crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
The memories of former political prisoners 4 show us the many facets of the Securitate brutalities
during the first two decades of its operation. “For dogs, a dog’s death”, proclaims a Stalinist slogan,
thus illustrating the toughness of the terrorist policy held by the communist authorities against those
who opposed the totalitarian regime. The Securitate conformed to this: violence, various forms of
torture, once known outside the concentration camps and prisons, often frightened former prisoners, as
it did those who were free. The Securitate used inhuman treatment applied to prisoners, of a violence
exercised for a long time during the 1950s, to teach toughness. This proved to be useful to State violence
developed later to control society and black out information. Midnight arrests, the fact of not knowing
for years on end what had happened to prisoners, the imprisonment of innocent people contributed to
an increase in citizen’s insecurity.
In the arsenal of cruelty of the regime of Soviet-Communist domination, torture played a
particularly important role, having repercussions on a social level, as a psychological factor, because
arousing fear is a means of subjugating citizens. Torture also aimed to attain immediate objectives, by
obtaining information considered to be useful by the machine of repression. A document classified as
strictly secret was kept in the archives of the former Central Committee of the Romanian Communist
Party, dating from the first of November 1967. In it all of the so-called “inappropriate methods”, used
before 1964 by the investigators of the Securitate are listed. They were divided into four categories, in
the following way:
1. The use of corporal punishment and prolonged under-nourishment to obtain accusatory declarations.
2. Moral pressure, used to constrain those under investigation to declare what they were ordered to
declare.
3. The falsification of declarations given by those under investigation and the use of false letters to make
them admit certain facts.
4. The writing of declarations in the absence of those under investigation or the recording of imaginary
answers that the prisoners were forced to sign. 5
Psychological torture was widely used during the investigation and the imprisonment. Lena
Constante, former prisoner with Patrascanu, member of the Communist party, brutally investigated
even after the death of Stalin, declared in 1967, in front of the official representative of the Central
Committee: “I was threatened with the arrest of my parents; I saw the investigator write the order in
front of me, and also make a telephone call. He then told me that he would leave me to think about it
until the next day. Terrified at the thought of my parents being arrested, I said to myself that I do what he
asked and lie.” 6 The falsification of declarations during investigations or the forcing of prisoners to sign
declarations concerning untrue acts, but that were supposed to justify new arrests, amplified the effects
of moral torture, by creating a feeling of guilt towards those incriminated by these false accusations.
After 1953, the investigations maintained this pattern in general. Investigators and those investigated
continued to play their roles: “The imaginary facts that each prisoner made themselves guilty of was
to give a picture of action organised against the Soviets, the Party and the State. The chief investigator
asked the questions, but also prepared the answers for each accused person, taken separately, who could
be found in his office”, told a former Securitate investigator. 7 The problem consisted of obtaining the
confirmation of this pre-established guilt. That is why physical torture was used, testimonies of which
extend over thousands of pages. We will mention, using the document quoted earlier, just some of
the means of torture whose use was recognized in 1967–68 by former agents of the Securitate. It is
also necessary to explain that these means were approved and sometimes they were even used under
the surveillance of the chief investigator or other high-ranking persons. Torture did not mean simply
over-zealousness; it was a task falling to all officers and sub-officers of the Securitate, as soon as they
4
See the bibliographical retrospectives concerning the memoirs of former political prisoners on the theme Anti-communist resistance in
Romania, published in the review The Archives of Totalitarianism, 5/4 (1994), pp. 244–266; 6/1 (1995), pp. 250–287, 7/2 (1995), pp.
202–221, 8/3 (1995), pp. 237–246, 9/4 (1995), pp. 203–220, 10/1 (1996), pp. 215–241, 11–12 (1996), pp. 221–233, a review published by
the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism, Bucharest.
5
Documents concerning inappropriate measures used in the investigation of Lucretiu Patrascanu case, the Archive of the Executive
Committee of the R.C.P., dossier No. 264, tome XX, pp. 343–363. The document was published in full (see Marius Oprea, The Platitude
of Evil. A documented history of the Romanian Secret Services – 1949–1989, Polirom, Iasi 2002, pp. 332–358).
6
Ibid., p. 352.
7
Ibid., p. 356.
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