Abstract
This article discusses the uses and functions of visual representations in the articulation of a comprehensive memory of dissent against the Communist regime in Romania. Through qualitative research using the interdisciplinary study of the art and politics of memory, the study answers the question of how artistic renditions of the past differ from official discourse on dissent and how these representations are used politically. This article argues that these artistic representations enrich the understanding of dissent against the Romanian Communist regime and thus play a political role in consolidating a missing or limited memorialization of diverse forms of opposition to the Communist regime, thus disrupting the narrative of perfect control. Artistic discourses about the Communist past include at least three types of portraits of dissenters: (1) anti-Communist heroes who participated in the armed resistance of the 1940s and 1950s; (2) Communist prisoners who are recalled either as victims or “prison saints”; and (3) (extra)ordinary citizens who had nonconforming ideas either through their political activity or through their cultural choices. The latter are recalled as participating in workers’ strikes, as exercising a form of personal opposition through their refusal to comply with the regime’s natalist policies (dissenting women), or as taking part in broader cultural opposition forms, such as watching Western films on videocassettes. These artistic discourses vary from heroization to politicization, serve to build legitimacy for the democratic regime, explain how dissent had a role in the change of regime, and accentuate individuals’ agency.
Introduction
Most accounts of the Romanian Communist regime emphasize that it had no real opposition: not many dissident intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s were well known and only a few “ordinary citizens” who dissented became better acknowledged afterward. However, the question of dissent has been prominently raised in Romania after 1989, not least via artistic means. To articulate a more comprehensive memory of dissent under the Communist regime in Romania, the uses and functions of such artistic representations need to be explored; this is precisely where this article aims to make an original contribution.
Starting from an understanding that disobedience to the Communist regime could be articulated in various ways among resistance, opposition, and dissidence, the article identifies in artistic representations (film and documentary theater, as well as comic books) three types of portraits of dissenters. Resistance is evoked through the anti-Communist heroes who participated in the armed resistance of the 1940s and 1950s (Portretul luptătorului la tinerețe, in English Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man, by Constantin Popescu, 2010) and through the Communist prisoners who are depicted either as victims or as “prison saints” (Între chin și amin, in English Between Pain and Amen, by Toma Enache, 2019). In the second instance, opposition is depicted through demonstrators who took part in mass protests, such as the workers’ strikes depicted in the comic book by Mihai Grăjdeanu titled Brașov 15 noiembrie 1987: Doi ani prea devreme (Brașov 15 November 1987: Two Years Too Early, 2017) and the documentary film Brașov 1987: Doi ani prea devreme (Brașov 1987: Two Years Too Early, by Liviu Tofan, 2017). In the third instance, dissent is acknowledged in the portrayal of (extra)ordinary citizens who practiced a form of personal opposition (Tipografic Majuscul, in English Uppercase Print, by Gianina Cărbunariu and Radu Jude, 2020), who took part in broader trends of cultural opposition (Chuck Norris vs. Communism, 2015, by Ilinca Călugăreanu), or who had illegal abortions after the approval of Decree no. 770 in 1966 (Născuți la comandă: Decrețeii, in English Children of the decree, 2005 by Florin Iepan; and 4 luni, 3 săptămîni și 2 zile, in English 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 2007, by Cristian Mungiu). 1
Beyond demonstrating the usefulness of this typology, the article proposes a broad conceptualization of dissent and the roles its memory has played after 1990. Exploring how dissent has been employed to build legitimacy for the new regime after 1989, the article advances the hypothesis that portrayals of dissent have ranged from victimization to heroization, and that the memory of dissent has thereby been politicized in two opposite ways: anti-Communist, totalitarian, and right-wing versus post-Communist, left-wing, and revisionist. Thus, this study contributes to a broadening of the dissident canon by considering how artistic renditions of the Communist past provide a snapshot of larger societal understandings. Furthermore, the article shows how representations of “symbolic anti-Communism” have evolved in the last thirty years, illustrating their connection to changes in political and cultural values.
After a brief presentation of the theoretical framework, I propose an understanding of the key term dissent and then provide an overview of how dissent against the Communist regime has been analyzed in the Romanian case. The second part of the article analyzes the examples mentioned above, which, as I aim to show, exemplify the three types of representations of disobedience.
The Official Politics of Memory: From Forgetting Communism to Victimization/Martyrdom
This article uses an interdisciplinary approach combining the study of the arts with that of the politics of memory to address the question of how artistic renditions of the past differ from the standard discourse on dissent and how these representations are in turn used politically. Art and the politics of memory are key foci of the interdisciplinary field of cultural memory studies as well as of democratization studies (especially those with a focus on transitional justice) that analyze how artists evoke the past in their works and what political functions their perspectives have.
Methodologically, this article uses a case study approach that looks at several examples of cultural memory selected with reference to their representativity. The theoretical literature used includes scholarship on the history of the Romanian Communist regime, the memory of Romanian Communism, comparative studies of dissidence in Eastern Europe, and cultural memory studies with a specific focus on the arts and politics of memory. 2
As Astrid Erll has pointed out, cultural memory is based on communication through different media, from television documentaries to monuments. 3 This article studies how the history of dissent against the Communist regime in Romania is being mediated, in the sense of Jan Assmann, in the form of cultural memory through a look at films, theater plays, and comic books. I argue that the analysis of practices of cultural memory, and especially artistic evocations of the past, can provide a useful source to understand the tension manifest in the Romanian case. Even though in 2006 the Romanian state, based on the official report of a presidential commission, condemned the Romanian Communist regime as a criminal dictatorship, in the past decade, public opinion polls have continued to register marked patterns of the positive evaluation of the Communist regime in Romanian society. 4 What’s more, nostalgic practices have surged in the last fifteen years, including commercial and touristic uses of the Communist past.
Although the artistic forms of the memorialization of dissent analyzed below do not represent the dominant discourse, they are worth analyzing, I argue, because they help enrich our understanding of dissent against the Romanian Communist regime. Art functions as a substitute and plays a political role in consolidating the otherwise missing or highly limited memorialization of diverse forms of dissent to the Communist regime, disrupting not only the powerful narrative concerning the regime’s supposedly perfect control but also the narrative of national victimization and religious resistance, restricted to the 1950s, which has been dominant in public space.
In what regards the memory frameworks of Communism in Romania, official policies have evolved from institutional forgetting to a policy focused on memory of the victims of Communism. In the 1990s and early in the subsequent decade, the Ion Iliescu regime (1990–1996, 2000–2004) concentrated blame for the Communist regime on the person of the former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu: in a certain sense— although contexts are different—this approach is reminiscent of the de-Stalinization launched in 1956. Through his trial and execution in December 1989, the past was meant to be closed. This policy of forgetting was contested by the victims, who were able to evoke their suffering publicly through memorial literature, the establishment of several memorials for victims, and the creation of monuments, in part through the non-governmental organization they established, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Romania (Asociația Foștilor Deținuți Politici din România). Several museums and memorials devoted to the memory of repression against opponents of the Communist regime have been established and emphasize suffering and injustice; the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Anti-Communist Resistance in Sighet (1993) is only the best example.
Conversely, the master narrative, or what Steve Stern calls “the emblematic memory” that public institutions have emphasized since 2004 (the presidencies of Traian Băsescu, 2004–2014, and Klaus Iohannis, 2014–2024), focuses on victimhood and resistance through religious faith. 5 The landmarks of this approach include the Tismăneanu Report (2006), the declaration of 9 March as the day of anti-Communist political prisoners from the period 1944–1989 (Law 247 from 11 December 2011), and the establishment of a State Secretary for Recognizing the Special Merits of Fighters against the Communist regime during the 1945–1989 period (2014). Finally, in a symbolic gesture, on the location of the Bucharest Lenin statue, which was created by Boris Caragea (1960–1990), there now stands the monument Wings Dedicated to the Anti-Communist Fight, by Mihai Buculei, which was erected in 2016. Close to this new monument, the mayor of the first district of Bucharest inaugurated Park Elisabeta Rizea in 2021, dedicated to one of the persons symbolizing anti-Communist resistance in Romania.
As we can see, when an official policy of memory of the Communist past was enacted, it privileged political prisoners and victimhood rather than portraits of resistance, opposition, or dissent. In this respect, as Monica Ciobanu has observed, the role of cultural memory has been paramount, as “it was through media documentaries, artistic productions and exhibitions, museums, and religious commemorations that the narrative of suffering and resistance against an obviously alien communist regime was manufactured.” 6
Limited Dissent in Romania: “A Vegetal People”? 7
Before analyzing artistic remembrance of dissent against the Communist regime in Romania, it has to be clarified what the concept of dissent against the Communist regime in Romania encompasses and how it has been theorized. Several terms are used to discuss the attitudes of those who did not follow the official policies of the Communist regimes. They include resistance, opposition, collective protest, victimhood, dissidence, dissent, and nonconformism. In their work, Jan Wielgohs and Detlef Pollack differentiate between resistance, dissidence, and opposition. 8 Barbara J. Falk defines “open dissent” as a continuum, adding that “resistance as a category is necessarily larger and includes what has come to be known as the ‘gray zone’ between regime support and opposition.” In the Soviet Union, for example, resistance included “a larger continuum of responses that range from accommodation, adaptation, and apathy through to internal emigration, opportunism, and positive support.” 9
The historian Dennis Deletant distinguishes among resistance, (collective) protest, and dissent in Romania. 10 By contrast, the Report of the Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship, otherwise known as the “Tismăneanu Report,” identified the following modes of struggle: active resistance, Aesopian resistance, insubordination and deviancy, and autonomous forms of popular opinion. 11 One of the critiques of the Tismăneanu Report, such as that by the New Left group around the journal Critic Atac, focused on the “anti-Communist ideology” of the report and proposed an opposing triad dependent on relations with Romania’s Communist regime, namely that of true believers, opportunists, and bystanders. 12 This critique of the Tismăneanu Report is in agreement with the observation by Monica Ciobanu, who noted in 2020 that addressing the past had not emerged as a priority for Romanians. 13 While certain authors, such as Alexandru Gussi, attribute this disinterest to the official policies of forgetting imposed by the left-wing governments of Ion Iliescu (1990–1996, 2000–2004), others maintain that this disinterest has to do with the fact that many people did not think of themselves as directly involved with the apparatus of repression. 14
Thus, in the Romanian case, certain authors follow Falk’s position of seeing a continuum between resistance and dissent. Others prefer to distinguish between them, applying the former category to the 1940s and 1950s and the latter category to the 1970s and 1980s. 15 They argue that while resistance to the new policies that the Communist regime introduced characterized the 1950s, in the 1980s dissent was “essentially Ceauşescu-centered, whether focused on policy or the cult of personality.” 16 Independently of the temporal distinction, Cristina and Dragoș Petrescu distinguish between two different types of resistance culture: that of the elite and that of mass political culture. 17
The analysis presented here follows Dennis Deletant’s typology because it best conceptualizes and theorizes the different types and degrees of disobedience Romania experienced under the Communist regime. The analysis thus focuses on three strategies of disobedience and their artistic memorialization: (1) resistance, which encompasses the armed resistance of the 1940s–1960s and focuses on anti-Communist heroes as well as the victims of the regime, and thus also “prison saints”; (2) opposition/collective protest that includes the workers’ protests of the 1970s and 1980s; and (3) dissent/dissidence, which comprises personal opposition by (extra)ordinary citizens, by both intellectuals and more anonymous individuals, and nonconformist cultural activities (“cultural opposition”).
Resistance and Repression: Anti-Communist Heroes and “Prison Saints”
Although several attitudes of disobedience toward the Communist regime have been variously theorized, the image of the past that has become emblematic in the last twenty years focuses on resistance and repression. It employs a “narrative of victimization” that emphasizes the martyrdom of victims in memory politics, and it equates the whole Communist regime in Romania with Stalinism. 18
Wieloghs and Pollack define resistance as “individual or collective action directed at the removal of the Communist regime,” which “encompasses both conspiratorial and public activities, militant as well as nonviolent, spontaneous and organized action.” 19 In Romania, Monica Ciobanu distinguishes between civilian resistance, manifest in rural areas, and armed resistance, which “involved open confrontation with the police and military forces and other overt forms of opposition to the regime.” 20 According to Dennis Deletant, resistance to the Communist regime included the rebellion of General Aldea (1944–1945) and the partisan struggle in the mountains between 1951 and 1952 (for which the American Central Intelligence Agency attempted to recruit Romanians). 21 This article looks mainly at armed resistance in the mountains (1944–1962) and resistance through religion in the case of the Pitești experiment (1948–1951) to explore how they are evoked in artistic practices of memorialization. 22
The number of those who suffered because of Communism is not known exactly, or it has only been approximated, because of a lack of access to archives or their inexact documentation in the first place. The numbers vary from 93,000 incarcerations with surviving documentation between 1945 and 1989 (according to the census realized by the Sighet Memorial) to 600,000 victims, including deportees and forced laborers (as Monica Ciobanu claims), or more than two million according to the Tismăneanu Commission’s report; this number includes the estimated 600,000 political detainees, another 200,000 administrative prisoners, peasants who were condemned for petty crimes, the hundreds of thousands of deportees, including those with a mandatory residence, women who died because of the demographic policy, the tens of thousands of people who attempted to cross the border illegally, and so on. 23 In the examples of artistic memorialization to be studied below, the numbers of victims presented are often larger. For example, in the film Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man the number advanced is of 250,000 killed between 1947 and 1962, and the film Between Pain and Amen mentions three million who suffered in prisons, of whom 800,000 died; finally, the comic book The Puppeteers mentions that eleven prisoners died at Pitești prison.
Anti-Communist heroes of armed resistance and the Legionaries
The so-called armed resistance in the mountains lasted from the late 1940s to the 1960s and “consisted of several isolated groups” that represented former members of all the political parties, including the fascist Iron Guard.
24
For Petrescu and Petrescu, “retreating into the mountains was a form of escaping the totalitarian control of the regime rather than a form of organizing an opposition movement.”
25
According to official documents released by the Communist government in 1959, the number of resistance groups was estimated at 1,196 for the period from 1945, “an astonishing number if true,” as Ciobanu notes.
26
Among these, three armed groups that confronted the Securitate stand out: the Arsenescu–Arnăuțoiu group, which was active between 1949 and 1958 in the southern area of the Făgăraș mountains near the village of Nucșoara in Argeș county; the Șușman group that operated in the Apuseni mountains [. . .] from 1948 until 1958, which was named after Teodor Șușman, a wealthy man belonging to the “rural bourgeoisie” (chiabur); and a group led by Ion-Gavrilă Ogoranu, a member of the youth wing of the Iron Guard fascist organization in the 1930s and early 1940s, consisting primarily of high-school and college students, which operated for a decade in the northern section of the Făgăraș mountains.
27
The film Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man (Constantin Popescu, 2010) is the first part of a trilogy about the anti-Communist armed resistance in the mountains. The first film deals with the Făgăraș group around Ogoranu, while the others present the brothers Toma and Petru Arnăuțoiu and Elisabeta Rizea. Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man follows a group of around fifteen young men between the ages of 22 and 30 as they hide in the mountains in small, separate groups. They are shown killing undercover members of the Securitate. It is also shown how they live in makeshift underground shelters and how locals in the area help them with clothes and food. The film alternatively depicts the armed members of resistance (partisans for the director of the film, bandits for the Securitate fighting them) and the meetings of the Securitate members in which they discuss the different measures to be taken (surveillance, informers, armed teams), and where they study pictures of the Ogoranu group to prepare their capture. The Securitate officers trying to capture these partisans are portrayed as violent brutes: the film includes scenes of torture, beatings, and interrogations of those caught.
The central character of the film is Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu (1923–2006), who asks his comrades at the beginning of the film what they are doing there, “waiting for the English, the Americans, whomever.” He says they will resist as long as it is necessary, so that he will be able to answer to his children when they ask what he actually did. Four years later, in 1955, Ogoranu and his followers pose the same question, having admitted that they no longer enjoy the backing of peasants: “Do you think somebody is coming? The Americans?” Toward the end of the film, in 1957, Ogoranu is shown all by himself in the woods—the others had already been captured and sentenced to death. The movie ends with the information that, in 1976, after 27 years, Ogoranu was caught, too, and although he had been condemned to death, his sentence was subsequently annulled and he was released after six months. He died a free man in 2006.
The director, Constantin Popescu, never explains what the Legionary Movement was and presents Ogoranu as an unblemished hero who fearlessly resisted the Communist takeover and the aggressive Securitate.
28
In fact, members of the Peasant Party were the most numerous members of the armed resistance groups, and, as Monica Ciobanu observes, there were only a few examples when partisan groups openly declared adherence to extreme right-wing fascist ideology. Among these the most significant were the group led by Ogoranu and the group called “Cross and Sword” (Cruce și Spadă), led by the Iron Guard member Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Mărășeți in the Cluj county area.
29
In other words, the film director chose to portray armed resistance against the Communist regime as organized by a group of former Legionaries. Ironically, such a choice actually reinforces Communist propaganda that labeled all the partisan groups as Legionary. This choice may also further delegitimize the memory of resistance against Communism as a politicized affair.
“Prison saints”: victimization and religious resistance
Considered an extreme form of Stalinist repression, the Pitești experiment “came to be defined as integral to what was perceived as the genocidal nature of the communist regime.”
30
The memorial in Pitești, inaugurated in the former prison in 2014, is part of the “prison saints” movement. The students imprisoned there were subjected to the “re-education through torture experiment” [. . .] between 1948 and 1951, a measure that led to the death of 22 inmates. This experiment was primarily designed to reeducate the “class enemies” (mostly legionaries) in Marxist principles of the socialist revolution [. . . . a process that many survivors described] as a struggle between dehumanization and martyrdom, stressing that they ultimately won over the forces of evil.
31
As Ciobanu emphasizes, the “prison saints” movement is “supported by various civil society organizations, intellectuals and segments of the clergy” in an attempt “to canonize former political prisoners who demonstrated particularly zealous religious devotion in the face of torture and state repression.” The movement has also been criticized, “given that many of the former prisoners that have been proposed for canonization were affiliated with the fascist Iron Guard (legionaries) in the interwar period.” 32
There are several notable examples for the memorialization of the “prison saints”: the comic book The Piteşti Phenomenon (Genţiana Iacob and Bogdan Topîrceanu, 2013), the fiction films Between Pain and Amen (Toma Enache, 2019) and The Pitești Experiment (Victoria Baltag, 2020), and the documentary films The Memorial of Suffering (Lucia Hossu-Longin, 1991) and The Unmasking (Nicolae Mărgineanu, 2011). In what follows, I analyze two of these examples: the comic book The Pitești Phenomenon and the film Between Pain and Amen, which follow this logic of memorialization of the martyrdom of the prisoners of Pitești. The reasons for choosing these two examples are that, on one side, the comic book has an educational purpose and addresses pupils and students who are susceptible to taking as valid the information provided in the drawings; second, the film by Enache has been seen by a larger audience than the usual public interested by anti-Communist artistic productions and can thus represent an interesting example of how the memory of Communism is constructed by mass-mediated cultural objects.
The Pitești Phenomenon includes two short booklets and was published with the support of the Center for Studies of Contemporary History, an NGO. The first volume, The Humiliation (scenario Alin Mureșan, text Silviu Man, graphics Gențiana Iacob), focuses on the victims, whereas the second volume, The Puppeteers (scenario Alin Mureșan and Bogdan Topîrceanu, text Bogdan Topîrceanu, graphics Bogdan Topîrceanu), centers on the perpetrators. The latter starts with Eugen Țurcanu, who was in charge of the reeducation process and was himself reeducated. The prison is presented as “the harshest treatment from the System: extreme violence. Permanent violence. Every day and every night”; “probably this is how hell looks.” The drawings reproduce different types of humiliations and specific forms of torture in “Room 4—hospital.” Although the experiment ended in 1951, the second volume closes in 1964 with the symbol of open cuffs, because it was then that the Ceaușescu regime liberated political prisoners. Finally, on the last page, the booklet mentions that eleven prisoners died in the Pitești prison.
The fiction film Between Pain and Amen (Toma Enache, 2019) presents the story of two brothers who were imprisoned together with other youngsters in a Communist prison. We are not told that they were incarcerated in the Pitești prison until the end of the film, when the following information is provided: in Romania there were 744 prisons and 72 forced labor sites for political detainees, in which three million Romanians suffered and 800,000 of them died. According to the film, the “Pitești experiment” was part of the repressive system and one of the most sinister attempts at “brainwashing” and reeducation through torture in the Eastern Bloc. Although the exact number of victims cannot be known, it is estimated that during the Pitești experiment between 1,000 and 5,000 were tortured there. Most of them were elite students, young people who opposed the Communist regime, while others had been members of political parties.
The film centers on the brothers Tase and Iancu Caraman. The older one, Tase, was a composer, arrested for “subversive anti-Communist activity” and condemned to 25 years in prison because he composed “Ode to God” on his contrabass. The film uses a sharp contrast between life before prison, which is luminous and sunny, and life in prison, which is dark, tragic, and full of beatings, pain, and blood; it insists on the horror and emphasizes the suffering through the naked prisoners who were drenched with cold water and beaten outside in the snow, and so on. Members of the Party discuss how they must make the prisoners testify no matter what and agree to use ten students to initiate their reeducation by forcing them give up their faith, since prisons are “the highest political school.”
The prisoners pray together. At Christmas and Easter, to disturb and disrupt their celebrations in the prison cells, those already reeducated are brought in to torture them. The intention of this cruelty is to force them to give up their faith and testify against all those who had “manipulated them against the great Soviet people.” The priest, who is imprisoned alongside them, tells them, at the same time, that they can escape from this hell only through their faith. If Tase refused to abandon his faith and accept that he was “objectively” an enemy of the people, his brother Iancu accepted and participated in the repression of his fellow prisoners, including his own brother. The only one to survive the ordeal was Tase, who is convinced that it was due to a miracle. According to the film, the commander in chief of the prison was investigated after the Pitești experiment ended for the crimes committed there, and because fifty detainees had died of heart attacks and foreign embassies were pressing the regime.
In these two artistic examples, the pain and suffering of the prisoners are presented very dramatically. The artists insist on horrific details and exaggerate the number of victims. The intention is to shock the viewer/reader. Resistance through religion is presented as the solution the prisoners found. Securitate members are presented as beasts but ridiculed at the same time. Different stages of the unmasking process are presented, and so is the horror of the various forms of torture. In the comic book, the portrait of Țurcanu is that of a former student who was himself reeducated; in the fiction film, he is not the central character, and although he appears as a human beast who tortures his fellow prisoners, it is the system controlled by the Securitate that is emphasized.
In the Romanian case, the representation of resistance against Communism does not imply open confrontation and intentional action to remove the regime. Resistance is instead presented as a strategy of survival. In the case of the Pitești experiment, its exceptional character is artistically memorialized as the emblematic image of the Communist regime through the aesthetic use of representations of extreme suffering. The type of resistance evoked is that of resistance through religious faith. The film by Popescu regarding armed resistance in the mountains is an attempt to recuperate a story of resistance against Communism but it is pursued through the portrayal of a Legionary figure. Consequently, the film can be criticized as an example of the “Legionarization of the memory of Communism.” 33
The dominant discourse regarding resistance against Communism uses anti-Communism and the theory of totalitarianism as its framework of analysis in order to heroize and victimize “the martyrs” of the regime. At the same time, the fact is kept silent that those portrayed in these films about the Pitești experiment and armed resistance in the mountains belonged to the Iron Guard.
Opposition: Collective Public Protest
Wieloghs and Pollack define opposition as “groups that sought, via various forms of organized collective action, not only to extend personal freedoms under the existing regime but, in addition, to question publicly the legitimacy of this regime.” 34 Romania experienced few protests between 1945 and 1989, and their memory is practically absent in public space. In 1956, following the example of the Hungarian Revolution, the first protests against the Communist regime in Romania were organized by students in several cities. In August 1977, between 30,000 and 40,000 miners from the Jiu Valley went on strike. In 1979, several workers from Drobeta Turnu Severin formed the Free Syndicate of the Working People of Romania (Sindicatul Liber al Oamenilor Muncii din România, SLOMR). The free trade union demanded better working conditions. SLOMR was soon dismantled by the regime, and its members were persecuted by the Securitate. These events were followed by the miners’ strikes in Maramureș in 1983, by the protests in February 1987 at the Nicolina factory in Iași, and by student manifestations against the regime. 35 Finally, on 15 November 1987, workers from the Brașov “Steagul Roșu” factory went on strike and marched to the city center to protest against the local party organization. Their protest is considered by some to be “the first major protest that turned into a violent anti-Ceauşescu revolt.” 36
Hooligans instead of “Communist martyrs.”
The only example of protest from before 1989 to be memorialized through artistic forms is the 1987 protest in Brașov. Mihai Grăjdeanu’s comic book Brașov 15 November 1987: Two Years Too Early (2017) and the documentary film Brașov 1987: Two Years Too Early by Liviu Tofan (2017) both accompanied the thirtieth anniversary of the protests. 37 In 1983, the Communist regime introduced a law that conditioned the payment of workers’ salaries on their realization of the production plan. As the plan was unrealistic, there was no way to accomplish it; however, in November 1987, the salaries of workers from the truck-producing Steagul Roșu factory were cut, and the workers went on strike. 38
The comic book, which contains 41 pages, begins with the story of the events accompanied by drawings of the workers and the police officers. At the end of the book, there are several exercises that children can do to verify that they understood the information presented. The documentary film starts with extracts from the Securitate files that comment on the bad condition of workers and their “negative comments.” We also hear workers crying “Down with the dictatorship! Down with the dictator!” Differently from the comic book, the documentary film features the testimonies of actual participants (around fifteen workers who took part in the protests) as well as the testimony of the son of the first secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (Partidul Comunist Român, PCR), who was in the building when it was occupied by the workers, and the Securitate colonel Ion Lupu, who was the commander of the troops in Brașov.
In the comic book, the recounting of the events starts with the difficult situation Romanians were experiencing in 1987. In the film, we hear the workers recount the events, and their stories converge into a common history: how they found out their salaries were cut and they were left with nothing. We see the worker who borrowed a white helmet that the engineers used to wear and how this encouraged workers to join the protest, believing that the engineers were in favor of it, too. On their way to the city center, people applauded and cheered them on, and several hundred people joined; workers from other factories (Hidromecanica, Rulmentul, Tractorul) of Brașov also came to participate. Certain bystanders at first believed they were part of the manifestations for the elections that were organized the same day. However, the protesters cried: “we want food! We want heat! Down with Ceaușescu! Down with the dictator! Down with Communism!” The comic book and the film in fact converge, because the scenes are recreated in the documentary film using images in the comic book.
Workers entered the headquarters of the PCR in Brașov and started to break portraits of Ceaușescu. They also discovered food and drinks that were otherwise inaccessible to them (Pepsi, Sibiu salami, bananas, wheels of cheese) and threw it out the window, saying, “Look what the Communists eat, while we die of hunger.” 39 In the film, Colonel Lupu recounts how he intervened with 87 soldiers. Protesters recall that vans full of men dressed in black arrived and started beating everybody before hundreds of them were arrested. Finally, the Securitate cleaned up the place completely, as if nothing had happened there. Archival images with Ceaușescu kissing children on election day are shown.
The subsequent repression was launched and coordinated by Securitate officers from Bucharest. In the film, the workers recall their arrests and the beatings, but their testimonies are interrupted by images from Brașov’s Song to Romania festival, which contributed to the personality cult of Nicolae Ceaușescu; men and women are shown reciting poems, singing, and dancing to glorify the party and Ceaușescu. A decision was taken to declare that protesters had rebelled against the director of the factory, and not against the PCR. In the end, 61 workers were sentenced in a trial on 3 December 1987 from six months to three years. The regime decided to label them hooligans, not least to avoid transforming them into “Communist martyrs” “because it was not well seen to have a political trial, as everybody knew there was no opposition in Romania since Ceaușescu had no foes.” Having been sentenced, they were transported to various cities around the country, often far from Brașov. In the film, we also discover acts of solidarity with the workers; for example, a student recalls how he supported the workers by displaying a sign on which he had written: “the workers who were arrested shouldn’t die.” He was joined by a colleague. They were both expelled from their Faculty for their actions. One of them recalls that the merit of the workers from Brașov was that “they showed it was possible and that their patience had its limits.”
These two examples reconstruct a missing cultural memory of Romanians’ protests against the Communist regime. Through the testimonies of the workers, the Tofan’s film shows how the Securitate effaced the memory of protest through the elimination of any trace, and the use of repression, imprisonment, and deportation. In this case, we have access to the memory of protest against the Communist regime in Romania, otherwise largely missing from public space, through artistic memorialization. While the Communist regime portrayed them as hooligans, the film does not show the workers as heroes, either. Instead, their reaction is depicted as a normal response to what they had experienced—that is, having their salaries cut in a context when food was expensive and scarce.
Dissent: Dissidents, (Extra)Ordinary Citizens, and Nonconformists
In Romania, the Securitate was quite successful in convincing large sections of society that they were under surveillance all the time and no protest was possible. The stories of those who opposed the regime were not properly memorialized after 1990, either, as the dominant discourse remained that of how Romanians had had to accommodate and even collaborate with the regime, and for many the times had not been so bad.
Dissent or dissidence designates the open and public critique of the regime and its professed values as well as all the activities that were intended to constitute “an autonomous sphere of public political and cultural communication.” 40 For Deletant, it is important to distinguish between a dissident, who is “a person who operates outside the system, who poses a challenge to it,” and a nonconformist, who “operates from within.” 41 Although they both oppose the regime, “the degree of opposition is greater in a dissident than in a nonconformist” and “dissidence involves a public act, such as a protest, whereas nonconformism is a discreet stance.” 42 For Ana-Maria Cătănuș, it was “an attitude of open and public criticism of the flaws of the Communist regimes, pointing to human rights issues or questioning the policies in economic, social and cultural fields.” 43 The motives for dissent could be either individual (prohibition of the right of signature, a denied passport) or collective—a reaction to the regime’s excesses or frustration regarding policies enacted. Dissent could also be a momentary reaction after years of compliance. 44
Several authors agree that in Romania dissent was rather rare (Deletant); quixotic (Tismăneanu); heroic, marginal, and feeble (Petrescu and Petrescu); uncommon, made of isolated acts (Cătănuș); or the manifestation of individual protest. 45 The extreme expression of this approach is encapsulated in Michael Shafir’s statement, “Romanian dissent lives in Paris and his name is Paul Goma.” 46 The limited nature of dissent has been explained in various ways that include the lack of a “focal point for opposition,” or that Romanians tend to be passive because they are so conditioned by their history and their Orthodox faith, or because the Securitate was highly efficient. 47 The control of intellectuals by the regime has also been explained by the use of both repression and manipulation and the employment of a nationalist discourse that appealed to and convinced some of them. 48 Deletant considers other factors as more important, “such as the linkage between formal and informal systems in Romanian society and duplicity” and the “networks of relatives or friends” who “were used to map a way through the maze of state bureaucracy.” 49
Moreover, the distinction Petrescu and Petrescu introduced between mass and elite protest applies to dissent and dissidence as well. The “quiet dissidence” that included ordinary citizens who wrote manifestos against the regime and letters to Ceaușescu, distributed pamphlets, wrote slogans on walls against the regime, and dressed up dogs with such statements has not been thoroughly analyzed yet. Among them were Iulius Filip from Cluj, who wrote a letter to the Solidarity movement in Poland; Ion Ilie, who pasted posters on phone booths in Pitești; and Piroska Barabas in Miercurea Ciuc, who threw manifestos while riding her bike. 50
Another perspective concerning dissent under the Communist regime in Romania is that of Maria Bucur, who argues for “gendering dissent.” According to her, the “choice to abort should be considered a form of dissent” because women, although they knew the cost, accepted the possible consequences and went through with it.
51
For Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu, it is important to observe how by engaging in illegal forms of contraception, especially abortion, women refused to accept the communist government’s takeover of their reproductive capacities. For over two decades, millions of women of childbearing years placed their lives and liberty in danger, knowing the potential consequences of their behavior: lifelong sexual or medical problems, public shaming, exclusion from the RCP, and prison time.
52
According to Petrescu and Petrescu, in Romania, besides dissidence, there were two other ways to refuse cooptation: “resistance through culture” and emigration. 53 “Resistance through culture” refers to “all those who neither publicly criticized the regime nor openly supported it,” and who avoided “ideological conformism.” 54 This category of resistance has been criticized as amounting to a form of post-Communist anti-Communism. Cristina Petrescu herself separates “resistance through culture” from “cultural opposition,” as the latter refers to “an alternative non-conformist independent thinking in relation to the system of ideas and values imposed by the party state.” 55 Such cultural opposition encompasses a “wide range of forms of non-conformism” that were tolerated and may even have been supported by the regime. Those engaging in these practices were “neither heroes nor mere opportunists” but “average individuals” who refused to think and act as the regime wanted. For Petrescu, this made them “the silent agents of change who were instrumental in re-Europeanizing Romania.” 56
Not all researchers agree. For example, Deletant criticizes the confusion that exists in Romania between dissent, nonconformism, and “resistance through culture,” while Falk argues that nonconformists do not qualify as dissenters. 57 My analysis below distinguishes among the representations of three types of dissent: the elite dissent of dissidents, the “quiet dissidence” of (extra)ordinary citizens, and “latent dissent” or “cultural opposition” by nonconformists. A fourth representation of dissent is that of the dissenting women who refused to follow the policy imposed by the Ceaușescu regime on their bodies and had illegal abortions.
Elite dissidence
Given that, in Romania, “political dissidence” amounted to no more than short-lived episodes that were performed by a handful of intellectuals, and even those were a “latent form of dissidence rather than open,” some authors emphasize how, given the circumstances of the regime, what matters is “not that dissent was uncommon, but that it happened at all.” 58 The example of Charter 77 led to “two founding moments of Romanian dissent: the movement for human rights headed by the writer Paul Goma and the drafting of the first program of dissent by the historian Vlad Georgescu,” who “asked for the inclusion among the other rights stated in the Constitution of the right to dissent.” 59
From 1977 to 1989, dissent included a series of isolated acts by courageous individuals, who refused the more and more meager advantages offered by the regime if accepted to be silent and dared to openly criticize the abuses of the communist system. In other words, the history of dissent during this period cannot be but a succession of individual stories.
60
A non-exhaustive list of dissidents would include Doina Cornea, Mariana Celac, Ion Puiu, Radu Filipescu, Florian Russu, Nicolae Stăncescu, Ion Fistioc, Nelu Prodan, Gabriel Andreescu, Gheorghe Calciu, Vasile Paraschiv, Dorin Tudoran, Dan Petrescu, and Mircea Dinescu. 61 It would also feature the disciples of Constantin Noica and the “Iași group,” as well as “a group of young writers, art historians, sociologists, and philosophers in Bucharest who engaged in oppositional activities after 1988: Călin Anastasiu, Magda Cârneci, Anca Oroveanu, Stelian Tănase, and Alin Teodorescu.” 62
There are not many examples of the artistic memorialization of Romanian dissidents. Key exceptions include the television series Memorialul Durerii (episode 33 is about Doina Cornea); the documentary Cold Waves (Alexandru Solomon, 2007), which presents the Romanian section of Radio Free Europe; the documentary film Babu, the Case of Gheorghe Ursu (Cornel Mihalache, 1995); and the fiction film Arrest (2019), by Andrei Cohn. The last two examples concern the case of Gheorghe Ursu (1926–1985), an engineer and a poet who was followed by the Securitate because his diary criticized the regime. He sent several letters to Radio Free Europe denouncing Ceaușescu’s decision to stop the consolidation of buildings affected by the earthquake of 1977, and he was in contact with members of the Romanian emigration, such as Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca. Remarkably, both films are considered inaccurate by Andrei Ursu, the son of the engineer and director of the foundation dedicated to his father’s memory, because they are based on the perspective of the Securitate rather than what actually happened.
“The quiet dissidence.”
As the case of Mugur Călinescu shows, artistic evocations of dissent can refer to ordinary citizens who protested against the regime. The play Typographic Majuscule by Gianina Cărbunariu (2013) is based on the Securitate’s files on Mugur Călinescu (1965–1985), the so-called “Panel Case” and the “Pupil.”
Mugur, who was from Botoșani, a small city in the northern part of Romania, was investigated in 1981 because he wrote messages criticizing the Communist regime and in support of the Solidarity movement in Poland. The Securitate considered these messages “inadequate inscriptions.” In the eyes of Mugur, they were necessary because his country was behind the other socialist countries. He felt it was crucial to awaken the conscience of people so that they could rebel against their situation. The messages Mugur wrote were (1) “Citizens, we must be conscious of our role in society and say a decisive no to our current situation. In Poland people have free trade unions to represent their rights.” (2) “We want food! We want the respect of all rights! We want freedom.” (3) “We are sick of queuing for long hours, we can’t accept the misery and injustices of this country.” They were displayed through video projections on the bodies of the actors and on the walls of the stage covered by darkness; the word freedom in capital letters was also projected on the actors’ bodies.
The play recaptures the investigation the Securitate conducted to identify the author of these messages: 30,000 writing samples were compared with the words Mugur had inscribed in capital letters (typographic majuscule) using white chalk, and over sixty informers were mobilized; all those who listened to Radio Free Europe were questioned, all passports were verified, and dogs were used for surveillance. Mugur’s case shows how the Securitate recruited high school students and investigated them. Besides Mugur, his parents, colleagues, and teachers, the play also reproduces the testimonies of witnesses questioned by the Securitate. Mugur was allowed to continue school but was called several times to talk with Securitate officers. At the end of the play, his mother recounts how people told her Mugur was killed by the Securitate, that he was irradiated. The play ends with the Securitate officers’ version: it describes how somebody was “attracted to collaboration” and how they convinced high school pupils to help them. They also say that Mugur’s file was closed soon after, in August 1982, and they sought to rehabilitate him, that they acted in the interest of prevention, “the protection of youth.” They assert that they had to do it because they “swore on the existence of the fatherland.”
In 2020, Radu Jude directed the film Typographic Majuscule based on the play of Cărbunariu, who co-signed the script with Jude. Jude restaged the play, but the different moments from the performance are interrupted in the film by short selections from the archive of Romanian Television from 1981 (the year in which Mugur Călinescu wrote on the walls of Botoșani), 1982 (when Mugur was questioned by the Securitate), and 1985 (when he died). The film juxtaposes the reality of Mugur, as revealed by his file, and the official one as mediated by propaganda films. What results is a mix between scenes from the play and a refrigerator of 160 liters, an ode to the woman, a recipe for a chicken moussaka, folklore music, a television report about honking, and crossing the street against the rules. Jude inserts Mexican music after the mother of Mugur talking to her sister, pupils in school, and women that nurse in a maternity ward; then comes a report about a man who tried to escape from Romania and who recounts how he ended up in a camp in Austria. The film includes more information from the two files (the “Panel Case” and the “Pupil”) than the play by Cărbunariu, and it ends with a photo of Mugur and photos of his writings contained in his file.
The two artistic examples evoke the case of Mugur Călinescu and the control the Securitate had over any protester, including high school students. The emphasis is placed on the system of surveillance and the mechanisms employed to survey and discourage all forms of protest. Radu Jude places side-by-side archival images produced by the regime (taken from the television’s archive) and the reenactment of the play based on Mugur’s files. By this artistic choice, the film director further accentuates the polyphony of memory discourses on the Communist past and directs our attention to the interstices of memory.
Dissenting women: illegal abortions under Communism
Another evocation of dissent against Communism is that of the struggle of Romanian women after 1966, when Decree No. 770, which forbade abortions, was approved. Two films, the documentary Children of the Decree (2004), by Florin Iepan, and the fiction film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007), by Cristian Mungiu, discuss illegal abortions realized by women during the period 1966–1989 from different perspectives by highlighting the position of women dissenting from the Communist regime’s plan of forcing them to become mothers.
Children of the Decree evokes the state policy introduced by Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1966 with the purpose of increasing the population of Romania. The effect of this decision was, according to Iepan, that “women had no escape. They were forced to become mothers. The silent war between them and Ceaușescu began” because “Romanian women were not ready to become childbearing machines for the regime, not even when facing the threat of imprisonment.” The regime used the presence of policemen in hospitals to scare women into confessing who had helped them, as well as mandatory gynecological controls in factories to check who was pregnant. Women who died in the process of illegal abortions, often realized by amateurs, were given as an example by the regime to scare others from doing the same. The film is based on interviews with women who suffered through the period, with the gynecologist doctors who had to supervise them, and with other witnesses, such as the child who was selected by the state propaganda machine to be the twenty millionth citizen of Romania. The details of the illegal abortions are awful, as are the images that recall the fate of the children who were born as a result of the decree and who, because of their disabilities, were abandoned to die in centers such as the one in Cighid.
The fictional 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007) introduces spectators to the difficult condition of women in Romania of the 1980s through the specific case of Găbița, a student who prepares to have an illegal abortion in 1987. The film accompanies her best friend Otilia as she tries to obtain Kent cigarettes and soap in the student dorm where they live, as well as to rent a room in a hotel for the illegal procedure. Along with this documentation of the different steps toward the illegal abortion, the film describes the atmosphere of daily compromises in which Romanians engaged. The film portrays the illegal abortion as an ordinary event in the life of a young woman at the time because the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu had made contraception illegal. This type of event—about which the two main characters agree never to speak again—is part of the history of many Romanian families.
Nonconformist citizens
The documentary film Chuck Norris vs. Communism (2015), by Ilinca Călugăreanu, starts with testimonies of different people—public figures such as the film critic Nae Caranfil and anonymous individuals—who all recount how they used to see films on video back in 1985. They describe how they, went to see films at a neighbor’s house, sometimes even three or four films in a row, and which ones they saw. The main character of the film is Irina Margareta Nistor, called “The Voice” because practically everybody knew her voice, as she was the one who translated most of the films recorded on VHS tapes.
The film argues that Romanians watched videocassettes with North American movies and saw how Westerners lived, so they discovered that a different life was possible and wanted to end the Ceaușescu regime to acquire the same lifestyle. As they recount in the film, for the Romanian viewers it was not even about the movies as such, but about the possibility of seeing how the characters and their houses looked. “We saw shops full of food, sweets”; women watched for the fashion; “it was as a window to the West, to the free world.” Some declare in the film that “we were subversive, although we only saw a video film.” These people were “the movement of resistance.” The film ends with images from December 1989, and some of those interviewed recount how “the seeds of freedom the movies we saw on videocassettes had planted grew.” “During the revolution, everybody was in the streets because they knew you could live differently. How did they know that? Because they watched movies.”
The analysis above has delineated several types of dissenters as portrayed through cultural memory practices: the elite dissent of dissidents, the “quiet dissidence” of ordinary citizens, “latent dissent” or “cultural opposition” of nonconformist citizens, and the dissent of women who had abortions after their interdiction in 1966. The example of Gheorghe Ursu shows how film directors might choose the memory promoted by the Securitate as emblematic. Artistic evocations of dissent can also help to recover and consolidate a memory of the “quiet dissidence” of ordinary citizens who were under surveillance by the Securitate and whose files have been recovered, as in the case of Mugur Călinescu, a teenager of sixteen years at the time. In this case, the film by Cărbunariu and Jude accentuates the polyphony of memory; it puts together the information from the archival file but relativizes it by presenting it as a possible version, not the one and only truthful and objective depiction—along with the memory of the Securitate as portrayed by the secret police officers who appear at the end and that of the viewer who is omnipresent. The memory of women who refused to comply with the natalist policy of the Ceaușescu regime is the topic of very few artistic examples. The two films discussed show the terrible effects this policy had on Romanian women and their struggle to decide about their own bodies. Finally, in the case of the memory of nonconformist citizens, the documentary film Chuck Norris vs. Communism exaggerates an activity—that of watching videocassettes with foreign films—that was not nearly as popular as the film suggests. Moreover, it argues that, because of this activity, Romanians knew what life in the West looked like, and that is why the revolution of 1989 happened.
Conclusion
The emblematic memory of Communism in Romania may have changed from one that focuses on forgetting to one that emphasizes victimhood, but the memory of disobedience against the Communist regime has remained marginal in public discourse. In the limited corpus of cultural memorializations that attempt to alter this state of affairs, artistic evocations that privilege the memory of suffering in prison and religious resistance constitute the dominant form of discourse.
This article has put forward a tripartite division of opposition to the Communist regime, as originally theorized by Dennis Deletant: a division among resistance, opposition, and dissent. How do the artistic examples of memorialization contribute to or help amend this tripartite understanding and the continuum between resistance and dissent, as evoked by Falk? As this research has shown, the examples of artistic memorialization analyzed express a more complex typology of dissent against the Communist regime that includes anti-Communist heroes, prison saints, protesters, dissidents, (extraordinary) citizens who were part of “quiet dissidence,” dissenting women, and nonconformists.
Several films and comic books have focused on armed resistance in the mountains between the 1940s and the 1960s (anti-Communist heroes) and on Communist prisoners who resisted repression through religion and have been memorialized as “prison saints.” In this case, the representation of resistance through armed struggle and religion has been conceptualized by an anti-Communist discourse that emphasizes the totalitarian character of the regime, focusing on the Stalinist period and extending its characteristics to the entire period until 1989. This form of memory has been politicized, as the revisionist New Left tends to portray dissent as an expression of “anti-Communist ideology,” which was in fact a product of the Legionary extreme right.
Second, a cultural memory of protest against the Communist regime is largely lacking. In this sense, the two examples discussed above regarding the 15 November 1987 protest in Brașov constitute an act of articulating a silent memory of one of the most important collective protests of the period. They also show how the Securitate erased the memory of this demonstration. The workers are not represented here as heroes; their protest is instead recalled as a normal reaction to the regime’s policies, while the artistic memorialization also stresses the solidarity of other Romanians with their acts.
Third, if the historic accounts of the Romanian Communist regime recall dissent as heroic, uncommon, and marginal, artistic evocations of dissent help put forward three types of dissenters: the elite dissent of dissidents, (extra)ordinary citizens who dissented, and nonconformists. The play by Gianina Cărbunariu and the film by Radu Jude emphasize how Mugur Călinescu was just one among other (extra)ordinary citizens who dissented from the official policies of the Communist regime. In this case, artistic memorialization helps put forward a diversified image of protest against the Communist regime by ordinary citizens, despite the fact that the Securitate tried to efface the memory of these actions. The portrait of Mugur also presents the possibility of individual agency, even if the system of surveillance was more powerful. Dissenting women have been erased from the canon of dissidents established after 1990, although cultural memory examples, as Iepan’s film shows, have tried to integrate them into the post-Communist history of dissent.
Nonconformists portrayed in Ilinca Călugăreanu’s film were seen as having contributed to the change of regime of 1989 because of their consumption of cultural Western products (films and music). At the same time, the film also puts forward the possibility that watching foreign films at private film sessions was tolerated by the Securitate as a sort of safety valve.
This article has argued that the artistic evocations of disobedience to the Communist regime encompass the victimization, heroization, and politicization of dissent, while also portraying the normalcy of protest against the regime. A thorough investigation of the different forms of protest against the Communist regime, as depicted in the archival documents of the Securitate and elsewhere, could further consolidate our understanding of the ways in which dissent found expression under the regime in place prior to 1989.
Footnotes
Funding
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-0025, within PNCD III, contract TE 24/2020.
