89 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 Political repressions in Moldavian SSR after 1956: towards a typology based on KGB files Represiuni politice în RSS Moldovenească după 1956: spre o tipolo- gie bazată pe dosare personale de la KGB Igor CAŞU Abstract The study is based on first hand accounts from the archive of the former KGB of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. This data has been disclosed recently in the framework of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Totalitarian Communist Regimes in the Republic of Moldova, created in mid January 2010 (the author was the vice-chairman). According to the new disclosed data, one can see that political repres- sions did not stop in 1953 when Stalin died, but continued until the mid 1980s during Gorbachev’s Perestroika. The aim of the article is to present separate cases from each post Stalinist decade and try to sketch a typology based on various motivations for re- pression on the part of the regime, and resistance from the unconscious and conscious critics of the Soviet Communist regime. The basic typology the author formulates im- plied the existence of two distinct groups of ‘enemies’ of the regime: the first one, called dissenters, being the persons that criticized the regime not straightforwardly as an illegal or unjust political system, but rather protesting against certain elements of it, be they nationality policy, ethnic discrimination or living conditions; the second category of critics of the regimes were called dissidents, defined as persons formulating a more or less coherent protest against the regime and implying a rather conscious stance, more than a spontaneous one compared to the first category. Keywords: KGB, Communism, political repressions, one party rule, party-state, totalitarianism, Stalinism, post Stalinism, nationalism Political repression in the Soviet Union, including in the Moldavian Soviet So- cialist Republic (MSSR), continued in various degrees after Stalin’s death in March 1953. The repression’s scale was different; the regime gave up the mass execution of innocent people, unlike for instance during the Grand Terror in 1937-19381; peas- ants who opposed the Communist collectivization and ideology, as well as repre- 1 About the context and victims of the Great Terror in the Moldavian ASSR, see Gheorghe Ne- gru, Mihai Taşcă, „Represiunile politice din RASSM în anii 1937-1938 („operaţiunea culăcească” şi „operaţiunea română”) and Ion Varta, Tatiana Varta, „Marea Teroare din URSS şi RASS Moldovenească (1937-1938)”, both in Sergiu Musteaţă, Igor Caşu, eds., Fără termen de prescripţie. Aspecte ale crimelor comunismului în Europa, Chişinău: Cartier, 2011, pp. 429-455, 356-428. 90 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 sentatives of other social classes seen as „unhealthy” by the regime were no longer subjected to starvation. The CPSU also gave up arrests and mass deportations of people that could be subjected to communist re-education or to slow or immediate physical liquidation. The logic of repression in the Communist regime was based on the idea that the Single Party holds the Absolute Truth. The others who did not recognize it – the majority of the population – were perceived by the Party as enemies who had to be annihilated one way or another, either by physical or psychological terror, or through deportation, starvation, placement in special camps, and later in psychi- atric hospitals, or they were forced to undergo special re-education programmes. Whenever someone dared to question the dogmas of the Soviet Communist ideol- ogy, to criticize food shortages or to display a critical attitude towards party leaders and statesmen, the regime immediately labelled them as people with anti-Soviet and anti-social behaviour, and legal actions were taken against them according to the Criminal Code. Until 1953, defendants were subjected to harsh punishments which affected their physical integrity, such as incarceration, deportation or sum- mary execution. These actions from the part of the totalitarian state are circum- scribed largely as „genocide” or „crimes against humanity”2. The Soviet Communist regime shared the view that Soviet power is the world’s most progressive political regime, claiming that human rights (named in official speeches as „the rights of working people” or of the „working classes”) were being observed only in the USSR (and the bloc of communist states after WWII). In other words, during the period before 1953, the Soviet Communist regime did not hesitate to make use of physical violence as a favourite solution in fighting against the „class enemies” and other potential or virtual enemies of the regime (who sometimes co- incided with a certain ethnic group3), whereas after Stalin’s death, the emphasis was laid on „prophylaxis” rather than repression. Warning those expressing anti-Soviet attitudes and opinions became the main method of social control practiced by the political police, mainly the KGB, as well as the Ministry of Interior Affairs and other institutions of the party-state. After 1953, punishments were not so harsh and were not administered so often, but this does not mean that the Soviet Communist regime changed the logic of its actions: the re-education of all „unhealthy” elements and „criminals” was a must as they were viewed as „abnormal” people and often were labelled as mentally alien- ated. Consequently they were to be „healed” with specific, humanistic methods, unlike in Capitalism, i.e. through psychiatric methods. The use of psychiatry for 2 See more on that in Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, Princeton University Press, 2010. 3 Terry Martin, „The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing”, in Journal of Modern History, vol. 70, no. 4, (Dec., 1998), p. 813-861. 91 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 political purposes after Stalin’s death was far from being a new phenomenon in the USSR. The first victim dates back to February 1919, when the revolutionary court sentenced the leader of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Maria Spiridonova, to a one-year placement in a psychiatric hospital. The reason was the criticism that her party, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, which was the only post-revolution coali- tion partner of Lenin, offered to criticize Bolshevik policy4. But it seems that Nikita Khrushchev was the very person who explicitly drew a parallel between the display of a critical attitude towards communism as a political and ideological regime and certain mental disorders of the people displaying it. In a speech he delivered before the Union of Writers of the Soviet Union in May 1959, the Soviet leader announced a new method for fighting against those who opposed communism or criticised it. He pondered over the meaning of communism when it would be put in practice, raised the question whether there would be crimes in the communism and gave the following answer: Some may ask: will there be crimes in the communist society? I, myself, in my tenure as Communist leader, cannot give any guarantees that there will be none. Crimes are a deviation from the norms accepted by society, which are often triggered by people’s mental disorders. Can it be that some individuals in the communist society have mental diseases and disorders? It appears that it can. If there are, then there are also violations characteristic of people with mental disorders. So, the communist society will not be as- sessed proceeding from the attitudes of these psychopaths. Those who cite this „reason” in order to fight against communism, it can be said that even nowadays there are people fighting against communism and its noble ideas, but these people do not seem all right from a psychiatric point of view5. Among the most well-known cases of persons being sent to psychiatric hospital in order to be healed of anti-Communist attitudes was Vladimir Bukovsky. He was sent in psikhushka for the first time from 1963 to 1965 for organizing poetry meetings at the Mayakovski statue in downtown Moscow. Bukovsky was arrested subsequently for defending Siniavsky and Daniel, Ginzburg and others, and released to the West in De- cember 1976, being exchanged with the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalán6. During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era there were not only anti-Soviet and anti-Communist attitudes expressed by individuals and groups, but also a range of popular rebellions took place, many of them evolving into violent confrontations between the authorities and the people. Moreover, rebellions continued after 1985 as well, especially on an ethno-national basis. In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev asked 4 Новая газета, 18 августа 2003. More on the alliance between the Bolsheviks and Left Social Revo- lutionaries in late 1917 and early 1918, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd, Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 260-312. 5 „Служение народу – высокое призвание советских писателей. Речь товарища Н. С. Хрущева на III Съезде писателей 22 мая 1959 года”, in: Правда, 24 мая 1959, стр. 2. 6 Vladimir Bukovsky, I vozvrashchaetsea veter…, Samizdat, 1978. 92 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 the then KGB head Viktor Chebrikov to present a report on the matter. The report covered popular rebellions that erupted in the period 1957-1988. According to it, in the last eight years of Khrushchev’s rule, 1957-1964, 11 popular rebellions were recorded in which an average of 300 persons participated. On the other hand, dur- ing Brezhnev’s period, i.e. during 17 years (1964-1982), only 9 popular rebellions were recorded. It appears that during Brezhnev’s rule a popular rebellion erupted once in two years, whereas during his predecessor’s rule, once per year on average. During Brezhnev’s rule, the peak of mass uprising coincided with 1966-1968 years, whereas in 1969 and 1977 – during the „stagnation period” – no revolt took place. Another difference between the two leaders, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, is the extent to which the armed forces were used to crack down on protesters. For instance, the authorities used fire arms against protesters in 8 out of 11 rebellions recorded during Khrushchev’s epoch. During Brezhnev’s rule, the authorities dared to use firearms against participants in mass protests only in 3 out of 9 cases, all of them taking place in 1967. There are two major explanations for the significant decrease in the number of popular rebellions during Brezhnev’s rule as compared with the ones recorded during Khrushchev’s period. The first one refers to the fact that Brezhnev stepped up even more the status of the KGB in the repressive Soviet system and concurrently, he partly rehabilitated Stalin, a trend that was noticed already in the last years of Khrushchev’s rule. In 1967, the KGB became more active in luring agents and in- formers. In that year, it lured 24,952 agents-informants, which made by 15% more and also 2-fold more than the overall number of the undesired people „identified” in 1967. All in all, in the late 1960s, there were about 166,000 KGB informants in the Soviet Union, a not too high number for a population of over 250 millions. Neverthe- less, the widely-spread conviction among the Soviet citizens that the political police was omnipresent and almighty played the role of an intimidation factor, discourag- ing dissatisfied people’s attempts to publicly express their critical attitude towards the Soviet Communist regime. Another reason for the lower number of protests during Brezhnev’s era was that the regime managed to buy the loyalty of „the silent major- ity” by investing in goods of the first order, which kept on being underproduced, but whose quantity was permanently on the rise, which was possible due to currency reserves collected as the price of oil was increasing on the world market (the two oil „shocks” in 1973 and 1979), rather than due to economic reforms7. In the mid 1960s, the swift identification of those expressing anti-Soviet and anti-Communist attitudes became the main mechanism for preventing mass pro- tests applied by the Soviet Communist regime. This practice was institutionalized 7 Егор Гайдар, Гибель империи. Уроки для современной России, Москва, „Российская поли- тическая энциклопедия”, 2007. 93 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 in December 1972, when the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted the (confiden- tial) decree „On the use of prevention by the state security bodies as a method of prophylactic action”. The number of those subjected to „prophylactic actions” is not known yet, but there are data for several years though. For instance, in 1976, there were about 68,000 people who passed through the „prophylaxis” in the USSR, i.e. persons critical of the regime were called to the KGB and warned: if they do not stop expressing critical ideas, then next time, they will face investigators and will become defendants, after which they will be tried and placed in camps or jailed8. In the light of the above-mentioned circumstances, one can notice that despite the frequently promoted idea, the so-called Thaw period did not represent a com- plete rupture from Stalinism9. It is true that the mass liberation of inmates from gulags and of deportees from special settlements started in June 1953. The process continued mainly after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev condemned the cult of personality10. The reactions of the Soviet society, as well as revolts in Poland and Hungary in the summer of 1956, and in particular the denial of the leading role of the Single Party, induced Khrushchev and the Soviet elite to restore the role of the repressive bodies in order to avoid the regime’s collapse. It is also true that Khrush- chev as compared with the late Stalinist period promoted a tougher policy towards the Orthodox Church, numerous „sects”, or the so called Neoprotestant denomina- tions, such as Jehovah’s witnesses, Baptists, Adventists and others. Workers staged mass protests as they were dissatisfied with their labour condi- tions and the chronic shortage of foodstuffs and consumer goods. An eloquent ex- ample is a rebellion of workers from Novocherkask. To repress it, Khrushchev did not hesitate to use the army and KGB forces that fired at the crowd11. It should be recalled that the new Soviet leader’s policy towards peasants was tougher. The size of land plots around peasants’ houses was significantly shrunk in order to make the peasants even more dependent on the party and the state. This measure aroused the discontent of villagers and had a negative impact on the Soviet agriculture sector since these individual land plots used to produce a significant quantity of food- stuffs. People’s discontent was increasing, the more so now that people were aware that the regime would not resort to mass repressions like during Stalin’s rule. After 1956, new forms of opposing the regime appeared in the Soviet society. First of all, 8 В. А. Козлов, Неизвестный СССР. Противостояние народа и власти, 1953-1985, Москва: Олма-Пресс, 2006, pp. 15, 421-432. 9 On the general account on this subject, see Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, London: Routledge, 2006. 10 Реабилитация – как это было, март 1953-февраль 1953, Москва: Фонд Демократия, 2000, стр. 296-380. 11 „Новочеркасская трагедия”, 1962, in: Исторический архив, 1993, № 1, 4. 94 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 it is about two main categories of political opposition12 (besides the above-mentioned street protesters): dissenters and, later on, dissidents. Who were the dissenters and the dissidents? The dissenters were those who ex- pressed more or less critical opinions about the regime, although, in broad terms, they did not question the existence of the regime or its key assumptions. They were criticizing the lack of consumer goods, the behaviour of the Soviet nomenclature and the privileges they were enjoying, they were favouring certain political lead- ers to the detriment of others, they were opposing the rehabilitation of such lead- ers as Stalin (for instance, as did Russian actor Oleg Yefremov in 1966), they liked better certain types of clothing and behaviour in public, which sometimes were shocking, or they simply needed to distinguish themselves (the so-called stilyagi, for example13), but they never called into question the foundations of the regime, let alone the fact that they never sought its liquidation. As a rule, the dissenters did not deny explicitly the monopoly of the Single Party over the power or the ideological dogmas of communism. From a social point of view, the dissenters were coming from various social classes, mainly from intellectuals, but also workers, public servants, peasants and ordinary people who were not necessarily up to date with the ideological subtleties of the regime and were unable to come up with a coherent alternative to the Soviet political system. This category of troublemak- ers used to express its opinion spontaneously rather than deliberately and was not paying too much attention to spreading its messages among the population, because they were unaware that they were holding a truth that needed to be known, a truth that could have helped change the existing realities. Instead of building the reality, they were putting inquisitive questions and were acting by instinct, so to say, without being aware of the content of their message or of its impact on the ordinary people and on the authorities. In other words, the dissenters represented a mindset structure. The dissidents differed from the dissenters in many aspects. From a social view- point, they were almost always intellectuals. They were very well educated, ques- tioned either certain dogmas of the regime or the whole Communist system. Com- pared with the dissenters, the dissidents were militants. They wanted to make their message known both inside Soviet society and outside the Soviet Union. The regime 12 I have borrowed the expression ‘political oppositions’ from a book on the subject focusing on Soviet Ukraine after 1956: Юрiй Данилюк, Олег Бажан, Оппозиция в Українi (друга половина 50-х – 80-тi рр. ХХ ст.), Київ, Рiдний край, 2000. There is another refference book, this time on Rus- sia: Борис Фирсов, Разномыслие в СССР. 1940—1960-е годы, СПб.: Издательство Европейского университета в Санкт-Петербурге, Издательство Европейского дома, 2008. Other authors pref- fer „inakomyslie” instead of „raznomyslie”: Людмила Алексеева, История инакомыслия в СССР, М.: Издательство Весть, 1992; Крамола. Инакомыслие в СССР при Хрущеве и Брежневе (1953- 1982), под ред. В.А. Козлова и С.В. Мироненко, М.: Материк, 2005. 13 Igor Caşu, „Vestimentaţia tinerilor basarabeni, în vizorul KGB-ului”[Clothing of Young Bessa- rabians, in attention of KGB], in Historia, no. 111, March 2011, pp. 26-28. 95 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 encountered serious troubles with them, because quite often they were incorrigi- ble, difficult or impossible to persuade, could not be forced to keep silent through threats, blackmail and other forms of intimidation. In particular it was true of those who were known in the West, such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov in Russia, Havel in Czechoslovakia, Michnik in Poland or Goma in Romania. The only case docu- mented in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) when a person who had problems with the regime succeeded to emigrate to the West in the early 1970s was the one of Nicolae Lupan. This was due to the fact that such radio stations as Free Europe/Radio Liberty made his fate known. There were others who sent letters to Free Europe/Radio Liberty as well, such as Gheorghe David during Perestroika, but it appears that nobody but Nicolae Lupan managed to secure the right to emigrate to the West on the basis of this strategy. Yet this does not mean that there were not numerous cases of individuals or groups of people having obviously anti-Soviet and anti-Communist positions or displaying behaviours that were denounced by the regime. On the contrary, there were dozens and hundreds of such cases and this is proved by the files stocked in the special archive of the former KGB from Chişinău, which is presently managed by the Information and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova, and which has become accessible recently. My purpose is not to make an exhaustive analysis of repressions in the MSSR after 1956, as this is impossible taking into account the level of documentation pres- ently available and the limited space for this article. In turn, I will attempt to depict some cases that may help us understand better the nature of the communist repres- sions under the five leaders of the USSR after Stalin. In order to draw a concise typology of cases made available to us, I would like to point out two main categories of actions proceeding from another criterion – the type of indictment, or the object of criticism of the Communist regime. The first covers anti-Communist attitudes or actions, when „the culprits” called into question the nature of the regime, either by opposing the supreme leader, the party’s monopoly in society or by expressing criti- cisms against the utopian nature of Communism, given the growing gap between the official discourse and the everyday life. The second type of attitudes and actions can be grouped in the category anti-Soviet, those who refuted the Soviet borders, in other words, those who called into question or explicitly opposed the Soviet Nationalities Policy, either in linguistic terms (assimilation) and economic terms (migration, cadres’ policy) or – in the MSSR case – called for Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina to break away from the USSR and unite with Romania. As for the official language used by the Soviet regime, there were almost never any mentions about anti-Communist attitudes and actions (except later, during Perestroika and in political not legal meaning). Of- ficials usually spoke about ‘unhealthy’, ‘hostile’, ‘nationalist’ and rarely about ‘chauvin- 96 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 istic’ attitudes and actions (including at the normative and juridical level), all these being overshadowed by a single word: ‘anti-Soviet’, mentioned expressly in the Crimi- nal Code. The last label extended to eminently ‘anti-Communist’ attitudes, to those questioning the dominant role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). It suited the regime to put them all under the ‘anti-Soviet’ umbrella, that is, aimed against the state, against the raison d’état. After Stalin’s death, and mainly several months after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, during which Khruschev condemned the cult of Stalin’s personality, the KGB did noth- ing but register anti-Soviet attitudes for fear not to be accused of Stalinism14. But shortly after, the Soviet political police bodies started persecuting ‘disobedient’ citizens. Besides, one can speak hardly about the political repression without talking about the resistance concept, even though as Michael David-Fox put it, the defin- ing of the concept of resistance (in the Russian and Soviet history) is a ‘three sided relationship among states, subjects, and historians’. In other words, ‘the most hege- mony-minded state can obtusely fail to register resistance as well as imagine, create or invent it’. Another danger is related to ‘historians looking for resistance can proj- ect their deepest assumptions onto the past, adopt the categories of the states they study and even remain ‘friends of the people’ all the while’15. Nevertheless, I will pay here less attention to the resistance aspects, except when it is implied as a part of the political repression phenomena. *** One of the first cases in the MSSR pointing up the continuity of political repres- sions after 1956 is the one of Alexei Sevastianov, who displayed a behaviour that would be seen as ordinary in any country that deserves being called at least a bit democratic. To be more precise, Sevastianov was put in a psychiatric hospital for ac- tions that the regime had labelled as anti-Soviet several years before Brezhnev came to power, that is, in the full swing of the Khrushchev-era Thaw. According to data available in the archive of the former Committee for State Security (KGB) subordi- nated officially to the Council of Ministers of the MSSR, starting from 1958, people doubting certain aspects of the CPSU could be subjected to psychiatric treatment 14 See more in Igor Caşu, „Iluzii şi decepţii: opinia publică în RSSM în contextul destalinizării şi revoluţiei maghiare din 1956”, in Pontes. Review of South East European Studies, Chişinău, Catedra UNESCO de studii sud-est europene, Universitatea de Stat din Moldova, no. 5, 2009. For an English version slightly revisited, see Igor Caşu, Mark Sandle, „Discontent and Uncertainty in the Border- lands: Soviet Moldavia and the Secret Speech 1956-57”, in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 64, issue 11, 2014 (under print). 15 Michael David-Fox, ‘Whither Resistance?’ in Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Marshall Poe, eds., The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History, Kritika Historical Studies 1, eds. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin, Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2003, p. 230. Se also Lynne Viola’s study on ‘Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s. Soliloquy of a Devil Advocate’ in the same voluime. 97 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 at the Costiujeni-based hospital near Chişinău. Alexei Sevastianov, a worker at a public heating company in Chişinău, on 26 September 1958 tore apart and then set on fire the portrait of a Soviet leader hung in the library of the enterprise16. He was running the risk to be severely punished for that deed. The authorities opened a criminal case against him straight away. Who was the leader whose portrait Alexei Sevastianov tore apart and then set on fire? Why did the regime deem that gesture so ‘dangerous’? Why is this case relevant for the topic of this article? Moreover, what does this case tell us about the scale of the Thaw and de-Stalinization launched by Khrushchev a few years before? One can learn from the official report drafted during the investigation that it was the portrait of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the first secretary of the CPSU, the one who had condemned the ‘cult of personality’, reproaching Stalin with the mass terror launched in 1937-1938, the deportation of entire peoples during World War II, as well as with the deportations after 1945, etc17. Instead, Sevastianov had expressed his ad- miration for Malenkov, who, in his opinion, should have been the leader of the USSR and whose portrait should have been hung on the wall instead of Khrushchev’s. This is the case of a Soviet citizen who expressed his preference for a leader he admired to the detriment of the one who won the competition against other con- tenders after Stalin’s death in March 1953. It was nothing out of the common, but the Soviet regime perceived this kind of situations as a gesture jeopardizing the existing order and the perpetrator had to be punished. A criminal case was opened against Sevastianov the day after he tore apart and set Khrushchev’s portrait on fire and his case fell under Article 54 paragraph 10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrai- nian Soviet Socialist Republic (back then the MSSR did not have its own Criminal Code). The provisions of this article were very vague, practically every person was liable to punishment for more or less banal actions that were of no explicit politi- cal nature. Paragraph 10 of Article 54 referred to „anti-revolutionary propaganda and agitation” and those found guilty of this offence were running the risk of being jailed for up to 7 years. Before that, in 1952, Sevastianov was sentenced to five years of correctional labour, but was set free in 1955 for exemplary behaviour18. Before and during the trial held at the Supreme Court of Justice, Alexei Sev- astianov wrote a range of letters to Moscow, to central newspapers, as well as to the Central Committee of the CPSU, explaining the reasons for his gesture. He did not 16 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 06696, ff. 1-2, 10. 17 This means he was selective in condemning the crimes of Stalin, mentioning some and excluding others, especially the ones he was personally involved in. Thus, Khrushchev instrumentalised the condemnation of „personality cult” in order strengthening his personal power. 18 Archive of the Service for Information and Security of the Republic of Moldova, former KGB of MSSR, in original Arhiva Serviciului de Informaţii şi Securitate a Republicii Moldova, fostul KGB. Acronym ASISRM-KGB, personal file 06696, ff. 102-103. 98 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 regret anything; he was merely outraged at the fact that nobody understood him. Sevastianov did not believe that he committed a blameable deed, let alone a ‘crimi- nal’ or anti-Soviet act19. The trial started, „evidence” had been collected from some witnesses, includ- ing an employee at the library where Khrushchev’s portrait had been burnt, Se- vastianov’s wife and relatives. Most testimonies were far from incriminating the defendant; on the contrary, they were favourable to him. For instance, one of his relatives from Russia spoke in very respectful terms about him. From his wife’s tes- timonies, we found that she had cared very much about him and that she had done very much for him in different periods of their life together. From his personal file, we learnt that he was severely wounded on his head on the war front in 1943. From the same file, we learnt that after staying a period at the psychiatric hospital in Cos- tiujeni, the „culprit” „relapsed”. An inscription was found on a cinema poster, re- writing the title of the movie „Nash Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev]” (Our Nikita Sergeyevich) into „ne-Nash Nikita Sergeyevich” (Nikita Sergeyevich is not ours) and beneath the initials „A. S.” were found20. The KGB assumed that it was Alexei Sevastianov, which was confirmed by a subsequent inscription on the same poster, which comprised the full name „Alexei Sevastianov”. This was the last detail in the KGB file of our „hero”. We do not know what happened to him after that. Should his relatives bring his story out of the dust of history, we will learn more. What preliminary conclusions can we draw from this case? First of all, Alexei Sevastianov behaved peacefully and not aggressively. He did not encroach on any- body’s physical integrity. In addition, one shall not forget that he was a World War II veteran who had bravely fought on the front. In other words, Sevastianov was a serviceman who had honestly served his duty, just like many others. From this point of view, having these merits to the state, the regime could have overlooked the incident when the portrait was ripped and burnt. Why didn’t the KGB bodies act this way, why did they not forgive him and deemed it of utmost importance to sub- ject him to a psychiatric „cure”? Proceeding from this example, one may ascertain that regardless of the merits to the fatherland that the Soviet citizens had, certain gestures could not be overlooked, because obviously there were „standard” and very clear instructions given „from above”21. All those who dared to express their discon- tent with any Soviet leader, in particular the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or with some realities of Soviet society were marked as people having „mental problems”, because questioning the lawfulness of the Single Party 19 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 06696, ff. 77-78. 20 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 06696, ff. 159-160. 21 The decision of CC of CPSU on the struggle against the anti-Soviet manifestations has been publsihed in Prezidium TsK KPSS 1954-64 [vol. 2]; Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006, pp. 493-510. 99 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 was a „crime” in itself. The Soviet propaganda permanently claimed that the USSR was the fatherland of socialism, of genuine democracy, the country that respected the rights of the working people, and that the party did nothing but contribute to improving constantly the welfare and spiritual wealth of the working people. The party considered itself to be the holder of the laws of the development of history and the holder of the key to the creation of a harmonious society from all points of view (social, as well as national, etc) in the long run. Those who called into question this „truth” were compulsorily „mentally alienated” people and were mandatorily subjected to appropriate „treatment”. During Stalin’s rule, people were subjected to harsher punishment for tearing apart or setting on fire portraits of „the great leader of the world proletariat”: they were either deported or jailed for years, or even sen- tenced to death immediately. During Khrushchev’s rule, such deeds were not so severely punished at a certain stage (in the late 1950s), but this did not change the essence of the regime. After Sevastianov „relapsed” in 1961, the authorities’ reaction was not so tough, which allows us to assume that there was nothing they could do about that. It seems that Sevastianov’s case was quashed and that the authorities re- alized that that his resentment against Khrushchev should have been interpreted as personal antipathy and nothing more. We will probably learn from possible future confessions of those who knew Alexei Sevastianov or from KGB officers who dealt with his case whether our assumptions are right or not. Another case of anti-Soviet attitude in the post-Stalinist period, about which we have many more details and which is more complex, is related to a person named Pavel Doronin, who was arrested in 1972 for actions that the regime denounced as anti-Soviet. What was he guilty of and how did the Soviet security agencies and courts treat his actions? This case points out another side not only of the relations between ordinary Soviet people and the state, party and the KGB, as well as the mindset of the then people. Who was Pavel Doronin, what his social origin was, how had his career developed and how come he expressed opinions disliked by the Soviet authorities to such an extent that a criminal case was filed against him and he was sentenced to imprisonment? Born to a family of workers in 1905 in the Bukhedu railway station of the Eastern Chinese Railway, Doronin was of Rus- sian parentage and had a „healthy” social origin. In 1934 he graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Railroad Transport Engineering and subsequently worked in the railway system in various regions of the Soviet Union22. In 1960 he came to Chişinău, where he was promised an apartment. He applied thrice for the promised apartment and ultimately he received one in Chişinău’s Poşta Veche district in 1963. Meanwhile he lived in a hostel together with his wife and daughter, both ill. Initially 22 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 018102, vol. II, ff. 9-11. 100 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 he was employed at the Railway enterprise, with a monthly wage of 135 roubles, and then at the industrial enterprise Luch, having a higher wage of 180 roubles and often receiving various bonuses. When he retired in 1967, he had a 44-year- long work experience and a monthly pension of 120 roubles, and, naturally, just like other Soviet citizens, he was expecting decent living conditions and a peaceful old age. Before retiring, he had never been detained by law-enforcement bodies or sentenced (except a short period during the war)23. In other words, he was an exemplary worker, worked wherever the party sent him to and was proud of what he did. But after he retired, his perception of the Soviet regime, and in particular of the CPSU, changed dramatically. From 1967 and until his arrest in 1972, he sent a number of leaflets and „anti-Soviet” messages to a range of enterprises, newspapers, party and state institutions from both the MSSR and other Soviet republics. He became a „people’s enemy” gradually rather than overnight. Initially, Pavel Doronin sent letters to the Chişinău city party committee, warning the authorities about the deplorable state of the district where he was living. He said that Poşta Veche was a mess, almost always muddy, there were no sidewalks, and busses were running very rarely. His apartment was small and wretched, although he had expected a bigger and better furnished one. He had accepted it as he realized that he would not be given a better one before long. He said that the apartment had been offered to him as nobody wanted one in that district. Yet, he protested against those realities only when he retired. So, we are witnessing an interesting metamorphosis. From a citi- zen loyal to the Soviet state and the party, he turned into a staunch dissenter. His at- titude got increasingly radical, since he had no promise that things would improve in his district. The Chişinău city party branch answered that there were no means to improve the situation in Poşta Veche. Doronin was outraged at the fact the capital’s centre was laid out and looked nice; people could have a walk calmly, whereas the state of things in the district where he lived was beyond any criticism. He alluded to the fact that whenever it came to bosses, there was no money shortage, but when- ever it came to ordinary workers, there were no funds24. Of special interest are the „evidence” and arguments brought by the Supreme Court of Justice, which delivered its verdict against Doronin on 30 March 1972. According to it, Doronin was sentenced by the Soviet bodies in 1943 and therefore he attempted to take revenge. For his part, Doronin said that he could not be an „enemy” of the Soviet power, because he fought to defend Moscow and Stalingrad. He admitted that he was condemned in 1943, but noted that this was an injus- tice, which did not impede him from behaving in an exemplary manner in prison and was subsequently rehabilitated, which means that the regime admitted to have 23 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 018102, vol. I, f. 74. 24 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 018102, vol. I, ff. 42-73. 101 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 made a mistake. In his message delivered in the court before judges walked out for deliberation, Doronin recognized that he had been wrong, promised not to repeat his deeds and begged not to be deprived of freedom. He insisted that he could not be an „enemy”; his attitude towards the Soviet power stemmed from „the dwelling problem” (he meant that he had brought no political criticism against the Soviet authorities). He said that had there been more people like him in Chişinău, many things would have been done to improve the design of streets adjacent to residential buildings! But at the end of the day, the court ruled that Doronin had defamed the Soviet power and the Communist Party because of his own resentments triggered by the fact that he was sentenced in 1943 rather than by the situation in the district where he lived. Despite the „defendant’s” plea for pardon and his arguments, the court sentenced him to 1.5 years in a high-security labour camp in line with Article 67, paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code of the MSSR. The article referred to anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation and was similar to Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was applied in the MSSR by 1961 and stipulated a punishment of 3 to 10 years in jail, as well as exile from 2 to 5 years25. One can notice that the Soviet regime did not stand criticism even when it was brought by people who had served the regime for decades and who kept on being loyal to them even after being unjustly punished. The court’s verdict does not specify explicitly, but the „crime” of which Doronin was accused consisted in the under- standing that he had called into question the authority of the Single Party and even asked for ousting it from power26. Thus, from the viewpoint of the Soviet authorities, he encroached on the holiest aspect of the regime – the CPSU’s monopoly over all levers of state government. Doronin’s behaviour fitted into the category of deeds that the regime viewed as anti-Soviet and anti-Communist, as he spoke against both the Soviet state authorities, their remit and even legitimacy, and the party bodies that did not take into account his messages of how to lay out the Poşta Veche district. In other cases, the Soviet Communist regime and the CPSU’s monopoly were contested at group level. One of such groups was headed by Nicolae Dragoş in the 1960s. It comprised another five people: Nikolai Tarnavski, Ivan Cherdyntsev, Vasile Postolachi, Sergiu Cemârtan and Nicolae Cucereanu. It is important to emphasize that all members of this group had an average age of about 30 years old, which means that they all were socialized in the Soviet system. At the same time, four of them, including N. Dragoş, were born in the historical Bessarabia and underwent several classes in Romanian schools until 1940 and during the war. Nonetheless, they were children of Khrushchev’s Thaw; marked by the revelations about the 25 Н. А. Беляев, А. И. Санталов, Комментарии к Уголовному кодексу Молдавской ССР, Chişinău: Cartea Moldovenească, 1964, p. 127. 26 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 018102, vol. I, ff. 76-79. 102 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 cult of Stalin’s personality that the Soviet leader made at the 20th CPSU Congress (Nicolae Dragoş said this explicitly in the court). It appears that this was the first explicitly anti-Communist organization of the post-Stalinist period that operated in the MSSR, and which also had a certain impact on other Soviet republics, such as Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The main activist of this group, Nicolae Dragoş, was born in the village Serpnevo, Tarutino District, Odessa Region, of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Southern Bessarabia, ceded to Ukraine in 1940). When he was arrested on 16 May 1964, he was the headmaster of an evening school in the settlement. Despite his Romanian name, he considered himself being of Russian nationality. According to his biographic card, he was born in 1932, had a higher education diploma, and graduated from the Chişinău State University, department of mathematics. He was single, had no party membership, was subject to military service, had no medals or orders, but had never been warned or reprimanded dur- ing his studies or at work and had no criminal record. Right after graduating, he taught mathematics in Bulboaca for a while (so he spoke Romanian well since there was a Romanian/Moldavian school)27, after which he returned in his native village, Serpnevo, near Tarutino (south Bessarabia). He was arrested jointly with the other members of the group in May 1964, with the trial being held at the Supreme Court of Justice in Chişinău from 28 August to 19 September. The following are the other members of the group in the order of accession: Nikolai Tarnavski, born in 1940 in the village Bereslavka, Bobrynets District, Kiro- vograd Region of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He was Ukrainian by nationality and graduated from a secondary pedagogical school. Until his arrest on 19 May 1964, he worked as carpenter at the department for railway repair and construction in Kiev. His mother was killed by Germans in 1944. He had no crimi- nal record. Before his arrest, he worked at a printing house in Tuzla (in Crimea, Ukraine) and then as teacher of labour training at the evening school in the village Serpnevo, Tarutino District (Odessa region, Ukraine), the school that was being headed by Dragoş. As a matter of fact, the two got to know each other long before Tarnavski settled down in Serpnevo. Moreover, Tarnavski’s settling down in Serp- nevo was directly related with the activities of the organization. The third member of the group was Ivan Cherdyntsev, born in 1938 in Petropav- lovsk city, North Kazakhstan Region (the former Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic). He was Russian by nationality, had an incomplete higher education diploma, had no party membership, was married, and until his arrest on 19 May 1964, he taught chemistry at the evening school in Serpnevo – the „headquarters” of the organiza- tion. Cherdyntsev was the only member of the group with a criminal record. In 27 This is confirmed by his reading on the radio Vocea Basarabiei of an interview he gave 2 weeks be- fore to a leading Moldovan newspaper Timpul. The interview was taken by Mihai Taşcă on the 10th of November 2010 and has been broadcasted on the 24th of November, 2010. 103 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 1957, he was sentenced to a 10-year detention on the base of the decree of the Su- preme Soviet of 4 June 1947 „On theft of state property”. He was released ahead of time for exemplary behaviour in 1959. The fourth member of the group was Vasile Postolache, born in 1934 in the vil- lage Pelenia, Rascani District. He was an ethnic Romanian, married, had no party membership, incomplete higher education diploma, and at the moment of his arrest on 14 May 1964, he was a fifth-year student at the Institute of Arts in Chişinău. Sergiu Cemârtan was the fifth member of the group, born in the village Cobâlna, Rezina District. He was an ethnic Romanian, single, member of the komsomol, had incomplete higher education, as he was a fourth-year student at the Institute of Arts in Chişinău and had no reprimands during his studies. Cemârtan was awarded a diploma for exemplary activity within the popular militia (druzhina). Nicolae Cucereanu, the sixth member of the organization, was born in 1941 in the village Mereni, Anenii Noi District. He was an ethnic Romanian, married, fa- ther of two children, member of komsomol, had incomplete higher education, and at the moment of his arrest, he was a student at the Institute of Arts in Chişinău28. The organization started its activities in 1962. Nicolae Dragoş was its main ideologue. While studying at the Chişinău State University (now State University of Moldova), department of mathematics, he read many philosophical books, in particular about the evolution of consciousness. According to his own confessions, he created his own worldview (mirovozzrenie) of the USSR back in 1959. He used to systematically keep himself up to date with political matters, especially with the living conditions of the labour class, and ascertained the existence of phenomena that were running counter to the Soviet officials’ discourse about the meaning of socialist society. This is where the idea that the political regime existing in the Soviet Union in that period needed significant improvement came from29. He believed that to meet that goal, it was necessary to set up a new political party meant to enliven the social life and to serve as an impetus for the development of conscious- ness which was in a lamentable condition back then. Nicolae Dragoş was aware of the dangers that existed when he started promoting his anti-Soviet activities and luring like-minded adepts willing to help spread leaflets. Nonetheless, he hoped to avoid his condemnation by the regime, since his political platform was not neces- sarily aimed against the CPSU. On the contrary, he believed that the Communist Party could survive but that it needed serious contenders30. Dragoş thought that Khrushchev’s revelations made in February 1956 badly tarnished the authority of the CPSU. Despite the past mistakes, the party might be viable, provided that it 28 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, ff. 30-33. 29 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, f. 38. 30 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, ff. 52-54. 104 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 recognized the existence of a new party, which was not against the interests of the CPSU and the people. These were the ideas that Dragoş and his associates were set to promote via leaflets. The first stage resided in compiling a list of specific addresses from all over the Soviet Union, from different cities, after which messages were to be sent to them by post. Tarnavski was the first person Dragoş associated with. He met him in 1962 and soon they realized that they shared the same worldview. Tarnavski accepted Dragoş’s advice to acquire printing experience in order to subsequently put into operation their underground printing house. Consequently, he resigned from his job and got hired at a printing house in Tuzla (a district centre in Odessa Region) initially as ap- prentice and then as skilled worker. Several months later, Tarnavski resigned from the printing house where he had very difficult labour conditions and from where he had managed to purloin 12 kg of letters for linotypes. Straight after he resigned from the printing house, Dragoş helped him get employed as teacher of labour training at the evening school in Serpnevo. Now that they laid the basis of a printing house, in June 1963, Tarnavski left for a trip in a number of Soviet cities in order to collect addresses to which to send the organization’s messages. So, he made a tour to Lvov, Minsk, Leningrad, Kiev, Rostov-on-Don and Kharkov and returned with a list of 5,000 addresses. Dragoş covered the spending for the trip, giving him 100 roubles of his 180-rouble wage, after which he sent him another 40 roubles by post31. Mean- while, Nicolae Dragoş wrote to his brother, Vladimir, who resided in Tuzla, and in- vited him to join the organization he was heading. The latter was not keen to do so as he did not believe in its victory, but at the end of the day, he accepted. In June 1963, he left for Moscow in an attempt to get admitted to the Conservatoire and to fulfil the task of collecting addresses among others. Thus, Vladimir Dragoş visited Moscow, Kazan and Gorki and managed to compile a list of 200 addresses32. Vladimir Dragoş was the liaison person between the three Moldavian students at the Institute of Arts in Chişinău and his brother Nicolae Dragoş. Another member of the organization was Boris Graciov, a student at the Institute of Arts, whom Nicolae Dragoş met in Pushkin Park in Chişinău (now Ştefan cel Mare public garden) in June 1963. Graciov fulfilled several tasks at Dragoş ’s order, but gave up subsequently. Vasile Postolache was the first to meet Nicolae Dragoş and subsequently per- suaded Sergiu Cemârtan and Nicolae Cucereanu to join the organization. The two helped extend the list of addresses and send by post leaflets published at the under- ground printing house in Serpnevo. What prompted the three students from Chişinău to join the organization of Nicolae Dragoş? First of all, let us see how Postolachi was „converted” as he was 31 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, ff. 57-62. 32 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, ff. 89 verso-92 verso. 105 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 the first to join the self-named group „Democratic Union of Socialists”. For a while, Postolachi studied the English language at the Pedagogical Institute „Ion Creanga” in Chişinău, but he gave up his studies because of material problems. Later on, he graduated from the College of Cultural Illumination and returned to his na- tive village, where he worked at a culture house for some time. There he witnessed numerous cases when the kolkhoz head and the head of the village council used extremely rude language while talking to locals, as well as cases when officials were systematically dead drunk. Discussing with Vladimir Dragoş, Postolachi told him about his deception with the kolkhozes, adding that people did not want to go to work, as they were discontented with the mechanism of calculating the norm for a working day, and at night peasants were forced to steal from the kolkhoz’s property in order to ensure their existence. Knowing Postolachi’s attitude towards those realities, Vladimir Dragoş offered to introduce him to somebody who shared his ideas. It was his brother Nicolae Dragoş. The first meeting between the two took place in late September – early October 1963. Nicolae Dragoş informed Vasile Postolachi about the organization and its goals. Among others, he criticized the CPSU’s mistakes and bureaucracy and spoke about the fact that the organization’s activity was aimed not against the Soviet power, but at promoting people’s interests. Postolachi agreed to become a member of the Democrat- ic Union of Socialists and agreed to fulfil various assignments set by Nicolae Dragoş. Several weeks later, Vladimir Dragoş was asked to join the army and on this occasion, Postolachi was invited to Serpnevo to attend a party traditionally organized in such situations. The day after, Vladimir left for the army and Nicolae Dragoş invited Posto- lachi to visit the evening school he was heading. When he entered Dragoş’s house, he was astonished at the poverty in which he lived. All he had in his house was a table and a bed. Asked why he was living in such meagre conditions, Dragoş said that all his money was used for people’s welfare. The leader of the anti-Soviet group was allocat- ing half of his wage for the organization’s activities. Back in Chişinău, Postolachi told Cucereanu about the clandestine democratic organization and the latter expressed his interest in joining it33. Subsequently, Cucereanu’s wife joined the anti-Soviet group as well, helping collect addresses and sending by post messages published at the under- ground printing house in Serpnevo34. As many as 200 envelopes with leaflets head- lined ‘Justice to the people’ (Pravda narodu) was sent to Chişinău and another several hundreds to other cities in the Soviet Union. Sergiu Cemârtan, another student at the Institute of Arts in Chişinău, participated in the organization’s operations as well, buy- ing envelopes and sending the organization’s messages by post35. 33 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, ff. 72-79 verso. 34 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, ff. 85 verso-89. 35 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, ff. 79 verso-85. 106 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 Those involved in the organization’s activities confessed these details at hearings at the Supreme Court of Justice in August-September 1964. People who had been offered to join the organization, but who had refused for different reasons, were sub- poenaed as witnesses. The witnesses were residents of the village Serpnevo, as well as Chişinău. When the court pronounced the sentence, Tarnavski, Cherdyntsev, Postolachi, Cemârtan and Cucereanu pleaded ‘guilty’ to participating in the actions that prosecutors incriminated to them. Nicolae Dragoş was the only one who had a separate opinion, admitting only partly his ‘guilt’. Consequently, Nicolae Dragoş and Nicolae Tarnavski were sentenced to 7 years in a strict regime labour camp in line with Article 67, paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code of the MSSR. Ivan Cherdyntsev and Vasile Postolachi were sentenced to 6 years in a strict regime labour camp, Sergiu Cemârtan and Nicolae Cucereanu to 5 years in a strict regime labour camp36. After his release, Nicolae Dragoş managed to emigrate to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he had taught mathematics at a high school for 18 years. He became one of the founders of the Democratic Union of Political Emigrants from the former USSR37. It should be noticed that the defendants’ confessions that they had wanted to draw attention to some mistakes made by the CPSU and had not been acting against the Soviet power were not taken into consideration. One can easily assume that from the arrest of the group in mid-May 1964 and until late August 1964, the KGB „worked” hard with those charged with actions that the Soviet Communist regime viewed as extremely dangerous. The Soviet security bodies probably „persuaded” them that it would be possible to get a shorter sentence provided that they pleaded guilty in court. In this context, it is also worth reminding that the confession of guilt by defendants was of special importance in the repressive Soviet regime38. At the same time, there were numerous cases when the legitimacy of the Soviet Communist regime was called into questions either implicitly or explicitly, and this time from the perspective of the identity policy, of the discrimination against ethnic Romanians, and of what the official propaganda used to call ‘national policy’. To reiterate the typology drawn at the beginning of this article, these cases fit into the category of anti-Soviet attitudes, of attempts to assert the ethnic-national rights that were aimed one way or another against integration into the Soviet state or against the manner in which Moscow drew the state border in 1940 and then in 1944. 36 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 010136, vol. 7, ff. 127-143. 37 Nicolae Dragoş: „Susţinând comuniştii, nu veţi obţine nimic” [By sustaining communists, you will get nothing], interview by Mihai Taşcă, in Timpul, November 10, 2010. 38 About denunciations, see Robert Conquest, Great Terror: A Reassesment, Oxford University Press, 1991; Idem, ed., Soviet Police System, New York, Praeger, 1968. See also Nicolas Werth, „L’aveu dans les grands procès staliniens”, în Nicolas Werth, La terreur et le désarroi. Staline et son système, Paris: Perrin, 2007, pp. 330-350. 107 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 One of these cases in the post-Stalin period was related to Zaharia Doncev. He was arrested by the Chişinău KGB on December 11, 1956 and accused of anti-Soviet agitation pursuant to Article 54 paragraph 10. Doncev was born in 1928 in Chişinău to a family of Moldavians (which means he was an ethnic Romanian), married, at the moment of his arrest he worked at the enterprise ‘Myasokombinat’ in the capital of the MSSR39. He finished 8 grades, of which 7 in a Romanian school, before 1940 and then in 1941-194440. Doncev was accused of writing and spreading anti-Soviet leaflets in May 1955, in which he asked explicitly for the liquidation of the Soviet power in Moldavia41. Later on, after questioning at the KGB, on December 20, 1957, one more accusation was brought against Doncev, the one of nationalism42. One of the leaflets was written in the Latin-script ‘Moldavian’ language and another three were written in Russian. The following was the Romanian text: (...) as you can see, the Communists are getting themselves into a catastrophe. In a year, we all will be liberated. The time is ripe for each of us to take pitchforks and scythes in order to show that we love our beloved Romania. The time has come for us to live better and more easily. Each of us must show his love for our former fatherland. This is the only way for us to win our freedom (...)43. The content of the leaflet in the Russian language was different. It was more ex- plicit and more incisive that the one in Romanian: Dear friends, very soon the whole Moldovan people will stand up for the interests that it had before the war. Communism is failing everywhere. Now they are going to learn how poorly the Moldovan people live. We have all become beggars; we have no bread, clothes or land. The time is ripe for us to rise and tell the Communists: it is enough for you to get rich as flunkeys. The time is ripe for us to take revenge for this life of slaves. Each of us must do something to set us free from the Communists (...)44. As a consequence, on December 30 1956, the KGB requested that a psychiatric as- sessment should be carried out to decide on the health condition of Zaharia Doncev, proceeding from the presumption that every citizen questioning Communism and its alleged progressive nature had mental problems. But the result was negative, the com- mission of experts decided that Doncev was in a perfect health condition. Its report said that the defendant was intelligent, sociable, and very attentive to everything that was happening around him, liked reading books and table games. As for his state of mind when he wrote and sent the leaflets, the experts established that he had been aware of his deeds, worked at night highly vigilantly in order not to be caught45. KGB 39 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 020293, ff. 4-5. 40 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 020293, f. 28. 41 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 020293, ff. 57-58. 42 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 020293, f. 90. 43 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 020293, f. 182. 44 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 020293, f. 175. 45 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 020293, ff. 194-200. 108 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 officers learnt from a document from the State Archive of the MSSR that Zaharia Doncev’s mother, Maria Doncev, was on the list of people willing to evacuate to Romania in 1944, which was compiled by the Romanian administration short be- fore the Red Army entered Bessarabia in early March 194446. For some reasons, she failed to evacuate. In addition, during a KGB questioning, Zaharia Doncev admit- ted that he had two brothers residing in Constanţa47. He also admitted that he used to listen to foreign radio stations, but said he had nothing against the Soviet author- ities. On the contrary, he said he loved his fatherland, that he lived a good life, had a monthly wage of 520 roubles, whereas his wife’s monthly wage was 500 roubles. He had a private house in Chişinău, which he had inherited from his grandfather. The Doncev spouses had a three-year-old child48. What do these details of Zaharia Doncev’s file tell us? First of all, they point to the fact that Doncev had a Romanian education, finishing 7 school grades during the inter-war period and World War II. So by 1944, at the age of 16, when the Red Army re-occupied the province between the Prut and Dniester Rivers, his world- view had already been formed to a large extent. He did not resist the new authori- ties. On the contrary, he tried to integrate into the Soviet society, resigning him to the change of the status of the province in 1944, the more so as meanwhile Moscow managed to impose the Communist regime in Romania as well. Perhaps, he did not think that there would be a big difference between living on the left or right bank of the Prut. Thus, he was enrolled in the army between 1948 and 1951, after which he underwent FZO courses, displaying loyal behaviour49. He had a good material condition, a high wage compared with other social categories, his own dwelling, a wife and a child. Consequently, the regime was much more concerned about his actions because they had not been prompted by daily problems, as it was the case with other people. It should be noticed that Doncev wrote the four leaflets in May 1955, that is, in the full swing of Khrushchev’s Thaw, when the Soviet authorities started recognizing, albeit in a low voice, Stalin’s crimes and when the tacit rehabili- tation of Stalinist victims began. In other words, Doncev hoped that he would not be punished for his stance as severely as until 1953 was usually the case. As he used to frequently read the Soviet press and to listen to foreign radio stations, he was aware of the wish of the Soviet authorities and of Nikita Khrushchev personally to restore a certain ‘Socialist’ legitimacy and to do away with the legacy of his prede- 46 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 06696, f. 206. About the first months of the second Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, see Igor Caşu, „Începuturile resovietizării Basarabiei şi starea de spirit a populaţiei (martie-septembrie 1944)”, in Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universităţii „Al.I. Cuza” din Iaşi (serie nouă), tom LIV-LV, 2008-2009, p. 287-306. 47 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 06696, f. 236. 48 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 06696, ff. 237 verso, 238 . 49 FZO (fabrichno-zavodskoe obuchenie) – schools of professional-technical education introduced in 1940. 109 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 cessor. Moreover, he saw the new situation in the USSR as an opportunity to start a rebellion against the Soviet Communist regime that enslaved the locals and forced them to live in poverty. Doncev was a well-off person in line with the Soviet stan- dards, but he drew his conclusions proceeding from the general situation of people in the MSSR. Although he talked with admiration about ‘his former fatherland’, he did not explicitly call for unification with Romania. So, in a way he resigned himself to the existing situation, but he wanted the Moldovans/Romanians to regain their lost dignity and be masters in their home country. Probably, information about Ro- mania received from his two brothers in Constanţa prompted him not to mention explicitly the idea of unification with Romania. He understood that the Communist regime in Romania was not better than the one in the USSR and in particular, in the MSSR. It is worth mentioning that the Chişinău-based political bodies were keen to learn his family’s past. The fact that he had two brothers in Romania and that his mother applied for evacuation to Romania in 1944 were weighty arguments for the authorities to accuse him not only of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, but also of nationalism. So, punishing such citizens as Doncev was very important for the Soviet authorities, especially when their messages were distributed to the public via leaflets. Political criticism brought against the regime was not perceived as serious by the regime as the ethnic and national dimension of this message, in other words, the fact that it doubted the ‘liberating’ nature of the USSR and stated that Moscow had conquered the Moldavians and turned them into slaves in their own country. The Soviet authorities did not tolerate the idea of the Bessarabians’ historical, linguistic and cultural affiliation with the Romanian nation. In another context, Zaharia Doncev’s arrest on December 11, 1956, eight days before the CC of the CPSU adopted a decision to combat anti-Soviet activities, may indicate that the KGB bodies had come out with the idea long before and its adoption by the CC of the CPSU on 19 December 1956 merely legitimized a practice that had already been applied by the Soviet political police. Consequently, Doncev was sentenced to 7 years in jail for nationalism in line with the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, Article 54, paragraph 10, and paragraph 250. There are also more explicit cases that took much dignity, courage and perse- verance for those involved in order to contest the regime on the basis of ethnic and national rights despite warnings and previous convictions. The story of Mihai Moroşanu is a highly eloquent example. He was born on 22 November 1939 in the village Drepcăuţi, currently Briceni District. In 1949, he and his family (mother, father, two sisters, a brother and grandmother) were deported to Siberia, Kurgan Region in RSFSR. In 1953, when he was only 14, he was coerced into getting a job as 50 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 06696, f. 243 verso. 110 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 his family was facing material problems and his parents were both ill. On 12 March 1955, he lost his right arm in the wake of a labour accident, thus getting a third- degree disability at 17 years old, which entitled him to a disability monthly pension of 17 rubles and 80 kopeks. He attended 7 school classes in Siberia. In 1958, his family returned to Drepcăuţi, which was located in Lipcani District back then (now in Briceni District). He graduated from a local secondary school in 1961, and in the same year became a student at the department of engineering and construction of the Polytechnic Institute in Chişinău51. He finished three university years and at the beginning of the fourth year he was expelled for having initiated a ceremony of laying flower wreaths at a monument to Moldavian medieval ruler Ştefan cel Mare. The event took place as Chişinău was celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Mol- davian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (created on October 12, 1924) It was rumoured that the monument to Ştefan cel Mare was being planned to be removed from the entrance to Pushkin park, as it was called back then, to be set in front of the movie theatre ‘40th anniversary of komsomol’ (presently cinema ‘Gaudeamus’). He collected signatures of students opposing the plan, as well as money to buy a flower wreath with the inscription ‘from Moldova’s youth’ which he laid at the statue of the great ruler. As punishment, he was suspended from the institute and obliged to work at a Chişinău-based reinforced-concrete plant for two years. Only after that could he resume his studies and finish the fourth year. But on July 28, 1966 he was arrested and on November 2, 1966, sentenced to three years in line with Article 71 and Article 218 part 1 of the Criminal Code of the MSSR. The reason for his convic- tion was his insistent demand that a shop assistant of the shop No. 50 from central Chişinău (called ‘Sintetica’, at the crossroads of the current Ştefan cel Mare Avenue and Petru Movilă Street, today the shop ‘Ciocoville’) should speak the „Moldavian” language. The shop assistant did not know or did not want to speak Romanian. Moreover, she was indignant at Moroşanu’s request. About 100 people witnessed the incident: Romanian ethnics welcomed Moroşanu’s attitude, whereas Russian- language speakers, bewildered at his boldness, bitterly criticized him. He was ar- rested for this bold peaceful civil activism and accused of nationalism. In fact, his request was in line with the Soviet legislation, since according to the constitution, the MSSR was the fatherland of the Moldavians and the territory where the Mol- davians had the right to the observance of their national rights, including to their language. But as a matter of fact, Moldavia was subjected to speedy Russification. Russians and Russian-language speakers settled down in Moldavia were reluctant to learn the language and overtly despised the local natives. Moreover, they requested that the locals speak only Russian; otherwise they labelled them as nationalists, 51 Arhiva Universităţii Politehnice din Chişinău [The Archive of the Politechnic University of Chi- şinău], personal file of Mihai Moroşanu, f. 3. 111 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 which was a rather grave accusation in that epoch, entailing serious consequences. He remembered later that while in jail in the Rostov Region, the food was despicable, most often he had soup of mouldy cabbage (just like in a well-known short story by Victor Crăsescu) and wheat porridge52, which was worse than the meals offered to the Bolsheviks jailed by the tsarist authorities. He was amnestied in 1967 at the 50th an- niversary of the October Revolution of 1917, but was released in September 1968, 10 months before the end of his three-year sentence. After his release, he was employed by a construction company in Chişinău, proving that he was a highly skilled specialist and frequently receiving bonuses for fulfilling the plan and meeting the deadline for completing the construction of residential buildings53. Backed by the management of the construction trust No. 13 from Chişinău, he submitted a request to be rehabili- tated at the department of engineering and construction of the Polytechnic Institute on September 30, 1968. Then Rector Sergiu Rădăuţanu and the admission commis- sion turned down his request by a decision of August 22, 1969, citing as reason the fact that more than three years passed since he had suspended his studies. Actually, it was a political problem, because both the institute’s rector and Minister of Education Evgheni Postovoi could not afford risking their careers by backing a former political inmate sentenced for nationalism. Moroşanu left for Moscow, asking for an audience with the USSR minister of higher education, who recommended the administration of the Chişinău-based Polytechnic Institute to revise its readmission decision. Now having Moscow’s note, Minister Postovoi directed that Moroşanu should be readmit- ted for distance-learning courses. Thus, at the end of the day, he managed to secure a higher education diploma due to his insistent efforts54. Mihai Moroşanu was well-known among Chişinău residents at that time, who admired his courage in requesting the observance of the national rights of the Ro- manian ethnics. He did not hesitate to discuss with the employees of the construc- tion trust where he worked after his release in 1968 about the need for Russians and Russian-language speakers residing in Moldavia to learn the Romanian language, which was called ‘Moldavian’ back then. Moreover, while being a student in 1963 and then after 1968, Moroşanu dared to repeatedly talk about the fact that the Is- mail Region had been part of the historical Bessarabia, but the Russians snatched it away and unjustly conceded it to Ukraine. For these ideas, Moroşanu was repeat- edly called to the KGB, harassed and threatened with incarceration. He avoided being repeatedly convicted because he fought against the regime with the weapons 52 Interview with Mihai Moroşanu, March 2011. 53 Arhiva Universităţii Politehnice, personal file of Mihai Moroşanu, f. 31. 54 Interview with Mihai Moroşanu, March 2011. Documents from personal archive of Mihai Mo- roşanu. The information is confirmed by documents I have found in the archives of the former Central Committee of Communist Party of Moldavia, today Arhiva Organizaţiilor Social-Poli- tice din Republica Moldova – acronym AOSPRM, F. 51, inv. 32, d. 64, f. 15. 112 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 which the latter tacitly approved of. In particular, he read and knew by heart every- thing that Marx, Engels and Lenin had said about Bessarabia, the tsarist regime in Bessarabia, the Soviet nationalities policy and the USSR laws that were being defied in MSSR. As for southern Bessarabia, he made reference to a book by Artyom Laza- rev of 1974, which overtly approached this issue. But the KGB and a commission of the Institute of History of the Moldavian Academy of Science insisted that these ideas were noxious and that they incited interethnic hatred55. Accordingly, it turned out that Lazarev had the right to say what he believed, due to his special relationship with Bre- zhnev, whereas those who were trying to promote these ideas among a wider public had to be convicted for ‘nationalism’. This is a special case that is worth further study. It is also worth mentioning Moroşanu’s contribution in the dismissal of Victor Smirnov, the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Moldavia (CC of PCM) in 1984-1988. Smirnov was one of the most malign individuals making law in the MSSR, initiating investigations, dismissing numerous specialists from the economic sector and the state and party administration who refused to recklessly promote the policy of the continuous Russification of the republic. Smirnov took the floor at a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the ULCTM (The Leninist Com- munist Union of Youth from Moldavia) on May 30, 1987, saying among other things: Now we have tightened the belt of those who used to live in abundance at the expense of others, who stole, cheated, counterfeited. The opposition forces are getting shaped. The former kulaks, those who served the fascists, those who were members of the peasants’ party, and their progenies started lifting up their heads. Now these lumpen individuals have found shelter in various places, and some of them have squeezed into administrative links, law-enforcement bodies, university departments, etc. Not only are they raising their voices, but they are also lifting their hands against people56. Mihai Moroşanu, jointly with other former victims of the Communist regime ini- tiated a lawsuit against Smirnov for damaging the dignity of the former political de- tainees, which he filed with Chişinău’s Lenin (today Centru) district court. The court ruled in favour of Moroşanu, but only after three years, on April 13, 1990. The letter of the law was observed as the Soviet society was undergoing a slow but evident de- mocratization process. The court obliged the Moldavian news agency, ATEM, to issue a press release to apologize to all those concerned. All newspapers that published the shorthand report of May 30, 1987 had to take over the press release in question. But it was only in 1994 that the successor of ATEM, Moldova-pres, apologized to all the victims of the Communist regime in Moldavia. Victor Smirnov was also obliged to pay 216 roubles to Mihai Moroşanu in spending for the lawyer57. 55 Interview with Mihai Moroşanu, March 2011. Documents from personal archive of Mihai Moroşanu. 56 Moldova Suverană, January 4, 1994. 57 The copy of the bank transfer made by Viktor Smirnov from Moscow to Mihai Moroşanu is kept by Moroşanu in his personal archive. I have seen it during several interviews with him in March 2011. 113 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 It is also worth mentioning Morosanu’s personal contribution during the na- tional liberation movement in 1988-1991. According to his own confession, he pro- posed that the military parade of November 7, 1989 should be blocked. It happened several days before at a meeting of the Popular Front of Moldova held at the Green Theatre and moderated by Gheorghe Ghimpu58. Moroşanu’s case proves his perseverance for the protection of the Romanian na- tional rights and symbols in the MSSR. Quite often those who had been warned or convicted previously were attempting to be more vigilant to avoid imprisonment. But it was not the case of Mihai Moroşanu, whom certain KGB officers started re- specting and taking seriously due to his boldness. Another more or less comparable case is the one of Gheorghe Muruziuc, who raised the tricolour on a sugar factory in Alexăndreni, Lazovsk District (now Sân- gerei District)59. Who was Gheorghe Muruziuc? He was born in 1930 in Alexăndreni, finished four grades in a Romanian school and had a national Romanian conscious- ness. In 1949, he was forcibly mobilised to the coal mines in Novoshakhtinsk. He became a high-skilled electrician and returned to his native village several years later, where he participated in the construction of the sugar factory. Before that he married a Russian, Ana, in Siberia, with whom he had two children (she died in 1983). He came into conflict with the factory’s administration, because its director, a Ukrainian Korobko, used to bring staff from Ukraine and Russia and was disre- garding the locals. In the night of 27 to 28 June 1966, when the Soviets were getting ready for the 26th anniversary of ‘Bessarabia’s liberation from the Romanian capi- talist and bourgeois yoke’, he raised the Romanian tricolour over the sugar factory in Alexăndreni at about 05:00 am on 28 June. When the day broke, relevant bodies panicked and came on the spot – the district militia, representatives of the local and district party committee, the administration of the factory, as well as representatives of the KGB from Chişinău. Muruziuc held out five hours on the roof of the factory, more precisely on the 45-metre-high factory chimney. All sorts of officials were begging him to descend, and those daring to go up on the roof were discouraged as Muruziuc had got ‘armed’ with a batch of bricks ahead of time, and throwing one from time to time, making sure though that no-one got hurt. After five hours, dur- ing which factory workers gathered on the spot and the whole village was roaring about Muruziuc’s feat, he decided to climb down60. He was left alone until 3 July, after which he was arrested and declared mentally ill and hospitalized in Costiujeni psychiatric hospital near Chişinău for 24 days. There a doctor advised him not to swallow the prescribed pills in order to avoid problems. He remained sane due to 58 Interview with Mihai Moroşanu, March, 2011. 59 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017122, f. 8. 60 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017122, ff. 9-10. 114 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 this. After that the KGB investigated him several months in a row and in November 1966 he was sentenced to two-year incarceration in a labour camp in Ivdel, at about 700 kilometres away from the Arctic Circle. He did not complete his sentence, being released in March 1968 (after one year, nine months and 10 days)61. He displayed a dignified behaviour during the trial, stating openly what he thought, in particular that Moldavia was being robbed and that Moldavians (that is ethnic Romanians) were being discriminated. Moreover, Muruziuc advocated the MSSR’s breakaway from the USSR and the settlement of the national problem either by creating an independent state or by uniting with Romania62. At a certain moment, it was suggested he leave for Romania together with his family, probably because the Soviet authorities realized that he was ‘incorrigible’ from the viewpoint of ideology and of his ethnic and national identification. But Muruziuc turned down the offer, saying that he had never had such plans saying that ‘I was born here and I want to die here’. Upon his return from the labour camp, the KGB offered to provide him with an apartment in any city of the MSSR, but he categorically refused and insisted to live in Alexăndreni. Only years later, when his children grew up, he moved to Bălţi, the biggest city in northern part of the republic. His family suffered a lot, as the authori- ties harassed them while he was missing in 1966-1968. Some workers of the sugar factory were instigated by their chiefs to call ‘fascists’ Muruziuc’s family members. When Muruziuc returned from Siberia, he insisted on being employed back at the sugar factory. The KGB and party bodies warned him against being so ‘stubborn’, but for his part, Gheorghe Muruziuc warned the authorities to leave him and his fam- ily alone, saying that otherwise he would get a weapon and would shoot them all. It seems that the authorities took his warning seriously and left him alone63. Sometimes ‘dangerous’ ideas were spread by people of the young generation who had studied only in Soviet schools. This made their behaviour and attitudes even more alarming for the regime, which, as a matter of fact, admitted its impotence to ‘eradicate’ and ‘uproot’ traces of the old ‘half-witted’ and ‘nationalist’ mindset. The case of Lilia Neagu and Asia Andruh is one of the most relevant in this re- spect. Born on 14 May 1951 in the town of Leova in the south of the MSSR, Lilia Neagu graduated from the local secondary school No. 2. Immediately after, in 1969, she entered the basic school of medicine in Chişinău. In the first study year, KGB warned her against repeating anti-Soviet remarks, which she used to make from time to time while talking to her colleagues and friends. On October 6, 1970, she was arrested by the KGB and on March 10, 1971, the Criminal Council’s Collegium 61 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017122, ff. 240-241. 62 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017122, f. 35 etc. 63 „Баллада о человеке с триколором,” in „Sfatul Ţării”, no. 43, 1992, p. 4; nr. 44, July 3, 1992; Iulius Popa, „Tricolorul de la 1966 al lui Gheorghe Muruziuc”, in Literatura şi arta, no. 26, June 29, 1995, p. 7. 115 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 of the Supreme Court of Justice of the MSSR considered her case. The court ruled to sentence Lilia Neagu in line with Article 71 and Article 203 of the Criminal Code of the MSSR. What was this 19-year-old student ‘guilty’ of and what danger did she pose to the Soviet Communist regime to such an extent as to be regarded as politically danger- ous and even a ‘criminal’? There were many people making such remarks, but the peculiarity of Lilia Neagu’s case resides in the fact that she did not ‘calm down’ after 1969 when the KGB warned her about the consequences of her actions if she con- tinued (or, using the terminology of the regime, she was ‘prophilaxed’)64. Moreover, sharing her ideas with her colleagues, friends and acquaintances was not enough for her. One night, together with Asea Andruh, her friend and daughter of the owner of the apartment where she lived, they wrote slogans on various buildings in Chişinău: the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, university hostels, the buildings of the Chişinău State University, the printing houses ‘Ştiinţa’ and ‘Cartea Moldove- neasca’, school no. 1 (named at that time after ‘Grigori Kotovski’, today High School named after ‘Gheorghe Asachi’). All in all, they wrote about 40 slogans, most of which were of a nationalistic nature, against [Eastern] Moldavia’s occupation by Russia, but there were anti-Semitic slogans as well65. An anti-Semitic inscription was dashed off on the building of the Ministry of Trade. Later on (in 2011), Asea Andruh and Lilia Neagu said that the then society had the perception that Jews were disproportionately represented in that ministry. Under other circumstances, they had normal and even friendly relations with people of Jewish parentage66. Accord- ing to the KGB file, some inscriptions were of a strong nationalistic nature, advocat- ing the introduction of the Latin script and the observance of the Moldavians’ rights in their own country, criticizing the chauvinistic behaviour of some representatives of the Russians and Russian-speaking minorities in Moldova. One such inscription was addressed to the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Moldavia person- ally: ‘Bodiul, get out of Moldova’. Other inscriptions could have been interpreted by no matter what regime as an attempt to stir up interethnic hatred and could have been subjected to a punishment commensurate with the severity of the deeds. Yet, the Soviet authorities reported the appeals as anti-Soviet, and respectively anti- state, as they allegedly jeopardized the existence of the Soviet state, as stipulated in the articles of the Criminal Code of the MSSR based on which Lilia Neagu was con- demned (but also Asea Andruh, as we are going to prove later, although the KGB file did not mention her). It seems that it was the pro-Romanian nature of the slogans and the fact that the new generation of Moldavians were identifying themselves as 64 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 1. ff. 126-131. 65 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 1. ff. 3-10. 66 Interview with Asea Andruh and Lilia Neagu, March 11, 2011. 116 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 Romanians that disturbed the regime rather than the anti-Russian and anti-Semitic nature of those inscriptions. The two girls acted spontaneously, but the paint had been prepared ahead of time, as Lilia Neagu brought it from Leova after one of the frequent visits she used to pay to her parents. The girls slept only several hours that night after which they left for school. Asea Andruh was studying at school No. 1 and on her way to school she followed almost the same itinerary, with the only difference that this time she took the trolleybus. After many years, she confessed that when she saw the inscriptions from the trolley- bus she told a classmate that she made them, but she was not taken seriously. Other classmates had the same reaction when she told them. Some did believe her but did not keep it secret. Several days after the event, more precisely on October 5, 1970, Lilia Neagu and Asea Andruh were arrested, but as they confessed this was not the fault of their classmates67. The KGB had samples of the type of writing of Lilia Neagu from 1969, when she was vainly subjected to „prophylaxis”. So, it carried out a graphological analysis of the inscriptions and established quite easily whom they belonged to. According to the archive file, on that night (30 September/1 October 19070), Lilia Neagu warned Asea Andruh that the KGB had a sample of her writing and that she would be easily identified, but Asea Andruh insisted that they both write the inscriptions, cherishing hope that the Soviet police was not so competent as to track her down68. Their imprudence, which was only natural for two girls, made it possible for the KGB to identify them in less than a week. Others were searched for for years. But as the KGB had a record of Lilia Neagu and was keeping a close eye on her, it was not difficult to reach the ‘perpetrator’. As the two confessed subsequently, they used to listen to the radio stations Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America rather often and subscribed to publica- tions from Romania. Asea Andruh had a close friend from Romania, Gabriela, who used to visit her from time to time. The two ‘culprits’ had recently confessed that they were outraged when they were being told at school that the inter-war Roma- nian regime subdued the Bessarabians and forced them to speak Romanian. Their indignation was caused by the following: ‘how can we be forced to speak Roma- nian since our language is Romanian?’ This incoherence of the regime’s propaganda opened their eyes and prompted them to call into question the ‘national’ policy of the Soviet Communist regime69. From October 5, 1970 to March 10, 1971 Lilia Neagu was in the KGB custody70. Asea Andruh was being brought from home for questioning as she was a minor. On March 10, 1971, the Supreme Court of Justice held a hearing attended by acquain- 67 Interview with Asea Andruh and Lilia Neagu, March 11, 2011. 68 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 1. ff. 144-150. 69 Interview with Asea Andruh and Lilia Neagu, March 11, 2011.. 70 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 2. ff. 1-10, 17-18. 117 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 tances and relatives of those involved in the trial, most of them as witnesses. Lilia Neagu said that investigative officer Mamaliga had told her a lot about Moldova’s history and she realized how wrong she had been when expressing her ideas on public buildings71. But it appears that this was not Lilia Neagu’s conviction; she was advised by her relatives to say that she had not been informed correctly, in order to secure a softer sentence. One way or another, it is worth mentioning that whenever Lilia Neagu and Asea Andruh are asked to explain how come they started expressing such ‘dangerous’ ideas, they reconfirm their credo: why churches in Chişinău were being closed down, why the south of Bessarabia had been conceded to Ukraine, the Latin script was the true clothing of the ’Moldovan’ language. The young ladies were also outraged at Soviet power because the Soviet Union did not create adequate entertainment conditions for youths like in the West. In court, the two confessed some more details that help us understand the reason for their gesture. On the one hand, they were sure that there existed underground anti-Soviet organizations and they did nothing but join the bravest ones who were not afraid of saying what they really thought. Andrei Vartic, who at that time was a student at the department of mathematics and physics of the Chişinău State University, as well as other people of the circle of friends and acquaintances of the two girls, were among those who made them believe that there was a strong underground national movement72. On the other hand, when they were asked in court what goal they were pursuing when they made the inscriptions on the above-mentioned buildings in the night of September 30 to October 1, 1970, both girls said that they were hoping to make students believe that underground national organization did really exist and thus to urge them to take actions for the observance of the Moldavians’ national rights and interests73. Judging by the hearings at the Supreme Court of Justice and by the KGB ques- tioning, we can ascertain that the inscription on school No. 1 ‘Mondial, we are with you’ had been made by Asea Andruh. She referred to a tour by the famous Ro- manian band ‘Mondial’ that had performed a concert in Chişinău, which aroused a feeling of communion and belonging of the locals to a much wider historical, cultural and linguistic area than the one specified by the Soviet Communist propa- ganda. Ultimately, Lilia Neagu was sentenced to two years in a labour camp, pursu- ant to articles 71, 203 and 39 of the Criminal Code of the MSSR74. It should be noted that the prosecutor asked for a three-year freedom-depriving punishment for Lilia Neagu, but due to lawyer Balan and to the fact that Lilia Neagu pleaded guilty and 71 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 4. f. 141. 72 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 4 ff. 124-125. 73 The same thing has been told by Lilia Neagu and Asea Andruh 30 years latter during the public lecture on „How KGB identified internal enemies after 1953/1956?”, organized by the Center for the Study of Totalitarianism, State University of Moldova, November 8, 2010. 74 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 4. ff. 142-148. 118 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 claimed that, meanwhile, she understood ‘the true history of Moldavia’, the sentence was reduced to two years75. According to the KGB file, Asea Andruh was acquitted, as she was subpoenaed as witness and not as defendant in Lilia Neagu’s case from the very beginning76. But, as a matter of fact, she was sentenced to one year of labour correction as she was a minor. Actually, she was expelled from school and employed at the garment factory ‘Steaua Rosie’ in Chişinău as a form of punishment. According to her latter testimony, she had a classmate at school no. 1 whose mother held a high post in the party and the open punishment of any pupil of that class would have discredited her and her authority as party servant. Therefore, it was decided to hush up Asea Andruh’s ‘guilt’. Due to favourable circumstances and to the risk that a head of shift at the factory assumed, this form of punishment was suspended as well after several months77. Subsequently, Asea Andruh had the opportunity to continue her studies, becoming an actress at the ’Luceafărul’ theatre for youth, and then teacher at a high school where she continues working nowadays (2012). As for Lilia Neagu, she was not so lucky to finish her studies, and this affected her quite a lot78. The case of Lilia Neagu and Asea Andruh is very relevant from several points of view. It proves that the values of the Soviet regime could not be perpetuated, be- cause young people were rejecting the dictatorship to which their parents had been subjected, they were thinking freely and this became a serious challenge for the regime. People’s internal freedom led slowly but surely to the collapse of Commu- nism. It was not by accident that the authorities were so worried: they were aware that Russians’ domination would not last endlessly with such national/nationalist protests like the one of the two girls and if others believed the same way. One fine day, the discontent and humiliation to which Moldavians, i.e. ethnic Romanians, were subjected, would erupt, as it happened in the late 1980s, when the change was possible due to favourable political circumstances. The group Usatiuc-Ghimpu, or the National Patriotic Front, is another important example of ethnic Romanians’ resistance to the Soviet ‘nationalities policy’ in the MSSR. The group was set up in 1967, advocating the observance of the Moldavians’ rights to freedom, their liberation from the Soviet occupation and unification with Romania. The main founder of the National Patriotic Front was Alexandru Usatiuc, born in 1915 in the village Ivancea, Orhei District. When he was arrested, he was heading a department for the sale of goods at the enterprise ‘Moldobuvtorg’. Alex- andru Usatiuc was the author of the idea to send a comprehensive written statement to the then secretary-general of the Romanian Communist Party and chairman of 75 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 4 ff. 140-141. 76 ASISRM-KGB, personal file 017004, vol. 4. ff. 103-110. 77 Testimony of Asea Andruh, November 8, 2010 and March 11, 2011. 78 Interview with Asea Andruh and Lilia Neagu, March 11, 2011. 119 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 the Council of State of Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu. Initially, he sent the statement via the Romanian post service on 29 March 1969, while he was on a visit to Ro- mania. Doubting that his message had reached the destination, Alexandru Usatiuc personally left for Bucharest, where on June 12, 1971, he asked for a meeting with Nicolae Ceauşescu. The latter refused to meet him and Usatiuc left the six-page statement at the chancellery of the Council of State of Romania79. Consequently, on June 30, 1971, the head of the Romanian Security Service, Ion Stănescu, informed the then KGB head, Yuri Andropov, about Usatiuc’s visit to Bucharest. Stănescu also sent ‘the big brother’ from Moscow a copy of the statement that Alexandru Usatiuc had left for Ceauşescu. Usatiuc was not arrested right away, probably because the KGB preferred to shadow him and collect additional ‘evidence’ of his anti-Soviet activities. It was only on December 10, 1971 that the Chişinău KGB decided to open a criminal case against Alexandru Usatiuc, after it received a report from Moscow about Usatiuc’s ‘crime’. It was the statement that Usatiuc addressed to Ceauşescu on June 12, 1971. On December 13, Usatiuc’s apartment on Lomonosov Street in Chişinău was searched. The second outstanding member of the National Patriotic Front was Gheorghe Ghimpu, born in 1937 in the village Coloniţa, Criuleni District (now in Chişinău municipality). He was arrested on 7 January 1972, almost one month after Alexandru Usatiuc’s arrest. According to an interrogation held at the KGB, Gheorghe Ghimpu was the most important backer of Alexandru Usatiuc’s ideas. He was the one who closely cooperated with Usatiuc to draft the most important programme documents of the National Patriotic Front. The report of the First Congress of the National Patri- otic Front was the most important document worked out by this underground orga- nization of patriots (whom the Soviet authorities called ‘nationalists’). According to Alexandru Usatiuc’s memoirs, the congress took place in 1961 and did not have a tra- ditional format, which means that it was not a simultaneous meeting of its members, but a series of meetings which were subsequently summed up. This is how Usatiuc depicted those moments in his memoires written down by Serafim Saka in 1995: Those were hard times and we held the congress over time, to say so, and per groups of four to five people. We also had an 84-page report, published a decision, an instruction and so on. The decision focused on reunification with Romania, state language – the Ro- manian language, the tricolour with a black ribbon along the colours until reintegration takes place. We stood up for the Latin script, hymn and coat of arms. But none of these could have a significant echo here in Bessarabia, which, at that time, was very Soviet80. On the other hand, according to an interrogation at the KGB in 1972, the First Congress of the National Patriotic Front took place in late 1969 – early 1970. The report reviewed the history of Bessarabia and North Bucovina, made an estimation 79 ASISRM-KGB, personal file Usatiuc-Ghimpu, vol. 2, f. 102. 80 Serafim Saka, Basarabia în Gulag, Chişinău: Editura Uniunii Scriitorilor, 1995, p. 114. 120 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 of the Romanians who had lived on those territories but had been exterminated by the Soviet authorities. It also talked about the policy of Russification of the native people launched in Bessarabia by the tsarist empire and continued by the Soviet Union. To compile the report, the Front’s members used such sources as textbooks of Romanian history published before 1940, the book by Ştefan Ciobanu ‘106 ani sub jugul Rusesc’ (106 years under the Russian yoke), Karl Marx’s work ‘Notes on Romanians’ published in Bucharest in 196481. According to the investigation carried out by the Soviet Moldavian secret ser- vices, both leaders of the organization, Alexandru Usatiuc and Gheorghe Ghimpu shared to a large extent the same views as regards the programme and the objec- tives of the organization. At the same time, the two had different approaches to the tactics of rebuilding the state unity of Romania, which was torn apart after part of its territory was occupied on June 28, 1940 and then in 1944. Ghimpu was advo- cating the separation of Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina from the Soviet Union and their unification with Romania with the status of provinces. Usatiuc believed that these territories should first gain their independence from the Soviet Union, and create an independent state named the Moldavian Popular Republic, whereas unification with Romania should have taken place in the second stage. Usatiuc was also taking into consideration the possibility of unleashing some military action in order to meet this goal. In the statement addressed to Ceauşescu on June 12, 1970, Usatiuc asked to be supplied with weapons if needed. The members of the group were also planning to send a letter to the United Nations Organization82. Valeriu Graur was the third outstanding member of the National Patriotic Front, who was tried jointly with Alexandru Usatiuc and Gheorghe Ghimpu. He was pre- paring to leave and settle down in Romania, but was arrested shortly before leaving, in March 1972. Usatiuc and Ghimpu asked him to take several copies of letters with him to send them from Romania to the UN and Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Graur’s apartment was searched and the KGB found several copies of a document printed at Usatiuc’s writing machine83. Alexandru Şoltoianu was among those accused in the Usatiuc-Ghimpu case as well, as he was suspected of links with the National Patriotic Front. Searching his apartment in Moscow, the KGB found a range of materials that the authorities re- garded as clandestine. But as historian Ion Sişcanu noted back in the 1990s, Alexan- dru Soltoianu was not a member of the National Patriotic Front. The Supreme Court of Justice of the MSSR completed the hearing of the case on July 13, 1972, sentencing the main ‘culprit’ of the National Patriotic Front, Alexan- 81 ASISRM-KGB, personal file Usatiuc – Ghimpu, vol. 2, ff. 46-49. 82 ASISRM-KGB, personal file Usatiuc-Ghimpu, vol. 2, ff. 130-132. 83 Valeriu Graur, De te voi uita, Basarabie…, Bucureşti: Pro Basarabia şi Bucovina, 2010. 121 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 dru Usatiuc, to 7 years in a high-security labour correction colony in the city Perm’ and 5-year exile in the city Tyumen. Gheorghe Ghimpu was sentenced to 6 years in a high-security labour correction colony. Valeriu Graur was sentenced to 4 years in a high-security labour correction colony. Alexandru Şoltoianu was sentenced to 6 years in a high-security labour correction colony and 5-year exile in Siberia. The case of the Usatiuc-Ghimpu group bears a mark of distinction in the whole post-Stalinist period in the MSSR. It appears to have been the only well-structured group that came out with clear-cut demands, stipulated in numerous documents worked out by Alexandru Usatiuc, and in particular Gheorghe Ghimpu. As we have seen, those documents were critical of the Soviet occupation regime and suggested the situation could be changed via the unification not only of the territory of the MSSR, but also other territories taken away from Romania in 1940 and then in 1944 – Northern Bucovina and Southern Bessarabia, which were part of Ukraine. The lead- ers of this group reasoned their positions by the fact that since the USSR and Romania were Communist countries, their initiative stood chances to succeed provided that Ceauşescu agreed to negotiate with Moscow. But it turned out that Ceauşescu was the one who informed the KGB about the existence of the group. Bucharest explained its stance by the fact that it could have been an act of provocation masterminded by the KGB itself. Actually, this proved to what extent Romania’s leader was ‘independent’ from Moscow. Ceauşescu dared to speak out loud about Bessarabia’s issue only in the autumn of 1989, when he felt he was losing the power levers under pressure from the international public opinion, and when large layers of the Romanian society started increasingly contesting his authority and legitimacy. It must also be said that the fate of this group of patriots, as they called themselves, eloquently shows the repressive nature of the Soviet regime. Judging by the documents that we analysed, the lead- ers of the National Patriotic Front did not question the nature of the Communist regime, but the legitimacy – or to be more precise the illegitimacy – of the Soviet rule in Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina. It was natural not to broach explicitly the is- sue of legitimacy of the Communist regime and ideology as such, because, had they done that, they would have had no chance to have Communist Ceauşescu agree to raise the proposals put forward by the Usatiuc-Ghimpu group. So, anti-Communism was merely an implicit dimension of the National Patriotic Front. The Soviet regime perceived this organization as a real danger, with nationalism being the main count of indictment. Although they were demanding the unification of Bessarabia and North Bucovina with Romania, in the verdict the Soviet regime laid the emphasis on the organization’s intention to ‘break the MSSR and part of Ukraine away from the USSR’, as Gheorghe Ghimpu confessed subsequently84. The group’s members were viewed 84 Gheorghe Ghimpu, Conştiinţa naţională a românilor moldoveni, Chişinău: Editura Garuda-Art, 2002, p. 419. 122 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 as extremely dangerous because they were vehemently denying a range of myths of the Soviet Communist regime, such as ‘the liberation of the Moldavians from the Romanian domination’, the existence of ‘an independent Moldovan nation” and of a ‘Moldovan’ language distinct from the Romanian language, as well as because they were attacking the corner stone of the Soviet national policy concerning the observance of equality among nations85. All the outstanding members of the anti- Soviet organization disclosed the policy of subjecting Moldavians to Russification and discrimination in their own country. Another representative case of political repression based on ideological and eth- nic-national criteria is the one of Gheorghe David, who was put in a mental hospital in full swing of perestroika. Gheorghe David was born in 1943 in the village Pepeni, Lazovsk District (now in Sângerei). In 1970, he graduated from the Chişinău-based Polytechnic Institute. In 1970-1979, he worked at the design Institute ‘Selenerg- proiect’ and in the management of ‘Moldglavenergo’, being subsequently employed in other organizations of the branch. In the early 1970s, Gheorghe David openly expressed his views on the nature of the Communist system and on how the Soviet state was created. More exactly, he called into question the main myth of the regime that the USSR had been purportedly created by the free will of peoples. Gheorghe David criticized the decision to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968. Consequently, in 1974, he was called to the KGB to be warned that he would be punished in line with the Criminal Code, had he ‘relapsed’. The intimidation attempt by the Soviet repres- sive bodies failed, and in 1982, right after Brezhnev’s death, David sent a letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, saying that the disastrous social and economic situation in the Soviet Union, in general, and the MSSR, in particular, was generated by inflated spending for the military sector. Gheorghe David stated explicitly that the Soviet Army was an aggressive army, rather than a defensive one, as the official propaganda claimed. After Andropov’s death (February 1984), Gheo- rghe David sent a letter to Konstantin Chernenko, the new secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, expressing his opinion about the situation of the overwhelming majority of the Soviet population and listing some of its causes. In April 1985, he sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, short after his appointment as head of the CC of the CPSU. As he had received no answer to his letters, and pressure was already being exerted on him, Gheorghe David decided to send an- other letter to Gorbachov on 26 October 1985. At the same time, he sent it to the editorial staff of some Soviet and foreign newspapers, such as ‘Tinerimea Moldovei’, 85 See more on that issues Wim Petrus van Meurs, The Bessarabian question in communist historiogra- phy: nationalist and communist politics and history writing, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; Charles King, The Moldovans. Romania, Russia and the Politics of Culture, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000 (both translated in Romanian by ARC Publishing, Chişinău); Igor Caşu, ‘Politica naţională’ în Moldova sovietică, 1944-1989, Chişinău: Cartdidact, 2000. 123 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 ‘Pravda’, ‘Rahva Heacle’ (Talinn), ‘România Liberă’, ‘Unita’ (the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party), ‘L’Humanite’ (of the French Communist Party), as well as to some private people. In the letter, Gheorghe David wrote to Gorbachev that the Soviet Union had promoted an imperial foreign policy, that the whole Soviet history was full of falsification, criticized the fact that historians were keeping silent about the content of the Soviet-German pact of 23 August 1939, etc. Besides the anti-Soviet and anti-imperial message, Gheorghe David bitterly criticized the Com- munist regime and ideology, defining the Communism as a system based on lies and people’s exploitation. He also emphasized that the experience of World War II proved to the whole world the need to ensure a better future which would be ‘more peaceful, more plentiful, without empires or wars’. As a result of his acts of courage, in 1986, Gheorghe David was demoted in his job, becoming an ordinary worker. He was arrested on August 1, 1986 during a business trip to Tiraspol. While questioned by the Chişinău-based Prosecutor’s Office, he was told that the Soviet regime had the means needed to ‘brainwash’ him and that he would soon feel that. David had been in custody for several months, after which he was put in the criminal psy- chiatric section of the Chişinău prison, where he was subjected to the ‘treatment’ promised by the authorities. In December 1986, a special psychiatric commission diagnosed Gheorghe David as being mentally alienated. The main ‘arguments’ that the commission invoked to back its diagnosis were David’s opinions about the vio- lation by the Soviet Union of the sovereignty and independence of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Afghanistan in 1979, as well as about the identity of the ‘Moldavian’ language and the Romanian one. Gheorghe David was tried and sentenced on Janu- ary 12, 1987 in his absence. It was only in the summer of 1988 that Gheorghe David was set free as a result of reports published by the Soviet press, which was becom- ing increasingly free, and of protests staged by foreign human rights organizations, among them Amnesty International86. There were also other cases when people were put in mental hospitals in the 1980s for reasons that seem commonplace nowadays. Anatol Oprea faced such an experi- ence. He was perceived as a hidden enemy of Soviet power for wearing an anti-gas mask, albeit discretely so as not to draw anybody’s attention, in order to protect his breath whenever he felt that the air in Edineţ in northern MSSR was polluted87. At the end of the 1970s – at the beginning of the 1980s, the Soviet party and state authorities, as well as the political police grew increasingly nervous. It was natural, since people’s discontent could be felt on a daily basis. There were many reasons 86 Basarabia, no. 9, 1990, pp. 140-152. 87 Alina Rusu, „Nebunii comunismului. Victime ale psihiatriei politice cer reabilitare”, http://www. investigatii.md/eng/index.php?art=193 (last access on April 1, 2011). 124 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 for this. First of all, the Soviet economy was plummeting, the living standards were somehow stable, but were far from meeting people’s increasing expectations. It was true that everyone was sure of having a job and a stable wage, but the problem was that the Soviet state could not cover this money with products and goods. This situ- ation was even more unbearable as 1980 was approaching. The year had a special meaning for the Soviet citizens, because in 1961, Khrushchev promised that the Communism would be built in two decades. Another destabilizing factor for the Soviet regime was the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in December 1979, which led to the worsening of the economic crisis of the regime and to the deterioration of relations with the West, with the bloc of the so-called capitalist states. The East- West relations saw a brief period of improvement in the late 1960s, which came to a head in 1975 when the Helsinki agreements were signed. As the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the USA elected a President who demonized the USSR (calling it „the evil empire”), a classical Cold War comparable with the one in the first post-war decades broke out. Groups of dissidents openly contesting the Com- munist regime started operating in Moscow and other important urban centres. These groups appeared mainly after 1975, under the influence of the Helsinki agree- ments, according to which, the USSR committed to the West to observe the human rights in exchange for the recognition of the post-war borders of the states of the communist bloc. The Chişinău-based KGB recorded an increase in anti-Soviet ac- tions. Data about people refuting the regime became increasingly numerous in the reports of the Moldavian secret political police starting with the 1970s. There were three categories of objectors: first of all ‘Moldavian nationalists’, who were some- times called ‘Moldo-Romanians nationalists’, second, „Zionists”, i.e. Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel but impeded by the Soviet regime, and third, members of religious „sects” and clerics (sektanto-tserkovnye elementy). For instance, in 1975, the politi- cal police recorded the spread of anti-Soviet leaflets in many districts of the repub- lic. Judging by their content and type of writing, they were not produced by a single person or group, but by more. Among the populated areas where anti-Soviet leaflets were spread were: Căuşeni, Vulcăneşti, Edineţ, Hânceşti, Leova, Nisporeni and the city Bender88. In 1974-1976 alone, 334 people were warned (profilaktirovano)89. The number of tourists visiting MSSR was on the rise. Thus, in 1960, about 100 foreign tourists were recorded, whereas in January 1974-August 1976, the Soviet Moldavia was visited by about 8,000 tourists from capitalist, i.e. western countries only90. The KGB was keeping a close eye on them, and the hotel Chişinău and its restaurant were swarming with dozens of secret agents and informants91. The foreign tour- 88 ASISRM-KGB, F. 1, inv. 59 (6), d. 58, vol. I, ff. 1-2. 89 ASISRM-KGB, F. 1, inv. 60 (2), d. 58, vol. II, f. 111. 90 ASISRM-KGB, F. 1, inv. 31 (6), d. 1, f. 64; inv. 60 (2), d. 58, vol. II, f. 136. 91 ASISRM-KGB, F. 1, inv. 44 (2), d. 58, vol. II, f. 53. 125 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 ists were permanently shadowed and were obliged to respect a clear-cut itinerary set ahead of time, otherwise they ran the risk of being expelled from the USSR, as hap- pened rather often. They were dangerous for the Soviet regime, because it was reck- oned that their contacts with the local population might „infect” the Soviet people and might instigate them to anti-Soviet actions. Actually, the Communist regime was concerned about the fact that its citizens might find out what was truly going on in the capitalist states, how they lived, what rights people enjoyed there, unlike the Commu- nist propaganda which kept on speaking about poverty and exploitation in the West. Foreign tourists were dangerous for the regime also because they could have brought forbidden books in the USSR. Thus, in several months of 1977, about 6,000 books forbidden by the regime were confiscated at the Leuşeni customs point92. The regime perceived the tourists coming from Romania as particularly dangerous. Romania was seen as a potential enemy by the Soviet authorities from Moscow and Chişinău, de- spite the fact that it was a communist country, having a stable Communist regime and ideology which was being maintained by repression. This was often mentioned in se- cret reports by the Moldavian KGB. Moreover, the Chişinău KGB invented a code for Romania – ‘object 24’ – in order to avoid the inconvenience of ranging the communist Romania in the same category with such capitalist states as the USA, Israel and West- ern Germany, which allegedly pursued the goal of destabilizing the USSR via spies under the cover of tourists93. Obviously, the problem resided in the identity of the majority population of the MSSR and in the increasingly explicit hints to the events in Bessarabia’s history in 1918, 1940 and 1944 made by the Romanian Communist authorities94. One shall not forget the shock that the Soviet authorities experienced in the early 1970s, when they tracked down several persons and organizations headed by Moldavians who were believed to be socially integrated in the Soviet society for good, but who brought up either explicitly or implicitly the issue of relations between Moldavians and Russians, and some of them even advocated the unification of the entire Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina with Romania (the case of the National Patriotic Front). The KGB subjected to rigorous control the Moldavians wanting to travel abroad, including Romania. The people believed to be able to ‘betray their fa- therland’, i. e., able to openly talk about their discontent with the Soviet authorities or to refuse to return to the USSR, were erased from the list of those having the right to leave for abroad. Only in January 1975-August 1976, 200 citizens of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic were barred from travelling abroad95. 92 ASISRM-KGB, F. 1, inv. 62 (4), d. 58, f. 222. 93 ASISRM-KGB, F. 1, inv. 59 (6), d. 58, vol. V, f. 1. 94 See more on the subject in Nicolas Dima, From Moldavia to Moldova. The Soviet Romanian terri- torial dispute, Boulder Co., 1991 şi George Ciorănescu (ed.), Aspects des relations russo-roumai- nes. Retrospectives et orientations, Paris: Minard, 1967; Idem, Bessarabia and Bukovina: disputed land between West and East, Bucureşti: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 1993. 95 ASISRM-KGB, F. 1, inv. 60 (2), d. 58, vol. II, f. 147. 126 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 To conclude, despite the generally known facts, the KGB archives, which have been recently made available in Chişinău, point to the existence of individuals and groups of Moldavians who in 1956-1986 called into doubt the regime’s ideology, disagreeing with the monopoly of the Single Party in society or criticising the re- gime from inside, i. e., believing that it could be reformed, as the members of the Dragoş group apparently believed. Others questioned Moscow’s domination in the region from a Romanian national perspective, and others, like those from the National Patriotic Front, were advocating unification with Romania. The regime harshly punished them, sentencing them to long years in jail and exile, and putting others in mental hospitals (the case of Gheorghe David, for instance). The people who resisted the Soviet Communist regime, the Communist dictatorship and the totalitarian regime, criticized the discrimination of the Romanian language and the Russification process. They continue to be a model to be followed by the young generations in the Republic of Moldova. No democratic society can be built and strengthened unless it knows its heroes who fought for democratic ideals, for the freedom of speech and national dignity. From another perspective, it can be seen that the years 1953 and 1956 were far from representing a complete dissociation from Stalinism. On the contrary, the documents that were made available to us and which I have cited on numerous oc- casions in this article rebuff this opinion, which still prevails in the former Soviet Union, including the Republic of Moldova. Accordingly, the period after the mid 1950s was a continuation of the rule of Stalin and Lenin, rather than their termina- tion. The post-Stalinist political repression differs from the Stalinist one in terms of scale, with repressions losing their mass nature and becoming applied most often against individuals or small groups. The authorities gave up deportations, mass ex- ecution and organized famine. After 1953, psychiatry got increasingly often used for political purposes, as it was the case of Alexei Sevastianov, Gheorghe David, Anatol Oprea and others. There were two categories of political critics to the Communist regime in the MSSR: the dissenters and the dissidents, with the former protesting unconsciously rather than consciously, whereas the latter acted consciously. They were not only indignant at the fact that the regime was unfair; they also aimed at changing the re- gime or at refuting it openly and continuously. Thus, proceeding from these criteria of a tentative typology, Mihai Moroşanu, Nicolae Dragoş and his group, Gheorghe David, Alexandru Usatiuc and Gheorghe Ghimpu can be viewed as dissidents. The others mentioned in this article fit into the category of dissenters as they vehemently opposed the injustice existing under Communism, but acted spontaneously rather than in line with some ideological plan. At the same time, another typology can be drawn within the above-mentioned one, taking as criterion the object of the criticism brought against the regime. When 127 DYSTOPIA | Nr. 1-2, 2012 it comes to criticism against unequal interethnic relations and the Soviet imperial policy, then we have the category of anti-Soviet actions that jeopardize the terri- torial integrity of the Soviet state either explicitly or implicitly (Mihai Moroşanu, Gheorghe Muruziuc, the National Patriotic Front, Lilia Neagu and Asea Andruh, and Gheorghe David). Criticism against the monopoly of the CPM-CPSU in soci- ety and the Communist utopia as a political project fits into the category of anti- Communist actions (Alexei Sevastianov, Nicolae Dragoş, Pavel Doronin, as well as Gheorghe David). The latter is present in both categories because his demands were both anti-Soviet (national: alphabet, etc), as well as anti-Communist (he backed the independence of the anti-Communist Czechoslovakia in 1968, the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan; hence he opposed the maintenance and export of a bankrupt regime). The research of political repressions in the MSSR after 1953 and 1956 is at the initial stage, and the main goal of this survey was to draw a typology proceeding from the object of resistance to the regime and the nature of the promoted mes- sages: conscious and planned, on the one hand, and unconscious and spontaneous, on the other hand.