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77-451: After the purging of Romanian Communist Party leader Ana Pauker , the experiment was halted because the Romanian communist regime was sidelining its hardline Stalinist leaders. The overseers were put on trial; while twenty of the participating prisoners were sentenced to death, prison officials were given light sentences. Journalist and anti-communist activist Virgil Ierunca referred to

154-662: A T-shaped design. The first political prisoners it housed arrived in 1942; these were high school students suspected of having taken part in the Legionnaires' rebellion . For a while after the proclamation of the Romanian People's Republic in December 1947, it continued to house primarily those found guilty of misdemeanors . Shortly after the establishment of the Securitate in August 1948,

231-681: A conclusion with the end of the Occupation in 1952. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro of Cuba often purged those who had previously been involved with the Batista regime . Purges usually involved the execution of the condemned. Castro periodically carried out purges in the Communist Party of Cuba thereafter. One prominent purge was carried out in 1989 when a high-ranking Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces general named Arnaldo Ochoa

308-426: A historic monument in 2023. The Romanian government has nominated the facility, along with four other prisons used during the communist era, to be included as UNESCO World Heritage Sites . Purge In history , religion and political science , a purge is a position removal or execution of people who are considered undesirable by those in power from a government, another, their team leaders, or society as

385-543: A million informers for a country with a population of 22 million by 1985. The Securitate under Nicolae Ceaușescu was one of the most brutal secret police forces in the world, responsible for the arrests, torture , and deaths of thousands of people. Following the Romanian Revolution in 1989, the new authorities assigned the various intelligence tasks of the Securitate to new institutions. The General Directorate for

462-470: A perpetrator or who did not beat a former friend mercilessly was crushed by Țurcanu’s most brutal assistants — Steiner, Gherman, Pătrășcanu, Roșca, and Oprea. In addition to physical violence, inmates subject to "reeducation" were supposed to work for exhausting periods doing humiliating chores – for instance, cleaning the floor with a rag clenched between the teeth. Inmates were malnourished and kept in degrading and unsanitary conditions. Not able to resist

539-643: A prisoner and former member of the Iron Guard, who had also shortly joined the Communist Party before being purged, dissatisfied with the progress in Suceava, proposed using violent means in order to enhance the process, obtaining the agreement of the Pitești prison administration. Țurcanu, who was probably acting on the orders of Securitate deputy chief Alexandru Nikolski , selected a tight unit of reeducation survivors as his assistants in carrying out political tasks. This group

616-622: A variety of restrictions preventing foreigners from residing with ordinary citizens, keeping them from gaining access to foreign embassy compounds and requesting asylum, and requiring them to report any contact with foreigners to the Securitate within twenty-four hours. Directorate IV was responsible for similar counterespionage functions within the armed forces, and its primary mission was identifying and neutralizing Soviet penetrations. The Directorate for Foreign Intelligence conducted Romania's espionage operations in other countries, such as those of Western Europe. Among those operations sanctioned by

693-635: A whole. A group undertaking such an effort is labeled as purging itself. Purges can be either nonviolent or violent, with the former often resolved by the simple removal of those who have been purged from office, and the latter often resolved by the imprisonment , exile , or murder of those who have been purged. The Shanghai massacre of 1927 in China and the Night of the Long Knives of 1934 in Nazi Germany, in which

770-457: Is difficult to understand the origins and the role of the Securitate". Initially, many of the agents of the Securitate were former Royal Security Police (named General Directorate of Safety Police — Direcția Generală a Poliției de Siguranță in Romanian) members. However, before long, Pantiușa ordered anyone who had served the monarchy's police in any capacity arrested, and in the places of

847-719: The East German Stasi was even more ubiquitous than the Securitate; counting informers, the Stasi had one spy for every 6.5 East Germans. During the period 1980–1989, the Securitate recruited over 200,000 informants, the largest number in its history, and about a third of the estimated number of 650,000 collaborators dating back to 1948; in 1989 alone, more than 25,000 recruitments were carried out. According to CNSAS  [ ro ] data, of those 200,000 new recruits, 158,000 were men. About 30,200 had higher education and more than 4,300 were students. Most collaborators came from

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924-649: The Elie Wiesel National Institute and others involved in the study of the Holocaust in Romania . The prison itself was built at an earlier stage. Work on it had begun in 1937, under King Carol II , and was completed in 1941, during Ion Antonescu 's rule. At the time, it was the most modern detention facility in Romania. Located at the northern edge of Pitești , the building was structured on four levels: basement, ground floor, and two upper floors, arranged in

1001-755: The Japanese government and private corporations with the aid and encouragement of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), the Red Purge resulted in tens of thousands of alleged members, supporters, or sympathizers of left-wing groups, especially those said to be affiliated with the Japanese Communist Party , removed from their jobs in government, the private sector, universities, and schools. The Red Purge emerged from rising Cold War tensions and

1078-648: The National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (abbreviated CNSAS , for Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității ) "is the authority that administrates the archives of the former communist secret services in Romania and develops educational programs and exhibitions with the aim of preserving the memories of victims of the communist regime." The General Directorate for Technical Operations (Direcția Generală de Tehnică Operativă — DGTO)

1155-746: The New Model Army . The Parliament of England would suffer subsequent purges under Oliver Cromwell 's Commonwealth of England , including the purge of the entire House of Lords . Counter-revolutionaries such as royalists and more radical revolutionaries such as the Levellers were purged. After the Stuart Restoration , obstinate republicans were purged while some fled to the New England Colonies in British America . Purges were frequent in

1232-567: The Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania ), Christian baptism was gruesomely mocked. Guards chanted baptismal rites as buckets of urine and fecal matter were brought to inmates. The inmate's head was pushed into the raw sewage; their head would remain submerged almost to the point of death. The head was then raised, the inmate allowed to breathe, only to have his or her head pushed back into

1309-502: The Red Scare after World War II, and was a significant element within a broader " Reverse Course " in Occupation policies. The Red Purge reached a peak following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, when communist China supported North Korea. It began to ease after General Douglas MacArthur was replaced as commander of the Occupation by General Matthew Ridgway in 1951, and came to

1386-591: The Romanian Police . Directorate V were bodyguards for important governmental officials. Colonel Dumitru Burlan was the chief of bodyguards of President Nicolae Ceaușescu , and served once as his stand-in (double), but was not able to protect Ceaușescu from arrest and execution during the Romanian Revolution of 1989. In the 1980s under the rule of the Romanian Communist Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu , Romania's secret police

1463-612: The Romanian Revolution of 1989, the Directorate for Security Troops was disbanded and replaced first by the Guard and Order Troops ( Trupele de Pază și Ordine ), and in July 1990 by the Gendarmerie . The Directorate for Militia controlled Romania's Miliția , the standard police force, which carried out regular policing tasks such as traffic control, public order, etc. In 1990 it was replaced by

1540-627: The Securitate ( pronounced [sekuriˈtate] , lit.   ' Security ' ), was the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania . It was founded on 30 August 1948 from the Siguranța with help and direction from the Soviet MGB . The Securitate was, in proportion to Romania's population, one of the largest secret police forces in the Eastern bloc . The first budget of

1617-569: The anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping to be a purge. A far-reaching campaign against corruption began in China following the conclusion of the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. The campaign, carried out under the aegis of Xi Jinping , General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party , was the largest organized purported anti-graft effort in the history of Communist rule in China. The Supreme Council of

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1694-580: The "reeducation experiment" as the largest and most intensive brainwashing torture program in the Eastern Bloc . In even stronger terms, Nobel Laureate and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called it "the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world". Ex-detainee Gheorghe Boldur-Lățescu has described the Pitești Experiment as being "unique in the history of crimes against humanity". Researcher Monica Ciobanu noted that, as part of

1771-521: The "reeducation", on occasion, the director of the prison, Dumitrescu, would personally engage in those beatings. Each subject of the experiment was initially thoroughly interrogated , with torture applied as a mean to expose intimate details of his life ("external unmasking"). Hence, they were required to reveal everything they were thought to have hidden from previous interrogations; hoping to escape torture, many prisoners would confess to imaginary misdeeds. The second phase, "internal unmasking," required

1848-575: The Ba'ath Party were to be removed from their positions and to be banned from any future employment in the public sector. It is estimated that, before 2007, 50,000 civil government employees, as well as employees of other organizations listed in Annex A of Order No. 2 , were removed from their positions as a result of de-Ba'athification. Another estimate places the number, also before 2007, at "100,000 civil servants, doctors, and teachers", who were forcibly removed from

1925-590: The Communist government were industrial espionage to obtain nuclear technology, and plots to assassinate dissidents, such as Matei Pavel Haiducu was tasked with, though he informed French authorities, faking the assassinations before defecting to France. The Directorate for Penitentiaries operated Romania's prisons, which were notorious for their horrendous conditions. Prisoners were routinely beaten, denied medical attention, had their mail taken away from them, and sometimes even administered lethal doses of poison. Some of

2002-555: The Cultural Revolution of the Iranian government purged universities. In August 2023, the government reportedly had a program to hire 15,000 replacements for people in universities and to place clerics in schools. It also removed Tehran University of Art ’s major curricula for sculpting, music and cinematography/filmmaking. The government added Islamic studies even more so. Many academics were terminated/fired. On 14 December 2023

2079-412: The Directorate for Security Troops as there were in the regular army . They adhered to stricter discipline than in the regular military, but were rewarded with special treatment and enjoyed far superior living conditions compared to their countrymen. They guarded television and radio stations, as well as PCR buildings. In the event of a coup , they would have been called in to protect the regime. After

2156-546: The Jackal to assassinate Pacepa. Forced entry into homes and offices and the planting of microphones was another tactic the Securitate used to extract information from the general population. Telephone conversations were routinely monitored , and all internal and international fax and telex communications were intercepted. In August 1977, when the Jiu Valley coal miners' unions went on strike , several leaders died prematurely, and it

2233-693: The Ministry of Education announced that it would hire 7000 clerics instead of teachers. De-Ba'athification was undertaken by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and subsequent Iraqi governments to remove the Ba'ath Party 's influence in the new Iraqi political system after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. It was first outlined in CPA Order 1 which entered into force on 16 May 2003. The order declared that all public sector employees affiliated with

2310-639: The Pitești Prison became a detention center for university students. By April 1949, the director of Pitești Prison was Alexandru Dumitrescu. According to Rusan, early attempts at "reeducation" had occurred at the prison in Suceava , continuing in a violent manner in Pitești and, less violently, at the Gherla Prison . The group of overseers had been formed from people who had themselves been arrested and found guilty of political crimes . Their leader, Eugen Țurcanu ,

2387-529: The Romanian post-communist politics and the trend to reincorporate a nationalist ideology within anti-communist rhetoric, the conservative right wing has attempted to reconstruct the recent past by transforming the victims in Pitești into martyrs and heroes, enlisting towards this end various quasi-religious organisations, the Romanian Orthodox Church and some former dissidents and civic organisations. Opposition to this trend has come primarily from

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2464-798: The Royal Security Policemen, he hired ardent members of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), to ensure total loyalty within the organization. Several Securitate operatives were killed in action, especially in the early 1950s. As listed by the internal news bulletin on the occasion of Securitate's twentieth anniversary, in 1968, these included major Constantin Vieru, senior lieutenant Ștefan Vămanu, lieutenant Iosif Sipoș, sub-lieutenant Vasile Costan, platoon leader Constantin Apăvăloaie and corporal Alexandru Belate. Furthermore, lieutenant Ionel Jora

2541-449: The Securitate in 1948 stipulated a number of 4,641 positions, of which 3,549 were filled by February 1949: 64% were workers, 4% peasants , 28% clerks, 2% persons of unspecified origin, and 2% intellectuals . By 1951, the Securitate's staff had increased fivefold, while in January 1956, the Securitate had 25,468 employees. At its height, the Securitate employed some 11,000 agents and had half

2618-455: The Securitate, with the goal of discrediting Romanian law enforcement. In the early 1980s, several apartment blocks were constructed on an area covering about a third of the prison courtyard; part of the old prison wall was left standing on the northwestern side. Abandoned and partially in ruin, the prison building was sold to a construction firm in 1991, after the Revolution of 1989 ; several of

2695-814: The Security of the People (Romanian initials: DGSP, but more commonly just called the Securitate) was officially founded on 30 August 1948, by Decree 221/30 of the Presidium of the Great National Assembly . However, it had precursors going back to August 1944, following the coup d'état of 23 August . Its stated purpose was to "defend democratic conquests and guarantee the safety of the Romanian People's Republic against both internal and external enemies." The Securitate

2772-642: The Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, military and internal security elites were more likely to be detained than civilian elites. The term "purge" is often associated with Stalinism . While leading the USSR, Joseph Stalin carried out repeated purges which resulted in tens of thousands of people sentenced to Gulag labor camps and the outright executions of rival communists, military officers, ethnic minorities , wreckers , and citizens accused of plotting against communism . Stalin together with Nikolai Yezhov initiated

2849-483: The advent of the communist regime. Literary critic Arleen Ionescu argues that, "although Makarenko's and Țurcanu's projects of engineering a New Man show structural analogies, the texture of the experience was very different." The prison also ensured a preliminary selection for the labor camps at the Danube–Black Sea Canal , Ocnele Mari , and other sites, where squads of former inmates were supposed to extend

2926-473: The careers of many individuals, particularly in the entertainment industry, where HUAC attempted to purge left-wing voices entirely from the industry through the Hollywood blacklist . While not part of HUAC, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy was a major driver of efforts to purge perceived communist sympathizers through the 1940s and 1950s, which ended in his condemnation and censure in 1954. Some observers consider

3003-563: The country's population with vicious rumors (such as supposed contacts with Western intelligence agencies), machinations, frameups, public denunciations, encouraging conflict between segments of the population, public humiliation of dissidents, toughened censorship and the repression of even the smallest gestures of independence by intellectuals. Often the term "intellectual" was used by the Securitate to describe dissidents who had higher education qualifications, such as college and university students, writers, directors, and scientists, who opposed

3080-467: The deputy directorships. Wilhelm Einhorn was the first Securitate secretary. As Vladimir Tismăneanu says, "If one does not grasp the role of political thugs such as the Soviet spies Pintilie Bondarenko (Pantiușa) and Alexandru Nikolski in the exercise of terror in Romania during the most horrible Stalinist period, and their personal connections with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and members of his entourage, it

3157-635: The director of the prison, Dumitrescu, was not in favor of reeducation; he changed course, however, after Ion Marina, the local representative of the Securitate, applied pressure on him. Marina was closely coordinating with the leadership of the Directorate for Penitentiaries , particularly with Iosif Nemeș, the chief of the Operations Service, and with Tudor Sepeanu, the head of Inspection Services. Detainees, who were subject to regular and severe beatings, were required to engage in torturing each other, with

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3234-438: The education area, approximately 8,500, and in second place were members of the clergy, almost 4,200. More than 3,600 doctors and nurses were informants, and 800 came from the legal professions. In the arts sector, over 1,000 recruits included 110 actors, 50 directors, 120 artists, 410 instrumentalists, 210 painters, and 55 sculptors. Less than 5% of the number of new informants (about 8,500) came from rural areas. After Ceaușescu

3311-593: The entire division was reorganized and was charged with rooting out dissent in the PCR. A top secret division of this Directorate was formed from forces loyal personally to Ceaușescu and charged with monitoring the Securitate itself. It acted almost as a Securitate for the Securitate, and was responsible for bugging the phones of other Securitate officers and PCR officials to ensure total loyalty. The National Commission for Visas and Passports controlled all travel and immigration in and out of Romania. In effect, traveling abroad

3388-482: The experiment were tried the following year; all were given light sentences, and were freed soon after. Colonel Sepeanu was arrested in March 1953 and sentenced to 8 years on 16 April 1957, but was pardoned and set free on 13 November of that year. Responding to new ideological guidelines, the court concluded that the experiment had been the result of successful infiltration by American and Horia Sima 's Iron Guard agents into

3465-657: The experiment. In 1952, as Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej successfully maneuvered against the Minister of the Interior Teohari Georgescu , the process was stopped by the authorities themselves. The ODCC secretly faced trial for abuse , and over twenty death sentences were handed out on 10 November 1954. Țurcanu was held responsible for the murder of 30 prisoners, and the abuse exercised on 780 others. He and sixteen accomplices were executed by firing squad on 17 December at Jilava Prison . Securitate officials who had overseen

3542-453: The facilities have either been torn down or underwent major changes. A memorial was built in front of the prison's entrance. According to the Romanian historian Mircea Stănescu, tens of people died in the "Pitești experiment"; its aim was not to kill the inmates, but to "reeducate" them. For a 2017 art exhibit at the former Pitești Prison, artist Cătălin Bădărău sculpted contorted figures lying in

3619-569: The former's first years in power, including, most prominently, his uncle Jang Song-thaek . After the failed 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt , the Government of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began a purge against members of its civil service and the Turkish Armed Forces . The purge ostensibly focused mainly on public servants and soldiers alleged to be part of the Gülen movement , the group

3696-472: The goal of discouraging past loyalties. Guards would force them to attend scheduled or ad-hoc political instruction sessions, on topics such as dialectical materialism and Joseph Stalin 's History of the CPSU(B) Short Course , usually accompanied by random violence and encouraged delation ( demascare , lit. "unmasking") for various real or invented misdemeanors. According to a former participant in

3773-517: The government blamed for the coup. As part of the purge, about 200,000 public officials, including thousands of judges, were dismissed and detained. Politicized Kurds in Turkey have also been a major target of the Justice and Development Party -led purge. Securitate#Directorate for Penitentiaries The Department of State Security ( Romanian : Departamentul Securității Statului ), commonly known as

3850-400: The hallways or in the cells; one figure stood awkwardly on his head, others had their hands tied behind their backs or were covering their faces. According to Bădărău, "They were strong people when they went into prison but they came out physical wrecks. But conversely, they became spiritual giants." The prison was turned into a museum in 2014 with the help of private funding and was designated

3927-459: The harshest prisons were those at Aiud , Gherla , Pitești , Râmnicu Sarat , and Sighet , as well as the forced labor camps along the Danube–Black Sea Canal and at Periprava . From 1948 to 1955, the penitentiaries operated by this Directorate were grouped into 4 categories: Gradually, a large number of penal colonies and labor camps were established as a form of political detention for administrative detainees and became an integral part of

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4004-424: The leader of a political party turns against a particular section or group within the party and kills its members, are commonly called "purges". Mass expulsions of populations on the grounds of racism and xenophobia , such as the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Soviet Union, are not. Though sudden and violent purges are notable, most purges do not involve immediate execution or imprisonment, for example

4081-410: The leaders termed the Cultural Revolution . In Maoist states, sentences usually involved hard labor in laogai camps and executions. Deng Xiaoping acquired a reputation for returning to power after he had been purged several times. The earliest use of the term dates back to the English Civil War 's Pride's Purge . In 1648–1650, the moderate members of the English Long Parliament were purged by

4158-438: The most notorious of the CPSU purges , the Great Purge , during the mid to late 1930s. In 1934, Chancellor Adolf Hitler ordered the execution of Ernst Röhm , other leaders of the Sturmabteilung militia, and political opponents. After France's liberation by the Allies in 1944, the Provisional Government of the French Republic and particularly the French Resistance carried out purges of former collaborationists ,

4235-846: The penitentiary system. The most important ones were along the Danube–Black Sea Canal , the Brăila Pond , and the lead mines in northern Romania. Specific locations included: Arad, Baia Mare, Baia Sprie, Bârcea Mare, Bicaz, Borzești, Brad, Brâncovenești, CRM Bucharest, Buzău, Capu Midia, Castelu, Cavnic, Câmpulung, Cernavodă, Chilia Constanța, Chirnogi, Crâscior, Culmea, Deduleşti, Doicești, Domnești, Dorobanțu, Dudu, Fântânele, Fundulea, Galeșu, Giurgeni, Ghencea, Iași, Ițcani, Km. 31, Lucăcești, Mărculești, Mogoșoaia, Nistru, Onești, Onești Baraj, Peninsula/Valea Neagră, Periprava , Periș, Poarta Albă, Roșia Montană, Roșia Pipera, Roznov, Salcia, Grădina, Băndoiu, Strâmba, Stoeneşti, Piatra-Frecăței, Saligny, Sibiu, Simeria, Slatina, Spanțov, Tătaru, Târnăveni, Toporu, Vlădeni, Zlatna. The Directorate for Internal Security

4312-449: The periodic massive purges of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on grounds of apathy or dereliction, or the purge of Jews and political dissenters from the German Civil Service in 1933–1934. Beginning in 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong and his associates purged much of the Chinese Communist Party 's leadership , including the head of state , President Liu Shaoqi and the then- Secretary-General , Deng Xiaoping , as part of what

4389-448: The philosophy of the Romanian Communist Party. Assassinations were also used to silence dissent, such as the attempt to kill high-ranking defector Ion Mihai Pacepa , who received two death sentences from Romania in 1978, and on whose head Ceaușescu decreed a bounty of two million US dollars . Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Gaddafi each added one more million dollars to the reward. In the 1980s, Securitate officials allegedly hired Carlos

4466-429: The physical and psychological violence, some prisoners tried to commit suicide by severing their veins. Two of the inmates, Gheorghe Șerban and Gheorghe Vătășoiu, ended their lives by throwing themselves through the opening between the stairways, before safety nets were installed. Many died from injuries sustained during beatings and torture. Alexandru Bogdanovici, one of the initiators of the reeducation process at Suceava,

4543-425: The pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese Yanan factions of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) attempted to depose Kim. Most of those involved in the plot were executed while some others fled to the USSR and China. While some purges were carried out under Kim Jong Il , they were not as common as they were under his father/son. Kim Jong Un purged several high-ranking officials and generals installed by his father Kim Jong Il in

4620-429: The public sector due to low-level affiliation. Members of the Kim family have each periodically purged their political rivals or perceived threats since consolidating their control over North Korea , beginning in the 1950s. The most senior Kim purged those who opposed his son's succession to the supreme leadership of North Korea. Kim Il Sung 's most prominent purge occurred during the " August Incident " in 1956, when

4697-499: The same annual pool of conscripts that the armed services used. The police performed routine law enforcement functions including traffic control and issuance of internal identification cards to citizens. Organized in the late 1940s to defend the new regime, in 1989 the security troops had 20,000 soldiers. They were an elite, specially trained paramilitary force organized like motorized rifle (infantry) units equipped with small arms, artillery, and armored personnel carriers, but their mission

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4774-571: The sewage. Ierunca further states that the prisoners' whole bodies were burned with cigarettes ; their buttocks would begin to rot, and their skin fell off as though they suffered from leprosy. Others were forced to swallow spoons of excrement, and when they threw it back up, they were forced to eat their own vomit. The inmates were required to accept the notion that their own family members had various criminal and grotesque features; they were required to author false autobiographies, comprising accounts of deviant behavior. Any prisoner who refused to become

4851-404: The so-called " vichystes ". The process became known in legal terms as épuration légale ("legal purging"). Similar processes in other countries and on other occasions included denazification in Allied-occupied Germany and decommunization in post-communist states . The Red Purge was an anticommunist movement in occupied Japan from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. Carried out by

4928-403: The target being, for example, an institute, a hospital, a school, or a company; case dossier ( dosar de problemă ), the targets being former political prisoners, former Iron Guard members, religious organizations, etc.; and element dossier ( dosar de mediu ), targeting writers, priests, etc. In the 1980s, the Securitate launched a massive campaign to stamp out dissent in Romania , manipulating

5005-459: The tortured to reveal the names of those who had behaved less brutally or with relative indulgence to them in detention. Public humiliation was also enforced, usually at the third stage ("public moral unmasking"), inmates were forced to denounce all their personal beliefs, loyalties, and values. Notably, religious inmates had to blaspheme religious symbols and sacred texts. According to Virgil Ierunca (an anti-communist activist and member of

5082-515: Was all but impossible for anyone but highly placed Party officials, and any ordinary Romanian who applied for a passport was immediately placed under surveillance. Many Jews and ethnic Germans were given passports and exit visas through tacit agreements with the Israeli and West German governments. The Directorate for Security Troops acted as a 20,000-strong paramilitary force for the government, equipped with artillery and armoured personnel carriers . The security troops selected new recruits from

5159-614: Was an integral part of the Securitate' s activities. Established with the assistance of the KGB in the mid-1950s, the DGTO monitored all voice and electronic communications in the country. The DGTO intercepted all telephone, telegraph, and telex communications coming into and going out of the country. It secretly implanted microphones in public buildings and private residences to record ordinary conversations among citizens. The Directorate for Counterespionage conducted surveillance against foreigners—Soviet nationals in particular—to monitor or impede their contacts with Romanians. It enforced

5236-435: Was called the Organizația Deținuților cu Convingeri Comuniste (ODCC, "Organisation of Detainees with Communist Beliefs"), and included the future Orthodox priest and dissident Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa and the Jewish detainee Petrică Fux. According to writers Ruxandra Cesereanu and Romulus Rusan the process begun in 1949 involved psychological punishment (mainly through humiliation) and physical torture . Initially

5313-591: Was considerably different. The security troops were directly responsible through the Minister of the Interior to Ceaușescu. They guarded important installations including PCR county and central office buildings and radio and television stations. The Ceaușescu regime presumably could call the security troops into action as a private army to defend itself against a military coup d'état or other domestic challenges and to suppress antiregime riots, demonstrations, or strikes. To ensure total loyalty amongst these crack troops, there were five times as many political officers in

5390-452: Was created with the help of SMERSH , the NKVD counter-intelligence unit. The SMERSH operation in Romania, called Brigada Mobilă ("The Mobile Brigade"), was led until 1948 by NKVD colonel Alexandru Nicolschi . The first Director of the Securitate was NKVD general Gheorghe Pintilie (born Panteleymon Bondarenko , nicknamed "Pantiușa"). Alexandru Nicolschi (by then a general) and another Soviet officer, Major General Vladimir Mazuru , held

5467-494: Was killed by the son of a suspect he had apprehended. The Securitate surveillance took place in different ways: general intelligence surveillance ( supraveghere informativă generală , abbreviated "S.I.G."); priority intelligence surveillance ( supraveghere informativă prioritară , abbreviated "S.I.P."); clearance file ( mapă de verificare , abbreviated "M.V."); individual surveillance dossier ( dosar de urmărire individuală , abbreviated "D.U.I."); target dossier ( dosar de obiectiv ),

5544-402: Was later discovered that Securitate doctors had subjected them to five-minute chest X-rays in an attempt to have them develop cancer. After birth rates fell, Securitate agents were placed in gynecological wards while regular pregnancy tests were made mandatory for women of child-bearing age, with severe penalties for anyone who was found to have terminated a pregnancy. The Securitate's presence

5621-518: Was originally given the task of monitoring the activities going on in the PCR. But after Ion Mihai Pacepa's defection in 1978 and his exposing details of the Ceaușescu regime, such as the collaboration with Arab radical groups, massive espionage on American industry targets and elaborate efforts to rally Western political support, international infiltration and espionage in the Securitate only increased, much to Ceaușescu's anger. In order to solve this problem

5698-604: Was ousted, the new authorities replaced the Securitate with a few special and secret services like the SRI ( Romanian Intelligence Service ) (with internal tasks such as counterespionage), the SIE ( Foreign Intelligence Service ), the SPP ( Protection and Guard Service ) (the former Directorate V), the STS ( Special Telecommunications Service ) (the former General Directorate for Technical Operations), etc. Today,

5775-533: Was repeatedly tortured until his death in April 1950. Historian Adrian Cioroianu argued that techniques used by the ODCC could have been ultimately derived from Anton Makarenko 's controversial pedagogy and penology principles in respect to rehabilitation . Such connection was however disputed by historian Mihai Demetriade , who noted that similar cases of extreme violence within imprisoned Iron Guard groups existed before

5852-637: Was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad on charges of drug trafficking . Purges became less common in Cuba during the 1990s and 2000s. In the period 1938–1975, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives , carried out a campaign of purging alleged "communist sympathizers" from positions in public life. While non-violent, HUAC's campaign destroyed

5929-575: Was so ubiquitous that it was believed one out of four Romanians was an informer. In truth, the Securitate deployed one agent or informer for every 43 Romanians, which was still a high enough proportion to make it practically impossible for dissidents to organize. The regime deliberately fostered this sense of ubiquity, believing that the fear of being watched was sufficient to bend the people to Ceaușescu's will. For example, one shadow group of dissidents limited itself to only three families; any more than that would have attracted Securitate attention. In truth,

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