COURAGE

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Vasyl Stus’ fourth volume of poetry was written under particularly difficult and unusual circumstances, during a nine month period in 1972, when he was held in isolation prior to his trial and sentencing. The poems were written in pencil (as he was forbidden from using pens) into a single notebook from January to September. Despite the austere conditions and near total isolation, Stus himself and literary scholars point to this period as one of explosive creativity in which he wrote nearly 200 poems and 100 translations. This notebook captures not only the circumstances under which these poems were written, but also Stus’ own extraordinary gifts as a poet and his strength of character. 

The cartoon “The Future,” which was included in the censored volume Umor 50% (Humour 50%), suggests through four successive images the story of a shipwrecked man longing in vain for rescue. In the first image, a huge ship on which is written “The Future” seems to be approaching a desert island to rescue a man; in the next three, however, it may be observed that this approaching ship becomes smaller and smaller, so that in the last image, the viewer’s eye can no longer even make out the inscription alluding to the long-awaited future of communist society, in which everyone should finally live happily. Beyond the ideological disillusion that was general in the whole Soviet Bloc, Mihai Stănescu captures that state of mind specific to communism in Romania in this final period, and suggests the hopelessness and lack of expectations. In this sense, the cartoon is not only a subtle criticism of Marxism-Leninism, but also a parable of the gradual disappearance of hope as the twilight of the communist regime in Romania approached.

Clearly dated 1983, the cartoon “Working Visit” was probably among those withdrawn from the exhibition at the Eforie Gallery that year. It was subsequently omitted from the volumes later prepared by Mihai Stănescu before 1989, but it was included in the volume Best of Stănescu, which comprises works from the period 1979–1989 and was published in 2009 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism. The cartoon “Working Visit” shows a crowd of people drawn like parquet pieces on which footprints can be seen. The drawing mocks in a tragic-comic key the so-called “working visits” made by the secretary general of the Party, Nicolae Ceauşescu, together with his suite of communist officials, to various cities, to factories, building sites, and cultivated fields. These working visits, unknown in the time of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej but introduced and intensely promoted by Ceauşescu, followed broadly the same pattern: the Party delegation, led by Ceauşescu himself and in most cases also including his wife Elena, travelled to various “objectives.” There they were greeted by the local authorities and frenetically applauded by crowds of people specially mobilised to give the distinguished guests a long ovation. During these visits, Ceauşescu formulated so-called “precious indications” regarding what ought to be done in the factory, building site, or agricultural cooperative that he was visiting. Once launched, these “indications” became the letter of the law, no matter how absurd they were, and those on whom they had been bestowed dared not contradict them, even when specialists understood that they could produce disastrous effects. In essence, the “indications” symbolised the arbitrary character of decisions in a dictatorial regime. At the same time, for the presidential couple as for the rest of the officials of the communist regime, these “working visits” constituted what we would today call an image-building exercise. At the time, they were an obligatory element in the complex arsenal of the personality cult. For the crowds of people brought to attend these working visits, they were an exercise in accepted humiliation. This is what Mihai Stănescu manages to show through the cartoon “Working Visit.” This cartoon is one of the most well-known works in his portfolio, and indeed in the history of Romanian cartoons under communism.

The Free Europe University in Exile (FEUE) was founded by the National Committee for Free Europe in New York in 1951 as a specific type of academic organisation. The purpose of the organisation was to enable academic education in a democratic spirit to a large number of immigrants who left the states ruled by communist regimes. Émigrés from Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Hungary could apply to this university. The University's goals were to train young émigrés to find jobs and fit into the democratic world as teachers, professors, engineers, doctors, scientists, economists, lawyers, historians, and so forth. They were supposed to become the drivers of a liberal-democratic system in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. Since 1952, the University has conferred scholarships for its summer seminars held in the Château de Pourtalèâs in Strasbourg. The seminars were focused on contemporary focal political and cultural issues. Lecturers at the Summer Seminar were prominent members of the academic community and experts from Western Europe and the United States.

Jakša Kušan was a FEUE student. He believes that the FEUE lecturers were elite members of the liberal academic community from the United States as well as numerous prominent European intellectuals and émigrés. What Kušan considered even more important was that students/refugees from the countries under communist rule could meet there and exchange ideas. There he began his cooperation with Tihomil Rađa and Branko Salaj, with whom he later founded and edited the magazine Nova Hrvatska. These summer seminars were, according to Kušan, an arena of ideas and cultural contacts. He thinks that the Poles and Estonians used these scholarships very well because their new liberal intelligentsia was forged there.

The Yugoslav communists wrote that the FEUE was a school for CIA collaborators. According to Kušan, the United States intended to gather people who would return to Europe one day and on whom they could rely when communist rule collapsed (Interview with Kušan Jakša_2). Of all the organisations that the USA funded, only Radio Free Europe survives to this day. Financing of the rest ceased when the US saw that there were no significant results from them (Interview with Kušan, Jakša_2).

The Jakša Kušan Personal Papers contain materials from some of the FEUE seminars, such as a brochure on a seminar held in 1957. According to the brochure, the seminar in 1957 continued the tradition of a one-month seminar that was held from 6 August to 7 September. It was devoted primarily to international relations and the political, economic and social problems of Central European satellite states. The 1957 seminar featured intellectuals such as Czesław Miłosz and Bogdan Radica as lecturers.

During the summer period there were various festivals at Costineşti: festivals of theatre, film, rock, folk, jazz, caricature. All these were given generous space in the broadcasts of Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti.

“The festivals had many moments that were subversive towards the communist regime, and some of these can be glimpsed in the ‘news-sheets’ of the festivals. These were true newspapers – truer, I dare to claim, and more playful, freer, more natural that the official newspapers,” says Andrei Partoş. He mentions also that the articles in these papers – not least because they were already approved by the regime – provided a sort of substantial “raw material” that was very precious for his radio broadcasts: “They were given out free on the beach. All the big names who came there on vacation wrote in them. They set up a ‘press unit’ and brought out various news-sheets, generally of four pages. They were distributed in large print-runs for the public there. The following year, I would reuse what had been printed on the radio – and the stuff was exceptional, because it had been approved.” Andrei Partoş is one of the most informed connoisseurs of these publications, and probably one of the few people in Romania who still keeps copies of them.

The print-runs in which these publications appeared varied from a few thousand copies to tens of thousands of copies. Written in an alert and fresh language, totally different from the general tone of the communist press in Romania, they were conceived and edited in the Costineşti resort. Many well-known names from central publications appear in them, especially those who signed articles in the youth sections of the newspapers of the day. The then dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu is only mentioned very rarely in them, in contrast to the official press, where mention of the name and “achievements” of the communist supreme leader was obligatory.

In contrast with what was produced in the summers in Costineşti – radio transmitting “with no holds barred” and publications through which there breathed an air of normality and even freedom – , the rest of the time in Romania the mass media felt to the full the constraints of the communist regime. The period 1980–1989, in which most of these publications appeared as “festival news-sheets,” was named the “satanic decade” by Mircea Zaciu, a respected literary critic (Zaciu 1993, 7). It was precisely the period in which the personality cult of the Ceauşescu couple reached its apogee. Moreover, in 1985 regional radio stations in Romania were closed down, officially on the grounds that the Romanian state had to save energy in order to pay its accumulated international debt faster. The broadcasting schedule of public television, which was indeed the only television channel in that period, was drastically cut back. The broadcasts, which were entirely controlled by the party apparatus, were reduced to two hours per day, from 8 pm to 10 pm. The official reason for this decision was that people ought to go to bed early, in order to be well-rested and ready for work the next day. Printed publications were likewise strictly controlled, with the language used in published articles being homogenised in the light of directives received from the Romanian Communist Party.

Among the publications printed in the course of numerous summers at Costineşti as “festival news-sheets” may be mentioned: Spectator (news-sheet of the Amphitheatre Galas), Secvenţa (The sequence, subtitled “The paper that gave in its resignation”, a news-sheet of the Film Festival), Stop-cadru (“Freeze frame”, also a news-sheet of the Film Festival), and Consecvenţa (The consequence). There has not yet been a systematic study of these publications, which provided little islands of normality in a media landscape which, like Romanian communism as a whole, was very dark at the time.