Tag #127231 - Interview #78410 (Ticu Goldstein)

Music, theater and books were actually a psychological refuge for many under the communist regime. This sort of suppression led to the implosion of the communist regime in our country, not to its explosion. We never had a samizdat literature [18] in Romania, like the Russians did, for instance. They had a real opposition. We only had a few exceptions here. In all those wretched years of Ceausescu’s [19] dictatorship , I only saw one single manifest, and it was pretty mild too. Someone brought a flyer to the Institute; it condemned the regime for the ‘poor quality bread’. I passed it on like a fool – I could have got in trouble, for people talked. I went to the head deputy of our lab and showed it to her. She said she wanted to show it to someone else, but, when I asked her to give it back, she told me she had thrown it in the toilet. The Russians had more courage. On the other hand, Ceausescu did attempt a form of pseudo-liberalism in the 1960s, but he ended up on the nationalist slope.