Bucharest, Romania -- Intellectuals here say they suspect that a secret “Ministry of Humor” was responsible for the jokes told about Nicolae Ceausescu during the last years of his brutal Communist regime. Since the government controlled everything, the reasoning goes, the content of political jokes also was probably its doing.
The belief on the part of some that such a scenario could very well have been true is part of the complex legacy left by Ceausescu’s Orwellian regime. His era ended in 1989, when a violent uprising resulted in the execution of the dictator and his wife. But only now are scholars beginning to come to grips with the period, and seriously trying to separate fact from fiction.
More than two decades of his rule took a severe toll on the country and its people. In higher education, the regime was responsible for dissolving academic disciplines--sociology and philosophy among them--as ruthlessly as it had eliminated entire villages, historic neighborhoods, and political opponents.
Historian Dinu C. Giurescu was forced to defect in 1986 after he documented Ceausescu’s “urban-development” campaign, under which a vast section of historic Bucharest and many of its palaces, cathedrals, and monasteries were leveled to make way for the grandiose Palace of the People and hundreds of associated structures. Now Mr. Giurescu is teaching the history of Communist Romania to a new generation of students at the University of Bucharest. He is one of a handful of historians who are trying to explain what happened during one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes of modern times.
“I want to re-establish as much as possible the truth, especially to the younger generation, which is open enough to face things as they are,” says Mr. Giurescu, who left his position as a visiting professor at Texas A&M University to return here to teach. “It’s much harder to deal with your own past and compromises. But I try to keep detached from that, to look at our postwar history from a balanced point of view and try to discover what really occurred here.”
It is not an easy task. Romania is just now beginning to recover from the Ceausescu years, which were marked by extreme privation--electricity, food, and heat were rationed--and severe repression. One in every five citizens was a police informant. International contacts and travel were restricted to privileged officials.
A “cult of personality” dominated public and university life, with references to the great leader’s works a prerequisite for publication of even the most obscure academic texts. Lazar Vlasceanu recalls how, as a young sociologist in 1981, he was told by his publisher that his book on research methodology would not be published for lack of such a reference. “I wasn’t aware that Ceausescu had ever written anything on sociological-research methodology,” he says.
“The worst thing was the fear, the fear of being caught, because you were always testing the invisible boundaries built in your mind by the police state,” says Mr. Vlasceanu, who now is an official of the European Center for Higher Education of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “It was a standard assumption that students were informing on you, there were microphones in the classroom, taps on the phone, and colleagues reporting your activities to the regime.”
The regime may be gone, but scholars still encounter serious obstacles in trying to establish the truth. Not the least of the obstacles is the determined effort that was made by the former government to erase the past.
“Communist historiography held that all of our history preceding the Communist takeover was bad, and tried to start history anew by eliminating the past,” says Vasile Vese, dean of the political-science faculty at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, another center of postwar studies. “Since 1989 they’ve tried to do the same thing. Of course, it’s impossible to extinguish the past completely; even the Communists failed to do that.”
The partial opening of the state archives has led to a flowering of research in history, political science, and sociology, but it focuses only on the period from World War II to 1965, when Ceausescu became head of the Communist Party. Archival material from 1965 to the present remains sealed, the result of political resistance from the new government, extremist forces, and the old nomenklatura, the collective name for those who held influential posts under Communism.
The government has reason to want to control information on the recent past. Romanians still don’t know the truth about the December 1989 “revolution,” although they memorialize its victims. A wall and plaque at the Institute of Architecture on Bucharest’s University Square is dedicated to the memory of students and others who died in the violence. The uprising now is widely assumed to have been a coup d’etat, perhaps orchestrated and even managed by the Securitate, the feared state intelligence and security agency. By shedding light on the Ceausescu regime, researchers run the risk of exposing potentially incriminating information about officials now in the government of President Ion Iliescu and the revolution to which they owe their political legitimacy.
“It’s very difficult to choose a topic from the Communist era,” says Adrian Cioroianu, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Bucharest who is writing a thesis on the cult of personality. “I can only find newspaper articles and official pronouncements of the regime, because the archives are still locked. It’s much more difficult to find sources than it would be if I were studying medieval or modern Romanian history, where a whole canon of research already exists.” This is why few students choose to study contemporary topics, he says.
Others may avoid the subject for fear of political interference. “It’s easy to attack a dissertation that deals with the recent period as being `too journalistic’ because of the shortage of published sources,” says Zoe Petre, the dean of the University of Bucharest’s history department. In one high-profile case, a University of Iasi review board delayed approval of a student’s dissertation on the history of the institution during the 1940s and 1950s because it documented, among other things, the role of the Communist Party in faculty appointments and promotions. “Students see these things, and they choose to study ancient history or something less controversial,” says Ms. Petre.
Professors like Mr. Giurescu, who teaches only contemporary Romanian history, support and encourage students to study the period. He believes that interest in the Ceausescu era will continue to grow. “The young people between 16 and 25 are the real hope for this country. The good ones are detached from the nationalistic approach we see so often here, and have the willingness and critical insight to face their own history with all its merits and shadows, to acknowledge the evil parts.”
Not everyone agrees. Ms. Petre is regularly attacked by extremist politicians in the governing coalition for her alleged “betrayal” of Romanian history and her “conspiratorial” involvement with foreigners, fascists, Jews, Hungarians, and other forces described as bent on tarnishing Romania’s image. Observers says this is because of her research on the Holocaust in Romania, the history of the Securitate, and atrocities committed at Communist-era political prisons.
Ms. Petre says critics accuse her “of every imaginable heresy and have even called for my execution. They don’t like the light to be shined on the exaggerations and distortions of our history left by the last regime.”
“Zoe Petre supports the study of history in a way that is very dangerous for Romania,” says Augustun Deac, a retired professor of history who is now a propagandist for the Greater Romania Party, which is part of the coalition government. “She’s denied a lot of valuable contributions of the Romanian people’s history after 1944 and allowed faculty members to participate in fascistic political actions.”
Mr. Deac and Sever Mesca, a spokesman for the party, deny that their party has threatened Ms. Petre, despite its repeated attacks on her and other liberals in the party newspaper.
Other social-science disciplines in Romania are simply trying to reestablish themselves. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, the number of universities and faculties was sharply reduced. Declaring the subjects to be useless to the Romanian people, the regime eliminated sociology and psychology departments nationwide, transferring their professors to programs in economics and teacher training. History and philosophy departments were merged, journalism and theology simply abolished. Everywhere, teaching and research were artificially separated. Scholarship became the exclusive domain of the government-run Academy of Sciences.
In addition to rebuilding many disciplines, universities are busy forming new research centers and degree programs.
In Cluj, Babes-Bolyai University has established autonomous research institutes on transition in Central and Eastern Europe, ethnic relations in Transylvania, and Jewish studies. It also has set up new departments devoted to Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theology, and a master’s-degree program in contemporary Romanian history.
The University of Bucharest has seen explosive growth since 1990, when only 7,000 students attended its seven faculties, or colleges. Today 30,000 students are enrolled at 17 university faculties, while researchers work at 23 newly formed centers, many of which are self-supporting.
“Five years after the revolution, we have almost returned to our 1928 level of 38,000 students,” says the university’s rector, Emil Constantinescu, a prominent leader of Romania’s political opposition. “We’ve tripled the number of professors and researchers. But it was difficult finding qualified teachers to develop these new departments.”
Drawing from the staff of the Academy of Sciences, exiled Romanians living abroad, and visiting professors, the university, by most accounts, has been very successful in reviving long-dormant disciplines under difficult circumstances.
But students say they are frustrated by the continued presence of unqualified academics on the faculty, most of them former political appointees, and some of whom the student body had voted to oust at a 1990 assembly. It was at that meeting that new administrators were elected, including Mr. Constantinescu, Ms. Petre, and Mr. Vlasceanu, all of whom had been kicked out of the university during the Ceausescu years.
“We have a very good young generation, but the older professors are still here, and many are entirely unqualified,” says Gabriel Zbircea, the president of the Bucharest student union.
“They’ve reached retirement age, but they want to stay, and there’s little we can do to make them leave,” he adds. The law makes it virtually impossible to dismiss faculty members.
“The students are right to be upset with unqualified professors,” says Mr. Constantinescu, the rector. “But it is only the beginning. The young researchers are reviving the universities. It’s only a matter of time before the change will be complete.”