In Search of Romania

Dennis Deletant

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781787388567
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

The imposition of Communist ideology was a misfortune for millions in Eastern Europe, but never for Dennis Deletant. Instead, it drew him to Romania. The renowned historian's association with the country and its people dates back to 1965, when he first visited. Since then, Romania has made Dennis appreciate the value of shrewd dissimulation, in the face of the state's gross intrusion in the life of the individual. This vivid memoir charts his first-hand experience of the Communist era, coloured by the early 1970s surveillance of his future wife Andrea; his contacts with dissidents; and his articles and BBC World Service broadcasts, which led to his being declared persona non grata in 1988.

In Search of Romania also considers how life went on under dictatorship, even if it was largely mapped out by the regime. How did individual citizens negotiate the challenges placed in their path? How important was the political police, the Securitate, in maintaining compliance? How did dissent towards the regime manifest? How did all this affect the moral compass of the individual? Why did utopia descend into dystopia under Ceau?escu? And how has his legacy influenced the difficult transition to democracy since the collapse of Communism?

1

1958–1969

My experience, as an outsider, of Communism was never a misfortune for me. The subject was introduced to me and my colleagues by George Rudé (1910–1993) when he came to teach history in 1958 at Holloway Comprehensive School in London. I was one of his second-year students. He stayed only twelve months, before the University of Adelaide offered him a senior lecturership, but his attentive and sympathetic classroom manner captivated us, especially when he spoke with enthusiasm about a six-week visit that he had made in 1932 to the Soviet Union, and his participation in an anti-fascist demonstration (the ‘Battle of Cable Street’) and arrest in 1936. It was only after his departure to Australia that I learned that he had joined the British Communist Party at that time, a decision that was to create a barrier for him to a teaching post at British universities. Instead, he taught languages at St Paul’s School in London until 1949, when he spent a year in Paris conducting research into the populace during the French Revolution, a topic that formed the subject of his PhD thesis defended at London University. His focus on what came to be known as “history from below” and his desire to restore “the nameless and faceless people in history”¹ added the dimension of social history to our study, in particular in the person of John Wilkes² and in the work of Asa Briggs.³ Rudé did not allow his political views to colour his teaching and he instilled in me an awareness of the significance of political action, be it of the “left” or the “right”, and its impact upon the common man and woman.

Rudé’s account of his visit to the Soviet Union made a deep impression upon me at the time and drove me, in combining my passion for the Romance languages with a fascination with Communism, to enroll in 1964 as a student of Romanian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University of London.⁴ I was captivated by my first visit to Romania in July 1965 and since then the country has never failed to reserve surprises for me. That visit was to attend a Romanian-language summer school under the auspices of the British Council. The school was attended by teachers and students from more than thirty countries and our ten-strong British contingent landed at Bucharest’s Băneasa airport on a sultry evening. We were taken directly by bus to the school centre in Sinaia, a mountain resort situated 150 kilometres north of the capital. Night fell as we sped towards our destination, as did our apprehension when we saw that vehicles extinguished their headlights as they approached each other. Sensing our unease, our guide explained that many of the Soviet-made vehicles on Romania’s roads at the time did not have dipped headlights and to avoid blinding oncoming traffic turned them off. I soon realised that lighting was eccentric in the country when as we passed through the city of Ploiești, a rooftop illuminated slogan on the local Communist Party headquarters proclaiming that “Communism is the enlightened future of mankind”⁵ had a fault which left the adjective “enlightened” in darkness.

We were quartered, along with some eighty other students from various countries, in a former barracks in Sinaia, previously used by units of the Red Army between 1944 and 1958. Access to the barracks, opposite a local restaurant called Furnica (The Ant) and close to the former gambling casino, used as the lecture theatre, was allowed only to authorised persons. On the Romanian side, these were officials from the Ministry of Education, our Romanian-language teachers, and “group leaders” who were assigned to contingents of students by language. Thus, the American and British students were entrusted to the care of Nicolae Lupu, an English-speaking journalist from the Communist Party daily Scânteia (The Spark), who was responsible for ensuring that we did not stray from the school compound. Members of the public were kept out by armed guards in civilian clothes who carried shotguns and who regularly patrolled the access points to the school area which, in addition to the barracks and casino, included the adjacent former royal castle of Pelișor.

My natural curiosity, fortified by my rudimentary knowledge of Romanian which I had been studying for six months at SSEES under the tutorship of Eric Tappe,⁶ and which I was anxious to practice with a native speaker, drove me to engage one of the guards in conversation. He wore what I later came to recognise as virtually regulation dress for a security policeman: a black leather jacket (and black knee-length leather coat in inclement weather). Asked why he carried a shotgun so ostensibly, he replied that it was to deter anyone from disturbing our privacy since we students were guests of the Romanian government. I told him that one of my reasons for coming to the school was in the hope of being able to meet Romanians of my own age and that under such conditions of security it was impossible to do so. He smiled and said that there were still “fascist elements” around in the country whose aim was to spread damaging propaganda about “Romanian realities” and that therefore it would be more instructive for me to stay in the summer school compound rather than venture out.

Undeterred, on the second Sunday of our course—excursions were arranged on Sundays to nearby places of historical and cultural interest—I took advantage of the affability of our group leader to ask him whether I could not go down into the town of Sinaia to visit a bookshop and buy some contemporary Romanian novels. My request clearly struck a melodious chord with him and he proceeded to recommend a handful of authors. He had, however, to consult with the course supervisors for an answer. It came back positive and I therefore ventured alone into the town. The guard at the entrance to the complex advised me to return by 6pm.

In Sinaia I was immediately intrigued by the fact that people of all ages stared at my clothes and, in particular, at my shoes, Italian-made black leather moccasins. The latter, I learned, were the conclusive hallmark of a Westerner, since Romanian items of clothing were uniform, Stas or “state-standard product”. Only on one occasion did a trio of young Romanians in Sinaia ask me where I was from. On hearing that I was British they invited me for a coffee. I was led to a log cabin in the hill-side trees from where, as we approached, I caught the strains, appropriately, of The Beatles, “Norwegian Wood”. Inside, it was crammed with teenagers in animated conversation against the background of music from a jukebox. Successive songs were from an album by the same band and my friends eagerly asked me to complement their fragmentary understanding of the lyrics. This I did, adding translations where necessary in my faltering Romanian. Eventually, feeling that they were in my debt, I enquired why no ordinary Romanians came up to the summer school complex. They laughed, looked around, and invited me to walk with them. “You see”, one of them explained, “we live in a socialist country and here the state maps out your life for you from birth. You are assigned a school, you are assigned a job, and you are assigned a place to live. Conformity is the rule, you do what you are told, and meeting foreigners is off-limits. If your expectations are low and you don’t step out of line, then you will be satisfied. And to make sure that you don’t step out of line they have the Securitate.”

That was the first and only mention of the secret police during my carefully stage-managed stay but taken together with my observations in the town was enough to puncture the bubble of socialist achievement with which the practical classes at the summer school in the Romanian language, and the lectures on Romanian history and literature were inflated. The brief encounter with the trio, and the reference to “they have the Securitate”, showed that while the uniformity of clothing might be interpreted as a symbol of that conformity which the Communist regime had sought to impose upon the people, there were some who saw the authorities as alien, and who did not share their values. It was only when I read, in 2006, a report dated February 1966 from my Securitate file that I became aware that I had attracted the attention of the political police. It was a background check made at the request of the Securitate to their Brașov office on two teenage Romanian girls whom I had met the previous July during one of the summer school Sunday excursions. The girls were members of a folk-dance troupe who had performed for us in the village of Săliște, close to Brașov. At their request, we became pen-pals, but such contact had clearly aroused suspicion. The background check revealed nothing suspicious or potentially so and the resolution on the report was that no action was to be taken against the girls or their parents.

Attendance at a second summer school in Sinaia, held in summer 1967, was followed by a week-long excursion through Transylvania. Among the towns we visited were Sibiu, the Saxon Hermannstadt, in the centre of the region, and during our stay there we were taken to Sarmizegetusa, the site of the capital of the Dacians in the Orăștie mountains, constructed in the first-century BC at an altitude of 1,200 metres, and whose ruins comprise a fortress, dwellings, and a sacred area. Our journey to the site was made on a narrow-gauge forest railway⁷ which ran from the village of Costești to a locality known as Gradiștea Muncelului. Our train, composed of open carriages with wooden benches, was drawn by a small 0–6-0 steam locomotive which spewed out heavy smoke. I found myself seated opposite a studious middle-aged figure with dark-rimmed glasses who as the train began its climb asked me in French what country I came from. I replied in Romanian and he smiled. “How do you come to know Romanian?” he asked. I explained that I was a student in London of the language and he followed up by enquiring as to whether I had read any literature in the language.

‘The poems of Eminescu impressed me with their sensibility of thought and expression.’

‘What of contemporary Romanian authors?’

‘Marin Preda’s Moromeții seems to give an arresting portrayal of the psychology of the Romanian peasant and I found this a valuable insight into the strategy used to cope with life in rural Romania at the time.’

‘Your appreciation of the novel is most gratifying, for you are speaking with the author.’

I was startled. To be in conversation with the country’s most celebrated novelist of the day was a privilege that I had not imagined. Upon arrival at the ruins, Preda mixed with other students but on the return leg he invited me to join him again in an open carriage. On arrival at the hotel in Sibiu he suggested that we wash our hands in the facilities in the restaurant and as we looked into the large wall mirror we laughed at our blackened faces. Preda was even more amused when he removed his glasses to reveal two white circles. I was to remind him of our encounter several years later.

It was only in January 1969, when I took up a nine-month postgraduate scholarship awarded by the British Council under the terms of the UK–Romanian cultural agreement that I was able to travel in the country unescorted, although not unshadowed, as my Securitate file was to reveal. In most of the bars and coffee-houses frequented by students there was the resident eavesdropper, who placed himself at a corner-table with the stock-in-trade newspaper. But in the comparative relaxation and optimism of that year, when Nicolae Ceaușescu’s stock internationally remained at its highest following his defiant condemnation of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the previous August, I was befriended by a number of Romanian students whose parents, in the privacy of their homes, felt confident enough to reveal to me some of the iniquities of the Communist past.⁸ What I had only learned at second hand from harrowing memoir literature published in the West about the Communist period in Romania, was now graphically described to me by victims of the terror of the era of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s predecessor as general-secretary of the Romanian Communist Party: the arrests of those who were unaware that they had committed a crime, the appearances before a court whose proceedings were aggressive, and the presentation of charges that were fictional.

During the tenure of my postgraduate bursary, for which I had drawn up a research project to study Romanian literature and language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I was allotted a room in Căminul 5 (Hostel no.5), formerly the Hotel Opera, on Bucharest’s Strada Brezoianu. Among the postgraduate students there, the only other non-Romanians were four Americans, all of whom were researching aspects of Romanian history. The administrator was a stunt-man at the circus, Domnul Alexandru (Mr Alexandru), a swarthy, muscular individual in his mid-twenties, who when not performing would pass the time in his ground-floor office gossiping with friends and drinking țuică, highly potent plum-brandy. My level of Romanian—he spoke very little English—enabled me to answer his frequent questions about life in Britain, workers’ incomes, the nature of health care, the cost and availability of food, and such was the rapport that developed over the months between us that we struck an understanding. In return for the occasional bottle of whisky that I was allowed to buy from the diplomatic food store in the basement of the British embassy, Alexandru would give me warning of an impending search in my absence by the Securitate of my room, a regular occurrence that affected my American colleagues as well. Dissident and religious literature in English or Romanian was the object of interest, I was told. The fact that my room was ransacked during the visit of President Nixon to Bucharest in August 1969, when I was asked to act as an interpreter and fixer for the American news network ABC, therefore came as no surprise, nor did the disappearance of a New Testament in Romanian, printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society, that I had brought from London. It was the only item that I lost during my entire stay.

My monthly stipend was a generous one—1100 lei (the official exchange rate was twelve lei to the dollar; on the black market, thirty), and the average monthly wage around 900 lei. In comparison, my American friends received 1400 lei. To give an example of the stipend’s buying power, the price of a 300-gramme loaf was thirty bani (one leu=100 bani), and a small omelette, three lei. The monthly rent of the three-bedroom state-owned apartment of one of my Romanian friends was 400 lei. I and my American colleagues spent our stipends largely on books, on western films that ran at the several cinemas downtown, and on evening restaurant visits at weekends, although we had access to a canteen reserved for foreign students. Here payment was in the form of coupons, bought monthly, and the range and quality of food was superior to that offered in the canteens for Romanians. Pasta and mamaligă (maize porridge) were the staple fare for the latter whereas foreign students at their designated canteen could choose between beef, pork and chicken and vegetables. On evenings when I planned to visit a restaurant, I would give my canteen ticket to a Romanian friend, a gesture that was repaid handsomely by introduction into his family circle, one that lived outside the capital, and by an appreciation of life in the provinces. One of my deepest pleasures in Bucharest was a subscription to concerts at the Athenaeum (Ateneu), where for twelve lei a ticket I had the privilege of listening to such Russian artists as Sviatoslav Richter and David Oistrakh.

A memorable figure with whom I formed a close bond was Alice Magheru (1892–1983). A microbiologist by training, in 1920 she married the doctor and poet George Magheru, the great grandson of Gheorghe Magheru, a leading figure of the 1848 revolution in Bucharest. Alice was appointed an assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Bucharest University in 1942 where she specialised in the study of intestinal infectious diseases. She and her husband withdrew into isolation after the Communist takeover in 1945 and her husband was unable to publish his plays and poetry. He died in August 1952, but Alice continued to work as a distinguished microbiologist at the Cantacuzino Institute in Bucharest until her retirement in the early 1960s.

My introduction to Alice took place through John Drew, a first secretary at the British embassy, in March 1969. I was given her telephone number and arranged to call on her at her house on Strada Justitiei 36. It was on a Sunday afternoon that I made my way to the address and found myself unable to locate a bell at the imposing iron gate to the courtyard. Both were overgrown with ivy and my attempt at discretion was frustrated by the need to signal my presence by shouting several times. Eventually, an elderly, stooping woman, dressed in a threadbare jumper and skirt, emerged into the yard and opened the gate. Without a word, she led the way into a dark hall, up a staircase, and ushered me into a room, empty of furniture except a hospital bed with folded linen. She then left, closing the door behind her. Having waited alone for some twenty minutes, I decided to venture out into the corridor. There was no sign of life, so I crossed the landing at the top of the stairs and sheepishly tapped gently on a door. A faint voice responded with “intrați!” (enter!). Before me, in a dimly-lit salon, sprawled upon a bed with head propped up on a cushion, a white-haired lady in a floral dressing-gown, greeted me with a broad smile, and said “You must be Dennis. I apologise for keeping you alone in the guest room but Erji, my Hungarian maid, who speaks little Romanian, thought that you were from the Securitate and we thought it best to keep you at bay”. “What led you to think that?” I asked. “Well, you are wearing a dark suit and tie.”

This was the first of many visits to that room. The other parts of the villa remained a mystery to me. It had been built by her father, George Focșeneanu, the governor of the Romanian National Bank, in 1912, and Alice had lived in it since then. An engaging raconteur, she described in detail the vibrant cultural activity that had animated her home in the 1930s. She and her husband were generous hosts on every Sunday afternoon to prominent artists and musicians. The composer George Enescu (1881–1955), the pianist Dinu Lipatti (1917–1950), and the artist Jean Steriadi (1880–1956) were guests and concerts were held until late into the night. The Germans had proposed to Enescu that they stage his opera Oedipe in Germany but being an anti-Nazi, he declined the offer. For that reason, Enescu, Alice told me, had hidden his scores in the house during the war and after, until his departure from Romania in 1946.

While there seemed to be shades of Miss Haversham in that room, it also embodied and exuded Alice’s cultural effervescence—bookcases, writing-desks, chests of drawers, small tables covered with letters, larger ones heaped with books, paintings on the wall, photographs strewn over every surface, an Aladdin’s cave that fired my admiration for her talent for artistic and cultural enquiry. Alice’s stories about her celebrated friends were connected to this house; it was the place where Steriadi had painted her portrait, where Enescu had played the violin, and Lipatti the piano. When she visited London in November 1972, she invited me to the National Gallery where she gave me a veritable lecture lasting three hours on the merits of innumerable canvases. For her, as she often emphasised to me, friendship, too, was an art, one that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Romania
• Preface
• 1. 1958–1969
• 2. 1970–1980
• 3. 1981–1988: Moldova, Corneliu Coposu
• 4. Countdown to Revolution
• 5. Revolution
• 6. May 1990: Elections
• 7. 1991: Moldova
• 8. 1992: Nucșoara and Moldova
• 9. 1993: Visit to the SRI
• 10. 1994: Moldova
• 11. The Sighet Memorial Museum
• 12. 1995: Nicolae Militaru and Traian Borcescu
• 13. 1996: Elections
• 14. Coen Stork
• 15. 2000: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• 16. Mircea Răceanu
• 17. My Securitate File
• 18. Ion Mihai Pacepa
• 19. Șerban Papacostea
• 20. Romania since 1990: Reflections
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover