Vilifying Ceausescu’s Time Serves the Liberals and the Former Informants

The opening of the files of the communist intelligence services, or Securitate, gave some the dangerous opportunity to rewrite history in black and white, with no in-between grey shades.

This is reminiscent of the communist times history, which depicted the period preceding it as the bleakest in history, and their intelligence services as the most brutal coercion system one could imagine.

These had nothing to do with the truth but with the need of the new communist hierarchy to legitimize its rise to power while bringing to extinction the previous political elite, as well as its access to privileges which were denied to the rest of the population.

In a very similar fashion today we witness how interested parties vilify beyond recognition the communist past, blending it all in one period of North Korea-like shortages and NKVD-like brutality of the Securitate.

Nothing could be further from the truth than this picture. During the early years of Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule Romania witnessed a true process of liberalization in the attempt to give communism a human face.

Even the later years of Ceausescu’s dictatorship, while harsh, were not altogether bleak when compared with the Stalinist period.

It was a dictatorship, true, which means a lower form of government than a democracy, and yet a higher form of government than a full fledged Stalinist-type dictatorship.

This is why I find it particularly dangerous to depict communism as one compact period to the younger generations of Romanians, who know nothing of those times.

I got an unlikely help from President Traian Basescu in his live intervention during the talk-show I was a guest to Tuesday evening on Antena 1 television channel.

He said he was sorry that the opening of the files of the former Securitate for the public did not lead to revealing the terrible crimes of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, and focused exclusively on the Ceausescu years.

Basescu said this action motivated by strategy or genuine attitude lead to only one thing: making hard to believe the true atrocities during the Stalinist period. True, all Romanians knew during Ceausescu’s time that the Securitate kept an eye on them to not show political dissent. But that was not a real crime when compared with the fact that a peasant could end up in prison for resisting to enlist his land in the agriculture cooperative during the Stalinist period.

However, Basescu did not bring the idea to its ultimate conclusion, as a political analyst should.

The final idea should be to ask ourselves who would benefit from distorting the past so badly. One answer would be the liberals, nominally the partners of the Democrat Party, or PD, in the current ruling coalition, and yet their true political rivals.

Rewriting history serves the liberals’ purpose to oust from their ranks the party members who had cooperated with the Securitate, but who also happened to lean towards supporting Basescu’s stances, like deputy Mona Musca did.

In the same vein, it also serves the liberals’ aim to vilify Basescu, former PD leader, as a Securitate mole, backed by his possible cooperation with the communist intelligence services in his official capacity as a ship captain.

The other people to benefit from this distortion of history are those who had been Securitate informants and made an about face in 1990, turning into the most vocal promoters of democracy.

Faced with having their past revealed, they have all the reason to make us believe that they would have faced immediate arrest or torture had they not given in and agreed to squeal on their colleagues, friends or family members.

Basescu said that such a faulty reconstruction of the past damages the fabric of the political elite.

I say that is does more than that: it damages the fabric our young generations are made of, as they are subjected to a flood of information depicting a distorted past, in the purest Neo Bolshevik style.