The 'Samizdat', which was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc, appeared in Romania at a time when all publications were subjected to harsh communist censorship.
The 'Samizdat', which was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc, in which individuals reproduced censored publications passing the documents from reader to reader,appeared in Romania at a time when all publications were subjected to harsh communist censorship. This form of underground press was used to disseminate ideas and attitudes that criticized the regime, at the same time introducing political and economic reforms. The particularity of this type of press was that it wasn't published by a certain publishing house, but by the authors themselves. One of the classics of this form of avoiding censorship was the Soviet writer and physician Vladimir Bukovski. Another major figure of this phenomenon was the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel. This type of press was either typewritten or rudimentarily printed.
In Romania the Samizdat didn't reach the intensity it had in the other communist countries because, under dictator Ceausescu, the country had the most repressive political police. In order to stifle the phenomenon, all those in the possession of typewriters had to have them registered with the local police, which was called militia back in the day. In spite of all those restrictive measures, some people resorted to this type of press in order to rally support for human rights observance. One of the subversive associations of the time was the Union of Hungarians in Transylvania, set up by a professor of philosophy called Borbely Erno. In an interview to the Oral History Center of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation, in 2002, Borbely told how he got the idea of setting up the organisation and how he got the first samizdat texts.
Borbely Erno: "I decided to set up this organisation following a series of discussions with colleagues and friends, with many intellectuals in Romania. I had already started reading and disseminating banned texts, which I got from abroad. One day we decided to take some action because we had that feeling of hopelessness, of being unable to do anything. So I came up with the idea of setting up an organisation. We got a lot of texts from Hungary, Austria and France. France had a strong community of Romanian expats at that time and from there we got a lot of Samisdat texts, very critical of the communist regime and the dictatorship in Romania. A similar organisation had been operational in Hungary since early 1970, but they enjoyed some liberty there unlike us in Romania. Although dissidents were being monitored there too, they had more freedom and there were more banned texts in circulation, most of them written by professors of philosophy and sociology."
Back in the communist time, anyone joining an association without the authorities' approval became a suspect of subversive intentions and was thrown into prison. Knowing he was actually taking on the communist Goliath, Borbely Erno decided to keep the organization small at first.
Borbely Erno: "We did not want to have many members in our organization, as political systems usually do, party or association members. It was a smaller group and its nucleus was made up of 3 people who had a lot of connections. We started having talks with people, including with dissidents who were already famous at the time such as Kiraly Karoly. We were holding those talks as we wanted to enlarge the group's nucleus at a certain point. But we wanted to count on 3 persons. There were the 3 of us, myself, Biro Katalin and Buzasz Laszlo. We knew it very well that we could get caught, the Securitate officers were very clever, they were tapping us everywhere we went and they had many collaborators across the country among the general population".
Borbely Erno also talked about the purpose of the organization.
"We wanted to distribute more materials, including materials taken over from samizdats written by experts in various fields, to draft our own samizdats and to make a certain type of propaganda. Of course we could not make a direct propaganda although we wanted to spread manifestos and the so-called small journals in various cities and towns. We thought of a method to spread them but we wanted them to reach various publications in the West, and especially radio stations such as Deutche Welle, Free Europe and the Voice of America, by means of which our texts reached back home. Through this method we would have tried to make a certain type of propaganda, to draw attention on us. If everything had gone smoothly without us being discovered, we would have managed to co-opt more adherents. With the help of friends from the West we could have gone public, in the sense of declaring ourselves as an official association. They could have annihilated 2 or 3 people easily but it would have been more difficult to kill 50 - 100."
The samizdat was more than a manifesto, it was a diagnosis put to an ailing regime in its final stage, as Communism was. We asked Borbely Erno about the content of the texts he used to write .
"Some of the topics I approached were related to freedom: freedom of the press, freedom of speech, free movement of people. We wanted to distribute a study that appeared in France, about the Helsinki documents signed by Ceausescu, that had not been either published or applied. We wanted to disseminate the human rights separately, on leaflets. Then I approached topics related to social life and opportunities for youth. Although we were a Hungarian organization, we were very aware that eventually everyone suffered the same and the issues of the Hungarian minority could not be solved without first solving the fundamental issues of society."
The samizdat in Romania was an attempt to mobilize the population in order to set up a civil resistance against the regime's abuse. Although it was not as widespread as in the Soviet Union, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, the samizdat in Romania got across to those who were determined to change something.
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