Love for Ceausescu

Jurnalul National
30/09/2005
The National Archives has in its deposits "priceless" proofs of the Romanians’ love for the first granger of the country, Nicolae Ceausescu. The hosannas for Elena Ceausescu are represented by all kinds of letters and albums or diplomas.

A good thought from the heart of a proud communist or a secret thought. A letter full of eulogies that got to Nicolae Ceausescu could have taken you, sometimes, a lot higher. You could have got closer to the grand sickle or to the beautiful Stalinist hammer from the heart of the Romanian emblem. Ladies and gentlemen, LOVE PROOFS!!!

IMMORTAL"At first, they were some spontaneous proofs of sympathy, if not love, because the letters are sent by simple people to the general secretary out of their own initiative. The tributes are diverse: some are simple, but some are very complex and sophisticated from the point of view of the execution technique", Alina Pavelescu, superior inspector at the National Archives, the Publications, Scientific and Cultural-Educative Activities Service, said.

When you look with your own eyes at the letters and albums dedicated to the two former leaders of the communist era makes you wonder, at first, and laugh afterwards. So many epithets and metaphors… even more than in poems. If the sender had a special reason, you could have easily used some letters and postal cards as calligraphy manuals.

THE SPECIALIST’S OPINION "It is interesting that, for the Ceausescu period, from ’69 to ’89, the letters have at first a spontaneous style, which is the evidence of the character’s effective popularity, and they reach to an official, elaborated and very costing style: they had gold insertions. It is spectacular when the beginning is a plain sheet of paper and the final result is a huge album plated with gold. It is clear that monumental was setting its seal on the dictatorship or it became representative for the literature. From the historical perspective, I can observe the way in which it evolves from spontaneous to official, from the manifestation of real sympathy to lies and even historical fakes, and, sometimes, from very natural to very sophisticated", Pavelescu explains.

ELENA. The First Lady, in Her Green Days

ALBUMS. Two albums get one’s attention in an instant. They are big, heavy and have the faces of Nicolae and Elena sculpted in gold on the covers. Their pages are full of all kinds of diplomas, keys of famous cities or signs of gratitude from other rulers. All the pictures on the pages are carefully made by hand, which might be considered rather crazy. "An album of this kind, before it got to the party’s archives, was studied by certain specialists, photographers, illustrators who, for the right sums of money, made them look this way. I suppose that some very good professionals supported all this propagandistic apparatus, and they managed to do some very great things for their times. The difference between our known cultural horizon in the 70s and the level of the artistic and technical executions indicated by these albums is striking", Alina Pavelescu says.

SCIENTIFIC SESSION The Romanian National Archives organizes on the 3rd of October 2005, at its central headquarters, in the 49th Queen Elisabeth Blvd, a scientific session to be called "From Gheorghiu-Dej to Ceausescu - the power control mechanisms of the RCP leaders" (Romanian Communist Party), which will be completed by a round table on the 4th of October. Here, the invited people are from several categories of specialists: historians, philologists who are very interested in the memoirs of the Ceausescu period. "The round table will be entitled "The Past is a Foreign Country - the Romanian Communism between the Live Memories and the Documentary Memories". The manifestations try to present the communist period, on one hand, from the perspective of the ones that lived during this period and for whom it represented everyday life for a good period of their lives. On the other hand, it will try to get a reaction from the youth, for whom Ceausescu is just a historical character and communism is generally a historical era", Alina Pavelescu, one of the organizers, explains.