THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

INCARCERATION AS A TOOL FOR SHAPING NATIONAL IDENTITY: ROMANIA, 1947–1989

JAKE PELINI SPRING 2016

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in English with honors in English

Reviewed and approved* by the following:

Robert D. Hume Evan Pugh University Professor of English Thesis Supervisor

Xiaoye You Associate Professor of English and Asian Studies Honors Adviser

* Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i

ABSTRACT

This essay examines how a regime can employ its carceral system to help reshape the national identity of its subjects, taking for a case study communist Romania between 1947 and 1989).

Historians have studied in detail the Romanian communist regime’s secret police, the securitate, as well the 1989 revolution that violently overthrew the regime. However, a paucity of scholarship exists on the prison spaces themselves. This study places the Romanian carceral system—both as a whole and through the examination of select individual prisons—at its center.

Using the spatial theories of Henry Lefebvre and Robert Whiting, as well as the nationalist theories of Georgio Agamben and Kenneth Jowitt, this essay shows that prisons functioned within Romania’s national and local frameworks to terrorize Romanians into complicity with the communist regime. Romanians who continued in their dissent were incarcerated by the regime, and this essay details the carceral program that the regime employed to brainwash prisoners according to communist doctrine. As a result of the communists’ imposition of the carceral program upon the Romanian people, the prison retains a presence in the Romanian cultural landscape, even thirty years after the regime’s fall. I hope that upon its conclusion this essay will have clear implications for rethinking how not only a Stalinist regime but any state employs its carceral system to consolidate its power. ii

Pentru unii libertatea nu există, însă, pentru alţii, chiar şi faptul că pot scrie această propoziţie înseamnă libertate.

For some, freedom doesn’t exist; for others, even the fact that I am able to write this sentence is freedom. For some, freedom is nothing more than a feeling—same as love or faith.

— Attila Bartis Lăzarea, 2012 iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

Chapter 1 Communist Romania’s Ubiquitous System of Incarceration ...... 1

Chapter 2 National Space: Constructing the Romanian State ...... 7

Romania’s National Awakening, 1821–1914 ...... 8 Peleş Castle: A Case Study in Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Romania ...... 11 Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania: Emergent Ethnic Hot Spots, 1914–1940...... 12 Bessarabia ...... 14 Bukovina ...... 15 Transylvania ...... 17 Finalizing Borders: World War II and the Transition to Communism ...... 18

Chapter 3 Local Spaces: The Consolidation of the Communist Romanian State...... 21

Systematization: Cultural Stalinism in Ceauşescu’s Romania ...... 22 Ceauşescu’s Casa Poporului [“People’s House”]: Nation Building in Local Space ...... 24 Conclusion ...... 26

Chapter 4 Incarceration as a Tool for Shaping National Identity ...... 27

Overview of the Romanian Gulag ...... 27 Romania’s Gulag Network: Nation Building on National and Local Levels ...... 31 The Role of Prisons in “Breaking Through” ...... 33 The Role of Prisons in “Political Integration” ...... 36 Prisons as Micro Spaces ...... 43 The Prison as Carceral Micro Space ...... 45 The Prison as Religious Micro Space ...... 51 The Prison as Educational Micro Space ...... 55 Re-education at Piteşti: A Case Study in Nation Building Inside Prisons ...... 58 Conclusion ...... 62

Chapter 5 “Incarceration Identities” in Twenty-First Century Romania ...... 65

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 71 iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Map of Political Boundaries in the Kingdom of Romania, 1877–1878 ...... 9

Figure 2: Map of Romanian Political Boundaries, 1940...... 13

Figure 3, Left: Front view of the Palace of Parliament, August 1989; Right: Aerial view of the Palace of Parliament, 2014 ...... 25

Figure 4: General Distribution of Location of Imprisonment in Romania, 1945–1989 ...... 28

Figure 5, Left: Spatial Distribution of Traditional Prisons in Romania, 1945–1989; Right: Spatial Distribution of All Locations of Incarceration in Romania, 1945–1989...... 39 v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, to the brave Romanian women and men who lived under the communist regime, especially those incarcerated by communist officials. For the courage and inspiration you have inspired in me throughout this process—I dedicate this to you.

Thank you also to my supervisor, Prof. Robert Hume, who dedicated countless hours, which were already sparse, to meet with me, provide feedback on drafts, offer book recommendations, and allow me to grapple with ideas. He saw this project from the beginning to its significantly different end. I feel honored to have called him my supervisor, mentor, and hopefully, now, a friend.

To Prof. Lisa Sternlieb, whose seminars and mentorship have molded me into a better thinker, writer, and reader, and have taught speak up for what I believe in, even when—no, especially when it goes against the grain.

To Prof. Catherine Wanner, who welcomed me into her undergraduate history seminar in the spring of 2015 and introduced me to Eastern European Borderland History. Without her, this essay would not exist.

To the Rock Ethics Institute, which provided generous funding for this research.

To my dear friends, without whose support and inspiration over the last few years I would certainly not have finished this thesis, and likely would not have continued to complete my degree. For their support and love, I would especially like to thank Anna, Coral, and Michelle.

To these and the countless others who deserve my gratitude:

Throughout my university studies, you have given me so much. And though I have appreciated the material gifts—the books and the articles and the funding—what has meant the most to me over the last four years has been the intangible gifts—of your time, your talents, and, ultimately, your love. All you have done has been greatly appreciated. 1

Chapter 1

Communist Romania’s Ubiquitous System of Incarceration

Between 1947 and 1989, Romanian communist leaders constructed a state that was as carceral as it was communist. From penitentiaries in the Carpathian peaks of the north; to psychiatric torture facilities near the western cityscapes of Timişoara; to deportation centers concentrated around the eastern Danube delta: Romania’s extensive, multifarious penal landscape was crucial to the communist regime.

Prisons were instrumental in both the rise and consolidation of Romanian communism.

Nearly a decade before the Romanian People’s Republic was officially proclaimed in 1947, future communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej formed Doftana prison’s “prison nucleus,” a think-tank of subversive intellectuals who developed many of what would become the communist party’s central tenets. This group included, among others, Ana Pauker and Nicolae

Ceauşescu, the country’s future dictator.1

If carceral institutions were present at the conception of Romanian communism, they were also omnipresent throughout it. Penitentiaries were found in cities such as Braşov and

Timişoara, where major revolutionary protest movements erupted and which eventually toppled

1 Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 36, 78. Though Ana Pauker played a crucial role in Romania’s communist era, this paper will not discuss her role outside of the context of prisons. For a biography of Pauker, see Levy, Ana Pauker. 2 communism.2 Romanians who were charged with economic sabotage and absenteeism were relocated to forced “labor units” or “work colonies” to serve their sentences.3 Finally, Romanian prison officials devised “Re-education,” a systematized torture that brainwashed subversive intellectuals to become communist zombies. Historians have noted Re-education for its

“grotesque originality” as among the Soviet Era’s most inhumane torture regimens.4

Following the communist regime’s fall, prison culture remained central to post- communist Romania. In 1992, three years after the revolution, an international report concluded that despite increased awareness of many human rights abuses in post-communist Romania, concern for the rights of prisoners had largely failed to improve prison conditions. The Helsinki

Human Rights Commission reported: “While the December 1989 revolution set off a wave of reform efforts in Romania and spawned an increased awareness of individual rights and international human rights standards, many of the prison personnel remain the same and the laws regulating prison life are largely unchanged.”5 In short, the system of incarceration, which had been instrumental in the rise and consolidation of Romanian communism, ultimately outlived the regime. It began as part of communist identity; it became a facet of Romanian identity. . . .

When constructing a state, how does a regime employ its carceral system to help reshape the national identity of its subjects? In the almost thirty years since the fall of Romania’s communist regime, historians have studied in depth Romania’s communist secret police force, the securitate.

2 See, for example, Oprea and Olaru, Day We Won’t Forget; and Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance, “Harta Penitenciarelor.” 3 Ibid., 23. 4 See Deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate, 29. 5 Introduction to Helsinki Watch, Prison Conditions in Romania, 1. 3 As of now, no general analysis of the system itself—the actual carceral spaces—exists. Perhaps one reason for this is that a study of Romanian prisons between 1947 and 1989 may perhaps seem esoteric or limited in scope. In fact, it has broader implications not only for key questions regarding the formation and maintenance of Romania’s variant of the Lenino-Stalinist communist state, but also for present-day political discourse. The violent fall of the Romanian

Communist Party in 1989 has divided scholarship of the period. That Romania alone resorted to violent revolution to overthrow its Soviet-era regime has led some historians to treat communist

Romania as entirely anomalous in the context of Soviet Era regimes. Other scholars caution against this tendency. Prominent Romanian-American historian and political scientist Vladimir

Tismăneanu, for example, argues convincingly that after analyzing Romania’s departure from the Soviet model, “one must still address . . . [Ceauşescu’s] successful utilization of a Lenino-

Stalinist party structure to reach absolute control over the whole of Romanian society.”6

Certainly, the inclination to treat the entire period as anomalous simply based upon its end seems like overkill. But what, then, precipitated the peculiar violence of the Romanian communist regime’s fall?

I would like to suggest that an investigation of questions related to communist Romania’s prison system may help us understand a connection between the regime’s Lenino-Stalinist model and its idiosyncratic demise. Between 1947 and 1989, how did the omnipresence of the carceral system, especially prisons, aid the creation of a communist state, and how did carceral practices help redefine Romanian national identity of those who lived in that state? What was the process of “forced nationalization” imposed upon prisoners inside the prisons themselves, and how was the prison space manipulated to facilitate this nationalization process? Because prisons were

6 Introduction to Tismăneanu, Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism. 4 prominent spaces in the landscape, how did they affect the lives of people not incarcerated— even people far from prisons, yet still in Romanian territories? If prisons reshaped the meaning of what it means to be “Romanian,” did this identity outlast the regime itself? What implications, if any, does this incarceration-inflected identity continue to have in the twenty-first century? In exploring these questions, I shall suggest that the Romanian revolution’s violence was in part a response to Romania’s unique system of brutality and control, embodied in the carceral system.

Communist-era Romania presents an especially instructive case study for exploring how a regime can manipulate carceral spaces to construct national identity. However, we need not confine the question temporally to the Soviet era, nor geographically to Romania’s borders, nor politically to Lenino-Stalinist communism. Essentially, Romania in 1947 was an amalgam of various ethnolinguistic groups within unsteady borders, which served as a testing ground for a nascent political ideology. In this way, Romania between 1947 and 1989 resembles many twenty-first century national conglomerates, such as the United States, and supranational entities, for example, the European Union. In writing this study, therefore, I hope to nod toward ways that a ruling power may manipulate systems of incarceration to achieve a vision of governance. That carceral systems could thus be central to the construction of modern states would suggest a similarity in the formation of such apparently disparate entities as a twentieth-century Lenino-

Stalinist satellite state like Romania, or a twenty-first century capitalist democracy such as the

United States.

Before I proceed with this discussion of the function of prisons in the Romanian communists’ national project, a brief review of the main theoretical constructs that I will employ in this essay—“space” and “nation building”—may prove helpful to readers. In his 1991 book

The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre argues that “space” is formed at the intersection of a 5 “conceptual triad” of three separate spatial constructs: space as it is planned and constructed; space as it is imagined; and space as it is lived. These three constructs are interdependent, and when one shifts, so too do the others. “Space” in toto is thus constantly reconstructed, redefined, and re-experienced. In other words, as societies redesign spaces (such as nations or cities), people necessarily perceive and interact with them (and within them) differently.7 More recently,

Robert Whiting has added another dimension to this spatial relationship. He writes that the spatial triad occurs on three levels: national, typically a state; local, smaller regions within that state; and micro, or specific spaces, such as buildings or monuments, within a local space. These different levels of space are in continuous dialogue and consequently (re)create and (re)define spaces, which are then (re)experienced by inhabitants.8

Kenneth Jowitt deconstructs the first decades of Romanian communism into a two-step sequence: “breaking through” followed by “political integration.” In other words, the revolutionary elite first altered or destroyed extant values, structures, and behaviors that threatened their political power. The erasure of subversive opposition then enabled the creation of new political spaces, institutions, and behavioral patterns—that is, the creation of a new communist community.9

In this essay, I shall employ these constructs to explore how Romania’s communist prisons functioned within the Romanian communists’ nation-building program on “national-,”

“local-,” and “micro-” spatial scales. The former two scales are defined essentially by the unique course of development of the Romanian state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

7 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 33, 38–39. 8 Whiting, “Space, Place, and Nationalism.” Throughout this introductory section, I have borrowed portions of Whiting’s language. 9 Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development, 7–20. 6 “National” space is the Romanian state as it existed during the communist transition to power

(and as it still exists today)—with the borders established at the conclusion of World War II.

“Local” spaces are regional areas that comprise high numbers of ethnic minorities—namely,

Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transylvania—or that are urban and important to the regime, such as

Bucharest. To analyze the role played by prisons in the construction of nationalism during the communist period, I have defined “micro” spaces as individual prisons in the traditional sense:

“buildings or facilities to which people are legally committed as punishment for a crime.”10

I would like to begin with a brief review of the development of the modern Romanian state to contextualize the problems that the communist regime would face in the formation of a uniform Romanian national identity. I shall then analyze how space generally facilitated nation building on national and local scales, focusing specifically on Systematization, Ceauşescu’s destructive plan of urban redevelopment in Bucharest. Third, I shall discuss prisons as micro- spatial loci of nation building from two angles. How did they facilitate the forced nationalization both of Romanians who were not incarcerated and of prisoners of the regime? Fourth, I shall conclude with an assessment of how the effects of incarceration persist into the twenty-first century and the broader contemporary implications of the study of Romania’s communist gulag, which I hope will provide a basis for future research.

10 Oxford English Dictionary, , s.v. “prison,” definition 1b, accessed March 15, 2016. An exploration of the Romanian communist regime’s carceral system in its entirety would require a book-length discussion. This definition provides a more appropriate necessarily excludes other carceral spaces in the Romanian gulag, such as sites used only for interrogation and selection, forced labor and deportation camps, “Re-education” torture centers (except those prisons that also served as centers), or locations of executions, of violence between police and partisans, and of common graves. 7

Chapter 2

National Space: Constructing the Romanian State

“. . . Romanians are perceived as a people apart, animated by a different spirit to that of Western nations. . . . While the West defines itself as an ordered and predictable world, Romania occupies a vague and unpredictable space.” — Lucian Boia, Romania: Borderland of Europe

Following more than a century of shifting borders, Romania was a conglomerate of territories that had either been part of or had been surrounded by three supranational empires: the

Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians, and the Russians. Following the dissolution of these empires in the early twentieth century, Romania absorbed not only territory from each of them but also the radically diverse groups inhabiting those territories. The integration of these various ethnic groups present the communist regime with a significant obstacle during their nationalization program.

Given the unique formation of the Romanian state that occurred up to the communists’ transition of power, a discussion of the formation of modern Romania will benefit an understanding of the Romanian communist regime’s nationalization project. In this chapter, I hope to contextualize the difficulty of promoting Romanian nationalism in the mid-twentieth century by detailing how the evolution of the Romanian state led to ethnic, cultural, and linguistic fragmentation. I have divided the chapter into three sections: Romania’s National

Awakening, which occurred between 1821 and 1914; World War I and the absorption of ethnically diverse territories into the Romania, from 1914 to 1940; and the events between 1941 8 and 1944, which surrounding establishment of Romania’s borders as the communist regime inherited them (and as they continue to exist).

Romania’s National Awakening, 1821–1914

The present-day conception of Romania is, in general geographic terms, a consolidation of three historic lands: Wallachia, which is predominantly Balkan; Moldavia, which stretches toward

Poland in the north and south, and Russia in the east; and Transylvania, which belongs largely to central Europe. While the country comprises parts of three different regions, it does not wholly belong to any of them. And because of its position in the East, many people have considered

Romania to be “Europe’s vanguard turned towards the Orient.”11 In short, Romania is in many ways a geographical frontier of Eastern Europe.12

Romania is a cultural and ethnic borderland, as well. Modern Romania’s national awakening occurred throughout the century preceding the Second World War.13 At the turn of the nineteenth century, territories with Romanian populations were still was surrounded by the

Ottoman Empire in the south, and were divided among the Habsburgs to the north and west

(Transylvania), and the Russians in the northeast (Moldavia). The revolutions that swept the continent in 1848 led to rebellions in these ethnically Romanian territories, beginning with

11 Berindei, “Nineteenth Century,” 212. 12 Boia, Romania, 11–27. In his book, Boia, a Romanian historian and professor at the University of Bucharest, presents readers with a less formal, more personal historiographical interpretation of the evolution of Romanian national identity throughout history. For a more formal study by the same author, see Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness. 13 For our purposes, I will focus primarily on Romanian history since 1821. However, Romania, as well as the Romanian people, have a rich history. For English histories of Romania that begin before the Roman Empire, see Georgescu, The Romanians; and for a more recent study, see Hitchens, Concise History of Romania. 9 Moldavia. After more than a decade of cyclical insurrection and suppression, Moldavia and

Wallachia finally united in 1859 as the Romanian United Principalities under the leadership of

Alexandru Ioan Cuza, who was of Moldavian descent. Seven years later, after a peaceful coup d’état deposed Cuza, the Prussian Prince Carol of the Hohenzollerns ascended to the throne and became King Carol I in May 1866. That same year, Romania ratified its first constitution.

Finally, in 1878, following the Russo-Turkish War, Romania gained its official independence, and in 1881 parliament proclaimed the Romanian Kingdom with Carol I at its head. The kingdom included Wallachia, as well as part of Moldavia (south of Bessarabia) and Dobrudja

(north of the Danube).14 (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1: Map of Political Boundaries in the Kingdom of Romania, 1877–187815

14 Berindei, “Nineteenth Century.” 15 Map obtained from Alexandrescu, Short History of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, 24–25. 10

What is important to note is that cultural blending occurred in what would become the

Romanian state from the earliest stage of its formation. After Moldavia’s unification with

Wallachia, the territory’s population continued to feel the effects of the Russian Empire’s colonial rule, especially on the Romanian administration and the peasantry’s traditional ways of life. Members of the Romanian administrative class either had been displaced from politics or had undergone a gradual Russification process.16 What resulted was a new class of Russo-

Romanian elites that, aided by the decline of the Romanian language in the Moldavian Orthodox

Church, led to the Russian language’s prominence in the region. In Wallachia, there is similar evidence of imposition of foreign culture on Romania, and the effects are much more conspicuous. In the region, the Prussian Hohenzollern, not the Moldavian Cuza, eventually became king with the Romanians as his subjects. King Carol I was therefore faced with the problem of solidifying his quasi-colonial reign, which he accomplished by weaving Prussian influences into not only the country’s political fabric but also the veritable landscape of

Romania.

16 Kristof, “Russian Colonialism and Bessarabia,” 31. As the elites underwent Russification in Moldavia, Wallachia emerged from a cultural and architectural Renaissance of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Wallachia’s ruler, Dimitri Cantemir, presided over a flourishing court and wrote the first novel in Romanian, while his colleague, Constantin Brancoveanu, patronized the arts and architecture. See also Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 94; and Jörgensen. “Balkans: Historical and Cultural Survey.” 11 Peleş Castle: A Case Study in Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Romania

The use of Peles Castle to legitimize Hohenzollern domination of foreign territory offers a useful case study in how physical space may be manipulated to serve nationalistic purposes.

Commissioned by King Carol I in 1873, the castle was to be the royal family’s summer residence. In reality, Peleş Castle possessed a much greater symbolic significance. It towers above the small town of Sinaia, nestled into the mountains about two hours northwest of

Bucharest. A visit to Peleş is an idyllic Transylvanian experience, up the Carpathian cliffs and past Sinaia Monastery, which dates to the late seventeenth century and is a hub of traditional

Romanian peasant art and iconography. Further up the mountain, a road lined with merchants selling traditional peasant garb, pysanky (Slavic-style painted eggs), and books about Vlad the

Impaler (the inspiration for Dracula), leads to the castle.

Looking at Peleş Castle from the front is almost like gazing at a glorified pastoral cottage.

Pointed spires stretch above a cream façade overlain with intricately carved fachwerk in a decorative cruck-like design. This provides the backdrop for a sculpture garden at the castle’s base, like a proscenium that frames the workaday movements of stone animals and people, at the forefront of which is the likeness of King Carol himself. Indeed, the very simplicity of its grandeur seems to evoke the rustic past of the Romanian peasant. Consequently, viewers may overlook the most surprising aspect of Peleş: the castle really is not Romanian. Indeed, its oaken interior inlaid and murals, its neo-Renaissance and Gothic Revival-inspired exterior, and its position atop the Carpathians: each resembles more a Bavarian Castle than a traditional

Romanian fortress.17 To legitimize his rule of non-Hohenzollern territory, Carol thus invoked the

17 For a juxtaposed visual and textual comparison of Peleş and Neuschwanstein, see Walter and Coignard, Dream Palaces, 210–57. 12 history and architecture of his Germanic lineage in a historically and culturally significant

Moldavian region. In doing so, he solidified Prussian dominion over the Romanian people, traditional culture, and countryside, both literally and symbolically.18

Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania: Emergent Ethnic Hot Spots, 1914–1940

The second major territorial shift occurred at the conclusion of World War I. King Carol died in

1914, and over the next two years (and under the pretense of neutrality), Prime Minister Brătianu capitalized on the sympathies of Carol’s successor, Ferdinand I, to negotiate with the Entente powers. In 1916, Brătianu secured the control Austrian territories with a Romanian population and of Allied support on the Romanian offensive, and Romania officially declared war on the side of the Entente, the alliance formed in 1907 between the Russian Empire, France, and Great

Britain.19 Thus, despite its military losses and its signing of the 1918 Treaty of Bucharest, which would have entailed geographic and economic losses had it gone into effect, Romania eventually emerged on the victorious side.20 During the peace talks at Versailles in 1919, “peoples considered allies by the Entente . . . got more territory and accordingly more numerous ethnic minorities within their frontiers. The nations considered enemies . . . got less territory and

18 Permanent Delegation of Germany to UNESCO, “Dreams in Stone.” 19 Georgescu, Romanians, 165–72. These Austrian-controlled territories included Bukovina, Banat, Maramureş, and the whole of Transylvania, up to a line going from Debreczen to Szeged. Castellan, History of the Romanians, 152–66, esp. 155. 20 See Georgescu, Romanians, 170–71. According to the Treaty of Bucharest, signed in May 1918, Romania would have lost Dobrudja, part of its mountain region (which included the Carpathians), and 170 villages. Additionally, Germany would have assumed control of its industry, commerce, and finances. Before the treaty took effect, however, in August the Romanian offensive against the Bulgarians finally became successful, and Transylvanian calls for independence threatened Hungarian control of Transylvania. 13 accordingly larger diasporas of their own people within the borders of other states.”21 Romania thus gained Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania, more than doubling its territory. The ethnic minorities were also absorbed into Romania, making its post-World War I population nearly 30 percent non-ethnically Romanian.22 (See Figure 2.) Faced with this new ethnic makeup Romania faced the challenge of internal consolidation.23 This difficulty of integrating ethnic minorities was especially concentrated in three areas: Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania.

Figure 2: Map of Romanian Political Boundaries, 194024

21 “Introduction: Hitler and Stalin.” In Snyder, Bloodlands, 8. 22 Lavizeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 9. Lavizeanu cites a 1937 population statistics that I was unable to retrieve. Institutul central de statistică, Anuarul statistic al României 1937 şi 1938, 44–45. By the end of 1920, Romania had annexed 156,000 square kilometers to its prewar 140,000, as well as 8,500,000, making its totally population approximately 16,250,000. Hitchens, Concise History of Romania, 158. 23 For a Communist perspective of the nationalism quandary that Romania faced in the interbellum years, see Oţetea, Concise History of Romania, 428–71. 24 Map obtained from Alexandrescu, Short History of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, 48–49 14 Bessarabia

In terms of minority populations, the most troublesome region was Bessarabia, in northeast

Moldavia. Specifically, as a former territory of the Russian Empire, Bessarabia had undergone

Russification during the early twentieth century. As a result, the Bessarabian social elite was dominated by Russian-speaking Russians and Jews, and Russian culture and tradition was promoted by the Moldavian Orthodox Church through books and church services in Russian.25

In addition to the dominance of Russian culture, the large proportion of minority populations in the region led Romanian officials to be suspicious of Bessarabia’s loyalty to the

Romanian national program. By 1930, out of a population nearly 3 million, a mere 56 percent of inhabitants were ethnically Romanian, and the rest comprised mainly Russians (12 percent),

Ukrainians (11 percent), and Jews (7 percent). In urban areas, the ratios were even less auspicious for officials: Romanians constituted just 32 percent of the urban population; Russians,

27 percent; Jews, 27 percent; and Ukrainians, 5 percent.26 Isolated events seemed to confirm the government’s worries regarding Moldavian loyalty. In 1917, for example, the Moldavian

National Party formed and developed a separatist independence movement that continued to threaten the security of Greater Romania after the official annexation of Bessarabia in 1918.27

Jews presented a particular obstacle to Romanian nationalists in Bessarabia because they exacerbated an urban-rural divide within the region. Jews accounted for just 7 percent of

Bessarabia’s population, half of them living in rural towns and shtetls. Nevertheless, a peculiar social and economic stratification had resulted from the shifting of borders that had occurred

25 Ibid., 95. See further Kristof, “Russian Colonialism and Bessarabia.” 26 Lavizeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 92. 27 Ibid., 94–98. Lavizeanu cites a December 1930 general census, which I was unable to retrieve. Institutul central de statistică, Recensământul general al populaţiei României. 15 throughout the last century. Although only a small percentage of Bessarabia’s total population,

Jews accounted for 37 percent of city dwellers. In the urban areas, moreover, they were often prominent and visible persons. In Kishinev, for instance, Bessarabia’s capital, more than 50 percent of doctors and 90 percent of dentists were Jews. At least 95 percent still declared Yiddish their native language. The rural population, with its history of anti-Semitism, conflated the socioeconomic monopoly of urban Jews with all Bessarabian Jews, who thus appeared “very much a community apart, not just religiously and occupationally, but linguistically as well.” 28

Angered that Jewish separatism was not resolved by Romania’s unification, Romanian nationalists continued to hold anti-Semitic attitudes during the interbellum years. Despite promises of naturalization, they denied Jews citizenship, and they harassed schoolchildren with racist death threats.29 In short, the legacy of Russification and high numbers of minorities in the region were unfavorable to the Romanian nationalist program, and the treatment of Bessarabian

Jews exemplifies how these fears manifested in the interbellum years.

Bukovina

Like the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary had been ethnically and culturally diverse; so, therefore, were its successor states.30 In Bukovina, as compared to Moldavia, ethnic ratios in

28 Laviezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 123. See also Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, 176. Kishinev was the center of one of the “most infamous of all modern pogroms” in 1903, and continued to be so in the interbellum years. 29 Lavizeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 123–27. This section includes a discussion of Jewish reactions to anti-Semitism in Bessarabia. 30 Boia, Romania, 102–07. While Boia does suggest that Romania was a partial exception to these borderland mosaics, he also notes the problem of “insufficient integration” of the ethnic minorities—notably, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews—in Greater Romania during the interbellum period. 16 Bukovina were even less favorable for officials seeking to Romanize populations than in

Moldavia. Romanians accounted for only 45 percent of the total population. Ukrainians, by contrast, made up almost 30 percent of it.31 Additionally, the prewar Austrian government had undermined Romanian nationalism by encouraging immigration of ethnic Ukrainians to

Bukovina, as well as by favoring Germans in the civil service and Jews in the economy.32 Unlike

Moldavia, however, Bukovina retained a large degree of autonomy so that even if Jews and

Germans dominated the elite class and administration, Romanians and Ukrainians still maintained political rights and opportunities for social mobility. As is often the case, the increase in opportunity for social mobility also led to socioeconomic inequality. Rising levels of inequality exacerbated already existing tensions between different ethnic groups. Each group, especially the Romanians and Ukrainians, felt as if it was forced to share lands to which it held historic claims.33 Thus, Romanian nationalists in Bukovina, like their Bessarabian counterparts, struggled with how to pacify competing cultures, but they also struggled with the competing historic claims made by various ethnic groups.

31 Ibid., 53. The next largest ethnic groups were Jews, who comprised 11 percent of the population, and Germans, who made up 9 percent. Like Bessarabiina, urban ratios were even worse: Romanians accounted for 33 percent of cities; Ukrainians, 14 percent; Jews, 30 percent; and Germans, 15 percent. 32 Though many accused the Austrian government of setting these policies in place specifically to undermine Romanian nationalism, whether this is the case is unclear. See Hitchens, Concise History of Romania, 147–48 33 Laviezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 49–87, esp. 51–56. See, for example, I. M. Nowosiwsky, who opens his history of Ukrainians in Bukovina, “Bukovina is essentially a compact Ukrainian land dating back to the fourth century A.D.” Nowosiwsky, Bukovinian Ukrainians, 13. For a Romanian perspective, see Alexandrescu, Short History of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. 17 Transylvania

In Transylvania, there also was (and continues to be) a similar inheritance feud, in this case between Romania and Hungary.34 Until the twentieth century, Transylvanian history was

“characterized by a series of annexations” that resulted in a regional mosaic of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, including Romanians, Magyars, Szeklers, Germans, Jews,

Ukrainians, Roma, and Serbs.35 Although the Romanian proportion of the population (a mere 54 percent) was only slightly smaller than the Romanian population of Bessarabia, the urban-rural divide was much greater. Though Romanians constituted more than half the total population, in

1910 nearly 90 percent of urban dwellers were Hungarians, Germans, or Jews. By 1930, this proportion had improved in favor of ethnic Romanians, although non-Romanian minorities constituted two-thirds of city inhabitants. Still, urban areas were obstacles to nationalists because the urban elite, who were typically ethnic Hungarians and Germans, often retained their respective linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In rural villages and towns, Romanians also were less dominant. In certain major towns, Jews and Transylvanian Magyars, although only a small segment of the total population, were prominent in their communities and retained their

Hungarian culture.36 I must also note that Transylvania, due to its high concentration of ethnic

34 These impassioned differing claims become apparent very quickly upon review of the scholarship of Transylvanian history. For example, Romanian scholar Constantin Giurescu begins his history of the region, “Transylvania has always been Romania’s ethnic reservoir. . . . This is an ancient phenomenon, which occurred as early as the times of the Dacians or Getae. . . .” Giurescu, “Transylvania in the History of the Romanian People,” 235. By contrast, in the “Preface” to a Hungarian history of the region, Béla Köpeczi writes that Transylvania has historically been “an organic part of the Hungarian state.” Barta et al., History of Transylvania, xii. 35 See Köpeczi’s Preface to Barta, History of Transylvania, xiii. See also Lavizeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 135. 36 Lavizeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 135–38. 18 minorities, experienced the most developed and mature Romanian nationalist movement in the pre-communist years.37 Nevertheless, minority ethnic groups remained in the region and retained their own language, culture, and history. Like Bessarabia and Bukovina, therefore, Transylvania was an obstacle for nationalists in the interbellum years, and would remain thus even up to the communists’ transition to power in 1944.

Finalizing Borders: World War II and the Transition to Communism

During World War II, Romania’s borders shifted once again. Following German victories in early 1940, King Carol joined the war “to rely on Germany to protect the country’s territorial integrity.”38 His plan backfired, however, and shortly after the war began, the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. That same year, Hitler, seeking to appease

Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, yet simultaneously ensure their cooperation with Germany, negotiated the cession of Romanian territories to Hungary and Bulgaria. In 1940, in exchange for the guarantee that Hitler would protect Romania as his ally, the country lost the Quadrilateral— which comprised two counties in South Dobrudja—to Bulgaria as part of the Treaty of Craiova, and Transylvania to Hungary. This latter agreement, known as the Vienna Diktat, writes historian Keith Hitchens, “signified the loss of Romania’s independence in foreign affairs and the subordination of her economy to the German war effort. In toto, these lost territories

37 The most important facet of the Transylvanian nationalism movement was the construction of schools, especially in the countryside, which promoted Romanian culture and language, and eventually precipitated the shift from a predominantly Hungarian to Romanian intellectual elite. Ibid., 129, 176–87. 38 Hitchens, Concise History of Romania, 198 19 amounted to almost one hundred thousand square kilometers and more than six million inhabitants, or a third of both Romania’s territory and its population. 39

The loss of these territories to Hitler decreased the monarchy’s popularity among

Romanians, and caused tension between the monarchy and anti-monarchical activists. Amid rising tensions, Carol II appointed Ion Antonescu as the government representative responsible for smoothing relations with the Iron Guard, Romania’s ultra-nationalist, Orthodox, right-wing political party, the Iron Guard; with peasants and other liberal groups opposed to the “royal dictatorship”; and with the German diplomats in Bucharest. Antonescu, however, had his own agenda. He determined to depose the king and assume power, and he soon convinced Carol to abdicate and flee the country. Carol’s successor, his nineteen-year-old Mihai, named Antonescu as the Leader of the Romanian State, and Antonescu capitalized on his promotion to strengthen his alliance with Hitler and Germany.40

The alliance with Hitler’s Germany ultimately prove fatal for Romania. Although with the assistance of the Germans the Romanian army again liberated Bessarabia and Bukovina during a 1941 offensive against the Soviet Union, it paid for years of collusion with Hitler, even though it had defected to the Allied side in 1944. Following the Allied win in 1945, Romania lost permanently Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Quadrilateral, though it did regain

Transylvania from Hungary.

The Romanian areas in the border regions felt the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural effects of constantly shifting borders. Furthermore, because Romania entered the war on the side of

Hitler’s Germany, then Prime Minister Ion Antonescu could no longer ignore the decades-old

39 Ibid., 199–215; and Boia, Romania, 94–95, 105–07. 40 Hitchens, Concise History of Romania, 202–04. 20 “Jewish question.” Certain Romanian ethnic minorities paid the price.41 During the war, some

110,000 Jews and 25,000 Roma people were deported; roughly half of these people died.42 In short, World War II had three main effects as it regards Romanian national identity. It once again shifted both the borders of the amorphous eastern corridor, it reshaped the identity of those who lived there, and it consequently exacerbated ethnic tensions.

Conclusion

As a result of the unique formation of the Romanian state, the communist leaders began their transition to power in 1944 cognizant of the fact that they were inheriting an ethnically, religiously, and politically fragmented country.43 By the mid-twentieth century, the “nation,” a relatively new construct, was increasingly defined not by borders or international treaties, but

“by its past history, its common culture, its ethnic composition and . . . its language.”44 There was little uniformity in any of these in Romania in 1944, even if the Romanian state’s borders had been defined for the time being. Therefore, communist leaders faced a dual task in their grand experiment: to institute a new model of government and to create a new nation. Romania had finally been constructed; it was up to communists to create Romanians.

41 For a discussion of the Jewish Question in Romania, see Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, 183–89. 42 Hitchens, Concise History of Romania, 210–11. Despite an agreement in 1942 to deport Jews deemed fit for labor, in the end Antonescu did not engage Romania in Hitler’s “final solution.” 43 Stephen Fischer-Galaţi writes, “August 23, 1944 is regarded as the day of enslavement by opponents of communism and the day of liberation by the communists and their supporters.” On this date, King Michael led a coup that deposed the Nazi-sympathizing Antonescu, which would cause the Soviet Union and other Allied powers to look favorably upon Romania. Fischer- Galaţi, “Prelude to Communist Totalitarianism, 391. 44 Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 82–97, esp. 84. In this celebrated study, Hobsbawm provides an assessment of nation building in the modern era. Though he focuses on the third quarter of the nineteenth century, his conclusions are applicable to Romania in the years before communism. 21

Chapter 3

Local Spaces: The Consolidation of the Communist Romanian State

By 1947, communist leaders had reestablished Romania as the Romanian People’s Republic and aligned the state with the Soviet Eastern Bloc. At the state’s inception, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej served as secretary general; he headed a secretariat that comprised the prominent communist thinkers and leaders Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Teohari Georgescu. Because the Romanian communists had identified themselves with Stalin’s Soviet Bloc, throughout the construction of the communist Romanian state, government leaders adhered to the tenets of Stalinism, the methodology of state construction devised by Soviet officials and named after their leader, Josef

Stalin. Graeme Gill, in his book Stalinism, writes that “Stalinism consisted of four distinct although related phases: the economic, the social, the cultural and the political.”45 These various phases were characterized by the implementation of nation-wide programs that were carried out locally. For example, the collectivization of agriculture occurred throughout Romania, but the land was consolidated into regional farms operated by local peasants and farmers. 46 The communist regime’s program for consolidating its power over the national space—the state— thus began on a smaller scale, with the local spaces.

45 Gill, Stalinism, 52. 46 Kligman and Verdery, Peasants Under Siege. 22 In this chapter, I shall examine one of the government programs that helped to consolidate the regime’s power and mold the state according to the Stalinist model. Such a discussion will lay plain the importance of local spaces in reconfiguring the Romanian national space. The program that I will examine is Systematization, Ceauşescu’s program of urban redesign, which leveled spaces of tradition and culture in towns and cities and replaced them with uniform, rigid architecture. I will suggest, through a case study of the People’s House, that

Systematization enabled the regime to insert itself into Romanian tradition and its people’s cultural mindset. In discussing the Romania’s local spaces in this way, I hope to contextualize my later analysis of how local prison spaces facilitate the communist’s consolidation of power.

Systematization: Cultural Stalinism in Ceauşescu’s Romania

The urban architecture project initiated by Nicolae Ceauşescu, the second and final Romanian communist dictator, provides a poignant case study of the way that communists used space in their nation-building project. Even today, this communist-style architecture constitutes much of the country’s urban centers.47 In Bucharest, for example, little remains of that “Paris of the

Balkans” of the interbellum years; much of what survived the bombings of World War II did not outlast a second blitz from the communist offensive.48 Notably, in 1988, Ceauşescu announced the “Systematization” of Bucharest, an urban redesign project so destructive that many

47 For a comprehensive review and analysis of communist architecture in Romania, see Zahariade, Arhitectura în Proiectul Comunist. 48 For an account of the metropolis Bucharest as the twelve-year-old Ceauşescu would have seen it in 1930, see Behr, Rise and Fall of Ceausescu. 23 Romanians have anachronistically dubbed it “Ceaushima,” in reference to the atomic bomb dropped on Japan.49 Ceauşescu’s plan was first to eliminate Uranus, Antim, and Rahova,

Bucharest’s three oldest quarters, which were dense with historical monuments, monastic buildings, and churches, some more than three hundred years old. In place of these buildings, he planned to build a monumental administrative complex, out of which the party would operate.50

What was to happen to the Romanians who had lived in those districts? Without any adequate government plan of resettlement, these homeless villagers, disoriented and with nowhere else to go, were forced to relocate. Indeed, deprived of a home, of tradition, and of a secure future, they were not officially “deported,” in the modern concept of the term, so much as effectively deported.51 Systemization was thus an unspoken, yet nevertheless effective, policy of forced migration for potential threats to power. Kate Brown has discussed the devastating effects that forced relocation of people from their land.52 By razing Bucharest’s oldest and most historic quarters, Ceauşescu’s Systematization destroyed local practices, beliefs, and institutions. In doing so, it broke down the national identities attached to them, leaving a void that would be

49 See Tismăneanu, Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism, 57n3. 50 For an overview of Ceauşescu’s Systematization scheme, see Deletant, Romania Under Communist Rule, 148–58. I should note, however, that Jowitt’s study spans only the first two decades of the communist era, whereas Ceauşescu announced Systematization in 1988. However, as Jowitt writes, nation building, and more specifically, breaking through “may be conceived of as a process extending over time, affecting different social domains and resulting in a mixed set of outcomes.” Therefore, I maintain that we may look at Systematization as an example of Jowitt’s theory in practice. See Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development, 8. 51 According to Deletant, there grew to be 231 Romanian village communes in Belgium, 95 in France, 42 in Switzerland, and 52 in Wales. Deletant, Romania, 154. 52 Brown, Biography of No Place, 52–172, esp. 148. See Brown for a powerful account of the effects of Soviet forced-deportation policies on both deportees and on the development of Soviet communism. 24 filled by the colorless, rigid, and standardized communist architecture that would come to symbolize life for the masses under a totalitarian communist regime.

The plan ultimately manifested a visible representation of communist control of the nation. It was successful for two reasons. It effaced both the villages and their local traditions and systems of rule, thereby making legible the previously opaque, and therefore potentially threatening, quarters of the city. But it also enabled the party to maintain dominion over not only the administrative but also the intellectual, historical, and cultural hubs of the nation. As part of this project, architects would erect the gargantuan House of the Republic (today, the Palace of

Parliament), the House of Science and Technology, the Ministry of the Interior, the State

Archives, and a National Library.53

Ceauşescu’s Casa Poporului [“People’s House”]: Nation Building in Local Space

Of the buildings constructed during Systematization, the most striking is what Romanians today have renamed the Palace of Parliament (Palatul Parlamentului). The building covers over 15.5 acres of land and is one of the largest buildings in the world, second only to the Pentagon. As noted, to accomplish this feat, Ceauşescu ordered the demolition of three of the city’s oldest historical quarters, as well as their monastic buildings, churches, and elegant houses reminiscent of the “Little Paris” epoch.54

Approaching the palace from the main boulevard—originally christened the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism—one sees what appears to be a classical temple design superimposed

53 Ibid., 149. For a discussion of the creation of legible cities and societies out of autonomous local entities in the twentieth century, see Scott, Seeing Like a State. 54 Deletant, Romania Under Communist Rule, 149–50. 25 on a gargantuan palace complex. (See Figure 3, Left.) From an aerial view, the building even resembles the throne of a seated god or king. (See Figure 3, Right.) Two square, turret-like structures stretch forward at diagonals from the building’s lowest level, like legs that curve to meet a seat. The seat’s front consists of a line of successive arched porticos that lift a façade studded with windows, at the center of which four columns flank the entrance. Where the diagonal legs meet the building’s seat, two more structures rise, like two armrests, and extend away to meet the seatback of the palace. From this second level lifts the building’s head, from

Figure 3, Left: Front view of the Palace of Parliament, August 198955; Right: Aerial view of the Palace of Parliament, 201456 which radiates the city of Bucharest. Despite these influences, the building is decidedly communist—rigidly linear, precisely segmented, and colorlessly elegant. All at once, therefore, it is Parthenon imposed on palace, castle overlooking medieval manor, communist dictator exercising his divine right over his capital.

55 Photograph by Boris Yurchenko, Associated Press, August 1989. This photograph was obtained from the AP Images database, Image ID 890814046. 56 “Palace of Parliament Bucharest—Aerial View,” Photo obtained online from Meet Romania, 7 March 2014 in “Palace of Parliament or People’s House—The world’s largest administrative building.” 26 In this way, its impression is much the same as that of Peleş Castle. Thus, there emerges a spatial dialogue—on both the local and national scales—between competing symbols of

Romanian identity. This dialogue epitomizes the tension between the vestiges of a former

European imperial regime and a grand totalitarian nationalist experiment. King Carol’s castle exercised Hohenzollern dominion over the inherited Romanian pastoral landscapes and culture and, therefore, over Romanians. Ceauşescu’s palace, by contrast, challenged Peleş’s symbolic past by situating communist grandiosity in the country’s capital, and embodied the focal point of

Ceauşescu’s rule: centralization of the state.57

Conclusion

If communists were to usurp effectively the legitimacy of rule, however, spatial symbolism and centralization in local cities alone would not suffice. Equally important to space in urban centers was space in towns and the rural countryside. For we have seen that in these areas, especially

Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transylvania, national identity was as amorphous as the fluctuating borders, and loyalty as tenuous as the competing historical claims of bordering nations. The importance of towns and rural villages further increased, as Ceauşescu planned to convert them into epicenters of Soviet-Era policies, such as forced collectivization. Communists thus confronted a spatial void, or more properly, a network of voids that, if filled, might bridge the regional-ethnic and urban-rural divides that had presented historical obstacles to a uniform national identity. In time, prisons were to become the micro spaces that filled those voids.

57 Ibid., 155. 27

Chapter 4

Incarceration as a Tool for Shaping National Identity

Space . . . proved to be more than a simple passive container. . . . [I]t was a made product whose endowed symbolic content became a routinely negotiated element in many people’s lives which helped shape their political beliefs. — Robert Whiting, “Space, Place, and Nationalism” To repeat day after day, hour after hour, that prison life is impossible. . . . Twelve years later, I was free. I saw all kinds of people. These people knew I had just been freed from prison. . . . “You must forget” was one of their typical statements. Nobody wished to shoulder the least of my memories. It might disturb the important process of their digestion. Their second typical statement was of an undisguised egocentrism. “You were on one side of the bars, we on the other, so we were all in prison.” To this, no retort is possible. — Lena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons

Overview of the Romanian Gulag

The Romanian gulag system was a network of symbolic, isolated micro spaces that shaped

Romanian nationalism on national, local, and micro levels. To preface the discussion of the role played by prisons in the communist national experiment, I will begin with an overview of the system’s sheer scope, especially as it relates to the Soviet Union’s gulag network.

Between 1947 and 1989, communist Romania, which had a total population of approximately 23 million, had more than 230 locations for state imprisonment, including 28

Figure 4: General Distribution of Location of Imprisonment in Romania, 1945–1989

29 penitentiaries, places of interrogation and selection, and forced labor and deportation camps.58 If one adds the more than one hundred town, district, regional, and county headquarters of the

Romanian secret police, where officers examined detainees upon their arrest, this number increases to approximately 350 carceral spaces. Researchers have also identified at least fifteen additional “Re-education” torture centers, or psychiatric facilities at which police officials systematically tortured subversive university students and reconditioned them in communist ideology. If inmates in these facilities persisted in subversive behaviors while incarcerated, they often received capital sentences. Indeed, more than ninety locations of executions, sites of violent outbreaks between police officials and subversive partisans, and common graves have been identified.59 (See Figure 4.60)

How many political prisoners passed through this Romanian gulag network? For context,

I shall cite estimates of the number of prisoners who passed through the Soviet Russian gulags.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning study Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum estimates the total number of those who passed through the Soviet Union’s gulag at 18 million.61 By contrast, a committee commissioned by the Romanian government in 2006 estimated that the Romanian

58 Deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate, xiv 59Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, “Sighet Museum: Room 5.” 60 This map marks locations of penitentiaries with a square; forced labor camps with a circle; obligatory residences with an oval; centers of deportation with a triangle; psychiatric facilities with the letter A; and mass graves and sites of assassination or execution with crosses. Map obtained from O’Neill, , “Of camps, Gulags and Extraordinary Renditions,” 471. The map was compiled by Romulus Rusan and was originally printed in the Final Report issued by the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of Communist Dictatorship in Romania. 61 See the Introduction and Appendix to Applebaum, Gulag, xvii; 578–86, esp. 580n9; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, USA/USSR: Facts and Figures, 1–2. 30 regime either deported or incarcerated at least 2 million people.62 When viewed in absolute terms, the magnitude of the Soviet Russian prison network appears to dwarf that of its Romanian counterpart. However, one must also take into account that in 1989 the population of the Soviet

Union reached approximately 287 million compared with a Romanian population of 23 million.63

In other words, when Soviet-era communism collapsed in 1989, a little more than 6 percent of the population had passed through the Soviet Union’s gulag. The Romanian regime had incarcerated nearly 10 percent of its population. Proportionately, therefore, Romania’s gulag network incarcerated, in terms of proportion of population, 150 percent that of the carceral system of the Soviet Union.

But quantitative data are mere unidimensional projections of a much more complex history. In truth, no statistic can communicate the reality of individual lives that suffered under the Romanian gulag, or the national identities that were formed by it.64 The character that these lives and identities would assume depended upon each individual’s relationship to the prisons.

This relationship may be classified in two broad categories. There were the literal prisoners— those persons arrested, often for trivial reasons, and incarcerated, usually hundreds of miles from their homes, in any of the various state penal institutions. There were also those “prisoners” who

62 Comisial Prezidenţială pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România, “Raport Final,” 161. Lavinia Stan echoes the Center’s figure in a summary of the measures the Romanian state has taken to reconcile with its communist history. Stan, “Reckoning with the Communist Past in Romania,” 142. Historians should be cautious of the exactness of this figure, since only fragments of the Romanian regime’s official documentation have survived. The Sighet Memorial Centre is currently compiling a database of documents from former detainees and deportees, as well as from archives of the Ministry of Justice. It has confirmed the existence of only 93,000 files from former detainees. Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, “Census of the prison camp population in Romania, 1945–1989.” 63 Applebaum, Gulag, xvii; 580n9; Deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate, xiv. 64 See Biography of No Place, 18–51. Here, I have borrowed phrasing from Brown’s assessment of Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, which includes an excellent discussion of the incongruity between statistics and the history behind them. 31 never confined in a communist prison, whose only crime was living behind the border-bars of a carceral country. For every Romanian during the period, the threat of both the secret police and arbitrary incarceration was ever-present, like a sinister murmur perpetually whispered in their ears.

In this chapter, I shall examine how communist leaders employed Romania’s carceral system to reshape the mindset of all Romanian citizens, regardless of whether they were officially incarcerated. Using the theories discussed in the first chapter of this essay, I shall explore how Romanian communist leaders accomplished the redefinition of Romanian identity using prisons. How did prisons function within the framework of national and local landscapes to terrorize populations into submission to, and complicity with, the communist regime—without necessarily incarcerating them? How did each prison enable the communist regime to bring

Romanians who continued to oppose the regime, such as students and clergymen, in line with communist doctrine? I shall look first at the role played by prisons in the forcible nationalization of Romanians who were never physically incarcerated by the communist regime.

Romania’s Gulag Network: Nation Building on National and Local Levels

There is a tendency, when one hears the word “gulag,” to conjure visions of a network of prison camps so extensive and entirely apart from the rest of society that it assumes its own geographical character. It is, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, a “Gulag Archipelago.”65 Certainly, many

Romanian prisons were isolated. Bruce O’Neill writes that like Soviet camps, each Romanian

65 Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. See also the Introduction to Applebaum, Gulag. 32 gulag was in many ways deliberately set apart from the everyday world of most Romanians.66

But in the case of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn’s term retains emotive power because Soviet prison camps—located far to the east at the base of the Ural Mountains or in the icy recesses of

Siberia—were often not only isolated but also remote.67

In an analysis of communist-era Romanian prisons, too great an emphasis on the notion of remoteness risks underplaying the effects of proximal prisons on Romanian people not incarcerated. In fact, Romanian prisons were not remote in the same way as the Soviet Union’s prison camps because the Romanian regime largely did not construct new penal institutions. In part, this was because the country was a great deal smaller than the Soviet Union, and there were fewer distant locations to build prisons. Consequently, communists often repurposed existing facilities to serve penal functions. (See Figure 4.) For example, Lena Constante, an artist imprisoned in the early years of the regime for participating in “espionage conspiracy,” writes that the first “prison” to which she was sent was actually the basement of a building, in which the police had added four cells and a room that doubled as a shower and punishment space.68 In the remainder of the first section of this chapter, I would like to show how the Romanian carceral network’s unique character—isolated without being remote—enabled communist leaders to employ prisons in the nationalization of Romanians, even those who were never literally incarcerated by the regime.

66 O’Neill, “Of Camps, Gulags, and Extraordinary Renditions,” 473. 67 See Applebaum, Gulag, xv; xxxviii; 74–75; 159–82. 68 Constante, Silent Escape, 6 and Gail Kligman’s introduction, ix–xv. In the Soviet Gulag, the prison network shared a similar beginning; lacking alternatives, authorities imprisoned prisoners in makeshift “jails,” including basements, attics, empty palaces, and churches. However, as the Soviet system developed, prisons moved to more remote locations, which is not true in the Romanian case. Applebaum, Gulag, 7. 33 The Role of Prisons in “Breaking Through”

Unlike the Soviet Union, which built most of its gulag camps,69 the Romanian regime simply continued to use prisons and other buildings that had existed in the pre-communist years. Such was the case, for example, of Piteşti prison, the penitentiary notorious for its Re-education torture experiment, which I will later discuss in detail. Communists strategically chose Piteşti as the location for the torture of subversive university students because it was situated to the northwest just outside of town limits—far enough from any residential area so that inmates’ screams could not be heard from the outside70—but they did not construct it for the purpose. In fact, Romania’s second king, Carol II, originally built Piteşti to hold common criminals, and

Antonescu, the Prime Minister who allied Romania with Germany during World War II, converted it into a political prison in 1941. Because of its relative proximity to the town of Piteşti as well as to its historical functions, the prison’s existence was not necessarily “secret”—merely veiled.

In addition to Piteşti prison’s location, there were more subtle motivations for choosing it as the “Center for Student Re-education.”71 As I have noted, Piteşti was a carceral space created to hold petty offenders under the monarchy, then redefined as a political prison during World

War II. By repurposing the space as a prison for subversive university students, communist officials intended to send a clear message to all of Romania. The regime was systematically persecuting ideological dissidents, who were considered baser than the ordinary criminals. Even if outsiders were not entirely privy to the torture regimen carried out within Piteşti—indeed,

69 See “Part One: The Origins of the Gulag, 1917–1939” in Applebaum, Gulag, 3–117. 70 Bacu, Anti-Humans, 29 71 Ibid. 34 many Romanians claimed that propaganda convinced them that students really went not to a prison but a recreational facility for “professional readjustment”—the symbolism nevertheless persisted.72 Students went to an isolated space that had a history of serving to house criminals and traitors; to outsiders, the students imprisoned in Piteşti, indeed all those who challenged the regime, were thus redefined as traitorous criminals.

Another notable instance of spatial repurposing is Sighet prison (today, the Sighet

Memorial Museum). Located in northwest Transylvania, a territory that formerly belonged to

Austria-Hungary, the prison was originally constructed to hold common criminals. However, following the empire’s dissolution, it became instead a “repatriation” prison for members of

Romania’s communist opposition, especially intellectual elites, as well as for deportees from the

Soviet Union. During this time, it was known as the “Danube Colony,” a misnomer given that the prison, which was located in a central block of the surrounding town, had a much more immediate presence in the daily lives of locals than was Piteşti.73

How did Sighet prison function within the national framework of the carceral system to aid the communist regime’s nationalist program? To answer this question, I will turn to the case of the approximately fifty Greek-Orthodox and Roman-Catholic bishops and priests who served sentences in Sighet prison beginning in 1950.74 The incarceration of these religious officials followed a 1948 decree that annulled religious “autonomy of denomination” by disbanding all

72 Ibid. 73 Here, I wish to note that one of my sources directed me to a 1910 Hungarian census of the region, which found there were nearly six thousand Greek-Orthodox Catholics and nearly five thousand Roman Catholics in the area. Additionally, nearly 20 percent of the population spoke languages other than Romanian. However, this secondary source was not credible for scholarly purposes, and though it directed me to its primary source, the census is available in Hungarian. Therefore, I was unable to confirm the claim. See http://www.talmakiado.hu/. 74 “The Sighet Prison: Short history of the building of Sighet prison,” Sighet Memorial website. 35 churches that were not Romanian Orthodox.75 By exiling elite religious officials to a repatriation facility in Transylvania (the object of a notorious territorial dispute between Hungary and

Romania), communists again employed recognizable space to send a subtler message. They used

Sighet prison to demonstrate to Romanians and perhaps even to the international community that

Transylvania did not simply belong to communist Romania. It had been assimilated to the extent that it had become a space for repatriating Romanians who lacked nationalist values.

Furthermore, elite Romanians who challenged official party doctrine were considered to have undermined Romanian nationalism and were forcibly repatriated.

There are many examples of spaces similar to Piteşti and Sighet, which were repurposed in ways that served both practical and ideological ends. In each case, Romania’s isolated, repurposed prisons function in a way that differentiates them from the Soviet Union’s remote, purposefully built camps. In the examples that I have explored in the previous two sections, the communist regime recycled prisons to redefine the nature of criminality. By imprisoning subversive students at Piteşti, the communists aligned subversive students with the common criminals and political traitors that the space had formerly been used to incarcerate. Sighet served essentially the same function, showing that even religious officials and other elites who departed from the Communist Party’s prescribed ideology were subject to punishment. The regime also used Sighet to stake a claim to Transylvania, a contested ethnic borderland, as a space of

Romanian nationalist space. Thus, The Soviet Union’s gulag archipelago redefined space on the national scale through its torture of prisoners in distant lands. The relative closeness of

Romanian prisons to towns and cities, by contrast, enabled the regime to terrorize the populations of local spaces in a more immediate and intimate way. In short, if the presence of

75 See Stan and Turcescu, Church, State, and Democracy in Expanding Europe, 137. 36 both the Romanian and Soviet gulag systems was felt by the states’ respective polities, but only

Romania’s was visible. I do not wish to suggest that The Soviet Union’s prison network was not instrumental to the regime, or did not inflict terror upon Russian citizens. As Solzhenitsyn observes, the Soviet government could not have maintained power without the threat of imprisonment.76 Rather, Romanian prisons possessed greater agency in the first stage of Jowitt’s nationalism theory. As close and constant reminders of the threat of imprisonment, Romanian prisons haunted the everyday lives of Romanians, thus aiding the regime in “breaking through” potentially subversive enclaves within the Romanian polity not behind bars. I shall now turn to how these spaces also enabled communists to complete the second stage of the nationalization process: “political integration,” or the inculcation of a new communist identity in Romanians.

The Role of Prisons in “Political Integration”

As I have demonstrated, the communist regime employed prisons both to expand its definition of criminality to include dissent of the regime and to terrorize the Romanian population. How did the gulag network also function as a system of “political integration,” aiding the regime in indoctrinating with communist ideology even Romanians not incarcerated?

For a case study in how prison spaces facilitated political integration on the national and local levels, I offer Doftana prison, which is perhaps the most important example from the period. Doftana was built near the end of the nineteenth century to be a model facility for hard- labor convicts, but during the interbellum years government leaders converted the prison into a

76 See Sozhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago. 37 carceral space for political prisoners and habitual offenders.77 Among those imprisoned in

Doftana were Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Romania’s communist leader between 1947 and 1965, and his successor Nicolae Ceauşescu, who led the country until the regime’s collapse in 1989.

Both future leaders were members of the Doftana “prison nucleus.” This collective of intellectuals included many of the Party’s future prominent leaders and produced official documents, such as the History of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Short

Course.78 In fact, during a speech at the space in 1968, Ceauşescu reminisced that the

“communists turned Doftana . . . into a revolutionary high school for shaping communist fighters and revolutionaries devoted to the people and the cause of socialism, freedom, and peace.”79

Despite its origins, the prison enabled the formation of the Communist Party by bringing together revolutionary figures who would eventually become a future communist elite.80 But in

1940, just before World War II, an earthquake destroyed the prison, killing between fifteen and seventeen of its communist inmates.

Although the earthquake could have ended Doftana’s role in Romanian history, the communists used the history of the space to legitimize their authority during their transition to control of the Romanian political order. The Communist Party’s transition to power began peacefully in late 1944. By 1947, however, early economic problems exacerbated tensions among insurgent property owners who were already angered by the agricultural collectivization program initiated in 1945, which the Communist Party had initiated even though it was still

77 See Bădică, “Curating Communism,” 32. 78 Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 78–79. 79 Ceauşescu, “Speech at the Doftana Museum.” 80 In fact, Tismăneanu notes that “experience in prison,” including Doftana, would become indispensable for ascention in the communist hierarchy. Stalinism for All Seasons, 158. But Doftana is a prison of interest for many reasons beside those discussed in this essay, especially in terms of its architecture. See also Bădică, “Curating Communism,” 25–46. 38 technically subordinate to the king.81 In response, the Communist Party dissolved the National

Peasants’ party and arrested twenty of its members. They also seized upon the period of unrest to usurp control from King Mihai. During the coup, Doftana still lay in ruins from the 1940 earthquake, but, desperate for credibility to rule, the Party capitalized on Doftana’s historic importance to provide a heroic narrative that would legitimize its assumption of power.

In November 1947, during the political turmoil but before Mihai had officially abdicated, officials organized a commemorative pilgrimage to the ruined space. Five thousand Romanians participated in the march, a number that was substantial enough for the communist regime to announce four months later the intention to transfigure the space from a ruined prison to a “red mausoleum.”82 This museum would reconstruct not only Doftana’s actual walls and cells; it would commemorate its historic importance for the communist regime. As Simina Bădică notes,

Doftana prison “created heroes, those who were killed in the earthquake . . . and those who risked their lives to rescue them, like Gheorghe Gehorghiu-Dej; it also created villains, the bourgeois politicians and the penitentiary administration who allowed for [sic] this to happen.”

The prison was therefore a space redefined, one that became a nationally symbolic of the solidification and heroism of communism and its leaders’ power, and it was used to integrate its pilgrim-visitors into the new regime—a national spatial symbol of the solidification of communist power.

Did communists also use prison spaces to solidify power in the local ethnic hotspots? As discussed in Chapter Two, three particular regions presented Romanian nationalists with

81 For information about this collectivization drive, as well as a general history of Romanian land reform, see Merurs, “Land Reform in Romania,” esp. 113–17. 82 For a review “profoundly political” role that museums may play in nation building, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 178–85. 39 difficulties following the formation of the modern state. Transylvania was formerly Austro-

Hungarian and heavily populated by minorities; Moldavia was south of Bessarabia and culturally still felt the effects of the Russian Empire’s colonialism; and Bukovina was the most ethnically diverse and the subject of a territorial dispute with Ukraine. In this chapter, I have also shown that communist officials appear to have recycled prisons in ethno-culturally diverse territories as a means of reinforcing their authority in the regions. Such was the case of Sighet in

Transylvania. To this point, however, I have only asserted that prisons discouraged ideological subversion. Did they also aid the political integration of ethno-cultural minorities? There are three factors to consider that, when combined, suggest that Romania’s prison system shared characteristics of not only the Soviet Gulag but also the Nazi German concentration-camps.

Figure 5, Left: Spatial Distribution of Traditional Prisons in Romania, 1945–1989; Right: Spatial Distribution of All Locations of Incarceration in Romania, 1945–1989 First, during the communist period, there was a higher concentration of prisons in the ethnic hotspots—Transylvania, as well as near Bukovina’s and Bessarabia’s borders—than in the two provinces that originally constituted the Romanian state, Moldavia and Wallachia. (See

Figure 6.) This disparity becomes more prominent when we consider all locations of state imprisonment. (See Figure 7.) Especially notable in this distribution is the territory surrounding

Bessarabia, an area that Soviet police forces used as a locus for experimentation in carceral 40 tactics, including “deportations,” execution of elites, and the “destruction of independent thought.”83 There were two anomalous regions, in the southeast around Bucharest and Dobrudja, which had relatively high densities of prisons, but there is clear logic behind this fact. The former was both the seat of power and Romania’s most populous city, which would necessitate a harsher presence in the form of prisons. The latter was near the Danube River and became a central location for the establishment of forced labor camps. (Though communists repurposed many pre- existing prisons, other forms of imprisonment, such as forced labor camps, often had no predecessors.)84 The prisons appear concentrated either in regions with large proportions of ethnic minorities, or in spaces that serve a symbolic purpose, such as the capital, or a practical one, as in the case of the Danube delta.85

Second, although much official documentation of the prison population has been either lost or destroyed, the records that do survive provide us with a significant demographic profile of the prison population.86 Of the extant files concerning Romanians who passed through the

83 This region also became a center for collectivization of villages, forced industrialization, and russification of culture and public life. Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance. “Virtual Visit–Ground Floor, Sighet Museum: Room 22– Basarabia in the Gulag.” 84 In Romania, the project of the Danube-Black Sea canal became a pretext for erecting forced labor camps along the canal’s route and in the Danube delta. Courtois, et al., Black Book of Communism, 417; Deletant, Romania, 74–82; and Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, “Harta Lagărelor de Muncă Forţată.” 85 Though I do not address this issue here, it may be interesting for future research. How were prisons spatial forces in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires that divided Romania in the twentieth century? 86 The following data is based on the most recent preliminary research results published by the Sighet Memorial Centre. At the time of this essay’s submission, they had analyzed and published a statistical profile based on the analysis of 71,056 prison files out of a total 93,000 files. For a more complete profile, and for information about the Centre’s project, see Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, “Census of the concentration camp population in Romania”; and Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, “Census of the concentration camp population in Romania.” 41 communist gulag that have been analyzed to date, nearly half were classified as middling or poor peasants. Petty bourgeois and laborers constituted an additional third. Kulaks, or wealthy peasants, made up less than 10 percent of the prison population. Regarding prisoners’ jobs, nearly one-third were agricultural workers, and an additional 14 percent were other laborers.

Meanwhile, functionaries amounted to less than 10 percent, while other elite professionals, such as priests, teachers, and engineers, together accounted for a mere 12 percent. The majority of prisoners were not the wealthy, intellectual elite, but the peasantry (mostly the poor and often subsistent agricultural workers) or other members of the working class. Of course, there were many reasons for this disparity. For example, communists initiated their collectivization policy in

1949 and imprisoned peasants who actively opposed it.87 But even this policy does not entirely explain the substantially higher rate of middling or poor peasants, since collectivization-driven arrests typically targeted kulaks, who were wealthier peasants and owned more land.88

Finally, what was the ethnic composition of the poor peasants and agricultural laborers in

Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transylvania? Broadly speaking, the “peasantry” was defined as the group of small, mostly self-sufficient landholders who tended to live in rural communalistic villages. In borderland areas such as Romania, peasants often were “unskilled,” poor, and

“illiterate.” (Recent scholarship, though, has pointed out that peasants were literate in ways not generally associated with the word, such as knowledge of land and tradition.)89 In 1930, more than half the rural population of Bukovina identified as ethnically non-Romanian, and as part of the interbellum nationalization campaign, the number of minority schools decreased

87 Deletant, Romania Under Communist Rule, 56–64. 88 For statistics related to collectivization-driven deportations and other policies in the Soviet Union, on whose model Romania depended, see Brown, Biography of No Place, 118–72. 89 Ibid., 21, 114, 229; and Scott, “Hegemony and the Peasantry,” 267n. 42 dramatically.90 If many ethnic minorities were the majority in rural areas but were “linguistically disenfranchised” from schools, many of these minorities would have increasingly constituted part of the peasantry. The case largely was the same in Bessarabia. As Livezeanu notes, Jews in the region especially “lived in small towns and shtetls” and made up the province’s lower middle class as laborers, “working as traders, craftsmen, and professionals.”91 Finally, in Transylvania,

Hungarians remained a strong presence in the rural countryside, constituting more than 40 percent. Like Bukovina’s minority groups, they were also the objects of cultural and educational nationalization strategies and were likely to match the peasant profile.92

In short, prisons were concentrated in notorious ethnic hot spots, the peasantry composed much of the prison population, and ethnic minorities likely made up a significant proportion of peasants. Together, these three assertions lead to the tentative conclusion that communists targeted ethnic-linguistic minorities for imprisonment.93 A full exploration of this hypothesis would require book-length treatment. Further research needs to be done. But if Romanian communist officials targeted ethno-linguistic groups for imprisonment, the character of the

Romanian prison network assumes less the passive character of a gulag than that of an actively discriminatory network of concentration camps. If this hypothesis proves correct, prisons become vehicles of a veritable ethnic purge in the nation-building process.

In the first half of this chapter, I have addressed how officials manipulated state prisons on national and local levels to redefine crime and criminality. The effect of their repurposing of

90 Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 53, 64–65. 91 Ibid., 122–23. 92 Ibid., 135–37, 143–61. 93 I wish to emphasize that this conclusion is speculative, and much further research needs to be done to substantiate it. In fact, as yet the Sighet Memorial Centre does not categorize prisoners according to ethnic background, but when it publishes it full analysis of extant documents, the Centre may well include ethnicity, if that data is available. 43 extant carceral spaces was to make the threat of incarceration visible in the local landscape.

Consequently, the regime terrorized Romanians regardless of whether they were incarcerated, which in theory quelled the subversive tendencies they may harbor. Once the regime had

“broken through” subversive units in the polity, they repurposed prison spaces, such as Doftana, to recast the communist transition to power as a heroic narrative and to legitimize their rule. By these means, the communist regime employed its gulag network to terrorize and intimidate approximately 90 percent of the Romanian population without actually incarcerating it. What happened, then, to Romanians who could not be tamed by the threat of incarceration, who persisted in their dissent of the regime despite the foreboding penal landscape?

Prisons as Micro Spaces

Romanians who could not be silenced by the threat of prisons alone were arrested and incarcerated in prisons often far from their homes. In this second half of this chapter, I shall explore how, within the national and local carceral network, every Romanian prison held importance in the communist nationalization project. What carceral program did the regime enact within each prison to break down individual prisoners, brainwash them in communist ideology, and reintegrate them into the communist state? How did the physical design of the prison spaces facilitate that carceral program?

For the discussion of individual prisons, perhaps a more useful framework of thinking of

Jowitt’s “breaking through” phase of nation building is as what Italian philosopher terms the reduction of prisoners to a state of “bare life.” According to Agamben, there are two dimensions to “bare life”: the external and the internal. The external dimension in the production of bare life 44 is the reduction of a person to the most basic level of physical, or external, life so that he exists as nothing more than “biological fact.” Reduced to the most basic physical state, he is subject to

“violence without having committed a crime.”94 The second aspect of bare life, the internal, deals instead with that person’s political life. When a person is reduced to “internal” bare life, he exists, in Agamben’s words, as “life situated outside the law.” Put simply, the person reduced to internal bare life has been deprived of the rights and traditions accorded to his or her society, the sole agency left to the person reduced to internal bare life is his capacity to be killed. He is included in the legal order only through exclusion from it.

Condensing Agamben’s complex theory to so brief a summary risks abstracting the construct of “bare life” to a degree that confounds readers, but a brief practical example may remedy this. Take, for example, prisoners of war incarcerated by his enemies. The captors may torture their prisoner until they reach the brink of death, but without killing them. With broken bones and ruptured organs, the prisoners exist at a state that many may consider animalistic, but physically they remains alive. The prisoners’ captors have reduced them to external bare life.

This reduction, however, does not require a physical component. The prisoners may never suffer physical torture, but they are nevertheless brought to a psychological state in which they wish to die but are kept alive. In this case, too, their captors have reduced them to external bare life. But because the prisoners remains alive, their captors may use them as currency for negotiations.

They do not afford the prisoners the rights of their own community, nor are the prisoners guaranteed the rights afforded their compatriots. They thus exists outside both legal frameworks.

At the same time, the captors’ ability to leverage the threat of death in potential negotiations

94 O’Neill, “Of Camps, Gulags, and Extraordinary Renditions,” 470; and Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 45 necessarily include the prisoners in some juridical order. Their only agency is the capacity to die: they have also been reduced to internal bare life.

Throughout the remainder of this chapter, I shall show communist officials employed the space of the prison itself to facilitate the reduction of subversive Romanians to bare life, internally and externally. Once broken, the regime then employed the space to reintegrate the brainwashed communist nationalists. In his acclaimed study The Age of Capital, Eric Hobsbawm writes that the “nation” was “not a spontaneous growth but an artefact . . . [that] had actually to be constructed,” and that critical to this development were state institutions, “which could impose national uniformity.”95 To recondition their prisoners, I shall suggest, Romanian officials could not rely on traditional methods of torture and incarceration alone. They could transform prisoners into communist nationalists only by incorporating into the prison elements of the other institutions that had been critical to the construction of the Romanian state since its inception in the early nineteenth century: the Romanian Orthodox Church and state educational institutions.

In short, the Romanian communist regime synthesized elements of carceral, religious, and educational spaces into each prison to transform it into a microcosm of nationalization—a model facility in which to break down prisoners and to instill in them a carceral, communist identity.

The Prison as Carceral Micro Space

How does the carceral space—as above all a space of incarceration—facilitate the reduction of prisoners to bare life? Agamben writes that the ideal space for producing and controlling bare life is one that suspends the “normal [political] order.” In such a space, “atrocities” may be

95 Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 94. 46 committed at the discretion of the “civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign.”96 In the case of prisons in communist Romania, coercive tactics that were illegal outside the prison walls, such as torture, were practiced inside, since the law was in abeyance within prisons. These torture tactics served a greater purpose, namely, the breaking through of subversive prisoners.

To understand how the prison also enabled officials to produce internal bare life—the stripping of juridical agency—I shall turn to a discussion of how each individual prison functioned within the larger gulag network. Officials in Romania’s secret police force, the securitate, often arrested and transported accused persons to prison in ways that prevented them from ascertaining the location their destination. Take, for instance, the case of Giurescu. The securitate arrested him abruptly in the middle of the night and transported him with other prisoners “without [them] being able to guess [their] route.”97 That carceral spaces were ubiquitous in the landscape allowed the regime to move persons over long distances and across imperceptible landscapes. This disorienting tactic heightened the prisoners’ vulnerability by reducing the risk that someone may search for them, and by lessening the likelihood that the prisoners would successfully escape the prison when in unfamiliar territory.

Another tactic of disorientation used by the communist regime was to transfer prisoners between various sites of incarceration before stopping them at the gulag site where they would spend a prolonged period. Such was the case of Lena Constante, an artist ambiguously convicted of “espionage conspiracy” during the Stalinist show trails of 1948–1954, gives a similar example

96 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 174. 97 Giurescu, Five Years and Two Months in the Sighet Pententiary, 16–22. 47 of this disorienting process.98 In the first four years of her imprisonment, Constante moved between four different carceral spaces ranging from a so-called special prison in a building’s basement to a traditional prison.99 The continuous relocation had a disorienting effect on prisoners had a disorienting effect on Constante. This sense of confusion is evident in her reflections on the first years of incarceration: “In this dungeon of a cell for unending hours I became aware of my duality,” she writes. I was two. For I was here and I saw myself here. I was two. For I couldn’t go through this bolted door and yet I could be elsewhere.”100 Her psyche splits as she shuffles between prisons, causing her to feel uncertain about where she exists in space. Even when prisoners remained in the same space for prolonged periods, Prisons also shared the same regulations, procedures, information, and even officials.101 The frequent changes in the carceral environment could also have served to disorient prisoners, whose view of the penal landscape, though narrow in scope, was constantly in flux, even if their location was stable.

Beyond disorienting prisoners in their method of capturing prisoners and transporting them to prisons, the securitate usually relocated the prisoners to penitentiaries in regions far from their homes. Readers will remember from earlier chapters that Romania is a conglomeration of four regions with different ethno-cultural traditions. As I have shown in the first half of this chapter, the demographic of Romanians who passed through the communist system of incarceration consisted largely of peasants and agricultural workers—namely, those who depended upon the land for a subsistence living. In A Biography of No Place, Kate Brown’s

98 See Gail Kilgman’s Introduction to Constante, Silent Escape, ix. For further information regarding the Stalinist show trials of 1948–1954, see Hodos, Show Trials. 99 Constante, Silent Escape, 5. 100 Ibid., 9. 101 O’Neill, “Of Camps, Gulags, and Extraordinary Renditions,” 470 48 acclaimed study of Soviet-era borderlands, Brown discusses the grave consequences that resettlement has for populations forced to move from the land to which they have strong traditional ties. She writes: “Stripped of their property, deportees also became disentangled from identities, which had been rooted in places and possessions. Once villagers were cut off from the powerfully articulate terrain which had contained myth, faith, and personal and communal histories, the need for impersonal (national) histories and abstract (national) identities became far more visceral.”102 By transporting prisoners to regions with separate ethno-cultural traditions, communist officials also severed prisoners from the rights and traditions—namely, the juridical order—of their homelands. No longer protected by the legal order of their respective homelands, and marked as criminals by the regime in power, the prisoners were thus “life situated outside the law” and had been reduced to internal life.

If prisoners were reduced to internal bare life before actually entering carceral spaces, the external dimension of bare life was produced only once they were imprisoned. Bruce O’Neill has convincingly suggested that the infrastructure of Romanian prisons aided in the reduction of prisoners to external bare life.103 Specifically, O’Neill points to three passages from the writings of Constantin Giurescu to show how prison infrastructures aided the suspension of the political order. A trained historian and professor, Giurescu was incarcerated for writing a history of

Romania of which the regime disapproved, and he subsequently spent more than five years in

Sighet prison. (The significance of Sighet prison on national and local scales has been examined in previous sections of this chapter.) Following his death, an account of the time he spent in prison, titled Five Years and Two Months in Sighet Penitentiary, May 7, 1950–July 5, 1955, was

102 Brown, Biography of No Place, 148. See further her entire chapter on the consequences of deportation, “A Diary of Deportation,” 134–52. 103 O’Neill, “Of Camps, Gulags, and Extraordinary Renditions,” 472–74. 49 compiled from journal entries he had written while incarcerated. Giurescu describes Sighet’s infrastructure, or in his words the prison’s “physical and psychological framework”:

I realize immediately that we are in a large prison, with a ground floor and two upper

floors.104

[From the outside] the building is massive; the rows of barred windows give it a grim

aspect. We are led one by one [indoors and] into a long and high room, it is the height of

the entire building, which looks like the nave of a gothic church. On the right and on the

left there are doors covered with iron and having [sic] heavy bolts; exactly above them,

on the second and third floors, there are identical doors. A wooden catwalk gives access

to the doors on each floor; at about twelve feet – the height of the first floor – a net made

of thick wire covers the entire room: this is in order to prevent prisoners from committing

suicide by leaping from the second or third floor. When you see all this a chill runs up

your spine.105

The building was imposing in its proportions: the ground floor and two upper floors—

around forty-eight feet high—occupied a rectangle bordered on all sides by streets. . . .

The building reserved for the political prisoners—that in which I stayed from 1950–

1955—is T-shaped; it is made up of a main body which is the base of the ‘T’, running

from east to west, and the second section, representing the toe of the ‘T’, running from

104 Giurescu, Five Years and Two Months in the Sighet Penitentiary, 22. 105 Ibid., 25–26. Emphases mine. 50 north to south . . . the big number of individual cells in Sighet offered—and continues to

offer today—the possibility of strict isolation for large numbers of prisoners.106

Sighet’s architectural design in clear ways assisted prison officials in producing bare life in prisoners. First, Sighet was “reserved for political prisoners,” a strategy which isolated intellectual, political, and religious leaders from the rest of the population. It effectively prevented some of the most capable noncommunist leaders from coordinating protests against the regime. Second, the prison’s layout enabled constant surveillance of detainees in their

“individual cells” by prison officials. The prisoners thus lived with the perpetual threat that even the tiniest misstep could result in their punishment. Third, the “net . . . of thick wire” prevented inmates from completing suicide, keeping them in state where many prisoners wanted to die, but were prevented from doing so. Given its size, Sighet facilitated the simultaneous reduction of

“large numbers of prisoners” to external bare life.

In this section, I have discussed how each prison in itself assisted in the reduction of those incarcerated to bare life, or, in Jowitt’s term, the breaking through of prisoners. Because prisons were omnipresent in Romania’s landscape, communist officials could arrested and transported prisoners in a disorienting way. Prisoners were often brought to several spaces of incarceration before being deposited at a prison for a prolonged period. Inside the prison, the space enabled guards to enable the surveillance inmates at all times, terrorizing them to the point that many attempted suicide or wanted to die. In the next section, I will show that the communists’ carceral program also incorporated aspects of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the production of bare life.

106 Ibid., 47. Emphases mine. 51 The Prison as Religious Micro Space

Before I examine the relationship between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the communist regime’s system of incarceration, a brief review of the Church’s history may prove beneficial for readers. In terms of constructing a uniform national identity, the Romanian Orthodox Church was historically as important as the solidification of the nation’s borders. Indeed, the Church’s movement toward autonomy from other patriarchates throughout the nineteenth century mirrored the process of Romania’s independence. Christianity in Romania dates from the early Common

Era, when the territory belonged to the Roman Empire. In 1862, just three years after the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia, the Church asserted its independence from foreign domination and switched to the vernacular for liturgical service. In 1865, one year before King

Carol I assumed the throne, the Romanian Church declared itself autocephalous, or self-headed, and in 1885, only four years after the establishment of the monarchy, the Orthodox patriarch in

Constantinople recognized its autocephaly. In 1925, less than a decade after the territorial shifts that occurred following World War I, the separate church groups of Transylvania, Bukovina, and

Bessarabia united to declare the Romanian Church as an official patriarchate. The

Constantinople’s patriarchate and the other Orthodox churches immediately recognized the

Romanian Church’s legitimacy.107 After both the Romanian church and the Romanian state attained independence, they continued to benefit one another. The state purged religious authorities that challenged the Romanian church, which assisted the state’s nationalization

107 See McGuckin, 66–72, Orthodox Church, esp. 66–68. 52 project because the autonomous institutions that challenged the official church often promoted the use of a different language and divergent cultural institutions.108

Following the communist takeover of 1947, the history of the Romanian Orthodox

Church unfolds in three phases. From 1948 to 1965, the party appointed three “red patriarchs,” who supported the communists and overlooked the religious persecutions that they carried. 109

After Ceauşescu assumed power in 1965, he restored peaceful relations between church and state. Between 1965 and 1977, under Ceauşescu’s leadership, the state acknowledged and accepted the Orthodox Church’s role in Romanian history, supported the restoration of churches, and promised the rehabilitation of clergy members whom the previous leader had imprisoned. By favoring the Romanian Church over its Russian counterpart, Ceauşescu distanced his rule from

Moscow and ingratiated his regime with the West. The Orthodox Church was eventually even brought into Socialist Unity and Democracy Front, which was “a national advisory organization totally controlled by the Communist Party.”110 But in 1977, after the death of one of the red patriarchs, Justinian Marina, the Church began to align itself with a broader movement throughout Eastern Europe that challenged the dictatorial regimes. In response, Ceauşescu recommenced the campaign of religious persecution from 1979 to 1989 by violating religious freedom and demolishing religious monuments, such as historic churches and monasteries.111

108 For example, this was the case in Bessarabia with the Moldavian Orthodox Church, which promoted Russian culture and language before it combined with the Romanian church. It may also partly explain the region’s violent treatment of Jews, who spoke Yiddish and were culturally apart from the Bessarabian community. See Lavizeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 95, 120–27. 109 See Stan and Turescu, Church, State, and Democracy in Expanding Europe, 137–38. 110 Ibid., 138. 111 Ibid. 53 The communist party officials, like their predecessors, used its relationship with the Orthodox

Church to bolster their authority, and persecuted its officials when they posed a threat.

One way the communists’ capitalized on the Church’s historic significance in the

Romanian national consciousness was by incorporating a religious element into the carceral program inside prisons. Like Peleş Castle and Ceauşescu’s People’s Palace, penitentiaries possessed architectural symbolism, especially a religious one. The religious significance of the prisons’ infrastructure has already been hinted at in Giurescu’s account, which compares the central corridor of Sighet prison to “the nave of a gothic church.”112 Another example of this architectural symbolism may be found in the design of Râmnicu Sărat.

Like Piteşti prison, Râmnicu Sărat, which operated between 1901 and 1963, became particularly notorious during the communist period for the brutalization of its inmates—in this case, political prisoners.113 The prison is a two-story, T-shaped space that from an aerial view looks almost like a cross-shaped cathedral. Standing on the ground floor inside the prison, passages extend to the right and left of the threshold and lead to solitary-confinement chambers.

As at Sighet, a wide main corridor like a nave stretches ahead, with walls punctuated by thick metal doors of narrow holding cells. Above the corridor is a view to a vaulted ceiling that is reminiscent of the ceiling a gothic cathedral. Ascending to the second floor, visitors stand on a pulpit-like platform, which overlooks both floors and presumably served as a lookout post for guards. Unlike on the ground floor, the second-story passages hold standard cells. Because the central corridor floor is open, a narrow catwalk provides access to cells around the perimeter,

112 Giurescu, Five Years and Two Months in the Sighet Penitentiary, 25–26. 113 See “Istoric” (“Historic”) and “Biografii” (“Biographies”), Memorialul Râmnicu Sărat (Râmnicu Sărat Memorial) website, http://memorialulramnicusarat.ro/istoric. See also Petrescu and Petrescu, “The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism,” 61n26. 54 like the raised side aisles of a church. At the prison’s far end, sunlight enters through a semi- circular arched window and illuminates the point at which prison and cathedral diverge. Though

Râmnicu Sărat’s is architecturally grandiose, it is devoid of decoration, as concrete and colorless is a communist housing block.114 In a sense, the spaces appear to have ordained the persecution of prisoners that occurred within their walls.115

Some readers may regard the infrastructural similarities between the communist prisons and religious structures as mere coincidence. Certainly, the communists inherited both Sighet and Râmnicu Sărat from former regimes. In accounts of the communist-era carceral program, however, former prisoners describe the religious dimension of the communists’ carceral program. These accounts testify to the fact that state officials often targeted prisoners’ religious identities as part of the breaking through process inside prison. Dimitru Bacu, for example, writes that during his incarceration at Piteşti, “complete breakdown” was only possible after destroying prisoners’ Christian moorings.116 Bacu’s assertion is echoed by Gheorghe Boldur-

Lăţescu, who describes how, during his imprisonment in Jilava prison, the regime combined physical torture with blasphemy to “cut [prisoners’] wings,” or totally annihilate their resistance:

114 Since its closing, the city has effaced communism’s crimes from the local landscape by razing the prison and supplanting it with a new block of modern homes. However, before the demolition, the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of Romanian Exile sponsored the creation of a virtual tour of Râmnicu Sărat. Similar tours of the prisons at Doftana and Jilava also are available at imago Factory, “Virtual 360 Tours,” under “historical prisons,” http://www.imagofactory.ro/Virtual360Tours/en-penitenciare.html. This essay will focus on the visual aspect of the tour, but accounts of former prisoners have been incorporated. 115 Religious symbolism in prison spaces was not specific to Râmnicu Sărat. In Giurescu’s account of his incarceration, he writes of Sighet: “The building is massive; the rows of barred windows give it a grim aspect. We are led one by one into a long a high room, it is the height of the entire building, which looks like the nave of a gothic church." See Giurescu, Five Years and Two Months in the Sighet Pententiary, 25. 116 Bacu, Anti-Humans, 42–49. 55 Yelling profanities, one of the guards was repeating like a robot, “You, scum! Jesus

does not exist; the Party is your father!” We were then thrown in the terrible cell 16

A, at the frigid temperature of 2 Celsius degrees, with freezing water up to our ankles.

We remained there for several hours only in shirts and long johns.117

The regime may not have constructed prisons to have infrastructural similarities to religious buildings, or have chosen which prisons to maintain with an eye to religious symbolism. But the religious aspect of the communists’ carceral program that constituted within prisons suggests that the regime exploited the extant infrastructure and the significance of the Christian tradition in

Romania to facilitate the reduction of prisoners to bare life. Having exhibited the significance of the carceral and religious dimensions of Romanian prisons, I shall now show how the communists incorporated the Romanian educational tradition into their carceral program.

The Prison as Educational Micro Space

To preface the connection between the Romanian educational tradition and the communist prison, I will again begin with a brief history of the Romanian system of education. Following the formation of the Romanian state, the education system was the first institution to be reformed. Schools, and more specifically universities, underwent rapid, radical transformation because of its critical importance in instructing youth in national tradition, as well as the virtual monopoly the state has over it.118 Following the annexation of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and

117 Boldur-Lăţescu, Communist Genocide in Romania, 2. 118 One prominent city in this nationalist educational offensive was Sighetul Marmaţiei (later renamed Sighet) the location of Sighet penitentiary. See also Wanner, Burden of Dreams, 79; and Lavizeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 173. 56 Transylvania as a result of the 1919 Treaty of Paris, primary and secondary schools were overhauled, especially in regions with a high concentration of ethnic minorities. In Bessarabia and Bukovina, primary schools more and more taught only in the Romanian language and promoted traditional Romanian culture. Additionally, state officials introduced a nationalized secondary education program that led to the demise of the Jewish lycée, and Jewish schools that remained open experienced anti-Semitic harassment. In Transylvania, schools likewise served a nationalistic purpose. Here, the state opened a linguistic and cultural front in the educational system, which targeted that children of urban and rural inhabitants alike and reeducated them according to Romanian tradition.

In terms of higher education, the only Romanian universities were initially located in the two regions that combined to create the Romanian state, Moldavia (University of Iaşi) and

Wallachai (University of Bucharest). Following World War I, the two original universities were joined by two more in Transylvania (University of Cluj) and Bukovina (University of Cernăuţi).

Nationalized education programs were especially prominent at the new universities given their geographic location and the significant rate of minority students that studied disciplines vital to the state’s future, such as medicine and pharmacy. The nationalization programs in these universities included not only Romanized education, but also extravagant festivities and decrees that promoted Romanian culture. Before the communist takeover, the state had already engineered an education system that consisted of Romanized institutions, which produced intellectual and political elites in every region, most especially those with high numbers of minorities.119

119 Lavizeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 211–43. Unlike the other ethnic hotspots, Bessarabia had no extant university for appropriation into the Romanian system. Even 57 When the communists took power, they launched an offensive against academic elites and students. In 1948, a decree restructured the Romanian Academy into the Academy of the

Peoples’ Republic. The new Academy’s primary purpose was to “develop its activity in accordance with the needs of strengthening and developing the Romanian Peoples’ Republic.”

At first, the regime merely excluded older intellectuals in favor of persons devoted to the party.

Soon, however, it arrested and imprisoned intellectuals who threatened to challenge the authority of the Academy.120 In addition to the Academy, the regime also targeted state educational institutions and their students. In 1956, revolution in Hungary spurred protests in Romanian university centers, such as Timişoara, where students attempted to collude with anticommunist

Hungarians. The regime’s response was quick: they dismissed teachers, instituted state-regulated student associations that supervised student activities, and arrested large numbers of students.121

Once they had arrested and incarcerated subversive students and members of the intellectual elite, officials forcibly imposed a carceral education system of their own upon the prisoners. Beginning in 1942, prison officials experimented with “Re-education,” a method of systematic physical and psychological torture that specifically targeted intellectual opposition to the Communist regime. Re-education’s own name betrays its purpose: educated, freethinking

Romanian university students and other intellectuals were tortured until they renounced their anticommunist beliefs. Once they had broken through to bare life, prison officials brainwashed the nearly dead, psychologically terrorized prisoners in communist ideology; forced them to

if there was not an independent university in Bessarabia, however, the University of Iaşi did open satellite schools of agriculture and theology in the region. 120 Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, “Virtual Visit—First Floor, Sighet Museum: Room 40.” 121 Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, “Virtual Visit—First Floor, Sighet Museum: Room 49-1956.” 58 betray intellectuals who had the regime had not yet apprehended; and induced them to become to become torturers themselves. Given its singularity as one of the most violent torture schemes devised during the Soviet era, Re-education merits its own section in this analysis. In the penultimate section of this chapter, I will analyze the Piteşti Re-education experiment in greater depth. This exploration will serve as a case study of how communist officials combined carceral space, religious persecution, and “Re-education” to reduce subversive intellectuals and then reintegrate them into the Romanian state as communists.

Re-education at Piteşti: A Case Study in Nation Building Inside Prisons122

Beginning in 1942, prison officials in Piteşti, Romania, experimented with “Re-education,” a new method of systematic physical and psychological torture that targeted university-student opposition to the Communist regime. Re-education’s own name betrays it: educated, freethinking Romanian university students were tortured and reeducated in Communist ideology, were induced to betray other political dissidents, and finally were forced to become torturers themselves. Although 780 prisoners underwent Re-education and thirty more died during it, strict regulations and government secrecy prevented widespread public knowledge of the conditions and torture at Piteşti (Deletant 41). Nevertheless, following the closing of the prison in 1952, fragmented oral histories of Re-education circulated in other Romanian prisons (Deletant 29).

Dumitru Bacu’s book The Anti-Humans: Student Re-education in Romanian Prisons, published

122 The following assessment is based on Bacu’s comprehensive account of prison life and the Re-education experiment at Piteşti. Future parenthetical citations in this section refer to Bacu, Anti-Humans. 59 in 1963 and translated into English in 1971, synthesizes some of these personal accounts to present the first comprehensive picture of prison life in Piteşti.

Born in Greece in 1925 to Romanian immigrant parents, Bacu chose to attend university in Costanţa, Romania, where he joined an anti-Communist group that was prominent before and during World War II. Following the war and during the subsequent Soviet occupation, the securitate, or Romanian secret police, arrested Bacu in 1949 on “suspicion of holding opinions inimical to Bolshevism.” Stories of Re-education circulated during his imprisonment, and though

Bacu was subjected to other tortures, he himself was not “re-educated.” (2). After listening to

“re-educated” students, however, and witnessing other tortures himself, Bacu combined his observations in The Anti-Humans, which both provides his own eyewitness accounts and retells stories from survivors of the Piteşti experiment (17).

These accounts of Piteşti detail an intricate prison system that punished those accused of everything, from minor “offenses” to what the regime considered serious subversive acts. The securitate categorized these prisoners according to the seriousness of the charges on which they were arrested. Those in category I, for example, were “retained” without due process for transgressions as simple as being suspected of joining the Communist party for opportunistic rather than ideological purposes. They received the shortest sentences, which might still be as long as seven years (26). Category II inmates had committed minor “offenses,” such as quartering anti-Communists, and might receive up to five years. Bacu also notes, however, that though some students in category II were arrested based on something more substantial than suspicion, most “had no political orientation and were victims of their own refractoriness, of special circumstances, or of the ‘subversive’ organizations fabricated by the Ministry of the

Interior.” Category III consisted of individuals that evidence proved were “plotting against the 60 social order,” and it carried a sentence of up to fifteen years. Finally, the securitate reserved category IV for notoriously subversive students, namely, those thought to pose a threat of armed resistance. Their sentences were ten to twenty-five years of hard labor. This classification system ultimately had a dual purpose: it not only differentiated between students according to the seriousness of their threat to the regime, but it also separated leaders from their followers, thus making the latter more susceptible to the torturous pressures within the prison (26).

Regardless their classification, the incarcerated students experienced inhumane treatment and conditions, of which Re-education initially was not a part. Guards kept food rations dangerously low; though health officials prescribed a daily 1,800-calorie diet, prisoners received at most 1,000 calories of food, and typically were given as few as 700—800. Malnutrition thus weakened inmates almost immediately, forcing them to “spend hours on end in almost total immobility to avoid using energy” (26). Even more scare than food was medical assistance.

Those whose nerves shattered from physical abuse received shots of strychnine—a potentially lethal sedative typically used as a plant and animal pesticide, and which can cause muscle convulsions and asphyxia. For all other ailments, the guards administered a single aspirin (26).

Lastly, Bacu notes that contact with the outside world was limited to those in categories I—III, who were allowed one monthly food package from families.

But here Bacu also emphasizes the solidarity of the Romanian spirit. Students who received packages often lifted food with ropes to category IV prisoners on Piteşti’s top floor. If caught, they risked detainment of unspecified length in the “cazina,” a damp dirt cellar, the implementation of which corresponds with an increase in cases of tuberculosis (26). But the students’ unified spirit proved difficult to uproot, and the securitate therefore eliminated outside communication and implemented Re-education. 61 To describe the introduction of Re-education in Piteşti prison, Bacu relies on the anonymous personal account of one of its first victims. He and about nine other unsuspecting prisoners were transferred one evening to a new cell, “Hospital Room Four” (28). Upon entering, they found twenty securitate under the guise of prisoners—including Ţurcanu, one of the experiment’s masterminds—who waited until lights out to explain that they were reformed students and to demand the prisoners either swear allegiance to Communism or face the consequences. When the prisoners expectedly refused, the securitate grabbed the weapons hidden under the blankets and assaulted them. The beating continued “for several hours,” until the “floor was full of urine and blood. Prostrate and bleeding, [the prisoners’] bodies were strewn on the floor like corpses on a battlefield” (29). After an “extremely minute” strip search, the securitate left them, “[bodies] made passive and void of volition” (30).

This “unmasking” process was only the first step of complete Re-education. What followed were the “routine day[s]” of Re-education, which Bacu returns to his own narration to outline. At five each morning, prisoners awoke to clean and scrub the cell while “piggybacking,” or carrying on their backs, at least one of their torturers (37). Following inspection, rooms were

“open” so that prisoners might “wash and . . . clean ‘the bucket,’” or use the toilet, an especially humiliating ordeal since prisoners unable to finish in one minute (at most) were beaten and forced to wait another twelve hours (37-8). Breakfast consisted of a meager serving of cornmeal soup or tea, which students, hands bound behind them, slurped “hog-like” from mess-pans off the floor (38). The food was purposely scalding so that prisoners would burn themselves, though they were beaten if they did not lick the pans clean. Besides “noon meal,” the rest of the day passed in the unmasking position—prisoners on the bed’s edge, legs stretched, hands on knees, head lifted—and guards administered beatings for any slight movement (38). At six was “Lights 62 out,” ironically named since the lights stayed on perpetually. The sleep position was as rigid as that of the unmasking, and the punishment for moving was equally severe. “It was a desperate waiting, endless, unnatural, for in their hearts they had known for a long time that they were utterly helpless and at the mercy of their torturers,” Bacu writes; even night, therefore, brought no respite (39).

Bacu likens the effects of this scientific, methodical “conditioning” to “Pavlovian effects”

(33). The prolonged, monotonous torture presses the prisoner to doubt his “moral and intellectual foundation”—his faith both in a just god and a just country—and physical abuse then re-trains him in “good” behavior: “He will submit, as animals do, to biological impulses” (33). He fears the torture he knows will result from continued dissent of the Securitate, so he becomes a torturer in order to escape. The officially re-educated prisoner then is assigned to befriend new prisoners, document their subversive sympathies, and then re-educate them himself: “Several months later I myself did to others what had been done to me,” one victim tells Bacu (29). The Re-education process was thus complete.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have suggested that, following the rise of Romanian communists in 1947, prisons served as a means of inculcating a communist identity in the Romanian people. By recycling spaces that previous regimes had used for purposes of incarceration, Romanian communist officials configured their penal landscape to be, in terms of geography, isolated without being remote. Therefore, unlike Soviet gulags that were constructed in faraway and sparsely populated regions, Romanian prisons loomed either in the center of towns or on the 63 towns’ peripheries. As a result, the prisons were visible in the everyday lives of Romanians and haunted them with the ever-present threat of incarceration. The regime also used prisons to legitimize and solidify its rule. The history of certain carceral spaces, such as Doftana prison, was manipulated to commemorate the communist takeover, and even recast it as a heroic narrative. Furthermore, the regime may have used prisons to target ethno-cultural minorities. The linguistic and cultural traditions of minorities in Bessarbia, Bukovina, and Transylvania presented obstacles to the consolidation of the communists’ rule of the country. Based on the records that have to date been examined, the regime appears to have incarcerated particularly large numbers of ethno-cultural cultural minorities. This hypothesis, should it prove true, would situate the Romanian carceral network in a liminal position on the spectrum of twentieth-century carceral networks. While it did not constitute a wholesale ethnic purge like the Nazi concentration camps, it targeted ethno-cultural minorities in a more acute way than did the

Soviet gulag program.

Despite the threat of incarceration, some Romanians, especially intellectual elites and university students, continued to resist the regime. In response, communist officials arrested and incarcerated them, often in prisons that were far from their homes and ethno-cultural traditions.

The method Romania’s secret police force employed when arresting prisoners—abruptly, often in the middle of the night—disoriented them; the prisoners’ forced removal to another region of the country, as well as the constant threat of arrest, decreased the risk that someone would come looking for them. Inside the prisons, communist officials implemented a carceral program that incorporated traditional tactics of incarceration, religious persecution, and educational instruction. This program was concentrated in “Re-education,” a systematic torture regimen that 64 broke through intellectuals’ anticommunist resistance and brainwashed them into compliance with the communist regime.

For the communist regime, incarceration thus functioned as a tool for reshaping

Romanian national identity into one that enabled the communists to consolidate their control of the state. Here, some readers may wish to object that the effect of communist prisons was temporary—that the communist carceral program manipulated Romanians’ fears to coerce them into silent complicity, but not necessarily into approval of the regime. This logic would suggest that, once the regime fell, the carceral element of Romanian national identity, which had enabled the communists to consolidate their rule, would also disappear. In the final chapter of this essay,

I will examine some of the ways that this Romanian “incarceration identity” outlasted the communist regime into the twenty-first century. 65

Chapter 5

“Incarceration Identities” in Twenty-First Century Romania

In the early hours of December 17, 1989, a crowd of protestors gathered on the chilly streets of

Timişoara, a town in Romania’s far west near the borders with Hungary and the former

Yugoslavia. They were protesting the eviction and relocation of László Tőkés, a pastor suspected by the securitate of coordinating organized dissent among young people and intellectuals. In response, securitate sprayed protesters with hoses, dispersed crowds, and patrolled the streets they had emptied. But the officials could not quell the revolutionary fervor. Throughout the days that followed, protests erupted across the country; they reached Bucharest, Romania’s capital, on

December 21. Nicolae Ceauşescu, the country’s communist dictator, proved unable to appease crowds during a public address on the twenty-first, so the next day he fled the city with his wife,

Elena. The couple was apprehended on December 22, and was transferred to an army garrison around 6:30 that evening. Three days later, on Christmas Day, by four o’clock in the afternoon, they had been charged with committing capital offenses, convicted in a trial that lasted less than an hour, and shot by a firing squad.123

The summary nature of the Ceauşescus’ trial and execution elicited mixed responses.

Among Romanians, especially those in the capital, a sense of triumph pervaded reports of the revolution. “The anti-Christ died,” proclaimed one Bucharest radio host. “Oh, what wonderful

123 See Chapter Two, “The Overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu,” in Siani-Davis, Romanian Revolution of December 1989, 53–96. 66 news.”124 Other reports viewed the rushed proceedings less favorably. On the same night of the executions, the United States government release an admonitory statement: “We regret the trial did not take place in an open and public fashion,” it said.125 Finally, some reactions were inscrutably ambivalent. A spokesman for Britain, for example, states, "It was a civil war situation and the normally accepted standards of legality hardly obtained at the time. Although one may regret a secret trial, at the time it was not really surprising.”126 These conflicting attitudes toward the proceedings did not fall. In 2010, more than ten years later, Ion Iliescu, who had been a leader of the revolutionary forces, stated in an interview that the events surrounding

Ceauşescu’s fall were “shameful, but necessary.”127 Whether or not they express approval, however, all of the reactions bespeak an eerie inevitability, as if the violence of the Romanian revolution and the execution of the country’s dictator were necessary for the communist regime to fall.

These reactions are not restricted to the trial and execution of the Ceauşescus. Traces of it may also be found, for instance, in the post-communist reaction to documents showing the extent of the securitate and its official informants. Perhaps the most reliable figure comes from documents obtained by Constantin Dumitrescu in 1993. These documents report there were

507,003 informers, and archival evidence has confirmed at least 486,000 of these—a number greater even than that of confirmed East German secret police. Oddly, both Romanians and

Western media outlets found these figures shockingly low.128 This reaction suggests that the

124 “Television Shows Last Hours of the ‘Anti-Christ.’” 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. 127 Demian, “In Romania, Ceauşescu’s Death Haunts Christmas.” 128 See Stan, “Moral Cleansing,” 55. For an example of a Western media reaction, see David Binder, “Police Were Fewer Than Romanians Feared,” International New York Times (online), June 13, 1993. 67 communist regime’s campaign of prophylactic terror had become the norm, that the domestic and international communities had become inured to totalitarian rule.

When I began my research on the Romanian communist period, the exceptional character of prisons themselves did not immediately strike me. Although nearly all of the sources that I came across during my preliminary research alluded to the carceral system, they mostly focused on the securitate, the Romanian secret police force. Despite prisons’ ubiquity in the landscape, I thought of them as mere whispers in the history period, sinister murmurs that, for most people, were only partially audible. If 10 percent of Romanians passed through the communist gulag—a startling rate by any standard—more than twenty million people did not. Of course, I recognize that the analogy of the “carceral whisper” is a gross understatement and oversimplification of the gulag’s effects. Even in this essay’s earliest stages, there were other sources, such as Bacu’s gruesome account of Re-education torture in The Anti-Humans, in which the whisper became more of a scream. Regardless, the essence of the analogy holds true. In the scholarship on the

Romanian communist era, prisons have amounted to background noise, important only inasmuch as the events that occurred within them.

Not until I learned of the general reaction to the carceral statistics released by the government and studied by scholars following the revolution did I begin to think of the implications of the carceral whisperTo me, this suggested that the carceral system not only had served an effervescent importance as locations of state control. They also had aided the regime in inculcating the penal threat into the Romanian psyche so effectively that it became a self- policing whisper in their minds—a veritable aspect of Romanian identity.

If at times carceral identities were self-policing, they were also a wellspring of hope and perseverance—a unique form of resistance. As I read the accounts of former prisoners of the 68 communist regime, I was struck by the solidarity and spirit of the prisoners, even while they were subject to the atrocities within the prisons. In the case of Bacu and the students at Piteşti, those who received packages lifted food with ropes to starving high-security detainees on the prison’s top floor, even though if caught, they risked detainment in the “cazina,” a damp dirt cellar that was a breeding ground of tuberculosis.129 Giurescu and the other academics in Sighet organized lectures in their prison groups to learn more of each other’s disciplines.130 And for

Constante, surviving three thousand days in Romanian prisons was a spiritual experience:

I had always had a belief in the spirit. In prison this belief sustained me from the

beginning. I couldn’t believe that man is merely measurable matter. No. I was a

piece of the eternal and infinite spirit that floated everywhere from time

immemorial and without end, and which men called God. Thus, a piece, as tiny as

it was, was also necessarily infinite. No force could bury it in my grave with my

decaying flesh. How could pure spirit decay?131

In each case, the Romanian spirit triumphed over the communists’ attempts to quash it.

The paradoxical nature of this spirit—defeated yet defiant—was the impetus behind my hypothesis of “carceral nationalism”—the notion that during the communist era, prisons became endemic to Romanian national identity. Throughout this essay, I have argued that the regime uses prisons to redefine the local and national landscapes as penal spaces. This facilitated the creation of a communist state with a uniform national identity—a carceral nationalism. For

Romanians who continued to resist the new state, prison micro spaces were carefully calculated

129 Bacu, Anti-Humans, 31–32. 130 Giurescu, Five Years and Two Months in the Sighet Penitentiary, 103–07. 131 Constante, Silent Escape, 238. 69 nuclei of nation building. However, if the hypothesis of carceral nationalism is to hold, it must pass one final test: Is there evidence of carceral identities in the twenty-first century, for certainly this nationalism would not have been effaced in such a short period?

In late 2005, an article in the Washington Post asserted that the United States had repurposed former communist Eastern-European prisons to hold suspected al-Qaeda members.132

Less than a year later, in 2006, the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human

Rights published a report substantiating the article’s claim and condemning the use of Romanian prisons by the West to incarcerate alleged terrorists.133 Just as prisons had enabled the creation of a communist nation among the Eastern Soviet bloc, the same prisons assisted the redefinition of the Romanian state in the twenty-first century among the Western international community.

Thus, carceral nationalism is still alive and thriving in the modern Romanian state.

In many ways, the case is the same in the United States, which is why I believe a subject as specific and arcane as the communist Romanian prison system merits closer study in contemporary scholarship. The U.S. currently has a prison population equivalent in number (2.3 million) as that of Romania’s gulag. Nearly 40 percent of these prisoners identify as African

American. If we add to this population those adults on probation or parole, the total correctional population amounts to almost 7 million, or more than 30 percent American adults. Like

Romania’s system, U.S. prisons are disproportionately filled with minority citizens—specifically people of color, especially black males.134 Just as Romanian carceral spaces, such as Piteşti, were isolated without being remote, so too are U.S. prisons, such as Rikers Island, notorious, yet

132 Priest, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons.” 133 Marty, Alleged Secret Detentions and Unlawful Inter-State Transfers, 16–17. See also O’Neill, “Of Camps, Gulags, and Extraordinary Renditions.” 134 See Chettiar, “Executive Summary,” 3–10. 70 tucked away from the everyday lives of Americans in proximal towns and cities. Finally, carceral injustices in the United States are giving rise to a general resistance—riots in Ferguson and

Boston, for instance—with a unique character.

In the recent dialogue surrounding criminal justice reform in the United States, many advocates have compared America’s prison system with communist-era gulags, and referred to it in such terms as an “archipelago of prisons and jails.”135 This analogy is shocking and sobering, but is it legitimate? Can we usefully compare American’s prison system with a communist-era gulag? Are there similarities beyond scale? Have we created an American gulag, or is the comparison rhetorical overkill, incendiary falsification? I believe that, more so than the Soviet

Union’s network, the Romanian gulag provides a good base of comparison to begin to ask the question of whether the United States has created its own variation of a carceral nationalism.

135 Ibid. See also Gopnik, “Caging of America.”

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2011

JAKE A. PELINI [email protected]

EDUCATION The Pennsylvania State University | Schreyer Honors College Class of 2016 Bachelor of Arts in English Honors Thesis: Incarceration as a Tool for Shaping National Identity: Romania, 1945–1989

Minor in History The Athens Center, Athens, Greece Modern Greek II and Modern Greek III Programs Summer 2015

SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS

 Internship with Penn State University Press, through which I engage professionally with all stages of the publishing process, including copyediting, proofreading (first and second proofs), acquisitions, editorial permissions review, and final design review.  Completed ENGL 417: The Editorial Process, and compiled an editorial portfolio, including a personal “house style guide,” based on a New Yorker piece, which demonstrated grasp of the Chicago Manual of Style. (Portfolio available.)

PROFESSIONAL/LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE

Production Intern, Penn State University Press August 2015–Present  Copyedit and fact-check manuscripts of forthcoming scholarly works—including text, notes, bibliographic information, and front matter—according to the rules prescribed by the Chicago Manual of Style, as well as Penn State Press’s House Style guidelines.  Proofread manuscripts in both the first and second stages of proofs.  Collaborate and attend meetings with the Press’s managing editor and other staff in the Press’s Production/Design Department.

Intern, Collected Works of Edmund Spenser September 2014–May 2015  Copyedited chapters and fact-checked quotations and citations for additional forthcoming scholarly articles.  Conducted deadline-driven research and assisted with administrative tasks for this collection’s first volume (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) under the supervision of Dr. Patrick Cheney and the project’s graduate assistant, Ms. Jayme Peacock.

Peer Tutor in Writing, Penn State Learning August 2013–Present  Tutor students across all disciplines and throughout all stages of the writing process, mentor prospective tutors, prepare presentations for undergraduates on the writing process and the Writing Center as a student resource, and attend staff meetings.  Completed English 250: Peer Tutoring in Writing, which focused on personal and research writing, preparing presentations on composition and tutoring in writing, and strategy building for tutors.

Member, Presidential Leadership Academy April 2013–Present  One of thirty students chosen to take courses and attend seminars and field trips that focus on developing leadership fundamentals and exploring diverse viewpoints in life’s “grey” areas.  Composed a researched public policy proposal and presented it before the Academy’s executive committee, including University President Eric Barron and Schreyer Honors College Dean Christian Brady.  Maintain a weekly blog on current events, leadership experience, and coursework (https://sites.psu.edu/academy/author/jap5766/). ADDITIONAL INTERESTS/RELEVANT COURSEWORK

AWARDS: RELEVANT COURSEWORK:  Rock Ethics Institute Honors Undergraduate Thesis Research  ENGL 304M: Honors Book Reviewing, intensive Award, Spring 2015. undergraduate seminar focused on the publishing and  Ann and Howard Moore Undergraduate Scholarship for editorial processes, specifically literary book reviewing. excellence in English, Fall 2014.  ENGL 417: The Editorial Process, with a focus on editing,  National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing Registration and Grub Grant, Fall 2014. proofreading, and the editorial process. OTHER EXPERIENCE AND INTERESTS:  Graduate-level research seminars in Victorian English  Research Assistant, “Serial Podcast,” Episode 11: Rumors, Fall Studies and Imperial Borderlands in Modern Europe 2014. CONFERENCE AND PUBLICATIONS:  Italian (thirteen semesters); German (two semesters); Modern  “Beyond Kaplan’s Doodles: The Relationship Between Greek (three semesters). Contrastive Rhetoric and Cultural Identity,” National  Study Abroad: London (Summer 2013); Athens (Spring 2014). Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, 2014.  Crisis Text Line Volunteer, Trained volunteer for a teen crisis  Review of Dog Medicine: How My Dog Saved Me From hotline, March 2015–Present. Myself by Julie Barton, Rain Taxi Review of Books, 2016