Universul.net is publishing an interview with Emil Hurezeanu, one of Romania’s best regarded intellectuals of the last 50 years and the country’s former Ambassador to Germany and Austria.
The interview (Romanian version) was carried out by news outlet Puterea a Cincea.
“More than 36 years after the fall of communism, we find ourselves in the situation of an aggressive return of ideas associated with national-communism, known as ‘sovereignism,’ which are promoted by relatively new parties, but share the same ideological vein: AUR, SOS, POT. At the same time, we are witnessing a rise of extremism with an accent on the legionnaires. A massive vote was given to a man (Eds’ note: Calin Georgescu) who is an apologist for the legionnaires and national-communism, but also (plays) the games of Russia which has been Romania’s enemy for decades.
How did we get here? This is a dialogue with Emil Hurezeanu, a well-regarded journalist, prominent voice of Radio Free Europe in the ’80s, political analyst, essayist and Romania’s ambassador to Germany and Austria.
In the interview, Emil Hurezeanu talks about national-communism before 1989, which he calls a perverted form of national-patriotism, about its post-communist metamorphosis and how it now influences politics and Romanian society and about the confusion that reigned in Romania after 1989, in a period when other former communist states were freeing themselves, as well as about the sovereignists and their ideological precursors of the ’90s. He also talks about he left Romania in 1982, how he became a prominent voice of Radio Free Europe and the repercussions that this decision had on him and his family. He also speaks of the end of “world peace”: “Destruction – total, partial, fragmentary and accelerated – is assured. It starts with each of us.”
The interview is the transcript – edited – of a dialogue we had in the podcast“Dialogues at the Fifth Power”.
When you left the country, in the early ‘80s, during communism, we were in the full throes of national-communism. Here we are, more than three decades later in the situation…..Could this also be an effect of the fact that we have not definitively separated ourselves from our communist past, that democracy in Romania was inherited by the Securitate, that a part of Romanian society, of the management structures in the institutions remained infiltrated by the Securitate or another, by people who were said, in official documents, to have been GRU and KGB agents?
Your analysis is pertinent, legitimate….. There are several lines of evolution, with different sequences. The lines of evolution between them are different. Even if, in part, certain results today of these lines of evolution may be similar to certain sequences from the time of Romanian national-communism, this does not mean that we are witnessing a reproduction, even partial, of Romanian national-communism.
The communist world was a globalized world, so globalization was also a function of communism. Communist revolutions, as Marx wanted, are not successful in the most advanced capitalist countries. At the end of the First World War, we know under what conditions, the Bolsheviks, who are terrorist extremists, come to power in the most backward country of Europe, which has the greatest development problems, but a rich country and a formidable imperial power, before the First World War. The Bolsheviks and the communists are the followers of globalization. After the Second World War, it globalized in the Soviet sense, including in the Soviet penal colony, literally, closed borders, the iron curtain between East and West, the Soviet army from the occupation that had been on the territories of some states for a long time.
But before that, Soviet troops were on an anti-Nazi offensive. Beyond the character of an occupying country, the USSR had, especially for the Western left, and for the few communists in the Eastern countries – more in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary than in Romania – also a liberating army feature, especially since we were together with the Germans until the Stalingrad moment. The West did not believe that the Russians would occupy entire territories militarily, and then occupy them politically for a long time.
The pacts between the United States and the West, but especially between America and the Soviet Union, slowly and surely led to the prevention of a cataclysmic war, because both countries had atomic weapons. These pacts led to a freezing of the situation, there were two global blocs, separated by the Iron Curtain, the American bloc, of the liberal, capitalist democracies, and the Soviet bloc, of the proletarian, communist dictatorships, in the East.
So the communist world was a global world, the Warsaw Pact, the Military Alliance and Defense Pact, in case of war, the CAER Economic Pact (Economic Council for Mutual Aid) which managed the commercial-economic collaboration only between these countries. Countries that, through Moscow’s voice, are forced to refuse the Marshall Plan of 1946-1947, which Bucharest, in the first phase, had accepted. The Marshall Plan which, applied to the West, led to the rapid overcoming of the consequences of the war, with the success known in the decades that followed.
Ceausescu was a voice of national-communism, of Romanian specificity, but completely perverted from the beginning. The national-communist specificity was propagandistic. In Romania, the working class, the proletariat, the control of files, the social control, the political police had the same weight as in the countries that literally followed Moscow’s line. But here national sentiments were used, with a propagandistic opening reminiscent of the Legionary episode. It was using a kind of national pride that had been completely liquidated in the late 1940s, in the 1950s, when the elites rotted in prisons, they were liquidated. It was not until 1964 that the amnesty came, and Ceausescu came to power a year later. This voice of national-communism also had some popularity. Especially since it was also based on a very concrete element, on the dimension of relative, pro-Western openness, especially of an economic nature. Ceausescu takes loans and develops a relatively modern economy, with Western technology, bought from countries where he also receives credits. That creates a kind of false reality. Ceausescu himself, with these followers of national-communism who surrounded him, could have had the best national intentions. However, they could not detach themselves from the hyphen that inextricably linked them to communism. It was a national-communism in which the emphasis was on communism. And they were communist leaders, they were not elected, they were not the result of a meritocratic selection, as happens in countries with truly free nationality and sovereignty, such as Western countries, which elected their leaders as they wanted and did not pervert their traditions in order to obtain results.
The history of France, Great Britain, Germany, even with the episodes of overcoming Nazism and de-Nazification, were histories of normal continuity. In our country, everything is turned upside down, a new language is created, a new reality with national and increasingly nationalistic accents as this line of evolution of the exception is accentuated. Ceausescu visits Paris, visits Rome, appears in a carriage with the Queen in Great Britain, receives in 1969 the visit of the first American president to visit a communist country, Richard Nixon, he is the first Eastern European president to visit America, in 1976, when the left-wing Democratic president Jimmy Carter, very left-wing compared to the current American president, He would say on the lawn of the rose garden at the White House: “I welcome today the great leader of a great nation.”
As you can see, in a horizontal transposition of the plane, without nuances, without relief, it is almost impossible in recent years to witness such a sequence, in which an American president receives the Romanian leader, saying: “I salute the great leader of a great nation.” It was possible then. Under the conditions of communism, in 1976. This means that the pro-Western opening immediately had effects of consolidating the national-communist system, because Romanians were open to the West, they had feelings, as all Eastern Europeans had, also related to the historical memories of the Western nucleus that was established in Romania after Cuza’s reign, after the arrival of the Hohenzollerns and so on.
In Romania there is a Western-type scaffolding. You can see this from the way Bucharest looks, you can see it from the way the streets, the schools, the way school was built, from the critical thinking with Maiorescu, with Junimea, from the way the parties functioned, beyond the oriental, post-Byzantine inertia, which we like too much to pay attention to.
Given the geographical and geopolitical position of this hard-formed state, I would say that these oriental, Byzantine traditions of abusive despotism are also inevitable. Which today appear in France and the United States, which have never passed through Byzantium.
So national-communism was not as horrible as, today, a man with a historical judgment too lacking in nuances could have. Of course, the system was communist, the leaders were not elected, of course they were the servants of Moscow, of course they were playing theater, but this contributed to the perversion of real patriotism, to the rewriting of the national meaning in historical anecdotes, through the films with Michael the Brave, with the history treatises in which we were the center of the Universe.
At the Museum of Party History, for example, there was a big map with lights – I remember I saw it when I was a student – which flickered intermittently, and there Bucharest was the center of the world, radiating bad lights all over the world. In the 80s I think it didn’t work anymore because of the power shortage.
Ceausescu was the most beloved leader of the world, or in any case the most interesting of the communist world – many Romanians believed. Others, many, did not believe. I was among those who realized relatively quickly that there is a ruse here. For a while, from 1965-1966 to 1974, the pre-eminence of the working class in the sorting of files did not necessarily work, there were no longer controlled exams at certain faculties, although in the year in which I finished the faculty of law in Cluj, the obligation to present a family file and of healthy origin was reintroduced for those who wanted to take the history exam, philosophy or law. Romania also had some obligations to the West and because of this it was a hypocritical game. What national-communist, pro-Western society does not allow its citizens to travel to the West?
Ceausescu’s servitudes, constraints were linked to belonging to the Warsaw Pact. Ceausescu knew the communist novel language of power, which had meant the repression of East German workers in 1953, the repression of Hungarians who rose up against the security and Stalinist communism in 1956, the repression of Czechoslovakia with its communist-reform party in 1968. Ceausescu knew that this was a reality that could be repeated in the case of Romania as well.
His desire for power and this orientation transforms Romania into a clan political society, of the Ceausescu clan and its entourage, based on kinship relations, and lowers the level of competence of this political class. At the end of the ’60s, factory managers, intellectuals, with good records when they finished college, could become secretaries with economy or agriculture in the counties thanks to their competence and could occupy important positions at the head of ministries, such as the Ministry of Mechanical Engineering, the State Council of Technology. That was until ’78-’79. As proof that dams, industrial constructions and urbanization – not to mention the systematization at the end of the 80s – all this has been done. I saw a recent interview with an eminent architect, the heir of the interwar school of architecture, the architect Belea, who built the Intercontinental Hotel and the National Theater in Bucharest, at the end of the ’60s. They were comparable constructions and even more beautiful than the Intercontinental in other capitals of the world, and the National Theater, in the version of ’71-’72, when the first version appeared, which is more like the one now, rebuilt under Caramitru, after the mutilation of the Ceausescu era, was more beautiful than many other modern theater and opera buildings in the West.
So things were more divided. I was finishing high school, in Sibiu, in 1973. At the end of the alley that took me from high school to the way home, there was a newsstand, from where for 3 lei I bought Les Lettres Français, the weekly political culture of the French Euro-communists, where the editor-in-chief was the great surrealist poet Louis Aragon and where, in the early ’70s, the texts were anti-communist, anti-Ceausesian, they were more anti-communist-Soviet than anti-Ceauses-national-communist. Because of this, the magazine had made its way. But it was still an anti-despotic magazine. It was a magazine of Marxist, critical thought. There was also L’Humanité, which was the press organ of the French communists, much more evolved than the Romanian communists. Le Figaro was also found from time to time. Antique shops had books taken out for survival, sold by their owners. Cioran was also found from time to time, there were also entire collections of Goethe, Schiller.
This clan system of power, slowly, slowly can’t cope any longer. There are several crises: the oil crisis of ’71-’73, the Israeli-Arab wars. Romania had a kind of pendulum that worked quite well between the Arab countries and Israel. He had an opening to America and could afford to obtain oil, to supply himself with oil from Iran for the large industry built by Ceausescu. Iran was ruled by a pro-Western leader, a post-Persian despot: Shakhinshah Reza Pahlavi. In ’79, he left Iran unwillingly. The mullahs came to power and the theocracy was established. Then the delivery of oil in barter is interrupted. Unlike Western countries that bought oil from the Soviet Union, national-communist Romania was denied this privilege. Moscow’s levers, which had become dangerous, led to more chronic results of underdevelopment, especially in moments of world crises, at a turning point, when the West itself was in trouble and when Ceausescu was already borrowing too much money without giving it back. It was seen in the ’80s at what cost. In addition, he had entered a major dilemma. He was a communist leader, a limited proletarian, a man with rural, ontological skills, but the regime can no longer cope with this situation: this story with the films about Michael the Brave, with the nationalist self-glorification, which was controlled by ideology, with the attempts to put the literature that denounces the obsessive decade, denounces Stalinism in a queen of ideological control, after the so-called Mangalia conference in the early 80s. All this creates a state of unrest that begins to resemble true communism and true dogmatic communism, but without Moscow’s support.
Then Ceausescu, who no longer receives oil from the Iranians, turns to the Russians, because there is nowhere else. The West no longer gave him money. He gave him about 12-13 billion dollars, which he returned in the 1980s. And the Russians say: “Welcome to the meeting, we have been waiting for it for a long time. You get oil, you still have gas, but you don’t have oil at all. We give it to you, but in hard currency, as your close friends in the West do. In barter? No. We have enough barter with the GDR, Bulgaria, we don’t do much with it. So you, who have been in the peripheral orbit for a while, with this almost provocative flirtation towards the West, for years, you just have to manage.” This is the economic cause of the beginning of the collapse of Ceausescuism. Because Ceausescu then enters a kind of syndrome typical for a limited man and gets angry with the global village. The global village was divided into two hamlets. There was a larger commune, the communist village, and the capitalist village, which leaves him in suspense because he says: “Are you giving me money to pay the Russians?” “I have the impression that you have to give us money. About 12 billion.” No leader, except Poland, which had $40 billion in debt, which it didn’t give until ’89 and half of which was forgiven in ’90, all the other communist countries didn’t borrow much from the capitalists. And then Ceausescu also gets angry with the capitalist village. And he says, “I’ll pay you in barter, and I’ll give you the money back.”
This annoyance, so to speak, also came from the simplicity of this system. From the fact that he controlled him more and more through himself, through his family, through his wife, Cabinet 2 and through the Securitate. The Securitate could no longer return to the old procedures of arrests, of repressions, but it had entered an intensive surveillance system because it had to keep up appearances and surveillance was harsh.
This is what produces the shortages of the ’80s, the fact that Ceausescu gives money back to the West, the fact that he doesn’t have enough oil, because he doesn’t have enough money to pay it to the Russians. All this brings shortages, hunger, cold, the disbandment of local radio stations, the central television program has two hours and is an exalted family chronicle, while the West is angry with him because he sees his true face. Man enters a kind of typically neurotic spiral, namely he thinks of pharaonic projects, to make a monument that will last over centuries, he destroys old neighborhoods in Bucharest – where dozens of people commit suicide – and he begins to change the face of the villages or to want to change it. During this period, in the ’80s, the West’s perspective on Ceausescu also changed completely. Even if Gorbachev had not come to power, giving a strong impetus to the collapse of communism, the national-communist-Ceausescu regime would not have resisted anyway.
So this was national-communism, it was a form of perverse, perverted exception of national-patriotism, so to speak, in the ideological constraints and in the ideological paradigm of communism. Well, either national, or communist. This situation leads, in Romania, to the dismemberment and tragic collapse of the communist regime compared to the only dramatic collapse in the other communist countries, including in the Soviet world, where no bullets are fired – neither in the GDR nor in Czechoslovakia. In Romania, a thousand or so people are dying. Two more. Nowhere in communist countries are rulers shot.
The rest of the interview can be seen here.
Who is Emil Hurezeanu?
Born August 26, 1955,Sibiu
Education. Graduated the Faculty of Law of the “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Cluj Napoca (1979), Herder scholarship holder at the University of Vienna, Faculty of International Relations (1982-1983), graduate of the Special Program for International Relations, Charlottesville University, Virginia, USA (1985), Master in International Relations and Strategies, Boston University, USA (1991).
Professional experience. 1976-1980: editor and general secretary of the student culture magazine Echinox, Cluj-Napoca; 1980-1981: legal adviser, UJCAP, Alba-Iulia; 1981-1982: lawyer, Mediaș Bar Association; 1983-1991: editor, then editor-in-chief, Radio Free Europe, Romanian section, Munich; 1991-1994: deputy director, then director of the Romanian section of Radio Free Europe, Munich; 1995-2002: director of the Romanian section of Radio Deutsche Welle, Cologne; 1995-2003: Radio Free Europe correspondent, Bucharest; 2002-2011; correspondent for Radio Deutsche Welle, Bucharest; 2002-2003: project manager, Gruner & Jahr – Evenimentul Zilei; 2003 (March-September): Foreign Policy and Communication Advisor to the Prime Minister of Romania; 2002-2003: Visiting Professor for International Relations, Faculty of European Studies, “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca; 2005-2009: Moderator of foreign policy shows, Realitatea TV; 2006-2008: editorial director of the daily newspaper România Liberă; 2007-2008: visiting professor at the Faculty of International Relations, “Al. I. Cuza” University, Iași; 2008-2009: member of the editorial board of Cotidianul; 2009-2010: Chairman of the editorial board of the Realitatea-Cațavencu Media Group; 2010-2015; visiting professor, National College of Defense, European Affairs and International Relations, Bucharest; 2011-2013: moderator of the foreign policy program “Compas”, Money Channel TV; 2015-2021: Ambassador of Romania to Germany; 2021-2024: Ambassador of Romania to Austria.
Publications. He is the author of several volumes: The Anatomy Lesson (Dacia, 1979), a volume that received the Debut Prize of the Romanian Writers’ Union; Seven Poets from Sibiu, lyrical anthology, Romanian – English (1992); The First, the Last (Albatros, 1993); Between the Dog and the Wolf (Apostrophe, 1996); The Black Box: 1001 minutes at the microphone of Free Europe, interviews (Albatros, 1998), a volume that won the Prize for Journalism of the Romanian Writers’ Union; On the passage of time. Romanian Political Journal 1996-2015 (Curtea Veche, 2015); Complete Lyrical Works (Paralela 45, 2016); The Poetic Work, bilingual Romanian and German edition, (Pop, Ludwigsburg, 2020)
Decorations. 1998: Honorary Citizen of Sibiu; 2000: National Order “For Merit” in the rank of commander; 2013: “Andrei Șaguna” Cross, Metropolitan Church of Transylvania; 2014: Honorary Ambassador of Sibiu; 2015: Order of the “Cross of Romania” in the rank of knight, awarded by King Michael I; 2015: Order “Faith and Virtue” in the rank of Grand Officer, Grand Lodge of Romania; 2015: Doctor Honoris Causa, West University of Timișoara; 2016: Doctor Honoris Causa, Andrei Saguna University, Constanta; 2017: Doctor Honoris Causa of the “Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu; 2018: Doctor Honoris Causa of the “Nicolae Bălcescu” Land Forces Academy, Sibiu; 2019 Diploma of Excellence of the South-East European Film Festival for the promotion of Romanian-German cultural relations, Berlin, Germany; 2019: “Negruzzi” National Award, Iași; 2019: Gold Honorary Badge of the Association of Transylvanian Saxons for the promotion of Romanian-German relations and those with the German minority in Romania, Germany; 2021: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
(Source: Romanian Foreign Ministry).
