 1948, non-violent opponents of the Romanian communist regime were arrested. Liberal and social democratic leaders were taken to prison as "enemies of the revolution", since they refused to compromise with the new communist "democracy" as instituted by the "will of the people". The members of the National Peasant Party and the Legionaires, who openly opposed the Sovietization of Romania, were eliminated from public life. Since many were indeed political fascists, their imprisonment was easily justified in the post World War II atmosphere. But most Romanian anti-communist resistance was not related to support for fascism, but rather, to the extreme irrelevance of Marxist ideology to a primarily agrarian, non-industrial nation with the tiniest indigenous Communist party in the Eastern bloc. Communism was truly a Soviet export to Romania; the resistance underlines this important and neglected fact.

Beginning in the summer of 1948, individuals or small groups went underground into the Carpathian mountains, forming various groups of armed resistance in what was a relatively large movement, gathering several thousand people. The rebels came from all social strata and all areas of the country, spreading everywhere the terrain could shield them. The movement is related to the spate of mass arrests hitting the country after the communist power seizure on the eve of 1948, as well as to the political and economical measures which destroyed a large part of the peasantry and the middle class. People sought shelter in the mountains for different reasons-- some to escape imminent arrest, some who fled in fear after being economically ruined. Significantly, entire families took flight in late 1948 and early 1949.

Retreating in the mountains from internal or external oppressors was a spontaneous and ancestral strategy of the Romanian peasantry. Significantly, the members of the armed resistance were not called "partisans" by the population, but haiduci, the word for the generous bandits that had fought the Austrian occupiers and were considered folk heroes. A further major component of the armed resistance consisted of individuals and groups motivated by anti-communist convictions and persuaded that only an armed engagement could contain increasing terror and prevent irrevocable communist takeover. Some of the resistance groups were led by ex-army officers and acted in a more coordinated and planned way. It appears that they put their hope in stirring up a more general armed insurrection, which never came to life. A smaller category of insurgents were Romanian refugees recruited in Europe by the Office of Policy Coordination, trained in France, Italy and Greece and then dropped in the Carpathians. It seems, however, that most of them, not being able to create local contacts imperative for survival, were soon captured.

Ion Gavrilă-Ogoranu led a resistance group in the Făgăraş Mountains from 1948 to 1956, and remained undetected until 1976. Among other haiduci in the anti-communist resistance, one must include the Cross and Sword Organization in the Rodna mountains, Decebal's Guards in Suceava, Fetea in Sibiu, Avram Iancu's Haiduci in Bistrita, the in Dobrogea, Capt. Brancusi Mihai in Gorj, the Haiduks of Mustel in the Southern Fagaras mountains, the Young Partisans of Romania in Bukovina, and many, many more.

The White Army, which I assume is another name for the White Guard, worked from the Apuseni mountains. Sadly, there is little detailed information about its members and its history online. Most searches lead me to information about the Soviet army or football teams. I will do my best to find more information in the coming week so that these men who died in the fight against communism can be properly acknowledged and honored.

Sources: Romanian Times + Wikipedia + Claudia Dobre's article in Memoria + Ionitoiu Cicerone's article for Gindirea Romaneasca + Tripatlas article

Reading history in the stars: The charm of horoscopes in the post-communist literary landscape.

When I visited Romania at the beginning of 1990, I scoured the newsstands for any and every shard of information about Romanian culture, the revolution, recipes, history, commi-nostalgia, concerts, life as lived and dreamed in the immediate post-1989 period. Imagine my surprise to discover that almost every newspaper or magazine boasted of its horoscope section. There was a horoscope available for every month, day, decade, and period. Horoscopes littered the dusty sidewalks of Bucharest, promising answers and explanations. My university-educated Romanian relatives would ask me quite seriously if I had consulted my horoscope before x and y.

In the post-communist period, the horoscope had become a reference guide in an unsure world and a source of revisionist history. Before the Romanian intellectuals settled into their desks to revisit the history of Romanian communism, the horoscopes had already published definitive guides to the truth about each and every important Romanian. The horoscopes were not burdened by Securitate files or ties to former leaders-- their information was pure as the night sky and powerful as the sun. Before Romanians could read revisionist history in the libraries, they could read it in the stars.

Does Romania's notorious and legendary fatalism explain why horoscopes gained such a following in the immediate post-communist period? Only for those who prefer the cosmos of cultural stereotypes to the cosmos of stars. In fact, Romanian fatalism is a facet of literary culture more than a facet of general culture (though one might argue that Romanians tend to be more Stoic, a philosophy which has its roots in fatalism). Romanian horoscopes, like Romanian legends, have the texture of a rich tapestry in which disparate colors and elements bind together as revelation.

Rather than the pithy American-style two-liner, Ceausescu's horoscope reads like an intimate portrait, a legend harvested from the stars. Among other salient details, the horoscope asserts that Ceausescu was supported by the US. I've heard this position expressed by a number of Romanians in hushed tones, but the horoscope sets it above rumor by relegating it to the realm of the stars.

It is alleged that Ceauşescu was supported overtly and covertly by the United States throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Romania gained "most favored nation" trading status in 1975, six years after a favourable visit by President Nixon. According to Noam Chomsky, it was partially due to Ceauşescu's divergent views on policy (such as the invasion of Afghanistan, opposition to Molotov-Ribbentrop, etc.), Ceauşescu garnered support from the Bush Administration, particularly George Herbert Walker Bush himself and then-Secretary of State George P. Schultz . There were negative comments regarding Romania during this time by both Schultz and Bush, but the former also called Ceauşescu a "good Communist" and the latter praised Ceauşescu's "respect for human rights" . This support, it is argued, was a major obstacle to the overthrow of Ceauşescu.

The horoscope is a superb historical vehicle in the dusk of the absurd. When unemployed dissidents would find work writing horoscopes for various journals, they were engaging in another form of dissent. Astrology, like religion, was not acceptable to the communist regimes grounded upon the predictive value of historical materialism and scientific socialism. In this environment, authoring a horoscope offered a subtle way in which to criticize communist leaders (for example, by predicting negative events in their future due to character traits like 'egoism'). When Czech writer Milan Kundera's work was banned in 1969, Kundera made a living by writing an astrology column under a fictitious name, which eventually got him and his friends in even more trouble.

It is no secret that Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Adolf Hitler relied on astrology in making political decisions. The Kremlin seems to have star-gazed quite frequently. The stars, like palms, books, and coffee grounds, must be read as life is lived, with a smile to illuminate the darkness. To explore Poland's national horoscope, venture here. For more on the absurdist humour of communism.

Protochronism and the Ceausescu regime: Creating a culture of national socialism.

The insistence on the need to develop the self-consciousness of the Romanian people on all spheres of life was an early and persistent theme in Ceausescu's cultural policy. The theoretical vehicle for this development first emerged with Athanase Joja's concept of "national specificity", which emphasized the uniqueness and special characteristics of Romanian culture. As Ceausescu's goals came to encompass a global role, Joja's concept was replaced by the theory of "protochronism", which emphasized not just the uniqueness but also the superiority of Romanian culture over all other cultures. For Ceausescu, national culture was a tool for comparison and confrontation.

Edgar Papu's essay, "The Romanian Protochronism", caught Ceausescu's eye in 1974. He adopted the idea of Romanian chronological (and hence cultural) superiority as a tool to expand the intellectual reach of national socialism. At the 11th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party a few months later, Ceausescu's chief ideologues linked protochronism to Marxism with the argument that the Dacians created a permament and unorganized State, the seed which later sprouted into the Greater Romanian nation.

At the Cultural Congress of 1976, Ceausescu stressed the need to rewrite Romanian history in a way that would correct the "grave errors [which] have been made in the interpretation of our history, of the formation of our people, of the language, and of the Romanian nation itself" (Scienteia, 3 June 1976).

Most Romanian academics hailed Ceausescu's statement as an opportunity to embolden Romanian national history and culture, previously given shorter shrift by Stalin's emphasis on the Soviet Union's primary role in world history. Those on the political and nationalist Right were especially pleased with Ceausescu's speech, as it turned the Romanian Communist Party into a national socialist state founded in a xenophobic, right-wing glorification of ethnic history. Protochronism led Romania away from the internationalism and global brotherhood suggested by Marx and other socialist theorists and back towards the fascist militarism so lamentable popular in last war. The Russians were not models for Romania after all, as Romania would pursue its own special and superior path to socialism.

Some academics, however, were not comfortable with this direction. Ovid S. Crohmalniceanu and Nicolae Manolescu protested the theory of protochronism. Apart from the warning that "every forced note risks sounding shrill", Crohmalniceanu and Manolescu disparaged even the term chosen to denote protochronism, as it was created in obvious counterpoint to Eugen Lovinescu's theory of synchronism launched in the 1920's. Papu's paper had suggested that Lovinescu's goal of "synchronization" with the West between the two world wars prevented the Romanians from discovering their own magnificence. Papu's critics knew better-- the protochronist theory would only institutionalize Ceausescu's totalitarianism even deeper by drawing disaffected Romanian right-wingers (who might have formed an opposition) into the folds of Romanian national socialism.

For more on Romanian protochronism:

• Maier, Anneli, "Romanian Protochronism and the New Cultural Order" (RAD Background Report #226, 16 November 1977).
• Mocanescu, Alice, "National Art As Legitimate Art: National Between Tradition and Ideology in Ceausescu's Romania" (Conference paper).
• Gavrila, Bogdan Cristian, "The Political Discourse of National Communism 1971-1979" (The Dept. of Nationalism Studies, CEU, 2004).
• Martin, Mircea, "Cultural romana intre comunism si nationalism II" (Revista 22, 31 October 2002).
  

[Credit for the great photo goes to the Nicolae Ceausescu blog.]

The persecution of the Greek-Catholic Church under communism.

In a paper for the Nicolae Iorga Institute backed by information from the Securitate archives, Cristian Vasile probed the perception of the Securitate on relations between the Vatican and Greek Catholics in Romania. Vasile offers an introduction to the historical issue:

After December 1, 1948 the Romanian Greek Catholic Church was banned and many of its clergy were injailed under the pretext of political offences or even "spying activity”, whereas their only “fault” was the fidelity to their faith. The Communist authorities tried to break the Greek Catholic faithful’s resistance even through the agency of absurd measures, such as the removal of the Romanian language from the Transylvanian Catholic Latin-Rite churches, for instance. Even after 1965, the Greek Catholics, especially priests and prelats (honourable persons like bishops Iuliu Hossu, Alexandru Todea, Iuliu Hirţea, Ioan Dragomir and Ioan Ploscaru) were considered as “dangerous elements”, and they were put under strict surveillance by the Securitate; they could not leave the country for the sittings of the Second Vatican Council although the Holy See invited them.

Among other things, Vasile's paper looks at Greek Catholic dissidents, including Doina Cornea, Viorica Hesia, Puiu Neamtu, and Maria Angelin. The persecution of the Greek Orthodox Church by the Romanian communist regime marks another sad chapter in the history of Romanian communism. For more on this topic:

• The Romanian Greek Catholic Church has a very resourceful website with lots of information in English.
• Memorandum to the Romanian State from the Greek-Catholic Believers from Romania and from the Entire World, September 2002.
• A document from a meeting in Sibiu 2007 in which the Romanian Orthodox and Greek-Catholic churches are declared "sister churches". 
• Romanian Greek-Catholic Church History through the ages.
• For the specific history of a congregation, the History of St. Mary's Parish and of the Romanian Catholic Church is excellent.
• The Dintre Brazi Church (picture in this post) is the oldest Romanian church in Sibiu.
  

Life in Romania circa 1986 according to Pavel Campeanu.

In1986, Pavel Câmpeanu, a Romanian sociologist who had built his career on support for socialism and who had shared a prison cell with Nicoale Ceauşescu during World War II, smuggled out an article which was subsequently published anonymously by a purported "visitor to Romania" in the New York Review of Books. At the time, it was assumed that the Securitate punished and assasinated dissidents even after they left the country.

The article is significant for its detailed description of the painfully bleak quality of life for Romanians living through the final years of Ceausescu's national socialism. I've excerpted a bit, but the article is well-written and worth reading in full:

One of my friends said that to understand the recent developments I must first consult a decree by the Council of State of the Romanian Socialist Republic issued on October 10, 1981. The exact text ran as follows:

It shall constitute illegal trading activities and, in accordance with the terms set down in the Penal Code, shall be punishable by six months to five years in prison, to purchase from any state commercial center or cooperative store, either with a view to hoarding or in any quantity that exceeds the requirements of a family for a period of a month, oil, sugar, wheat or corn flour, rice, coffee and all other foodstuffs the hoarding of which might affect the interests of other consumers and proper provisioning of the population.

Since then, he said, the situation has changed drastically. Coffee can no longer be bought by private citizens and has been replaced by an ersatz substance disapproved of by physicians, which the public, guessing at the ingredients, has nicknamed "henna." Meat, buttermilk, and bread are rationed in most districts, sugar and cooking oil throughout the country—and the ration is much more generous than the shops charged with distributing them can supply.

Since 1968, it should be explained, Romania has been divided into more than forty districts, each with a Party secretary, who is its supreme head. He is responsible for delivering a quota of food from his district to the central government—a task that must give him bad dreams. For it poses an insoluble problem: if he distributes locally less food than is called for by the plan—as he is virtually obliged to do—he will be popular with the authorities but held in contempt by the people of the district; and if he tries to help the population get more food, he will be unpopular with the authorities. Everyone has a different approach to the same dilemma—for even in the CP no district secretary is quite like another—and this psychological diversity makes for diversity in the distribution of food shortages throughout the country. In Cluj or Pitesti the situation, I was told, is frankly horrible; in Sibiu or Vilcea it is merely wretched. Thousands go from district to district on shopping excursions from which they often return empty-handed.

Romania seems unique in many ways. It is the only European country in which one can be sentenced to five years in prison for buying excessive quantities of food that is generally unavailable to the public. It is also, in my experience, the only such country in which the legal work week is forty-six hours and the urban population often spends three to four hours a day shopping for groceries. In Romania President Ceausescu takes upon himself to compose lyrics for a new national anthem, rather than entrusting the task to a poet. And in spite of a republican form of government of which he is the constitutional head, the president carries a scepter and is grooming his son as his successor.

Workers often spend entire days waiting for raw materials that their factory cannot obtain. If they leave the premises without permission or bring alcoholic beverages, or cigarettes, or lighters, or matches onto the shop floor, they are regarded as having broken the law and can receive prison sentences from three months up to two years (Decree 400 of December 29, 1981, Article 18).

The Letter of the Six from 1989.

In March of 1989, six big wigs in the Romanian Communist Party sent Nicolae Ceauşescu an open letter that was also strategically leaked to the international press. In this letter, the six openly disagreed with Ceausescu's policies and suggested reform measures. Scholars differ over the extent to which the writing of this letter was truly risky or bold, since their privileged status as old-school members of the communist coterie provided them with protection.

On Silviu Bruncan's view, "the six signatories of the letter did suffer some reprisals, such as house arrest, but they were treated relatively gently, since they were widely respected in the Romanian Communist Party and had important international connections". As a signatory to the letter, Bruncan's opinion is not a statement of fact but rather a historical account of how the six signatories wanted to be perceived by international public opinion. Personally, I am skeptical about the extent to which this letter reflects anything except the power-hunger of its signers, but educated gentlemen like Immanuel Wallerstein have a less cynical perspective.

Among the six signatories to the letter:

• Gheorghe Apostol, former member of the Politburo and chairman of trade
 unions
• Alexandru Birladeanu, former member of the Politburo and chairman of the planning committee
• Corneliu Manescu, former minister of foreign affairs and president of the UN General Assembly
• Constantin Pirvulescu, founding member of the Communist party
• Grigore Raceanu, veteran of the Communist party
• Silviu Brucan, former acting editor of Scinteia

 Without further ado, here is an excerpt from this letter:

To President Ceausescu:
At a time when the very idea of socialism, for which we have fought, is discredited by your policy, and when our country is being isolated in Europe, we have decided to speak up. We are perfectly aware that by doing so we are risking our liberty and even our lives; but we feel duty-bound to appeal to you to reverse the present course before it is too late.

The international community is reproaching you for nonobservance of the Helsinki final act, which you have signed yourself. Romanian citizens are reproaching you for nonobservance of the constitution, which you have sworn to observe. Here are the facts:

• The whole plan for systematization of villages [i.e., their "modernization" by destroying             existing buildings] and the forced removal of peasants to three-story apartment blocks runs             against Article 36 of the constitution, which protects the right to personal property of a household, with its annexes and the land on which it is situated.
• The decree forbidding Romanian citizens to have contact with foreigners has never been voted on by the legislative body and never been published; thus it lacks legal power. And yet our citizens are threatened with being fired, harassed, arrested, and sentenced for doing so.
• The Civic Center [in Bucharest], the biggest multibillion lei investment made in Romania, has no public budget and is being built in violation of all existing laws regulating constructions and their financing. The cost of the immense building has tripled because of changes you order every month in the interior and exterior of the building.
• Securitatea [i.e., the State Security Service], which we created to defend the socialist order against the exploiting classes, is now directed against workers demanding their rights, against old members of the Party, and against honest intellectuals exercising their rights to petition (Article 34) and freedom of speech (Article 28) guaranteed by the constitution.
• Factories and institutions have been ordered to force their employees to work on Sunday against Article 19 of the constitution and the labor code.
• Mail is systematically violated and our telephone conversations are cut off in violation of Article 34, guaranteeing their privacy. To sum up, the constitution has been virtually suspended and there is no legal system in force. You must admit, Mr. President, that a society cannot function if the authorities, starting from the top, show disrespect for the law.

Planning no longer works in the Romanian economy. The meetings of the Executive Political Committee are all oriented toward the past, [and taken up with] exhorting the workers to make up for the unfulfilled plan of the previous year, previous semester, or previous month. An increasing number of factories lack raw materials, energy, or markets. 

Agricultural policy is also in disarray. Harsh administrative measures are directed against the peasants, who, according to your own data, provide 40 percent of the country's vegetables, 56 percent of the fruit, 60 percent of the milk, and 44 percent of the meat, though they have only 12 percent of the arable land. But, of course, what is now predominant in the villages is the fear of being "systematized," with seven or eight thousand villages threatened with being razed. Above all the economic, cultural, and humanitarian objections of the civilized world to that program, a legitimate question arises: Why urbanize villages when you cannot ensure decent conditions of urban life in the cities, namely adequate heating, lighting, transportation, not to mention food? A government that for five winters in a row has been unable to solve such vital problems for its population proves itself incompetent and incapable of governing. Therefore, we are not pressing on you any demand in this respect.

The very fact that Germans, Hungarians, and Jews are emigrating en masse shows that the policy of forced assimilation should be renounced.

Finally, we are deeply worried that Romania's international position and prestige are rapidly deteriorating. As you know, this is concretely shown by the decision of quite a few countries to close their embassies in Bucharest. Most alarming, embassies of such European nations as Denmark and Portugal have already been closed and others may follow. Our growing isolation affects not only diplomatic relations. We have lost the most-favored-nation status for trade with the United States and as a result some of our textile factories have no orders. The EEC is unwilling to extend its trade agreement with Romania, which will negatively affect other sectors of our economy. You have always maintained that summit meetings are decisive in improving relations between states. But how are you going to improve Romania's external relations when all the leaders of the non-Communist nations of Europe refuse to meet with you? Romania is and remains a European country and as such must advance along with the Helsinki process and not turn against it. You started changing the geography of the countryside, but you cannot remove Romania to Africa. To stop the negative processes, both domestic and international, besetting our nation we appeal to you, as a first step, to take the following measures:

1. To state categorically in unequivocal terms that you have renounced the plan of systematization of villages.

2. To restore the constitutional guarantees regarding the rights of citizens. This will enable you to observe the decisions of the Vienna Conference on Human Rights.

3. To put an end to the food exports that are threatening the biological existence of our nation.

Once such measures are taken, we are prepared to participate in a constructive spirit in a dialogue with the government on the ways and means of overcoming the present impasse.

The first anti-communist DJ: Cornel Chiriac.

Eugen Tomiuc shares his affection for Cornel Chiriac in an article at RFE/RL:

No other figure was more influential for my generation than the legendary music presenter Cornel Chiriac. A perpetual rebel, Chiriac and his radio music show "Metronom" had been hugely popular in Romania even before his defection in 1969. But once Chiriac joined Radio Free Europe, "Metronom" achieved cult status.

I remember that the streets in many Romanian cities were deserted on Sunday afternoons -- that's when "Metronom" was aired. A whole generation of young Romanians looked forward to staying home, glued to their shortwave sets, to hear this:

"Cornel Chiriac salutes you and invites you to enjoy the album of a band that is about to disappear..."

Like the unknown band he was presenting, Chiriac, too, would soon disappear. He was stabbed to death in March 1975 in a parking lot in Munich, leading to whispers that the dreaded communist secret police, the Securitate, was behind his death.

The regime feared him. His shows were never about music alone. They were about liberty, oppression, politics, dictatorship -- and music. Perhaps he had become too popular and influential among Romanian youths.

In the days after Chiriac's death, my friends and I discreetly wore black bands on the lapels of our school uniforms. When asked whether someone close had died, we would all reply, "Yes, a very good friend." Many Romanian youths made the same gesture. While other RFE journalists had been targeted or even killed by the Securitate, it was Chiriac's death that hit closest to home -- for he was one of us.

In fact, I remember my parents' hushed whispers about the Securitate chasing and killing Chiriac-- a reminder that even in America, we were not truly safe. The power of the Securitate was ever-present in my childhood home; my bright, educated parents could not be convinced that the secret police would not somehow come and find us.

Chiriac provided a flash of light and levity in the drab spirituals dungeons of communist Romania. Rather than stick to the scripts provided by Ceausescu's regime, Chiriac played the latest rock n' roll music straight from America or the UK. He gave young people an opportunity to dream outside the context of the commutopia.

You can listen to a number of Chiriac's broadcasts here. Or you can read "Make Love Not War" by Monica Andrei. Or you can read "A Fost Odata.." by Doru Ionescu. Or you can learn why Chiriac earned the title "First Anticommunist DJ".

Doina Cornea's Securitate file.

The Securitate files remain a complicated and dark part of recent Romanian history. In 2002, Le Monde published an article about the selective opening of the files. In this article, they profiled Doina Cornea's experience with her own files:

"I’ve always liked a cigarette with my coffee,” Doina Cornea continues. “At one point, I was contacted by a young African who was studying in Romania. He told me how much he admired me, and offered to carry my protest letters to the West. Each time he came to visit me, he would bring a packet of coffee, something you didn’t often see at that time. I suspected this young man was up to something, and my husband told me to stop accepting his gifts. But I always took his coffee. For a year, I drank coffee which I imagined was paid for by the Securitate, and had a lot of fun sending their informer off on wild goose chases. It turns out I was right. When I was able to read my file, I found reports the student had written about me. Sometimes he would exaggerate so as to look good. This is typical of informers. They make certain things out to be bigger than they are, so as to seem invaluable to their bosses.”

It was in April 2001 that Doina Cornea made her first request to see her secret police file. She had to jump a series of bureaucratic hurdles, but eventually, 28 voluminous files were opened to her on condition she go consult them in Bucharest, more than 400 kilometers (250 miles) from where she lives. “It’s been tough,” she admits. “My pension isn’t big enough to pay for frequent trips to Bucharest, or to pay for all the photocopying I’d have to do. I don’t think I’ll live long enough to read all they wrote about me.”

In spite of the revelations of human deception occasioned by her files, Cornea is glad she made the decision to see them.

“I’m happy and at peace. The past hasn’t spoiled my friendships. I still see friends who know that I know. We don’t ever speak of this, but I think all Romanians should go see their own file and get to know themselves better, because we can’t move forward by hiding behind lies.” The truth hurts, though. The truth is that the Securitate would not have succeeded in its totalitarian enterprise without the help of many ordinary Romanians. The secret police with its 20,000 or so officers could never have kept watch on several million people. The Securitate’s secret, so to speak, was its ability to recruit some 600,000 informers from among the men and women in the street. According to a study done by the Romanian Political Prisoners Association, 39 percent of the informers were university-educated, while 37 percent had finished high school. An even more troubling statistic: Just 1.5 percent of the collaborators were paid and 1.5 percent were blackmailed, while fully 97 percent were motivated purely by “political and patriotic feeling.”

In an interview with Ziua last year, Cornea noted that Romanians have gotten used to being ordered around. The post-communist period has been more difficult because everyone is a little "lost" or disoriented, searching for a leader or a scapegoat. Cornea also shares her perspectives on Romanian politicians, monarchy, and civil society in this interview. She does not appear to have suffered for seeing her Securitate file.

Perhaps the emigre situation is different. Every year, as we purchase our tickets to visit Romania, my mother struggles with the decision of whether to request her files. She is sure that the files will be damning, for a defector in 1979 was nothing if not an enemy of the communist state. Selfishly, I hope that this year, she will make the appeal. My interests are impure-- I am fascinated by history, seduced by the prospect of first-hand accounts of the communist bureaucracy, haunted by dreams of bygone totalitarianisms.

High school reunions in Romania.

Leave it to Andrei Codrescu to open the world of Romanian high school reunions to unwitting Americans. In this 9-page essay for Harper's, Codrescu moves through poetry, sex, epaulets, secret communist signals, hugs, kisses, wine, optimism, and other social graces. Enjoy.

Click here " to download "Big Chills: My High School Reunion in Romania" by Andrei Codrescu.

Codrescu on censorship in communist Romania.

These chunks of writing are drawn from Andrei Codrescu's wonderful memoir, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto For Escape in which he details his experience under Romanian communism and his life in exile. In the excerpt below, Codrescu describes the role and confusion of communist censors:

The Janus-faced censors in the towers had to look both outside and inside their domain for unauthorized books. In addition they had to define and maintain the official ideology they were sworn to defend. It was not an easy job, particularly since no one, at least in Romania, was doing it with any particular zeal. After Stalin had written all the books, only exegetes and enforcers were left. Our schoolteachers, forced to parrot the line of the textbooks, were bored out of their minds, as were we. The immense boredom into which I was born was an ideal conductor for the forbidden and the transcendent. The (real) penalties meted for breaching this boredom made it all worthwhile: my world was made to order for adolescent rebellion. I viewed my teachers and the countless Party small-fry who ran everything as insects (particularly since I'd read Kafka). These bugs were trying to confine my world with their unconvincing edicts because they were not well. They were ill.

The censor was a flawed person because he could not be entirely loyal. To be so, he'd have to have an exact idea of what he was being asked to forbid, and the State could not provide one. Consequently, he embarked upon his enterprise of interdiction with only the vaguest of guidelines, and found that he had to invent the enemy. The use of imagination, even under such minimal conditions, was self-defeating because imagination, once kindled, could not be extinguished. The censor, at the mercy of his blazing imagination, began to see enemies everywhere while beset simultaneously by the suspicion that they did not exist at all. This sort of paranoia followed by radical doubt eventually became self-paranoia and self-doubt: the censor questioned his own existence. He became invisible to himself at certain times and in varying degrees, states for which he compensated by making himself extremely visible and dangerous at other times. These moods determined the weather and depth of censorship.

A few pages later, Codrescu turns to the self-censorship practiced by so many under communist regimes. In return for icing Ceausescu's birthday cakes, the self-censored were ensured vacations to Mamaia. But no vacation can take a man far enough from the treacherous self.

The self-censored, who pursued a life without intellectual minefields, suffered from tameness. They were timid academics who kept their jobs through endless kowtowing and mandarin reasoning. Their conservative forms were quite well crafted, hiding the empty insides. Content had vacated them, leaving in its wake a sterile virtuousity that was the subject of endless, equally sterile reviews.

The self-censored kept the literary machine grinding on to no one's surprise, pleasure or delight. They turned up dutifully at congresses, readings, conferences, and rallies, their puffed-up, gray faces with large, dark circles under heavy, horn-rimmed glasses. Their air of weariness was a signal to the world to leave them alone so that they could start drinking. The self-censored drank themselves to death at the red-clothed tables of the Writer's Union, in dives, and at home. When they traveled abroad, their first order of business was getting expensive booze to drink. It was their payoff for years of restraint, deliberate suppression of talent, thought, and life....

The self-censored lied, but they were so unconvincing that every word they wrote was the opposite of what they would have liked everyone to believe. They served as weather vanes. Their only hope, and one that was,  alas, being realized, was that eventually everyone would exhibit the same ambiguous,  ironic disposition. At that point, the lie moved on to a new level, where it was authenticated by ubiquity. Foreign journals and books were confiscated at the border, not because of their content but because they conferred status to the censor who could display them on his coffee table. Too amorphous to hurt, too ambiguous to catch, too faceless to love, the self-censored flowed heavily, as a sort of intellectual molasses, into the life of the country, gumming up the works.

"Anti-nostalgia links".

"On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at a breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors…

The conviction that everything that happens of earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden that our century has placed on us — neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality — whatever it may be…

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain."

I thoroughly enjoyed chasing the "anti-nostalgia links" posted at O'Connor's Opinions-- enough, in fact, to start working on an anti-nostalgia links list of my own. Hat tip to the O'Connors for the inspiration. And due respect to Hannah Arendt for the above-listed quote from the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism (a.k.a. my guidebook).                                      

• "The Gulag Archipelago in Romania: The Story No One Has Told Before" by Sandro Magister. This includes information garnered from the Vatican.
• Memo from Henry Kissinger to President Nixon on May 15, 1973 urging "high priority" relationship between US and Romania.
• "Behind the Facade of the Ceausescu Regime" by Vladimir Tismaneanu for RFE/RL
• The names, the short sentences describing their fate, the condemnations, the many who simply disappeared.
• The archives of Romanian state television in the 1970's.
• The Museum of Communism, created by one of my favorite people in Arlington, Virginia.
• Cum era? Cam asa: Memories of Romania's Communist Years edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu with excerpt at link.
• Bless This Prison video from Fundation ICAR.
• "Pioneers Forever" by Vasile Ernu.
• "The Legacy of Elena Ceausescu" by Catherine Lovatt for Central European Review

Norman Manea's "Compulsory Happiness".

If happiness is a choice, then what does it become when compelled? Norman Manea's collection of novellas, Compulsory Happiness, toys with "the institutional optimism" required by a systemic application of communist ideology whose results insist, contrary to physical evidence, on the best life for everyone. These four novellas were written in Romanian during the deepest murk of the Ceausescu dictatorship. One was published in Romanian in 1981, the others in German in 1988 or 1989. They were first collected in a single volume in French.

The novellas do not follow the conventional plot scheme. Instead, the reader is invited inside the head (or perhaps only inside the room) of a person/s living in fear, intellectually bound by an ideology so inconsistent that insanity is not a plea but a mentality. Manea writes with the clean-cut despair of Kafka, but, unlike Kafka, manages to address human relationships and the external world with nostalgia. There are no conclusions or plot resolutions-- only a hovering, contagious terror that poisons the thoughts, loves, relationships, and hopes of its citizens.

In "The Interrogation", a young woman prisoner is tortured and starved as the secret police attempt to get information about her intellectual associates. However, when it is decided that the Plenipotentiary will meet with her, the prison wards immediately feed her caviar and insist that she begin to behave "normally", or at least offer the pretense to "normalcy", for the Plenipotentiary, despite his big name, is very sensitive to that which lies outside the realm of the normal. During the meeting, the Plenipotentiary asks questions and then tells the young prisoner that he is appreciated because his reports come to "an optimistic conclusion, the compulsory optimism, the institutional optimism" required by a system with the pretension to absolute control.

"Composite Biography" takes Ceausescu's infatuation with control to its absurd conclusion-- an systemic attack on "chance", or luck, which does not play into official plans. The novella is lengthy, but the most interesting part occurs when a Comrade proposes that the winners of national lotteries should no longer be selected by lot but, instead, "chosen from deserving citizens" to "avoid the injustices caused by chance". Here we get a frightening view of the central-planning mindset taken to its logical extreme. At this extreme, even luck (not to mention nature) is an enemy of the state, especially if this state mandates happiness.

According to the Comrade, this is "ideologically consistent with the concepts of dialectical materialism regarding the world, life, and the active role of man, who is not subject to fate, but is the master and creator of events".

Did the end of communism usher in a rightful heir in fatalism? After all, if Romanian communism, which purported to uproot fate and empower man, was revealed as a sham, what was left to believe? Clearly the communist experiment dealt a blow to the idea of human agency and responsibility, particularly in creating and sustaining a culture which repeatedly denied both. In "Composite Biography", for example, the protagonist suffers from a "generalized syndrome" which he witnesses in others. He believes this syndrome is due to an inability to make, do, or be anything anymore, since everything is decided by others. The Party members are "Puppets" dancing on their pre-ordained strings; the non-Party members are silent shadows, not real or strong enough to assert physicality. The ultimate goal is "to control chance"-- the become the gods which have been dethroned.

Of course, there is more.... just not in my words:

• The best bio I've found on Manea so far is this one.
• "A Lasting Poison", an article by Manea in which he remarks upon Milan Kundera's claims that communism never happened.
• "Norman Manea on the lasting poison of Stalinism" via podcast.
• Unlike Herbert Mitgang, I think the word "satire" is far too flimsy and loaded with Western regalia to do Manea's work justice. Instead, i prefer to say that he draws on the tradition of using the absurd to convey the problems of meaning and life under totalitarianism.
• Don't miss Michael Shafir's "The Man They Love to Hate: Norman Manea's 'Snail House' Between the Holocaust and the Gulag" in PDF format.

An excerpt from "The Neighbors of Franz Kafka".

One of the more interesting tracts on the postcommunist experience from a stylistic standpoint was penned by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Mircea Mihaies in the form of a "novel". I've always wondered if this was meant as a play on the dissident tactic of writing the truth and then insisting upon its fictional character to communist authorities. The book, The Neighbors of Franz Kakfa: A Novel of Neuroses skims the difference between Romania and other Eastern bloc countries with a collection of observations on the cultures of European communism. In it, the alleged Romanian fatalism is continuously contrasted with the more activist spirit of its Catholic neighbors.

The authors refer to Emil Cioran, the prophet of the Romanian fatalist approach, regularly. They also bemoan the new nationalist scourge rising in the wake of communism. 

Paul Goma is right: 1956 was the occasion manquee in Romania. The Romania intellectuals continued to enjoy their isolation from their peers in the other Eastern European countries. There was no thaw in Romania, just the perpetuation of the terrorist mechanism. Could it have been different? What if some of the literary barons of the time, the Petru Dumitrius, Marin Predas, Eugen Jebeleanus, G. Calinescus, and Geo Bogzas had opened their mouths and spoken the truth? Cioran's desperation about his former motherland was rooted precisely in this sentiment of historical impotence. His frantic excitement about the Hungarian revolution was matched only by his painful regret that history had once again passed Romania by. As for Noica: his response to Cioran was meant to explain why Romanian intellectuals were silent. For this justification of failure he was later sentenced to many years in jail. In prison, instead of pondering the responsibility of Hegelian-Marxist dialectics for the Leninist nightmare, he learned how to love his tormentors. When he was liberated in 1964, he even volunteered to become a 'trainer' in Marxism for the younger generation. The regime's failure to recruit himfor such a pedagogy was just another proof that Romanian communists were poor ideologues.

A cornucopia of thoughts on Romanian fatalism.

Nae Ionescu gathered a group of despairing young men about him and began to theorize. These men would later speak about the impossibilities of speaking to everyone around them.

---

Mircea Vulcanescu died insisting that there could be no true revenge-- that no action possessed the power to create a hero, that the struggle for freedom was its own prison. The communists arrested him in 1946. Convicted as a war criminal, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Fellow prisoners told the story of his death: he and a group of 12 other convicts form his cell were all punished to stay naked, without any clothes or chairs, in a very cold and wet cavern in the prison's dungeon, for reciting poetry (poetry was very popular in prisons that communists used to condemn people just for being intellectuals; it was one of the few resorts of resisting the mental torture). An young man fell to the floor, risking to die of a lung disease, and Mircea Vulcănescu practically forced him to stay on top of him, rather than on the wet stone floor, and thus saved his life. He said: "I'm an old man, how can I let a young man like you die?". Yet he was only 48, an age many do not regard as "old". Soon after this, the young man was better, but Mircea Vulcănescu developed pneumonia, and soon after he died. His last words to the world were: "Do not avenge us!"

His death, of course, remains unavenged. As he wished.

---

Constantin Noica believed Romanians fell under the spell of determinism. Some things were fated.

---

Stan Farnya sees an organic connection between Romanian fatalism and the rise of what he calls the "new fascism". From the fomer fascism of the Ionescu school to the "new fascism" stands a great gulf. But Farnya sees the seeds. And he believes the soil is well-nourished.

---

The Filter, citing the Romanian response to a pile of rotting meat, can't see the fatalism for the trees. 

---

The Union for the Reconstruction of Romania, goes so far as to limit membership to applicants who do not subscribe to the tenets of "Romanian fatalism". Members argue on sidewalks about the complacency of the pensioners perched on park benches.

If people only undertook those initiatives whose success was guaranteed we would all still be living in caves and pick fruit with sticks. The only guarantee we have is our name and reputation. You can believe us and come with us to take action to solve the many problems our country faces or sit on the fence to see what happens and wait for guarantees. Skepticism is a legitimate attitude but, unfortunately, not at all constructive. This precise attitude of the people allowed the political class to degenerate to the parasitic stage it is in today. Sociologists call this a "self-fulfilling prophecy". This means that if you strongly believe that something, good or bad, will happen then the chance of that event to happen significantly increases. The explanation is very simple: what you believe will influence the way you act and your attitude influences the events around the particular event. In our particular case, skepticism and fence-riding generates inactivity and negative thinking which in turn makes one see more the mistakes than successes which in turn produces inactivity and more inactivity. But changes don't come by magic, they need activism and energy. So the initiative will fail: bingo! You were right! "Just another political party, did I not tell you?" Isn't it wonderful to be always right? Even if it serves no purpose? This is the Romanian fatalism at work and it has already turned us into a spectator nation.

---

In An Ontological Definition of the Romanian National Identity, Mihaela Alexandra Pop cites Vulcanescu's view that Romanians tend towards a "theophanic" identification rather than an individualist one-- they accept what comes as part of the universal order in which struggle is just the other side of foolishness. Rather than nourish a Protean self-understanding, Romanian folk tales and stories reward the man who sits back and thanks God for the troubles in life, as well as the freedom from responsibility for the outcomes.

---

An executive study entitled "The Evolution of Mentalities in Eastern Europe and the Future of the European Project" from a summer school session asserts:

Romanian intellectuals such as Mihail Sebastian, Emil Cioran, Panait Istrati have described Romanians sometimes as fatalistic but also slightly megalomaniac, subdued, endowed often with a low self-esteem and a tendency to blame others for their mishaps. Romanians often see themselves as having good humor, as being optimistic and hospitable people.

One of the big thinkers at this session was Mircea Malitza, who served as Ceausescu's ambassador to the USA in the 1980's. Malitza knows a lot about the Romanian national psyche, and how Romanians can be broken into a thousand tiny pieces, so tiny that the edges fray. Malitza was a good servant to the communist regime. And fate was on his side. He now maintains an illustrious career as a member of the Romanian academy and an expert on Romanian national identity.

---

Z. Ornea looks at Cioran's contribution to Romanian fatalism via his book, The Transfiguration of Romania. Ornea quotes Cioran extensively:

Truths sprung from compliance are not a matter of glory. No historic act was borne by wisdom; wisdom can only be manifest in sub or trans-history. Wisdom can be the negation of history, for it is distance taken from life, whereas history reinforces it. The daily truths of Romanians are paralyzing. They tend to strip man of any responsibility. Fatalism is an a-moralism of evolution. I can well understand the drives of individual and internal fatalism, translations of the dynamism of the inner demon, but it is a deviation and an anthropological blasphemy to cede to times… The fatalism of our people is a curse we shall have to rout in thunder. To the heart shall the lightning strike us. I want another people! The centennial plague that has befallen the Romanian is skepticism… A skeptical soul is not a creator as any structural skepticism implies exhausted sources, original sterility… Romanian skepticism – superficial in its scope and the nature thereof – is nonetheless deep-seated by its enrootment in the popular soul.

Exploring Ceausescu's warm relationship with the USA: Part 2.

Perhaps the most revealing book on the political battle over communist Romania's MFN status is Pinstripes and Reds by David Funderburk. Funderberk was a Reagan appointee who served as ambassador to Romania from 1981-1985. Funderburk's book is an indictment of the Romanian communist government as well as the US State Department and foreign policy establishment that helps to keep Ceasescu in power. It is also a more personal indictment of foreign policy demi-gods including Lawrence Eagleburger, Alexander Haig, President George Bush, Paul Tsongas, Ronald Reagan, and especially Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

The policy which Funderburk deplores is the policy of differentiation, which "dates back to the late 1960's strategy developed by Nixon and Kissinger" and "has continued to be the American policy through Republican and Democrat administrations in large part because the elite of the State Department has made it a litmus test for any who would advance in the Eastern European affairs area". As a policy, differentiation was a fairly simple and sensible one-- the US government would treat European communist countries differently, not as a solid monolithic bloc, based on their records of economic liberalization, respect for human rights, and putative independence from Moscow. This meant that "good" communist regimes would be rewarded with official visits, MFN status (including trade credits and tariff reductions), and "friendship" treaties, while "bad" communist regimes would receive none of these carrots. At the time of the book's publication, Hungary and Romania were "good" MFN status states, while Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Poland were not.

Vice President Bush made a clear statement of this differentiation policy in his Vienna speech on September 21, 1983:

"In our relations with the countries of Eastern Europe, we take these differences into account, our policy is one of differentiation-- that is, we look to what degree countries pursue autonomous foreign policies, independent of Moscow's direction; and to what degree they foster domestic liberalization-- politically, economically and in their respect for human rights. The United States will engage in closer political, economic, and cultural relations with those countries such as Hungary and Romania which assert greater openness or independence."

The perceived benefits of this differentiation policy for the United States included trade, emigration, and "leverage". MFN would give the US leverage in human rights and emigration cases. In a footnote, Funderburk expresses his concern about the effectiveness of this "leverage":

"MFN was intended for countries to improve human rights and allow freer emigration, not those that decide on getsures just prior to annual MFN renewal. State (Dept.) post facto puts the cart before the horse. If Romania lost MFN, it would be hard to imagine treatment of political and religious dissidents getting worse."

Funderburk is a fascinating fellow in his own right-- a passionate Baptist Christian who refers to his "conservatism" throughout the book with pride and yet calls Ceasescu to task for outlawing abortion and contraception. It is difficult to read this book without admiring his passionate commitment to human rights. As a self-described foreign policy "realist", Funderburk wants Romania's MFN status to be revoked on the grounds of consistent human rights violations, secret transfers of American technology to the Soviets, illegal arms trade, abuse and persecution of Christians and Jews, and incessant duplicity with regards to official agreements. The State Department's longstanding commitment to differentiation policy keeps the US government from seeing the farce that is Romanian "foreign policy independence", from condemning Ceausescu's brutal treatment of his own people, and from acting in accordance with the evidence. As a result, the US government is rewarding one of the most devious, anti-American communist regimes in the world. He notes:

"Romania's leadership gained pretige, support, and credibility with the Third World and non-aligned countries by having a steady stream of US visitors in Bucharest. Ceausescu's harsh domestic policies were in effect given a stamp of approval by such visits."

Rather than advance his position in the foreign policy establishment, Funderburk chose to resign from his post in 1985 and return to teaching at a university. When Funderburk resigned, the MFN battle was continuing in Congress, with those who opposed MFN status for Romania lining up behind Senator Jesse Helms. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act linked the assignment of MFN status to the establishment of free and open emigration procedures. This Amendment was at the core of the political dispute over MFN.

In spite of the information provided by Funderburk, Romania received MFN status again in 1985 and 1986. At this time, the Ceausescu regime had implemented a new policy which required hopeful emigrants to pay the Romanian state for the cost of their public education before being granted a visa. In a country without money, this meant that that a recent graduate would have to find $50,000 hard currency when owning that kind of hard currency was considered a crime.

In 1987, Romania's MFN status was suspended for six months contingent on an improvement in the human rights record. Ceausescu called this a "free emigration" policy, and the US government concurred.

• "Exploring Ceausescu's warm relationship with the US: Part 1" preceded this post. In it, I explore the origins of Romania's independent foreign policy.
• The Foreward for this book, written by Phillip M. Crane, is available online.
• Reagan's nomination of Funderburk for Amabassador.
• If you scroll down, there is a good discussion of Funderburk and US policy at "US Administration, the Hungarian lobby, and the Romanian-Hungarian conflict".
• Funderburk was right about the Romanian government selling military secrets and technology to the Soviets. A great article on Romanian-Soviet relations is "Romania and the Soviet-Union, 1965-1989".

Nicu Steinhardt, the happy monk.

Paula, at Receiving Light, shared a long excerpt by Nicu Steinhardt that made my day and reminded me of Steinhardt's amazing faith. For those unfamiliar with Steinhardt, I've posted the best online bio I've found, written by Claudia Miclaus:

The celebrated Romanian writer, hermit and confession father bearing the name of Nicolae Steinhardt was born near Bucharest, in Pantelimon. He was of Jewish descent, born of Romanian mother and a Jewish father. He was a great admirer of the Romanian culture and spirituality, his conversion to Orthodoxy being in perfect harmony with his tremendous love for all things Romanian.

He graduated from the Law and Literature School of the University of Bucharest in 1934. Later on, in 1936, he started his PhD in Constitutional Law. Consequently, between 1937 and 1938, he traveled to England, Austria, France and Switzerland.

The communist persecutions started in 1948, when non-communist intellectuals were declared "enemies of the people". Yet his real troubles began in 1959, when he refused to testify against his friend and former school colleague Constantin Noica during a court trial. Because of his refusal, he was found guilty of "crimes against social order", together with the "batch of mystical-Iron Guardist intellectuals".

He was also charged with the penalty of 13 years’ forced labor in several communist prisons such as Jilava, Gherla, Aiud, and others. While being in prison, he discovered the joy of pure and true faith and decided to convert himself to the Orthodox Christianity. Therefore, he was baptized there, in jail. Although performed by an Orthodox hermit, his baptism was witnessed by people of different denominations-2 Roman-Catholic priests, two Greek-Catholic priests and a Protestant pastor, which gave an "ecumenical character" to this special, crucial event of his life.

His most famous writing is "The Happiness Diary", based on the memories of the years spent in the communist prisons. Unfortunately, the so-called "Securitate" confiscated the very 1st edition of this book, in 1972, and returned it to its author three years later, after censuring it. Since he had written another version of the same book, the Securitate also confiscated it from him in 1984. Steinhardt ended by having several variants of this writing.

"The Happiness Diary" is now included among the best writings of the Romanian literature. It has as a motto a Bible quotation: "I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!" (Mark, 9:24). Steinhardt explains that these simple, honest words stand for the most perfect definition of Christianity.

In 1980, sixteen years after his being released from prison, Nicolae Steinhardt got into the Rohia Monastery, working there as a librarian and writer also. Since he was an excellent counselor and father-confessor, many weekly visitors came to Rohia, to look for spiritual guidance from the brilliant "Father Nicolae". Many people still go there nowadays, to visit his famous library and enjoy the peace and serenity governing that beautiful place.

He spent the last days of his life in Baia Mare, at the city hospital. Many of his admirers and friends came to his funeral, though it was strictly supervised by the communist Securitate.

Pope John the 2nd made the following assertion regarding the personality of Nicolae Steinhardt: "Out of the numerous witnesses of Christ that bloomed in the fields of Romania, I would like to mention the hermit of Rohia, Nicolae Steinhardt, an exceptional believer and also a highly-cultivated man, who perceived in a very special way the enormous treasures common to the Christian churches."

Indeed, Steinhardt’s life has been a genuine example of pure faith and commitment to the Christian principles. While answering to the question "what do I owe Christ?", Steinhardt refers to the feeling of general peace, wrapping around his heart. Peace with God, peace with other people, with the whole world, with evil-intended people, with those who did him wrong, with those to whom he did wrong and, above all, peace with himself. "To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self", Oscar Wilde once said.

Steinhardt also repeatedly expressed the idea of an unbelievably generous God, full of grace and mercy, the God of Christianity. One of his favorite quotes seemed to be the one belonging to the celebrated Russian writer F.M. Dostoevsky: "if anyone ever proved to me, beyond any doubt, while I am on my dying bed, that Christ is not the truth, that the real truth is another one, if the arguments provided to me were impossible to contradict, I wouldn’t give it another thought: I would choose Christ over truth."

And so he did.

• You can find the story of Nicu's life in his own words (granted, they are Romanian words) here.
• The wikipedia on Nicolae Steinhardt.
  
• "Giving You Shall Receive" by Nicu Steinhardt.
• "365 uncomfortable questions", an interview with Steinhardt (Romanian). Not all the questions and answers are posted, but what can be read is truly fascinating.
• "Communism: The Refined Laboratory of Terrorism, Nicolae Steinhardt, The Diary of Happiness", a very informative paper in pdf
• Nicu's mention in The Steinhardt Family Book
  
• An interview with Virgil Ciomos, who talks about Parintele Steinhardt to Radio Romania International
• Excerpt from The Happiness Diary, 1935
• Excerpt from The Happiness Diary, 7 March 1960
• A fistful of links from a neat little blog dedicated entirely to Steinhardt,
  

       

Stanciu Stroia's prison memoirs.

Stanciu Stroia knows the unavoidable side of totalitarianism-- the extended prison sentence offered to  those who refuse to put on the uniform and start marching lock-step. His honest book, My Second University, was published in 2005. Here is an excerpt from the introduction, written by his grandson, to Stroia's book:

To better understand my grandfather’s memories, one must be familiar with Romania’s political situation before and during World War II and in the eventful period that followed. The next several pages do not represent an attempt at an exhaustive history lesson—numerous comprehensive textbooks written by competent individuals serve that purpose. Rather, they constitute a succinct and chronological presentation of the essential events and circumstances that shaped Romania’s fate. The intention is not to overwhelm the reader with superfluous information, but to provide a framework for facilitating comprehension of the book’s content. Historical facts often differ in their packaging and labeling according to the distributor’s opinions. The information selected here comprises well-known, rudimentary data and dates, accompanied by interpretations based on my own reading, observations, and conclusions. It is researched history supplemented by personal experience. For the apparent redundancy of ideas, I ask the reader for forgiveness. It is aimed at underscoring necessary points. Ultimately, this introduction’s ambitious proposition is to provide basic answers to timely questions: How was Communism in Romania possible? What happened to the people who opposed it? Why is it important for you, the reader, to know about it? What is the story’s contemporary relevance? If the following text succeeds in delivering the intended message, the significance of knowing these answers will be evident. [...]
To forgive and to forget are entirely different concepts; one does not consequentially imply the other. A crime can be forgiven, but if it is forgotten, the victim’s punishment becomes continual. The survivors must not forget, while those who have been spared must not ignore. Without subscribing to the notions of “competitive martyrdom” or “monopoly of suffering,” the Communist repression has to at least be put in its proper perspective. And although I am equally appalled by other atrocities committed throughout the world—particularly at the time of this publication—I believe that the Stalinist crimes of the past century should occupy a well-documented and deservedly infamous place in the historical literature. Their significance has not faded over the past fifty years, and they represent a history lesson that ought to be told, so that the world learns from it and avoids a repetition of a terrible past. Ignorance is at the root of all evil—according to an old maxim; a clear understanding of how Communism was possible is crucial for our own self-preservation. [...]
One can argue that it takes a multitude of socioeconomic and political elements, favorable internal circumstances, and a permissive or powerless international community for a radical government to emerge. Unfortunately, auspicious conditions develop frequently, and the results are painfully similar. This personal saga is an eye-opener regarding events with a true potential for recurrence if collective political vigilance fails. One glimpse at the current international situation is sufficient to reveal the present-day relevance of this memoir.

Who was this dangerous man, and what threat did he pose to Romanian communist society? Here is a brief bio that might fill in the details:

Dr. Stanciu Stroia was born in rural Transylvania. He was a graduate of Cluj University Medical School, with a doctoral dissertation on the “Radiotherapy in Basedow desease”, submitted in 1928. As a junior doctor he moved over to the Regional Hospital of Fagaras where, in the early 1930’s he established the first department of Internal Medicine. By the age of 41 he became the director of that establishment. This was during WWII and only one year earlier the Soviet armies occupied Romania. With them, on the back of Russian tanks came the fifth columnists, the handful of exiled Romanian communists who were going to impose a new “social order” of Stalinist brand. At this point Dr. Stroia’s high-profile medical position, caused him to be invited to join the ranks of the Communist Party, which he refused. This stance marked him as an “undesirable” by the Communist hierarchy. Once Romania turned into a one-party dictatorship, in 1948, the medical know-how became subsidiary to political allegiance: this is how, in 1949, Dr. Stroia was demoted from his position of hospital director. Two years on he was under pressure to become an informer of the Securitate, the ubiquitous Romanian Secret services. This he rejected outright, because of his personal and professional ethics and so, in 1951, he was arrested for allegedly “helping and not denouncing anti-communist partisans”. He was given a six-years prison sentence on trumped up charges of “favoring the crime of plotting against the Romanian state”. Within 48 hours of his arrest, his wife and two young children were evicted from their private property, his estate was nationalized, the medical practice confiscated and the house eventually demolished. During his long prison years, he was not allowed to receive any correspondence or food and clothes parcels, except on one occasion. On his release, in December 1957, Dr. Stroia was made to sign a declaration undertaking not to disclose his prison experiences, under threat of being re-arrested. He was also forbidden to restart his medical practice in his home town and was relocated instead in a remote province. Nine years after his release and after many failed attempts Dr. Stroia was granted, in unusual circumstances, a “political and judicial rehabilitation”, for a crime he has never committed and which was in private, but never officially acknowledged, of having been a “misguided interpretation of the law”. He retired at the age of 64, when Ceausescu just came to power and thereafter he spent all summers in his native village in Transylvania, where he offered free medical consultations.

Anyone with grandparents who lived in communist Romania has heard at least half of this biography before-- the stealing of property, the forced signatures of declarations, the closing of professional practices, the destruction of family histories.... The list goes on-- for each person, there are minor differences-- and not one speck of life as it was lived prior to communism remains untouched. Under Romanian communism, nothing was marginal.

If you read Romanian, you can learn more about Stroia and his book from this article by Lidia Vianu. If English is your preferred tongue, you can learn a little more here.