Ceausescu and the Securitate

Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989

Dennis Deletant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315481555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First Published in 2017. This book contains Deletant's research and view that an inescapable feature of life in Romania under Ceausescu was the ubiquity of the Securitate or the security police, known officially for much of the period as the Department of State Security of the Ministry of the Interior. He seeks to right the omission in Romanian literature, until now, of the mechanism of terror which Stalin used in Romania to enforce his will and about the organisation of the Department of State Security.

1

POLICE TERROR AND THE IMPOSITION OF COMMUNIST RULE

Police terror is an intrinsic feature of totalitarianism, and Communist rule in Romania confirmed this. Terror was the instrument wielded by all the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe as the means of implementing the Marxist – Leninist revolution. The destruction of an existing society and the creation of a new one was achieved by a single mass party, composed of an elite and dedicated membership whose targets were central control and direction of the economy, a technologically perfected monopoly of the media and complete direction of the armed forces. The task assigned to the police was to remove the ‘enemies’of the regime and those classes of the population who were considered an obstacle to the centralized running of the economy. This programme was initiated by Gheorghiu-Dej (hereafter, Dej) after 1945. It was the inheritance of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

In Romania, police terror was used in two stages, first to eliminate opponents in the drive to consolidate power and secondly to ensure compliance once revolutionary change had been effected. Broadly speaking, the first stage encompassed the years from 1945 until 1964, when there was an amnesty of political prisoners; the second ran from 1964 until 1989. There was a perceptible change in the degree of repression exercised by the regime after 1964, which resulted from the rift with Moscow. Until the final year of the Dej era, terror embraced the whole of Romanian society, searching for actual or potential opponents of totalitarian conformity, and many citizens had the sense that they were being hunted. After 1964, Romanians were marked by fear rather than terror of the Securitate, for the Ceauşescu regime, for all its appalling abuses of human dignity and disrespect for human rights, never repeated the tactics of mass arrests and wholesale deportations which were a feature of most of Dej’s rule. The latter had done his work too well.

Romania came under Communist control as a direct consequence of its participation in the Second World War and of the policies of the Alliance which defeated Romania’s ally, Nazi Germany. In 1939, Romania proclaimed its neutrality. That it thereafter became an ally of Germany was due entirely to the policies of the Soviet Union, especially during the period when Russia was Germany’s ally and Romania was not.

The Romanian state, the object of the policies of these two major powers, had been created at the end of the First World War in circumstances which left it vulnerable to external pressures. Through the peace treaties, Romania increased its national territory by acquisitions from Hungary (Transylvania), Bulgaria (southern Dobrogea) and Russia (Bessarabia and northern Bukovina). With the territories, of course, came non-Romanian populations, and the policies of Romanian governments in the 1920s did little to reconcile them to their minority status.

From 1919, Romanian foreign policy aimed at consolidating the gains and keeping all the new frontiers intact. To that end, it relied upon France and upon the League of Nations. By the late 1930s, both aims had been largely negated. The strategic advantages achieved by a resurgent Germany, from the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 onwards, made nonsense of the French structure of alliances in Central and Eastern Europe and prompted the Munich Agreement in 1938. The débâcle of France in 1940 consummated a shift in Romanian policy towards Germany, with whom a formal alliance was concluded on 4 July 1940.

Bessarabia was a rather different problem. Hungary by itself was not a threat to Romania, but on the country’s eastern frontier the Soviet Union was. The province had been taken over in 1918 at a time of total political confusion and although the major states of Europe had formally recognised the transfer of sovereignty, the Soviets had not. The frontier remained closed and the railway bridge over the Dneister River remained down. Various attempts were made to negotiate a settlement involving formal Soviet recognition of the new frontier but they all broke down on that specific issue. The most that could be achieved occurred in 1934, when the Soviet Union, like Romania, adhered to an international pact covering territory in de facto occupation. The reality was, however, that the Soviet Union continued to be unreconciled and it ensured that its specific interest in Bessarabia was accepted by Germany when the alliance between them was concluded on 23 August 1939.¹

Ten months later, on 26 June 1940, and less than a week after the Franco – German armistice, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum demanding the return of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina within four days under threat of invasion. Romania’s new German ally withheld its support and the Romanian government capitulated. The Red Army moved in. King Carol of Romania asked Hitler to guarantee his country’s frontiers but Hider made this guarantee dependent on a solution of other territorial disputes with Bulgaria and Hungary. Stalemate in negotiations produced an imposed settlement, by which Bulgaria received back southern Dobrogea and Hungary northern Transylvania. The attempt to maintain the gains of 1919 intact completely collapsed. In two months, Romania had lost about one-third of its area. The German government then guaranteed the resulting frontiers.

The internal effect was to destroy the existing regime of King Carol and replace it with a military dictatorship under General Ion Antonescu. But the Bessarabian episode also provided popular support for Romania’s participation in the German attack on Russia on 22 June 1941. Bessarabia was restored to Romanian control by the end of July. The troops then went on into the Ukraine and set up an area called Transnistria, which remained under Romanian administration until 1944.

After the tide of war turned against Germany, Romania was necessarily involved in the retreat and, by the same token, in Soviet political ambitions. These were unclear at the time. That there would be no other force to oppose the Soviets had been decided at Teheran in 1943, when British ideas about a possible liberation of Europe from the south were brushed aside by the Americans and the Russians; the Red Army was to enter Europe from the east and the western Allies were to invade from the west.

The problem, then, for the latter and the Romanians alike was to find out just what Soviet intentions were. In 1943, the Romanian Government began to sound out the Russians and the western Allies respectively on getting out of the war, on terms which would guarantee Romania’s independence of Soviet authority. The more quickly the Red Army advanced, the more the scope for manoeuvre narrowed, as the Russians could get their ends by force rather than by negotiation.

On 23 August 1944, a coup carried out by King Michael removed Antonescu. Soviet troops arriving in Bucharest on 31 August found a Romanian government in place, ready to co-operate against the Germans. There was no political vacuum in which the Soviets could immediately install their own nominees. It took six months and direct interventions from Moscow for the Soviets to get in Bucharest a government to their liking. The technique by which this was achieved was the systematic creation of chaos, in which the prime movers were the Communists, who had arrived from Moscow in the baggage train of the Red Army, and indigenous Party members, who had previously been in jail or worked underground. With the war against Germany still in progress, the demands of the Red Army took priority and they provided the framework within which the Communists could operate to frustrate the political and economic reconstruction of Romania on any terms but their own. On 5 March 1945, a direct Soviet threat that only the setting up of a pro-Soviet government could guarantee ‘the continuance of Romania as an independent state’ brought about the decisive change. The key ministerial position, that of the Interior, was occupied by a Communist, Teohari Georgescu, and the holder of the powerful post of Secretary General to the Prime Minister Petru Groza (who kept up the non-Communist facade) was not only a Communist but also an officer of the NKVD (the People’s Commissaniat for Internal Affairs), Emil Bodnăraş. In that capacity, he also controlled the SSI, the intelligence service.²

The presence of the Red Army ensured that the Communists could not lose but they took initiatives through the political structure, the trade unions and the educational system which were designed to reduce Romania to subservience to the Soviet Union. Internally, the aim was to break the existing structures of society and in this they succeeded. The final action was the enforced abdication of King Michael on 30 December 1947 under the threat of civil war. The same day, the Romanian People’s Republic was declared. Its establishment did not stem from a popular will, freely expressed, but from the dictates of political groups who were the puppets of a foreign master. Even the legality of the law establishing the Republic was suspect, since the official record of the special session of the single chamber parliament, convened on the evening of 30 December, stated that it lasted only forty-five minutes. In this time the law was alleged to have been presented, a presidium nominated and both measures voted upon by the casting of white balls by 295 deputies. In addition, there are said to have been nineteen ovations which interrupted the presentation. Doubts have been cast as to first, whether so many deputies could have been assembled so rapidly in Bucharest while parliament was in recess on during the New Year, and secondly, the business could have been completed as rapidly as claimed.³

With the establishment of the Republic, the foundations of the totalitarian state could be put in place. The first step was to cement Romania into the Soviet bloc from a military point of view. This was achieved by a treaty of friendship, co-operation, and mutual assistance between Romania and the Soviet Union on 4 February 1948, based on the idea of a common defence against ‘Germany or any other Power which might be associated with Germany either directly or in any other way’. The full significance of this article was explained by the Soviet Foreign Minister, who said that it was ‘especially important now when the fomentors of a new war from the imperialist camp are endeavouring to knock together political and military blocs directed against the democratic states’.⁴ The regime had secured itself externally.

The second step to totalitarianism was the consolidation of the single mass party composed of an elite and dedicated membership. This was achieved by dissolving the major opposition parties, the National Peasant and National Liberal Parties in the summer of 1947 and by the forced merger of the Social Democrat Party (SDP) with the Communist Party on 12 November 1947 as the result of Communist infiltration. At the last SDP Congress on 5 October 1947, attended by Groza, Dej and Ana Pauker, a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo, a resolution on merger with the Communist Party was passed by acclamation. According to figures presented at the Congress, the SDP at that time had some half a million members, only half of whom appear to have joined the newly-fused party which was known as the Romanian Workers’ Party (RWP) and had a combined membership of 1,060,000.⁵

The RWP held its first Congress on 21-23 February 1948 and Dej was re-elected Secretary General, as were Pauker, Luca (another Politburo member) and Teohari Georgescu as the other three members of the secretariat. Emphasis was now given to the elite character of the Party and stricter membership requirements were introduced. No members of the ‘former exploiting classes’ were to be admitted, those applying for membership were to be carefully screened and a period of ‘candidate’ or trial membership was made compulsory. As a result of a Central Committee resolution of November 1948, a verification campaign was undertaken by what was called ‘a non-party aktiv’ of some 200,000 investigators, a euphemism which covered the participation of the security police, the army and officials of the Ministry of Justice.⁶ The period of investigation lasted from November 1948 until May 1950 and was directed at the various waves of members who had been recruited into the Party.

The first of these was comprised of non-politically affiliated workers and young Iron Guardists who in 1945 had been given responsible positions in factories and trade unions as a reward for joining. This group included domestic servants who had been canvassed by the Communists for membership as useful instruments for reporting on the activities of their employers. The second wave had come in during 1946 and 1947 and was drawn from army units, such as the Tudor Vladmirescu division which had been formed from Romanian prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. It also included Romanian administrative personnel working for the Soviet army. A third wave had been generated by the merger of the Social Democratic Party in 1947 and a fourth by those who had joined the new bureaucracy which staffed the institutions set up to effect the Com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Map
• Preface
• 1. Police Terror and the Imposition of Communist Rule
• 2. The Securitate and the Removal of Opposition, 1948-1965
• 3. From Terror to Fear: Nicolae Ceauşescu and the Securitate, 1965-1978
• 4. Ceauşescu’s Appeal to National Sentiment: The Case of Transylvania
• 5. Cultivating Support: The Role of Bessarabia
• 6. Compliance
• 7. Dissent
• 8. Central Planning as Coercion: Systematisation
• 9. The Securitate and Repression, 1978-1989
• 10. Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index