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...control Romania under Communist rule whose consequence was the 'freezing' in time of a country deviated from its normal course by a totalitarian regime, a country in which people had come to beg for what they were in fact entitled to, for what was already, and rightly, theirs. I will focus on the use of terror as the chief means of maintaining control in a totalitarian state and on ideology as the main underpinning of political power in Soviet-type regimes, managing--initially--to "devour reality in the name of an all-embracing project of universal happiness" (Tismaneanu, 68).
My main concern will be the impact of such tactics of domination and control on the everyday life of Romanian people. The devastating, dehumanizing effects of a universe plagued by fear and duplicity will be illustrated in the works of Romanian writers Marin Sorescu and Augustin Buzura. A brief comparative study of the 'soft' controlling designs in the American consumer culture will further reveal possible causes that led to the failure of the Communist experiment in Romania.
While Communism is impotent as an economic system, it proved extremely efficient as a system of worldwide expansion and social control. In order to accomplish that, Communism had to conceal its reality and remain an 'idea.' This 'idea' would promise a total revolution, collective salvation and universal happiness, a "bliss of final redemption in a world devoid of conflict" as Polish anti-utopian thinker Leszek Kolakowski ironically put it (quoted in Tismaneanu, 97). This facade of something high was actually meant to conceal the low foundations of totalitarian power.
The popular appeal of totalitarian ideologies and their capacity to mobilize populations rested upon the devastation of ordered and stable contexts in which people once lived. The impact of the First World War and the Great Depression, the pervasive anti-fascist mood in Europe and the USSR's shrewd equation of Communism with Anti-Fascism, the spread of revolutionary unrest, all this left people--in their desperate need for ultimate salvation and a new epoch--open to such ideologies that would claim to secure the future against insecurity and danger. Unfortunately, these hopeful Eastern European peoples would soon experience the clash between 'lofty' ideals and abject practices.
In Romania, as in other Eastern European countries, ideological masquerade and police terror were the main instruments used to control the population, to crush opposition, to destroy civil society, to completely reconstruct the displaced society in the Party mold.
In the late '40s and the '50s, Romanian statements--infused by the Soviet cliches--repeated the aggressive Leninist discourse regarding the capitalist world, in particular the American foreign policies. As Ileana Marin points out, "even national history was programmatically altered in order to meet the expectations of the Romanian People's Friend, the Soviet Union" (90). Romania was no longer a sovereign state because the government was dominated by communists--eager to carry out Moscow's orders--and their Soviet mentors. The Soviet model became mandatory resulting in the overall regimentation of ideological life in all satellite countries.
The Communist Party (called the Romanian Workers' Party at the time), imposed by Moscow and supported by Soviet tanks, banned political parties, enthroning the terror of one party rule and exterminating the best Romanian intelligentsia and youth. Communist ideology was enforced, mock trials enacted and freedoms suppressed while political, cultural and religious leaders were imprisoned (Nicolae, 108).
Another step in imposing the Soviet totalitarian model in Romania was the adoption of the Constitution in 1948, based on the 1936 Soviet Constitution. Among other provisions--formulated in the characteristic wooden jargon of indigestible, empty of substance, ready-made recipes--Article 38, for instance, stipulated that "citizens have the right to assemble and organize unless the goals they pursue are directed against the democratic order, established by the Constitution" (Barbulescu, 395--my translation)--a simulacrum of civil liberties since this "democratic order" was defined by the Communist Party and consolidated by the Securitate.
Therefore, in order to perpetuate its power, the totalitarian regime resorted to hyperreal, aberrant ideology--according to its promoters, justified by historical necessity, by the 'historically proven' evolution towards communist society--enforced, whenever the case, by the secret police repressive means. This rendered the regime captive to its own lie. But living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. As Vaclav Havel points out in The Power of the Powerless, first published in 1978, the principle must embrace and permeate everything, the regime must falsify everything:
It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends to respect human rights.... Thus the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views. (1)
Indeed, as Vladimir Tismaneanu remarks, the party bureaucrats are "viscerally inimical to truth and the role ascribed to ideology is to cover and disguise reality. Ideology furnishes the masks needed for the perpetuation of the historical travesty called soviet-type socialism" (67). Consequently, perpetual repetition of pseudo truth makes truth itself less important, ultimately irrelevant. In fact, these empty propaganda stereotypes are, to quote French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard "no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulacra" (12), illustrating the proliferation of an ideologically-driven hyperreality.
A climate of fear is needed to preserve monolithic authority and annihilate individual spontaneity--in thinking, in any aspiration, in any creative undertaking--which is the greatest obstacle to total domination over man. Total power, Hannah Arendt points out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, can be achieved and safeguarded "only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity" (560-62). Ideologies are "never interested in the miracle of being," she writes in her 1953 essay "Ideology and Terror" (Hollinger, Capper, 290).
The widespread use of repression and terror under Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, the purges and show trials, the "re-education" and brainwashing in the atrocious penitentiaries of Pitesti, Gherla, Sighet, Jilava, sought not only to punish and kill the regime's 'enemies' but to dehumanize them and moreover, to erase any trace of their existence from the memories of the governments' other subjects. People simply disappeared in the night and nobody dared to speak or ask about it (Arendt, 556-57). According to Hannah Arendt, terror was no longer just a means to a political end but an end in itself whose necessity would be justified by recourse to supposed laws of history such as the inevitable triumph of the classless society.
Consequently, for the Communists, the 'internal enemy' was readily available: property owners were "necessary victims"--not through any dissenting acts committed by them, but simply because the theory (the communal ownership of property, the essence of Communist ideology) had declared them so. Therefore, cruelty against the class enemy was the ultimate virtue. But it was not just the class enemy. The "enemy," in whatever incarnation, seemed "larger-than-life," everyone was a potential traitor. The public discourse was saturated with frightening images of deviators, heretics, spies, agents, in order to justify the arbitrary, ideology-serving, repressive actions of the totalitarian clique.
The system managed to unify victim and torturer, to blur the distinctions between them. Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December, published in 1982--based on the American writer's visit to Romania in the 1980s--depicts such characters, perfect instruments of a totalitarian regime, that no longer distinguish between true and false, between loyalty and infamy: "So there was Ioana"--the family neighbor, and interestingly, considered 'family'--"big on emotion, loyal to the family, fully informed, very potent, dangerous to neglect ... The concierge protected, loved and blackmailed the old sisters"...
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