The Communist Party, banned
Steliu Lambru, 09.11.2024, 13:51
The end of WW1, far from clearing the air, fuelled new anger and obsessions, and extreme solutions were considered the most appropriate. Thus, left-wing and right-wing extremism, communism and fascism, monstrous creations of the war, came to dominate the minds of many people. A particularity of the Great War was that neither the victors could enjoy their victory nor the losers could give up thoughts of revenge. It took WW2 for the destructive energies to be consumed.
The new states resulting after 1918 took measures against extremism and for securing their borders. The Kingdom of Greater Romania, also a creation of the Versailles system, took harsh measures to liquidate extremist behaviours that endangered its existence and functioning.
On February 6, 1924, more than 100 years ago, the Liberal government headed by Ion I. C. Brătianu passed the law on legal entities, which made extremist organizations illegal. The two main organizations targeted were the far-right National Christian Defense League, founded in 1923, and the far-left Romanian Communist Party, founded in 1921. The architect of the law, from which the document took its name, was the Minister of Justice Gheorghe Gh. Mârzescu, a law expert and mayor of the city of Iași during the war years.
If the far right reinvented itself in 1927 under the form of the Legionary Movement and was able to operate legally and successfully in public in the late 1930s, the far left, an agent of Moscow in Romania, remained banned until 1944. At the end of WW2, after the Soviet Union occupied Romania and brought the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) to power, the few members of the party made a title of glory out of the fact that they had been members of a banned organization. They were called “illegals” and among them were both those who were in prison and those who, not in prison but out of sight, followed instructions from Moscow.
One of the ‘illegals’ was Ion Bică. The archive of the Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation has an interview with him from 1971 in which he explained how from the camp in Târgu Jiu, where some of the communist militants were detained, they escaped in April 1944 with the help of some people from the administration: “The party had managed to establish a close connection between the militants outside and the militants in prisons and camps. It was going to face a difficult situation. As Hitler’s armies were receiving blow after blow, the party’s activity intensified in the country. The connection between the communists inside and those outside was made through simple people who performed certain jobs in the administrative system of the camp. For example, there were women who, with the dissolution of the camp, left for various localities in the country and to Bucharest. There were women who enjoyed the trust of the communists, they carried notes, correspondence between the communists outside and those inside.”
Anton Moisescu was also an ‘illegal’ and in 1995 he explained what his activity consisted of before the war and during it: “I was still doing the party activity illegally before, but working in a factory and with my real name, known to everyone, but unknown as a party activist or activist with the Union of the Communist Youth (UTC) . This time, however, I had to change my name and not show myself anywhere, so that none of the agents would spot, or they would have arrested me immediately. And then, I lived in a secret house, I carried out my activity at night, I went out to meetings and sessions only at night. I was searched for, but I was not found anywhere by the Security.”
Anton Moisescu also referred to the means of subsistence that an ‘illegals’ had: “We lived off the aid of the group in the Capital. People would collect some money for us because there were only a few of us. There were not many in this situation. The other party members and sympathizers collected for the political prisoners, I also took care of that, with the Red Aid: clothing, food, provisions, money. I would give them what we collected through their relatives, I would send them to prisons. They would also collect for us. We had a secret house where we could live, usually we had nothing to rent, we didn’t have any house in our name. It was the house of a sympathizer where we would stay for a period of time. When something seemed suspicious to us, we would go to another house of another sympathizer and so on. All the time we were in secret houses unknown to the Securitate, to people who were not known as activists either, but only as sympathizers.”
The period of illegality when the Romanian Communist party operated, between 1924 and 1944, was one in which the Romanian state consolidated in terms of legislation administration and economy. The Mârzescu Law was the instrument through which extremism, both right-wing and left-wing, was prevented from hijacking the development of a state that had paid with heavy sacrifice for what it had achieved.
