Political opposition in the 1980s - Doina Cornea

political opposition in the 1980s - doina cornea

A political figurehead of the Romanian anti-communist opposition, 88-year old Doina Cornea passed away in Cluj on May 4, 2018. In Romania but also in the European civic activism circles, Doina Cornea's name needs no introduction. She was one the intellectuals who put up the staunchest opposition against the communist regime in the 1980s Romania. Doina Cornea openly expressed her opinions in a country that at that time was fearful because of the violence of the then communist regime and the long period of time when rights and freedoms had been brutally trampled on.


Between 1945 and 1989, in Romania, women paid dearly because of the way the country had been led immediately after the end of World War Two. Intellectuals or workers, country girls or city dwellers, women in Romania fought and died in the armed resistance, alongside their husbands, others had to do time in prison for a great many years, with some of them even dying while serving their sentence. Famous or unknown, such heroines as Marina Chirca, Ana Simion, Maria Plop, Arlette Coposu, Ecaterina Bălăcioiu proudly include the name of dissenter Doina Cornea among them. Those figure heads refused to be accomplices to the instatement of an utterly inhuman regime in Romania.


In 1982, 52-year old teacher Doina Cornea decided she could no longer go hush-hush about what was going on in Romania at that time. She wrote a letter to Radio Free Europe denouncing the abuse and the way the country was being led by the then communist party. In 1996, Doina Cornea gave an interview to Radio Romania's Oral History Center. Back then she recalled how her relationship with the communist regime began.


Doina Cornea: "The first text, titled 'An open letter addressed to all those who have never stopped thinking' primarily targeted teachers, whose moral obligation was to always say the truth to those they educate. It was a great lesson l also learned during the Stalinist regime, from my former professor at the Faculty of French Philology, Mr Henri Chaquier. I was very much impressed with that idea he tried to instill in our souls and our minds, since that was the age of the most horrendous Stalinist regime, it was in the 1950s, or thereabouts. All the time I felt there was something urging me to write it, even against my will. But I did not want to sign that letter. I wrote it, my daughter dispatched it, she came to the country for the first time after she had left, and I went something like, 'I am not going to sign the letter, they should present it just as they want to.' I drew a line at the end of the text, but, in order for them to be certain it was an authentic text and not a 'fabricated' one, written on somebody else's behalf, I wrote the following: 'For Radio Free Europe, Doina Cornea, a teaching assistant with the Faculty of Philology'."


Doina Cornea was afraid to cry out her revolt, and she confessed so many times.  Yet a new revelation of her existence was honor, which made Doina Cornea regain her strength, having heard her name on air at the then most strongly blamed foreign radio station.


Doina Cornea:  "I was in Vama Veche with my husband, who did not know anything about the text, neither that it was written nor that it was snail-mailed, and I brought my radio receiver with me. I didn't listen to Free Europe too often, but this time I insisted to take the receiver with me. 'But what's got into you?' he asked. And I told him I wanted to listen to Free Europe. There were two beds in those peasant rooms, I was sitting in the near bed, my husband in the second one, and the radio receiver was on the window sill. And when I heard the voice on the radio going 'let's just say <Doina Cornea>, my blood curdled. I'm telling you, I was more afraid of my husband than I was of the political repercussions. There followed a moment of silence, and I was waiting for him to start shouting at me. But he did not say anything, as if we could no longer breathe. And then I said: 'What are we going to do now?' And he grabbed my arm and said: let's go for a walk."


There followed the meeting, at the workplace, aimed to judge and sentence her. Her colleagues, with just a very few exceptions, showed no solidarity with her, although some of them tried to find ways to keep her away from the rage of the regime.


Doina Cornea:  "It was a terrible meeting, I remember rector Vlad, whom I love dearly, he was my colleague, and I did not hate him. I understood the way in which the system worked. Still, there was something else they could have done. But they wanted to hear self-criticism from me, at that meeting, and I did not do anything of the sort. They kept asking: 'What is your problem with Mircea Eliade? Why are you saying that intellectuals are liars, that economists provide false statistics? I was telling students those things, stressing that no society, even a socialist or communist one, cannot be built on lies. 'Why do you say that intellectuals are cowards?' they'd ask. 'Because they are', I would respond. At a certain time, I burst into tears, when the head of department told me to get a medical certificate and get hospitalized, in the psychiatric ward. That's all I need, to get hospitalized for mental problems! That offended me a lot. I cried then, but I said nothing that would incriminate me."


Eventually, Doinea Cornea was fired, but she didn't let them beat her down. She kept writing letters to "Free Europe" and supported the workers' strike in Brasov, in November 1987. In August 1988 she was placed under house arrest, until December 1989, when she faced the bullets of the revolution. In 2016, Doina Cornea got one final struck from destiny: the death of her daughter Ariadna Combes, who carried the words of her mother to the free world.



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Publicat: 2018-07-23 12:21:00
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