CAPITALISM, CORRUPTION, AND CLEANING UP

Moral Cleansing
Romanian Style
Lavinia Stan

Romanias secret police files

are used more to fight current
political battles than to expiate
the sins of the communist
regime.

LAVINIA STAN is assistant professor of political science and Killam postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University. She would like to thank Lucian
Turcescu, Nadya Nedelsky, Michael Shafir, Antoine Roger, and especially
Gabriel Andreescu for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions
of this article.

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Problems of Post-Communism

July/August 2002

HE issue of transitional justice has posed difficult

political and ethical problems in Eastern Europe
since the demise of communism. The effort to establish
culpability for the sins of the former regime leads inevitably to hotly debated differences about lustration,
the ritual cleansing of former communists, and about
access to the voluminous files compiled by the secret
political police. Policy advisers, political commentators, and social scientists alike, seeking models and lessons for post-communist Eastern Europe, have looked
closely at how the process of transitional justice played
out in post-authoritarian Latin America.1 Some authors,
based on thorough studies of the legislation on lustration
and file access in various countries, emphasize the limitations of the process.2 Others focus on the economic,
psychological, and political considerations motivating
efforts to out and oust former high-ranking communists
and secret police officers.3 Still others, adopting a more
comparative approach, try to explain the tactics postcommunist societies have used in dealing with
lustration. The outcome of the torturer problem, as
the effort to root out former secret police agents is called,
is said to be determined by the type of transition a society undergoes, the psychological variables of exit
(emigrate) or voice (criticize official policies) and the
amount of political power retained by the communist
successor parties in the early stages of the democratic
transition.4
Few studies, however, have probed the efficacy of
the new legislation.5 Did it actually identify former torturers? Does it provide a legal basis for excluding them
from politics? A great deal is known about the laws
themselves, the arguments for and against adopting
Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 49, no. 4, July/August 2002, pp. 5262.
2002 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 10758216 / 2002 $9.50 + 0.00.

them, and the political bargaining process that led to

their passage, but not much about their impact on the
political process or their success in achieving their stated
goals. Studies of lustration and file-access laws usually
chronicle the events leading to enactment and the establishment of appropriate enforcement mechanisms.
They implicitly assume that the enforcement agencies
will bring the intended process to a successful consummation. But there is no reason to believe that the transitional-justice laws adopted across the countries of the
post-communist region all address the issue with equal
success or that the verdicts handed down by the enforcement agencies are always correct.
This article starts from the premise that transitional
justice in post-communist Eastern Europe does not end
with the adoption of a legal framework on lustration
and file access but extends, like any other policy process, to implementation and enforcement. Taking the
investigations of parliamentary and presidential candidates in the 2000 Romanian elections as a case study,
the article discusses two seemingly mistaken verdicts
in an effort to discern why the process of unmasking
former Securitate collaborators was so quickly compromised in the eyes of the Romanian public. Among the
reasons outlined here are the many loopholes in the law,
several unresolved issues pertaining to the political police archive, and a series of mistakes by the National
Council for the Study of Securitate Archives, the agency
in charge of the process. The aim is not to recount the
positions of various Romanian political actors or to provide a step-by-step history of Law No. 187, the Law on
Access to Files and the Unmasking of Securitate as a
Political Police (December 1999). These issues have
been detailed elsewhere.6 Rather, the focus is on how
well the spirit of the law was translated into practice
and what the verdicts reveal about the Securitate archive
and the tenuous link between life under communism as
it really was and as depicted in the files.
It must be stressed that Romania was a latecomer to
transitional justice, adopting the necessary legal framework well after the other countries of Eastern Europe,
but still ahead of Russia and the newly independent
former Soviet republics. One reason for the delay is that
the Party of Social Democracy in Romania (PDSR), the
communist successor, controlled politics from the downfall of Ceauescu until 1996. President Ion Iliescu lost
his bid for re-election in November 1996 to Emil
Constantinescu of the Democratic Coalition of Romania. Many observers expected that this election would
finally allow the transition to come to Romania. Iliescu
was re-elected in 2000.

Romanian President Ion Iliescu continues to dodge accusations that he

is papering over his past as an employee of the notorious Romanian
Securitate. A Romanian man passes by Iliescus campaign posters during the November 2000 presidential elections. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Although former political prisoner Constantin

(Ticu) Dumitrescu drafted a lustration and file-access law as early as 1993, it took six years for a watered-down version to narrowly win parliamentary
approval.7 The laws tortuous road through parliament
seems to indicate that the self-avowed pro-democratic
parties like the Liberals and the Christian Democrats
did not want it to be enacted. Nor did the Social Democrats, understandably, as many of them had been highranking communist officials. Instead of supporting Ticu
Dumitrescus initiative, the Christian Democrats
promptly expelled him from the party and joined hands
with the Social Democrats to drop the stipulations that
would have made the law a therapeutic instrument
for the countrys moral regeneration.8
In its final form, the law grants Romanian citizens
the right to read their Securitate files and allows citizens and the media to request investigations of the
Securitate involvement of political candidates and highStan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style

53

Table 1

individual was an angel or a villain. Each raises fundamental questions about the accuracy and ultimate relevance of the councils efforts to identify Securitate
agents and collaborators.

Occupations Subject to Lustration

President
Members of parliament

The Legal Framework

Cabinet
Local administrative and governmental bodies
Judiciary
Army chiefs
Heads of police
Heads of national and county financial guards
Heads of diplomatic corps
Heads of ombudsman
Heads of public utilities and state-owned enterprises
Heads of press organs
Heads of banks
Heads of postal service
Heads of universities and schools
Heads of hospitals
Heads of political parties
Heads of non-governmental organizations
Heads of trade unions
Heads of officially recognized religious denominations

ranking appointees. The law falls short of being a tool

for lustration, however, in that it does not ban unmasked
Securitate collaborators from participation in politics,
and simply hopes they will voluntarily step down, something which has not yet happened.
Following the laws adoption, the Council for the
Study of Securitate Archives was set up as the Romanian version of the Gauck Institute for East German
secret police files. The councils main task was to identify politicians and officials who had collaborated with
the communist political police. During its first year the
council released the names of some seventy tainted electoral candidates, parliamentary deputies, and party leaders, and cleared hundreds of other prominent figures.
None of those named as informers had been ranking
communist officials, and most were former communistera political prisoners who after 1989 had rekindled their
political careers as members of pro-democratic parties,
especially the Christian Democrats and Liberals. The
verdicts have been bitterly contested but also passionately defended by journalists, political commentators,
and representatives of civil society. The discussion that
follows will explain the legal framework guiding the
council and then examine two of the most controversial
verdicts. Each case provides a glimpse at how the council uses information from the files to decide whether an
54

Problems of Post-Communism

July/August 2002

According to Article 2 of Law No. 187, Romanian citizens monitored by the Securitate, or their designated
close relatives, can obtain the names of the police agents
and collaborators who contributed information to their
secret files. To access ones file it is necessary to submit a written request which the council must answer
within thirty days (Article 12).9 Citizens can read their
files at the council headquarters and can obtain copies
of their files or a statement about their collaboration, or
lack thereof, with the secret police (Article 13). Such
statements can be contested within thirty days, and the
council has sixty days to respond, explain its verdict,
and uphold or reverse it. Citizens dissatisfied with the
response may petition the Court of Appeals for a review (Article 14). The three-judge appeals panel that
reviews the case may interview the plaintiff in a closeddoor session before handing down a final decision (Articles 1516). Once the court does so, the council must
make public the identity and role of the Securitate informer (Article 17).
More important for the present discussion is the provision stating that ordinary citizens as well as members
of the press, political parties, civic organizations, and
public administration bodies must be informed, on request, of any collaboration with the Securitate by candidates elected to or nominated for almost every position
of responsibility in the state at the central and local levels (Article 2). The list of positions of responsibility
appears in Table 1. To the chagrin of civil society representatives, it does not include members of the secret
services, but it paves the way for investigating such
minor figures as village priests and teachers. Together
with their nomination or election registration, individuals seeking state posts must submit a personal statement of honor detailing their past relationship with
the communist political police. The council verifies the
accuracy of the statements and sometime before the election publishes the results of its investigations in
Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei (Article 3). The verification process stops if a candidate withdraws or renounces the post within fifteen days of the beginning of
an investigation. It is unclear whether false personal statements incur any penalties, since the law does not provide
for indicting candidates who misrepresent their past.

Collaborators. The law defines the political police as

including all Securitate agencies whose activities infringed on fundamental human rights and liberties. A
secret agent is defined as a person who worked overtly
or covertly for the political police between 1945 and
1989, when Romania was under communist rule. The
law distinguishes several kinds of informers but does
not recognize degrees of past taint, for everyone involved with the Securitate, regardless of the nature of
the involvement, must be identified publicly. A collaborator is defined as a person who received an honorarium,
was a Securitate resident, was enlisted by the secret political police to offer information that infringed on human rights, or facilitated in any way the transmission
of such information (Article 5). The law includes as
collaborators everyone who had decisional, juridical,
or political responsibilities, whether at the central or
local level, related to the activities of the Securitate or
other totalitarian structures of repression, but does not
say what these other structures might be.
While the law does not clearly distinguish different
types of Securitate employment, the political police are
known to have had both full-time officers and part-time
informers. A simple informer would become a collaborator upon joining the Communist Party, then a paid
collaborator, and finally a paid referent contemplating
promotion to the rank of Securitate officer. An officers
identity could be uncovered, partly covered, or completely covered, with the last being the highest honor
within the Securitate organizational structure. Add to
this the largest network of informers in Eastern Europe,
believed to have included some 600,000 to 700,000
people in a total population of 23 million. Monetary
and non-monetary perks alike were available to informers, who could earn as much as an additional average
monthly wage if they provided useful information on
their relatives, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and personal enemies. Romanians in all walks of life enrolled
as Securitate informers in the hope of being granted a
passport, permission to work abroad, transfer to a big
city, or a better job. Of course, not all collaborations
were voluntary and opportunistic, but it is simply impossible to say how many informers spied out of fear,
revenge, misplaced patriotism, or blackmail. To further
complicate things, some of the victims who were reported on were themselves spying on others, making it
difficult to differentiate victims and perpetrators.
There are few reliable independent estimates of the
number of informers in communist Romania. Human
rights activist Gabriel Andreescu and former antiCeauescu nomenklatura member Silviu Brucan esti-

mate that the country had around 700,000 informers,

and Ticu Dumitrescu cites 600,000, of whom 100,000
were Communist Party members.10 According to documents Dumitrescu obtained from the Information Service in late 1993 as head of the Senatorial Committee
on Abuses and Petitions, there were 507,003 informers,
but archival evidence confirmed the involvement of only
486,000. Of these, 29,613 were former Nazi sympathizers, 6,726 had been members of the inter-war National
Peasant Party, 3,641 were members of the National Liberal Party, and 2,753 were former political prisoners.
Demographically, 241,932 were between sixty and
eighty years of age, 145,294 between forty and sixty,
81,572 between thirty and forty, and 17,995 under thirty
years of age. The number of active informers fluctuated over time, depending on the domestic and international political situation, but steadily increased from
73,000 in 1968 to 144,289 in 1989. According to a socioeconomic analysis of 3,007 new informers quoted by
Dumitrescu, 39 percent had university educations, and
another 37 percent high school educations, 18 percent
were engineers, researchers, or scholars, 17 percent were
professionals, 19 percent public servants, and 32 percent military officers, workers, or peasants. Around 97
percent had been recruited voluntarily because of their
political and patriotic sentiment, 1.5 percent through
offers of financial compensation, and 1.5 percent were
being blackmailed with compromising evidence.11
Custodians. The Council for the Study of Securitate
Archives, an autonomous public agency under parliamentary supervision, serves as custodian of the archive
and ultimate judge of the involvement of Romanian citizens with the communist political police. The council
is led by an eleven-member college whose members,
nominated by the legislature, can serve for two six-year
terms. Civil-society groups object to the college, arguing that the council should be independent of the politicians whose past it is supposed to investigate. The
balance of forces in the upper chamber of the Romanian parliament determined the composition of the college in the spring of 2000. The seat allotment favored
the self-avowed pro-reformist and pro-democratic governing parties, hailed in the West as Romanias last
chance to move closer to democracy and a market
economy. The government won the right to nominate
seven members of the college, including the president
and the deputy president, while the opposition nominated the remaining four.12 By law, candidates must not
have been Securitate agents, cannot be members of any
political party, and cannot be occupants of a state office
Stan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style

55

Table 2

Extant Securitate Files

Type of file
Individuals or groups
Informers
Appendix
Documentation
Correspondence
Actively compiled in December 1989

Number
1,162,418
507,003
154,911
29,281
47,917
317,258

when nominated. But despite protests by the opposition, the parliamentary majority ignored these restrictions, nominating philosopher and former exterior
minister Andrei Plesu and pote extraordinaire and
former dissident Mircea Dinescu. Both men had surrendered their Communist Party cards more than twenty
years earlier, but the taint of membership remained.
The council has access to everything in the Securitate
archive except files whose release might jeopardize an
undefined national security. Before they reverted to
the council in late 2001, the Securitate files had been
scattered throughout the country in the archives of the
Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice, the Romanian Information Service, and the External Information
Service. Nobody knows exactly how many files the
Securitate produced, how many were destroyed, and
whether the council now has custody of all the extant
files. Since its inception in 1990 the Information Service, which housed the bulk of the Securitate files
(around 1.9 million) in its Bucharest headquarters and
forty county branches, has offered contradictory information on the number and contents of the files and refuses to grant public access to them. In 1993, according
to Information Service data obtained by Ticu
Dumitrescu, there were 1,901,530 extant Securitate files
(see Table 2). Around 78,227 files were destroyed sometime between 1989 and 1993.13 In 1996 the Romanian
government announced that the Securitate archive totaled 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) of files on those informed upon, 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) of files on
informers, and another 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) of denunciations. Since every meter (1.1 yards) of archival
material contains around 5,000 documents, and every
file, on average, is 200 pages in length, one wonders
why the Securitate produced only one-fifth of the East
German Stasis output when it had to account for a populace of about the same size.14 Whether the files released
to the council are authentic or were fabricated since
December 1989 by unknown hands eager to compromise local luminaries is still an open question.
56

Problems of Post-Communism

July/August 2002

The college meets twice weekly in closed-door sessions, works with a quorum of at least eight of its eleven
members, and makes decisions and gives verdicts with
a simple majority of those present (Articles 2324).15 If
someone is absent and the vote is split, the meeting chair,
usually the council president, breaks the tie. Collaborator verdicts are based on evidence from the files, and,
when the files are missing or incomplete, on written
documents submitted by interested parties. The councils
personnel are public servants who must preserve the
secrecy of the information contained in the files even
after retiring or transferring to another job (Article 20).
Destroying, falsifying, or concealing Securitate files and
documents is punishable with a two-year prison term.
Leaking or misrepresenting information in the files is
punishable with a prison term of six months to five years.
Publishing false information to slander a persons life,
dignity, honor, and reputation is punishable with three
months to three years. The law and the statutes, however, do not clearly specify the punishments applicable
to regular council employees and to the college members, and there is no provision for dismissing college
members found guilty of misconduct.

President Ion Iliescu: High-Ranking

Communist But No Spy
Born on March 30, 1930, in a small southern Romanian
town on the banks of the Danube River, Ion Iliescu was
drawn into the Communist Party through his father, a
loyal Stalinist, and by attending a Soviet university.
Iliescu became minister of youth in 1967, shortly after
Nicolae Ceauescu became Party leader. Ceauescu subsequently appointed Iliescu Central Committee secretary for ideological issues and propaganda. When
Ceauescu launched a personality cult rivaling those of
Mao and Kim Il-Sung, and Iliescu did not sufficiently
laud his accomplishments, he fired him. Iliescu was
exiled to remote Iai County, where, despite his feud
with Ceauescu, he faithfully served the Communist
Party, first as a county councilor (197174) and then as
county leader (197479), a position combining political and administrative responsibilities.
Claiming that he was the sole leader of the December 1989 revolution that toppled the dictator, Iliescu has
tried to reinvent himself and rewrite his past. He depicts himself as having been an active opponent of the
Ceauescu regime and downplays his image as a highranking communist and state official who advanced as
a protg of Ceauescu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

His political opponents see his activities in Iai as proof

positive of his continuing allegiance to the Party, but
according to Iliescu his stint there was an undeserved
punishment inflicted by a mad leader. In reality he never
openly challenged Ceauescu or the Communist Party.
He signed no letters of protest, not even the one drafted
by top communist officials and released just months
before the December 1989 uprising. In the late 1980s
many Western observers saw Iliescu as a possible successor to Ceauescua liberal, open-minded communist apparatchik predisposed to follow Gorbachevs
reformist lead, but he seemed impressive only in comparison to Ceauescu.16
In the final days of the November 2000 presidential
campaign, the council cleared nine of the twelve candidates. The Christian Democrats contested the decision and asked for the 197479 activities of Ion Iliescu
as Party secretary for Iai County to be re-evaluated
and re-verified. Since county first secretaries were responsible for blunting popular criticism of the Communist Party, they usually supervised the local
Securitate inspectorate. For this reason, the Christian
Democrats believed that Iliescu would qualify as a
Securitate collaborator under Article 5 of Law No. 187.
In order to clear him, they argued, the council would
have to find that the Iai inspectorate did not function
as a political police at the time when he was county
leader.17
The Christian Democrat protest stirred up a hornets
nest. The Social Democrats, the main opposition party
supporting Iliescu, denounced it as an attempt to block
his presidential bid, which seemed likely to be a landslide because of the unexpected withdrawal from the
race of incumbent Emil Constantinescu. After four years
of erratic rule marred by inefficiency, mismanagement,
clientelism, and corruption, and with practically no prospect of winning a majority in parliament, they alleged,
the Christian Democrats were hoping to avoid political
obliteration by helping to elect the new president. Since
their candidate, long-time Central Bank governor and
prime minister Mugur Isarescu, had neither the popularity nor the charisma needed to win the presidency,
their call for re-verification looked like a last-ditch attempt to inflict a mortal wound on their political enrmy.
The incumbent ruling coalition vehemently denied the
Social Democratic allegations, insisting that in keeping
with the spirit of the law, all former communist officials had to be designated as Securitate collaborators.
Thus the Social Democrats considered the matter closed
and upheld a verdict that, they claimed, accurately reflected Iliescus lack of ties to the Securitate, but their

political opponents demanded a thorough review of new

archival materials.
Iliescu defended himself with a statement claiming
that as Iai County first secretary he had supervised the
inspectorate only from an ideological standpoint and
thus had nothing to be ashamed of. Like most other Party
officials, he had nothing to do with recruitment, investigation, and persecution, the core activities that made
the Securitate a political police. Moreover, by the time
he was demoted to the post of Iai first secretary in the
early 1970s because of his opposition to Ceauescu s
policies and cult of personality, he had become a victim
of the Securitate, not one of its tools. In other words,
his statement implied, an official evicted from the higher
nomenklatura by Ceauescu could hardly have been
considered reliable enough to control a county Securitate
apparatus, and if he had done so would have aroused
suspicions that he was trying to build a personal power
base for someday challenging the dictator.
Iliescu sent this statement neither to the council nor
to the Christian Democrats, but to the press, the arbiter
of political reputations in Romania. He provided no
documents in support of his claimed opposition to
Ceauescu or the Securitates independence from the
Party. His argument was baffling, because it was widely
believed that the Party had controlled the Securitate,
not the other way around. But the fact that Iliescu did
not feel compelled to produce concrete evidence shows
that the conflict was a war of words and public image
more than anything else.
For its part, the council insisted that time and personnel shortages precluded a re-investigation of Iliescus
past so near election day. The councils president,
Gheorghe Onioru, a history professor whose appointment to the college had been supported by the Liberals,
declared that the two archives his organization had consulted before arriving at a verdict, those of the Romanian Information Service and the Ministry of Defense,
did not reveal Iliescu to have been either a Securitate
collaborator or a target. In an open letter to the Christian Democrat campaign committee, Onioru pointed
out that a guilty verdict could not be handed down without supporting documentation.18 The letter raised three
important points. First, all guilty verdicts, even those
involving former communist officials, had to be supported by hard evidence. Article 5 of Law No. 187 was
interpreted by many Christian Democrats to equate
nomenklatura membership with collaborationin other
words, the very fact of occupying a Party leadership
post meant that one had a more than casual connection
to the political police. However, Onioru acknowledged
Stan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style

57

the councils refusal to name informers without conclusive archival evidence. Second, Onioru said that
what appeared to be final verdicts were just preliminary, since new evidence might yet surface in archives
that the council had not consulted. Few critics accepted
this. Third, Onioru implied that the Iliescu verdict had
been based only on archival evidence, even though the
law allowed, in cases where files were partially or completely missing, for the consideration of additional materials submitted by third parties. It had not have been
possible to solicit such materials because the council
lacked the time and money that would have been needed
to collect, catalog, authenticate, and analyze them while
concomitantly searching the archives for the files.

Ashes to Ashes
If those who wanted a moral cleansing had hoped that
the council would reveal links between the Communist
Party and the Securitate, the Iliescu case proved them
wrong. Iliescu, and most probably other prominent communist leaders, had no Securitate file. As the council
itself confirmed, hundreds of thousands of files relating to Party members employed by the Securitate had
been destroyed at the Partys request in the so-called
Jarul (ashes) operation of 1969. Only a small fraction of the files had survived thanks to the negligence
of certain Securitate officers, or perhaps by design. Wary
that its links to the Securitate might become public, the
Party had decided that none of its members should continue to work for the political police. The Information
Service has repeatedly claimed that Party members followed this recommendation, but, quite to the contrary,
Romanians interviewed in early 1999 admitted that, as
Party members, they had drafted reports for the
Securitate as late as 1989.
Although the informer files of Party members might
have gone missing, the information they contained was
not irretrievably lost. According to historian Marius
Oprea, by 1989 the Securitates Information and Documentation Center had computerized the names of
135,000 active informers.19 This easy-to-use databank
could help reconstitute the identity of the informers and
the nature of the reports they filed.20 Exiled Securitate
officer Liviu Turcu claimed that by early 1989, the center had entered 1 million files in the computerized
databank, and the rest were available both in microfiche and hardcopy.21 According to Oprea, when files
were incinerated, their contents were summarized in
memos that the Securitate stored separately. Moreover,
the associations of Party members with the Securitate
58

Problems of Post-Communism

July/August 2002

was recorded both by the Party and by the political police. Therefore, when Securitate records were damaged
or lost, the names could be recovered by consulting Party
records or Securitate incineration memos, provided that
these could still be located. Another possibility would
be to study the lists of sources submitted by Securitate
officers as part of their annual performance reviews.22
Gabriel Andreescu contends that the most complete
Securitate archive, located at Bran, a village in the southern Carpathians, includes microfiches of all political
police documents, including those destroyed after 1989.
He says that the council has yet to avail itself of this
archive.
The council did not explain the investigative methods it used in reaching verdicts, but press reports suggest that it did not explore these indirect sources. Oprea
faulted the council for not adhering to the spirit of the law,
which stipulates clearly the reading of all available archives, including that of the Communist Party, before
reaching a verdict.23 The council, in response, claimed
that the Party archive had not yet been catalogued, and
thus its holdings were not readily available.
In an effort to exonerate itself, the council pointed
out that it did not have direct access to the Securitate
archive. According to college member Claudiu Secaiu,
the council first manually searched the old card files
listing the names of everyone with a Securitate file,
whether informer or target. Once it selected those it
wished to investigate, it submitted their names to the
Information Service. In Secaius words we look up
the persons name in the card system. If it does not come
up, then the person is clean. It is possible for the name
to turn up in somebody elses file and thus to come to
realize that that person brought lots of damage to others. In that case we will publicly name him or her as a
[Securitate] informer.24 The Information Service would
release any files held in Bucharest within a few days,
and files stored in other localities usually arrived in several weeks.
None of the college members publicly acknowledged
the obvious problems associated with this procedure.
They were assuming that the card system was complete
and reliable even though it had been set up by the secret
police. Since council personnel did not search the
shelves personally, sensitive files not listed in the card
system might be overlooked or stashed away. Nor was
there any guarantee that the files the council received
were complete, since only the Information Service knew
the size and contents of each file. As a result, the investigations and the subsequent verdicts were questionable.
Whether the council relied on the card system because

of time and personnel constraints or because the Information Service refused to grant direct access to the files
is uncertain. But if the latter, the council should have
complained publicly, because its legislative mandate
required direct access to the files.

Ludovic Rakoczi: The Man Who

Collaborated by Resisting
For the November 2000 parliamentary elections, the
council had to verify some 20,000 candidates from
eighty-eight parties running for a total of 467 seats. In
the end, it managed to verify only the 4,500 candidates
considered likely to pass the 5 percent electoral threshold. One week before the vote, the college began to interview candidates suspected of past involvement with
the Securitate, revealing that one-tenth of the verified
names (i.e., around 450) had extant informer files.25
Three days before the election, on November 23, the
council made public the names of thirty-eight former
Securitate informers seeking parliamentary seats. Two
of them had been Securitate officers, seventeen had
drafted reports for the Securitate and were remunerated
for their efforts, and nineteen others had collaborated
in unspecified activities. This time, the council stated
that its verdicts were based on the archives of the Ministry of Defense and the Information Service. Two-thirds
of those named were candidates representing the unstable democratic coalition that ruled Romania from
1996 to 2000. Interestingly, the list included no prominent communist officials or sycophantic supporters of
the Ceauescu regime, but as many as seventeen communist-era political prisoners. Mircea Ionescu-Quintus
(of the National Liberal Party) was the only leader of a
major party.26
Among those listed was Ludovic Rakoczi, an incumbent deputy running again on the list of the Democratic
Union of Magyars in Romania (UDMR), a broad coalition representing the interests of the 2-million-strong
Transylvanian Hungarian minority. His name figured
in the third category of Securitate collaborators whose
involvement could not be proven with documents contained in the files. On December 7, a few days after the
list was made public, Rakoczi petitioned the council
for a chance to exonerate himself in an interview.
Months laterand long after the electionthe council
officially responded to his petition. Gheorghe Onisoru,
the president of the college, apologetically told the press
that Rakoczis files indicated a refusal to collaborate
with the political police organs.27 But by that time the
damage was done. Together with four other UDMR

politicians labeled as former Securitate informers,

Rakoczi had been struck from the UDMR parliamentary list on grounds that representatives of the Hungarian community must be of impeccable moral and
political background. Bowing to public pressure, he had
resigned his post as teacher and principal of a remote
Transylvanian village school because, in his own words,
he no longer had the moral basis for teaching children.
As if being unemployed were not enough, he and his
family had been publicly ostracized, and his teenage
daughter had repeatedly been harassed and humiliated
by her high school teachers.28
Eager to clear his name, Rakoczi asked the college
for a written statement exonerating him of any link to
the Securitate, a reasonable request given the not-guilty
answer to his petition. After a long wait and several
trips to Bucharest, he eventually received the statement
via the UDMR member of the college, Ladislau
Csendes. When the council did not see fit to inform the
press about its erroneous verdict, Rakoczi went public.
Joining several council members on the popular Marius
Tuca television talk show, Rakoczi explained the basis
for his complaint.
To begin, he said, the council had not given him a
fair chance to tell his side of the story, even though Law
No. 187 requires it to interview individuals with informer files before publicizing their involvement with
the Securitate. Rakoczi had only learned about the verdict from press reports when it was already too late for
him to do anything. The college claimed that it did not
have enough time to interview every parliamentary candidate suspected of past collaboration, but it had not
explained the criteria for selecting the names for interviews. The councils representative on the program,
Mihai Gheorghiu, reminded the audience that time was
short because the list of informers had to be released
before the election. But Rakoczi had a point, because
countless other candidates, representing several political parties, all had opportunities to face the council before the list was published. Equally unconvincing was
the councils claim that it had tried to telephone Rakoczi,
and that the legal stipulation he had invoked applied
only to citizens inquiring about their own files, not investigations into a politicians past. Thus the council
was trying to claim that it was not required to interview
candidates suspected of collaboration, thereby simplifying its mission at the expense of due process. While
the article laying down the procedure for individuals
appealing their own files does stipulate the need for interviews, the provision was clearly also intended to include cases where third parties launched investigations
Stan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style

59

of current and would-be state officials. The parliamentary debates preceding the adoption of the law support
this interpretation, as do the councils statutes. Interviews are, therefore, a requirement, not a discretionary
favor the council grants to selected candidates.
Rakoczi also complained that the delay in responding to his November 2000 petition was unpardonable.
The law provides for a resolution within thirty days,
but the official answer took two months. Constantin
Berechet, the colleges secretary, who was also appearing on the talk show, replied that Rakoczi had been informed in a timely manner that the council had erred
with respect to his past and had cleared him. Specifically, Berechet drew attention to a December 2000 interview with college member Ladislau Csendes in the
Hungarian-language newspaper Kronika. But even if the
council had made sure that Rakoczi read it, an interview could hardly qualify as an official answer. And
even if, as Berechet pointed out, the council was not
legally obliged to publicize verdict reversals, it was
morally responsible for the way its decisions affected
those identified as Securitate collaborators. As Oprea
argued, To say that there was no time for appeals
demonstrates irresponsibility on the part of an institution supposed to sustain the countrys moral rebirth.29
Even more puzzling was the councils casual attitude about the inconsistency between its first verdict
and its later statement of exoneration. Rakoczi held that
the very category under which his name was listed was
a contradiction in terms, since one cannot be an informer
without concrete proof of collaboration. If that was the
case, the college should have branded all suspected individuals as Securitate collaborators, including communist officials like Iliescu. Moreover, the law provided
for only two categories of individuals to be publicly
identified (communist officials supervising the political police, and Securitate agents and informers), neither of which included individuals not proven to have
engaged in activities specific to the political police,
Rakoczis category. Thus, Rakoczi said, his name should
not have been made public in the first place. Furthermore, he continued, in mid-1989 the Securitate had harassed him by twice searching his house and
subsequently forcing him to sign three documents, including the collaboration pledge the college used as the
basis of its verdict. But during the few months between
his signing the pledge and the December revolution he
had not provided any meaningful information to the
Securitate.
Adding to the confusion, months after the reversal
the councils president, Gheorghe Onisoru, continued
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Problems of Post-Communism

July/August 2002

to defend the initial verdict, saying that Rakoczis file

as a Securitate informer did exist and that Rakoczi himself had admitted that the collaboration pledge in the
file was authentic. The investigation had also turned up
a written evaluation signed by an unnamed Securitate
officer which mentioned that Rakoczi had given the
secret police some valuable information. Despite these
findings, Onisoru said, Rakoczi had not been listed as
a Securitate informer because the council did not have
uncontestable proof for his actions, as the folder with
his reports on others could not be found. Onisoru
summed up by saying that Rakoczi had an informer
file, and this is why we could not remain silent about
his involvement with Securitate but [the college] could
not label him an informer on the basis of the information we discovered.30 Other college members echoed
Onisorus position. Mircea Dinescu told the press that
his colleagues should not have given Rakoczi the statement declaring him morally clean because the document contradicted this finding. Since Rakoczi had
provided information to the political police, he is neither an angel, nor a victim. Around the same time,
Ladislau Csendes, the very person who wrote and signed
the not-guilty statement, declared that Rakoczi was no
victim of the witch-hunt for Securitate collaborators
because his career was not thwarted: from village teacher
he became a member of the Romanian Parliament.31

Conclusion
To carry out its mission, the National Council for the
Study of Securitate Archives must hand down well-researched verdicts based on as much information as possible, including archival and non-archival materials and
personal interviews with suspected Securitate collaborators. Before publicly labeling someone as an informer
it should clearly explain any limitations on the investigation. To fend off possible criticism, and be faithful to
the spirit of the law, the council should list the archives
it consulted and should identify, in general terms, the
documents supporting a guilty verdict. More generally,
it should clearly spell out, for its members if not for the
public, the type of materials that would prove beyond
any doubt a persons involvement with the political
police. And the council should realize that its verdicts,
and its work in general, will be taken seriously only to
the extent that it takes seriously the legal stipulations
governing its activities, especially regarding the interview and appeal procedures.
During its first year, the council undoubtedly worked
under tremendous pressure to demonstrate the utility of

its existence and justify the public money it spent. True,

the late adoption of Law No. 187 delayed the appointment of college members. When the time came to launch
the candidate verifications, the council had too few personnel, no office space, and no official access to the
archive. But the many reversals, the careless and contradictory remarks made by many of its members, and
the fundamental mistakes it could have easily avoided
shed serious doubt about the councils competency. The
strategy of shifting the blame to the Information Service, the conservative political parties, the electoral candidates, the press, and even the general public, combined
with the hasty excuses its leaders came up with every
time their verdicts were questioned, denote an unexplainable lack of responsibility.
The two cases detailed here were not the only ones
to arouse criticism. Candidate Mircea Bleahu also complained about not being interviewed before his name
was made public. Another candidate labeled a Securitate
informer pointed out that he had a different middle name
than the person designated by the council. When the
Caras-Severin press published documents indicating that
certain Social Democrat and Liberal candidates running
in local elections had been associated with the secret
police, the council refused to label them as Securitate
informers, claiming that the documents were inconclusive. Similarly, it refused to name as an officer of the
political police Ristea Priboi, the head of the parliamentary committee in charge of supervising the activity of
the Information Service, on grounds that the institutions housing the Securitate archives reported that
[Priboi] did not engage in political police activities.32
But as head of a Securitate service supervising dissident activities abroad during the 1980s, Priboi had ordered the monitoring and the physical assault of some
Radio Free Europe collaborators. Two council employees pursuing advanced research degrees, Mircea
Stanescu and Gabriel Catalan, were fired after divulging the intimidation they had been subjected to by unnamed persons both inside and outside the council. The
college, however, refused to discuss the dismissal of
Mircea Dinescu, a member who had openly supported
a presidential candidate despite regulations barring college members from political activity.
Some of the councils problems stem from the legal
framework governing its activities. The law lists several categories of Securitate agents and informers, failing to recognize that more often than not there was no
clear-cut difference between informers and those informed upon. Furthermore, individual actions on behalf of the Securitate are difficult to categorize, and

neither the law nor the councils statutes distinguishes

between actions in terms of the damage they caused
their victims. As Gabriel Andreescu points out, a measure of the councils performance is its capacity to identify the presence of the political police in those cases
when [that presence] is not apparent.33
Probably the most serious legal difficulty is the absence of clear guidelines regarding the type of written
documents that could attest to collaboration. Does collaboration rest in the quantity or the quality of the information given to the political police? If both matter,
is one more important than the other? Was a person who
signed a pledge of allegiance a Securitate informer? In
some cases such pledges were not followed by active
involvement, while in others information was given to
the political police even in the absence of a written
pledge. Then was a person who periodically signed information reports a Securitate informer? Often these
reports contained worthless information already in the
public domain. What about someone who was praised
by the secret police for the quality of his or her collaboration? An automatic guilty verdict in such cases would
mean that the council was giving up its function as ultimate judge and deferring to evaluations made by the
very political police whose evildoings it is supposed to
undo. Even more important, can the archive be trusted?
What guarantee is there that materials in the files are
authentic and were not altered after the collapse of the
Ceauescu regime? Perhaps the greatest challenge facing transitional justice in Romania is the delay that occurred before the Securitate archive was transferred to
the custody of an independent agency. Because of the
delay, Romania was the only East European country
where the destruction of political police files continued
after the demise of communism.
The verdicts handed down by the council seem more
provisional than the agency is ready to admit. As the
two cases detailed here suggest, neither a guilty nor a
non-guilty verdict is ever definitive. Part of the blame
rests with the elusory relationship between reality and
recorded material. Archival verifications do not uncover
an individuals real involvement with Securitate, but
only whether an archive heavily altered during the last
decade lists him or her as an informer. Over the years,
press reports have documented the buying and selling
of files on the Bucharest black market, and the more or
less skillful addition and subtraction of archival materials.34 But most of the blame rests with the council itself and the way in which it misunderstands its mission.
Fearful of being unable to justify their expensive headquarters and lavish wages, the councils leaders hurStan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style

61

riedly published the results of incomplete investigations

as definitive verdicts. Instead of erring on the side of
caution and employing materials from a variety of
sources, the council set a dangerous precedent of sloppy
research and contradictory declarations, forgetting that
any moral reform must start with the council itself.

Notes
1. See, for example, Daniel Nina, Learning from Experiences of the
Past: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Latin
America and the Situation in Eastern Europe (Cape Town: University of
Cape Town, 1994).
2. Among the many articles that describe lustration, see Mark S. Ellis,
Purging the Past: The Current State of Lustration Laws in the Former
Communist Bloc, Law and Contemporary Problems 59, no. 4 (autumn
1996): 18196; Maria Los, Lustration and Truth Claims: Unfinished Revolutions in Central Europe, Law and Social Inquiry: Journal of the American Bar Association 20, no. 1 (1995): 11763; Herman Schwartz, Lustration
in Eastern Europe, Parker School Journal of East European Law 1, no. 2
(1994): 14171.
3. See Helga Welsh, Dealing with the Communist Past: Central and
East European Experiences After 1990, Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 3 (May
1996): 41329; Vojtech Cepl and Mark Gillis, Making Amends After Communism, Journal of Democracy 7, no. 4 (October 1996): 11824.
4. The explanations were proposed, in order, by Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); John P. Moran, The Communist Torturers in Eastern Europe: Prosecute and Punish or Forgive and
Forget? Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27, no. 1 (March 1994):
95109; and Nadya Nedelsky, The East European Torturer Problem:
Lustration in East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, University of
Toronto, 1995.
5. The only exception is Roman Boed, An Evaluation of the Legality
and Efficacy of Lustration as a Tool of Transitional Justice, Columbia
Journal of Transnational Law 37, no. 2 (1998): 357402.
6. For more details, see Lavinia Stan, Access to Securitate Files: The
Trials and Tribulations of a Romanian Law, East European Politics and
Societies 16, no. 1 (2002).
7. Calls for lustration accompanied the December 1989 revolution
and were first featured in the Timioara Proclamation, a text produced by a
group of local intellectuals and supported by the Christian Democrats and
Liberal Party and the Hungarian ethnic minority. Article 8 of the proclamation envisioned a temporary ban of former communist officials and secret
police officers from post-communist politics. The proclamation was never
picked up.
8. The phrase belongs to poet Ana Bladiana.
9. See also Gabriel Andreescu, Legea 187/1999 si primul an de
activitate a Consiliului National pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securitatii (Law
187/1999 and the First Year of Activity of the National Council for the
Study of Securitate Archives), Revista Romana de Drepturile Omului, no.
20 (2001): 3856.
10. See Silviu Brucan, Generatia irosita: memorii (Wasted Generation)
(Bucharest: Editurile Univers and Calistrat Hogas, 1992). The author would
like to thank Gabriel Andreescu for this information. For historical details,
see Denis Deletant, Ceauescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in
Romania, 19651989 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995).
11. See Ticu Dumitrescus report in the newspaper Ziua (January 21,
2002).
12. The seats were divided as follows: the Christian Democrats, Social
Democrats, and main government and opposition parties got three seats
each; the Democratic Party, a junior ruling partner, got two; and the National Liberal Party, the Democratic Union of Magyars in Romania, and
the Greater Romania Party, one each.

62

Problems of Post-Communism

July/August 2002

13. See his report in Ziua (January 2002).

14. 22 (November 1320, 1998).
15. See Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei (June 2, 2000).
16. An independent biography of Iliescu is yet to be published. For
information on his political career and involvement in the December 1989
events, see his Revolutia traita (The Revolution as I Lived It) (Bucharest:
Redactia Publicatiilor pentru Strainatate, 1995), Revolutie si reforma (Revolution and Reform) (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedica, 1994), and Momente
de Istorie (Moments of History) (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedica, 1995).
17. The request was posted on the Christian Democrat Web site
(www.pntcd.ro) and at the same time sent to the press. See also Curentul
(November 21, 2000) and Cotidianul (November 19, 2000).
18. Onisorus statement was published by almost all the Romanian dailies, including Ziua (November 20, 2000) and Cotidianul (November 21,
2000).
19. Before 1976 the Securitates Information and Documentation Center was known as the Centrul de Triere, Dispecerat, Cercetare, Documentare
si Arhiva. After 1990 it became part of the Information Service.
20. Article 10 of the Instructions on the Organization and Functioning
of the Securitate Database (Interior Ministers Order 1050 of May 25, 1977)
states that the alphabetically organized database was housed at the Information and Documentation Center at the national level and at the Interior
Ministry Inspectorate at the county level. It includes data on the following
categories of individuals: persons currently under surveillance or previously under investigation; current and former informers; individuals with
reactionary political pasts; individuals found guilty in cases documented
by the Securitate; individuals who were warned (by dismantling their support circle, by publicly denouncing them, by cutting short their visit to
Romania, by labeling them personae non grata, etc.); Romanian citizens
who went abroad for personal or business reasons and refused to return;
citizens who crossed or tried to cross the border fraudulently; individuals
who asked to emigrate or who asked to marry foreigners; foreign citizens
living in Romania; and other persons of interest for the Securitate. See
also Romania Libera (December 10, 2001).
21. 22 (August 2128, 1998).
22. Ibid. (November 1320, 1998).
23. Cotidianul (November 24, 2000).
24. Adevarul (January 31, 2001).
25. Cotidianul (November 20, 2000); Romania Libera (November 20,
2000).
26. This list was later enlarged to include a total of sixty-seven names.
See Stan, Access to Securitate Files.
27. Adevarul (February 12, 2001).
28. Ibid.
29. Cotidianul (November 24, 2000).
30. Evenimentul Zilei (February 13, 2001).
31. Ibid.
32. Ziua (February 13, 2001).
33. See Andreescu, Legea 187/1999.
34. The attempted destruction of seven tons of Securitate files occurred
in June 1990, when former Securitate agent Nicolae Bordeianu arranged
for the cargos abandonment in the forest. The files were soon found, however. They included information on individuals, secret correspondence and
informative notes drafted before December 1989, religious pamphlets and
mail confiscated by the political police, and various documents belonging
to post-communist political parties and the Information Service. The military Procuratura and a special parliamentary committee began investigations but were unable to conclude them.

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