Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
![Patron Bonus Episode [Unlocked] - The Securitate of Romania image](https://media.zencastr.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=54,quality=85/image-files/609cc5cfa0f17908a21fb6a5/5989cbc0-f98c-43d6-a1ea-60dd2e5f63c9.jpg)
Patron Bonus Episode [Unlocked] - The Securitate of Romania
22 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss the Romanian Secret Police under the Communist Period, the Securitate, and what happened after the December Revolution of 1989.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Josh Edmissing's Story
00:00:08
Speaker
It's the podcast's guide to the conspiracy patron bonus episode. Good evening. My name is Alfred Hitchcock, and tonight I provide you with a story which will chill the bones.
Josh's Reading Confession
00:00:28
Speaker
This is a story of Josh Edmissing. He never did this week's reading.
00:00:36
Speaker
I admit that I didn't do all of this week's reading. I did read some of it. I definitely read the conclusion bit at the end. I also read some of the 37 pages that came before it. Possibly not half of them. Possibly not a quarter of them. I read the beginning and I read the end. And once my eyes started to glaze over at the minutiae of Eastern European politics in the 1980s, I kind of started skipping ahead.
00:01:06
Speaker
You will be judged, Joshua, like I judge Jimmy Stewart. And Jimmy Stewart is dead. So this week, so we are doing a Halloween episode then? No. No, OK. In fact, I can't. A, it was a really bad aphrochic compression. Good evening is as good as I get. And also, that's going to hurt my voice long term. So I'm going to stop right now.
The Securitate of Romania: History & Theories
00:01:30
Speaker
So yes, this week we're talking about the Securitase of Romania.
00:01:33
Speaker
In part, this is because a few weeks ago I was doing edits on a chapter for a book called Conspiracy Theories in Eastern Europe. I have a chapter which occurs at the beginning of the book. It's a theory chapter mostly, talking about the theory of conspiracy theory. And then the second half is a little bit of talking about the Eastern European context
00:01:58
Speaker
and arguing that people who do conspiracy theory theory, the study of conspiracy theory, should be paying more attention to policies which aren't ye bog-standard Western policies. Because it turns out that when you start listening to stories about conspiracy in places like Eastern Europe, where conspiracy was much more common in the later part of the 20th century, you get a very different appreciation of what people actually say and think about conspiracy theories generally.
00:02:28
Speaker
And so because of that, I ended up reading two articles by Levidia Stan, who's a historian of the Securis Arte, and the law changes that occurred after 1989. Those of you who don't know anything about Romanian history, 1989 was the year where the dictator Ceausescu was basically deposed. He was giving a speech in December in front of Parliament, someone threw a rock from the crowd at Ceausescu.
00:02:58
Speaker
For the first time in history, the security guards did nothing whatsoever, which led to riot in the square, Ceausescu and his wife Elena fleeing Bucharest, then being captured by revolutionaries as they were driving out from Bucharest to a nearby town. I think it was Cebu.
00:03:16
Speaker
and then eventually being tried and killed about three days later.
The Fall of Ceausescu & Aftermath
00:03:22
Speaker
So this is the December Revolution of 1989 and after that Romania has a rather interesting history about dealing with its Securitate past because as you find in most communist regimes the secret police
00:03:40
Speaker
weren't particularly nice or good? No, so yeah, what I got from the reading was that in communist Eastern European states, including the USSR, secret polices were sort of par for the course. I understand the Romanian Securitaté was kind of based on the KGB, that sort of model, and they were all into, you know,
00:04:09
Speaker
rooting out potential revolutionaries and crushing dissent and generally not being very nice people at all. And so then when you had these various revolutions throughout the communist countries and communism was getting turfed out along with its communist leaders, that also meant getting rid of the various secret polices. And in other countries, there'd be laws along the lines of the fact that no one who used to belong to the secret police could be in governments anymore and things like that. And also they would start
00:04:35
Speaker
releasing the various files that the various secret polices had compiled on the people who they've been keeping tabs on, which tended to be a lot of people. But in Romania, that sort of happened, but it sort of happened a bit differently and on a slightly different timeframe. Yeah, so when you think about the Securitasae, probably the Western analogy most people will get immediately is the Stasi.
Impact of Securitate on Society
00:05:03
Speaker
So the Stasi were the secret police and I always get the east-west distinction in Germany completely wrong. Eastern was the Communist one. Yeah, so the Stasi were in East Germany. It sounds right. It does sound right. Terrible secret police spying on everyone all the time. The Securitate basically were doing exactly the same thing but in a Romanian context. So the Securitate consisted of members of the secret police
00:05:33
Speaker
And collaborators. Lots of informants. Now, to be an informant or a collaborator didn't necessarily mean that you were doing it voluntarily. You might be being blackmailed by the security to inform on other people. Or you might be doing it as a matter of sort of self preservation, better to be on the side of the people who can get you locked up and brutal. Or you might be doing it for money.
00:05:59
Speaker
I mean, there was a stipend you got. And I suppose there would have been some who genuinely were. Yeah, there would have been true believers. But the problem with the December 1989 revolution, most revolutions, this is not a general claim you can make, absolutely, but most revolutions in Soviet republics or communist bloc states saw power transition from the Communist Party to the opposition.
00:06:29
Speaker
This wasn't the case in Romania. The government that formed in early 1990 in Romania was basically the old Communist Party under a new name. So after the revolution, Ceausescu was executed,
00:06:46
Speaker
There was an interim government made up of Communist Party officials who were running a caretaker government before elections could be held. Initially, they said, we're not going to run. We'll allow free and fair elections, allow new political parties to emerge.
00:07:03
Speaker
opposition parties to stop acting in secret etc etc and then just before the election they went actually we will run after all and basically got voted in because it turned out that they were kind of the devil that everyone knew and so what you got was continuation it was no longer a communist
00:07:26
Speaker
country but it was a case of a communist party reinventing itself as a kind of socialist democrat party instead. And so what you had was a situation where there wasn't really a change of government, there were simply people changing their hats or changing their ties.
00:07:46
Speaker
which meant that you suddenly had members of the new government of Romania, who were Communist Party officials, who presumably were officials that used to be giving instructions to the Securitate, or at least were very friendly with Securitate officers.
00:08:04
Speaker
So rather than getting the kind of instantaneous change that most countries of that type got, where a new government came in and went, we're going to completely sweep the floor of the old policy and the old way of doing things, Romania went, so we're replacing the security with a new organization, the Romanian Intelligence Service,
00:08:29
Speaker
It's completely new and untainted by any association with the Security RCA whatsoever, but we're going to do it in secret. Yes, so it was a matter of, yes, it's completely different. Just trust us on that.
Secrecy & Suspicion in Romanian Government
00:08:46
Speaker
They refused to open the actual Securitaté's archives, which is suspicious off the bat because presumably that could have shown if current members had actually been part of the Securitaté originally. So apparently in the 90s, there were various attempts to destroy information relating to the Securitaté. A lot of records were destroyed, ostensibly for the health of the Romanian government.
00:09:16
Speaker
or at least the safety of the people. So that led people to be somewhat suspicious that this new Romanian intelligence service wasn't simply the securetate with a new name. Now I understand their files did get released, but when did that actually happen?
00:09:32
Speaker
Late 90s, almost 10 years later, and there's actually quite a lot of legal arguing about what form the law would take, whether particular branches of the government would be exempt, what you would do with former officers and informants, and also a rather tricky discussion
00:09:57
Speaker
about the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church under communism, because it was widely thought that the Romanian Orthodox Church had worked with the communists to maintain their stature in society. So it was widely thought that maybe one of the problems was that priests
00:10:20
Speaker
were informants working for the security telling people about things that were spoken about in the confessional, which would mean that if those files got released, then there would be a huge loss of faith in the state church.
00:10:38
Speaker
Now, we said at the start that it seemed to be typical in other countries where you had this sort of not communist revolution, anti-communist revolution. So the weird thing is they do talk about it as the communist revolution, the revolution against the communists. But yes, it was a revolution to topple communism rather than a revolution to bring communism into effect.
00:11:03
Speaker
So they took about, they would then afterwards put in place laws saying that members of the secret police or possibly even the older government, I'm not sure, were not allowed to be involved in the new government at all. And yet there was no such law in Romania. No. So when the law was passed,
00:11:19
Speaker
they implemented an honor system. If you were revealed through access to the Archives to be a member of the security or an informant, it was just expected that you wouldn't stand.
00:11:36
Speaker
Now, this ended up being problematic for a variety of reasons. Because it took almost a decade to get to the point where they opened up the archives, there were rumors that former securitaté were using information they had access to to blackmail prominent members of society by going, well, I've got your files, so
00:12:01
Speaker
Unless you do what I tell you to do, those files might get leaked and there were leaks of security information over that time.
00:12:12
Speaker
But the other worry was not only was information being leaked, but it was surmised that former security table also going in and altering records as well. Or destroying their own records. Yes, so getting rid of evidence of their existence, but then changing records to implicate people in things they hadn't done.
00:12:36
Speaker
So when the law came into effect and there was a local election in Bucharest and there was a contest for who was going to be the mayor, three of the candidates were figured as being former informants and they went, no, I wasn't an informant. Those records have been altered.
00:12:59
Speaker
And because there was such a long period of time between the demise of the SEC and the law that gave people access to it, along with the rumours that actually the SEC members were going around and perverting records anyway, people were going
00:13:17
Speaker
It's actually possible they're telling the truth. I mean, they may have been a securitaté asset, or it might be the case that they've been targeted by former securitaté to make them look bad, to allow other candidates to slip through.
00:13:35
Speaker
So what does this tell us all? I mean, so you talked at the beginning about it being a good idea to look at different kinds of environments and how conspiracy theories might work in them. And I suppose, like we've talked in the past and other past podcast episodes about how, say in America,
00:13:53
Speaker
For a long time, it used to be that if you said the government's spying on you and you're recording everything you say, people would say, oh, that's just absolute nonsense until we got the likes of Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks and so on, showing that there was a lot more gathering of information, at least, than people had first thought.
Trust Issues in Governance: East vs. West
00:14:12
Speaker
But I suppose if we're talking about these Eastern Bloc countries where
00:14:17
Speaker
There would be a different situation where right from the get go, if you'd said to people the government spying on you and watching everything you do, everyone would be like, well, yeah, yeah, it's kind of what secret police do. I mean, they openly threaten that they know exactly what we're doing. And they also openly talk about the fact that you don't know who's informing upon you. So yeah, of course, we know there are people spying upon us. And then if you get the Romanian situation, where post the revolution,
00:14:47
Speaker
You have essentially the same government in power that is remarkably resistant to then opening up archives about what the secret police did. You're going, so they used to hide things and they're still hiding things. We knew why they were hiding things in the past. We've got a fairly good idea as to why they're hiding things now. And this was kind of exacerbated.
00:15:12
Speaker
by the fact that when the bill was passed and you had a law allowing public access to a now depleted archive of Securitas A material, because large chunks of it had been destroyed, it was kind of interesting that, whilst the archive showed that some minor members of the government of the day
00:15:33
Speaker
had been informers or former Securitate officials. None of the major members of the government, people who were either Communist Party members who had just continued to be in power over time, or people who had been mentored by those Communist Party officials, none of them turned out to be informants or Securitate officials. And people went
00:16:01
Speaker
That just seems unlikely. That just seems very unlikely indeed. Interesting that so many of those files disappeared. So is it simply just heightened suspicion? People are a lot more suspicious and a lot less willing to give benefit of the doubt to the government, or is it
00:16:21
Speaker
So in terms of different attitudes towards conspiracy theories and the like, is it just kind of quantitative and that there's just more suspicion, more knowledge that there is dodgy stuff going on that would make people more likely to believe in it? Or were there conspiracy theories different, sort of qualitatively in any way?
00:16:38
Speaker
So that's a really good question. So it doesn't seem that Eastern Europe, when it comes to conspiracy theories generally, is any more different from the West. So they have their anti-vax theories, their Flat Earth theories, their low-level governmental suspicion. Theories. But it does seem to be the case.
00:17:00
Speaker
that with a history of actively conspiring governments, and in Romania's case, actively conspiring officials after the fall of a communist government, Romanians are going, you know, when it comes to distrust of political figures,
00:17:20
Speaker
We've never really had a good reason to trust them in the communist period or the post-communist period. And the security data stuff is simply evidence that that mistrust appears to be deserved or the lack of the ask for trust is undeserved, depending on how you want to phrase it.
00:17:44
Speaker
So any sum up, what's the moral of all of this? Is there one? Morals, tomorrow, comedy, tonight. Right. That's a line for it. If anything happened to me on the way to the forum, I think the moral is, in a situation where Western norms about open and transparent governance never emerged,
00:18:09
Speaker
kind of understandable that people are suspicious about their governments. And I think actually the other moral here is, as we're seeing in the UK and the US, those norms of open and transparent governance that we take to be kind of quintessential to our liberal style democracies in the West are relatively new. They really only appear in the last century and they've neither really been bedded in and now they're collapsing.
00:18:38
Speaker
So, frankly, maybe we'd be better off being Eastern Europeans who are just suspicious about the government all the time, rather than live in the utopia where we thought everything was fine until Edward Sodden went, you fools! You've damned us all. Soylent Green is plenty of the apes. They're after us. They're after all of us. God damn you, you dirty Joseph Cotton.
00:19:08
Speaker
Yes. They've gone slightly off topic there, which probably means we're at the end of an episode.
Reflections & Conclusion
00:19:13
Speaker
We are indeed. So yes, that was our little look into the securitatte in the history thereof post the 1989 December Revolution, because I thought it was a nice little bit of history. I had some notes. Yep.
00:19:28
Speaker
And as we like to make the practice of having our Patreon bonus episodes when it's a Newsweek be about something other than news, I seemed a good candidate for that. And this is very old. 1989. That's very old. That's why it's not as old as us, obviously.
00:19:46
Speaker
My oldest son turned 10 last weekend. I know, it's very scary. What the hell is going on? Seems like only yesterday, Ewan. I know we're coursing for the first time and now... Children. Now you've got children, some of which are a decade old. Yep, that's just wrong.
00:20:05
Speaker
Grisham has children as mid-teens now. I mean, it's just... It's not... It shouldn't be allowed. A passage of time. Do something about it. You know what you've got to do. Stop time in some way. You've got to turn back time. Well, if I could turn back time, if I could find a way, I'd take back all the words that have hurt you and you'd stay. Ah, if only we could turn back time.
00:20:32
Speaker
But we can't. And stay for the night. Yes. I think this can only go downhill here, so I think we better stop recording. Look at the Barbie girl. How does that tie into the time travel? It doesn't turn back time in Aquasong. It's a sheer song. No, but I think Aqua did the cover for Sliding Doors. I've never seen Sliding Doors. It's a Gwyneth Paltrow film. It is. Still has a British accent.
00:21:01
Speaker
You sure you haven't seen Sliding Doors? I was sure we saw that at the cinema together. No, never saw it. Maybe it was just Richard and me. Anyway. Anyway.
00:21:14
Speaker
This has been the podcaster's guide to movies that we may or may not have seen. No jade eggs were shoved into locations they shouldn't be kept. No steaming of anything happened during the recording of this podcast. Apart from the steamed hams. And we'll see you next week for more steaminess. And more ham. This is always going to be more ham. Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:21:42
Speaker
you