Balkan Academic Book Review 6/2000
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Dennis Deletant, Communist Terror in Romania. Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State 1948-1965. London: Hurst & Company, 1999, 351 pp + xii; Appendices; Bibliography; Index, GBP 45.00 (Hardcover), ISBN 1-85065-386-0
Reviewed by Mark Pittaway (Department of History, The Open University, UK)
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Since the Revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in late 1989 the opportunities for western scholars to use the archival material generated by the vanquished socialist regimes have increased enormously. With greater academic freedom, though with reduced financial resources, local scholars have begun to examine the previously hidden aspects of their countries’ recent histories. Dennis Deletant’s monograph on Stalinist Romania takes advantage of these opportunities to tackle an area that in the West has largely been shrouded in darkness. This is welcome: much historical research to date has examined the post-war histories of Central Europe and has left Romania largely untouched. Likewise the Stalinist era has been left alone by historians who have tended to examine the immediate post-war years, or those that directly preceded the fall of socialism. By providing us with a political history of the Gheorghiu-Dej era in Romania Deletant has filled a gap and enriched our knowledge of the trajectory of East European Stalinisms.

Deletant’s history is based on archival research in the materials of the Securitate and in the ambassadorial reports generated for Britain’s Foreign Office during the period. In addition to his use of new archival material Deletant has also productively drawn on secondary materials generated by Romanian scholars in the past decade. The result is a history that concentrates on two aspect of the country’s history under Gheorgiu-Dej. The first aspect is a detailed political history of Romania’s Communist movement from the inter-war years until 1965 concentrating especially on the brutal politics that characterised the party’s leadership during the period. The second aspect is the methods of repression that the state used after 1948 to eliminate and to muzzle political opposition. The use of new material considerably enriches the picture previously available to English speaking reader. There is much new information on the organisation and creation of the Securitate, on the use of forced labour, and on aspects of popular resistance to socialist rule. The tensions within the Communist leadership are well covered as are the brutal and undemocratic tactics used by Gheorgiu-Dej to secure his position.

These two histories are conflated as a result of the author’s use of the “totalitarian model” in explaining the trajectory of Romania’s early socialist regime. He proves beyond doubt that brutality characterised the practice of regime power and that the abuse of human rights was widespread in Gheorgiu-Dej’s Romania. He assumes that these two things naturally added up to “terror”; the implication of which is that the socialist regime ruled by terrorising the population. Deletant, however, does not investigate popular responses to the regime’s use of repression systematically. Where he mentions popular response it is in the context of resistance to the policy of the regime, for example during the regime’s collectivisation drives or as the shock waves of the Hungarian Revolution hit Romania in 1956. Deletant needs to examine the relationship between state repression and patterns of accommodation, consent, control and opposition if he is to convincingly demonstrate that Romania was successfully ruled through the mechanism of repression alone.

The other major problem with the framework used is that it assumes that the intention of Gheorgiu-Dej and by extension the socialist regime was first and foremost the extension of his and its own power. Such an argument implicit throughout the books needs to be systematically investigated rather than assumed. Attempts by the socialist state to re-mould Romanian society are discussed only in the context of the repressive measures used by the state. More could have been said about the policies of collectivisation and industrialisation in their own right so that the regime’s use of coercion could be seen in the context of a broader social and political programme.

The archives, oral histories, and the contemporary press allow such questions to be addressed and answered for the first time. We need to know more about the operation of the institutions of repression, about the secret police, regular police forces and the early socialist criminal justice system. We need to know more about popular opinion, about the social histories of groups within Romanian society, we need to know about the implementation of industrialisation and collectivisation, about the role that Gheorgiu-Dej’s recourse to nationalism played in mobilising public opinion behind the regime in the 1960s. Without exploring of these aspects of the dictatorship, its operation and popular responses to it, it seems premature to assume that its rule was based on the recourse to coercion and to terror alone.

All this is, of course, not to deny the dictatorial nature of the Romanian regime it is merely to suggest that with the opening of the archives a new set of questions need to be asked about it. All of Eastern Europe’s Stalinist dictatorships used repression, secret police services, labour camps and resorted to routine abuse of human rights. Was there anything unusual about Gheorgiu-Dej’s Romania? Was it more or less repressive that neighbouring states? Why, under Ceausescu, did Romanian socialism develop in the way that it did? Can the roots of Ceausescu’s socialism be seen under Gheorgiu-Dej? Given that unlike Rákosi in neighbouring Hungary Gheorgiu-Dej’s rule survived Khrushchev’s secret speech, can Gheorgiu-Dej’s regime be seen as an authentically Stalinist one, and if so, in what senses? Although Deletant’s monograph adds much fascinating new material this reviewer did not find the kinds of questions that new, archivally based histories of Eastern Europe’s socialist dictatorships need to address.
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© 2000 Balkan Academic News.
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