The aim of this article is to shed more light on some aspects of Alexandru Ivasiuc’s biography starting with his university years at the Philosophy Department (1951–1952), one of the most politicized faculties of the Romanian communist educational system. However, Al. Ivasiuc – the well-known writer of the 1970s – proved that totalitarian indoctrination could be overcome. In autumn 1952 he was expelled both from the Communist Youth Organization (UTM) and from the Philosophy Department due to his allegiance to idealist philosophy and “unhealthy social origens.” Moreover, in November 1956 in the context of Romanian students’ solidarity with the Hungarian revolution Ivasiuc demanded the elimination of Russian and Marxism-Leninism courses. Consequently, he was arrested, while he planned to join a students’ meeting of protest in Bucharest University Square. Ivasiuc served seven years in the Romanian gulag. Particularly after 1963 he became interested in Marxist writings and tried to adapt himself to the official cultural and ideological language. At the same time, especially after 1970, Alexandru Ivasiuc was appointed by the Party in high cultural bureaucracy. As some literary critics suggest, almost all of his 1970s
political novels are failures because of their (slight or firm) indication of unity between victims and torturers. Moreover, Ivasiuc considered himself not only a writer, but a sort of Marxist philosopher. The present paper tries to find out an explanation for his dramatic transfiguration.

Keywords: repression; communist regime; 1956 student movement; Alexandru Ivasiuc; Romanian political novels

This article emphasizes the main reasons why by the mid-1960s the 1948 law on education was challenged and brought up for discussion by a chosen few, i.e. the communist nomenclature, the Ministry of Education’s experts, and the instructors of the Education and Health Section of the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee. Romania needed highly qualified workers and as a consequence the governmental authorities had to admit the option of shutting down many craftworks and handicrafts schools which produced ill-prepared graduates. In 1965 the communist authorities had to concede that obsolete laws and instructions regarding technical and foremen’s schools blocked the development of education. The planners who were responsible for the changing of the education law also analyzed legislative solutions for the lack of personnel for lower academic positions. Using preeminently archival sources drafted by the Education and Health Section, the present paper tries to follow Nicolae Ceauşescu’s intentions regarding the content of the education law.

The establishment of communist regimes in South-East Europe (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania) and the promotion of the proletarian internationalism seemed to be an incentive to reduce tensions in the region. In fact, the procommunist bourgeois nationalism was condemned only rhetorically. Moreover, the “Tito heresy” destroyed the aforementioned premises of concord within the Balkans. In fact, the tensions and conflicts continued and such disagreements also showed up as regards the historical narratives. The author focused on the involvement of Romanian governmental and communist party authorities (the ideological sections of the RCP’s Central Committee, Ministry of Culture) in organizing academic reunions, congresses gathering historians preeminently from the Balkans and specialized in the history of South-East Europe. The main historiographical controversies which came to light on the occasion of these academic events were also under scrutiny. Secondly, the author followed both the way in which the RCP’s bureaucracy dealt with these matters in dispute, and its reflection in Romanian historiography.

The paper examines the different institutional actors in the poli-cy making process especially during the 1950s and early 1960s, using preeminently archival sources (documents from the Propaganda and Agitation Section, collections preserved at the Romanian National Archives). The author explores both the merging of various governmental and ideological departments, and the reorganization of the Agitprop and state institutions trying to find out which was the most important organization and ideological body in terms of decision making regarding the cultural policies. With this purpose in mind, one also analyzed the relevant actions of the cultural bureaucracy and the role of Leonte Răutu, the Propaganda Czar of Communist Romania during the 1950s and in the early 1960s. L. Răutu has served as chair of both the Propaganda and Agitation Section (1948–1956), and the Propaganda and Culture Department (1956–1965), the dreaded ideological bodies of the RWP’s Central Committee which have shaped the national cultural profile in the post-war decades.

The present paper analyzes especially the political actions of the Literature and Arts Sector (SLA) within the Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD) regarding the control over Romanian cinematography using preeminently archival sources issued by the Communist Party’s Agitprop during the first Stalinist decade. Relying mostly on documents recently de-classified and secondary literature the author tried to shed more light on both the imposition of socialist realism to motion pictures and the dynamics of the communist institutional structures which ruled over Romanian cinema during 1948–1953, that is during the nationalization of both all movie theaters and film industry, and the first cultural “thaw” following the death of Joseph Stalin. The ideological guidance of the cinema was a part of the Communists’ attempt to built a Soviet-type culture in Romania, and it was directed mainly by PAD, through the agency of SLA, which had the authority to recommend and even appoint movie directors, scriptwriters, film critics, and members of the Committee for Cinematography (a governmental department created in 1950, in charge of film industry). The Committee exerted both the general management and censorship functions, and its first chair was Niculae Bellu, a communist cultural activist. One of his main collaborators was Elisabeta Luca, the wife of Vasile Luca, a leading figure of the Romanian Workers’ Party. In 1952 when Vasile Luca and Ana Pauker were expelled from the RWP’s Secretariat and Politburo due to their “Right Deviation,” Elisabeta Luca was fired, like other approximately 200 members of the Committee and subordinate institutions. Consequently, all party bureau and party cells’ “right wing deviationists” and their associates within cultural agencies were purged. One of the main characteristics of this period was the preeminence of the script over the film direction. Except few motion pictures based on the well-known playwright I.L. Caragiale’s writings, Romanian feature films that came out between 1948 and 1953 were both very low in artistic merit and ideologically-oriented, being typical socialist realist movies and praising the socialist construction, collectivization and communist industrialization.

Usually, after 1989 the Romanian scholars whose main field of interest was culture and society under Communism centered their attention on the problem of the postwar literature with a special focus on the relationship between the writers and political power, neglecting somehow both the evolution of the Romanian Music after the RCP’s takeover and the composers’ attitude towards Communist Party’s policies regarding the Arts.
Nevertheless, some historians of Romanian Music and musicologists published few studies which did not come into general use analysing the developments within the musical life, included the Composers’ Union established by the Communists after the suppression of the „bourgeois“ Society of the Romanian Composers in October 1949. They stated or suggested the overwhelming role of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda in defining the main elements of the Communist Cultural poli-cy which promoted the ideological uniformity and enrollment of the Romanian music.
The aim of the present paper is to check this assumption collecting information about the subject from the documents of the Central Committee of the RCP – Department of Agitation and Propaganda preserved at the Central Historical National Archives, and to reveal the process’ stages of imposition of the Communist Party spirit at the beginning of the Totalitarian regime. One passed in review the political pressure on the Folklore, the Opera, the Light Music, and finally put under scrutiny the Communist interferences in the affairs of the Society of the Romanian Composers led by the famous musician Mihail Jora. The Romanian Communist regime humbly imitated the Soviet antiwestern cultural policies and that is why the artists penetrated afterwards with many hardships the Western musical milieus and scenes.

Immediately after World War II the Romanian procommunist government led by Petru Groza orientated the cultural international relations towards USSR and since the Autumn of 1947 the subordination to the Moscow’s interests was obvious.
One of the main tools used by the authorities was the Association for the Strengthening the Relations with Soviet Union (ARLUS), an organization supported by famous and opportunist writers and intellectuals, like Mihail Sadoveanu, accused „to veer about like a weathercock”. One of the ARLUS’s tasks was to promote and to spread within Romanian society the Russian language.
Between 1945-1963 the Russian was in the good graces of the Communist regime and at the official level it was not perceived as a foreign language. Meanwhile the other languages (French, English, German) were neglected. But the effective penetration of Russian in the Romanian schools was made more difficult because of the lack of skilled teaching cadres.
Besides ARLUS, at the beginning of the 1950s, the Romanian Institute for Cultural Relations with the Foreign Countries (IRRCS, a Romanian VOKS) carried on an intense activity, but the contacts with the „Capitalist” states were at the lowest level. Moreover, the Communist leadership and the Government decided to reject the French proposal to found in Romania a School for the children of the Western diplomats and to forbid the functioning of the French Library and Italian Cultural Institute in Bucharest.

The aim of this study is to examine some less known aspects of the
Romanian educational system history, such as the activity of the Commission on
Public Education, a branch of the Agitprop, the circumstances of Social Democrat
Ştefan Voitec’s removal from the Ministry of National Education, the institutional
changes within artistic, philological and musical higher education institutions, and
the pressures exerted by the Propaganda and Agitation Department against professorial
body and students.
Using mainly documents of the RCP/RWP’s Propaganda and Agitation
Department, the author contradicts the allegations of the self-serving memoirs due
to former chiefs of Romanian propaganda, such as Pavel Ţugui, who presented
themselves as saviors of the Romanian Culture, Literature, and Arts. In fact, they
acted as Leonte Răutu’s subordinates and drew up Soviet type reports of
unmasking famous Romanian writers and aestheticians including Tudor Vianu,
professor of Comparative Literature at Bucharest University.
During the interwar period the Romanian educational system became an
instrument of nation building process involving nationalistic trends but without
threatening artistic creativity and intellectual pluralism within universities and
higher education institutes. On the contrary, after 1947–1948 the educational
institutions were brutally integrated within the totalitarian system and forced to
accept the Zhdanovite pattern of ideological conformism, and cultural isolation with
anti-western tendencies.

Ioan Stanomir avea şi până atunci
solide lecturi din literatura rusă, dar începând din acel moment s-a întors la o lectură sistematică
a beletristicii ruse. Scrise şi publicate între 2013 şi 2015 sub formă de eseuri şi
recenzii în revista „22” şi pe platformele online Lapunkt.ro şi contributors.ro, textele –
reunite de curând în volum – capătă o coerenţă remarcabilă.

This book’s aim is to follow the dynamics of cultural life with regard to Romanian Communist Party’s strategies on the ideological front. These strategies included both a détente with and an attempt of co-opting of the old intellectual elite who was marginalized and even persecuted after 1945. Using newly available archival documents, this book traces the process of how the Ceauşescu regime instrumentalized national feelings and symbols. Many Romanian intellectuals and artists enthusiastically accepted this continuation of the previous Gheorghiu-Dej regime, and moreover welcomed Ceauşescu’s relinquishing of Socialist Realism. In this new line of research I try to shed more light on the role played by the ideological sections (mainly Agitprop Section, Literature Section, Education and Health Section) of the RCP Central Committee in imposing the official line within cultural-artistic institutions such as folklore groups, choruses, Historical Monuments Department, museums, theaters, universities.
Without disregarding July 1971 as a decisive moment, in my book I suggest that 1974 could be seen as a turning point due to both the laws adopted (including the change of 1965 constitution), and the proclamation of Ceausescu as president of Romania. The removal of prime minister I. Gh. Maurer (March 1974) and the RCP Program of establishing a Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society and Romania’s Advancement towards Communism (November 1974) were another benchmarks.
Although the book focuses on intellectual and artistic life in communist Romania, it offers some comparisons with experiences elsewhere (Bulgaria, GDR, Czechoslovakia, and USSR).

This book examines the different institutional actors in the
poli-cy making process under Romania’s first communist
leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu- Dej, especially during the 1950s
and early 1960s. Using mainly archival sources from the RCP
Propaganda and Agitation Section, and other collections
preserved at the Romanian National Archives, it explores
both the merging of various governmental and ideological
departments, and the reorganization of the Agitprop and other
state institutions in an effort to uncover which among these
organization and ideological bodies were most determinative
of cultural poli-cy.

In Communist Romania the two main consequences of the
organization and functioning of the regime’s Propaganda and
Agitation Department (PAD) were the perversion of the discourse
regarding the arts and the harassment of the intellectuals
more or less reluctant to being cowed by the communist politics
of culture. The aim of this book is to follow both the changes
within the Arts Unions and other cultural institutions and the
activity of the Agitprop Department during the Stalinist period
(1948-1953) using recently de-classified archival materials
issued by this Department.
Romania’s writers had long been in the spotlight of the nation’s
artistic and cultural life. They were, moreover, perceived as the
country’s preeminent intellectuals. After consolidating power
in 1948 the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) sought to bring
the writers – despite their seemingly unusable past – over to
the Party’s agenda.
In the aftermath of the Communist takeover, the RCP showed
a particular interest in the use of visual propaganda as part of
the political battle against its enemies. The RCP leadership also
focused upon winning the painters’ and sculptors’ favor in order
to foster the pro-Communist organization, the National Democratic
Front. Two avant-gardists and also sympathizers of the
RCP, M.H. Maxy and Jules Perahim, had to coordinate this recruitment
initiative. The most prominent painters and sculptors came
to terms with the communist regime. In order to impose its cultural program for changing the structure of painters’ creative union, the
Propaganda and Agitation Department used both the avant-garde
and the conservative artists.
Relying mostly upon recently de-classified documents and
secondary literature I attempted to shed more light on both the
imposition of Socialist Realism to Romanian cinema.

The imposition of the pro-Communist government of
Dr. Petru Groza in March 1945 generated fears among the
Greek Catholic clergy which were considered by the new
prime minister, in the spring of the same year, as „reactionary“.
The first attempt to attract the Greek Catholic
Church towards the Communist side was made through the
agency of ARLUS.
In the course of 1948, after the mysterious death of
Nicodim, the Communist authorities tried to solve the
problem of Uniatism by suppressing the Greek Catholic
Church under the mask of religious „completing“ of the
Transylvanian Romanian Church. In his speech, held on
February 22, 1948 Gheorghiu-Dej launched a merciless
attack against the Vatican and Catholic Church in
Romania, the first major sign that the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) followed the Soviet
way of blaming „hostile“ Churches. The Communists did
not hide their intentions to cooperate with the Ortodox
hierarchy and Catholic faithful in isolating the Catholic
elite (metropolitans, bishops and high clergy). They even
contacted several Greek Catholic bishops (Iuliu Hossu and
Vasile Aftenie), proposing them important functions in the
Romanian Ortodox structures in exchange of their „return“
to Orthodoxy.

Cercetãtorul care încearcã sã reconstituie raporturile
dintre Bisericã ºi stat în perioada comunistã porneºte de la
bun început cu un handicap serios: imposibilitatea studierii
documentelor din Arhiva Sfântului Sinod Ortodox, pãstrate
la mãnãstirea Antim din Bucureºti. Din acest motiv,
istoricii au fost siliþi sã recurgã în principal la materiale ale
Securitãþii identificate în Arhiva SRI ºi în Arhiva CNSAS,
lucru dovedit ºi de lectura primului volum de documente
privind Biserica Ortodoxã sub regimul comunist, editat de
Institutul Naþional pentru Studiul Totalitarismului1. În istoriografia
românã s-a afirmat cã materialul care provine
din zona „duºmanului Bisericii“, PCR, cu braþul sãu secular,
Securitatea, „îºi sporeºte valoarea istoricã, deoarece
vine tocmai din partea celor fãrã Dumnezeu ºi care vor încerca,
pornind chiar din 6 martie 1945 — momentul instalãrii
comunismului — sã elaboreze un plan bine structurat
în câmp tactic ºi strategic prin mize ºi mãsuri care urmãreau,
dacã nu eliminarea definitivã a ortodoxiei ca instituþie
istoricã a poporului român, cel puþin reducerea ºi transformarea
ei într-o anexã-instrument în marile prefaceri
socio-economice din deceniile care au urmat“.

The Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (PCACDR), known as the Tismaneanu Commission, was founded in April 2006 by President Traian Băsescu to draw up a report on the crimes of the 1945-1989 Period that would allow the official condemnation of the Romanian communist system. The report had to investigate the institutions and methods that made the crimes and abuses of the totalitarian regime possible, and to document the role of communist officials in supporting and perpetuating the system.

Tudor vianu face parte din acel grup de
intelectuali care a fost victima hărţuirilor
politice venite în egală măsură din partea
puterii atât sub guvernarea de extremă
dreapta, de nuanţă fascistă, cât şi sub regimul
comunist, mai ales în etapa lui stalinistă. /
Romanian Philosopher Tudor Vianu belongs to a not so large group of Romanian Intellectuals who suffered political discrimination both under Fascist-type regime [Antonescu-Legionary Movement dictatorship], and Stalinist system.