crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
In my presentation, I am going to concentrate on the most inhuman element: the exercising of
State terror by violent means, because this is the point which has particularly traumatized the whole
society, causing deep wounds that are difficult to heal.
Imposed by violent means, characteristic of a regime of occupation, Romanian communism was
strengthened and perpetuated on a repressive base. The analysis of administrative processes of the
political police during the Romanian communist totalitarian regime proves that brutality was raised
to the level of a state policy, in the name of “class war” and provoked a long-term reflex, a “rendering
commonplace” of evil, maintained by the political police machine. The majority of the population,
terrorised by the omnipresence and violence of this machine, re-learnt to live under an occupying regime,
and also unfortunately revived a tradition of a way of life long practised by Romanians throughout
history. Unlike in the past, the severity imposed by Soviet-Communist occupation of Romania, which
is also true for the other countries covered by the Iron Curtain, were harder, and the violence more
efficiently managed. The role of imposing this harshness fell, in the case of Romanian communism,
to the Securitate, as the main instrument of State terror. Paradoxically – but not fortuitously –, the
term securitatea (security) was chosen, which usually expresses a state of comfort and the absence of
troubles provoked by interference in the private life of the citizen, to name an institution that actually
devoted itself to the limiting of the rights of man, to the point of nullifying them. And all this to support
the State-Party, in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the construction of socialism.
But how could this have happened? This is a rhetorical question that has often been asked in the
shocking times following the reversal of the communist regime. A possible answer was offered some
time before, in 1985, in an essay by a dissident from East Germany, Jens Reich, a renowned professor
of bio-mathematics, who explained this by “the loss of consciousness in the shadow of STASI”, the
political police of the German Democratic Republic. In his text, entitled Security and cowardice: the
cockroach under the lamp glass, he remarks that the power of the regime came from the control exercised
by the Securitate on the processes of fear, because “next to fear imperceptibly slides cowardice in the
face of authority, the constraint of behaving well, being in the line, accompanied at the same time by
a deft going back into one’s shell: a mixture between submission and the reflex of playing dead. The
Securitate maximised its efficiency by its very existence, and not by its actions. It triggered a subtle
mechanism of self-censure in the consciousness, manifested as a reflex system, nipping in the bud any
fragmentation, preventing the outbreak of possible conflicts with system.” 3
Before a description of the stifling atmosphere of the 1980s, and the refining of this self-censure, the
author evokes the brutal repression against all opposition during the two first decades after the death of Stalin.
On the one hand, the annihilation of all contestation of the regime was pursued, not only of the foundations
of its legitimacy but also the standards to be observed in daily life. On the other, violence was supposed to
obtain the formal adherence of the rest of the population (those who had escaped the concentration camps or
imprisonment) for the benefit of the communist authorities and the State-Party policy.
Violence would maintain the state of broadcast fear. The management of such fear, the result of brutal
means of repression against the adversaries of the Romanian communist regime, proved to be so efficient that it
created an image of an evil power, truly supernatural, for the Securitate. Fear, first cultivated and then maintained
by the political police, to the benefit of the communist power, had the same effects as monarchic absolutism two
centuries before and Nazism in the mid 20 th century. Despite the fact that the number of those who had direct
dealings with the Securitate is quite small with respect to the total population, the majority of the population
was in extreme fear of this institution. Even if, after Stalin’s death, for a brief period of three years, there was
a remission of brutalities by the repressive machine, they acted even more ruthlessly and with more violence
between 1957 and 1959 and increased people’s feelings of insecurity. Continual surveillance led to fear leaving
the prisons and forced labour camps and going into the streets. It entered homes to reach, after two decades of
reinforcement of the regime, the performance of a manipulation that no longer needs virulent repression. In the
mid 1960s, anti-communist resistance in Romania was almost wiped out. The regime had been accepted and
seen as an integral part of the daily universe by a large majority of the population, its principles accepted and
taken on as legitimate by an even larger number of citizens in comparison with the time at which communism
was established. Repression had ceased to be obvious, instead impregnating daily life. Evil became the norm
after two decades of administration of violence, carried out with scientific rigour.
3
Jens Reich, “Sicherheit und Feigheit – der Käfer im Brennglas”, in the volume Staatspartei und Staatssicherheit, under the coordination
of Siegfried Suckut and Walter Süss, Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1997.
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