the securitate and the police state 2

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The securitate and thepolice state in Romania:1948–64Dennis Deletant aa Senior Lecturer in Romanian Studies at theSchool of Slavonic and East European Studies ,University of London ,Published online: 02 Jan 2008.

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The Securitate and the Police Statein Romania: 1948-64

DENNIS DELETANT

Of all the secret police forces of the Communist satellite states of EasternEurope, the Romanian Securitate has achieved the most notoriety; indeed,such was the Western media's obsession with it during the revolution of1989 that the very word Securitate was included in the Oxford EnglishDictionary. That obsession was merely a reflection of the success of theSecuritate in instilling itself in the minds of Romanians as the ruthlessinstrument of a regime which, in its repressiveness in the post-war period,was probably surpassed among the East European states only by that ofEnver Hoxha in Albania. As with other machines of political terror, theSecuritate's most potent weapon was fear, and the depth of its inculcationinto the Romanian population provides the principal reason for its success.By the same token, the legacy of this fear will influence the behaviouralpattern of many Romanians for years to come, especially if they areunconvinced that the coercive practices of the past have been abandoned.

Fear induces compliance and is therefore a tremendous labour-savingdevice. From the evidence which I have been able to gather about themanpower of the Securitate, its numbers were far smaller than popularmyth would have us believe. Records indicate that in 1950, two yearsafter its creation, the number of officers of all ranks in the GeneralDirectorate of People's Security, Securitate for short, totalled almost5,000. In 1989 this number had risen to 14,259 according to VirgilMagureanu, the Director of the SRI (Serviciul roman de Informafii), thenew security service body established on 26 March 1990 as one of thesuccessors to the Securitate.1 These figures do not, of course, include thetens of thousands of informers whom the Securitate, by exploiting fear,was able to recruit, maximizing its efficiency by extending its feelers intothe innermost niches of Romanian society, nor, as regards the 1948 figure,the scores of Soviet advisers who worked alongside their Romanianapprentices in the national directorates. These numbers do not take intoaccount the security troops command (Comandamentul Trupelor deSecuritate) which was set up on 7 February 1949 and placed under theauthority of the Ministry of the Interior. At the time of the 1989 revolutionthese security troops numbered 23,370 officers and men and came underthe authority of the Department of State Security.

Intelligence and National Security, Vol.8, No.4 (October 1993), pp. 1-25.PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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2 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

This is the first of two articles outlining the evolution of the Securitate.In neither do I propose to offer an explanation of the Securitate's success;such an undertaking must await another occasion. I shall simply tracethe history of the Securitate in post-war Romania, examine the nature ofits subservience to its Soviet masters, and chart its relationship to theleadership of the Romanian Communist Party. A few words of clarificationabout my sources of information will help to establish the status of thearticles. Published materials provide only a fragmentary account of theSecuritate's history and organization. I have completed some of themissing details by consulting, for the years 1948—78, a mimeographedhistory of the Ministry of the Interior, produced for in-house use andentitled Organizarea sifuncfionarea Organelor Ministerului de Interne dela Infiinfare pfna fn prezent.2 This is principally a register of legislationregarding the Ministry but also provides a useful chronicle of structuralchanges to the Department of State Security. For the Securitate's organiza-tion in the period 1978-89 I have preferred to rely on private sources ofinformation rather than on the public statements of officials or formerSecuritate officers, many of which my researches have shown to bemisleading. Exceptions are Defence Minister Colonel-General VictorStanculescu's communique published in Romania libera on 28 February1990 that the numbers employed in the directorates of the DSS (excludingthe technical and communications units) totalled some 8,400, and PresidentIliescu's revelation that, with the technical and communications personnelincluded, the figure reached about 15.OO0.3

Much of what was written about the Securitate at the time of the revolu-tion, both in Romanian and in the Western media, was sensationalist andlacked definition. An example of the latter was the way in which manyRomanians used the word Securitate and its derivative securist 'secretpoliceman' as a blanket term to denote anyone employed by the Ministryof the Interior. It was thus applied to members of the police force {militia)which included traffic and criminal investigation departments, the PassportOffice, and the prison service. Some Romanians even extended securistto include those who occupied any administrative post, be it in a ministry,bank, hospital, collective farm, or on the railway, such was the allegedubiquity of its presence. Another example of the paranoia about theSecuritate was the customary attribution of the rank of 'colonel' to everySecuritate officer; there were no lesser ranks. Correctly applied, Securitatewas the shorthand term for the institution which policed Romanians' livesthroughout the period of Communist rule, and which, for the greater partof it, was known as Departamentul Securitafii Statului (Department ofState Security) of the Ministry of the Interior.

A glimpse under the veil of secrecy enveloping the activities of the

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THE SECURITATE AND THE POLICE STATE IN ROMANIA - I 3

Securitate was provided by the racy revelations of Lieutenant-General IonMihai Pacepa in Red Horizons.* Pacepa was one of the highest-rankingofficials of any Communist secret service ever to defect to the West,having been one of the heads of the Directia de InformafiiExterne (DIE),the foreign intelligence service which formed part of the DSS. Pacepa hadentered the counter-sabotage section of the DSS's forerunner, the DirectiaGenerals a Securitafii Statului, in the early 1950s and was later sent toWest Germany where, it is alleged in Romanian circles, he was recruitedby the CIA. That the public in the West was aroused to the excesses of theCeaus,escu clan and to the assistance given by Romanian intelligence toArab terrorist groups owed much to the impact which Pacepa's revelationshad in this best-seller, published, it should be stressed, ten years after hisdefection to the United States in July 1978. In what the author called adiary, but was rather a patchwork of reminiscences covering the lastmonths of his life in Romania, with excursions into the period before andafter 1978, he paraded before the reader a catalogue of crimes such asmurder, blackmail, drug-smuggling and kidnapping in which he describedCeaus,escu's direct involvement.

Most of Pacepa's career was spent in the DIE, of which Pacepa himselfsays he became deputy head in 1972.5 In his book he provides glimpsesof the structure of the DIE, but says little about its history, while theDepartment of State Security warrants barely a passing mention in a singlesentence.6 Nevertheless, the activities of the DIE often overlapped withthose of the DSS and in describing the former Pacepa offers an insightinto the intrusive part played by the DSS in Romanians' daily lives.

Initially, Romania shared with all the Communist regimes of EasternEurope a total reliance upon terror as an instrument of political power.This terror was wielded in two stages: first to eliminate opponents inthe drive to consolidate power, and second to ensure compliancy oncerevolutionary change had been effected. In Romania's case the first stage,broadly speaking, encompassed the period 1945 until 1964, the year inwhich an amnesty of political prisoners was completed, and the secondran from 1964 to 1989. There was a perceptible change in the degree ofrepression exercised by the regime in 1964. Until this final year ofGheorghiu-Dej's rule as General Secretary of the Romanian Workers'Party (1948-64), terror embraced the whole of Romanian society, searchingfor actual or potential opponents of totalitarian conformity, and impartingto many the sense that they were being hunted. After 1964 Romanianswere marked by fear, rather than terror, of the Securitate and theCeausescu regime, for all its appalling abuses of human dignity and dis-respect for human rights, never repeated the tactics of mass arrests andwholesale internal deportations that were a feature of most of the Dej era.

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The coup of 23 August 1944, carried out by Romania's young KingMichael against the wartime dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, marked awatershed in Romania's history. Its military effect was to produce a volte-face and take Romania out of the Axis camp and into the Allied one.Its political intention was a return to democracy. But the coup, far frominaugurating a return to the democratic rule, with all its imperfections,of the interwar period, was subverted by Stalin to impose Communist ruleupon the Romanian population. Ironically, the principal architects of thecoup, King Michael and the leaders of the main democratic parties, over-threw a military dictatorship only themselves to be virtually overthrownwithin six months by a new totalitarian order.

The maintenance of Soviet imposed Communist rule in Romania wasdependent on the presence of the Soviet Army and upon the seizure ofthe forces of law and order - the army, the police, and the judiciary.Control of the Ministries of the Interior, Defence and Justice thus becameprime targets of the Communist Party. In the new caretaker governmentof General Constantin Sanatescu (23 August-2 November 1944), set upto direct Romania's new war course, the majority of ministerial postswent to military officers; only the Ministry of Justice was secured by theCommunists in the person of Lucre(iu Patrascanu, who had been a partyto the preparations for the King's coup against Antonescu. The ForeignIntelligence Service, the SSI (Serviciul Special de Informafii), was purgedof most of its senior officers but the personnel of the Ministry of theInterior and of the Siguranfa, the security police, remained largely un-changed. It was the failure to replace these figures that provided a pretextfor the Communists to set about torpedoing the Sanatescu government,while at the same time the Soviet authorities set about weakening Romania'sarmy and police force.

While the Romanian military and police forces were being drasticallypruned, a para-military left-wing group called the 'Guard of PatrioticDefence' was carefully nurtured under the supervision of the NKGB.The 'Guard' was set up in September 1944 and placed under the commandof Emil Bodnaras, a Romanian-born Soviet agent of Ukrainian-Germanparentage. Bodnaras is believed to have been recruited as a Soviet agentwhile he was a cadet at the artillery school in Timisoara in the late 1920s.His transfer to a barracks at Sadagura in northern Romania only 30 kilo-metres from the river Dniester and the border with the USSR offered himthe perfect opportunity to defect (published sources place the date of hisdefection in the period 1931 -34). A colleague of his has recently revealedthat Bodnara§'s fluent knowledge of German allowed him to be used onvarious espionage missions in Poland and the Baltic Republics before beingsent to Bulgaria in 1935. En route through Romania he was recognized

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at Ploie§ti station, tried for desertion and 'Communist activity' in 1936, andsentenced to six years' hard labour.7 He was released in December 1942 onexpiry of his sentence and may well have been used by Marshal Antonescuin order to facilitate military contacts with the Soviets following the defeatat Stalingrad. On 23 August 1944 'engineer Ceausu', as Bodnaras wasknown conspiratorially, took charge of the arrested Antonescu and hisassociates and held them until they were handed over to the Russians on1 September. The 'Guards' provided the ideal cover for the training ofagents and thugs who were to be infiltrated into the police and securityforces when the Communists gained access to the Ministry of the Interior.

Sanatescu resigned at the end of November and in his place the Kingappointed General Nicolae Radescu, formerly Chief of the General Staffand a non-party figure, to form a Cabinet on 2 December. Radescu wasfar more forthright and resolute than his predecessor and proved muchmore of an obstacle to the Russians, who had supported his appointment,than they anticipated. The Communist-dominated National DemocraticFront had hoped to secure the Ministry of the Interior and when Radescureserved the post for himself Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, two of theleading Communists, refused even to discuss participation of the NDF inthe new government. They backed down when the new Prime Ministerconceded the position of Under-Secretary, or Deputy Minister, to theCommunists, appointing Teohari Georgescu, a member of the Party'sCentral Committee. Other Communists in the Cabinet were Patrascanu,the Minister of Justice, and Gheorghiu-Dej, the Party Secretary, whobecame Minister of Communications and Public Works.

Georgescu's appointment gave Bodnaras and his NKGB associatesthe chance for which they had been waiting. With the Under-Secretary'sauthority they introduced into the Siguranfa and the SSI agents trained inthe 'Patriotic Guards', and Georgescu installed prefects in the provinceswith strict orders to avoid government instructions and to do only hisbidding. How well-orchestrated the Communists' moves to grasp thelevers of power were became evident from the visit made in early January1945 to Moscow by Ana Pauker and Gheorghiu-Dej. Shortly after the pairreturned to Bucharest British diplomats reported that they 'claim to havereceived Soviet approval for the bringing into power of a Communistgovernment'.8

Matters came to a head on 24 February. At the end of a large NDFdemonstration, the crowd moved into the palace square in front of theMinistry of the Interior where Radescu had his office. Shots were fired,it is not clear by whom, and several people were killed. Unable to containhis anger at the provocation, the Prime Minister broadcast to the nationand denounced the Communist leaders Pauker and Luca as 'hyena;;' and

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"foreigners without God or country', a reference to their non-Romanianorigins and their atheist creed. The Russians now intervened. The SovietDeputy Foreign Minister Vyshinsky arrived unexpectedly in Bucharest on27 February and went straight to the palace to demand that R5descu bedismissed. The King was so intimidated that he consented.

On 1 March Vyshinsky informed the King that Petru Groza, Radescu'sdeputy and a trusted stooge of the Russians 'was the Soviet choice' asPrime Minister. Michael reluctantly gave Groza the go-ahead to form agovernment. From this date control of the Romanian security policepassed entirely into the hands of Soviet NKGB officers, even though theSecuritate's personnel was largely Romanian. The new Groza governmentwas dominated by the NDF, which held 14 of the 18 Cabinet posts, whileCommunists controlled the Ministries of the Interior, Justice, War, andthe National Economy. Teohari Georgescu was elevated to the position ofMinister of the Interior and so the direction of this ministry passed intothe hands of the Romanian Communist Party. Georgescu's colleague insubversion, the NKVD-trained Emil BodnSra? was promoted secretarygeneral to the Prime Minister. On 27 April Groza signed an order givingthe secretary general control of the Serviciul Special de Informafii (SSI).The order stated that the SSI was constituted 'from its own civilian per-sonnel and from military personnel seconded from the Ministry of Waron the recommendation of the secretary general'. Another Soviet agent,Serghei Nikonov, was appointed to be the actual director of the SSI,reporting to BodnSras,.

Nikonov's career illustrates the methods used by the NKGB to infiltratetheir agents into Romania. Nikonov was born of Russian parents inBessarabia. He had been expelled from la?i University in northern Romaniawhere he was a student of chemistry for participating in Communistmeetings and was sent to Brussels to continue his studies. From there hewas moved to Marseilles where he was co-opted into the local leadershipof the French Communist Party. He was brought back to Romania torun an espionage network but was caught, tried and imprisoned, first inDoftana jail, and then, after its destruction in the earthquake of November1940, in Caransebes where he joined Bodnaras and Pintilie Bodnarenko.Upon his release following the 23 August coup he was reassigned dutiesby INU, the Foreign Intelligence Directorate of the NKGB, and thesewere institutionalized with his appointment as Director of the SSI. In thesummer of 1952 Nikonov was transferred with the rank of Lieutenant-General to head the Second Bureau of Military Intelligence of the RomanianGeneral Staff.9

The SSI's remit covered 'the gathering of general intelligence whichmet the higher interests of the state'. It was organized in four sections,

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later renamed directorates and a secretariat. The first section was chargedwith 'obtaining intelligence from abroad of a political, economic, socialand military nature' and 'control of all diplomatic offices abroad', andwas subdivided into three departments, organized on a geographical basis:'South', 'West' and 'North'. Section One also included the Office forIssuing Entry-Exit Visas and Passports to Romanian Citizens which wasto be used 'as an auxiliary means of recruiting part-time informers'.10

Here, for the first time, we find a policy statement of a government agencyin Romania making the issue of a passport conditional on collaborationwith an organ of state security. It was a tactic that remained an integralpart of the Communist regime's armoury of coercion until the overthrowof Ceausescu.

Other sections of the SSI were responsible for obtaining intelligencefrom within the country and for mounting counter-espionage operations,both civilian and military. A Bessarabian-born Russian, Petea (Pyotr)Goncearuc, was named head of the counter-espionage section. Born in1911 in the Bessarabian capital of ChisinSu, he joined the CommunistYouth Movement in Bessarabia, and in 1932 was sent to Moscow fortraining in military espionage. Three years later he was infiltrated backinto Romania across the Dniester, but was quickly captured, tried andsentenced to ten years' imprisonment. After his release from Caransebesjail in August 1944, he was given a post in the political and administrativesection of the Romanian Communist Party and in April 1945 transferredto the SSI." According to Mezincescu, who met Goncearuc on severaloccasions in a professional capacity (Mezincescu was a veteran Communistand later a senior Foreign Ministry official), the latter was a 'cunningbrute' who proved himself 'very efficient' with his interrogation methods.Although these are not described, the beatings and torture of such figuresas Peasant Party leaders Ion Mihalache, Nicolae Penescu, and VasileSerdici in 1947 speak for themselves.

Eavesdropping and shadowing of targets was carried out by section fourof the SSI in collaboration with a parallel directorate in the Siguranfa.Military intelligence remained the task of the Second Bureau of the ArmyGeneral Staff but this was also subordinated to a Soviet master, the GRU.The subservience of the Romanian security and intelligence services tothe interests of the Soviet Union was completed with the appointmentas head of the political and administrative section of the RomanianCommunist Party of Pantelimon Bodnarenko, a Ukrainian-born NKVDagent. This section of the Party was charged with counter-espionageamong CP members. Bodnarenko, who was also known as Pantiusha,had been resident in Bucharest since 1924. He was arrested for spying in1936 and sent to Doftana jail near Bucharest where he met the imprisoned

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Dej. Bodnarenko assumed a Romanian name, Gheorghe Pintilie, as didSerghei Nikonov of the SSI (Serghei Nicolau) and a number of Soviettrained agents who later moved to the apex of the Siguranfa, among themBoris Grunberg (who took the name of Alexandru Nicolski).

After the installation of the Groza government in March 1945 theCommunist ministers performed as Soviet puppets whose moves werechoreographed in Moscow and made with the help of Soviet counsellorsin Bucharest. Political censorship had been carried out since September1944 on the instructions of the chief Soviet censor, Serghei Dangulov(later press attache at the Soviet Embassy) who controlled the flow ofpublic information in and out of Romania. Among the Soviet intelligencechiefs from whom instructions were channelled to Bodnaras and Pintiliewas Dmitri Georgievich Fedichkin, the principal representative of theExternal Intelligence Division (INU) of the NKGB. (INU's head between1941 and 1946 was General Pavel Mihkhailovich Fitin.)

At the level of direct political involvement the most influential figurewas Andrei Vyshinsky, Soviet Deputy Foreign Commissar. The first steptaken by PatrSscanu, Georgescu, Bodnaras, and Pintilie on orders fromVyshinsky was a purge of the bodies they directed. On 2 April 1945 theCommunist Party daily Scinteia announced that several hundred policeand counter-espionage officers who were 'guilty of the disaster whichhad befallen the country' (the Communist euphemism for 'siding withGermany') had been arrested. Party activists and opportunists werebrought in to fill the empty posts.

As elsewhere in their satellite countries, the Soviet authorities neededwell-trained security and intelligence personnel in Romania, and valuedmen of experience. Eugen Cristescu, the wartime head of the SSI, hadbeen taken to the Soviet Union on 12 October 1944 and detained thereuntil the spring of 1946. In his absence Cristescu was tried and sentencedto three years' imprisonment on 17 April 1945 for 'abuse of power'.12

On 6 May 1946 the 'Great National Betrayal Trial' opened in Bucharestin which Marshal Antonescu and his associates, including Cristescu, facedcharges of 'war crimes'. All were found guilty and sentenced to death,but Cristescu's sentence was commuted to forced labour for life. Fromthe circumstantial evidence available it seems that Cristescu was sparedbecause of his value to the NKGB. A Romanian agent reported on 1 April1946 that

intelligence officials at the American legation [in Bucharest] hadinstructed their agents to look out for one of the headquarters ofthe NKVD near Carol Boulevard. It is known that the former headof the SSI, Eugen Cristescu, is in this building. He has agreed to work

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for the NKVD. At the moment he is working at the headquartersof the above-named body with Colonel Borisov and Lieutenant-Colonel Leontiev. Eugen Cristescu is co-ordinating the activity ofthe NKVD in Romania. He has travelled in the company of Borisovto Moscow and lately to Paris. Eugen Cristescu has agreed to co-operate in order to save his life. He is a prisoner, can see no one,and only goes out accompanied by the two NKVD chiefs. The[American] agents have received orders to report on the possibilitiesof making contact with Cristescu.13

Cristescu's co-operation with the authorities was made, however, as aprisoner, for his life sentence had not been lifted, and in April 1949 weare told that he was subjected to fresh interrogations by the new Securitate,the DGSP. A little over a year later, on 13 June 1950, he died, accordingto the death certificate, of heart failure in VSciresti jail.14

After the imposition of the Groza government in March 1945 thesecurity police Direcfia Polifiei de Siguranfa, which remained sub-ordinated to the General Directorate of Police within the Ministry of theInterior, was organized in four departments known as servicii. The firstdepartment followed the movements and activities of foreigners, the secondcovered suspected subversive figures, the third intercepted correspondence,and the fourth assured radio contact throughout the organization. In 1946a new 'special mobile brigade' was added to the DPS to carry out arrestsand organize the transport of prisoners whose numbers had grown rapidlyin the purge of 'fascists' from public life which Prime Minister Grozaannounced on 7 March 1945.

Citizens'committees were formed after Groza became Prime Ministerto assist the police, who had been reduced by Soviet order to 7,500 on28 February 1945 and thereafter purged. These committees abrogated tothemselves the right to check people's documents in the street, to searchhomes for goods allegedly removed from the Soviet Union during the waror formerly the property of Germans and Hungarians and to verify thatfood was not being hoarded, and to inspect houses with a view to billetingrefugees or Soviet officers. With no legal supervision of these randomintrusions into people's lives, the arbitrary ease with which the forces oforder degenerated further into repressive forces under Groza generated awidespread fear of authority.

On 20 March 1947 315 members of the opposition parties were ar restedand in the following month another 600. The campaign to eliminate theopposition parties, approved by Stalin and co-ordinated by Vyshinsky andFedichkin, had entered its final stage. The latter instructed Pintilie tocompromise the Peasant Party leadership, which Pintilie did by getting

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an agent provocateur to persuade Maniu's deputy Ion Mihalache to attemptto flee the country in a plane provided by Pintilie. The plan succeeded,and on 14 July 1947 Mihalache and several prominent figures in thePeasant Party were arrested as they were about to leave for Turkey fromTSmSdsiu airfield, about 46 km from Bucharest. A few days later Maniuwas detained and the whole leadership of the Party was put on trial on 30October for plotting against the security of the state. Maniu and Mihalachewere each sentenced to hard labour for life, commuted to life imprison-ment. Neither was ever seen in public again, the former dying in prisonin 1953, and the latter in 1963.

PStrSscanu had also become a target of the Soviet security service. TheMinister of Justice's advocacy of collaboration with the National PeasantParty before the imposition of the Groza government in March 1945 hadalready marked him out to the Russians as unreliable and fuelled suspicionsthat he was placing his own personal interest as a potential national leaderabove that of Soviet policy. According to Ion Pacepa, in the winter of1947 Pintilie informed Pyotr Vasilyevich Fedotov, the new head of theforeign intelligence service of the KI, the Committee of Information, whichhad been formed from the merger of INU and GRU (Soviet MilitaryIntelligence) in the autumn of that year,15 that P&trascanu was sabotag-ing 'Romania's march towards Communism' and furnished proof that theMinister of Justice was protecting opposition party leaders. On 20 February1948 Pintilie sent a report to Moscow claiming that he had 'overwhelmingproof that PStrSscanu had been an informer of the Siguranfa during thewar.16 Two days later, at the First Congress of the Romanian Workers'Party, formed in the previous November from the union of the Communistand Social Democrat parties, Teohari Georgescu denounced Patr^scanuas 'an exponent of bourgeois ideology' who had 'overestimated the forcesof the enemy, that is, of the class-enemy, potentially helped by the westernimperialist powers',17 but nothing was said about P&trSscanu's allegedpolice collaboration; in fact this particular accusation, and the charge oftreasonable activities in concert with Foris before and during the war, weremade public only just before his trial in 1954.

On 28 April 1948 P5tr5scanu was detained on Dej's orders and neverseen again in public. He and his wife were ordered to be moved to a villaat Lake Snagov some 35 km to the north of Bucharest, and were held inisolation there until 19 January 1949 when Pintilie, accompanied by ColonelValerian Bucikov, the head of the DGSP Sixth Directorate responsiblefor Gheorghiu-Dej's bodyguard, and Iosif Ranghef, deputy member ofthe Politburo responsible for Party cadres, brought them to the DGSP'sheadquarters on Calea Rahovei in Bucharest where they were placed inseparate cells in the basement.18 Each was interrogated at length and then

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Lucrefiu was taken to the SSI HQ for questioning about his links withWestern intelligence agencies. Here he fell into the hands of PyotrGoncearuc, the head of the counter-espionage section. Eduard Mezincescu,a senior official in the Romanian Foreign Ministry at the time, has recentlyrecounted details of conversations with Goncearuc which reveal theprincipal directions the interrogation took. These included a proposalmade to Patrascanu during a visit to Brussels in 1947 that he should defect,and alleged hard-currency dealings with the help of Herant Torossian, aRomanian-based Armenian businessman. But Goncearuc's main obj ectivewas to discover what links Patrascanu had with the British Secret Intel-ligence Service which were maintained, allegedly, through the intermediaryof a folklorist Harry Brauner and his wife Lena Constante who had beenarrested at the same time as the Patras.canus.19

Goncearuc maintained that Patrascanu was.not tortured during hisperiod of interrogation at the SSI, but despite this Mezincescu's sources statethat he tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists with a razor blade.In order to prevent detection of the source of the razor blade P&trascanubroke it into small pieces and then swallowed it. SSI officers were instructedto give laxatives to Patrascanu in an effort to retrieve the fragments andclosely examined his bowel movements. Although they managed to piecetogether the object the gastric juices had removed any traces of finger-prints. On the admission of Lieutenant-General Serghei Nikonov (SergiuNicolau), the head of the SSI at the time, no evidence was produced to linkPatrascanu with the British SIS, despite interrogation lasting over a year,but a disgruntled Gheorghiu-Dej ordered a continuation of Patrascanu'sordeal which was to last another four years.

Pintilie's promotion to membership of the RWP's Central Committeein February 1948, and that of his wife, Ana Toma, herself an INU agentin Romania, to a senior position in the Foreign Ministry, demonstratedthe stranglehold which the Soviet security service had upon the RomanianParty. The career of Ana Toma (Grossman) herself illustrates the roleassigned by the NKGB/INU to its female agents who were often describedin Romanian Party circles as 'amazons'. Infiltrated into the Party in the1930s she seems to have acted more as a custodian of her partners thanas a wife. Her first marriage to a veteran Communist Sorin Toma dis-integrated following the latter's exile to the Soviet Union, and in 1942 shebecame the partner of Constantin Plrvulescu, another senior figure in theembryonic Party. Four years later she married Pintilie, a notorious drinkerover whom the NKGB/INU deemed it prudent to have total supervisionin view of the position he held. Soviet control was further demonstratedby the composition of Dej's immediate entourage in 1948: his privatesecretary was Nina Nikonova, wife of Serghei Nikonov, the head of the

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SSI; his chefde cabinet was Mikhail Gavrilovici, an NKGB agent, and thehead of his personal guard was Valerian Budkov, another Soviet agent.

Six months after Pintilie's promotion to membership of the CentralCommittee he was moved from his post as head of the political andadministrative section of the CC to head a new body for state securitywhich replaced the DPS or Siguranfa. It was named Direcfia Generals aSecuritafii Poporului (DGSP) or Securitate for short. The new namesignalled a new mission for the security police. Formally, it remained abranch of the Ministry of the Interior. Its role, defined under its foundingdecree no.221 of 30 August 1948, was 'to defend the democratic conquestsand to ensure the security of the Romanian People's Republic against theplotting of internal and external enemies'.20 However, defence of the'democratic conquests' meant the maintenance of the RWP in power andthus the new Romanian People's Republic officially certified itself a policestate. Two weeks earlier, on 15 August, Lieutenant-General GheorghePintilie was appointed by decree the DGSP's Director. Two assistantdirectors, with the rank of Major General, were appointed on 1 September;they were Alexandru Nicolski, a Russian-speaking Bessarabian Jew, andVladimir Mazuru, a Ukrainian from Northern Bukovina (later Romanianambassador to Poland). All three were Soviet officers of the NKGB (thePeople's Commissariat of State Security), which in 1946 had been raisedin status from a Commissariat to a Ministry, becoming the MGB, theSoviet Ministry of State Security. At the same time the NKVD (thePeople's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) became the MVD, the SovietMinistry of Internal Affairs.

A body of Soviet counsellors from the MGB supervised the activity ofthe young DGSP. The MGB chief adviser in Bucharest from 1949 to 1953was Aleksandr Sakharovsky who in 1956 became head of the First ChiefDirectorate of the KGB.21 The Soviet Ambassador to Bucharest, SergheiKavtaradze, appointed in 1948, who came under the authority of the newlyformed KI (foreign intelligence service), headed by Vyacheslav Molotovand his deputy Fedotov, was given control of the civilian (MGB) andmilitary (GRU) residents in Bucharest for a brief period22 but there is noevidence that the Ambassador pulled rank on his nominal subordinates.In 1949 Molotov was succeeded as Foreign Minister and Chairman of theKI by Vyshinsky, a sycophant of Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria.

It was Beria who oversaw the creation of the security framework withthe satellite states. Although Stalin had attempted to dilute his power,which had grown enormously as a result of the wartime expansion of thesecurity network, by replacing him as head of the NKVD in 1946, Beriaremained, through his position as Deputy Chairman of the Council ofMinisters, and through the sycophancy shown to him by the new head of

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the MGB, Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, the second most powerfulfigure in the Soviet Union. Abakumov's management style in the MGBwas, like that of Beria, brutal,23 and this same quality characterized themen chosen by the NKGB/MGB to head Romania's security police. Theconduct of both Pintilie and Nicolski speaks for itself. The former carriedout the death sentence imposed on the former RCP general secretaryStefan Foris by Gheorghiu-Dej in 1946.24 Pintilie collected Foris by carfrom the secret residence in which he had been held since his arrest inApril 1944, and in a lonely Bucharest street, with the help of his Russianchauffeur Vania, beat Foris to death with an iron bar. He then gaveinstructions for Foris's mother to be murdered, again on Dej's orders.She was drowned with millstones hung around her neck in the Cris riverin Transylvania.25

Alexandru Nicolski's original name was Boris Grunberg. He was bornon 2 June 1915 in Chisinau, the principal town of Bessarabia which atthat time was under Russian rule. In 1932 he joined the Union of Com-munist Youth in his native town and in the following year was detainedfor two weeks by the Siguranfa. He obtained a job in the telephoneexchange in ChisinSu. In December 1940, six months after the Sovietannexation of Bessarabia, he was recruited by the NKVD and moved toCernSufi where he underwent training as an agent of the foreign intel-ligence directorate (INU) of the NKVD. He was given false Romanianidentity papers in the name of Vasile Stefanescu and sent across thefrontier on 26 May 1941 to gather information on Romanian troop move-ments. Within two hours he was arrested by Romanian frontier guards.According to the record of his interrogation, his rudimentary knowledge ofRomanian betrayed his foreign identity and he passed himself off as anethnic Russian with the name of Alexandru Sergheevici Nicolski. He wastried for espionage in July 1941 and sentenced to forced labour for life.He was jailed in Ploiesti and then moved to Aiud to join other im-prisoned Soviet spies, among them Vladimir Gribici, Simion Zeigner andAfanasie Sisman, all of whom stayed after their release in August 1944 inRomania. In October 1944 Nicolski joined the police (Direcfia Generatea Polifei) and after the imposition of the Groza government in March1945 was named head of the Corps of Detectives. On 17 April 1947 he wasappointed Inspector General of the Siguranfa (Polifia de Siguranfa) andwhen the DGSP was established in the following year, he was made oneof Pintilie's deputies.26

Despite the veil of secrecy cast over the personnel of the DGSP, Nicolski'sreputation for brutality earned him the dubious distinction of becomingthe first senior officer to achieve notoriety outside Romania. In a state-ment made in Paris in January 1949 a young assistant of Prime Minister

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RSdescu, Adriana Georgescu Cosmovici, who was arrested in Bucharestin July 1945 on the grounds of having belonged to the Young Liberalsgroup which the Communist authorities characterized as a 'resistancemovement', recounted how the 'communist secret police investigators'beat her repeatedly with a sand-filled leather hose, struck her head againsta wall, and hit her face and chin until she was left with only six teeth inher lower jaw. She named three investigators as having threatened herwith guns: Stroescu, Bulz and Nicolski.27 Documents published afterNicolski's death on 16 April 1992 suggested that in July 1949 he orderedthe murder of seven prisoners, allegedly leaders of an anti-Communistresistance movement, in transit from Gherla jail.28

The DGSP was organized in ten national directorates: Information (I);Counter-sabotage (II); Counter-espionage in the Prisons and Police (III);Counter-espionage in the Armed Forces (IV); Penal Investigation (V);Protection of Ministers (VI); Technical (VII); Cadres (VIII); Political(responsible for Party purity) (IX); Administration (X). Auxiliary depart-ments dealt with interception of mail, surveillance and eavesdropping,and further included a cipher section and a secretariat. The SSI, whichwas responsible for foreign espionage and counter-espionage, worked inparallel with directorates I and IV of the DGSP between 1948 and 1951when it was absorbed into the DGSP. Regional directorates (direcfiiregionale) were established to cover the capital Bucharest and the districts ofBrasov, Cluj, Constanta, Craiova, Galafi, Iasi, Oradea Mare, Pitesti,Ploiesti, Sibiu, Suceava, and Timisoara, and each of these directorateshad its own organization corresponding to that of the ten nationaldirectorates to which they were subordinated. Each regional directoratewas further subdivided into county offices (servicii judefene) whichthemselves encompassed town and communes bureaux (birouri desecuritate).

Establishing the strength of the DGSP is difficult because much of thematerial relating to its organization was removed by the Soviet authoritieswhen their counsellors were withdrawn in the early 1960s (the last Sovietcounsellor left the Ministry of the Interior in 1964). Consultation of rudi-mentary figures surviving in the Ministry of Interior archives relating tothe strength of the DGSP indicates that the number of officers servingin the ten central directorates shortly after its constitution was 1,151, ofwhom 848 were listed as secretarial and manual staff (the latter all carriedmilitary rank, such as sergeant-major, even if they were typists, chauffeurs,plumbers or waitresses). The 13 regional directorates employed 2,822officers, roughly two-thirds of whom were manual or ancillary staff. Thesefigures may appear abnormally low, given the popular conception of theDGSP as a ubiquitous and all-pervasive instrument of coercion. But they

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do not include the network of informers who enabled the Securitate tofunction as efficiently as it did.

Soviet advisers were attached to each of the national directorates tosupervise the training of the Romanian recruits and to monitor theiractivity, and communication was carried out through interpreters, manyof whom were from Bessarabia. Emphasis was placed on trustworthycadres. In the eyes of the Soviet advisers many educated Romanianswere considered unreliable and compromised because of the Antonescuregime's alliance with Germany. A second reason for caution derivedfrom the fact that very few Romanians had willingly shown any enthusiasmfor the Romanian Communist Party before its propulsion to power,whereas, conversely, members of the ethnic minorities had. Against thisbackground we should not be surprised to find several recruits for thesenior positions in the DGSP drawn from two categories of person:members of the ethnic minorities; and unskilled manual workers.

Contrary to claims made by ultra-nationalists, the numbers drawn fromethnic minorities, although disproportionate, do not appear to be excessive.I stress 'appear' because it is clear from the DGSP's own listings of theethnic identity of its senior officers that the Soviet advisers wished toobscure the Soviet provenance of its three principal commanders, Pintilie,Nicolski and Mazuru, by entering them as Romanians. However, there isno evidence to suggest the 'Romanianization' of officers of other ethnicorigins. An examination of the ethnic and professional background ofsenior (with the rank of major and above) officers in the DGSP shows thatof a total of 60, 38 were Romanians, 15 were Jews (including Nicolski),three Hungarians, two Ukrainians (Pintilie and Mazuru), one Czech andone Armenian. These figures hardly bear out the claim made in the extremenationalist weekly Romania Mare (25 October 1991) by its editor CorneliuVadim Tudor, a notorious sycophant of Ceausescu, that the DGSP wasstaffed largely by Hungarians and Russian-speaking Jews. As far asprofessional background is concerned, the information available limitsus to the national directorates and the secretariat; among 25 personsappointed to senior officer rank, there were two electricians, two carpenters,a locksmith, a blacksmith, a lathe operator, a craftsman, a tailor, achemist, a schoolteacher, a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer, one personwithout a higher education, five with degree studies, and five whosebackground was not given.

Two other principal organs of internal security in the People's Republicwere established early in 1949. On 23 January the militia (DirecfiaGenerala a Mili(iei) was set up to replace the police and gendarmerie(rural police) and on 7 February the security troops (trupele de seairitate)were created. Both bodies were placed under the authority of the Ministry

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of the Interior, and Lieutenant-General Pavel Cristescu, allegedly aRussian,29 was named as commander of the former. Among the militia'sduties was that of issuing residence permits, one which facilitated its taskof regulating the movement of population, of monitoring suspects, andof preparing for deportations. The security troops were estimated in themid 1950s to number 165,000 officers and men, organized in brigadesand equipped with artillery and tanks.30 Their principal duties were tomaintain public order in the major industrial centres and to quell anyresistance to government measures such as collectivization or appropriationof goods and property. Throughout the 1950s they were called upon toeradicate partisan resistance in mountain areas and, in a more passive role,were employed to guard the labour camps (colonii de munca) which in 1950had been placed under a special department of the Ministry of Interiorknown as Direcfia Unitafilor de Munca.

The three arms of the Ministry of the Interior, the DGSP, the militia,and the security troops, were the blunt instruments used by Stalin, Molotovand his deputy Vyshinsky, to impose the dictatorship of the proletariatupon the Romanians. The revolution of Romanian society was effected byeradicating the vestiges of the old 'bourgeois-capitalist' order: democraticpoliticians, lawyers, journalists, priests, landowners and industrialistswere rounded up and charged with conspiring with the Western powers,notably the United States and Britain, to overthrow the new regime. Thecoercive nature of the revolution was evident from the methods employedto nationalize the country's economic institutions and to collectivizeagriculture. Failure to respect the collective agreements, made by Partyrepresentatives in the name of industrial workers, was punishable underthe 1948 penal code, and in early 1949 a law was passed imposing thedeath penalty for crimes endangering the security of the state or thedevelopment of the national economy.31

Forced labour was introduced under the labour code of 8 June 1950.Cosmetically obscured by the euphemism 'temporary labour service',which the Council of Ministers was given the right to demand from citizens,it was used as an instrument of punishment for the thousands chargedwith economic sabotage and absenteeism, which included tens of thousandsof peasants who resisted the forced collectivization of agriculture. Thenumbers of inmates were swelled by the victims of mass deportations,usually carried out by the militia, from the major cities which had begunin 1952 to make room for the workers drafted in to provide manpowerfor new urban-based factories created in the drive to industrialize. Undera decree of 16 February 1952 several categories of person were to beremoved from Bucharest. The families of war criminals, persons in prison,and those who had fled abroad were to receive notice 12-24 hours before

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being deported, and were allowed to take with them 50 kilos of luggage.Officers purged from the army, former judges, lawyers, industrialists andthose who owned more than ten hectares of land were also to be removed,but were allowed to take all of their property with them.32

By the end of 1952 no city resident was allowed to change his dwellingwithout permission from an 'Office of Rental Accommodation', and allmovement between towns was controlled by the militia. Travel was per-mitted only in the line of work or for health reasons. Any person stayingin a place other than home for more than 24 hours was required to registerwith the militia, including hotel guests and people staying with relatives,and foreigners required a permit for all trips made inside the country.The restrictions on travel for both Romanians and foreigners were liftedin the early 1960s, but the other controls remained in place until theoverthrow of Ceausescu.

Only estimates can be given for the numbers of persons deported to thelabour camps, called first unitafi de munca and later colonii de munca,which were set up under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior in1949 'to re-educate through labour elements hostile to the RPR'." In theearly 1950s there were believed to be 180,000 in camps scattered aroundthe country, 40,000 of whom were exploited on the notorious Danube-BlackSea canal project, which had eight camps and an additional 20,000 so-calledvoluntary workers.34 Corneliu Coposu, the secretary of the Peasant Partyleader Maniu and himself an inmate of Romanian prisons for 17 years,put the numbers of those arrested after 1947 as 282,000, of whom heestimated 190,000 to have died in detention.35 Even allowing for a marginof error, these two independent estimates support the description ofRomania in the Dej era as one vast prison camp. Related to the populationof Romania at the time, the numbers of those denied their liberty wouldrepresent about one person in every 40 of the population. The explanationfor these numbers lies, in Coposu's view, in the excess of zeal with whichthe Romanian coercive apparatus sought to outperform its patron.36

Many of those detained were peasants who resisted the land reformof 2 March 1949 under which all agricultural property over 50 hectareswas expropriated by the state. To overcome this opposition to the teamsof collectivizers sent from the cities to expropriate the land security troopswere brought in, and in several regions, such as Arges, Dolj, Bihor, theApuseni mountains, Vlasca and Hunedoara, the peasants, aided by'partisan groups', were engaged in violent skirmishes with the troops toorganize them into brigades as prescribed by the land reform of 2 March1949. In a report made to the Central Committee of the RWP in December1961 First Secretary Gheorghiu-Dej admitted the arrest of 80,000 peasants'accused of failure to discharge their obligations towards the state' had

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been carried out to force through collectivization, allegedly on ordersfrom Ana Pauker and Teohari Georgescu, and that 30,000 of them hadbeen tried in public.37

Under decree no. 50 of 30 March 1951 the DGSP, now renamed theDirecfia Generals a Securitafii Statului (DGSS), was expanded with theaddition of two new directorates, for transport and for surveillance (infact, the title Direcfia Generals a SecuritSfii Statului is used to describethe DGSP in decree no. 102 of 16 March 1949 regarding the reorganizationof the Ministry of the Interior). The 12 regional directorates of 1948 hadalready been increased to 28 to reflect the territorial reorganization ofthe country enacted in September 1950. On 2 April the SSI was absorbedinto the DGSS, thus passing under the control of the Ministry of theInterior, and giving Teohari Georgescu nominal control of both intelligenceand security operations. In fact, effective control remained in the handsof the Soviet authorities: the KI (Committee of Information) and theMGB, and, more specifically, Beria, for the KI's chairman Molotov wasreplaced in 1949 by Andrei Vyshinsky, the new Foreign Minister and aBeria sycophant. Moreover, Pavel Fedotov was at the same time succeededas First Deputy of the KI by Sergei Romanovich Savchenko, a protegeof Beria.38 Pintilie's activity, as head of the DGSS, was under thepermanent scrutiny of the MGB chief adviser in Bucharest, AleksandrSakharovsky, who set up Directorate A, the foreign intelligence departmentof the DGSS of which Serghei Nikonov (Nicolau), the NKGB/MGBofficer, was appointed head in April 1951 (at the same time the SSI wasabsorbed into the DGSS). Proof of the Soviet insistence in keepingintelligence activities in their own hands was furnished by the successivedesignations of Vasile Vilcu and Mikhail Gavriliuc as Nikonov's successors(in 1958 a native Romanian, Gheorghe Nicolae Doicaru, formerly head ofthe Constanta regional directorate, was made head of this Directorate).

Dancing to Stalin's tune eventually allowed Dej the chance to consolidatehis hold on the Party by removing potential rivals. When the order cameearly in 1952 from Stalin to purge alleged Zionists throughout the Sovietbloc, Dej used the opportunity to dismiss not just the Jewish Ana Paukerbut the Gentile Luca who was a Transylvanian Hungarian. Included amongthe 'deviators' was the long-serving Minister of the Interior TeohariGeorgescu, an ethnic Romanian who had spent the war years with Dej.The charges against Pauker, Luca and Georgescu were prepared understrict supervision from Soviet counsellors, the principal one being AleksandrMihailovici Sakharovsky.39

A Party plenary meeting of 26-27 May removed Georgescu as Ministerof the Interior, a position that he had held since November 1944, andnamed Alexandru Dr^ghici as his successor. Dnighici had served as

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Pintilie's deputy in the political and administrative section of the CentralCommittee whose duties included counter-espionage monitoring of CCmembers, and when Pintilie left to assume the direction of the DGSPDraghici succeeded him. Four months later, on 20 September 1952, theDGSS was separated from the Ministry of the Interior and incorporated ina new distinct body, the Ministry of State Security (Ministerul SecuritfifiiStatului). The DGSS's structure remained unchanged, except for theaddition of a general inspectorate and section K for counter-intelligencein the militia and prison service.40 This reorganization was short-lived;perhaps the conflict with Beria and his arrest in June 1953 warned thenew Soviet leadership under Khrushchev of the dangers of giving a statesecurity service too long a leash, and it was for this reason that instructionswere given to the Soviet advisers in Bucharest to recommend the mergerof the MSS with the Ministry of the Interior. On 7 September 1953 theamalgamation of the two bodies was decreed.

Unlike in Poland and Hungary, Stalin's death in March 1953 had littleimpact on Romania's internal affairs: there was no major change in theParty leadership, no decentralization of the economy, and no stop to thecollectivization of agriculture. Mere lip-service was paid by Dej to theprinciple of collective leadership introduced by Khrushchev. The Romanianleader took one more step to ensure his control of the Party by havingLucre^iu PStrSscanu tried in secret between 6 and 13 April 1954 andexecuted by firing squad four days later, at 0300 hours on 17 April.41

The regime's image of seemingly arbitrary terror was not softened by ashort-lived amnesty of political prisoners in 1955, nor by reports thatprison conditions had improved between 1955 and 1957.42 On the contrary,Romania's behaviour during the Hungarian revolution marked it onceagain as one of the most repressive of the East European regimes and theSoviet Union's most faithful satellite. Thousands of university studentswho participated in demonstrations in Bucharest and in the Transylvaniancapital of CIuj in support of their colleagues in Hungary were arrestedand were joined in prison by persons amnestied in 1955. Dej's fidelitywas also translated into action involving the Romanian security service.

Convergence of interest and not just mimicry determined the stanceadopted by Dej and his colleagues. They had two main concerns: a success-ful revolt in Budapest against Communist rule might spread to the twomillion-strong Hungarian community in Transylvania, thus sparking ananti-Communist rising in Romania; and a non-Communist Hungarymight lay claim to parts of Transylvania. Khrushchev and Georgi Malenkovpaid a secret visit to Bucharest on 1 November 1956 to discuss theHungarian crisis with Romanian, Bulgarian and Czechoslovak leaders. TheRomanian trio of Dej, Bodnaras and Ceausescu pushed for firm military

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intervention against Imre Nagy's government, and the Soviet troops basedin Romania had been among the first to cross the Hungarian border on26 October to reinforce the Soviet presence.

A key figure in the Romanian Party's support for Soviet interventionin Hungary was the NKGB agent Emil BodnSras. During the uprisinghe was appointed Minister of Transport and Communications and in thiscapacity he supervised the widening of roads of strategic importance toSoviet troops for their transit through Romania. He was probably instru-mental in making arrangements for the detention of Imre Nagy in Romania,for on 21 November he and Dej paid a visit to Janos Kadar, the new FirstSecretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, and on the following dayNagy was abducted by KGB officers and flown to Bucharest where hewas granted what the Romanian Foreign Minister Grigore Preoteasa termed'asylum'. In fact, he was held in a Securitate safe house near S&fticajust north of Bucharest where he was interrogated by Boris Shumilin,chief KGB adviser, 'for counter-revolutionary affairs'43 and not allowedthe visits from UN officials promised by Preoteasa to prove that he wasnot under duress. Hundreds of other prominent supporters of Nagy sharedhis fate in Romania, among them the Marxist critic Georgy Lukacs.

Another purpose of the visit by Dej and BodnSras to Budapest, whichwas ostensibly to supply the food and medicines urgently needed as aresult of the uprising, was to help with the reorganization of the Hungariansecurity service, the AVH, which had been decimated. Several hundredSecuritate agents of Transylvanian Hungarian background were sent toBudapest and BodnSras's extended stay in the Hungarian capital indicatesthat he was closely involved in this operation. A second Soviet agent inRomanian clothing who assisted BodnSras was Wilhelm Einhorn, aHungarian Transylvanian of Jewish origin who had been recruited by theNKVD, had fought as a volunteer in the international brigades in theSpanish Civil War, and had been appointed director of the secretariat ofthe DGSP in autumn 1948 with the rank of major. According to IonPacepa, it was as deputy director of the DIE (strictly speaking in 1956we should speak of Directorate I for Foreign Intelligence since the DIEwas only created in 1972) that Einhorn was sent to Budapest under thecover of counsellor of the Romanian embassy, becoming chief of the newlycreated DIE station there.44

Pacepa informs us that Securitate participation in Soviet supervisedsecurity and intelligence operations in Hungary had also taken place beforethe uprising and had again involved Transylvanian Hungarian officers.Many such officers from the First Directorate were sent as visitorsto Hungary via the West on false Austrian, West German, French andItalian passports to identify Hungarian 'counter-revolutionaries' and the

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information they gathered was transmitted to Bucharest. This particularcampaign is said to have been supervised by Ceausescu with the assistanceof a KGB adviser.45

Soviet satisfaction with Romania's role during October and November1956 must have played a positive part in Khrushchev's decision two yearslater to withdraw Soviet troops. To compensate for the withdrawal, andto allay Soviet fears that it might demolish the underpinning of theRomanian regime, Dej approved the immediate introduction of stringentinternal security measures in order to maintain the Party's control. Amend-ments were made to the penal code which were even more draconian intheir remit than the provisions for the death penalty enacted in 1949.Under decree 318 of 21 July 1958 new crimes attracting the death penaltywere defined. Article 9 of the code imposed the death penalty on anyRomanians contacting foreigners to perpetrate an act 'which could causethe Romanian state to become involved in a declaration of neutrality orin the declaration of war'. This was clearly designed to deter those whomight be tempted by the example of Imre Nagy in Hungary who, duringthe 1956 revolution, proclaimed his country's neutrality and thus, implicitly,its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. That temptation might prove evengreater in the absence of a Soviet occupation force. The definition of'economic sabotage' was enlarged to include theft and bribery, as was thatof so-called 'hooligan' offences committed by juveniles. By the autumnof 1958 the first death sentences for the new crimes were applied.46 Penalcolonies were established in the marsh areas of the Danube Delta, notably atPeriprava, to channel the flow of convicts sentenced to forced labour underthe new measures into the collection of reeds for the recently constructedcellulose plants financed j ointly by Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia andEast Germany. A further decree signalled another wave of purges fromgovernment employment of former officers in the royal army, formerlandowners, persons with a record of 'political' crime, and children ofall the above. On a much more petty scale, divulging the location ofRomanian archives also attracted the death penalty.

It was not just the exceptional severity of these new measures whichsent a clear signal to the Romanian people that the regime of terror wasnot to be relaxed; the failure to publicize them in the press or on theradio (they were merely printed in the Monitorul Official, the equivalentof Hansard) generated uncertainty about the legislation and so amplifiedthe fear inculcated into the population. The apparent randomness in thelegislation's application by the instruments of the police state servedperfectly to enhance the regime's control by terror at, ironically, themoment when the most public Soviet symbol of power, the Red Army,was withdrawn.

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Behind the irony lies the explanation: Dej was making a distinctionbetween the Soviet model and the Soviet Union. In opting for the former,Dej took his Party and the country on a new course of autonomy fromhis Soviet overlord by refusing to accept for Romania the role withinComecon of 'breadbasket' for the industrialized members such as EastGermany and Czechoslovakia. There is also a paradox here, as MichaelShafir has pointed out. Dej's commitment to the Leninist-Stalinist values ofindustrialization turned him into a 'national communist'.47 Furthermore,this same consistency as a Stalinist eventually led to a diminution ofinstitutionalized terror.48

The rift with Moscow was produced gradually and unevenly, withfluctuations in its development. The principle of national Communismwas laid down at the Third Congress of the Romanian Workers' Partyin June 1960. Romanian economic and foreign policy became moreindependent of Moscow and with these changes came a notable shift in theseverity of police rule. Dej authorized the opening of the political prisonsin 1962 and according to official figures 1,304 prisoners were released.In the following year an additional 2,892 were freed, and in the first fourmonths of 1964 the 'final' 464 were allowed out.49 How accurate thesefigures were as testimony to the numbers of political prisoners held inRomanian jails at the time (some 4,500) is open to very grave doubt.Even admitting that many of those arrested in the late 1940s and early1950s perished in prison, we need only recall the large numbers arrestedand rearrested after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, and the waves ofarrests after the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Until the publication ofprison files from the period we shall not be able to determine how greata parody of the truth these figures represent, but we are safe in assumingthat the numbers detained for 'political' offences at the time of theamnesty ran into tens of thousands.

Dej's break with Moscow, by striking the chord of deep anti-Russiansentiment felt by most Romanians, attracted support for his regime, evenamong the newly released prisoners, who saw the amnesty solely in termsof the rift and of Dej's new 'liberalism'; they did not, however, forgetthat it was the same Dej who had authorized measures sending them to jailin the first place. The amnesty marked the end of an era of political terrorwhich had cost the lives of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands ofRomanians, from the pre-Communist political, economic and cultural elitedownwards, but the instrument of that terror, the Securitate, remainedintact, unreformed and ubiquitous. It, and its powerful and ambitioushead, Minister of the Interior Alexandra DrSghici, who had held officesince May 1952, remained a constant reminder of the past and a threatto the present.

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APPENDIXTHE ORGANIZATION OF THE ROMANIAN SECURITY SERVICE 1948-64

All information presented below on the organization of the Romanian security servicesdown to 1964 is taken from Organizarea fifunc/ionarea Organelor Ministerului de Internede la Infiinfare pma in prezent.50 I am grateful to the relevant authorities in Roma nia forallowing me to consult this document.

1. The organization of the DGSP {Direcfia Generals a Securitafii Poporului) as establishedby decree on 30 August 1948:

Directorate I Domestic IntelligenceDirectorate II Counter-sabotageDirectorate III Counter-espionage in the Prisons and PoliceDirectorate IV Counter-espionage in the Armed ForcesDirectorate V Penal InvestigationDirectorate VI Protection of MinistersDirectorate VII TechnicalDirectorate VIII CadresDirectorate IX Political (responsible for Party purity)Directorate X Administration

Auxiliary departments dealt with interception of mail, surveillance, and eavesdropping andfurther included a cipher section and a secretariat.

Twelve regional directorates were established.

2. On 30 March 1951, by decree no. 50, the DGSP is referred to by the new name of theDGSS (Direcfia Generala a Securitafii Statului), which was structured as follows:

Directorate A Foreign IntelligenceDirectorate B Counter-espionageDirectorate C Counter-sabotageDirectorate D TransportDirectorate E Counter-espionage in the MilitiaDirectorate F SurveillanceDirectorate G Penal InvestigationDirectorate H Counter-espionage in the Armed ForcesDirectorate I Protection of Party leadershipDirectorate J Cadres and SchoolsDirectorate K AdministrationDirectorate L Political

There were also departments for accounts, records, interception of mail, transport of secretdocuments, and a secretariat. To reflect the local government reorganization of September1950 when the counties (judefe) were combined to form 28 regions, the number of regionaldirectorates was increased to match this figure.

3. The Ministry of State Security (Ministerul Securitafii Statului) was set up as a distinctbody from the Ministry of the Interior on 20 September 1952. It incorporated the DGSS.

4. On 7 September 1953 the Ministry of State Security was amalgamated with the Ministryof the Interior.

5. The Ministry of the Interior was reorganized on 11 July 1956 and divided into twodepartments: the Department of Security (Departamentul Securitafii) and the Departmentof the Interior (Departamentul Internelor). The latter was given responsibility for themilitia and prisons while the former inherited the structure of the DGSS with the followingmodifications:

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Directorate I Foreign IntelligenceDirectorate II Counter-espionageDirectorate III Domestic IntelligenceDirectorate IV Counter-sabotageDirectorate V Counter-espionage in the Armed ForcesDirectorate VI TransportDirectorate VII SurveillanceDirectorate VIII Penal InvestigationDirectorate IX Protection of Party leadershipDirectorate of Cadres and SchoolsDirectorate of AdministrationSecretariatDepartment B Radio counter-intelligenceDepartment C RecordsDepartment D Transport of prisonersDepartment F Interception of mailDepartment H CipherDepartment K Counter-espionage in the prisons and militiaDepartment T Technical

A school for training offices and one for learning foreign languages was also placed underthe control of the DS as were the security troops and the frontier guards.

6. On 30 May 1963 the control of the security troops was removed from the DS (Departa-mentul Securităţii) and placed under a separate department within the Ministry of theInterior. By the same decree of 30 May Directorate I (Foreign Intelligence) of the DSwas redesignated UM (Unitate militară) 0123/1 and given the name Direcţia Generală deInformafii Externe (DGIE).

NOTES

1. SWB Summary of World Broadcasts. BBC Monitoring. Part 2. Eastern Europe EE 0932(27 Nov. 1990), B/9.

2. Bucharest: Ministry of the Interior, 1978, 144 pp.3. România literară, No. 27 (5 July 1990), p. 14.4. Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons (London, 1988).5. Indiscret, No.4 (Bucharest, 1992), p.3.6. Ibid., p. 165.7. E. Mezincescu, 'Din nou despre fantoma lui Dej', România literară, No. 41 (16-22 Dec.

1992), p. 15.8. Paul D. Quinlan, Clash Over Romania. British and American Policies towards Romania:

1938-1947 (Los Angeles, 1977), p. 120.9. E. Mezincescu, 'Ecouri la Cazul Pătrăşcanu, Magazin Istoric, No. 7 (July 1992), p. 37.

10. Organizarea şi funcţionarea Organelor Ministerului de Interne de la Infiinţare pînăîn prezent (Bucharest, 1978) (mimeographed), p. 87.

11. Mezincescu, 'Ecouri la Cazul Pătrăşcanu', p.34.12. Cristian Troncotă, 'Eugen Cristescu despre Eugen Cristescu (IV), Magazin Istoric, No. 9

(Sept. 1992), p.58.13. Ibid.14. Ibid.15. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB. The Inside Story of its Foreign

Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London, 1991), p. 388.16. Ion Pacepa, 'Falsificarea istoriei', Indiscret, No. 2 (Bucharest, 1992), p. 10.17. G. Ionescu, Communism in Rumania 1944-1962 (London, 1964), p. 152.18. Mezincescu, 'Ecouri la Cazul Pătrăşcanu', p. 33.

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19. Constante has given an account of her ordeal in her book L'évasion silencieuse (Paris,1990).

20. Organizarea şi funcţionarea Organelor Ministerului de Interne de la înfiinţare pînăîn prezent, p. 106.

21. Andrew and Gordievsky, op. cit., p.485.22. Ibid., p. 388.23. Ibid., p. 349.24. E. Mezincescu, 'Polemici', România literară, No. 27 (9-15 Sept. 1992), p.2.25. V. Tismăneanu, 'The Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism', East European Politics

and Societies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 1989), p. 350, note 47.26. Cuvîntul, Nos 112-115 (March-April 1992); I am grateful to Claudiu Secaşiu for

locating these articles.27. Suppression of Human Rights in Romania (Washington DC, 1949), p. 65.28. Cuvîntul, No. 119 (May), 1992, p. 6.29. W. Bacon, 'Romanian Secret Police', in J. R. Adelman (ed.), Terror and Communist

Politics: The Role of the Secret Police (Boulder and London, 1984), p. 142.30. S. Fischer-Galati (ed.), Romania (New York, 1956), p. 123.31. Ionescu, op. cit., p. 199.32. R.L. Woolf, The Balkans in our Time (Cambridge, MA, 1956), p. 461.33. Organizarea şi funcţionarea Organelor Ministerului de Interne de la înfiinţare pînă

în prezent, p. 112.34. Ionescu, op. cit., p. 199.35. C. Coposu, Dialoguri cu Vartan Arachelian (Bucharest, 1992), p.95.36. Ibid.37. Ionescu, op. cit., p.201.38. Andrew and Gordievsky, op. cit., p.390.39. Ibid., p.485.40. Organizarea şi funcţionarea Organelor Ministerului de Interne de la înfiinţare pînă

în prezent, p. 113.41. C. Popişteanu, 'Finalul Cazului Pătrăşcanu', Magazin Istoric, No. 2 (Feb. 1992),

p.26.42. Amnesty International, Prison Conditions in Rumania: Conditions for Political

Prisoners 1955-1964 (London, 1965), pp.2, 21.43. Andrew and Gordievsky, op. cit., p.435.44. Pacepa, Red Horizons, p. 359.45. Ibid.46. Ionescu, op. cit., p. 290.47. M. Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economics and Society (London, 1985), p. 48.48. Bacon, op. cit., p. 144.49. V. Georgescu, The Romanians: a History (Columbus, 1991), p. 246.50. See note 2 above.

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the securitate and the police state 2

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