Confiscation of the drafts of the open letters authored by Doina Cornea by the Securitate, November 1987

http://courage.btk.mta.hu/courage/individual/n102674

Doina Cornea in front of her home; photo taken by Securitate employees in the summer of 1989

After listening on RFE to the news news regarding the harsh repression of the anti-communist revolt of the workers in the factories of the city of Braşov in November 1987, Doina Cornea openly manifested her solidarity with the protesters. She displayed a placard in front of her house in Cluj and on 18 November 1987 she drafted 160 manifestos, which were spread with the help of her son Leontin Horaţiu Iuhas in the main squares and factories of Cluj (Cornea 2009, 194–195). The Securitate, which closely monitored all her movements, arrested her and her son on 19 November 1987 (Cornea 2006, 203). In order to collect proofs of her guilt, the secret police made two home searches of her private dwelling on 19 and 23 November 1987. On these occasions the Securitate confiscated many documents authored by Doina Cornea, including all the drafts of her letters sent to RFE. These documents were archived in the criminal file created on Doina Cornea. As in many other cases of similar confiscations, the Securitate archives thus ironically became an important repository institution for artefacts of the cultural opposition in Romania.

Location

Cluj-Napoca, Romania
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Starting year of event

1987

Main actors

Securitate (Department of State Security)

Author(s) of this page

Petrescu, Cristina
Pintilescu, Corneliu

Event of

Doina Cornea Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS

References

Archives of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (Arhiva Consiliului Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii - ACNSAS), Files: I 000 666, P 000 014.

Cornea, Doina. 1990. Liberté? Entretiens avec Michel Combes. Paris: Criterion.

Cornea, Doina. 1991. Scrisori deschise şi alte texte (Open letters and other texts). Bucharest: Humanitas.

Cornea, Doina. 2009. Ultimele caiete (The last notebooks). Bucharest: Fundaţia Academia Civică.

Eliade, Mircea. 1978. L’épreuve du labyrinthe: Entretiens avec Claude-Henri Rocquet. Paris: Belfond.

Eliade, Mircea. 1992. Încercarea labirintului (The test of the labyrinth). Cluj-Napoca: Dacia.

Petrescu, Cristina. 2013. From Robin Hood to Don Quixote: Resistance and Dissent in Communist Romania. Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică.

Verdery, Katherine. 2014. Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police. Budapest: CEU Press.

Moldovan, Silviu, interview by Pintilescu, Corneliu, February 01, 2017. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection

Last edited on: 2018-10-18 19:11:18