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Home , Ana Pauker, Chivu Stoica, Gheorghe Apostol, Gheorghe Gaston Marin, Gheorghe Pintilie, Hysni Kapo

RESEARCH NOTE The Death of a Leninist Dictator “The Memory of Comrade Gheorghe Gheorghiu- Forever Alive in the Heart of the Party, of the Working Class, of the People”

✣ Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu

Leninism is our beacon and strength and élan We are faithfully following the invincible Party We are building in our land State anthem of the Romanian People’s Republic In in August 1964, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the party and state leader of Communist , was experiencing a moment of total triumph. He was hosting important guests, including , the veteran Soviet official who was then head of the Presidium of the USSR’s Supreme Soviet; Li Xiannian, the first deputy prime minister of the Peo- ple’s Republic of (PRC), who later served as Chinese president; and countless other magnates of the Communist world. They arrived in Bucharest to participate in the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of 23 August 1944, a historical watershed in Romanian history when King Michael and the leaders of the democratic political parties rid the country of general Ion An- tonescu’s fascist dictatorship. The Communist regime’s symboli- cally usurped and mystified this event as “having been organized and led by the headed by the healthy nucleus from the prisons guided by Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej.”1 Significantly, sent its own party and government delegation, headed by member and Deputy Prime Minister Hysni Kapo. This was an unmistakable indication that Romania had decided not to go along with the boycott of the Tirana regime imposed by the Soviet leader, . Such a policy was a direct consequence of Romania’s April 1964

1. On the mystification of 23 August 1944, seeStefan ¸ Borbély, “Politics as Memory Distortion: A Case Study,” Caietele Echninox (Cluj), No. 1 (2001), pp. 123–133.

Journal of Studies Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 2017, pp. 202–214, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00759 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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pledge to remain neutral toward the deepening fissures within the world Com- munist movement.2 In the same vein, despite the acerbic anti-Titoist rhetoric from Chinese and Romanian officials at the gathering, Gheorghiu-Dej also hosted a party and state delegation from . That same month, Ana Toma, a member of the Central of the Romanian Workers’ Party (PMR), as well as Romania’s deputy trade min- ister and the wife of General (nom de guerre “Pantiu¸sa”), a close friend of Gheorghiu-Dej, visited the PMR first at the “Elias” party clinic. The 63-year-old party leader had been hospitalized in a special pavilion for a complete medical checkup. That same day, Pintilie told a close friend that “Comrade Dej is in great shape.” The friend’s name was Cristina Luca-Boico, the aunt of one of this article’s authors. In February 1965, Gheorghiu-Dej headed the PMR’s delegation to the meeting of the ’s Political Consultative Committee. During the trip to Poland, members of the delegation, including the PMR’s chief ideo- logue, Leonte Rautu,˘ noticed Dej’s frailty. Later that month, Dej delivered his last important political speech at a gathering of the Bucharest party organiza- tion. He spoke slowly, with many interruptions, emphasizing the significance of the preparations for the PMR’s Fourth Congress. The Third Congress had taken place in 1960, attended by Khrushchev as head of the Soviet delega- tion and by the Beijing mayor, Peng Zhen, and had turned into a battlefield between the two competing world Communist centers. Witnesses described Dej as exhausted, weakened, cachectic. Despite his poor condition, he defended his political and economic strategies based on an opening to the West and rejection of Soviet hegemony within the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance. He insisted on the necessity of technological modernization and emphasized the need to import foreign licenses in order to avoid lagging far behind. In his memoirs, the former fighter and head of the State Planning Commission and deputy prime minister Ghe- orghe Gaston Marin maintains that Gheorghiu-Dej was determined to put an end to Soviet economic domination and allow for dynamic trade relations

2. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 383–384. For detailed analyses of Gheorghiu-Dej’s career as party leader, see , Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the , 1948–1965 (: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1999); and Mihai Burcea andStefan ¸ Bosomitu, eds., Spectrele lui Dej: Incursiuni in biografia si regimul unui dictator (Iași: Polirom, 2012). On the early stage of Ceau¸sescu’s career, see Mary Ellen Fischer’s seminal volume, Nicolae Ceau¸sescu: A Study in Political Leadership (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989), pp. 1–83. For a provocatively thoughtful perspective on Gheorghiu-Dej’s successor, see the section on “How Ceau¸sescu Came to Discover Kim Il Sungism,” in Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and the Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: The Free Press, 1994), pp. 236–240.

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with the West.3 Gaston Marin, one of Dej’s closest confidants, led the Ro- manian delegation in November 1963 to the funeral of the assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy and, a year later, paid an official visit to the , , and other Western countries. In line with this approach, Ro- manian Prime Minister visited France in 1964 and met with President to inform him about Romania’s defiance of Soviet attempts at limiting its independence and .

March 1965

Despite being terminally ill, Gheorghiu-Dej voted in the elections for the Grand National Assembly (the figurehead Romanian parliament) at the be- ginning of and delivered a short televised speech. His physical appearance during the speech left little doubt that he was in agony. At the last New Year’s Eve party held at Gheorghiu-Dej’s residence, as Ceau¸sescu disap- provingly recalled three years later, Gheorghiu-Dej did not invite his Politburo comrades and preferred to keep the party a private family event with one or two personal guests. During his final years he increasingly relied on Prime Minister Maurer, Deputy Prime Ministers Alexandru Bârladeanu˘ and Gaston Marin, and the party’s chief ideologist, Rautu.˘ In March 1965, Gheorghiu-Dej died as a result of a fast-spreading lung cancer. Rumors spread immediately that he had been irradiated during his February trip to Warsaw. The rumors were wholly unsubstantiated, but many found the dictator’s sudden demise perplexing and mysterious. The official medical communiqué, signed by Voinea Marinescu, the minis- ter of health and social assistance, as well as by such renowned doctors as N. Gh. Lupu, Tiberiu Spîrchez, Constantin Nicolau, Ioan Bruckner, Con- stantin Anastasatu, Leon Bercu, and Alexandru Dumitriu, director of the “Elias” Communist Party hospital, explained how the death occurred:

During the second half of January 1965 Comrade Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej presented signs of a pulmonary infection with coughing and expectorations. Analysis of the sputum did not reveal anything out of the ordinary. X-rays showed an infiltrating process at the level of the right pulmonary hilum. Over the next ten days, clinical observation disclosed a fast liver growth accompa- nied by sub icterus. Clinical and laboratory analyses disclosed the presence of hepatic tumor formations. On 2 March 1965, microscopic examination of the

3. , În serviciul Romanieiˆ lui Gheorghiu-Dej: Însemnari˘ din viata̦˘,(Bucharest: Editura Evenimentul românesc, 2000).

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sputum showed the presence of neoplastic cells. The diagnosis based on clinical and laboratory data was pulmonary and hepatic neoplasm. Taking into account the gravity of the diagnosed illness, a group of renowned foreign experts, hep- atologists, pneumonologists, and oncologists was invited to Romania, and they confirmed the diagnosis. During the illness, the treatment applied to the patient was appropriate. Because of the aggressive nature of the disease and the spread of neoplasia, the illness continued to develop and determined a rapid and grave evolution associated with the installation of an intense icterus and hepato-renal deficiency. On 19 March, after 4:00 PM, the patient’s condition suddenly wors- ened. Despite all the care provided, the patient lapsed into a coma and died at 5:43 PM.4 Some clarifications are necessary at this point. Leon Bercu had been Gheorghiu-Dej’s personal physician since 1945. He had also been ’s physician until her political decline and excommunication in 1952. In later years, in private conversations with close friends, Bercu reported that he had been emphatically forbidden by Ceau¸sescu (then a Politburo member and Secretary overseeing the party apparatus) to inform Lica Gheorghiu-Radoi˘ (Dej’s favorite daughter) about the gravity of her fa- ther’s disease. Lica Gheorghiu (1928–1987) and her children shared the res- idence with her father and their grandfather, who had adopted them. Her second husband, Gheorghe Radoi,˘ was a Central Committee member and deputy prime minister who had previously been director of the “ Flag” truck factory in Bra¸sov. Ceau¸sescu and his aides were apparently worried that Lica could obtain from her father at the last minute a spectacular promotion for her husband in the party and government hierarchy.

Leon Bercu and the Physicians from the Special Sector

Bercu was a highly regarded internist who taught at the Bucharest Medical School (Institutul Medico-farmaceutic). Before World War II and the intro- duction of anti-Semitic legislation, he had his own private practice and was a sympathizer of Romania’s underground Communist party. From 1945 to 1965, he served as Gheorghiu-Dej’s personal physician and accompanied him on all foreign missions, including the September 1960 steamship trip with

4. The medical report was published on the front page of the regime’s two main newspapers, Scînteia and România Libera˘, on Saturday, 20 March 1965.

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Khrushchev and the leaders of Bulgaria and to New York for the United Nations sessions. In 1962, Bercu accompanied Dej on his long trip to India and Indonesia. He was married to Lucia Berdicev, an associate professor of obstetrics at the medical school. They lived in a villa on Herastr˘ au˘ Street, close to Bulevardul Primaverii,˘ in a three-room apartment with old, elegant furniture and an im- pressive library. The building was located in the Cartierul Primaverii˘ district of Bucharest, the most exclusive and strictly watched area of the capital, an area favored by senior politicians. Other tenants in the building were Gheo- rghe Stere and Leoni Stere, the former of whom was the son of the Bessarabian writer and national militant Constantin Stere. Leoni Stere was a Jewish once active in underground Communist circles. On the top floor, in a studio, lived Dolores (Dolly) Bancic, the daughter of and Alexandru Jar. Olga Bancic had been the only woman executed (actually decapitated) by the Nazis in the repressive action against the foreign partisan resistance movement known as Francs-tireurs et Partisans—Main-d’œuvre Immigrée. Her husband had also been a resistance fighter and until 1956 was one of the most promi- nent and zealous promoters of Socialist Realism in Romania. After criticizing Gheorghiu-Dej in the aftermath of the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress, Jar was expelled from the PMR and disappeared from public life. Leon Bercu was close friends with my father’s sister, Nema Tisminețki, who was a physician. Even during the period when my father was expelled from the PMR (1960–1964), the Bercus invited us to their place, which would have been unthinkable in the case of ex-friends such as , the director of the party’s publishing house (Editura Politica),˘ whom my par- ents had known since the mid-1930s. The Bercus did not have children. In the summer of 1963, I was at the seaside in Eforie Nord with my mother, Her- mina Tismaneanu, who was a doctor, and her close friend, Sanda Sauvard, who had served as a pharmacist at the Hospital of the in Vic and had then become an anti-Nazi resistance fighter and an Auschwitz and Ravensbrück survivor. We visited Bercu and his wife at the Filimon Sârbu, the PMR Central Committee’s hotel. He was not afraid to be seen with us, although in the hotel’s garden one could see plenty of establishment figures walking, including Gheorghe Radulescu,˘ a deputy prime minister and, in the 1930s, my mother’s colleague in the antifascist Democratic Students’ Front. Bercu regarded me as a relative of sorts, a much younger friend. He took me seriously even during my adolescence, when we would chat about literature, music, and the arts in general. I visited them during my student years, and when he died (in the meantime they had moved to the Bulevardul

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Primaverii,˘ in a building just across the street from Ceau¸sescu’s mansion), his sister invited me to choose any books I wanted from his personal library. I picked two volumes of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, in German, and the original 1941 edition of the Istoria Literaturii Române (History of Romanian Literature) by George Calinescu.˘ Bercu had once told me that among his du- ties as Dej’s personal physician was to check the bathtub water temperature before the august character would start his bathing. When Bercu put his hand in the hot water, his wristwatch broke. Laughing, Dej told him: “Don’t worry, doctor! I will give you a very precious watch.” He never did. Under the watchful supervision of the Securitate (state security police), Bercu and other physicians responsible for the health of the top party and state leaders were part of a special sector within the Party Administration Depart- ment. Others belonging to this group from 1950 to 1960 included Abraham Schechter, Abraham Farchi, and Tiberiu Tigerman. The presence of numer- ous Jewish doctors in this highly select team was probably attributable to their earlier connections with the PMR underground. Schechter, who served as a personal physician for Nicolae and Elena Ceau¸sescu and was a close friend of Bercu, died under strange circumstances in the 1970s, ostensibly of suicide. Until , he had served as personal physician to the former Minis- ter of Internal Affairs Alexandru Draghici˘ and his wife, Marta Cziko. After Draghici˘ was demoted at the party’s Central Committee plenum that reha- bilitated Lucrețiu Patr˘ a¸˘scanu in April 1968, Schechter ceased to work as his physician. According to some sources, Schechter’s suicide was actually a Securitate action. Either he took his life because of unbearable psychological pressure, or, more likely, he was murdered. For the Securitate, at that moment headed by party apparatchik Ion Stanescu,˘ Schechter, with his unrestrained conversa- tional behavior and foreign relatives, represented a vulnerability that needed to be dealt with. Maurer’s physician, Usher Segal, also dealt with the health of party ideologue Paul Niculescu-Mizil and of Petre Borila,˘ a (Comintern) and veteran and former Polit- buro member, whose daughter Iordana was married to Ceau¸sescu’s eldest son, Valentin. The director of the “Elias” Hospital was Nicolae Manoliu, a party old-timer who had been imprisoned in the Vapniarka concentration camp during World War II. In the 1950s, the chief of the special sector was Cor- nel Kaplan, a party veteran married to the niece of Iosif Chi¸sinevschi, a party official who had been Gheorghiu-Dej’s chief aide until 1957, when he was de- moted from the Politburo under charges of anti-party factionalism. Kaplan’s successor was Vsevolod Bilyk. For a short time in the 1950s, Maurer’s brother, a physician, also worked in the special sector.

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Communist Leaders Confront Twilight and Death

Lica Gheorghiu never forgave Bercu for having concealed Dej’s real diagnosis from her, and she refused to attend his funeral at the Filantropia Jewish ceme- tery in the late 1970s (her children were present, however). One can assume that Maurer and Ceau¸sescu feared Lica might intervene with her father in fa- vor of , whose daughter Geta was one of her closest friends. Moreover, relations between Lica Gheorghiu and Elena Ceau¸sescu had always been cold. On numerous occasions, the supercilious Lica had turned down Elena’s overtures.5 What followed was a rite of passage or separation, as Arnold van Gen- nep puts it.6 The political culture of Romanian was crucially shaped by the watershed year 1965 and the events linked to Dej’s succes- sion. Many conspiracy theories arose about Dej’s unexpected illness, but none has withstood scrutiny. What we know beyond doubt is that both competing centers within the world Communist movement paid vibrant tribute to the dead leader. The Soviet delegation to the funeral was headed by the chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet, Anastas Mikoyan, and the Chinese delegation was led by Prime Minister . At that moment Zhou was the third- most-powerful figure in the Chinese hierarchy after Mao Zedong, the head of the Communist Party, and Liu Shaoqi, the Chinese president. Aleksandar Rankovic,´ a Central Committee Secretary of the Communist League of Yu- goslavia who also headed the Communist Party of Serbia and had earlier been in charge of Yugoslavia’s state security apparatus, led Yugoslavia’s delegation. For understandable reasons, future-oriented revolutionary movements tend to focus on youth/vitality. When such a movement is endowed with an atheistic ideology, the question of senescence and death becomes very com- plicated. The had tried to solve this issue via a transcendental in- cantation of sorts: “The revolutionary is dead, long live the Revolution!” The Soviet symbolic dramaturgy was imbued with the slogan “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!”7 Funerals of revolutionary heroes such as Iosif Stalin, , Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong were frequently marked by this appeal to the hereafter. When, as the saying goes, la guerre est finie,the question of aging, sickness, and death requires finally a non-heroic treatment.

5. This was reported by Lica Gheorghiu’s son, Gheorghe, in a personal communication to Vladimir Tismaneanu. 6. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 7. Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

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Dying thus turns into a duty to the party, to the working class, to the whole people. In an article published in on the occasion of Muam- mar Gaddafi’s death, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore offered a cap- tivating survey of how various tyrants have perished throughout history. Particularly savory are Montefiore’s musings on the ironies of destiny and his illustration of what G. W. F. Hegel perhaps had in mind when in his philos- ophy of history he refers to the cunning of reason (List der Vernunft): Stalin had arrested the Kremlin physicians and charged them with treason before a stroke hit him in March 1953, leaving him paralyzed in his own urine for more than twelve hours, with his sycophants not daring to call a doctor. The dictator’s paranoia took revenge over the dictator’s life. He was not assassi- nated like Gaddafi, concludes Montefiore, but he was the author of his own destruction. Another provocative idea comes from the following illuminating passage: The death of a democratic leader long after his retirement is a private matter, but the death of a tyrant is always a political act that reflects the character of his power. If a tyrant dies peacefully in bed in the full resplendence of his rule, his death is a theater of that power; if a tyrant is executed while crying for mercy in the dust, then that, too, is a reflection of the nature of a fallen regime and the reaction of an oppressed people.8

Ephemeral Immortality

Gheorghiu-Dej’s death fits this idiosyncratic taxonomy, falling within the cat- egory “dead in his own bed” (we do not discuss here the illness and its causes), with all the adjacent dramaturgy, such as national funerals.9 An avalanche of tributes followed. The Yugoslav leader declared: “The unex- pected and premature death of the great son of the Romanian people and revolutionary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej shattered us profoundly.” The leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, John Gollan offered a similar en- comium: “On behalf of the Communist Party of Great Britain, I express the most profound condolences to the RWP and to the Romanian people on the occasion of this great loss. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was the prominent

8. Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Dictators Get the Deaths They Deserve,” The New York Times,26Oc- tober 2011, p. A21. 9. The pageants are masterfully captured at the beginning of Andrei Ujica’s˘ outstanding film The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceau¸sescu. See Manohla Dargis, “Popular Ascendance to Grim Downfall,” The New York Times, 8 September 2011, p. C1.

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leader of the Romanian working class during the darkest days of fascism to the building of the Romanian .”10 From all segments of society—party functionaries, writers, artists, musi- cians, engineers, mechanics, blue-collar workers—the tributes poured forth. The authors of articles in the Communist press outdid one another in un- derscoring the unbreakable unity of the Romanian people around the party leadership and in pledging that Gheorghiu-Dej’s “luminous example [would] guide us forever.” The Communist party, as the embodiment of Reason in his- tory, represented the most important legacy of the Leninist intervention in the political practices of the . This is the way one should read a title such as, “In honoring the memory of its great son, the nation expresses its profound attachment to the party.” One grasps here a trace of the Bolshevik exaltation of historical transcendence. As soon as the old leaders passed away, the movers and shakers within the top elite put together a party and state commission charged with organizing the funerals. This body determined all details of the solemn choreography. The commission for Gheorghiu-Dej’s funeral was chaired by veteran Communist leader , a Politburo member and Central Com- mittee Secretary who had been a friend of Gheorghiu-Dej since the days of the February 1933 “Grivița” railroad strikes. The commission also included Emil Bodnara¸˘ s, a former Soviet spy who had served as minister of defense, deputy prime minister, and a PMR Politburo member; former Minister of Internal Affairs Draghici;˘ Stefan ¸ Voitec, the chairman of the Grand National Assembly and a candidate Politburo member (he had been a leading Social Democrat until 1948, when his party was swallowed by the Communists); and Leontin Sal˘ ajan,˘ a candidate Politburo member and minister of defense. The commission did not include either of the two most influential individu- als in Gheorghiu-Dej’s entourage, Maurer and Ceau¸sescu. Nor did it include First Deputy Prime Minister Apostol, who allegedly might have been chosen by Gheorghiu-Dej as his successor. Even more surprising, the commission did not include Alexandru Moghioro¸s, a Hungarian Politburo member and for many years one of Gheorghiu-Dej’s closest collaborators. The funeral procession was designated to begin at 11:00 AM on 24 March in Republic Square. After the mourning ceremony, the convoy was to walk toward Parcul Liberta˘ții, “The Monument of the Heroes of the Strug- gle for the Liberty of the People and the Fatherland and for Socialism.” This was the place where Gheorghiu-Dej’s earthly remains were buried until 1990

10. The statements recorded here come from the official proceedings, published on the front page and next two pages of Scînteia, 25 March 1965.

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when, in the wake of the December 1989 revolution, the Communist pan- theon ceased to exist with its previous functions.11 As an expression of grief, at 2:30 PM on the day of the funeral, work across Romania was stopped in all factories and institutions; trains and other vehicles came to a halt; and the sirens of industrial plants, shipyards, trains, and barges rang for three min- utes. The funeral pageants were broadcast live by all the Romanian radio and television stations. The purpose of the whole exercise was to demonstrate, via the “eternal- ization” of the memory of the beloved son of the people, the infallible political continuity from Dej to his successors. The PMR Central Committee, the Ro- manian State Council, and the Romanian Council of Ministers adopted a joint decision to immortalize Gheorghiu-Dej through the publication of all his speeches and articles and the publication of his biography; the erection of Gheorghiu-Dej statues in Bucharest and Cluj; the placement of Gheorghiu- Dej busts in buildings around the country, including the PMR Central Com- mittee headquarters; and the bestowal of Gheorghiu-Dej’s name on the city of One¸sti, the Bucharest Polytechnic, and numerous other facilities. Many of these decisions were later forgotten or ignored. No statue of Gheorghiu-Dej was put up in Bucharest, and in April 1968 his former protégé and successor, Ceau¸sescu, denounced Gheorghiu-Dej as having been chiefly responsible for crimes against Communist activists, first and foremost Lucrețiu Patr˘ a¸˘scanu andStefan ¸ Foriș. In so doing, Ceau¸sescu attempted, quite successfully, to establish his image as a de-Stalinizer, a liberal of sorts, and a reformer.12 In denounc- ing Gheorghiu-Dej’s abuses he also managed to get rid of the late leader’s obedient tool, Draghici.˘ This was the early meaning of what we can call “de-Dejization,” the Romanian version of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization. Ac- cording to all reliable sources, Ceau¸sescu had been a perfectly loyal officer in Gheorghiu-Dej’s army. He was even called “Dej’s club.” Whenever a purge had to be carried out, Dej relied heavily on the secretary in charge of cadres. If Ceau¸sescu wanted to defeat someone like Apostol, he needed the support

11. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Press, 2000.). 12. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, for All Seasons: A Political History of the Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan, Dosar Stalin: Genialissimul Generalissim (Bucharest: Curtea Veche Publishing, 2014). For an insightful survey of Romania’s history before and during Stalinism, see , The Romanians: A History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991). On the conflicts within the top party elite in the 1950s, see Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For a classic approach to Romanian , see Ghita Ionescu, Communism in Romania: 1944–1962 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

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of Dej’s acolytes: Maurer, Stoica, and Bodnara¸˘ s. Ceau¸sescu promised them whatever they wanted and, at least in the cases of Maurer and Bodnara¸˘ s, he stuck to his word. Less than two weeks after Dej’s death, the eternal leader’s pictures were removed from the walls of school and college classrooms, to be replaced with the emblem of the Romanian People’s Republic. As the new First Secretary of the party, Ceau¸sescu managed to achieve full control over the party apparatus and thereby over the whole Romanian state. Prime Min- ister Maurer was happy to deal with foreign policy, and the notoriously inept Stoica enjoyed the perks that came with his ceremonial position as chairman of the State Council. After only a few weeks had passed, the party suddenly announced that its name would be changed to the (PCR), and in July 1965 the Ninth PCR Congress solemnly anointed Ceau¸sescu as General Secretary. This congress became the foundational myth for Ceau¸sescu’s image as the champion of a new strategy based on self-reliance, an independent for- eign policy, and the recovery of national traditions trampled and overlooked during more than half of his predecessor’s rule. Whereas Dej had staked his claim to authority on the working class, Ceau¸sescu purported to be acting on behalf of the whole nation. For the Communist militant who had pursued a modicum of foreign policy autonomy in order to shun de-Stalinization, his demise in 1965 came in a sudden but somewhat redeeming way (at least in comparison to the fates of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Hideki Tojo, Vidkun Quisling, Ceau¸sescu, Gaddafi, and so many others). Montefiore is right in arguing that there is no greater accomplishment for a dictator than dying in his own bed. Despite the gradually evolving malady, political will can achieve “miracles” such as dictatorial control over the time, place, and consequences of death. However, even if Gheorghiu-Dej died a non-violent death, he failed to manage the most important consequence of his death: the designation of a successor. What would have happened if he had lived longer is impossi- ble to say. He lived long enough to leave behind deep, malevolent traces— ruthless purges, a network of harsh prison camps, forced collectivization, cells—but he was never able to assert himself as a reformist leader, an experiment he had timidly initiated at the beginning of the 1960s when he first established significant contacts with the West. Nowadays, he is re- membered as a little Stalin who died while still mimicking the real Vozhd’ in .13

13. See Myron Rush, Political Succession in the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).

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Conclusion

Gheorghiu-Dej was a Romanian Leninist leader whose personality blended both Bolshevik intransigence and the Byzantine mores of the local political culture. He had no theoretical vocation or ambition and did not pretend to be, as his successor did, a champion of “creative .” His ideological education, acquired in the Doftana prison in the 1930s, relied on the sacred texts of Bolshevism as codified by Stalin. Gheorghiu-Dej never moved away from the Bolshevik canon: combating factions, promoting forced industrial- ization, imposing the collectivization of agriculture, and practicing unbound repression against those defined and demonized as “class enemies.” Gheorghiu-Dej, together with the other members (mostly former jail in- mates) of his party’s ruling organs, abjectly acquiesced in the supremacy of the Moscow center so long as this humiliating subaltern status did not involve the weakening of his personal power and an erosion of Stalinist institutions. After Khrushchev unleashed de-Stalinization, limited though it was, Dej started to distance himself from the Kremlin. He engaged in this behavior not because he had suddenly discovered the virtues of , as his apologists main- tained, but because he saw it as a way to ensure his political survival. In this respect Ken Jowitt has rightly emphasized that Gheorghiu-Dej’s death in 1965 occurred quite “conveniently,” preempting the eruption of a fierce intra-elite struggle over the “political meaning” of Romania’s independent course.14 Those who state that the departure of Soviet troops from Romania in June 1958 was the expression of an inchoate, long-repressed patriotism within Gheorghiu-Dej’s group forget two crucial elements. First, this group included notorious Soviet-leaning officials, particularly the Comintern veteran Petre Borila,˘ the former Soviet military intelligence agent Bodnara¸˘ s, and the former Moscow political refugees Bârladeanu˘ and Rautu.˘ Second, the ’s willingness to approve the withdrawal of Soviet troops was feasible only be- cause PMR leaders offered staunch guarantees of loyalty. Such guarantees had actually been offered even earlier, in November 1956, when Gheorghiu- Dej and his team unconditionally supported the crushing of the Hungar- ian revolution.15 Furthermore, after November 1956, when and other officials who had formed the revolutionary Hungarian government were brought by force to Romania and kept under strict surveillance (presumably

14. Ken Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 1944– 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 212–213 n. 27. 15. Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 33, No. 2. (April 1998), p. 201.

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“political asylum”) at Lake on the outskirts of Bucharest, the Roma- nians showed unbending dedication in carrying out Soviet wishes. During those months, Gheorghiu-Dej uttered the infamous words about Nagy: “First we interrogate him, then we hang him. By the tongue!”16 Gheorghiu-Dej shared with Maurice Thorez, Antonín Novotný, Mao Ze- dong, Kim Il-sung, , and deep unease about Khrushchevism. But he harbored these misgivings discreetly, without provok- ing the Soviet Union more than he deemed necessary. Gheorghiu-Dej’s Lenin- ism was not ostentatious, unlike Ceau¸sescu’s. His most excruciating fear was that de-Stalinization would lead to a reevaluation of the 1950 purges, includ- ing Pat˘ ar¸˘ scanu’s assassination and Pauker’s excommunication. The leader who in 1949 had delivered the Communist Information Bureau’s vitriolic indict- ment titled “The Communist Party of Yugoslavia in the Hands of Murderers and Spies” could not become an independent figure like Tito. He could mimic Yugoslavization, but in reality he remained a Stalinist. This happened partly as a result of his own belief system but mostly because of his own biography. Until his death, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was the little Stalin from Bucharest.

16. Vladimir Tismaneanu, “By the Tongue,” Times Literary Supplement, 5 September 2008, p. 11.

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