Press, Propaganda and Politics : Cultural Periodicals in Francoist Spain and Communist Romania [1 ed.] 9781443865678, 9781443843232

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Press, Propaganda and Politics

Press, Propaganda and Politics: Cultural Periodicals in Francoist Spain and Communist Romania

Edited by

Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu and Rubén Jarazo Álvarez

Press, Propaganda and Politics: Cultural Periodicals in Francoist Spain and Communist Romania, Edited by Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu and Rubén Jarazo Álvarez This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu and Rubén Jarazo Álvarez and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. .

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4323-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4323-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables............................................................................................ viii List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Foreword ..................................................................................................... x Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... xv Part I: Comparing Francoism and Communism Chapter One................................................................................................. 2 Francoism and Communism: A Historical Approach Àlex Amaya Quer and Manuela Marin Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 14 Comparing Francoism and Communism: Methodological Issues and Implications Florin Abraham Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 32 War of Words: Similarities and Differences between Francoist Spain and Communist Romania in the Development of Totalitarian Propagandistic Systems Àlex Amaya Quer Part II: Francoist Cultural Press Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 56 Surviving Literature: Literary Subgenres Published in the Spanish Periodical Press (1936-1975) Rubén Jarazo Álvarez

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Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 80 Anglophilia and Popular Culture in the Francoist Spanish Press: The Case of Shakespearean Representations Elena Domínguez Romero Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 96 Pro-German Press and Literature in North-Western Spanish Cultures during the World War I (1914-1918) Joám Evans Pim Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 106 Cultural Revival and Internationalization of Galician Press (1900-1945) Adrian Healy Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 117 The Rise of Syndicalism in the United States (1933-1945) as Reflected in the Spanish Press María Luz Arroyo Vázquez Part III: Communism and 1950s Romanian Cultural Press Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 130 Periodicals, Propaganda and Politics in Romanian Culture: Media Discourse Strategies in the 1950s Romanian Cultural Periodicals. Case Study: Flacăra and Contemporanul Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 156 Ascribing a New Political Identity: Women during the 1950’s. A Case Study on Săteanca Magazine Manuela Marin Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 173 Between East and West: Rival Discourses of Identity in Romanian Historiography (1954-1964) Andi Mihalache

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Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 189 Media Censorship and the Local Periodical Gazeta Transilvaniei (1943-1945) Ruxandra Nazare Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 213 Press, Libraries and Secret Funds in Romania (1945-1989): Case Study Daniel Nazare Contributors............................................................................................. 227 Index........................................................................................................ 230

LIST OF TABLES

5-1 Publications by the Francoist Press 5-2 Seized publications per regions 8-1 Union membership in the USA: 1900-1945

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

5-1 Benefits obtained by the National Press as compared with the Francoist Press 5-2 Benefits of the Francoist Press in Catalonia 5-3 Benefits of the Francoist Press in the Basque Country 5-4 Benefits obtained by the Francoist Press in Galicia (I) 5-5 Benefits obtained by the Francoist Press in Galicia (II)

FOREWORD

Twentieth century dictatorships and/or totalitarian regimes (with all the necessary conceptual and methodological explanations attached to the use of these problematic notions) have represented objects of specific historical, cultural, media or social approaches in the last decades. However, the development of contemporary research within Human and Social Sciences towards interdisciplinary approaches and especially the development of Cultural Studies (placing such topics at the border between history, media, arts, sociology and political sciences) have shown that beyond investigating individual phenomena, collective projects are equally necessary and useful – bringing together the expertise of the several fields mentioned earlier and attempting to understand the complexity and the multileveled implications of these totalitarian/ dictatorial regimes. This collective work aims to compare media (and in particular cultural press) in Francoist Spain and Communist Romania, placing the two opposing paradigms in a common approach with the intention to identify common patterns and intricate connections between them, without ignoring, at the same time, their radical differences. The volume is particularly interested in the manner in which press (and especially cultural press and the culture as mirrored by it) manifested within two European dictatorial/ totalitarian regimes In designing the volume, we started from the idea that while maintaining the features of individual approaches (specialised in history, cultural studies, media or literature), the volume can also represent an attempt to approach two such individual regimes – Francoism and Communism - from a comparative perspective. This comparison is performed both implicitly (by offering the academic frame to a series of case studies from both regimes) and explicitly (by several chapters focusing on the general methodological implications of such a comparison, as well as on the similarities present at the functional level – the similarities and differences between Francoist Spain and Communist Romania in the development of totalitarian / dictatorial propagandistic systems). The volume focused on the importance of media (and, as a particular example, cultural press) for these regimes (although the complexity of both phenomena taken individually and the multiple level of their possible

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comparison offer several interesting prospective frameworks). The choice is justified by the fact that media represented if not the main tool then definitely one of the most significant among those used by a regime to communicate its ideological message, to implement and/or justify its policies, as well as create and maintain the illusion of its legitimacy, while imposing its specific models and identity patterns, shape mentalities and level all opposition. Media established, thus, specific persuasive and propagandistic relations, while mirroring the dynamics of policies and ideological approaches, of international politics and relations as well as the manner in which culture (and intellectuals, cultural project and events in particular) was being affected by censorship (and political control). For contemporary research, press also represents a privileged element in approaching totalitarian and/or dictatorial regimes due to its dynamic (through its total or partial simultaneity to the events) as well as its complex character (through its textual and visual language). The contributors to this volume – mainly Spanish and Romanian scholars – are approaching several aspects of media in relation to politics, propaganda, historical or social aspects in the two regimes, based on their academic background: history (mainly), cultural studies, media and literature. This collection is divided into three thematic sections, approaching the areas of Francoist and respectively Communist phenomena in relation to press, culture and censorship from several different angles. This first section plays the role to introduce the debate, while its authors create the historical, theoretical and methodological basis for the further discussions and case studies. Thus, the first section focuses – in a reflexive manner – on a direct comparison performed at the theoretical level between the two phenomena, drawing parallels, acknowledging differences and difficulties as well as inquiring on the limits of such historical (Àlex Amaya Quer and Manuela Marin), methodological, theoretical (Florin Abraham) or functional comparisons (Amaya Quer). Without ignoring the difficulty of periodisation (although initially the volume was meant to focus on the same decade, the fifties), the particular researches have revealed that it is necessary to approach these phenomena based on their functional features, their inner mechanisms as reflected by media (and discussed in the same analytic framework) rather than remain at the level of analysing a certain period and thus their contextualised differences. The second section of the volume is devoted to Francoism as reflected in controlled media, as well as the evolution of the latter in relation to the instalment of the dictatorship. Evans Pim revisits the initial spawn of totalitarian/dictatorial thought in Spanish Press during the World War I

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and Pro-German Press in Spanish periodicals so as to account the initial state of Fascism and Francoism in Spain. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the settlement of Francoism, censorship apparatus and the limitations over the publishing industry were defining factors in the construction of a new totalitarian/dictatorial cultural regime, but the ideological substrate that sustained it cannot be understood without analysing such influential precedents of nationalist and conservative press at the local and regional level. Rubén Jarazo Álvarez attempts to illustrate with his contribution the only Surviving literature published in the Spanish periodicals (1936-1975), the main mechanisms to avoid censorship, as well as the strategy that many peripheral communities within the Spanish state used to preserve their literary traditions and languages in the press. Cultural unity and homogeneity was strongly emphasized specially during the years after the war. In order to survive, autochthonous cultures had to resort to foreign media, as Adrian Healy proves in a process defined as the Internationalization of Galician Press, violently suppressed by Francoist censorship. However, in the final years of Francoism, some cultural openness was reflected in the Spanish periodical Press, especially to the news and publications related to the American Culture. The analysis of the media during Francoism (with extensions in the media phenomena preceding or announcing it) allowed us to approach the Spanish society of the time, which inevitably reflects the social, political and ideological situation of the Spanish state after the Civil War. Its analysis is essential to discern not only the impact of censorship in Spanish publications, but also the limitations suffered on peripheral communities such as Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country, as well as a thermometer of the cultural reality during Francoist regime and its openness to European cultures. After the most difficult years in Spain during the forties and fifties, the new agreements with the American government helped to recover some economic stability in Spain. That stability was also reflected in the media, mirroring a new social and cultural reality in the periodicals. But that apparent cultural openness was, however, a delusion in the cultural sphere, a delusion that could not break apart from the strict censorship in Francoist Spain, as Maria Luz Arroyo and Elena Domínguez Romero posed in their respective contributions. The third and final section is devoted to Communist Romania (especially under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in the 1950s, but also with references, when necessary, to the prior or further evolution of media in relation to the instalment of totalitarianism/ communist dictatorship). After World War II the Romanian cultural press became part of the propaganda apparatus, together with all media. The political monopoly imposed a

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unique discourse, which had to be reflected by every article on culture, art or education, prose and poetry, literary or art criticism. Moreover, the unified political convictions had to be revealed by the reproduction of enthusiastic interviews with artists or transcriptions of their official meetings, a sort of s(t)imulated cultural debates, conventional, stereotypical language replacing a real cultural effervescence. Thus, culture did no longer perform a “live recording” of real cultural phenomena but rather described a convention. Cultural press mirrored the complex mechanisms of propaganda of spreading the official discourse and cultural policies (the latter presented by the periodicals, which reproduced extensively decrees and laws referring to culture). The section includes a series of specific analyses and case studies referring to the manner in which political control and propaganda manifested within press, in particular cultural periodicals but also in other cultural environments (such as libraries). In a paper suggesting the title of the volume (“Periodicals, Propaganda and Politics in Romanian Culture: Media Discourse Strategies in the 1950s Romanian Cultural Periodicals. Case Study: Flacăra and Contemporanul”), Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu approaches the emergence and evolution in 1950s Romanian cultural press of specific discursive strategies associated to political manipulation and propaganda, following the Soviet model. Manuela Marin focuses on the female identity patterns associated with political propaganda and official discourse and promoted by the rural women’s magazine, Săteanca, within the same decade. Andi Mihalache approaches, from the perspective the contemporary historian, the manner in which specialised press such as the History periodical Studii (1954-1964) was used by the regime as a space for promoting official policies and propaganda discourse. Censorship, as a recurrent phenomenon in relation to cultural manifestations and especially to media as important political tools, is also studied by Ruxandra Moaúa Nazare in a chapter focusing on local press. She approaches the evolution of local periodicals from the early 1940s towards their appropriation by communism (and particularly the evolution of Gazeta Transilvaniei, chosen for a case study as it was one of the oldest and more important Romanian local periodicals). Dealing with the early 1940s, the approach is however relevant and useful for this volume because beyond the particular phenomenon it offers an element of comparison with the late 1940s communist censorship practices, revealing the evolution and persistence of censorship and control mechanisms and patterns within different regimes (more significantly when the comparison refers to the succession of dictatorial regimes in the same decade and the same country). Finally, an interesting extension from periodicals to larger press and book funds and

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library archives (as specifically treated by the regime in Communist Romania) is achieved by Daniel Nazare in his paper Press, Libraries and Secret Funds in Romania (1945-1989). Case Study. The study discusses the mechanisms of censorship in relation to purge, prohibition (or even burning of books) as well as the specific practice of creating “secret funds” for a selection of books and archived periodicals. The approaches in this section aim therefore to offer a perspective on the communist censorship and control practices applied to press and in the same time a space, at a micro level, for debating and comparing patterns and mechanisms individually or in a larger framework. The volume intends thus to suggest - through its collection of general, comparative and analytic chapters, as well as through this new approach on two political and cultural phenomena traditionally studied only as opposing paradigms – the need for a larger debate on the potential of approaching these phenomena under a common framework. —The Editors

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu’s contribution as an editor of this volume was supported by the Sectoral Operational Programme Human Resources Development (SOP HRD), financed from the European Social Fund and the Romanian Government under the project number ID59323. Rubén Jarazo Álvarez’s contribution as an editor of this present volume has been supported by the Galician Regional Funding for Human Resources Programa Ángeles Alvariño (2010-2012) Xunta de Galicia, European Union’s FEDER Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (20072013), the University Institute of Research in Irish Studies ‘Amergin’, University of A Coruña, and the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). We would also like to express our great appreciation and gratitude to the authors and all scholars and colleagues that have contributed somehow to this volume, and in particular to the team at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for accepting this project. We would also like to thank our families and colleagues, who have offered us their support during the process of editing this volume.

PART I: COMPARING FRANCOISM AND COMMUNISM

CHAPTER ONE FRANCOISM AND COMMUNISM: A HISTORICAL APPROACH ÀLEX AMAYA QUER AND MANUELA MARIN

Francoism: Origins and Nature Franco’s dictatorship emerged in full force in April 1939 after the final victory of the nationalist or rebel side in the Spanish Civil War. This side consisted of civilian and military forces that had rebelled against the authority of the Second Republic almost three years before, and its success made possible the establishment in Spain of a forty years dictatorship led by General Francisco Franco Bahamonde. The failure of the coup, started in the Canary Islands and North Africa on 17 and 18 July 1936, resulted in a civil conflict that led to more than 500,000 deaths (Ortega Silvestre 2005),1 counting the victims of the military actions on the front, the political repression in the rearguard, the bombing of civilian population, and the famine and epidemics that hit vast areas of the country. Francisco Franco held absolute power from October 1, 1936, when he became Head of State and Generalísimo of all the armies on the rebel side, until his death on November 20, 1975. His political profile followed the characteristics of his military tactics: he had pursued a strategy of war characterised by a cautious and slow progress - due not only to his nineteenth-century concept of the art of war2 (Cardona 2006), but also to his interest in consolidating his personal power and systematising an intense repression policy in the conquered territories. Similarly, in politics Franco slowly built a personal dictatorship which was never fully institutionalised. Even though it lasted nearly four decades, the dictatorship relied so much on Franco’s political persona that it eventually disappeared just a year after the dictator died.3 At the end of the civil war the Francoist New State had a well-defined profile which remained almost unchanged until the end of the dictatorship. This meant the existence of a leader with unlimited power who was the

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Head of State, of the Government4 and of the Armed Forces; a single party -FET y de las JONS5- under the command of a National Chief who was no other than Franco himself; a group of framework organisations such as the Spanish Trade Union Organisation, the Women’s Section and the Youth Front, devised to control, indoctrinate and mobilise different sectors of society; a close collaboration between the regime and the Catholic Church, which legitimised the dictatorship until the early seventies; a formidable repressive apparatus responsible for tens of thousands of executions6 and for a horrific constellation of concentration camps which held hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of whom died of starvation, torture or as a consequence of the inhumane prison conditions (Molinero, Sala and Sobrequés 2003);7 and a far-reaching apparatus of propaganda and censorship intended to establish a totalitarian system of press and communication based on the models of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Although the structure created around Franco contained different rightwing attitudes and degrees of attachment, from the overt and genuine fascism of the falangists to the Bourbon monarchists or the Carlist traditionalists, a fact that conditioned the internal balance of the dictatorship, the basic similarities between all these political families were sufficient to maintain the authoritarian and undemocratic essence of the dictatorship over four decades. That need to ensure this sustainable balance determined the notable lack of institutionalisation of the dictatorship, unlike other totalitarian or authoritarian regimes. Franco forced a slow institutional configuration of his regime; keeping the different ideological sectors that helped him rise to power sufficiently satisfied – or not too unhappy – so that they would not rebel. Such an internal rebellion would have threatened the survival of a regime that in 1945 had really feared for its very existence. Thus the Franco regime itself was organised by ambiguous fundamental laws,8 without ever enacting a constitution. Moreover, the establishment of FET y de las JONS in April 1937, uniting in one single party all the trends that had supported the coup of July 1936 or the configuration of the Spanish Trade Union Organisation in 1939-1940 followed the same pattern. This led to tension and anxiety among the political class which was at the service of Franco, for example because of the fact that he did not appoint a successor, the current King Juan Carlos of Bourbon, until 1969. But this also prevented dramatic ruptures, and ensured not only the survival of the dictatorship during the change of the international system that took place after 1945, despite the birthmark of its alliance with Hitler and Mussolini,9 but also its continuity deep into the second half of the twentieth century without changing in the least its undemocratic essences.

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Presently a historiographic debate regarding the nature of Franco’s dictatorship is troubling historians. Was Franco's regime a fascist one or was it not? Similarly to the analysis of the historical events in Romania in December 1989, which orbits around the question of whether or not they were a revolution, historians specialising in the Francoist dictatorship have spent more than three decades locked in a debate that goes beyond the semantic meaning of words and which itself involves the discussion on whether to include Franco’s regime within the framework of twentieth century totalitarianism. The authors who defend the characterisation of Francoism as a fascist regime insist that fascism – as a phenomenon – took different shapes in its embodiments. Even Italy and Germany, the epitomes of fascism, did not share exactly the same characteristics and therefore Spain would represent a different but genuine application of fascist ideology, specifically a Catholic-traditionalist and corporative one due to its historical evolution and social structure (Morodo 1985; Germani 1975).10 Other authors also claim that the regime in its early years revealed its obvious fascist nature, and that this was disguised later by the imperatives of the international context after World War II, a fact that would not be sufficient to remove the label of totalitarian when analysing the Francoist dictatorship (Fontana 1986). After all, it was the only system of its kind to survive World War II. Another perspective equates Franco’s regime with other European fascisms in its classist goal of defence of capitalism against the threat of Bolshevism, and notes that the counter-revolutionary alliance responsible for carrying it out was very similar in Germany, Italy and Spain (Casanova 1992). In a similar vein, some historians have identified for the entire tenure of the regime the usual elements of fascist totalitarianism, in both its structure and propagandistic speech, taking into account its differences from other historical examples (Molinero and Ysàs 1992). However, other scholars have characterized Franco’s regime as a personal dictatorship tinged with fascist elements in its repressive apparatus (Elorza 1988) or simply as a military dictatorship of a traditional type (Pérez Ledesma 1994; Sánchez Recio 1996). More recently, it has been argued that the apparent fascistisation in some characteristic elements of the Francoist dictatorship is not enough to justify its inclusion in the group of European fascism. These authors note the lack of strength of the most openly fascist actors in the reactionary coalition that brought Franco to power– the original Falange; the lack of attempts to build an active popular consensus, as opposed to its policy of annihilation against its political rivals (Molinero 2003); the artificiality of FET y de las JONS as a single party; the absence of a clearly fascist official ideology; and the smaller

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capacity of interventionism on civil society in comparison with Germany and Italy (Thomàs 2001; Saz 2004). These discussions are still alive and should be taken into account when dealing with topics such as politics and propaganda press in Spain, or Franco’s relationship with the cultural environment, and even more when designing a comparative approach with other totalitarian regimes, such as the case of Romania. Greater consensus among historians – both from Spain and from other countries – has been generated by the analysis of Franco’s regime as a brutal dictatorship that caused the killing, torture or exile of hundreds of thousands of citizens, and understood liberal democracy as an obsolete and outdated formula that had to be destroyed. The illegitimacy of the Franco dictatorship is marked by its origins in a barbaric civil war which was the result of a coup against a democratic government. Despite recent revisionist attempts – totally rejected by the academic world, though highly publicized by some types of media – which try to blame the unstable republican order and the leftist political parties for the outbreak of the war of 1936-1939 (Moa 1999; 2009), the specialized and respected historiography agrees to analyse the Francoist dictatorship under the prism of its brutality and undemocratic nature which was incapable of reforming itself. This includes a relationship with the press and culture that sought to make a clean sweep with the previous liberal traditions, searching for a totalitarian homogenisation by eliminating the cultural representations from the peripheral regions and making the most of the conservative ideological foundations of the pre-existing press. To identify the depth and consequences of that relationship, whether labelled as totalitarian or authoritarian, proves absolutely necessary in order to analyse correctly the society, politics and culture in the current constitutional Spain, and to enrich comparative perspectives with respect to other countries’ history, which have also experienced traumatic dictatorships and complex processes of democratic transition.

Communism: The Beginnings (1945-1964) The Communist Party of Romania11 (CPR) played an insignificant role in Romanian political life until August 1944. Soon after its creation in 1921, CPR became an illegal party, preserving this status during the interwar period. Among the factors contributing to its political marginalisation there were the limited number of members (2,000 in the most optimistic statistics), the existence of several factions among its leaders and last but not least the strict control Moscow exerted over the party and its political direction. This subordination of the Communist

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Party of Romania to the Soviet interests had limited furthermore the former’s social basis, this being perceived as an instrument of a foreign and constantly hostile power (King 1980, 9-38, Tismăneanu 2005, 67106). Following the coup of 23 August 1944, to which CPR made its own contribution, Romania abandoned the Nazi Germany ally position and continued by fighting alongside the Allies until their final victory. However, Romania was soon occupied by Soviet troops. The presence of the latter on Romanian territory as well as the role the Soviet Union played in Romania since August 1944 strengthened the political status of the CPR (King 1980, 39-47, Tismăneanu 2005, 107-109). The following period, until the instalment on March 6, 1945, of the first communist government led by Petru Groza, was marked by permanent government instability generated by the attempts made by CPR representatives to take control over the state apparatus. After the establishment of the government led by Petru Groza, the communists gained control over all levels of power consolidating their position within some key ministries (Internal Affairs, Justice, Economy). They managed to achieve – due to an apparent fraud of the November 19, 1946 elections – the majority within the Romanian Parliament. Simultaneously, the arrestment of the opponents of the CPR focused especially on the members or supporters of the so-called Romanian historical parties (The Liberal and respectively The Peasants’ Party). Later, in the summer of 1947, all political parties opposing the instalment of the CPR were dissolved, with the exception of the Social Democrat Party, which merged with CPR in February 1948, creating together the Romanian Workers’ Party (RWP) (Ionescu 1994, 124-173). At the end of 1947, the last obstacle faced by the communists in their attempt to take total control was the institution of monarchy. Blackmailed to resign, the last king of Romania, Michael I, signed the Abdication Act on December 30, 1947 and left the country into exile. The forced abdication of the last Romanian king meant not only a change of political leadership but also a change of political regime. Thus, Romania became the Romanian People’s Republic [Republica Populară Română] and had a new, Soviet-inspired constitution, which made official the political domination and control of the unique party, the Romanian Workers’ Party, over all areas of political, social and economic life (Deletant 1997:61-68). The control imposed by the RWP made it possible to initiate a programme in order to transform the country following the Soviet model. Thus, the nationalisation of industry was followed by the imposing of a centralised model for economic development. This meant a centralised control of the economic resources and their use according to some

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priorities decided by the national development medium-term plan. In addition, the early 1950s First Five Years Plan, inspired by the Soviet experience, included a massive investment into heavy industry at the expense of agriculture, consumer goods industry and public services. The next step in the socialist transformation of the country concerned the collectivisation of agriculture. Announced in March 1949, this new direction in “developing the country” caused a concentration of agricultural land in the newly created collective or state farms (King 1980, 53-54). Within these farms, labour was provided by the same farmers who – more or less forced – gave up their lands and agricultural inventory in favour of collective farms. Moreover, in order to strengthen its monopoly over the Romanian society, the RWP sought to establish control over education, religious and secular organisations, and, last but not least, over the Romanian intelligentsia. The communisation of education meant subordinating it to the political and ideological goals of the new regime. The emphasis placed on the industrial development model favoured technical education at the expense of the Humanities, while the adoption of Marxism-Leninism as the official state ideology influenced the education system and the way certain topics were taught. In addition, the political alliance with the Soviet Union led to a process of sovietisation of the public and cultural life. A series of streets, cities or towns have been given Russian or Soviet names, Romanian-Soviet institutions were created and the whole national history was reinterpreted based on the positions of the party and official ideology. Historians of the new regime tried to highlight the Slavic influence on the formation of the Romanian people, the superiority of the Russian civilization as well as the so-called historical friendship that has bound the two nations over their existence (Georgescu 2008, 1-46). The political changes have also affected the status of Romanian intelligentsia. Part of it refused to collaborate with the new regime, as a consequence being marginalized or even excluded from the Romanian cultural life. Those who embraced socialist realism (the official cultural model) and used their talents to create convincing and ideologically correct images (considered to reflect the new realities of the time) were motivated, among other things, by the privileges offered by the regime in return for such services. An important motivation was the amount of social and professional advancement opportunities offered by the regime in such circumstances, even to individuals with an insufficient educational background (Gabanyi 2001, 30-37). Another major issue concerned religion. The interest shown by RWP to the religious organisations is explainable in the context in which the

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latter, through their work, promoted alternative or even contradictory views to the atheistic, materialistic worldview promoted by the communist ideology. Still, although ideologically desirable, the prohibition of all religious manifestations would have determined significant opposition from the Romanian population. Therefore, the Romanian communist regimes chose the solution to survey and limit religious activities, in parallel with an educational and propagandistic offensive, designed to consolidate the materialist and atheist worldview. The regimenting of the entire Romanian social life continued with the abolition of all associations which could have been immune to the influence of the RWP. They were replaced by mass and communal organisations - targeting certain social and age groups - existing and functioning under the direct leadership of the single party. However, there was an even more ambitious project than the economical transformation and that was the creation of the new socialist man, which involved two main directions. The first was aimed at the transformation of the material life conditions by supporting the implementation of industrialisation, collectivisation of agriculture, and respectively urbanisation. Designated in Marxist terminology by the notion of structure, these changes – made according to the national plan – were supposed to proportionally influence the superstructure, the socialist consciousness of those called to contribute to building the socialist project. Consequently, the second direction followed by the Romanian communist regime in order to create the new man targeted the process of political socialisation of the popular masses. The aim of this political socialisation was to impose a set of attitudes, beliefs, values, feelings that individuals were supposed to have towards the political regime and their officially assigned roles within the society (Dawson and Kenneth Prewitt 1969, 16-17). Political socialisation – as a process and also as the result of the internalisation of socialist norms and values – was primarily based on educational action. Education, conceived as an activity organised around the transmission and assimilation of values and norms was not reduced to the action of institutional factors represented by the school. It also aimed to continue and even deepen the specific educational principles and direction through auxiliary activities. In the case of the Romanian Communist regime, these activities involved the organisation and mass participation in official propaganda activities. Culture played an important guiding role within the latter, as it was the environment for the creation and promotion of convincing images and values of the new socialist society.

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Those who refused the political and social uniformity imposed by RWP were sent to labour camps (the largest being the building site of the Danube-Black Sea Canal), prisons (an entire prison system was created, the most famous ones being at Sighet and Piteúti) or were deported (forced deportations being organised for example in Banat for those identified as enemies of the regime). Despite the official political unanimity regarding the necessity to transform the entire national structure on the Soviet model, at the political superior level (among the leaders of the RWP) a dispute took place between different fractions of the party over political supremacy. Counting on Soviet support, the fraction led by the General Secretary of the Party, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, managed in 1952 to politically neutralise their rival group, led by Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca. Moreover, GheorghiuDej acted against another of the party leaders, LucreĠiu Pătrăúcanu, who was sentenced to death in 1954, after a long detention and a mock trial. (Betea 2001). Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the so-called Secret Report or Speech presented by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956 established new challenges for the RWP leaders. Accused by Miron Constantinescu and Iosif Chiúinevski of using Stalinist methods in his political activity, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej neutralised the political attack with the help of the other Romanian party leaders. The consolidation of Gheorghiu-Dej’s position within the party, after he had supported the Soviet Union in solving the 1956 Hungarian crisis, allowed the RWP leader to eliminate his last opponents at the superior level of the party. During the plenary that took place in June-July 1957, Miron Constantinescu and Iosif Chiúinevski were politically marginalised, losing all their functions within the party (Tismăneanu 2005, 173-203). 1958 was a year marked by two significant events for the evolution of the Romanian communist regime. The withdrawal of the Soviet troops from the Romanian territory, as well as the aggressive measures to finish the collectivisation process determined the tightening of the internal security measures. Thus, criminal laws became more severe and the number of political prisoners serving their sentences in the labour camps increased (Deletant 1997, 114-118). Early 1960s coincided with the official announcement in 1962 of the completion of the socialist transformation of agriculture and also with the first tensions between the Soviets and the Romanians, due to the refusal of the Soviets to support the Romanian commitment to continue the industrialisation policy. This conflict influenced the autonomous direction

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taken by the Romanian international affair policies in relation to Moscow. The conflict was determined mainly by the necessity to find alternative sources of technology for Romanian industry. Simultaneously, by distancing itself from the Soviet position, the RWP was left without its main source of internal legitimacy (the proletarian internationalism and the political alliance with the Soviet Union). As a consequence, the RWP was forced to adopt nationalism as a legitimising discourse. The main element of the nationalist discourse promoted at the time by the party in order to support the industrialisation plans of the country was the argument of following the national interests. In other words, from the Marxist ideological perspective, such a model of inner development was identified by the Romanian leadership as the only viable option for consolidating national independence and development, respectively for creating a strong working class as a support of the political regime (Ionescu 1965, 51-83, Floyd 1965, 72-81). The tensions between the Soviet Union and Romania also determined in 1962-1964 a campaign for the de-sovietisation of the Romanian public and cultural life: a series of institutions with a Romanian-Russian profile were closed, and the Russian names previously given to streets, research institutes or towns were changed (Niculescu-Mizil 2003, 12). Moreover, the emphasis previously placed on the importance of the Slavic element in relation to the new “historical truths” decreased (Georgescu 2008, 47-53) within the cultural or academic publications. Following Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s death in March 1965, his political successor to the party leadership, Nicolae Ceauúescu, continued and even intensified the ambitious plans for industrialising the country. His public defiance towards the Soviet leaders brought him genuine popular support and strengthened his national and international image. More significantly, during his leadership, nationalism not only survived but also succeeded in subduing the Marxist discourse resulting in what Katherine Verdery termed as the indigenization of Marxism” (Verdery 1994, 121).

Works Cited I. Francoism Cardona, Gabriel. 2006. Historia Militar de una Guerra Civil: Estrategias y tácticas de la guerra de España. Barcelona: Flor del Viento. Casanova, Julián. 1992. El pasado oculto. Fascismo y violencia en Aragón. Zaragoza: Mira Editores.

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Elorza, Antonio. 1990. La modernización política en España. Madrid: Endymon. Fontana, Josep. 1986. España bajo el franquismo. Barcelona: Crítica. Germani, Ginno. 1975. Autoritarismo, fascismo e clasi sociale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Moa, Pío. 1999. Los orígenes de la guerra civil española. Madrid: Encuentro. —. 2009. El derrumbe de la Segunda República y la guerra civil. Madrid: Encuentro. Molinero, Carme. 2005. La captación de las masas. Política social y propaganda en el régimen franquista. Madrid: Cátedra. Molinero, Carme., Margarida Sala, Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó. 2003. Una inmensa prisión. Los campos de concentración y las prisiones durante la guerra civil y el franquismo. Barcelona: Crítica. Molinero, Carme and Pere Ysàs. 1992. El règim franquista: feixisme, modernització i consens. Vic: Eumo. Morodo, Raúl. 1985. Los orígenes ideológicos del franquismo. Acción Española. Madrid: Alianza. Ortega, José Antonio and Javier Silvestre. 2005. Las consecuencias demográficas de la Guerra Civil, X Congreso de la AEHE. Pérez Ledesma, Manuel. 1994. “Una dictadura por la gracia de Dios.” Historia Social, 20: 173-194. Reig-Tapia, Antonio. 2006. Anti-Moa. Barcelona: Ediciones B. Sánchez Recio, Glicerio. 1996. Los cuadros políticos intermedios del régimen franquista, 1936-1939. Alicante: Instituto Juan Gil-Albert. Saz, Ismael. 2004. Fascismo y Franquismo. Valencia: Universitat de València. Thomàs, Joan Maria. 2001. La Falange de Franco. Fascismo y fascistización en el régimen franquista: 1937-1945. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés. ICJG-A.

II. Communism Betea, Lavinia. 2001. LucreĠiu Pătrăúcanu: moartea unui lider comunist: studiu de caz. Bucureúti: Humanitas. Dawson, Richard E., Kenneth Prewitt, Political Socialization. 1969. New York: Little, Brown. Quoted in Yinghong Cheng, Creating the “New Man” From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009. Deletant, Dennis. 1997. România sub regimul comunist. Bucureúti: FundaĠia Academia Civică.

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Floyd, David. 1965. Rumania. Russia’s Dissident Ally, New York: Praeger. Gabanyi, Anneli Ute. 2001. Literatura úi politica în România după 1945. Bucureúti: Editura FundaĠiei Culturale Române. Georgescu, Vlad. 2008. Politică úi istorie. Cazul comuniútilor români 1944-1947. Bucureúti: Humanitas. Ionescu, GhiĠă. 1994. Comunismul în România. Bucureúti: Litera. —. 1965. The Reluctant Ally. A Study of Communist Neo–Colonialism. London: Ampersand. King, Robert. 1980. History of the Romanian Communist Party. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Niculescu-Mizil, Paul, O istorie trăită, Memorii. II. Bucureúti: Editura DemocraĠia. Tismăneanu, Vladimir. 2005. Stalinism pentru eternitate. O istorie politică a comunsimului românesc. Iaúi: Editura Polirom. Verdery, Katherine. 1994. Compromis úi rezistenĠă. Cultura română sub Ceauúescu. Bucureúti: Humanitas, 1994.

Notes 1

It is important to note that another half a million people left Spain in 1939, frightened by the Francoist political repression. 2 Compared, for example, with the German Blitzkrieg strategy. 3 The key elements of the dictatorship continued to exist throughout 1976. It was not until November of that year that the Francoist parliament – the Cortes – passed a law for political reform. This was followed by the dismantling of the single party and trade unions and the legalization of the Communist Party in the spring of 1977, the first democratic elections in June 1977, the amnesty of political prisoners in October 1977 and the adoption of a democratic constitution in June 1978. 4 Due to his advanced age, Franco handed over the position of Prime Minister to Luis Carrero Blanco in June 1973. After the assassination of Carrero Blanco in December 1973 by the ETA organisation, the position of Prime Minister fell into the hands of Carlos Arias Navarro, former Minister of Security. Because of his long and fatal illness, Franco also handed over the functions of head of state to Juan Carlos of Bourbon between July 19 and September 2, 1974, and again between October 30 and November 20, 1975. 5 Spanish Traditionalist Phalanx of the Assemblies of the National Syndicalist Offensive (Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva NacionalSindicalista). Years later it was simply known as the National Movement (Movimiento Nacional). 6 In September 2008, Judge Baltasar Garzon issued a list of 143,353 people known to have been executed by the Francoist regime, although the true figure may be considerably higher according to historians.

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13

The last concentration camp was dismantled in 1962. The individual laws were the Fuero del Trabajo (March, 1938), the Ley Constitutiva de las Cortes (July, 1942), the Fuero de los Españoles (July, 1945), the Ley de Referéndum Nacional (October, 1945), the Ley de Sucesión en la Jefatura del Estado (July, 1947), the Ley de Principios del Movimiento Nacional (May, 1958), and the Ley Orgánica del Estado (January, 1967). 9 The military aid from Hitler and Mussolini was instrumental in Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. However, the Spanish dictator used the terrible economic situation in Spain after the war as a pretext not to get involved in World War II on the Axis side. Spain was neutral between September 1939 and June 1940, nonbelligerent between June 1940 and October 1943, and again neutral from October 1943 until the end of the war. Between August 1941 and October 1943, about 47,000 Spanish volunteers – the Blue Division – participated along with the Wehrmacht in important military actions on the Eastern Front. The balance of casualties was 5,000 dead and over 11,000 wounded. 10 Gino Germani distinguishes between "totalitarian fascism" in the case of Germany and Italy, and "authoritarian fascism" in the case of Spain. 11 CPR existed until 1948; a new version of the name, Romanian Communist Party (RCP), appeared in 1965 [Partidul Comunist Român] 8

CHAPTER TWO COMPARING FRANCOISM AND COMMUNISM: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES AND IMPLICATIONS FLORIN ABRAHAM1

Research Premises Using rational instruments for researching human societies’ organization has implied from the very beginning a comparative undertaking. Aristotle, in his Politics, can rightfully be considered the founder of comparative political analysis (Ishiyama 2012, 8-9; O’Neil 2009, 7-8). In an operational definition, the comparative method consists in identifying, analysing and explaining resemblances and differences between the subjects of the comparison. Giovanni Sartori identifies three essential questions for the comparative method: “why we compare?”; “what is comparable?”; “how we compare?” (Sartori 1994, 14-34). Although the comparative method has been known and used for more than two millennia, and during the twentieth century Comparativism in political science defined itself as a distinct topic under the influence of Behaviourism, with important results, the epistemological dilemmas and the methodological controversies remain numerous (Landman 2008, 11-5). When associating different phenomena and historical processes they are inevitably resembled or even cognitively homogenized in order to be more easily comparable. However, we must instantly ask ourselves if the elements identified to be comparable are the most important features, or we confront ourselves with the risk of essentialising and de-contextualising events, phenomena and historical processes which are not only distinct but also different. This is the disadvantage of any synchronic comparative analysis, by which the importance of the fundamentally diachronic nature of historical facts is minimized. The collocation “comparing the (in)comparable” can describe the problematic knot of the comparative method, also used for analysing Communism in Romania and the Francoist regime in Spain.

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The objective of the present chapter does not concern a debate on general issues regarding comparative political analysis of states, governments or societies; instead, we set to clarify aspects concerning a comparison of ideology and propaganda within non-democratic regimes, in order to use the proximate kind for Communism and Francoism. This chapter, of a theoretical nature, has the role of facilitating an understanding of the problematic dimension of historical studies concerning Francoism and Romanian Communism included in the second and the third sections of the volume. The main premise of the current research is that theories, concepts or philosophical visions over historical phenomena have both a specific epistemic function, in the sense of describing and explaining the past, and a political one, explicitly assumed or implicitly attached, with the objective of transforming reality by the very manner of defining and explaining it. If within political analysis the use of the comparative method has an explicitly predictable purpose, comparative historical analysis, apparently neutral, assumes nevertheless the task of explaining some facts and political phenomena belonging to the past. In spite of all the apparent objectivity of the historical method, we argue in this introductory context that choosing the cases, the comparison units and, also, the level of the analysis (micro- or macro-societal, individual or systemic) implies a subjective influence reflecting the political values of the researcher. Such clarification is the more important as our reflection dwells upon two important “isms”, Communism and Francoism, both generating polarized reactions within the academic field. Assuming the inherently subjective (but not partisan) nature of the analytic undertaking is the precondition of an honest research in the socio-political field (Eagleton 2003, 103-39). The purpose of comparing Francoism and Communism is neither the exaggeration of resemblances nor the cancellation of differences, but emphasizing some politico-institutional mechanisms of certain regimes that marked the European history during a “short century”, according to the suggestive formula used by Eric Hobsbawn (1994).

Spain and Romania: Mirror Images The simple comparison between the politic-institutional elements that confer identity to Francoism and Romanian Communism is not sufficient in order to thoroughly understand the two political regimes, different but also similar in many respects. We need to take into account the structural historical elements upon which the dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century dwell.

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Spain and Romania are Neo-Latin nations and spaces dominated by Romance languages, evolving mainly from the civilization matrix of the Roman Empire. Their paths of historical development were however different. In Spain the Islamic (Moorish) civilization came as an addition to the Roman and pre-Roman cultural and linguistic levels. The Romanian space has been a meeting point of Slavic, Ottoman, Hungarian and German influences. The modern Romanian and Spanish nations were formed under the strong influence of the Christian religion: the Catholic rite in Spain and the Orthodox rite in Romania, both legitimizing hierarchical social structures. The traditional Romanian and Spanish societies are hierarchically organized, being based on the communitarian family type, in which the relation between parents and children is authoritarian and that between brothers is equalitarian (Todd 1996). This family matrix had an important influence upon the type of political culture emerging during the twentieth century. While medieval Spain developed into a great colonial power, by means of its vast American empire, the Romanian medieval states were under the permanent pressure of the Ottoman Empire. However, the idea of an antiIslamic “Reconquista” played an essential role in the political imagination of the Spanish and the Romanians (Boia 2001, 129-160; Payne 2011, 72110), each of the two states considering itself to be the “defender of Christian Europe”. In spite of the geographical distances separating them, Spain and Romania remained at the periphery of the capitalist system, having strong conservative agrarian economic structures. Adapting to modernity proved to be a problem both for Spanish and for Romanian political elites. The issue of national identity, of the relation between centre and provinces (periphery) is common to both Spain and Romania during the period following World War I. The fear of Communism was common to both Spanish and Romanian societies, but manifested in different forms and at different levels. If in the interwar Romania Communism was synonymous to bolshevism and the neighbouring Soviet expansionist danger, in Spain Communism was initially associated to Republicanism and to other manifest forms of democracy. At a later stage, following the Soviet Union’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Communism also meant international political and military presence (Casanova 2010, 212-35; Payne 2004). Francoism was born and legitimized through the idea of the permanent danger embodied by Communism. Upheld by conservative and nationalist elements of Spanish society, Franco was supported during the Civil War not only by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but also by small groups of volunteers of

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the European extreme right, including some from Romania (Keene 2007, 1-17). Afterwards, during the Cold War, the Francoist regime was accepted by the West, through a tacit but limited recognition. In fact, General Franco’s dictatorship was also possible due to the competition between the Great Powers and to the geopolitical games that prevailed over democratic considerations (Balfour 1999, 127-228). The instauration of Communism in Romania was not the result of an internal conflict, as in the case of Francoism, but was the direct consequence of Soviet Union’s military and political domination over the Eastern European space. Romanian Communism was considered, at least during its first two decades, a direct result of the imperial control exercised by the Soviet Union and not a bloody consequence of a civil war in which an internal force defeated the other. By contrast, although General Franco won the Civil War with external help, he benefited from another type of legitimacy than the Romanian communist regime, which was rightfully perceived as exogenous to society. Summing up this sketch of basic historical data concerning Spain and Romania at their meeting points with Francoism and Communism, we can highlight that both the Spanish and the Romanian societies were submitted to endogenous and exogenous modernizing pressures. Francoism and Communism can be thus interpreted as two different methods, by which a break-up with the liberal bourgeois societies was attempted, for different ideological reasons, but often using similar instruments.

Macro-Theories and their Methodological Utility Comparativism in the field of non-liberal regimes (in the sense of those governing types which do not use the procedures of representative democracy) was dominated and still is by two “great political theories”: Totalitarianism and Fascism. Both macro-theories aim to explain the genesis, functioning and the evolution of at least two non-democratic political regimes, thus being genetically comparative (Brooker 2009).

Totalitarian Theory The comparative analysis of the twentieth century types of European extremism was from the very beginning approached by means of the totalitarian theory, which underwent a gradual methodological consolidation. Franz Borkenau, in his book The Totalitarian Enemy (1940), initiated, at the beginning of the World War II, the undertaking of the comparative systemic analysis between Nazism, also called “brown bolshevism”, and

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Stalinism, defined as “red Fascism” (quoted in Traverso 2001, 35-6). Following this line of analysis, Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a fundamental book for the theory of Totalitarianism. In the comparative research of the totalitarian phenomenon, Arendt considers bolshevism and Fascism as representative as totalitarian movements and regimes. Italian Fascism, to which the “totalitarian” concept first referred to, was not considered an authentic totalitarian regime, being placed in the category of traditional dictatorships, as in the Il Duce’s Italy terror did not reach the dimensions and did not possess the nature of that used in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The Arendtian theory of Totalitarianism contains, within its explanatory core, the idea of the degeneration of the human condition in the case of the modern man, isolated and alienated in a new type of society, which makes possible the rise of totalitarian movements, transformed after winning the power into party-states. Two European emigrants in the United States of America, Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski consider, in a second founding book of the totalitarian theory, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1965), that Stalinist bolshevism, Nazism and Italian Fascism are prototypes of the totalitarian regimes. In addition, communist China and the communist regimes in Eastern Europe were defined as “totalitarian dictatorships”. The functionalist analysis achieved by Friedrich and Brzezinski distinguished six defining elements for totalitarian dictatorships: an official ideology, consisting of a doctrinal body covering all important aspects of human existence; a single mass party, including a small part of the population (up to 10 per cent), which is a hierarchically organized political group, led by a single leader; complete monopoly over the army; complete monopoly over means of mass communication (press, radio, cinema); a controlling police system not only for the proven “enemies” of the regime, but also arbitrary against various categories of the population; central control over the entire economy through a bureaucratic coordination of corporatist entities that used to be independent (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965, 22-3). The analytic premise assumed by Friedrich and Brzezinski in Totalitarian dictatorship is the possibility of increasing the number of totalitarian regimes and implicitly the diversification of the power exercising forms within them. Totalitarian dictatorships are different from other types of political regimes through their structure and leadership process, that is, through the political system morphology. Friedrich and Brzezinski rightfully consider that a single factor of the six mentioned above is not totalitarian in itself, but their cumulative combination leads to the totalitarian state. The latter differs from traditional forms of

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dictatorship by the simultaneous existence of a political elite and an ideology that promises a realization of the Future, radically different from the old society, by precisely the group that takes totalitarian state leadership. As far as ideology is concerned (National-Socialism and Communism), the political elite promoted a total destruction of the past society and an integral reconstruction of a new society, having as its main element the New Man. The consensus reached by the totalitarian theory authors refers to the inclusion of Nazism and Stalinism among totalitarian regimes. The extension of the “totalitarian” adjective over other regimes becomes a problem if we rigorously apply the conceptual grid used by Hannah Arendt, and also by Friedrich and Brzezinski. The totalitarian character of the Romanian communist regime was automatically presumed, as it was applied, under Soviet military control, in the so-called “popular democracy” model. If we thoroughly acknowledge the issue of the Romanian communist regime’s totalitarian nature, we notice that it was imposed from outside, for lack of a significant previous communist movement, so that, contrary to the Soviet Union, here the legitimacy of Communism was problematic. The fact that the totalitarian type of state was directly imposed in the countries behind the Iron Curtain had a great importance during the first two decades of communist regimes; in the absence of the communist movements previous to the satellization – and, implicitly, in the absence of a popular support for communist parties – societal control was predominantly exercised by violent means. From a formal point of view, communist Romania and the rest of Soviet satellitecountries took over the totalitarian state institutions. However, their functioning, the specific feature of Romanian Communism was provided by two factors: the imposition in power of the Romanian Communist Party, under the threat of the Red Army present in the country, and the lack of a radical left movement political tradition. Differences emerging among countries of the Soviet bloc during the post-Stalinist period (often called post-totalitarian) are consequences both of Moscow’s control relaxation in Eastern Europe and the broader context of the East-West relations, as well as different political traditions (Brzezinski 1967). From a methodological point of view, we can extract the important observation that totalitarian analytic grid established during the first decade of the Cold War is not flexible enough in order to analyse the transformations taking place even in the case of one type of political regime, the communist one. The numerous attempts to save the classical theory of Totalitarianism, by revising a part of its initial theses, are a

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strong argument for demonstrating the marginal utility of a “grand theory” in the diachronic analysis of communist regimes (Thompson 2002, 79-89). The classic totalitarian theory (i.e., Arendt and Friedrich, Brzezinski) was only marginally used for the study of Francoism. The “conspiracy explanation”, which essentially states that General Franco’s regime was not stigmatized through the “totalitarian” collocation in the Western academic environment during the Cold War for political reasons, is not sufficiently credible (Gleason 1995, 128-148). Even the authors of the non-Marxist left hesitate in calling Francoism a form of Totalitarianism, preferring to integrate it among dictatorial regimes. Even if in the public discourse Franco is often defined as “totalitarian”, the academic approaches refuse to trivialize totalitarian theory. During the Cold War Francoism was not considered a totalitarian form of leadership by the academic mainstream because it did not cumulatively fulfil the conditions stated as essential for a totalitarian state (Linz 2000, 53; Schapiro 1972). At most, in a maximal interpretation, Franco’s regime fulfils the features of a totalitarian dictatorship during the years of the Civil War (1936-1939), when the political opposition was subject to terror, the Falange became a single party and political and civil liberties were suspended. All in all, totalitarian theory has a marginal utility for comparing Francoism and Romanian Communism as: (a) by using a closed theory, created in the opening stages of the Cold War, the analysis of the communist regimes’ dynamics is deficient, as post-Stalinist changes were no longer incorporated within its conceptual corpus; (b) General Franco’s regime cannot be categorized as orthodox Fascism as we will see in the following section. The comparison between a totalitarian regime and a military dictatorship lacks the epistemic support of the totalitarian theory.

Fascism Theory Ideological and scientific disputes around the totalitarian theory have also extended over the study of Fascism. During the Cold War, left wing Western intellectuals, using Marxist theory, built a “grand theory” of Fascism, in which they also included “extreme right” parties and political regimes (Gregor 1999, 3-5). According to this approach, Fascism was a global scale phenomenon, in which the Mussolinian and the Nazi models were considered the most representative cases, but not the only ones (Iordachi 2009, 1-2). Fascism was interpreted as a result of the crisis of capitalism, being a form of reaction against the resurrection of the proletariat in the context of deepening class struggle.

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The counter-reaction to the Marxist “grand theory” of Fascism was, coming from the right wing historians (for example, Ernst Nolte), the use of the concept of “generic Fascism”, being synthetically defined as a reaction to modernity. Following the same conceptual line, of defining a “minimal Fascism”, Roger Griffin presented Fascism as an ideology whose core myth centres on the imminent rebirth (palingenesis) of an existing nation-state from decadence and dissolution prevailing within a post-liberal (and decidedly anti-Marxist) new order, a concept summed up in the (binomial) expression “palingenetic ultranationalism”. (quoted in Feldman 2008, 26)

The theoretical spectrum dedicated to the analysis of Fascism is wider, as several competing and conflicting schools of thought could be identified in this respect. If we take into account only the general manner of explaining European Fascism, following Daniel Woodley, we can extract the following: the Marxist perspective – “structural crisis of capitalism; new form of Bonapartism; exceptional form of capitalist state; bourgeois reaction; destruction of reason; generalized tendency”); the modernization theory – “extremism of the centre; crisis of modernization; Fascism and Communism as modernizing dictatorships”; the “generic Fascism” theory – “Fascism as populist ultranationalism; third-way ideology; comparability of fascist ideologies; complicity of conservative elites”; the culturalist approach – “specific cultural sources of Fascism; Fascism = national + socialism; Nazism manifests aspects of Fascism; singularity of Nazism”; critical theory post-structuralism – “Antinomies of Enlightenment rationality; logical consequence of humanism; state of exception; regulation of capitalist modernity” (Woodley 2010, 4-5). The dispute between the authors supporting competing Fascism theories and the obsession for finding an all-encompassing typology for Fascism, following the Weberian tradition of the ideal type, highlight a few weaknesses of the comparative theory within the studies on Fascism. First of all, we can notice that offering a minimal operational definition of Fascism may settle its nature but not its causes. The dispute on the classifications and generalizing concepts focuses too much on an aspect which is not essential for the historical research, the latter using induction for the empirical investigation. Of course, the deductive method should not be fundamentally rejected, but the theoretical descriptive set must be approached from the perspective of its heuristic value for comparing various forms of Fascism. We can notice, from the multiple theories concerning Fascism, the prototypical role that Italian Fascism and Nazism play. They have a central

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role in defining Fascism and their features are also (mechanically) extended over some other extreme right movements or political regimes (Dobry 2001, 56-8). Extreme right political parties from the United Kingdom, France, Hungary or Romania have been integrated into the “European Fascism” starting in fact from the classical types of Italian Fascism and Nazism (Renton 1999, 30-43). However, the import of an explanatory model and its expansion over different societies in which radical parties and movements activated can prove risky, as a uniformed and falsely synchronic history “is invented”. However, this does not mean that European extreme right parties were completely disconnected with one another or that each represented a unique, exceptional and incomparable case, but only that each party, movement or political regime must be understood within the complexity of the historical (inter-) national context. The use of the concept of “fascist essence” within the comparative historical research presents the risks of approaching political phenomena in static terms. Also, the sole use of the ideological criterion, the political values of political parties, can lead to a superficial understanding of the political process. Ideologies must be analysed in the context of its social interaction and not only as a philosophical corpus of ideas. At a certain historical moment, nationalism, for example, can have a significant political impact, while in some other contexts its influence can be limited or even marginal, without significant changes taking place within its ideological core. However, these changes in the historical role of fascist parties in the twentieth century Europe can be better understood if the synchronic analysis is combined with diachronic inductive research. The comparative method and the case study should be complementary, in order to avoid both the “scholastic” formal character of a research anchored in “generic Fascism” and the localizing Positivism lacking a theoretical horizon. The analysis of disputes from inside the study of Fascism demonstrates its relevance by trying to answer the question “Is Franco’s regime fascist?” In studying Franco’s regime, this question has acquired obvious ideological connotations. In an encyclopaedic work, Richard Griffiths provides from the beginning his arguments concerning the non-fascist nature of Francoism, often branded “fascist” but in fact differing very substantially from the “classic” Fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. Francoism was less a coherent political ideology, more a series of pragmatic reactions to a changing political scene, the main aims being the maintenance of Franco’s power within Spain and the preservation of Spanish interests in the outside world.

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As circumstances changed, one or other of the disparate components that made up the ruling party came to the fore, and others became less important. Most generalizations turn out to be invalid, whether they be the Spanish post-Franco characterization of Francoism as having been a form of “Fascism”, or the delineation, by so many, of Franco’s basic political position as having been purely and simply that of a traditional military reactionary. The picture of Franco as a “conservative” rather than “fascist” figure has always been helped by the fact that the nationalist rebellion in 1936 appears to fit in with a whole Spanish tradition of right-wing military coups from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, the most recent of which had resulted in the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera from 1923 to 1930. (2006, 250).

Marxist historiography, Spanish or international, considered Francoism as just another variety of the interwar European Fascism, which also extended after the World War II. More interesting than these ideologically biased evaluations are the researches that are not starting from a minimal definition in order to reach a verdict at any price, but which instead seek to establish various resemblances between the Francoist regime and other political regimes existing simultaneously with Franco’s dictatorship. The dictatorial regime established by Franco in 1939 is obviously different from the Nazi or even the Mussolinian ones. The competition between the army, representing the conservative strata of society, and the fascist party can be found both in Spain and within the dictatorial regime of General Ion Antonescu in Romania. At the same time, much like the Vichy regime of Marshall Philippe Pétain, General Franco utilized the fascist rhetoric used in Europe in those times but did not apply an ideological project similar to Italian Fascism or Nazism. During the sixties and the seventies, Francoism was closer, in terms of political objective and governance, to the Perónist regime in Argentina or to the Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile (Tusell 2007, 11-3). During the same period of the Cold War, from an academic Western perspective, the Franco regime was not regarded as a totalitarian regime, as was the case with communist countries. Another argument for prudently defining Francoism as a fascist regime consists in the fact that, although the Falange has become a single party in Spain in 1939, it was not an avant-garde modernist movement, as it initially emerged following the Italian fascist model, but instead turned into a conservative movement. The Falange’s influence did not go so far as to become a real party-state (as happened with the NSDAP in Germany), having to share its control over society with the Army and the Catholic Church. Without aiming to perform a detailed comparative analysis between Francoism and the other military dictatorships of the twentieth century, we

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must notice however that the plurality of interpretations concerning Franco’s regime starts from the fact that it has suffered significant changes between 1939-1975, according to the international macro-tendencies. During the World War II, although it formally preserved Spain’s neutrality, Franco was close to Fascist regimes (i.e., Germany and Italy), which had arisen to power throughout Europe. From the end of the second world conflagration until 1953 an isolationism policy was followed by Franco’s regime. After signing the Madrid Pact with the United States of America a gradual accommodation with Western democracies could be detected, but without the new approach in international policy to involve immediate and large changes in domestic political, meaning democratization. Spain’s accession to the United Nations in 1955 triggered slow changes in the domestic policy in order to avoid a new international isolation. Therefore, interpreting Francoism by using the analytical grid of the grand theory of Fascism rather leads us on a closed road than towards decrypting the avatars of a political regime lasting almost four decades. A complementary approach to the traditional one, in which resemblances are sought between a list of Fascism’s general features and a given political regime, is that by which the character of a regime is analysed based on the manner in which transition towards democracy is performed. Walter Laqueur considered that Franco’s “national Catholic” regime was neither fascist nor above all totalitarian, as transition towards democracy lasted less than, for example, in the case of Russia, which was led with the instruments of a totalitarian state. (Laqueur 1996, 115-6). However, evaluating the nature of a non-democratic political regime from the perspective of the time span concerning transition towards democracy is, no doubt, innovative but methodologically inconsistent. The time span and the depth of the post-dictatorial transition processes are not, by themselves, direct indicators for the “fascist” or “totalitarian” character of a political regime. Transition towards democracy has an exogenous component, and Spain managed to overcome most of the problems generated by Francoism also because it benefited from the support of United States of America and European countries. In comparison, postSoviet Russia, which is a country four times larger in terms of population, did not benefit from financial resources such as those provided to Spain, by direct economic trade or European funds. If we also take into account the different time span of dictatorial regimes, then it becomes clearer the fact that transition to democracy does not tell us much about the nature of the non-democratic regime.

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The Role of Ideology and Propaganda in Communism and Francoism The analysis of the societal control as exercised in communist Romania and Franco’s Spain inevitably involves the study of the roles fulfilled in the two regimes by the ideology and the propaganda machine. Thus, the role of ideology occupies a central position within the disputes concerning the totalitarian or fascist nature of Francoism. Unlike the communist regime in Romania, which used a relatively stable corpus (called Marxism-Leninism), the Francoist regime did not build a unitary ideological arsenal, comparable in the complexity with Karl Marx’s and Lenin’s writings. We decided not to focus in this study on the numerous competing visions concerning the nature and political functions of ideology, as this was not the aim of our research. We are using instead the generic definition regarding the operational function of ideology: “the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life” (Eagleton 1991, 1). The comparative study in a functionalist grid of the role of ideology indicates significant differences between Communism and Francoism. Marxism-Leninism is an ideological model pre-existing the formation of the communist regime in Romania. What we call “Francoism” is a corpus of ideas created in the atmosphere of the Civil War, followed by the establishment and the stabilization of regime and remodelled for pragmatic reasons until 1975. Communist ideology, at least in its official statement, had a great stability because its teleological project aimed at building the communist society, the New Man. The differences in ideological emphasis emerging in Romania during Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime (19481965) and Nicolae Ceauúescu’s regime (1965-1989), although explainable through political strategies of legitimizing the two leaders, were motivated by the logic of historical materialism. During the first two decades, the communist power was in a period of “struggle against the bourgeois regime and its remnants” and in the following stage a “quantitative accumulation” was achieved, which allowed the abolition of “class exploitation” and the set of the objective of “building the multilaterally developed socialist society”. By contrast, Francoism was inexorably linked to the personality and political vision of General Francisco Franco, and during its early stages “was a system marked by a reactionary and militaristic coalition of conservative Catholics, monarchists and fascists” (Pinto 2011, 210). Similarly to Romania, where General Ion Antonescu was associated with the Legionary Movement (September 1940 – January

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1941), General Franco used the fascist movement, the Falange. Unlike the Romanian case, though, the rivalry between the fascist movement and the army was not settled by a violent conflict, but the fascist movement merged into a single party dominated by the conservative elements of the Army and the Catholic Church, a structure named FET-JONS (Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva NacionalSindicalista). It is important to mention, in this context, the fact that Francoism did not have the racial dimension of German Nazism. (Vincent 2010, 145-6). Analysed from a historical perspective, Romanian Marxism-Leninism did not preserve its “ideological purity” but has experienced emphasis changes. The core ideas were never questioned, but nationalism was introduced as the second tool for gaining political legitimacy and mass mobilization, during Nicolae Ceauúescu’s regime. During the last two decades of the communist regime in Romania, the political role of Marxist-Leninist ideology gradually decreased, while by the cult of personality Nicolae Ceauúescu was attributed the image of “grand ideologist”. The analysis of the main ideological documents issued by the Romanian Communist Party between the 10th Congress (1969) and the 14th Congress (1989) highlights the construction a sui generis theory of “ending dependence”, equally towards the Soviet Union and the United States of America. References to Marx and Lenin in official texts are fewer and fewer as the Ceauúescu regime enters into crisis, being replaced by abundant citations from the “leading genius’ works”. Communist Romania under the leadership of the Ceauúescu family acquired the appearance of a conservative state blocking the social elevator and the agrarian work was re-valued; autarchization was an ever stronger tendency. From such a perspective, the end of the communist regime in Romania takes over a part of the features characterizing early Francoism. General Franco proposed to the Spanish society an ideological production having at its centre the cult of personality focused on his own person, to which he added nationalism, fascist elements, anticommunism, traditional conservatism. The emphasis differences were placed according to international political evolution: close to Germany and Italy when they dominated Europe, and open to collaborate with the United States and the United Kingdom after the World War II. Franco did not want the achievement of a “revolution” by which the Spanish society to be transformed, but militated for a dictatorship that would impose “law and order”. Beginning with the sixties, Franco undertook measures of changing the economy, of expanding collaboration with capitalist countries, so that the oppressive regime became less harsh. Implicitly, the

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mobilizing role of ideology was less important, the Spanish citizens being allowed a higher degree of freedom than in the beginning of the regime, but without entering into an authentic transition towards democracy (Townson 2007, 10-1). Spain’s economic growth, which was considered a “miracle”, was achieved in the absence of political liberties, but with the support of American investments, in the economic boom environment characterizing Western Europe during the Cold War. Accepting foreign investments implicitly meant overcoming the phase of autarchy and isolationism, economic nationalism and the anti-capitalist rhetoric being loosened. Communism and Francoism have in common the rejection of parliamentary democracy and of the “bourgeois regime” for different reasons. Communism considers the bourgeois regime as the supreme form of exploitation of man by man. For Franco, liberal democracy and secularization represented the causes of degeneration of the Spanish nation, the Civil War and of the “perversion” of traditional values, affected by the “Masonic liberal conspiracy”. Both in the case of the communist regime in Romania as in the case of the Francoist regime, the ideology served as a vehicle for political mobilization around political leaders and single parties. Of course, official propaganda was the instrument by which the regime tried to attract the citizens’ adhesion to the political values promoted by the respective ideologies. Censorship was the consequence of exercising the state monopoly on information. The functions of the propaganda system were similar for the dictatorial regimes of Romania and Spain, the difference arising in what concerns the amplitude of used methods, the propagandistic instruments and their efficiency. Both Communist Romania and Francoist Spain alike have known periods in which the censorship regime was institutionalized and others in which it was abolished de jure but existed de facto. Formal “abolishment” of censorship (1966 in Spain, 1974 in Romania) was a measure meant to prove the international respectability of regimes which remained dictatorial until the end (Herrero-Olaizola 2007, xii). From the perspective of methodological challenges, the comparison between a communist regime and Francoism, the most important issue is not the difference between Marxism-Leninism and a heterogeneous blend of political values subsumed to Franco’s personality. It consists, however, on explaining the different ideological arguments which took place in the domestic changes of both regimes. We are dealing with a two-level comparative process: firstly, the elements separating or resembling

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Marxist-Leninist ideology to Francoism and, afterwards, the role the ideological factor plays in the domestic changes of each country.

Conclusions Comparative studies contribute to the progress of research, revealing features of events and phenomena that would remain obscure if approached only individually. However, the trans-national comparative analysis is not without risks. Even the research of a single phenomenon from a comparative perspective by using a general theory, for example nationalism, does not remove the danger of reductionism and false evidences (King 2010, 26-30). The parallel study of Francoism and Romanian Communism increases the number of methodological decoys. The use of the grand theories of Totalitarianism and Fascism do not offer analytical instruments of a high methodological precision. The comparison between Fascism and Communism, becoming a classical theme, can be accepted as valid by the reduction to Nazism and Stalinism (Geyer and Fitzpatrick 2009; Kershaw and Lewin 1997), but its extension to Francoism leads us into an authentic minefield. If we use the totalitarian paradigm, we notice that General Franco’s regime does not fulfil the theoretical criteria in order to undoubtedly be defined as totalitarian. The inclusion of Francoism among fascist regimes is therefore a subject of broad polemics. Anyway, the Fascism theory creates the conceptual framework for the analysis of radical “right wing” movements, excluding Communism from its interpretative field. The comparative undertaking must leave the grandiose territory of grand theories, in favour of an inductive sequential approach. Analysing the role ideology and propaganda have in the communist and the Francoist systems can prove to be valid by relying on the functionalist approach. Identifying a set of problems and applying it on the analysed subject is a path that can prove fruitful, if we want to find out not only what resembles the two regimes but also what differentiates them. Only by following empirical approach, after establishing the common and different elements, we can answer if Francoism and Romanian Communism have multiple elements of resemblance or, on the contrary, they only share a common experience since they belong to the genre of “non-democratic regimes”. Totalitarian theory and Fascism theory are therefore useful for analysing some of the features of Romanian Communism and Francoism, but they cannot constitute the comparative theoretical framework. The model proposed is functionalist, in which the premise according to which

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Fascism and Communism are “fundamentally identical”, as the totalitarian theory assumes, has the same weight as that of the failed comparison between Fascism and Communism (rejecting the “grand theory” frame). Thus, the researchers should start their analysis not from the objective of establishing at any price an approximation between Communism and Francoism, but by taking into account the important differences between non-democratic political regimes. In spite of all the methodological risks involved by the comparison between a regime lasting 39 years (in Spain) and another lasting 45 (in Romania), the study of the complex and contradictory relations between political processes and media is useful both for the historiographic progress and for a reflection upon Europe’s history during the twentieth century by means of two case studies: Romanian Communism and Spain under the dictatorship of General Franco.

Works Cited Arendt. Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Balfour, Sebastian, and Paul Preston. 1999. Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century. London, New York: Routledge. Blamires, Cyprian P.. and Paul Jackson, ed. 2006. World Fascism. A historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1. Oxford: ABC Clio. Boia, Lucian. 2001. History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness. Budapest: Central European University Press. Borkenau, Franz. 1940. The Totalitarian Enemy. London: Faber&Faber. Brooker, Paul. 2009. Non-democratic regimes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. 1967. The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Casanova, Julián. 2010. The Spanish Republic and Civil War. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Dobry, Michel. 2011. “Desperately Seeking ‘Generic Fascism’: Some Discordant Thoughts on the Academic Recycling of Indigenous Categories.” In Rethinking the Nature of Fascism. Comparative Perspectives, edited by António Costa Pinto, 53-84. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology. An Introduction. London, New York: Verso. —. 2003. After Theory. New York: Basic Books.

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Feldman, Matthew, ed. 2008. A Fascist Century. Essays by Roger Griffin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedrich, Carl J., and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. 1965. Totalitarian dictatorship and autocracy. New York: Praeger. Geyer, Michael, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds. 2009. Beyond Totalitarianism. Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gleason, Abbott. 1995. Totalitarianism. The Inner History of the Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press. Gregor, A. James. 1999. The Faces of Janus. Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Griffiths, Richard. 2006. “Francoism”. In A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1. World Fascism, edited by Cyprian P. Blamires, and Paul Jackson, 250-252. Oxford: ABC Clio. Herrero-Olaizola, Alejandro. 2007. The Censorship Files. Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain. Albany: State University of New York Press. Iordachi, Constantin, ed. 2009. Comparative fascist studies: new perspectives. New York: Routledge. Ishiyama, John T. 2012. Comparative Politics. Principles of Democracy and Democratization. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Keene, Judith. 2007. Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain During the Spanish Civil War. London: Hambledon Continuum. Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin eds. 1997. Stalinism and Nazism: dictatorships in comparison. New York: Cambridge University Press. King, Charles. 2010. Extreme Politics. Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Landman, Todd. 2008. Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics: An Introduction. Third Edition. London: Routledge. Laqueur, Walter. 1996. Fascism: Past, Present, Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Linz, Juan J. 2000. Totalitarian and Authoritarian regimes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. O’Neil, Patrick H. 2009. Essentials of Comparative Politics. Third Edition. New York, W.W. Norton & Company. Payne, Stanley G. 2004. The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union and Communism. New Haven: Yale University Press. —. 2011. Spain: A Unique History. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Pinto, António Costa. 2011. “Ruling Elites, Political Institutions and Decision-Making in Fascist-Era Dictatorships: Comparative Perspectives.” In Rethinking the Nature of Fascism. Comparative Perspectives, edited by António Costa Pinto, 197-226. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Renton, Dave. 1999. Fascism. Theory and Practice. London: Pluto Press. Sartori, Giovanni. 1994. Compare Why and How. Comparing, Miscomparing and the Comparative Method. In Comparing Nations. Concepts, Strategies, Substance, edited by Mattei Dogan, Ali Kazancigil, 14-34. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Schapiro, Leonard Bertram. 1972. Totalitarianism. London: Pall Mall Press. Thompson, Mark R. 2002. “Totalitarian and Post-Totalitarian Regimes in Transitions and Non-Transitions from Communism.” Totalitarian Movements & Political Religions 1: 79-106. Todd, Emmanuel. 1996. L' invention de l'Europe. Paris: Éd. du Seuil. Townson, Nigel, ed. 2007. Spain Transformed. The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959–75. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Traverso, Enzo. 2001. Le totalitarisme: le XXe siècle en débat. Paris: Éd. du Seuil. Tusell, Javier. 2007. Spain: from Dictatorship to Democracy. 1939 to the present. Oxford: Blackwell. Vincent, Andrew. 2010. Modern political ideologies. Third edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Woodley, Daniel. 2010. Fascism and Political Theory. Critical perspectives on fascist ideology. London: Routledge.

Notes 1

This paper is supported by the Sectorial Operational Programme Human Resources Development (SOP HRD), financed from the European Social Fund and by the Romanian Government under contract number SOP HRD/89/1.5/S/59758.

CHAPTER THREE WAR OF WORDS: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FRANCOIST SPAIN AND COMMUNIST ROMANIA IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOTALITARIAN PROPAGANDISTIC SYSTEMS ÀLEX AMAYA QUER

Socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain were two States based on hostile and antagonistic ideologies. For two decades, until 1967, the two countries had no consular or commercial relations of any kind. Ten more years had to pass until diplomatic relations were fully normalized, and that only occurred when the dictator Francisco Franco had already been dead for over a year and Spain was heading towards a democratic model of a Western kind. However, despite building their regimes on opposite ideological foundations, Francoism and Romanian socialism were both essentially undemocratic and dictatorial. In their quest for their own utopia, both states oppressed their people by depriving them of basic freedom, atomizing them and destroying the social networks and symbolic references. To ensure strict social control and to achieve an acquiescent consensus, Franco’s regime in Spain and communism in Romania used propaganda as a main weapon. Understanding politics and the management of their societies as an ideological war, both regimes used propagandistic means to neutralize any democratic influence considered harmful, constructing elaborate institutional apparatuses whose fundamental features were maintained until the end of both dictatorships. This chapter aims at explaining both processes of development and construction of totalitarian propaganda systems, searching for similarities and differences between two dictatorships whose shadows still hang over the Spanish and the Romanian societies.

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Press and Propaganda in Franco’s Spain When the Civil War began in Spain in July 1936, the side that had risen against the legitimate authority of the Republic was formed by various right-wing political groups. Among them, the Spanish fascist party Falange and the JONS [Falange Española y de las JONS] stood out above the rest. Founded in 1933 by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was imprisoned on Republican territory in March 1936 and would be shot in Alicante on November 20th, and being one of the smallest fascist parties in Western Europe during the Interwar period, Falange interpreted the Civil War as a unique opportunity to achieve its political and social model, as well as the ideological hegemony in the future new order that the military coup intended to establish. Although Falange had to accommodate and share the political space in the rebel side with other political families, it stood out for its activism. That is why many aspects of its program – plus abundant aesthetic elements – would be officially adopted by the new regime after Franco consolidated his supreme authority. The Falange’s fascist conception of propaganda impregnated the New State information policy in the process of establishing a totalitarian model. During the first months of war, the rebel camp provided itself with a power structure called the Junta of National Defence or JDN. Although it was a primal authority scheme, propaganda was from the outset considered a key player in the war effort. In this sense, the JDN established a strict control of both the press and the radio emissions. Ten days after the start of the war, the JDN issued an order to implement the military censorship on all printed publications (BOJDN 1936, 2). This was followed on August 5, 1936 with the creation under the command of the JDN of an Office of Press and Propaganda (BOJDN 1936b, 3). The replacement of the JDN with the so-called State Technical Junta on October 1st meant the rise of Francisco Franco as the head of the state, beginning a process of increasing concentration of political functions in his own person. The powers of the Office of Press and Propaganda (Sevillano Calero 1998, 54) were subsumed within his orbit until January 1937, when Franco ordered the creation of the Delegation of State for Press and Propaganda. This opened the way for a totalitarian propaganda model in which members of the fascist Falange found a suitable environment to insert the communicative doctrine most appropriate to their interests. In April 1937 Franco ordered the merge of all political families that supported him into a single political party, called FET and JONS (Thomas 2000, 35-95). Simultaneously, a more complex and complete propaganda

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policy began to be designed and implemented. It was based on the principles and techniques that the Falangist sector had practiced since its birth. But the process of creating a totalitarian type of press was being conditioned by the struggle over a fundamental issue between the original Falange and other sectors of the regime. This question was whether it should be the state – and by extension Franco –, who directed the policy of propaganda, or the party, in which the Falangists held the hegemony, at least in its superior levels.1 To fix this, Franco imposed a duality of institutions to manage the politics of propaganda. On the state side the National Press and Propaganda Service was created, while on the party side the National Delegation of Press and Propaganda appeared. But in practice the policy of propaganda was being built to benefit the state structure at the expense of the skills and organizational potential that could take FET and JONS as a party. In return, the ideological basis in the building of the propaganda structure was consistent with the goals of the Falangists, as so many of them felt comfortable contributing to the installation of this structure. Some of the Falangists acted as true architects of an information model with a clear fascist orientation which, especially in the case of print media, was very close to the totalitarian doctrines governing in fascist regimes such as Italy and Germany (Pizarroso 1993, 307-355; Cannistraro 1975, Zeman 1973, Welch 1993; Huici Modens 1996, Pratkanis, Aronson 1994). The man who personified this early stage of integration of the Falangist propaganda doctrine in the construction of the New State was the priest Fermín Yzurdiaga2 (Andres Gallego 1997, 41-57), named head of the FET and JONS National Delegation of Press and Propaganda in May, 1937. Yzurdiaga used the Delegation – and periodicals like Arriba España and Jerarquía – as a meeting place for a large group of young Falangists actively interested in developing a propagandistic system of fascist orientation. After the Unification, and in spite of his clerical status, Yzurdiaga clashed with members of the Church hierarchy and the Traditionalist Communion – the Carlists3 – during the process of absorption of all media within the authority of the FET and JONS National Delegation of Press and Propaganda. In any case, Yzurdiaga was momentarily useful to Franco in order to lead and simplify the passage of an agitprop model to an integrative propagandistic model. In February 1938, after finishing his task, Yzurdiaga was replaced by Ramon Serrano Súñer.4 This meant an even greater centralization of the information policy in the state structure to the detriment of the party (Sevillano Calero 1998, 57). Both the state and the party press and propaganda organs were linked to the same person, as Serrano was the minister of Interior – on which the National Press and

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Propaganda Service depended –, and now also Chief of the FET and JONS National Delegation of Press and Propaganda. But Serrano had an ideological perspective that did not break with the conceptualization that Yzurdiaga had imposed, so he protected many of the young Falangists who had begun their work as propagandists with the first Chief of the FET and JONS National Delegation of Press and Propaganda. In fact, Serrano Súñer continued with full-force the construction of a totalitarian political information system. The epitome of this totalitarian policy was the Press Act of 22 April 1938, which had a very noticeable fascist imprint. The authors had been primarily young Falangists such as Jose Antonio Giménez-Arnau,5 Dionisio Ridruejo6 and Antonio Tovar,7 and it was clearly inspired by the Italian press law of 1925. The 1938 Press Act considered the press as the first support of the state, responsible for the creation of a collective consciousness in accordance with the principles on which this New State was established. Those journalists who do not act as “apostles of thought and faith of the nation recovered to its destiny [...] worthy workers in the service of Spain” (BOE 1938, 549)8 should therefore lie outside the world of this new media. Following this line of thought the Official Register of Journalists was created, in order to control who was to be licensed and who was not. The act also greatly restricted the ability of self appointment of editors for the private media. These government-appointed editors became responsible for all purposes for what the media published. An extremely strict censorship was established (Sinova 1988). The Francoist press represented thus a radical break with respect to the old liberal press, which, in the eyes of the 1938 Press Act, had emerged as a harmful agent, a poisoner of consciences that had understood freedom as debauchery. In this sense, the goal was to create a model that would annihilate the concept of free press as it had been understood in the years of the Republic. As FE, one of the many Falangist publications pointed out in April 1937: The national revolution that embodies the Falange in Spain will destroy the anti-Spanish private journalism and also the partisan journalism. There will no longer exist in Spain any another press than the one led by the national-syndicalist state. (FE 1937, 1)

The most active members of the Falangist propagandistic world were enthusiastically ready to carry out the task of destroying the liberal press model, participating in the development of a totalitarian informative policy which did a clean sweep with the traditional liberal journalism. Not only in the creation of a dictatorial model for managing the press, but also physically removing many of the journalists who had the misfortune of not

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being in exile. But the influence of the Falangists in the 1938 Press Act, which was in force until March 19669 (Ruiz Romero 2003), was not sufficient to establish a unique model of totalitarian media as they wanted, because the dictatorship granted the existence of private press. However this was controlled by the Official Register of Journalists, meaning strict censorship and the inability to appoint independent editors. Consequently, the difference between official and private press was virtually nonexistent. The overwhelming use of censorship, the diffusion of rigid slogans (Pérez López 1990, 737-749) and the inclusion of official scripts to be used in the writing of editorials and news (Sevillano Calero 2000, 31) sought to achieve for Spain a landscape for the media, described as follows in the journal Arriba in March 1944: The time of that dark and gloomy fourth power of the liberal years is past and dead, and our newspapers serve today the only thing that is big, endearing and superior in all that we know in the historical life: the truth and the fate of Spain. (Arriba 1944, 1)

From platforms such as the Under-secretariat for Press and Propaganda of the Ministry of the Interior, which was held by Antonio Tovar, and the General Delegation of Propaganda, headed by Dionisio Ridruejo, Falange became a key element in the articulation of direct and absolute control of the state over journalistic information. This is exemplified, among other things, by the creation in 1939 of the EFE News Agency, whose direction was assigned to Giménez-Arnau. But the political struggle within the regime prevented a consolidation of the Falangist hegemony in the fields of the press and propaganda, a consolidation which was amputated in May 1941. Serrano Súñer was appointed as foreign minister and replaced at the Interior by the monarchist General Valentín Galarza. As a consequence, the official media were given to a political rival of the Falangists, and this fact involved the removal of some of its leading figures in this field. These movements took place in a context of the power struggle that led to the departure – and sometimes imprisonment – of those engaged in the most revolutionary aspects of Falangism. This included for example the arrest of the Union leader, Gerardo Salvador Merino,10 in a dark episode that included charges of Freemasonry (Domínguez 2006). Salvador Merino had tried to circumvent the authority of Franco and turn the Spanish Trade Union Organisation – OSE –, the only union allowed by the regime, into an institution of enormous influence and independent of the balance of power within the regime. After two years of dominance, the Falangists began to be expelled from the highest levels of power in the state propaganda machine,

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although the model that they had largely established remained intact for nearly thirty years. The press policy of the dictatorship would remain essentially the one that the Falangists promoted, although it was not directed by them. In order to guarantee the balance of power, Franco handed back to the party some new competences in propaganda, creating the FET and JONS Under-secretariat of People’s Education, which managed the party press (Bermejo 1991). But he also put at the head of it a very moderate Falangist with a clear Catholic background and a blind loyalty to Franco: Gabriel Arias-Salgado.11 Despite this painful withdrawal of authority at the state level, these movements guaranteed that Falange, now with a new Secretary General, José Luis de Arrese, would have an important presence in the distribution between the different political groups performed by Franco in the management of the cultural and informative policy of his regime. In fact, the conception of the Falangist propaganda did not change a bit in its theoretical formulation. This ministerial changes of May 1941 put an end to the consolidation of propaganda as a purely Falangist domain, although the doctrine that inspired it undoubtedly came from the fountains of Spanish fascism. And this was important, because the propaganda was one of the most important weapons that Franco’s regime had for the achievement of social control. Franco’s idea of balance between the different tendencies that had risen against the Republic and were holding the building of his personal regime determined that FET and JONS, as a party, could not reach the importance of the NSDAP in Germany, the National Fascist party in Italy or, logically, the one that Communist parties would have in Eastern Europe. In return, the Spanish Trade Union Organisation became a kind of official union more autonomous than its counterparts in these countries. And it was always directed by Falangists. The autonomy of the OSE also affected the area of propaganda, which evolved independently from the events of 1940-1941. In early 1940 Gerardo Salvador Merino had ordered the creation of a Union Press and Propaganda Service, as a first step to a complete structuring of the publications and media associated with the OSE. The Press and Propaganda Service, later called the National Service of Union Information and Publications, or SIPS, assumed its political role in 1941 as follows: To form, persistently and systematically, a collective state of doctrinal conviction, allowing the spontaneous and sincere attraction of the masses still not incorporated in the Union. [...] Our work as propagators cannot be a systematic praise of an order whose material advantages we are still far from feeling, but must involve an educational mission, and must have, as essential goal, the creation of a true trade-union consciousness, a body of

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Chapter Three convictions whose basic rules are to be establishing, by suggestion and persuasion, of a spirit of community, discipline and service, without which any serious revolutionary task is useless. (BIDNS 1941, 3)

For some of the Falangists, social acquiescence was not essential because the authority of national-syndicalism was self-legitimized by the fact that, in a regime like Franco’s, it had to be necessarily obeyed (Aparicio 1980, 174). However this was compatible with the exaltation of the most revolutionary elements of the national-syndicalist discourse in the OSE’s press during Salvador Merino’s tenure. But that changed with his successor as leader of the official union, Fermín Sanz-Orrio, who also turned the OSE into a more docile organisation, less ambitious in its political objectives. In any case, the official union had a propagandistic structure that in the sixties would prove crucial in the wake of the OSE as a political actor of importance (Amaya Quer 2012). This structure’s main weapon of propaganda was the journal Pueblo. Created in June, 17, 1940 as the “national labour newspaper”, this newspaper served for 44 years12 as the syndical voice within the Falangist sector. Its first editor-in-chief, Jesús Ercilla13 quickly permeated the newspaper with his vision of the press as a battlefield. As he said years later, “the national life in 1940 still had the flavour of the barracks and the urgency of combat”, so the journalistic function could only be understood through the prism of the fascist propaganda, according with the times that Europe was living. As he wrote in the journal Pueblo in June 1940: The world is fighting two tremendous battles, one with guns and one with propaganda [...] And the most intense and the largest noise is produced by the war of words. Millions and millions of rounds per second escape from the antennas of the agencies of the major cities around the globe. (Pueblo 1940, 3)

The model of the press and propaganda in Franco’s Spain was established in 1941 and suffered no excessive variations until the 1966 Press Act. The power struggle within the regime had conditioned its construction and had determined that the State, through the Ministry of the Interior,14 was to be responsible for setting the standards of a system in which both private and official press existed. Since both FET and JONS as in the OSE the leading cadres were in the hands of those Falangists that had survived the purges unleashed against their most rebellious members since 1937, the remaining families of the political order preferred for it to be the state that implemented a propagandistic doctrine largely based on fascist criteria. And this meant that, in spite of the existence of private press, a strict censorship and a tight control prevailed, and determined

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what was to be published and who would do it. The glorification of the Head of State was the main consequence of this model, and one of the elements that survived the shift in the discourse imposed by the international context of 1945. This context blended the issues that were closest to that fascism defeated in the war, covering them with an apparently more respectable veneer of Catholicism. But it did not change in the least the undemocratic nature of Franco’s press model, which kept serving a personal dictatorship during its remaining three decades of life.

Press and Propaganda in Communist Romania When Soviet troops launched in the spring of 1944 their offensive on the Iaúi-Chiúinău line, the leaders of the Communist Party of Romania (CPR) – both those who were exiled in Moscow, and those living in hiding or those who were in the Romanian prisons – realized that their hour of reckoning was approaching. The CPR was a tiny party, with a very limited number of militants throughout the country. This was due not only to its illegality, which persisted from 1924,15 and the repression of Marshal Ion Antonescu’s regime, but also because of a chronic shortage of social penetration since its inception in 1921. In a predominantly agrarian society, in which anti-Semitic prejudices had been widespread, with a meagre proletariat and an intelligentsia clearly tilted to the right and nationalism - which explains the rise of a fascist movement embodied by the Iron Guard between 1930 and 1941 (Veiga 1991) - the Communists simply did not have land on which to grow. But the defeat of the Axis powers on the Eastern Front was near and, with it, the moment which the Romanian communists had been waiting for twenty years: the opportunity to seize power and establish a socialist regime in Romania like the one existing in the Soviet Union. On August 23rd 1944, when the Red Army approached the Romanian border, King Michael I sponsored a coup d’état that finished the dictatorship of Antonescu. Romania switched sides in the war and turned its weapons against Germany. Even though the leadership of the CPR was divided among the exiles - or muscovites, led by Ana Pauker - and those who had been detained in prisons or labour camps, led by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej,16 the coup of August 23rd and the immediate occupation of the country by the Soviet army led them to abandon their differences in order to fulfil the orders that came from Moscow. Both factions accepted to subject the CPR to the status of an essential tool for the political interests of the USSR in the Balkan country. Romanian Communists regarded the Soviet neighbour as the homeland of all workers, not as a

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foreign power, and in the case of many of their leaders the USSR had long been a refuge from the persecutions in their home country. It was a sister nation and it also represented the practical reality of their utopia. Hence their willingness to take power without any kind of democratic modesty was part of an overwhelming desire to build socialism in Romania as soon as possible and at any costs. Since 1945 the wheels of history were turning in their favour, so that in the Stalinist logic that prevailed in them, the orders coming from Stalin were not questionable. There was also no remorse for the lack of morality of the methods used to implement them. First, the party had to grow numerically. Not surprisingly the CPR was a “head in search of a body” (Frunză 1999, 180), but in the context of Soviet occupation the CPR was able to surpass 55,000 members in April 1945 (Tismaneanu 2003, 87) in a propagandistic action dedicated to attract workers, peasants and intellectuals (Morar-Vulcu, 239-282). The Communist Party joined in the first post-Antonescu government, led by General Constantin Sănătescu and gradually gained influence in the cabinet. Communist leaders took over key ministerial portfolios in the second Sănătescu government, inaugurated in November 1944, and in Nicolae Rădescu’s cabinet starting in December. In March 1945, when the pro-communist Petru Groza was appointed Prime Minister, the CPR had become the most powerful party in the Romanian coalition government. Moscow recommended a prudent but unstoppable strategy towards the achievement of total power for the Communists. In this strategy, propaganda would be of fundamental importance. Since the coup of August 23rd, the CPR launched an aggressive and offensive propaganda campaign through the press, radio and street demonstrations. In a positive sense, this offensive meant to represent the CPR as the champion of the struggle against fascism, the defender of the recovery of Northern Transylvania for Romania,17 while respecting the rights of the Hungarian community, and guarantor of the internationalist alliance against fascism and for the achievement of the final victory. In a negative sense, the Communist press launched attack after attack against the traditional parties, accusing them of anti-Sovietism and of collaboration with fascism. They also attacked incessantly Rădescu and Sănătescu, although the CPR had ministers in the governments that they headed. In a propaganda book published by the party in 1945, Rădescu was accused of protecting the old fascists: “under the shield of some alleged Democrats, fascist wolves come out of their lair barking their thirst for blood” (PCR 1945, 169; Semeniuc 2011, 73). However, the CPR, a party that until recently had been struggling to avoid annihilation, suffered from a noticeable lack of experience in the

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area of propaganda. As a result, in January 1945 the party organized a conference on propagandistic issues in order to plan its strategies in this domain and to improve its effectiveness. The conference concluded that the organizational capacities of the Propaganda and Agitation Section of the party, which was controlled by Iosif Chiúinevschi,18 were not sufficient to achieve the political objectives agreed. That is why in March 1945, when the pro-communist Groza reached the head of the government, a Ministry of Propaganda was established.19 Petre Constantinescu-Iaúi,20 an important CPR official, was appointed as minister. This did not involve a loss of power for Chiúinevschi, the authentic Romanian propaganda tsar, but favoured the use of state resources to achieve the goals of the party in this area.21 For the Romanian authorities who did not belong to the CPR the pressure of the presence of Soviet troops in the country and, above all, the hostile and manipulative attitude of Ambassador Andrey Vyshinsky (Ciuceanu et al. 1997), famous for having been the prosecutor in the wellknown Moscow Trials of the thirties, began to be unbearable. Vyshinsky’s pressures forced the king to appoint Petru Groza as Prime Minister, thus paving the way for the obtaining of absolute power for the Communists. The international context also helped his purposes. The honeymoon between the Soviets and its Western Allies was coming to an end and even though in December 1945 American and British envoys agreed with the Soviets that Romania was ready to hold free elections, the traditional parties began to feel that the West was moving its attention away from this part of Europe and directing its concerns to other scenarios of the emerging Cold War such as Germany and the division of Berlin, or the Greek Civil War. In October 1945, the CPR held its first national conference, in which Gheorghiu-Dej was elected Secretary-General, while Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu accompanied him as main secretaries of the Central Committee. Since that moment, propaganda acquired a new goal: to promote incessantly the cult of personality of each of the members of this collective leadership.22 The balance between them was however difficult, and some differences began to appear. In Soviet eyes the most serious of all was the effervescent Romanian nationalism represented by Lucretiu Pătrăúcanu, Minister of Justice. At various meetings held in Transylvania in 1945 and 1946, this Communist intellectual delivered inflamed discourses that could have broken the party’s official caution in the interethnic issue and jeopardized the weak balance between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians in this region. In fact, the CPR, following the Soviet doctrine with respect to national minorities (Brown

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1992, 100-102), had advocated the opening of a Hungarian university and opera in the city of Cluj, in addition to several publishing houses, newspapers and radio stations broadcasting in Hungarian. Pătrăúcanu’s speeches jeopardized the party’s image as a guarantor of minority rights, and this was one reason why he became in 1948 the protagonist of the first important purge within the CPR after World War II. But in 1945 the priority was to achieve absolute power, using the cautious but unstoppable guidelines that Moscow was emanating and were applied both by Ambassador Vyshinsky and the leaders of the CPR. The next step was to guarantee a Communist victory at the first elections after the war, which took place on November 19, 1946 (Giurescu 2007). The Communist Party led an electoral alliance called Democratic Parties Bloc along with other neighbouring forces, including Petru Groza’s Ploughmen's Front and the Social Democratic Party. The Bloc had ample budgets delegated by the Groza government for a massive campaign in which propaganda played a key role, both to glorify the Communist candidates and to vilify the rival bourgeois parties (Banu 2002). In addition there were significant irregularities on Election Day, so the official election results showed a landslide victory for the Communists and their allies, winning 379 of the 414 deputies in dispute. A few weeks after the election the National Bank was nationalized, and in early 1947 the Central Committee plenum of the CPR decided to launch a campaign to “strengthen ties with the masses of the party”, as Scânteia described in January 1947. Practically speaking, this meant the creation of trade associations controlled by the CPR, whether the National Union of Students of Romania, the Union of Trade Unions or the re-launch of the Communist Youth. Along the same lines, the government accelerated the sharing out of land to the landless peasants, all wrapped in the vociferous propaganda of unequivocal proletkult type (Mihai 2009, 208-223) expressed by the party media, but also by Dej, Pauker and Groza under the coordination of Chiúinevschi and Constantinescu-Iaúi. These in turn were surrounded by young activists as close as possible to the Stalinist ideal. It was the case of Miron Constantinescu23, director of the official party organ Scânteia; Leonte Răutu24 (Tismaneanu and Vasile, 2008), responsible for the most acerbic articles against the opposition parties, or Mihai Roller,25 who ended up specializing in the control of history and historiography in Romanian universities. Opposition parties were eliminated throughout 1947, with the connivance of the Soviet Embassy and with the help of Groza’s government. After the famous episode of Tămădău,26 opposition leaders were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, many of them dying in

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prison. When the sentence was announced in November 1947, Scânteia characterized the opposition politicians as a “band of plotters, spies, traitors to the country” and, that they had “received a deserved punishment.” The same issue stated that those arrested had tried to leave with “luxurious furs, jewellery and foreign currency… 100 gold Napoleons and two machine guns” (Scânteia 1947, 1). Moreover, shortly after the Tămădău episode, the leftist faction of the Social Democratic Party managed to take control of the party at its eighth congress and imposed a resolution to merge with the CPR. The leaders opposed to this strategy were expelled from the party and were soon arrested and charged with sabotaging the unity of the working class. The merging process finally culminated between 21st and 23rd February 1948, when Bucharest hosted the First Congress of the Romanian Workers’ Party, or RWP, as the fusion of the CPR with the Social Democratic Party was called. Gheorghiu-Dej was elected Secretary General of the new unified party. In this context, shortly before the unification, the Communist leadership had imposed through the parliament a fundamental decision for the country: the abolition of the monarchy. On December 30th 1947, after various pressures from Dej and Groza, King Michael I abdicated and went into exile in London. The People’s Republic of Romania was immediately proclaimed, thus closing the circle which had begun in August 1944. The communists had finally achieved absolute power in Romania. Throughout this process, the propaganda apparatus gained control over the press and culture in a slow but unstoppable fashion. One of its key features was the purge of journalists. As early as February 1945, before Groza took office as Prime Minister, the Act of Purification of the Press27 was published. Shortly after, an important part of the staff of the Romanian Radio Society was purged. In August 1945 the Union of Professional Journalists was eliminated. Instead the party created the Communist Union of Unions of Artists, Writers and Journalists (Tismaneanu 2006, 489). Simultaneously many books and publications were censored, following a strategy oriented to the past – the books already published –, to the present – those who were in the process of being edited –, and into the future, marking guidelines on what could be published and what could not (Corobca 2010, 39). Thousands of titles were included in lists that grew exponentially as the CPR was achieving the control of the mechanisms of the state. If in 1945 the list had 910 titles, in 1949 it had 8,779. This spread terror in the cities, while government agents went to remove the condemned books from the bookstores and libraries; as a consequence, people were now afraid to read what had been published before 1945 (Tismaneanu 2006, 490). This dynamic was

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strengthened institutionally with the creation in 1949 of the DGPT (The General Direction for Press and Publications [DirecĠie Generală a Presei úi Tipăriturilor]), which was responsible for authorizing what was published, to control the distribution of publications, monitor the bookstores, libraries, antique stores or newspapers, as well as control the typewriters. The DGPT was a direct copy of the Soviet Glavlit.28 A new penal code specified the penalties for those who did not respect the rules of the DGPT, which included imprisonment (Vasile 2011, 57-62). Moreover, journalists, writers and poets who had been highly recognized in the past and who had the misfortune to stay in the country were censored, publicly insulted and ostracized, while sycophants of the new power quickly ascended the social ladder. One of them was a young journalist Sorin Toma,29 who replaced Miron Constantinescu as director of Scânteia in 1947. In January 1948 Toma signed a number of famous articles against the poet Tudor Arghezi. The title of the series of articles -”Poetry of Putrefaction or Putrefaction of Poetry” - revealed how aggressive the new regime was towards the authors who did not conform to the norms of socialist realism (Cesereanu 2003, 84-87).30 Arghezi was severely ostracized and only partially rehabilitated in the years of relative deStalinization after 1956 (Vasile 2011, 168-171). The installation of the Communist dictatorship in the informative, cultural and media spheres was burning stages rapidly, also at the bureaucratic level. Regarding the State, those competencies in terms of censorship were centralized in 1947 in the Ministry of Information coordinated by Constantinescu-Iaúi through the so-called Defascistization Service after they had belonged to a multitude of different agencies.31 But while the machinery of institutionalized censorship and purges at the state level grew, the party kept the dominance in managing the propaganda apparatus. The foundation of the RWP in February 1948 led to several changes in the structure of its Central Committee. These modifications included the lifting of the Section of Propaganda and Agitation32 to the category of Direction of the Central Committee (Ionescu-Gura 2003, 14), the other three being those of Organization, Cadres and Administration. The propaganda seemed to gain importance within the institutional framework of the party. And while the appointed head of the new Propaganda and Agitation Direction was none other than Ana Pauker, the reins of the single-party political propaganda remained in the hands of Iosif Chiúinevschi.33 But the Soviet authorities criticized these changes and the lack of effectiveness and central control that derived. In May 1949 Chiúinevschi travelled to Moscow accompanied by Răutu and other leaders of the propagandistic system34 to see how the propaganda organs

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of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union worked. A few months later, the Propaganda and Agitation Direction returned to its former status of Section and lost the ability to issue directives. The decision-making policy in the field of propaganda was again centralized in the small group of top leaders, i.e. Dej, Pauker, Georgescu and Luca. However, the Section of Propaganda and Agitation controlled much of the official publications, except Scânteia, and other agencies such as the School of Social Sciences, the Institute of Party History, the RWP publishing house and the theoretical journal Lupta de clasă. This pattern remained virtually unchanged, except for a few name changes35 until 1956, when the Section regained the category of Direction of the Central Committee. But the biggest adjustments in the structure and political discourse of the propaganda system were introduced later by Nicolae Ceauúescu at the ninth Congress of the party in July 1965 (Burakowski 2011, 79-86), held four months after his ascension to the position of General Secretary. One of the consequences of this conference was to organize a committee to rehabilitate LucreĠiu Pătrăúcanu’s memory for propagandistic and political reasons. He had been stripped of his position in the party in 1948, arrested, tortured and finally executed six years later. The Communist propaganda machine had played a decisive role in the figuration of Pătrăúcanu as an enemy of the people. The fact that the propaganda was now rehabilitating him only confirms the political nature of its role. Even more spectacular had been its performance thirteen years earlier, having been used to serve the interests of Dej in the almost simultaneous fall from grace of Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu in 1952. The three ended up in jail despite having belonged to the powerful quartet that had dominated the party and the country since 1945. In the case of Pauker, who had been the subject of an extraordinary personality cult following her years of exile in the Soviet Union – she was known as “the Pasionaria of the Balkans”36 – her fall was even more sudden and unexpected (Levy 2001, 194 -220). The Romanian version of Stalinism had eaten most of its parents, and would do so with many of its children. In a country gagged by terror and censorship, one of the dubious legacies they left was a totalitarian propaganda machine which served the political interests of the party leadership. And this was a device that still took forty years to disappear.

Conclusions In spite of the obvious ideological differences between Franco’s dictatorship and the Socialist dictatorship in Romania, the establishment of a propaganda machine of totalitarian type in both countries had important

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similarities. In the process of creating two regimes, both the Falangists and the Communists interpreted the historical context of that time as a unique opportunity not only to achieve power, but to establish their own regime that would make possible their respective and opposing utopias. In this sense, propaganda was understood as a war weapon of great importance. In the case of Spain, the war metaphor corresponded to the context of civil war the country was experiencing, but this understanding of propaganda as a weapon remained after Franco’s victory in 1939 and until the end of the dictatorship. The same happened in the case of the Romanian Communist regime, which although not emerging from a civil war but from a foreign military occupation still used propaganda as a tool to assist in the elimination of the enemies of the party, and even within the party. Both regimes paid close attention to foreign models in order to establish a totalitarian propaganda machine. In the Spanish case it was Mussolini’s Italy and to a lesser extent, Nazi Germany. For Romania, the Soviet example was the only possibility. Although the Franco dictatorship evolved to more heteroclite forms compared with Italian fascism or Nazism, because of the need for adaptation to new historical context after the World War II, the fascist imprint on their way of managing the press and propaganda remained for decades. Franco’s Spain was born in a time when fascism, in spite of its nationalist impulses, seemed able to create a New European Order. And although Germany and Italy were militarily defeated in 1945, Franco’s regime never sacrificed its totalitarian essence. The goal was to keep Spanish society under dictatorial control in spite of a new democratic Europe, which until 1955 attempted to isolate the Spanish regime and never accepted it completely. Propaganda is perhaps the clearest case of continuity of these totalitarian essences. In the Romanian case, Soviet influence has different explanations related to the formation in Central and Eastern Europe of a geopolitical glacis that had to protect the Soviet Union of any military threat from Western Europe. But the transformation of Romania into a socialist regime was not a task carried out by Vyshinsky or the Soviet troops, much as their presence facilitated such actions. It was managed by native Communists who believed in their cause in a fanatic way. The Soviet military occupation made possible a context where people like Dej, Pauker or Chiúinevschi could rise to the foreground of the Romanian political scene. But their actions, however suited to the geopolitical interests of Moscow, had an undeniable ideological basis. Despite standing on opposing political trenches both the Spanish Falangists and the Romanian Communists were alike: they attempted to seize the political opportunities created by international and

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national contexts to impose their historical truth. Characters like Yzurdiaga or Chiúinevschi can thus be perceived as a mutual reflection. Both truths needed to erase the liberal and democratic past in order to consolidate themselves. In this, obviously, the propaganda was to play an important role. The destruction of all traces of freedom and democracy in the media in Romania was an easier process than in Spain, as in the Balkan country the time preceding the arrival of the Communist dictatorship had been also of oppression and lack of liberties. In Spain, however, the vibrant Republican democracy was very recent and thus was excised with greater brutality. The fact that Spain maintained an important private press does not, on the other hand, mean greater tolerance than the one that existed in Romania, but showed the profound differences between Franco’s sui generis fascism and Dej’s Stalinist socialism in the field of economy. At the end of the day, the private press that existed in Spain also bowed to censorship, to the political slogans and to the strict control exercised by a propaganda apparatus to which it was complementary. Perhaps the most important difference is that the heterogeneity within the regime of Franco’s regime – different political families united around a dictator by their common hatred against republican democracy, but with different political objectives – prevented Falangism from dominating the propaganda apparatus. The Falangists laid the foundations of the totalitarian model of the press, but were denied the full management of it in order to maintain the political balance of the dictatorship. This resulted in a greater importance of the state over the party in the management of propaganda. It also made possible for other institutions linked to FET and JONS, like the OSE, to develop their own political agenda and their own tools of propaganda. This scenario could not exist in Romania, where the party assumed the preponderant role. Furthermore, power struggles within the Communist Party did not include different political projects. The construction of Soviet-style socialism was a goal shared by Dej, Pauker or even Pătrăúcanu. But personal struggles were inevitable and they often turned political. The winners of these struggles always made use of propaganda to consolidate their victories. The same happened in Spain, as exemplified in the case of Gerardo Salvador Merino. In this, as in regard to the personality cult of the country’s leader, Franco’s Spain and Socialist Romania looked each other from both sides of the mirror. During Spain’s and Romania’s transitions to democracy, decades later, some issues and some political faces changed little. But in both countries, one of the first elements to be eliminated right away was totalitarian propaganda. This is so because it always represented for both dictatorships

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and for the people subjected to them, its very essence and its most formidable weapon.

Works Cited Amaya Quer, Àlex. 2012. El “acelerón sindicalista”: discurso social, imagen y realidad del aparato de propaganda de la Organización Sindical Española. Madrid: CEPC. Andrés Gallego, José. 1997. ¿Fascismo o estado católico?: ideología, religión y censura en la España de Franco, 1937-1941. Madrid: Encuentro. Aparicio, Miguel Ángel. 1980. El sindicalismo vertical y la formación del Estado franquista. Barcelona: Eunibar. Arrese, José Luis. 1959. La Revolución Social del Nacionalsindicalismo. Madrid: Ediciones del Movimiento. Arriba. 1944, March, 3: 1 Banu, Florian. 2002. “Alegerile din 1946. Strategii úi propaganda electorală în judeĠul Covurlui”. Analele UniversităĠii Dunarea de Jos din GalaĠiSeria Istorie 1: 103-118. Also available at http://www.istorie.ugal.ro/anale/1/108%20BANU.pdf Bermejo, Benito. 1991. “La Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular (19411945): un ministerio de la propaganda en manos de Falange.” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 4: 73-96 Boletín de Información de la Delegación Nacional de Sindicatos (BIDNS). 1941. 19: 3 Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE). 1938. 549: 6915-6917 Boletín Oficial de la Junta de Defensa Nacional (BOJDN). 1936. Nr.2: 2 —. 1936b. 4: 3 Bosomitu, ùtefan. 2008. “Planificare – implementare – control. ApariĠia úi dezvoltarea aparatului de propagandă comunist în România. 19441950.” In IICCR. Structuri de Partid úi de Stat în timpul regimului comunist,Vol.III, edited by Burcea, Mihai, Drăghia, Dan, Lacatusu, Dumitru and Stan, Marius, 19-48. Bucureúti: Polirom. Brown, J.F. 1992. Nationalism, Democracy and Security in the Balkans, Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing. Burakowski, Adam. 2011. Dictatura lui Nicolae CeauЮescu (1965-1989). Geniul CarpaĠilor. Bucureúti: Polirom. Cannistraro, Philip V. 1975. La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e massmedia. Roma-Bari, Laterza. Cesereanu, Ruxandra. 2003. Imaginarul violent al românilor. Bucureúti: Humanitas.

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Ciuceanu, Radu et al. 1997. Misiunile lui A.I.Vîúinski în România. Din historia relaĠiilor româno-sovietice, 1944-1946. Documente secrete. Bucureúti: INST. Corobca, Liliana. 2010. Epurarea cărĠilor în România (1944-1964). Bucureúti: Tritonic. Domínguez Arribas, Javier. 2006. “La utilización del discurso antimasónico como arma política durante el primer franquismo (19391945).” Hispania. Revista española de Historia 224: 1107-1138. FE. 1937. 7: 1 Frunză, Victor. 1999. Istoria comunismului în România. Bucureúti: Ed.Victor Frunză. Giménez-Arnau, José Antonio. 1978. Memorias de memoria. Madrid: Destino. Giurescu, Dinu C. 2007. Falsificatorii. Alegerile din 1946. Bucureúti: RAO. Huici Modenes, Adrián. 1996. Estrategias de la persuasión. Mito y propaganda política. Sevilla: Alfar. Ionescu-Gură, Nicoleta. 2003. Nomenclatura Comitetului Central al Partidului Muncitores Român. Bucureúti: Humanitas. Levy, Robert. 2001. Ana Pauker. The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mazower, Mark. 1999. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morar-Vulcu, Călin. 2007. Republica îúi făureúte oamenii. Cluj-Napoca: Eikon. Morente Valero, Francisco. 2006. Dionisio Ridruejo: del fascismo al antifranquismo. Madrid, Síntesis. PCR. 1945. Pentru o Românie democrată. Bucureúti: Ed. Partidului Comunist din România. Pérez López, Pablo. 1990. “El régimen de consignas de prensa durante el franquismo: análisis de una fuente.” In Actas del Congreso de Jóvenes Historiadores y Geógrafos, edited by Asociación de Estudios Histórico-Geográficos, 1015-1029. Madrid: UCM. Pizarroso Quintero, Alejandro. 1993. Historia de la propaganda: notas para un estudio de la propaganda política y de guerra. Madrid: Eudema. Pratkanis, Anthony and Elliot Aronson. 1994. La era de la propaganda. Barcelona: Paidós, 1994. Pueblo. 1940. June, 17: 3 Rad, Ilie. 2009. Limba de lemn în presă. Bucureúti: Tritonic.

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Ruiz Romero, Manuel. 2003. “Censura y consignas en la prensa franquista.” Ámbitos 9, 10: 507-529. Scânteia. 1947. November, 13: 1 Semeniuc, Sorin Cristian. 2011. “ViolenĠa de limbaj în discursul totalitar din România (1945-1989).” Sfera Politicii 164: 70-77. http://www.sferapoliticii.ro/sfera/164/art09-Semeniuc.php Sevillano Calero, Francisco. 1998. Propaganda y medios de comunicación en el Franquismo. Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante. —. 2000. Ecos de papel. La opinión de los españoles en la época de Franco. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Sinova, Justino. 1988. La censura de prensa durante el franquismo (19361951). Madrid: Espasa. Thomàs, Joan Maria. 2000. La Falange de Franco. El proyecto fascista del Régimen, Barcelona: Plaza & Janés. Tismăneanu, Vladimir. 2003. Stalinism for All Seasons: a political history of Romanian Communism. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 2006. Raportul final. Comizia PrezidenĠială pentru analiza dictaturii comuniste din România. Bucureúti: Comisia PrezidenĠială pentru analiza dictaturii comuniste din România. Tismăneanu, Vladimir and Cristian Vasile. 2008. Perfectul acrobat. Leonte Răutu. Măútile Răului. Bucureúti: Humanitas. Veiga, Francisco. 1991. La mística del ultranacionalismo (Historia de la Guardia de Hierro). Rumanía, 1919-1941. Barcelona: UAB. Welch, David. 1993. The Third Reich. Politics and Propaganda. London: Routledge. Zeman, ZbynƟk A.B. 1973. Nazi propaganda. London: Oxford University Press.

Notes 1

Although Franco was National Head of FET and JONS, the management of the party remained in the hands of a Secretary General of the Movement. Moreover, after the Unification some of the most revolutionary Falangists were removed from the center of power to ensure the balance between the different political tendencies. Manuel Hedilla, heir of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera at the helm of the original Falange was sentenced to death for treason, although his sentence was commuted. 2 Fermín Yzurdiaga Lorca (1903-1981). Director of the Falangist journal Arriba España (1936-1937), Falange’s National Chief for Press and Propaganda (19361937), Chief of the FET and JONS National Delegation of Press and Propaganda (1937-1938), member of the National Council of FET and JONS (1937-1947).

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51

The Carlists were the supporters of the alternative line of the Bourbon monarchy, represented by Charles V and his successors. With a traditionalist and anti-liberal ideology, the Carlists started three wars against the Spanish government during the nineteenth century: between 1833 and 1840, between 1847 and 1849, and between 1872 and 1876. His presence was still strong in Navarre. Under their leader, the Infante Alfonso Carlos I, the Carlists joined the 1936 coup because of his radical defense of Catholicism and its goal to destroy liberal democracy. 4 Ramon Serrano Súñer (1901-2003) was married to the sister of Franco’s wife. A lawyer by profession, Serrano was Interior minister from 1938 to 1940 and Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1940 and 1942, representing in the Spanish government the the most sympathetic side to Nazi Germany. After falling from grace in 1942, he kept a low profile until his retirement from political life in 1957 5 José Antonio Giménez-Arnau y Gran, (1912-1985). General Director or Press (1937-1942), later on he was ambassador in Argentina, Ireland, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brazil, Portugal and Italy (1943-1972). 6 Dionisio Ridruejo (1912-1975). He broke with the Franco regime in 1942, was banished in 1947 and imprisoned in 1956 and 1957. Exiled until his death. 7 Antonio Tovar Llorente (1911-1985). Director of Radio Nacional de España (1938-1939). He was undersecretary of Press and Propaganda of the Ministry of the Interior and special envoy to the Nazi Germany (1939-1941). He broke with the Franco regime in 1942. He was exiled in the United States, Argentina and Germany until 1979. 8 Preamble of the 1938 Press Act. 9 A new press law came into force in March 1966, that eliminated direct censorship, but replaced it by a type of self-censorship applied by the editors and journalists. It was still far from any type of freedom of speech. 10 Gerardo Salvador Merino (1910-1971) was a member of the original Falange, and during the civil war had problems with some military authorities for his revolutionary verbiage. He directed the Spanish Trade Union Organisation between 1939 and 1941, after which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison and exiled in the Balearics. Pardoned
on after, he disappeared from political life, settling in Barcelona as a business advisor. 11 Gabriel Arias-Salgado y de Cubas (1904-1962). Civil governor and provincial party chief in Salamanca (1939-1941), FET and JONS Undersecretary of People’s Education (1941-1945), Minister of Information and Tourism (1951-1962). 12 Survived nine years after the death of Franco, disappearing in 1984. 13 Jesus Ercilla (1907-1984) was a psychiatrist and a member of the original Falange. He was the editor of several falangist publications during the civil war and in February 1939, he founded the journal Solidaridad Nacional, the official newspaper of francoist trade-unions in Barcelona. He was editor of Pueblo until 1946, after which he returned to the field of psychiatry. 14 Since 1951 and until the end of the dictatorship this function was exercised by the Ministry of Information. 15 Since the Mârzescu Act from April 1924.

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16 The underground faction, led by Secretary General Stefan Foris, had been removed in April 1944 in an internal purge that led to death of Foris himself two years later. 17 That Romania had ceded to Hungary in August 1940 following the Second Vienna Arbitration. 18 Iosif Chiúinevschi (1905-1963) was a member of the Central Committee from 1945 and of the Politburo from 1948. Party chief ideologue and supreme representative of the CPR loyalty to Stalin and the USSR, Chiúinevschi fell from grace in 1957 when he conspired to overthrow Dej from the General Secretariat after the XX Congress of the CPSU. 19 Sănătescu’s cabinet had eliminated the Ministry of National Propaganda from Antonescu’s times in September 1944 on the grounds that the new democratic regime did not need “an instrument of political dirigisme of public opinion through propagandistic methods.” 20 Petre Constantinescu-Iaúi (1892-1977) was active in the labour movement before the existence of the CPR, becoming one of its founding members in 1921. Constantinescu-Iaúi was a member of Dej’s faction and served as Minister of Propaganda to November 1946, after which he became responsible for the control of the universities from his position as member of the Romanian Academy. Between 1953 and 1957 he was Minister for Religious Affairs. 21 These goals did not change when a year later, in March 1946, the department was renamed Ministry of Information. 22 Using slogans such as “Ana, Luca, Teo, Dej bagă spaima în burgheji” (“Ana, Luca, Teo, Dej frighten the bourgeoisie.”) Similarly, it was a much publicized the fact that some party leaders named their daughters Ana, in honour of Ana Pauker. 23 Miron Constantinescu (1917-1974) was a remarkable intellectual, trained as a sociologist. Politburo member and Director of Scânteia between 1944 and 1947, Constantinescu fell from grace in 1957 after attempting to conspire against Dej in the aftermath of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. 24 Leonte Răutu (1910-1993) was Chiúinevschi’s right hand and had run Scânteia in the underground times. Exiled in the USSR during the World War, Răutu survived Chiúinevschi’s fall and after 1957 became the undisputed dictator of propaganda and of the relationships with culture as head of the Department of Propaganda and Culture of the Central Committee. He held leadership positions in the party until 1981. 25 Mihai Roller (1908-1958) was a party member from the time of its illegality. Răutu’s assistant in the Department of Propaganda, Roller became a member of the Romanian Academy and coordinated the influential history books that were mandatory in every Romanian school during the 50s. 26 It consisted of a clever trap devised by the intelligence services in the hands of CPR member Emil Bodnăraú. By the action of various agents, the main opposition leaders were convinced they could leave the country by plane from the Tămădău airfield without a risk to their safety. Outside Romania they thought they could form an alternative government that would be recognized by the Western

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governments. Police stopped them at the airport and a few weeks after both the National Peasant Party and the Liberal National Party were dissolved by decree. 27 Called Legea 102/1945: Decret-Lege pentru epurarea presei. 28 Glavlit: Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs under the People’s Commissariat of Education. 29 Sorin Toma, born in 1914, was the son of proletkult poet Alexandru Toma and had taken refuge in the USSR during World War II. He was a member of team of propagandists who orbited around Iosif Chiúinevschi, and he directed Scânteia until 1960. Fallen from grace in 1963, he ended up in exile in Israel. 30 It is a linguistic-symbolic analysis of Toma’s articles in his criticism of Arghezi’s poetry. 31 Such as the Cultural Section of the Ministry of Propaganda, the prefectures’ Censorship Services, the Central Military Censorship Service, and the Censorship Service Allied Control Commission, that was in Soviet hands. 32 Since 1947 it was called Central Section of Education Policy, linked to the Committee for Culture and Art of the Central Committee of the RWP. 33 A report from the American legation in Bucharest from September 1948 characterized Chiúinevschi as the most powerful man in the country. 34 Simion Bughici, Dumitru Petrescu, Raia Vidra‫܈‬cu and future Securitate leader Alexandru Drăghici. 35 In 1953 the Propaganda and Agitation Section was divided into three sections: Propaganda and Agitation, Literature and Art and Science and Education. A few months after the sections were two: Propaganda and Agitation, which absorbed Literature and Art, and Science and Education. In 1955 the Section of Science and Education was renamed as Science and Culture. 36 Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria, was the leader of the Spanish Communist Party. She was known for her emotional and passionate speeches.

PART II: FRANCOIST CULTURAL PRESS

CHAPTER FOUR SURVIVING LITERATURE: LITERARY SUBGENRES PUBLISHED IN THE SPANISH PERIODICAL PRESS (1936-1975) 1 RUBÉN JARAZO ÁLVAREZ

José Acosta Montoro wrote that journalism and literature “are the trunk and the branches: they cannot live separately”2 (1973, 51); and they both, in turn, feed from communication.3 In that sense, every act of literary creation may be perceived as a message to the reader, conceived with reference to his previous knowledge, language command and personal experience (54). The main discrepancy between the two forms occurs in their treatment of reality: The writer, the creative artist, can distort reality by exaggerating (creative hyperbole). The reader can move from reality to fantasy, choosing to live on this side of the world or beyond it […] In journalism the first imperative is to convey knowledge from a comprehensive and real perspective […]. Even the most serious journalism has to outdo reality in terms of honesty and objectivity. Literature, or creative writing, is a luxury; journalism is a necessity. (quoted in Martín 1986, 249)

Bourdieu (1984) also proposes a theory of culture that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only writers and artists, but also publishers and critics. If we use the term “producer” to refer to the author of a literary work, the same definition should be applicable to journalistic activity, since the ultimate goal of both is to sell the largest number of copies. In other defining respects, however, Maricruz Seoane highlights the distinction between both professions:

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The job of journalists and literary authors is to write and they should do it well. Yet, while there are many ways of writing good literature, the options in journalism are more limited. […] when the reporter and the novelist relate new stories, describe new environments or portray new characters, we do not expect the journalist to invent his or her information. In short, a journalist may write with a certain literary stylishness and the literary author may recount real events in his or her books, but only within an established framework, since there are still significant differences between the two professions. (Seoane 2003, 12)

Seoane’s analysis may not be applicable in the case of the Spanish media during the Francoist dictatorship, however, bearing in mind the influence of factors such as ideological control, censorship and press propaganda during and after the Civil War. Following this tendency, Martínez Albertos also makes a clear distinction between journalists and literary writers, and makes the following observations about the cross-over between them: 1. There must always be a relationship between writers and journalists since they share the same working tool – language – even taking into account the deep differences and objectives of both professions. 2. Writers always fit within the confines of entertainment and opinion journalism. 3. Many writers have to work in the media industry, in journalism, as a first school of style […]. According to Alberto Moravia, “all contemporary writers start off in journalism”. (quoted in Aguilera 1992, 20)

In addition, Fernando Lázaro Carreter proposes the following distinctions between the two professions: 1. The writer does not urge to write a book, while the reporter seeks the news. 2. The writer addresses a universal receiver, while the journalist writes for a specific target audience. Nonetheless, he must of course know the public to whom he is addressing his information, which is generally associated with the ideology and editorial line of the newspaper. 3. The literary message acts without limitations of space and time, while the journalist’s one is constrained by a very limiting format: the physical space of the newspaper itself. 4. Additionally, the reader of a book usually has no immediate utilitarian needs, while the reader of the newspaper does. 5. The literary work has a very different effect on each reader, who may interpret the work in any number of individual ways. The journalist, however, is responsible for ensuring the transparent and immediate interpretation of his or her works, which should not be critical, cynical or obscurantist. (Santamaría 1990, 22)

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Journalism and Literature in Spain When the first newspapers appeared in the eighteenth century, they were very different, both in format and content, from the press we know today. Journalism in the modern sense emerged as a response to the demand for news, which explains why periodical press publications did not begin to appear on a regular basis until the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The first modern Spanish newspapers were modelled on the English newspaper, The Spectator (Guinard 1962); El duende especulativo de la vida civil (The Speculative Elf of Civilian Life) (1761), El pensador (The Thinker) (1726), El censor (The Censor) (1781-1787), and El Observador (The Observer) (17871788). In the decades that followed, journalism in the country was influenced by Spanish costumbrismo and the belated arrival of European romanticism. In emulation of the early English Romantics, a number of prominent Spanish writers (such as Larra) became masters of the literary sub-genre, the article (Marín 1983). Armed with their literary columns and short critical essays after the English tradition, the first Spanish literary press was born. The case of Spanish journalism is similar to that of other European countries, though the latter had already introduced substantial changes to their press during the nineteenth century. The main advances achieved belatedly by the Spanish press related to circulation and profile. In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, Spanish newspapers were characterised by opinion journalism and limited distribution; after the Civil War, circulation increased and new sections devoted to advertising and sales were introduced. Newspapers had become business. Modern Spanish journalism finally emerged as a result of technological improvements, industrialisation, and the growth of a literate proletariat in urban areas; however, this only came about at the end of the Civil War (Marín 1989, 104). Following the restoration of Alfonso XII in 1875, Spain began the process of rebuilding the country as a constitutional monarchy. The press was considered a fundamentally political institution by the monarchy and its liberal government, as evidenced by the supervisory legislation enacted in 1883. Paradoxically, however, this repressive Press Act, introduced by the liberal government, actually favoured the publication of periodical journals. The combination of legal support and sophisticated new printing techniques, led to an increase in newspaper production in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

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In 1875, the number of newspapers published in Spain by 1875 was 380; in 1882, it grew to 917; and by 1900, the number had risen to 1,348. According to Desvois, of the 1,348 papers published in 1900, 520 were political, 103 religious, 342 scientific, literary and artistic or professional, and 382 represented diverse interests. Most of the daily papers defined themselves as politically independent (192 in total), while others represented themselves as republican (70), liberal (65), conservative (59), traditionalist (26), regionalist (20), socialist (17) or fundamentalist Catholics (10) (Desvois 1977, 3).4 The heyday of Spanish journalism is closely linked to […] the adoption in 1883 of the Ley de Policía de Prensa [Press Policy Act]. The Press Act was responsible for the initial stability that led to the development of the modern Spanish press. It was the first law to establish a repressive liberal system in Spain and remained formally active until the Press Act (or “Fraga Act”) of 1966. (Sánchez and Barrera 1992, 169)

The folletín and the serial novel were the only literary sub-genres from the nineteenth century that survived into the twentieth. Romero Tobar (1994) explains the rise of leaflets and handbills in terms of the consolidation of liberalism and individualism in Spain. The serial leaflet, or folletín (derived from the French word feuilleton), is a literary text that is incorporated into the lower band of a newspaper, from where it may be cut out and collected. Its contents include short stories and novels created and serialised specifically for this format. The flexibility of this sub-genre explains why it survived for so long. The section was generally associated with the kind of fictional stories used by newspapers to help boost their sales (Brotel 1974, 111). Brotel demonstrates that, despite the limited circulation of the periodicals themselves, this type of literature was read by 25 per cent of the literate population. Spanish journalism during the first three decades of the twentieth century was also characterised by its critically unstable financial situation, one result of which was the great range of heavily politicised publications or, as journalists tend to prefer to call them, publications with a strong editorial line: The Spanish journalistic panorama during the 1930s was greatly varied in political terms, ranging from the fundamentalist Catholic El Siglo Futuro to the anarchist Solidaridad Obrera. The oldest press publication in the capital was the official newspaper of the conservative party, La Época, founded in 1849, which had survived every political upheaval since then. […] The most influential newspapers were usually the conservative ABC and El Debate. (Barrera 1995, 18)

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During the period of the Second Republic in Spain, the failed coup d’état led by General Sanjurjo in 1932 was used by the government to visit severe punishment on ideologically conservative publications. The repressive trend continued during the years of the Franco dictatorship through the organs of state censorship, pre-publication censorship, selfcensorship and the Press Act of 1966, among other measures. Sanjurjo’s attempt to remove the government led to the suspension of more than 120 newspapers, including 77 conservative daily publications, even though the vast majority of them had played no part in the coup. Pre-publication censorship was first introduced, paradoxically, during the years of the Republic. The measure was enforced frequently during the republican period, leading to the mass suspension of newspapers and the smear campaigns against of many professional journalists. When the republican government decreed a state of emergency, censorship of the press was formally instituted and specific new legislation introduced to regulate it. The “Defence of the Republic Act”, passed in October 1931, also affected journalism. The notoriously ambiguous wording of the new law gave rise to a great deal of arbitrary enforcement, especially in relation to what could be classed as an “act of aggression against the Republic”. Incitement to resist or disobey the law through the dissemination of information deleterious to the institutions and agencies of the State, or the monarchy, could be treated as a serious criminal act or a simple misdemeanour. Despite the claim in the final paragraph of the preamble to the Press Act, stating that “today it is the day we can truly and solemnly declare freedom of the press”, such a pretension was hardly credible when the very first article stated that “[t]he State is responsible for the organisation, monitoring and control of the national institution of the periodical press”; or based on the description in the next article of the powers in the State, which ranged from regulating the length and print run of newspapers, to regulating journalistic practices, the appointment of editors and censorship. The infamous editor of Ya summed up the situation when he declared that “the minister will do whatever he wants with the newspapers and journalists”. (Morcillo 1988, 82)

One of the most interesting journals of this period was La Gaceta Literaria, the first issue of which was published in 1927. The generation of politically engaged writers who founded the magazine, among them Ramón Gómez de la Serna, were affected by the philosophical and historical conflicts provoked by the loss of Spain’s colonies and the final disintegration of the Spanish empire after the Disaster of 1898. From its inception, La Gaceta Literaria explored the idea of universal culture, maintaining the literary objectives of the Generation of ’98 before

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them. Yet while the latter had focused their literary interests on Europe and Africa, the new generation took in a new direction, towards America. European issues were by no means abandoned, however, especially in relation to anything concerning Spanish literature, language and culture. The inaugural issue opened with an article in Catalan and a poem in Galician. Any early indications that a space would be made for peripheral languages such as Catalan and Galician were soon proved mistaken: the journal’s core group of contributors ultimately found it impossible to reconcile the pluralist aspirations they had early on with the tight-knit Madrid literary circles in which they moved. The article “Diálogo de las lenguas” (Dialogue on Languages) reasoned that “there is no point writing in a language that is not understood. In other words, it is useless to assist in the expansion of Catalan literature” (quoted in Bassolas 1975, 161).5 The journal’s art and film sections were edited by film-makers such as Luis Buñuel, reflecting the avant-garde nature of the magazine. As a result of the success of the journal, the editors decided to replicate the model in a number of local editions (thus, the Gaceta Catalana, the Gaceta Portuguesa and the Gaceta Americana), and introduced three new supplement sections: “Workers and Literature”, “Student Observatory” and “Literary Raids”. When the subsidisation of the Gaceta ceased in 1929, as happened in the case of every other Spanish periodical publication, it was acquired by a business group. During the 1930s, the journal’s manifesto and the views of its writers reflected the radicalisation of pre-Civil War society (Mainer 1971, 16-20). The economic crisis in Spain was felt in every corner of society, including culture. Liberal thought began to filter into the sector and fascistisation of culture was soon to add even more tension to the mix. However, the expansion of primary education and rising literacy levels created a different type of reader who identified with these publications. Gradually, this new generation of readers split into two very different ideological camps: Falangists and supporters of the Republic.

The Rise of Spanish Fascism and Propaganda The rise of Fascism and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (19231930) initiated a period of dramatic political upheaval. The new totalitarian regime altered the trajectory of the press, most significantly in relation to censorship, which was used as a way of enforcing ideological control. Political coverage all but disappeared from the daily papers. Designated registry offices were created for the accreditation of journalists. Despite the relatively important role played by the press in

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removing the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the old Press Act of 1883 remained in place under the new government of the Second Republic. With the outbreak of Civil War in 1936, almost all peripheral language journals disappeared, and two distinct factions came to occupy the surviving press in Spain: republicans (or “loyalists”) and nationalist rebels. Some of the most striking aspects of this early period include the heterogeneity of the republican press, the propagandistic nature of the press released by both sides, and the existence of cultural magazines such as El Mono Azul (The Blue Monkey), an anti-Fascist journal edited by intellectuals such as Rafael Alberti; Cuadernos de la Casa de la Cultura (Journal of the House of Culture) (1937), Nueva Cultura (New Culture), and Hora de España (Spain’s Time) (1937).6 The Civil War was the first Spanish experiment in the use of arms and military tactics in the twentieth century, but it was also a pioneering period in relation to information and propaganda (Pizarroso 1990, 356). The newspaper ABC, with editions in Madrid and Seville, occupies an important space in the history of twentieth-century Spain. The most interesting period is between 1936 and 1939, since it is the only time when a single newspaper was published by the two opposing sides in a war: the rebels, publishing in Seville; and the republicans, printing in Madrid (Langa 2007). The use of propaganda in the press on a massive scale began during World War I. The reaction among citizens was one of rejection and disbelief, yet the press persisted in its use regardless. The psychological crisis provoked by the Great War and its aftermath, with the emergence of totalitarian regimes and their confrontation in some instances with existing democracies, meant that propaganda was a useful tool even during peace time (Domenach 1986, Delgado 2006). In Spain, Francoism refined these mechanisms based on the Nazis’ use of propaganda, which was in turn a corruption of the earlier Leninist model. Nationalist Spain followed the example set by Italy and Germany. In Italy, the media played a central role in the evolution of Fascist propaganda. Mussolini, who had worked as a journalist before becoming Prime Minister, instituted the press (in union, later on, with radio and cinema; Tannenbaum 1975, 159-201) as a key instrument of ideological control by creating the Department of Press and Propaganda in 1935, subsequently re-named the Department of Popular Culture (1937). In Mein Kampf, Hitler alludes to propaganda from a similar perspective when he writes: “Its [propaganda] primary objective is to talk people into the organisation. The objective of the organisation is to talk men into continuing with the propaganda” (1966, 281).

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The message of national unity was also promoted using literature.7 Stories published in the daily press were a particularly successful medium. These short narratives, moralistic and ideological in tone, had little literary merit, but offered an ideal representation of a Fascist society which the reader was encouraged to preserve and consolidate as a lifestyle that had cost millions of lives to achieve. The literature of the early years of the dictatorship focused on the defence of Spanish unity, national Catholicism, and nationalism based on a distinctive Hispanic race whose existence had been put in danger by the Republic.8 The scarcity of reliable information during the 1930s and 1940s, popular mistrust of the media, and low levels of literacy and education among the middle and lower classes are only a few of the factors that made the Spanish press an ideal mechanism for the dissemination of the regime’s propaganda. The propaganda apparatus targeted a limited readership, which isolated itself to a large extent from the rest of the social and cultural world for fear of reprisals (Sevillano 1998, 112). After the 1940s, Spanish society became progressively more relaxed, and a simulated normality reigned in every aspect of the dictatorship. Many of the daily newspapers had their publishing headquarters in the provincial capitals, with the exception of Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, Gijón and a few others. Madrid and Barcelona experienced the greatest growth in relation to the number of titles, principally because the newspapers that had a national circulation were edited and printed there. The most successful were Arriba (the official newspaper of the Falange), ABC and Ya, in addition to Pueblo in Madrid and La Vanguardia Española in Barcelona. The main preoccupation of the public in general during this period was the outbreak of World War II and international politics. In fact, in a survey conducted by the Spanish Institute of Public Opinion between 1942 and 1943 (immediately following the Allied landings in North Africa), 88.52 per cent of respondents claimed to read at least one newspaper each day (Anuario de la Prensa Española 1945-1946, 880). After World War II, cultural supplements became a more standard part of newspapers, featuring columns on literature, music, theatre and cultural news in general, as well as translations, poetry, feuilletons and other literary contributions. At the end of 1956, a total of 7.4 per cent of readers in Madrid professed a preference for the literary section of their newspaper (Boletín del Instituto de la Opinión Pública 1956, 13). During World War II, the regime was careful not to support too openly either the German-Italian axis or the Western Allies in the press. The propagandist press thus began a tentative process of defascistisation that

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resulted in the opening up of both literature and journalism in Spain to the rest of Europe. The presence of and dialogue among respected intellectuals in a variety of different disciplines increased: initially, among Spanishlanguage intellectuals from different parts of the world, and later on extending to writers in other languages. In order to mend the fracture with the rest of Europe, the Francoist regime needed to connect with the intellectual and literary life of the country, even if that meant rehabilitating the reputations of certain despised members of the literati.9 Literary tributes were held year after year: first, in honour of openly Fascist intellectuals, and later in celebration of several writers from the Catholic Church (as the eternal bastion of Spanish culture and morality). At an even later stage, the regime made its peace with a number of previously condemned figures, such as Byron, Shakespeare and Verlaine, who were represented as repentant Catholic sinners who had eventually sought redemption for their misdeeds.10 Another way of demonstrating the openness of the regime was to celebrate recent historical events, principally those of an apolitical or religious nature, or foreign interest stories. In 1943, for example, the most popular newspaper sections, in order of preference, were: war reports (5.79 per cent), national news (5.44 per cent), jokes (5.39 per cent), local news (per cent), sports (4.63 per cent), foreign chronicles (3.95 per cent), film reviews (3.87 per cent), theatre reviews (3.87 per cent), articles (3.62 per cent), book reviews (2.81 per cent), music reviews (2.66 per cent), fashion and women’s interests (2.44 per cent) (Gaceta de la Prensa Española 1943, 305-308). This trend increased in 1945, when readership figures for coverage relating to World War II were at their peak (49.69 per cent of respondents) (Anuario de la Prensa Española 1945-1946, 880). In relation to censorship, 6.53 per cent of respondents in 1945 believed that the media were subject to too much regulation by the State, while 1.33 per cent believed the opposite, that ideological control should be stronger (876). The impact of the press was considered positive by 52.26 per cent of the readers surveyed, and 23.17 per cent believed that journalism set an appropriate standard of social behaviour. Only 6.68 per cent of those surveyed condemned journalism as a harmful activity (878). In the 1950s, post-Civil War writers used journalism to emerge from the relative obscurity of the literary sphere and reach a wider audience. This was especially true in the case of writers from the peripheral linguistic communities within Spain, such as Camilo José Cela and Álvaro Cunqueiro (Galicia), or Josep Pla (Catalonia), all of whom achieved greater fame by having their work published in national newspapers. Despite the success of literary journals during the first three

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decades of the twentieth century,11 for the newspapers, literature remained a secondary concern. The cultural supplements introduced in the early 1950s revived literature and literary criticism, transforming them into two of the mainstays of the Spanish press (a status they have continued to enjoy ever since). As occurred in other areas of Spanish society, control and oppression of the media gradually altered as a consequence of greater strategic concerns developing on the European political and military stages. The Cold War in the 1940s marked the end of the international siege of Spain as the Francoist State allied itself with Western Europe and the USA in the fight against Communism. This opening up of relations between Spain and America brought with it the recognition of Franco’s government by the international community, and the reintegration of Spain within Europe. This new direction was reflected in the replacement of the Súñer Press Act (1938) with the second Press Act, introduced in 1966. Between 1962 and 1966, freedom of the press in Spain increased, yet this theoretical relaxation of State control led to a different type of repression: selfcensorship. Editors and management were held responsible for the format, content and editorial line of their newspaper or periodical publication, with the accompanying threat of fines and other serious penalties, for permitting the publication of content that could be considered an attack in the dictatorship. This greater cultural openness brought with it a renewed interest in the ethnography, folklore and cultural diversity of the peninsula, in contrast to the rigid ideology of national homogeneity of the early years of the dictatorship. The Press Act in 1966 relaxed quotas on paper use and distribution, thus lowering the costs of newspaper production and allowing titles to expand their circulation and content. One result of this was that culture sections and Sunday literary supplements gained more space and prominence. The opening up of the regime to different cultural influences, though not ostensibly a threat to the unity of Spain, represented the first step in the re-emergence of peripheral communities and their cultural identities for the first time since the Civil War. The “new journalism” which emerged in Spain after the initial period of rigorous censorship in the aftermath of the Civil War, was characterised by the principle of objectivity and the assertion at last of the distinction between opinion and information journalism. Whereas journalism culture in English-speaking countries was strongly influenced by the different counter-culture phenomena of the 1960s (Racionero 1977, 11), the revolution in Spanish journalism came about as a result of the introduction

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of globalised neo-liberal culture, United States foreign policy, the gradual opening up of the Franco regime and a growing interest in Europe. On the subject of 1950s’ literature and journalism in Spain, Tom Wolf (1976, 49-50) identifies four characteristics of the kind of literary art featured in Spanish newspapers of the time. The first establishes a clear distinction between literary and journalistic sub-genres, based on the view that literary sub-genres narrate a story scene by scene. The use of dialogue, narrative point of view and symbolic language are the other most characteristic features of this type of literature. During the 1950s, these sub-genres were excluded from the literary canon, on the one hand, and gradually became despised by professional journalists on the other. Making the case for the affinity between the genres, Octavio Aguilera (1992, 20) argues that, despite the different ends sought by journalism and literature, the instrument they use is the same: language. Literature is also represented in other sub-genres, however, including memoir and the chronicle. From 1937, journals such as Vértice also began to recover the feuilleton, with the publication in this form of short stories by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Álvaro Cunqueiro and Emilio Carrere; but the subgenre was soon eclipsed again by the rise of cultural and literary supplements. Buoyed up by the resurgence of folklore, the short story was the literary sub-genre that fared strongest in the periodical press in this period. Until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was unthinkable that such a limited literary sub-genre would be collected in an anthology. Romero Tobar (1994) compares the short story at its peak to the publication of No me olvides, the Spanish version of Ackermann’s Forget Me Not, a short miscellany of poems and stories, usually given as a gift. As was the practice in the case of novels and plays, stories in newspapers were usually translated into Spanish from their original French or English versions, or even adapted into a different literary sub-genre.12 The popularity of other sub-genres, such as war chronicles or epistolary articles, increased with the arrival of “new journalism” in the 1950s and under the influence of literary realism. Spanish fictional narrative was virtually non-existent in this period. The economic crisis and political censorship created a literary vacuum in the country, with the result that many of the most widely read novels in Spain were translated and printed in France.13 The French preference was due to geographical proximity as well as specific literary interests (French was the lingua franca in Spain in the early twentieth century). The private libraries of most Spanish intellectuals in the first half

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of the twentieth century were stocked with French titles and works in French translation of literature from around the world.14

Literary Journalism and Censorship in Spain Spanish writers of the post-Civil War period shared a number of characteristics. Many of them chose newspapers as a medium in which to convey their literary and cultural interests and ideas, though they were viewed as artists rather than professional journalists. They were prolific, producing literature in a range of genres – poetry, drama, fiction, translation – and many of them also contributing work to the national newspapers in Madrid at some point in their careers, in particular to newspapers such as ABC or Arriba (Carbajosa 1997, 468). This was the case of Eugenio Montes (1900-1982), Josep Pla (1897-1981), Miguel Delibes (1920-2010), Camilo José Cela (1916-2002), Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911-1981), Joan Perucho (1920-2003) and José María Pemán (18971981), who produced work for ABC, Informaciones and La Vanguardia, and weekly journals such as Vértice, Blanco y Negro, La Gazeta Ilustrada and Acción Española. Special attention should be paid to Miguel Delibes and Camilo José Cela, two writers notorious for their relationship with the censorship apparatus of the Francoist State: Delibes for his opposition to the system, and Cela for his collaboration with it.15 First as deputy editor of the newspaper El Norte de Castilla, and subsequently as chief editor, Delibes overhauled the publication with the aim of recapturing the spirit of preCivil War journalism, provoking many disputes with the regime and much concern on its part in the process. Supplements such as “Artes y Letras” (Arts and Literature), “Ancha es Castilla” (Wide Country of Castile) or “El Caballo de Troya” (The Trojan Horse), expanded the literary and cultural horizons of Castilian language and culture in the northern half of the country. For Delibes, censorship not only limited freedom of speech, but also forced writers to disseminate regime propaganda (Delibes 1985, 6). The main change introduced by the Press Act of 1966 was that at least in this second phase writers were no longer obliged to distribute the Fascists’ propaganda; freedom was still restricted, nevertheless, by selfcensorship. Delibes finally resigned as chief editor in the face of diverse pressures on the part of the government to regain control of the direction of the newspaper. Another new feature of the development of mass-readership newspapers in the 1960s was the relationship it created between the reader and the writer; that is, the producer and the consumer of the newspaper

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(Bourdieu 1984, 1992). If part of the role of a journalist is to sell newspapers, clearly the news he or she reports will be influenced by that goal or purpose. During the 1960s, newspapers were designed specifically for mass consumption, as well as to promote a reading culture that had originally been envisaged for an exclusive minority. Journalism has been described as the body that speaks out on behalf of indigenous literature,16 and this was the case in peripheral linguistic communities in Spain during the 1960s, where newspapers helped to disseminate work by authors writing in their native Galician or Catalan: [...] the two main reasons that led writers to become journalists were: financial difficulty and the desire to succeed. [...] There was also, in some cases, a third reason: the desire to create a work of culture and/or effective policy; the moral imperative to preach their ideas to their fellow citizens from the public gallery of a newspaper. [...] As a result, Spanish journalism during this period was deficient in terms of information but highly interesting in terms of intellectual and literary creation, as it relied on the pens of writers and intellectuals… (Seoane 2003, 24-25)

This inversion of journalistic priorities was even more pronounced among writers in regions whose economic and social opportunities were more limited, such as Galicia, Catalonia or the Basque Country: The situation was possibly even more striking in the Catalan newspapers, where journalists and literary writers were even more closely associated since writing in Catalan was virtually the preserve of professional authors up to the middle of the twentieth century. A similar situation arose in other Spanish regions (or nations) with their own language. (Casas 2003, 25)

Literary Journalism in Galicia: A Case Study The creation in the 1920s of the cultural collective known as Nós launched a new generation of Galician cultural nationalists whose ideology combined Celticism (Montiel 1974), philosophical irrationalism, geographic determinism and ethnography. They defined Galicia as an Atlantic nation, characterised by race, language, sense of place, social organisation and national sentiment. With the creation of the literary journal Nós, the Galician language assumed an instrumental role in ensuring the recovery and development of the region’s cultural identity. While the earlier regionalist movement had established the ideology of a distinctive cultural identity, literature and periodicals in Galicia did not become explicitly politicised until the 1920s.17 The few journals that managed to maintain a “neutral” position (insofar as such a thing is ever

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possible) included El Pueblo Gallego, Galiza and El Noroeste. It was a burgeoning period for magazines such as Nós, Ronsel and Alfar, and this political tendency in Galician newspapers continued in the decades that followed, with special attention devoted to aspects of European and American culture (Even-Zohar 1990, 1993, 1996 and 2007). César Antonio Molina describes “literary press” (1989) as the sub-genre responsible for the revival of journalism in Galicia after the Civil War. Molina’s analysis of the press in Galicia from the late nineteenth century to the introduction of the Press Act in 1966 offers an outstanding (and almost unique) insight into this subject. He also remarks that, following the dispersal of the avant-garde movements, and the disappearance of their leaflets, journals and handbills, literary sub-genres largely faded from print journalism until the revival of the cultural supplement in Galicia during the 1950s (Molina 1989; 1990, 254). One of the most representative and prolific writers and journalists of this period was Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911-1981). For years, the journalistic work of Álvaro Cunqueiro has been ignored by critics and his talents as a journalist, editor and director of various newspapers questioned. However, the author’s biography makes no sense without his journalism: the contributions he wrote for journals such as Galiza, or his sudden decision to join the ranks of the Falange following the outbreak of the Civil War, with his work on Era Azul or Vértice; his disqualification as a journalist (Franco 1991), and the personal and professional crisis of the years that followed; or his final years as chief editor of the Faro de Vigo (Armesto 1987, 1993a, 1993b). His poetic, dramatic and narrative work, likewise, becomes incoherent if we ignore his literary contributions to the Spanish press in the post-Civil War period. The literary column and the cultural supplement are two of the most interesting literary sub-genres represented in the Galician press. The literary column originated in American journalism and was preceded in Spain and Galicia by the “chronicle”. The literary column in Spain, however, has sometimes been considered deficient in terms of both journalistic and literary value. As García Posada explains: “Not every column, chronicle or article is literature. The literary column is a specific product created by a writer, a contributor who is not a journalist” (García 2003, 62). If we consider what may be conceptualised as literature and what may not, we may assume that column writing does not always maintain a unilateral relationship with journalism. The journalistic profession is a source of information or of opinion that is intrinsically linked to information. By contrast, column writing must transcend information and at the same time break free from the shackles of mere

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opinion, in a similar way to an editorial (62). César González Ruano, one of the most important Spanish chroniclers of the mid-twentieth century, expounds the main characteristics of the literary column in his article, “Crónicas y literatura” (On chronicles and literature): 1. The main topic is not important. The “abstract chronicle” is the most difficult. 2. The article “should not be an essay”, or a story, or follow a complex style. 3. It should be timely and relevant. 4. It must have a structure, or “proportion”. 5. It should not contain too many ideas: “The ideal article should address a single issue and then follow a sequence.” 6. Sharing personal information in an article creates a bond with the audience. 7. It does not matter if the topic or subject is very well-known: every writer should be able to transmit a different perspective. 8. Today, the chronicle or the literary article is the highest and most expressive literary genre, because the classical genres have lost their specificity. (quoted in García 2003, 62)

The primary focus of Álvaro Cunqueiro’s journalistic production in the Faro de Vigo for two decades was the literary column “El Envés” (“The Other Side”), which presented readers with a different perspective on the front-page news of the day (as noted by Montserrat Mera 2000).18 However, this column also acted as a channel connecting the author’s journalistic career with the whole of his narrative, theatrical and poetic production. In “El Envés”, Cunqueiro revisited his literary works and his fables; he experimented with new literary techniques, defended himself rom public attacks, and involved the reader in the creative process. He was also closely involved in the creation of cultural supplements at the newspaper. The Faro de Vigo Sunday supplement, “Artes e letras” (Arts and Literature), was one of the first modern cultural supplements produced by a Galician newspaper in the Galician language. It represented a milestone in the history of Spanish journalism in a peripheral linguistic context. “Arte e letras” is also one of the oldest surviving literary supplements in the Spanish press, alongside that of the Catalonian La Vanguardia. The first issue of the supplement in 1963 was the result of the determined efforts of Francisco Fernández del Riego and Álvaro Cunqueiro. A structure soon emerged, organised around a number of key sections: for example, the anonymous literary reflections of “Táboa revolta das letras”;19 or poetry from different parts of the world in Galician translation (remembering that translating any kind of literature into Galician, whether canonical or marginal, was still a major act of transgression at the time). Other regular sections included: “Galician Books”, looking at local literary activity; “Book Reviews”, comprising

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short critical notes on different Galician publications; and “Galician Culture”, covering other local subjects of cultural interest. A final section of interest was the weekly contribution of Francisco Fernández del Riego – arguably the central pillar upon which the entire supplement was built. This untitled section was usually signed by S. Lorenzana, one of the pseudonyms of Fernández del Riego, and its focus was the reception of world literature in the Hispanic context (Jarazo 2009, 227-460). From 1964 onwards, Cunqueiro became a committed believer in the importance of translating world poetry into Galician. In their efforts to understand the author’s sudden enthusiasm for translation, scholars have proposed a number of possible explanations: his long-standing interest in avant-garde poetry; the possibility of side-stepping the censor; space limitations in the supplement; or the desire to bring foreign cultures and their literatures to local Galician readers each week. In addition to Cunqueiro’s reasons, however, one should also consider what the impact of his translations was on Galician society and culture in the 1960s and 1970s. To answer that question, one must look to what was possibly the single greatest achievement of the publication as a whole: the fact that every week, over the course of several decades, the editors – Cunqueiro and del Riego – united world culture with the local, providing Galician readers with access to a host of international authors, including Stephen Crane, A. Ginsberg, E. Pound, T.S. Eliot, C. Sandburg, W. Stevens, A. Tate, R. Jeffers, W. Whitman, E. Dickinson, e. e. Cumings, L. Ferlinghetti, E. Lee Masters, R. Lowell, R. McKuen, W.C. Williams, H. Dolittle, L. Ridge, L. Cohen, R. Frost, K. Patchen and A. MacLeish, to name a few.20 All in all, the reception of foreign literature in peripheral linguistic communities such as Galicia should not be straightforwardly perceived as an exercise in separatism, but an emergency solution to preserve the literary and cultural system of the community. Even-Zohar suggests that these intellectuals had no alternative way of regenerating their cultural and literary systems than to adopt the prevailing Celticist ideology and its followers as their own. In the long run, ironically, this convenience strategy of representation ended up becoming the accepted cultural narrative of Galicia, so that even today, though ideologically outdated at this stage, Celticism and Atlantism still occupy a privileged position in contemporary Galician culture. These very same criteria could be applied to Galician literary journalism, or to literary journalism in Catalan or Castilian Spanish.

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Conclusions Francoist Spanish press21 responds to a totalitarian press model in which the media are centralized, dependent on the state apparatus, manipulate information according to their interests, and exercise a comprehensive control over information.22 In the post-World War II, these features are consistent with those developed by the Communist world, paradoxically the main enemy to fight from the Fascist ranks. Newspaper sections were impregnated with the anti-Communist policy of those years. Common allusions to the salvation of Spain from Communism, the Catholic defense of Christian civilization against Marxism, and many other slogans concerning the dissemination of these ideas appeared in the National sections of every newspaper, but slowed after the Press Act of 1966.23 In later decades, Francoist media moved from a centralised informative structure to a policy closer to the Capitalist world, especially due to the political and cultural impact of the United States and the United Kingdom over the second half of the twentieth century. Spanish Press (1936-1975) was, in the end, a true reflection of the situation in the country. A mutating country governed by a dictatorial government, but an ally of the Western United States. A press system and a political regime detached from the consolidation of democracy in the twentieth century,24 a truly exception in Western Europe. As a consequence of this new relaxed Capitalist model, writers and journalist were able to regenerate the literary systems of their own linguistic communities by modernising and revitalising their repertoire of literary products and techniques with the help of alternative sub-genres and literary experiments, both native and foreign in origin. Without this conscious, dedicated process of stimulation, these peripheral literary systems would have disappeared completely. The literatures of the Iberian peninsula (principally those of Galicia and Catalonia), aided by both intellectuals and journalists, have had a regenerative impact on the Spanish literary system (Even-Zohar 1993, 441-458; 1996, 59-65). By renovating and expanding their repertoires, these sub-literatures have managed not only to survive, but to move from the periphery of the polysystem to the centre of the European literary macro-polysystem in just a couple of decades (Bassel et al. 1991).

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Langa Nuño, Concha. 2007. De cómo se improvisó el Franquismo durante la Guerra Civil: La aportación del ABC de Sevilla. Sevilla: Centro de Estudios Andaluces. López Campillo, Evelyne. 1972. La Revista de Occidente y la formación de minorías (1923-1936). Madrid: Taurus. Litvak, Lily. 1980. Latinos y anglosajones. Barcelona: Puvill. Mainer, José Carlos. 1971. Falange y literatura. Barcelona: Editorial Labor. Marín i Otto, Enric. 1989. “Estabilización y novedad en la prensa diaria.” In Historia de los medios de comunicación en España. Periodismo, imagen y publicidad (1900-1990), ed. Jesús Timoteo Álvarez et al., 104-112. Barcelona: Ariel Comunicación. Martín Vivaldi, Gonzalo. 1986. Géneros periodísticos. Madrid: Paraninfo. Marún, Gioconda. 1983. Orígenes del costumbrismo ético-social. Addison y Steele: antecendentes del artículo costumbrista español y argentino. Miami: Ed. Universal. Mendezona, R. 1995. La Pirenaica y otros episodios. Madrid: Editorial Literarios.

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Mera Fernández, Montserrat. 2000. “Álvaro Cunqueiro, el haz y el envés de las noticias. Análisis de la columna “El Envés” en el Faro de Vigo (1961-1981).” PhD thesis (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). —. 2007. El periodismo de Álvaro Cunqueiro. Lugo: Deputación Provincial de Lugo. Millán Trujillo, M.J. 1998. “Radio España Independiente: información y propaganda desde el exilio.” Cuadernos Republicanos 34: 47-69. Molina, César Antonio. 1989. Prensa literaria en Galicia (1920-1960). Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia. —. 1990. Medio siglo de prensa literaria española (1900-1950). Madrid: Endymion. Morcillo, Aquilino. 1988. “Mis relaciones con gente importante.” Periodistas 16 (November): 82. Montesinos, J.F. 1966. Introducción a la historia de la novela en España en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Castalia. Montiel, Isidoro. 1974. Ossián en España. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta. Muñoz, Berta. 2005. El Teatro crítico español durante el Franquismo visto por sus censores. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española. Ochoa de Eribe Urdinguio, María Ángeles. 1992. “Walt Whitman en España: recepción de su poética. 1900-1960.” PhD thesis (Universidad de Deusto). Palomo, María del Pilar. 1997. Movimientos literarios y periodismo en España. Madrid: Síntesis. Pamiés, T. 1978. “Mi apasionante experiencia como corresponsal. Aquí Radio España Independiente, estación Pirenaica.” Nueva Historia 13: 38. Parratt, Sonia. 2011. “Literary Journalism in Spain: Past, Present (and Future?).” In Literary Journalism across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences, eds. John S. Bak and Bill Reynolds, 134-147. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Pizarroso Quintero, Alejandro. 1990. Historia de la Propaganda. Notas para un estudio de la propaganda política y de guerra. Madrid: Eudema. Plans, M. 1982. “Radio España Independiente, entre el mito y la propaganda.” In De las ondas rojas a las radios libres, ed. L.L. Bastells, n.pag. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Racionero, Luis. 1977. Filosofías del “underground”. Barcelona: Anagrama. Rebollo Sánchez, Félix. 1997. Periodismo y movimientos literarios contemporáneos españoles 1900-1939. Murcia: Huerga y Fierro.

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Notes 1

Acknowledgement: This paper is the partial result of the Ph.D. thesis “La cultura de los países de habla inglesa en la obra periódica de Álvaro Cunqueiro en el Faro de Vigo (1961-1981)” (2009), which was initially supported by the Galician regional funding for Human Resources Programa María Barbeito 2006-2009 Xunta de Galicia. 2 Translations by the author, unless otherwise stated. 3 For an in-depth discussion of the relationship between journalism and literature in Europe and Spain since the eighteenth century, see Parratt (2011), Chillón (1999), and Palomo (1997). 4 For an additional analysis of the categories identified by Desvois, see Juan Luis Guereña (1982, 114). 5 “Diálogo de la lenguas” illustrates the cultural and ideological tensions in Spain at the time, particularly in relation to Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country. For more information on the impact of Spanish literature in Catalan newspapers during the period of the Republic, see Sanz (2010); on the periodical press in Galicia, see De Toro (2007) and De Toro & Clark (2007). 6 Detailed information on literary journals and periodical publications during this period are found in Seoane (1987); Trapiello (1994), on literature published during the 1936-1939 period, is also illustrative. 7 For information on the Spanish press and international politics and culture, see the section on neighbouring nations during the Civil War in Langa (2007, 279394). For information on theatre, performance, publishing and dissemination in the Francoist press, see Muñoz (2005). 8 Litvak (1980) studies the relationship between European literature and thought by contrasting regionalism, commonly associated with Spanish culture and literature, with Pan-Germanism and the theory of master races. 9 In recent years, a number of studies have demonstrated the influence of writers such as Walt Whitman on the avant-garde in Spain, even during the most repressive years of the dictatorship. See Ochoa (1992) for detailed information on the reception of Walt Whitman in Spanish periodicals, or Young (1980) for the influence of foreign literature on Spanish writers in the twentieth century, such as J.R. Jiménez. 10 On Shakespeare in Catalonia, see Helena Buffery’s postcolonial/post-imperial approach (2007); for more information on Shakespeare in the periodical press in Galicia, see Jarazo and Domínguez (2010). 11 See López Campillo (1972) and her research on cultural minorities in the literary journal La Revista de Occidente, as one of the most representative periodical publications of the period. 12 The poems of Lord Byron were originally translated into Spanish from the French and introduced into the Spanish market as novels (Montesinos 1966, 62-ff). Other English writers translated from the French included William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, to name just a couple of the most notable examples.

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13 Ballesteros de Martos calculates that, in 1925, 80 per cent of Spanish literature was based on foreign translations, including drama and performance (cited in Fernández 1982, 285). This trend continued right up until World War II. 14 For detailed information on the reception of world literature and French writers in Spanish journals, see Nicole Dulin’s El granito y las luces (1987). 15 For a detailed account of Cela’s active collaboration with the censorship apparatus, as well as a full account of the journals censored by the Nobel prizewinning writer, see Sinova (2006, 149-ff, 338-ff). 16 Agustí Bartra is one of the most important figures in Catalan literature, and one of Spain’s most prolific translator; see Jarazo (2009), and Bartra (1974). 17 Carlos Barrera suggests that the influence of economic and political liberalism across Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, combined with the bourgeoning regionalist movements in Galicia and Catalonia, was complemented by three key factors: the general decline of centrist politics in Spain; the modernisation and adaptation of journalism as a globalised industry; and the prevailing anticlericalism of the national newspapers which was countered by the creation in several provinces of periodical publications with a strong Catholic bias (Barrera 1995, 270). 18 For a detailed study of Cunqueiro’s literary column in the Faro de Vigo, see Mera (2007) and Jarazo (2009, 461-628). Both studies include an in-depth analysis of Cunqueiro’s columns and a comprehensive list of catalogued articles. 19 Discourse analysis of the texts suggests these were most likely the work of Fernández del Riego and Cunqueiro writing in varying turns. 20 See Bartra (1974) for a full account of translated poets in Catalan and Spanish literature. 21 This chapter did not discuss Republican press published from the exile, but it should be also considered Spanish press. 22 Please see Gómez and Marín (1999) for a detailed comparative analysis of the Republican and the Francoist Press. 23 Periodical publications and media broadcasting from the exile has been studied in detail by Pamiés (1978), Plans (1982), Bastells (1988), Mendezona (1995), Millán (1998), with special emphasis in the radio broadcasting from Romania, and Eiroa (2006). 24 The evolution of the Spanish press in the twentieth century has been summarised by Vizcarra (2001), with special emphasis on the Capitalist model.

CHAPTER FIVE ANGLOPHILIA AND POPULAR CULTURE IN THE FRANCOIST SPANISH PRESS: THE CASE OF SHAKESPEAREAN REPRESENTATIONS ELENA DOMÍNGUEZ ROMERO

Introduction Franco declared Spain’s neutrality in the World War II although he was deeply indebted to Germany and to Italy for their contribution to his victory over the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. But the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 gave him the opportunity to participate in the conflict and to try to get revenge for the Soviet Union’s aid to the Republicans. He still believed that the Axis powers would win when the war turned suddenly in favour of the Allies with the entry of the United States in the conflict in December 1941 and the Allies landing in Casablanca in November 1942. At that time, Spain cancelled its pro-Axis policy to agree, in May 1944, to end shipments to Germany, to close the German consulate in Tangier, and to expel German espionage agents from its frontiers. In exchange for these actions, the Allies were to provide Spain with petroleum and other necessary supplies, thus making up for the international blockade suffered by Francoist Spain (Nicolás 2011). By the end of 1944, Spain had entered into a period of “benevolent neutrality”. And, as events evolved, Franco’s anticommunist stance proved to be a significant factor in the United States’ decision to revise their policy toward Francoism in view of the Cold War. United States policy makers also began to recognize the strategic importance of the Iberian Peninsula and took steps to normalize their political and economic relations with Spain in the years 1948-1950. In 1950, the United States

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supported a United Nations (UN) resolution lifting the boycott on Franco’s Regime and resumed full diplomatic relations with Spain in 1951 so that the Spanish period of isolation came to an end (Powell 2011). Meanwhile, Spain’s European neighbours were less willing than the United States to modify their aversion to Franco’s authoritarian rule. For quite a long period of time, the West European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) vetoed the United States’ efforts to include Spain (Powell 2011). Finally, in 1955, the UN approved Spain’s membership and Franco placed a high value on Spain’s relationship with the States, for the prestige they conferred as well as for strategic reasons. This relationship continued to be a dominant factor in the development of the country’s foreign policy up to Franco’s death. As for the Anglo-Spanish relations, it is important to claim that the fate of Gibraltar constituted a sore point in the Spanish foreign affairs since 1713, when Spain ceded this area to Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht. The question of sovereignty revived in the 1960s and jeopardized friendly relations between Britain and Spain. Still nowadays, Spain has never relinquished its claim to Gibraltar while the British have always maintained that the inhabitants of the area should determine Gibraltar’s fate. Indeed, the heterogeneous population of Gibraltar voted to remain under British rule in 1967 and thus to enjoy local democratic selfgovernment and an increasingly higher standard of living than that prevailing in Spain. The situation continues to be rather problematic today, since no clear results were obtained by Spain’s steps, taken already in 1969, to seal off Gibraltar and to accelerate the economic development program launched for its Spanish surrounding area known as Campo de Gibraltar (Gunther 1980). In terms of the literary relations between Spain and England, it can be said that translations were quite uncommon until the eighteenth century in Spain, even though authors like Quevedo or Montemayor had already been translated into English already in the seventeenth century. Indeed, English works such as Newton’s did not begin to be published in Spanish until England started to excel in the fields of scientific research or philosophy. Shakespeare, meanwhile, would have to wait until the nineteenth century Romanticism to be translated into Spanish. Actually, most of the English works that reached Spain at the time managed to enter the Iberian literary tradition through French translations. A clear example of this tendency, still sadly present in twentieth century Spain, is the fact that romantic authors such as Blake, Coleridge or Shelley were almost unknown for Spanish readers. French readership’s previous taste for Byron prioritized

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the translations of his works into Spanish above those by Blake, Coleridge or Shelley (Alberich 1994). The present study is aimed at showing that Anglophilia does only reach Spain under the socio-political moves which would follow World War II, once the Spanish Civil War is over and Franco’s Spain forced to open beyond Europe’s frontiers for logistic, political reasons. The initial Francoist rigid restrictions against British and North American literature were progressively transformed into an Anglophone tradition that transcended Spanish culture and, more specifically, Spanish periodical press. The figure of Shakespeare, and its use by the Spanish Regime both as a sign of its newly adopted Anglophilia and as a way to reinforce the Regime’s ideas, will be also considered. The Shakespearean representations, as reviewed by Franco’s system of press and propaganda, will work to unveil this double function performed by the English bard in the Francoist stage.

Franco’s Press and (Counter)Propaganda: From German to Anglo(philia) With the advent of the Civil War one of the objectives of the Francoist forces is the conquest and control of the media. This is considered a strategic mission for the army and a key step in the organization of the new society, the “new order”. The obligation of the media was to be kept reserved for a means of political action in the service of the authorities; the media became a tool for education and propaganda of the new state in which “the power of journalism was essentially spiritual, the good power of the press being its wide and deep guiding and educational opportunities” (Prados 1943, 13). Francoist Press was thus initiated after the war concluded, on July 13th 1940, through the establishment of a colossal information-propaganda apparatus that was provided for the victors of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Its patrimony was configured by the seizures carried out under numerous decrees and orders. The National Delegation of Press and Propaganda was authorized for the use, enjoyment and disposal of the seized capital. With its roots well sunk deep into the war period, Francoist Press grouped its writers by ideological affinities and, as a direct consequence of this, contributed to outline not only a new society within the margins of the “new order”, but also a new style, heroic and rhetoric (Heras 2001).

Anglophilia and Popular Culture in the Francoist Spanish Press Titles

Cities

Alerta Amanecer Arriba Arriba España Baleares Córdoba Diario Español El Pueblo Gallego Falange Fe y Sevilla Hierro Imperio Información Jaén Jornada y Levante La Mañana La Nueva España La Voz de España Libertad Línea Los Sitios de G. Mediterráneo Nueva España Odiel Patria Proa Pueblo Solidaridad Nacional y La Prensa Sur y La Tarde Unidad Voluntad Yugo

Santander Zaragoza Madrid Pamplona Palma de Mallorca Córdoba Tarragona Pontevedra (Vigo) Las Palmas Sevilla Bilbao Zamora Alicante Jaén Valencia Lérida Oviedo San Sebastián Valladolid Murcia Gerona Castellón de la P. Huesca Huelva Granada León Madrid Barcelona Málaga San Sebastián Gijón Almería

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Table 5-1. Publications by the Francoist Press (National Delegation of Press and Propaganda) in 1946 as reproduced in Heras (2001). Begoña Zalbidea, in her study on the Francoist Press (1996), reveals useful information on the confiscations carried out by the Regime that, per regions, can be seen in Table 5-2 below:

84 City Albacete Alicante Almería Baleares Barcelona Bilbao Castellón Córdoba Ciudad Real Cuenca Gerona Granada Guadalajara Huelva Huesca Jerez Las Palmas León Madrid Málaga Marruecos Murcia Ourense Oviedo Pamplona Pontevedra San Sebastián Santander Sevilla Tenerife Teruel Valencia Zaragoza

Chapter Five Title Diario de Albacete Gaceta de Alicante Emancipación, Diario de Almería El Felanigense, Pedra Foguera, Nosotros La Veu de Catalunya, La Publicitat, Solidaridad Obrera, La Humanitat, Las Noticias, Día Gráfico, La Noche, El Diluvio Euzkadi, El Liberal, El Nervión Heraldo de Castellón, Diario de Castellón, República El Sur, La Voz El Progreso Manchego Cuenca Roja El Autonomista El Defensor Comuna Libre La Provincia El Pueblo, Diario de Huesca Ayer, El Chazo, El Martillo Avance, Tribuno La Democracia Claridad, Ahora, La Nación, El Socialista, Mundo Obrero, El Sol, La Voz, El Liberal, El Heraldo El Popular Heraldo de Marruecos El Liberal Galicia, La Zarpa La Región, El Noroeste, Boletín de Avilés, La Voz de Asturias, Avance, El Comercio La Voz de Navarra El Pueblo Gallego, La Tarde Guipúzcoa Obrera, El Pueblo Vasco, La Voz de G. La Región, El Cantábrico El Liberal El Tiempo, Spartaco Cultura y Acción El Mercantil Valenciano, El Pueblo Diario de Aragón, El Frente, La Justicia de Calatayud

Table 5-2. Seized publications per regions, as shown by Zalbidea (1996). The creation of this new journalism, with a new style, implies a direct attack to the old freedom of the press in the country at the beginning of the post-war period. Yet this would also indirectly attack the newspaper advertising system, particularly in the early years of the Regime, as it

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coincides with the need to use any space in newspapers to propagate the ideologies of the new state, thereby sacrificing actual advertising. As shown by Heras (2001, 246-271), Figures 5-1 to 5-5 below reveal the lack of benefits generated by this new journalism that had been devised for propagandistic purposes only. As shown by the figures, this is especially clear in communities where languages other than Spanish – the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia – were condemned to be unofficially spoken:

Fig. 5-1. Benefits obtained by the National Press and the Francoist Press

Fig. 5-2. Benefits of the Francoist Press in Catalonia

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Fig. 5-3. Benefits of the Francoist Press in the Basque Country

Fig. 5-4. Benefits obtained by the Francoist Press in Galicia (I)

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Fig. 5-5. Benefits obtained by the Francoist Press in Galicia (II)

Any serious approach to periodical press in Franco’s Spain would be incomplete without considering the role of counter-propaganda developed by the underground opposition in the exile and/or that of propaganda and informational activities in Spain proceeding from other countries. Elisa Chuliá indicates that the media in non-democratic regimes entails some inherent problems due to distrust of official information, commonly working as government control and inspiration, which end up favouring the development of alternative media within these countries (1995, 513). Authors like Bassets and Bastardes claim in this sense that Franco’s underground press performed a real function of mass media which stood as one of the pillars of the dissidence from the beginning of the dictatorship. According to the authors, this opened underground expression to those classes and social strata who agreed to the use and consumption of these counter mass media taking them as wider and fruitful for individual and collective spaces of freedom of expression (1979, 157). Yet theirs is probably a too optimistic assumption in assessing the role of the underground press under Franco. In general, the nature and evolution of clandestine information in Francoist Spain depended on the course of the anti-Franco opposition. During the first two decades of the Franco Regime, counterpropaganda was marginal and had a

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poor view of everyday life in the country. Only in the sixties, with the spread of social unrest in Spain, especially in more urbanized and developed areas of the country, illegal counterpropaganda was gradually adopting a “massive” nature, more closely linked to the new groups of student and trade union opposition, with a higher affinity to the political reality of the country and increased contacts with the exiled active opposition. Several stages can be traced in this evolution process which would also contribute to pave the Spanish way towards Anglophilia (Oliver and Pagès 1978). After the World War II, the various French governments maintained a stance against Franco’s Regime amid international condemnation equally shown by the Spanish emissions of Radio Paris although the start of the Cold War would give place to a sudden shift in this attitude (1978, 527). British authorities, meanwhile, sought to counter German propaganda in Spain, focusing heavily on Spanish radio broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in addition to the work done by their diplomatic services, as was the case of a more subtle “cultural propaganda” carried out through the “British Council”ʊsince its establishment in Madrid in November 1940ʊand the new institutions opened in Bilbao and Valencia at the end of 1944 (Berdah 1993, 273-286). As the BBC Year Book states: “Since the war, the chief demand of the Spanish audience of the BBC has been for more news and comment about Spain; one of the ways of endeavouring to meet this demand has been the introduction of a weekly series of Spain regional programmes, a different part of Spain covered in each” (BBC Year Book 1948, 125-126). Also, the United States developed an intense propaganda by the creation in Spain of the “Office of War Information” (OWI, hereafter), which operated under the umbrella of the Press Office of the U.S. Embassy, directed by John Hughes. Trying to outshine the German power, American propaganda was channelled directly through various printed materials and broadcasted emissions in the Spanish Voice of America and, indirectly, through Hollywood cinema (Pizarroso 1994, 119-154). Sevillano Calero (1996, 618) calls our attention on the change in the Regime’s instructions in this sense. Initially, London and Washington were considered by the Regime to be completely at the service of the European Bolshevisation and annihilation of the Western culture. The Francoist state feared their intention to destroy Germany and hence to deliver Europe to Bolshevism and to infiltrate Russian-Soviet agents in the European countries to contain possible reactions against this same Bolshevisation. And then, the sudden move came whenʊright after the success that followed the Allied landings in Normandy, in an extensive

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confidential slogan dated September 5, 1944ʊthe Regime stated the obligation for press comments to suit the political criteria dictated by the state, having to abandon any attitude of Germanophilia, thus highlighting the Regime’s neutrality and good relations with the allied countries, towards Anglophilia.

The Presence of United States and Great Britain in Franco’s Spain The organization of propaganda in Britain and the United States had some elements in common. They both highlighted the previous existence of liberal regimes to claim themselves as defenders of freedom of expression although there still was control censorship by governments.

The United States of America During WWII the United States launched a formidable propagandistic campaign referring to neutral countries like Spain, the intention being 1. To increase respect and regard for the United States and the other United Nations, to promote confidence in their total victory over the Axis, and to convince the Spanish people that the historical continuation of Spain as a nation depends on a United Nations victory. 2. To prevent Spain from willingly becoming a base for military operations by the Axis against the United Nations. 3. Considering the possibility of Germany’s invading Spain to stimulate the Spaniards, all classes of Spaniards, to make the path of the invader as difficult and dangerous as possible. (Pizarroso 1994, 129)

In this sense, the media put to use for the OWI activities in Spain included, principally, radio recordings, cable wireless news, pictures, exhibits, film strips, motion pictures and social entertainments (Pizarroso 1994, 131). Also, Hollywood had joined the Allied propagandistic effort even before the entry of the United States into the war, producing a large number of war-themed films with a clear political nature (Pizarroso 1994, 152). However, at least in the perception of the U.S. Embassy, Spaniards first showed a preference for United States and British films of every sort, and thereafter for light comedy, (a) adventure films, love triangles, (b) sentimental, (c) mystery, crime, and detective, and last of all war films, of which the publicʊexcept for the least discriminating groupsʊseemed to be tired (Pizarroso 1994, 152). This task was not always going to be easy, especially in the years when Spain still prioritized Nazi above American propaganda. As explained by

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Pizarroso, the OWI complained that the Regime usually fought USA propaganda activities on many fronts, confiscating and destroying American publications, while newspapers and magazines were forbidden to publish, particularly USA friendly news items or special articles: “The Regime forbade the Spanish press to publish advertisements of American programs, but simultaneously authorized full-page German ads along with advertisements selling the Nazi propaganda theme of European autarchy” (1994, 138). It is true, though, Pizarroso also explains, that this attitude changed especially after the fall of Mussolini and the success of the allies’ campaign in Sicily in the summer of 1943. Since late 1943 onwards, the United States could legally distribute propaganda printed in Spanish. As a result, shortly afterwards, the OWI elaborated a second report where some positive changes were acknowledged despite ignoring the still pro-Axis editorial line in the Spanish press: “Since then there has been some improvement: …still responds with facility to the main German propaganda lines, but is now using American materials weekly. Of course, numerous items from the Axis and Axis-occupied Europe are used for every American or British item, but still our gain, by comparison, has been noticeable” (1994, 138).

Great Britain As previously mentioned, British Propaganda developed an effective censorship accompanied by intense persuasion campaigns. A major propaganda system, with the coordination of ministerial departments, was thus launched in 1941. The British created the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), which coordinated all the activities of British overseas information (allied, neutral and enemy). Though initially difficult to organize, the information system gradually became a joint system including various media. Despite censorship, the information provided was basically true and, therefore, contributed to increase confidence in the Government (Cole 1990). The important role of the BBC in Franco’s Spain has been also mentioned above. Not in vain, Francoist Spain managed to reach a great importance for Britain’s grand strategists since they first became well aware of the fact that the loss of control over the Strait of Gibraltar would clearly have an immediate impact upon the British positions in the Mediterranean (Smyth 1986, 2). Consequently, Denis Smyth explains that: “Based on the assessment, perhaps the assumption, that Franco wished to remain outside the European conflict, and might be weaned away from the

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axis orbit, a policy emerged designed to satisfy Spanish economic needs, and demonstrate British sympathy and, or support for Spain’s territorial ambitions” (1986, 4). However, the gradually disclosed unwillingness of the United States Government to co-operate in substantial economic aid and credits to Spain, the author continues, “also greatly reduced the scope of economic help with which Britain could tempt Spaniards” (Smyth 1986, 4).

Shakespeare’s Reception in the Francoist System of Press and Propaganda Moral censorship prevailed in Spain until well into the sixties, with political censorship being much more powerful in the twilight of the Regime. Repeatedly, works that raised serious controversies among censorship reports ended up being passed with the intention of fighting the arguments of internal or external opposition, or to give the Regime a more “liberal” touch for propagandistic reasons abroad (Montalbán 2007, 5758). It is to be noticed that literary reviews were also included in the censorship files well up until the mid fifties (Neuschafer 1994, 314). Censorship was undoubtedly in line with the culture of Franco’s Spain, in turn influenced by the ideas of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was hailed as an icon of the Regime for his foundational role after his execution at the star of the Spanish Civil War. Thus the new Regime, and its censorship system, was intended to watch over the supremacy of the Catholic Church and to establish the individual perception in terms of the collective society that this belonged to. Of special consideration were in this sense the religious festivities and the monumentalism of the state, as much as the mass parades in the German and the Italian style. Celebrations unfolded uniformed martial parades with an excess of liturgical details, altars, crosses, triumphal arches, etc. (Montalbán 2007, 70) The end was promoting racial and religious purity and stability of family and society (Gregor 2009, 30) where, at the same time, the individual was once more considered to be as part of the community only. Sufficient is to say in this sense that the culture developed in Francoist Spain fulfilled the purpose of praising the imperial pomp and rhetoric characteristic of the time (Gracia and Ruiz 2001) with premieres of works with direct relation to the soconsidered glorious historical moment, the re-enactment of titles that were significant in terms of propaganda, and the ongoing programming of classical authors. As it was to be expected, Francoist theatre did also go in line with the ideology of the Regime (Oliva 2002, 141). Classical theatre, in which

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characters are supposedly being handled by the honour, or belonging to earlier times considered glorious, hence gained special importance in this context. The canon was reviewed to fit Francoist values and, as noted by Claudio Guillén, texts were rewritten and reworked for this purpose (1985, 413). Montalbán’s review (2007) of the literary critics of some of the Francoist representations of the Shakespearean works that were published at the time give an idea of this adaptation of the canon to the new Spanish taste. A good example of this can be seen in the first Shakespearean stage production of the Franco Regime, Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor (1941), after which critics simply reported that there had been “changes in our current way of conceiving the play” (Información, 04/06/1941). Macbeth, represented in 1942, was said to emphasize magnificence (Madrid, 01/20/1942) and was considered as “an example of the achievements of the New Spain” (Información, 1/21/1942), as much as as an exponent of both serious and dignified drama (Gol, 02/12/1942). Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet was presented as “a clean truth in the middle of the dirty Spanish scene” (Madrid, 01.12.1943) (quoted in Montalbán 2007, 97-98). In this process of Shakespeare’s assimilation into the Regime’s ideas, it is quite saying that, as reported by Antonio de Toro Santos in his illuminating study on the reception of British and Irish writers in the Spanish periodical press (2007), Shakespeare’s magnificence was highlighted by the publication of articles equalling the English bard to his nationwide admired Spanish contemporary Cervantesʊ“El ‘barnacle’, de Shakespeare, y el ‘barnaclas’ de Cervantes” (Astrana 1958, 3); “En el CCCXLII aniversario de la muerte de Cervantes” (Coincidencias entre una comedia de Shakespeare y otra de Cervantes) (Astrana 1958, 3). Also, the author is somehow made closer to Catholic Spain through the publication of articles with clear Catholic connotations such as “El teatro nuestro de cada día” (Coll 1943, n.). Astounding relations between Shakespeare and Fray Luis de Granada were similarly traced with this same intentionʊ“Fray Luis de Granada y Shakespeare” (Laín 1946, 3); “Shakespeare y Fray Luis de Granada” (Astrana 1946, 3). This ends up being a Catholic, patriotic Shakespeare, in the light of important Spanish writers from the Golden Age as Boscánʊ“Boscán y Shakespeare” (Andrónico 1945, 26), or highly influential philosophers like Descartes and Senecaʊ“Hamlet y Descartes” (Camón 1946, 3); “El influjo de Séneca en Shakespeare” (Astrana 1952, 3). That is to say, a National Catholic Shakespeare who could be even related to the Spanish playwright Benavente, who got the Nobel Prize in literature in 1922 for his defence of the Spanish traditional theatreʊ“Benavente y la literatura

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inglesa” (Revesz 1945, n.). Not in vain, this is a Shakespeare for Spaniards, properly translated into Spanish, intentionally reworked and reshaped in advance, to become worthy of the Francoist theatre: “Shakespeare para los españoles” (Ley 1951, 7). The closer Shakespeare is made to Spain, the closer Spain gets access to Anglophilia in this two way process towards openness to the world in which the assimilation of a world author like Shakespeare to Franco’s Catholic and patriotic Regime is only curiously involved.

Works Cited Alberich, J. M. 1994. La difusión de la literatura inglesa en España. Translated from the original Storia Della Civiltà Letteraria Spagnola (1990). Torino. institucional.us.es/revistas/rasbl/22/art_3.pdf. Andrónico. 1945. “Boscán y Shakespeare.” Destino December 22, 26. Astrana Marín, L. 1946. “Shakespeare y Fray Luis de Granada.” September 4, 3. —. 1952. “El influjo de Séneca en Shakespeare.” ABC March 26, 3. —. 1958. “El ‘barnacle’, de Shakespeare, y el ‘barnaclas’ de Cervantes.” ABC March 22, 3. —. 1958. “En el CCCXLII aniversario de la muerte de Cervantes (Coincidencias entre una comedia de Shakespeare y otra de Cervantes).” April 23, 3. Bassets, L. and Bastardes, E. 1979. “La prensa clandestina en Catalunya: una reflexión metodológica.” In Alternativas populares a las comunicaciones de masa, edited by J. Vidal Beneyto, 155-176. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas CIS. Berdah J.F. 1993. “La ‘propaganda’ cultural británica en España durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial a través de la acción del ‘British Council’: un aspecto de las relaciones hispano-británicas (1939-1946).” El régimen de Franco, 1936-1975: política y relaciones exteriores, edited by Javier Tussel, S. Sueiro, J.M. Marín, and M. Casanova, 273-286. Madrid: UNED. British Broadcasting Corporation. 1948. BBC Year Book. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Camón Aznar, J. 1946. “Hamlet y Descartes.” ABC September 13, 3. Cole, Robert. 1990. Britain and the War of Words in Neutral Europe. London: Macmillan. Coll, J. 1943. “El teatro nuestro de cada día.” Destino December 24, n.pag. Gracia García, Jordi and Miguel Ángel Rui Carnier. 2001. La España de Franco (1939-1975). Cultura y vida cotidiana. Madrid: Síntesis.

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Gregor, Keith. 2009. “Shakespeare at the Español: Franco and the Construction of a ‘National Culture’.” Multicultural Shakespeare 4: 29-36. Guillén, Claudio. 1985. Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introducción a la literatura comparada. Barcelona: Crítica. Gunther, Richard. 1980. Public policy in a No-party state. Berkeley: University of California. Heras Pedrosa, Carlos. 2001. La prensa del Movimiento y su gestión publicitaria (1936-1984). Málaga: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad. Laín Entralgo, P. 1946. “Fray Luis de Granada y Shakespeare.” ABC August 10, 3. Ley, Ch. D. 1951. “Shakespeare para los españoles.” ABC September 15, 7. Montalbán Martínez, Nicolás. 2007. La recepción de Shakespeare en los teatros nacionales franquistas. Murcia: Digitum. Universidad de Murcia. Neuschäfer, Hans-Jörg. 1994. Adiós a la España Eterna. La dialéctica de la censura. Novela, teatro y cine bajo el franquismo. Barcelona: Anthropos. Nicolás, Encarna. 2011. Breve historia de la España de Franco. Madrid: Catarata. Oliva, César. 2002. Teatro español del siglo XX. Madrid: Síntesis. Oliver, J.; Pagès, J. and Pagès, P. 1978. La prensa clandestina (19391956). Propaganda y documentos antifranquistas. Barcelona: Planeta. Pizarroso, A. 1994. “El cine americano en España durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial: información y propaganda” REDEN. Revista Española de Estudios Nortemericanos 7: 119-154. Powell, Charles. 2011. El amigo americano: España y Estados Unidos: de la dictadura a la democracia. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutemberg. Prados López, Manuel. 1942. Ética y estética del periodismo español. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Revesz. 1945. “Benavente y la literatura inglesa.” Destino February 17, n.pag. Sevillano Calero, Francisco. 1996. “Persuasión ideológica y opinión en España bajo el franquismo 1939-1962.” Ph.D. Thesis Universidad de Alicante, Spain. Smyth, Denis. 1986. Diplomacy and Strategy of Survival: British Policy and Franco’s Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toro Santos, A. R. de, and Clark D. 2007. British and Irish Writers in the Spanish Periodical Press (1900-1965). A Coruña: Netbiblo.

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Zalbidea Bengoa, Begoña. 1996. Prensa del Movimiento en España (19361983). País Vasco: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad.

CHAPTER SIX PRO-GERMAN PRESS AND LITERATURE IN NORTH-WESTERN SPANISH CULTURES DURING THE WORLD WAR I (1914-1918) JOÁM EVANS PIM

Introduction During the First World War both Allies and Central Powers tried to push neutral Spain to their own side, focusing a considerable part of their war efforts on propaganda and information campaigns in the printed media of the time. Motivations for collaboration, or even proactive militancy, are subject to each case, ranging from sincere sympathy for the cause of the contenders to pure economic interest. For some of the latter, the scarcity and high cost of basic materials for the editorial industry (such as paper) together with the appreciable decrease of the incomes from advertising (due to war restrictions) turned subsidies or bribes from belligerent nations in main form of survival. This is, at least partially, the case of La Raza, a Galician short-lived fortnight literary magazine that had its first issue published in January 1918. As far as we know, this clearly pro-German publication based in Santiago de Compostela (Rua do Horreo, 22) published eleven issues in The Franciscan Echo Press (until July 1918), ceasing most probably when German subsidies came to an end. Unlike the Allies, Germany’s propaganda efforts started late and clumsy, partially because of its initial success in the battlefields that apparently predicted an eminent victory. Nevertheless, the failure at the Battle of the Marne (September 9th 1914) led to the creation in the following month of the Zentralstelle für Auslandsdienst or ZFA (Foreign Service Central Office) to coordinate propaganda efforts of what would be a long and savage war, in which the role of information, morale and public opinion would have unprecedented importance.

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Within a neutral Spanish State, Galician opinion was also a target to be focused upon by regional and local media. Even though La Raza is not an isolated case (other Galician clearly pro-German publications as El Eco de Galicia may be mentioned) it has, due to its cultural-literary character, special interest in relation to its contents. This will be the main focus of the present chapter, as we will try to disclose how cultural and literary issues were used and displayed in an attempt to gain sympathies among Galician readers in the context of a wider propaganda campaign to influence public opinion, which, as we see, was not only based on plain news pieces in daily newspapers.

German and Pro-German press in the Spanish Context The penetration of German propaganda in the Peninsula was an extremely complicated process, due to the international blockade and relative isolation of both countries. The main telegraphic cables were sabotaged in the first weeks of the war, and the participation of Italy and Portugal complicated to great extent communications by ordinary post. Switzerland, Sweden and Holland served as base for distribution of materials but soon enough contraband was the only viable method (Schneider 2004, 903). While some of the initiatives where launched and directed from German soil, the increasing difficulties in reaching the country from abroad due to Allied blockade progressively fostered the creation of local alternatives, with the (spontaneous or requested) support of existing or newly created media. Among the first category, public actions to reach the Spanish speaking world, represented by ZFA, were complemented by private and mixed enterprises as the Sociedad Editora Hispano Americana de Hamburgo, that launched a Spanish version of the Hamburger Nachrichten later called El Heraldo de Hamburgo (even though this article is centred in the Galician case, the “war of opinions” was generalized across South America (Parra 1986). Curiously enough, it was a former Nicaraguan diplomat, Máximo Asenjo, who pioneered this initiative, which (as he stated), It aims to [...] bring the Spanish-speaking population the true knowledge, fairly accounting the real events, as they have happened, and are happening in this ruthless and relentless war, a universal war which is spilling with blood the soil of Europe. This simple narration will be best way to refute the false information spread by some unscrupulous foreign press, especially Reuter and Havas agencies. (Albes, 1996, quoted in Schneider in 2004, 903-904)

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The support of the Zentralstelle also came in the form of subsidies so that, jointly with the Hamburgisher Iberoamerikanischer Verein (Asociación Iberoamericana de Hamburgo), brought the introduction of an illustrated supplement boosting its circulation up to 25,000 copies at certain stages among many Spanish and South American cities. Another journal, Die Welt im Bild (an illustrated supplement of Hamburger Fremdenblatt edited in 12 languages, including Spanish) also circulated among the Spanish speaking countries (growing up to 200,000 copies in total), also thanks to ZFA’s subsidies, materialized in the form of acquisition of a significant part of the print run. Publications of similar nature were Handelstag-Nachrichten (renamed in Spanish as Noticias para el esclarecimiento sobre Alemania y la guerra) backed by German comercial and industrial societies (with around 6.000 monthly readers); El Correo de Alemania, a weekly newspaper edited in Berlin by Hermógenes Sánchez y Rosal, a Guatemalan subject, with a circulation estimated in 7,000, but that did not survive the 1916 blockade; or El Progreso, a short-lived magazine launched in Berlin by Granados de Siles, Carlos Kühn de la Escura and Julio Arija, with similar fate as the previous one. All three had important subsidies from the Zentralstelle (Schneider 2004, 904-905). On the other hand, the Nachrichtendienst für dir Länder spanischer und portugiesescher Zunge (or Servicio de Noticias para los Países de Lengua Española y Portuguesa), had an important role on disseminating these publications, together with the main German newspapers, around the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world. It was also responsible for the edition of Nachrichtendienst, a fortnightly magazine published in German, Portuguese and Spanish. Heavily subsidized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was forced to cease its activities by 1918 as most of its products were intercepted by Allied forces (Schneider 2004, 906). A similar role was played by Deutscher Überseedienst, editor of La grande Guerra en cuadros (Der grosse Krieg in Bildern), a monthly illustrated magazine with a total 50,000 copies, and Transocean GMBH, news agency responsible for the transmission of telegraphic information, summing up to 5 million words in 1918. Matthis Erzberger, editor of the Zentrum party journal and soon after vice-president of Transocean, also launched a series of newspapers that were translated to many languages (id., ibid., 908). Besides, Kriegs-Chronik (Crónica de la Guerra), that had around 5,000 copies published in Spanish, he also translated propaganda essays as Der deutsche Krieg und Katholizismus (La guerra alemana y el catolicismo).

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Inside Spanish territory, initiatives as Deutscher Nachrichtendienst für Spanien, linked to the previously mentioned organization with similar name, headed by August Hofer, a German businessman settled in Barcelona, had notable importance disseminating without charge news pieces received through radio telegram from Nauen or Norddeich (information was translated and sent daily to 90 Spanish newspapers, 15 Portuguese newspapers and 140 subscribers). Besides translating and distributing German articles and photographs, it launched a weekly free magazine of about 8,000 copies, though it soon disappeared due to financial difficulties. In Madrid, Wilhelm Rautzenberg created a similar office (Oficina de Información Alemana), also linked to the Nachrichtendienst, and with many common functions. And Carlos Coppel, another businessman, published, together with Francisco Sánchez Ocaña (a journalist at ABC newspaper), Por la Patria y por la Verdad, a Embassy subsidized newspaper that reached a circulation of 150,000 copies (id., ibid. 909-911). In any case, the greatest amount of information, even though having the above mentioned as regular sources, would be channelled through autochthonous Spanish newspapers. Generally speaking, it was mainly liberals, reformists, republicans and socialists who bowed to the “cause” of the Allies, while the majority of the conservatives (specially liberal, maurist and carlist monarchists), military officers and clergy aligned themselves with the Central Empires (DíazPlaja 1981, 232; Aguirre de Cárcer, 1995; Barreiro, 2004). In the context in which newspapers were clearly identified with political parties or ideologies: The Allies’ supporters ascribed themselves on the side of the defenders of civilization, justice and law, pillars of democracy, seizing the word “progress” against the Spain which connected with its past. The Catholics and retrograde Germanophiles, in turn, were regarded as representing the religious, social discipline and authority, against atheism, corruption, democracy and other stigmas they carried on their opponents, especially influenced by the image of the Republican France. (Marrero 1992, 588)

Following this division, pre-existing journals (usually linked to the latter) as La Tribuna, ABC, El Correo Español, El Debate, El Universo, El Siglo Futuro, El Parlamento, La Correspondencia Militar, La Acción, Nueva España, El Día, El Mundo, where commonly labelled as clearly pro-German, while some of them did received subsidies. In the Catalan Countries publications as Diario de Barcelona, Correo Catalán, Tribuna, El Día Gráfico, La Veu de Catalunha or El Diario de Valencia, may be also mentioned and, in the same way, Basque journals as La Gaceta del Norte, Semanario Aurrerá, El Nervión, El Correo del Norte shared this

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pro-German tendency. Even though this list is not complete, local papers as Correo de Andalucía, El Noticiero, Sevilla, Sevilla Nueva, La Gaceta del Sur, El Correo de Cádiz, La Defensa (all from Andalusia); La Provincia, Gaceta de Tenerife, El Tradicionalista (Canary Islands); El Pueblo Asturiano (Asturias), El Diario Montañés (Cantabria), El Porvenir (Valladolid), La Crónica (Zaragoza), El Bloque (Cáceres) give a significant outlook of the dimensions of German sympathies and propaganda efforts in the Spanish context (Gómez Aparicio 1974, 471475; Ponce Marrero, 1992; Barreiro, 2004; Schneider, 2004).

A Case Study: La Raza Certainly relations between Galicia and the Germanic countries where probably not as fluid in the first years of the twentieth century as they had been in the remote past (we are referring to the many Germanic-Nordic invasions and “visits” by sea and land soon after to be transformed into pilgrimages), but it may be said that an early connection did exist. Ramom Cabanilhas translated Goethe and Schiller into Galician language, Álvaro Cunqueiro translated Holderlin, Díaz Castro translated Rilke and, in a later date, Celso Emilio Ferreiro and Antonio Blanco Freijeiro published a selection of German poetry. Not to mention the intellectual and scientific exchange, with Galicians as Vicente Viqueira (that studied with Husserl, Cassirer and Wundt in Germany between 1911 and 1914), Vicente Risco (who published Mitteleuropa in 1934) or Álvaro das Casas. Piel may be a good example among German scientists that had great interest with Galician archaeological sites (specially our megalithic heritage), language, toponymy, folklore and traditions. A direct connection between Galicia and Germany was established in 1897 through a submarine telegraph cable from the city of Emden to Vigo, personally inaugurated by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Initially, the idea was to link Germany to East Africa, Asia and Australia through this Galician city, developing a connection to British owned Eastern Telegraph Company (Schneider 2004, 901). Unfortunately this last project did not materialize, but it placed a firm communication channel between both countries, and with the whole of the Peninsula. However, this cable, together with other four sea telegraph links, were cut in early August 1914 by a British ship in an strategic manoeuvre to isolate Germany’s means of international communication, which gave Reuter and Havas news agencies a clear position to disseminate their propaganda materials unchallenged. Facing up to this new reality, Germany had to improvise alternative forms to penetrate the Peninsula’s North West.

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Even though certain proclivity to Germany did exist among part of Galicia’s intellectual elites (especially those linked to traditionalist regionalism and other conservative factions), German representatives and industrials were keen to foster and promote any publication that was favourable to their interests. Of course, many publications were more than willing to do so because of their ideological background (and, consequently, that of their readers) even without mediation from German authorities, even though these were frequently recommended to German companies and businessmen for their advertisements. On the other hand, some publications received a monthly subsidy as reward for publishing pro-German news and opinion articles. Furthermore, newly created editorial projects, as La Raza, were supported in similar terms. Among the eleven issues of which we have record (from February to July 1918; number 7 is missing from consulted archives) ten articles make clear or even apologetic statements in favour of Germany, also making reference to its arts and literatures. The first issue’s Editorial (Nuestros Ideales) is clear: La Raza sets out to “cultivate politics (...) defending relentlessly the most convenient and fair causes...”, stating, more specifically, that: Not because their imperial eagles (seized in battle from formidable Roman [sic] regions) landed on our Spanish shields and ensigns one day, not because that nation has reached admirable art and science, and carry out the most daring and amazing inventions, or because they have carried on with the greatest epic ever told, not for their patriotism, discipline, organization and individuals, not for their power and strength, but simply because we have no account of spoliation and grievances with them, and because it is the only major power that can sincerely desire the prosperity and aggrandizement of Spain. (La Raza 1918 1, 2)

In spite of this, in the equinox of its existence and with the war near its end, the number and character of pro-German articles declines abruptly, together with the financial difficulties of the magazine that must include notes requesting its readers to update their subscription fees. In any case, the following list, of which excerpts will be reproduced, may be illustrative: No.1 05/02 1-2 “Nuestros ideales.” The editors. 7-8 “Las condiciones de la paz.” M. Brailsford. 13-14 “Literatura alemana (I).” Unidentified. 15-16 “En favor de la ciencia alemana (I).” Gabriel M.ª Bergara.

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No.2 20/02 23-24 “La razón y la ciencia están de parte de Alemania.” Juan M. López. 32-34 “En favor de la ciencia alemana (II).” Gabriel M.ª Bergara. No.3 05/03 44-46 “En favor de Alemania. El bloqueo por la calumnia (I).” Un hijo de Alemania. No.4 20/03 62-65 “En favor de Alemania. El bloqueo por la calumnia (II).” Un hijo de Alemania. No.5 05/04 84 “Literatura alemana (II).” Unidentified. No.6 20/04 - *No pro-German contents No.7 05/05 - *Issue not available No.8 20/05 - *No pro-German contents No.9 05/06 - *No pro-German contents No.10 20/06 - *No pro-German contents No.11 05/07 174 “Siluetas. Franz Schubert (1797-1828).” Bartolomé de Palafox. The articles published in this journal varied in their scope and nature, from the elitist essays based on German literature – Literatura Alemana (I and II) – to the graphic art of Schubert’s Siluetas. Franz Schubert (17971828). It is curious how in the two first ones, culture is used as an argument to state German superiority over its war adversaries through assertions such as: “from 1888 to 1912, while France has extensively published 316,7 and England a total of 197,7, Germany surpasses these two nations with the eloquent number of: 642,4” (13).

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However, other texts constitute clear examples of war political propaganda, some of them probably provided by the authorities, but not necessarily of their authorship. A significant occurrence is the reprint of an article allegedly published in the Daily Mail by a British journalist, M. Brailsford, criticising peace conditions to Germany in Wilson’s, Lloyd George’s and Clemenceau’s joint proposal. According to this text economical and territorial penalties would lead Germany to its absolute ruin. Other articles condemning French and British propagandistic actions in Spain were dedicated to the Germanic influence in science – for instance, Gabriel María Bergara’s En favor de la ciencia alemana (I and II)–. Bergara focuses his criticism against one of the Comité Internacional de Propaganda documents in which Germany’s contribution to science in history is minimized. Bergara also insists in the common leitmotif in which The British, French and Russians have been assigned the role of defenders of law, freedom and independence, and no one has given them such a request (...). Since (...) they are named from the beginning of the war defenders of the most sacred rights of mankind, there was no other qualifier to Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria, than destroyers of the nations’ independence, violators of their rights and enemies of freedom and, in addition, qualifying their actions as barbaric, savage, criminal ever since the war began. (La Raza 1918, 1, 15)

In a similar tone, Juan M. López explains in La razón y la ciencia están de parte de Alemania, why Spain, if she were to leave her neutrality, should take arms against England, France and the United States putting forward historical justifications as Trafalgar, Napoleon’s invasion, the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the role France and Great Britain played in it. For that reason, “Spain, at least morally and spiritually, should and must be on the side of Germany, and against France and England, which have only caused betrayal, vilification, insults and offenses that provoke our minds” (La Raza 1918 2, 24): Should we abandon our neutrality and our role of passive spectator, our dignity, decorum, patriotism and humanity should be in favour of Germany. That great and noble Germany tried to save Spain from the ruin and the shame of its defeat, and whose noble aspirations could not be achieved because of the opposition of England and the United States of America. (1918 2, 23)

Finally, in what seems a direct insert from propaganda officers, an article signed by “A son of Germany” (“Un hijo de Alemania”) entitled El bloqueo por la calumnia (I and II), insists in the Allies’ systematic

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propaganda efforts against Germany, forming a new blockade in the moral and communicational sphere. The second part of the article (no. 4) ends with a “To be continued” but, unless it was published in the missing issue no. 7, the series were never to be completed. This is significant as no. 4 was the last issue with political or war propaganda articles in favour of Germany. After that, no. 5 included in one page the last paragraphs of the article on German literature previously mentioned, and no. 11 included a short text on Franz Schubert, in which pro-German attitudes can be sensed only tangentially. Obviously, the end of the war was near and any existing subsidies from German agents must have ceased. The end of La Raza was eminent. In the last issue of which we have knowledge (Issue no. 11) a new position is shown: This war – the Great War – not only has bloodied the world, from the Falklands to the Bosphorus, but also has widely clouded the understanding and the intelligence of mankind... And yet, the racial pyre burning in the middle of Europe, reveals its dramatic and barbaric splendour, so as the fossilized, dead feelings finally awake, propagate and reappear [referring to religious sentiment] ... These are the beautiful and rewarding resurrections that gives us the Great War. Europe is on fire, but the huge pyres melt the encysted ice of our living souls. The salvation is bloody and brutal, but it is effective and, perhaps, permanent. (La Raza 1918 11 176-7)

Conclusions La Raza, as many other publications of the time, was created in the Fascist atmosphere, and, in some way, its short life was also thwarted by the war, or rather, by its end. During the eleven issues of which we have noticed it represented a good showcase of Galician cultural and political life, especially that of Santiago de Compostela. Conservative regionalism manifested in articles and short essays, interviews, and poems, over a dozen of them written in Galician language. Galician authors such as Manuel-Antonio, as we know from his correspondence, were subscribers and, at least once, submitted poems for publication (Pérez 1979, 30-31). It is likely that the dependence on propaganda subsidies together with the decline of its defended positions with the end of the war (possibly less attractive both to readers and subscribers) made the project unfeasible from certain point onwards, also considering its coexistence with many similar publications of the time: Vida Gallega, Suevia (to name just a few of them). In any case, La Raza constitutes a still insufficiently explored multifaceted example of wartime Galician press that can provide a wide

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range of study materials ranging from literary to political issues, from war propaganda to local advertisements.

Works Cited Aguirre de Cárcer, Nuño. 1995. La neutralidad de España durante la Primera Guerra Mundial: 1914-1918. Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores. Barreiro, Cristina. 2004. “La prensa española ante la primera Guerra Mundial.” Arbil 78: n.pag. Díaz Plaja, Fernando. 1981. Francófilos y germanófilos. Madrid: Alianza. Gómez Aparicio, Pedro. 1974. Historia del Periodismo Español. Madrid: Editora Nacional. Maestro Backsbacka, Francisco Javier. 1989. “Germanófilos y aliadófilos en la prensa obrera madrileña, 1914-1918.” In La sociedad madrileña durante la Restauración: 1876-1931, Vol. 2, edited by Ángel Bahamonde Magro; and Luis Otero Carvajal, 319-332. Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid. Martínez Hermoso, Manuel. 1998. La primera guerra mundial en la prensa sevillana (1914-1918). Sevilla: Padilla Libros. Montero, Enrique. 1983. “Luis Araquistain y la propaganda durante la Primera Guerra Mundial.” Estudios de Historia Social 24-25: 245-266. Parra, Yolanda de. 1986. “La Primera Guerra Mundial y la prensa mexicana.” In Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México, Vol. 10, edited by Álvaro Matute, 155-176. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. Pérez Sánchez, Manuel Antonio. 1979. Correspondencia. Vigo: Galaxia. Ponce Marrero, Francisco Javier. 1992. “Prensa y germanofilia en Las Palmas durante la Gran Guerra.” Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos 38: 581-602. Schneider, Ingrid Schulze. 2004. “La propaganda alemana en España en la Primera Guerra Mundial.” In Comunicación y Guerra en la Historia, edited by Alberto Pena, 899-916. Santiago de Compostela: Tórculo. Seoane, María Cruz and María Dolores Sáiz. 1996. Historia del periodismo en España. Madrid: Alianza.

CHAPTER SEVEN CULTURAL REVIVAL AND INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE GALICIAN PRESS (1900-1945) ADRIAN HEALY

By the end of the nineteenth century, there had been a noticeable recovery of the Galician language as a cultural, historical and literary language. The Galician literary revival of the nineteenth century, known as the Rexurdimento, had helped to revive Galician as a literary language even though many people still viewed the language as backward and associated it with poverty and the lower social classes. However prolific cultural activity began to take place around the beginning of the twentieth century in an attempt to promote the oral use of the language and to help the Galician people to remember their cultural and historical importance. This chapter focuses primarily on the role and activities of the Irmandades de Fala and the Xeración Nós (Nós Generation) while also examining the role of the Galicia press and the integral part that Ramón Plácido Castro played in this cultural revival as a journalist, writer and translator. Numerous translations of foreign authors, the majority of whom were English-language authors, began to appear in the Galician press from 1920 onwards, in an attempt to provide inspiration for Galician nationalism and self-determination which the Nós Generation centred around Celticism and the Celtic links between Galicia and what they deemed as their sister nations to the north, including Scotland, the Isle of Man, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. Much of the focus was on Irish authors, largely due to the admiration that Galician writers and activists held for the Irish people who had long struggled against British domination and who had finally gained independence from Great Britain in 1920 subsequent to the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin. Plácido de Castro was particularly aware of the manner in which the results of the Irish literary Renaissance had directly influenced and provided the ideals for the uprising.

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Nationalistic resurgence in Galicia began around the years 1915-1916 with the celebration of a series of conferences in the Ateneo in Madrid and with the publication of the magazine Estudos Galegos, which sought to revive the Galician language and explore the region’s culture, politics, economy and society. Also central to the re-awakening taking place amongst Galicia scholars, writers and journalists was the publication of Antón Villar Ponte’s Nacionalismo gallego, nuestra afirmación regional, which inspired the foundation of the Irmandades de Fala in Coruña on the 18th of May 1916 (Villares Paz 1995, 208). The Irmandades was founded by Republican and Regionalist sympathisers led by the brothers Antón and Ramón Villar Ponte. The ideologies of the group were publicised through the publication of the journal A Nosa Terra, of which the first edition appeared on the 14th of November 1916. This newspaper was published exclusively in Galician and became an integral part of the diffusion of Galician language, culture and literature. The first issue of the journal Nós appeared on 30th of October 1920 in Ourense. The magazine was led by Vicente Risco, Ramón Otero Pedrayo and Florentino L. Cuevillas, all members of the so-called Nós Generation and it provided a platform for Galician writers from which they could voice their opinions on various aspects of Galician literature. Nós attracted some of the most brilliant and inspiring Galician intellectuals of the time and the journal help the ideas of Galeguismo (Galicianism) to flourish. These intellectuals embraced an idea of Galician nationalism based on Celticism, which distanced Galician and her people from the Spanish state and forged links with the Celtic nations of the north, and particularly with Ireland. From 1920 to 1936 the magazine played a major role in the development of Galician culture through its popularization of European literature, the study of folklore, archaeology, ethnography and history. It provided one of the most important means of cultural and ideological expression during the construction and re-awakening of Galician nationalism and it sought to promote the Galician language as a viable language which was suitable for all disciplines including debate, trade, literature, science, and even economics and politics. The literary, artistic and political contributions of the Nós Generation were central to the promotion of Galician culture, while they also helped to define and develop a clear concept of Galician nationalism at the beginning of the century. Nós undoubtedly inspired the creation of other important publications in Galicia at the time such as; LA Zarpa (1921), founded and directed in Ourense the agrarian leader Basilio Álvarez; Galicia (1922) which was directed by the writer and businessman Valentín Paz Andrade and El Pueblo Gallego (1925) which was founded by the

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Liga de Defensores de Vigo and later acquired by Manuel Portela Valladares. In an attempt to defend the political rights of Galicia and her people the Nós Generation looked to other European nations for inspiration and found an exemplary model in Ireland, whose uprising in Dublin in 1916 had led to the Anglo-Irish treaty and the subsequent foundation of the Irish Free State in December 1922. The first step in the Galician revival had already been taken in the nineteenth century by Rosalía de Castro, Manuel Curros Enríquez and Eduardo Pondal, who helped to elevate the status of the Galician language from that of a purely oral language to a literary one. As de Toro (2007a, 55) highlights, this was but the first step of the revival, and the Nós Generation realised that the future of the culture and language depended not only on hitherto introspective methodologies but on opening up to other European cultures through the creation of links with other Celtic nations in an attempt to find inspiration in other revivalist movements which had been largely successful, as was the case with the Irish literary Renaissance of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The members of the Nós Generation undoubtedly understood the importance of taking part in a cultural and literary revival and must have been aware of the political implication which the movement would subsequently carry. It is interesting to note the politicization of other European cultural revival movements, such as the Gaelic League (founded in 1893) in Ireland, and to note the similarities between them and the Irmandades de Fala in Galicia. Indeed, what Declan Kiberd stated regarding the Irish revivalist movement also holds true in the case of Galicia and the efforts towards cultural revival there: “What makes the Irish Renaissance such a fascinating case is the knowledge that the cultural revival preceded and in many ways enabled the political revolution that followed” (de Toro 2007: 55). Evaristo Correa Calderón, who was a member of the Irmandades, highlighted the importance of looking beyond Galicia’s shores and creating links with other European literatures. In 1932 he stated, in an article in A Nosa Terra, that: We should contribute with a new meaning to Galician literature nowadays. We must also attempt to give Galician language useful and practical new forms, and innovative ideas. [...] We believe that the old Galician language should be abandoned in the nineteenth century. We should give the right words to our language, even if they are of Portuguese, French or Italian origin. [...] Our literature and arts must have a modern appearance to be eternal. [...] We must contribute to the modernization of our language of iron and gold. (quoted in de Toro 2007, 55-56)

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As Clark (2010, 16) points out, authors and members of the Nós Generation, such as Otero Pedrayo and Vicente Risco, saw Ireland’s successful struggle for independence as a model for Galicia in its then intellectual struggle against the hegemony of the Spanish state, and used the perceived relationship between the two “Celtic” nations as a basis for their “Atlantism” theories. Ireland’s literary Renaissance provided a unique exaple to the writes and journalists of Nós during the 1920s and 1930s in Galician and as McKevitt (2006) emphasises, the translation into Galician of three books of the Lebor Gabhála Érenn (The Book of Invasions), an early folkloric account of the history of Ireland, which was published in Nós in 1931, provided an important anchor upon which to base some of the ideals of Galician nationalism. As Jarazo Álvarez (2010, 1) highlights, one of the foremost names in Galician journalism at the beginning of the twentieth century was Plácido Ramón Castro del Río (1902-1967). He was one of the key figures in creating the European cultural and literary links which the Nós Generation sought to popularize, and he focused his attention on Britain and Ireland in an effort to defend the “Atlantism” movement in the face of Mediterranean cultural influences that were discernible in other parts of Spain at the time. De Toro highlighted three qualities which made Castro uniquely suitable for this role: He had three basic qualities that configured him [Plácido Castro] as the right interlocutor between the Galician and English cultures – a profound belief on his mission, and a vast knowledge of English literature, as well as a great poetic sensibility. (de Toro 2007, 56)

The Irmandades de Fala and the Nós Generation understood the importance of translating other Celtic literatures into Galician and they used these translations as an instrument of cultural renovation at a time when Galician identity had been diluted following years of linguistic oppression and ignorance. Castro realised that translation was necessary, not as an effort to construct a new literary tradition but rather in order to create a nationalistic conscience and a sense of pride among the Galician people: Isn’t it reasonable […] to create new purely Galician traditions for the revival of Galicia? A sensible Galician will never prevent from being in contact with the European cultures, a more intimate contact by means of translation than the Madrilean thinkers’ offer. (Castro [1928] 2002, 101)

Much of Castro’s focus in this international approach to re-establishing Galician culture and patriotism was focused on Ireland. Ireland provided a

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unique example to Galician nationalists at the beginning of the twentieth century as a result of its struggle for independence from Britain and due to its strong tradition of patriotic literature and art which evoked the mythological past of the country. Central to the establishment of the Celtic myth in Galician during the nineteenth century was the translation into Spanish of the Lebor Gabhála Érenn (The Book of Invasions). The book, compiled by an anonymous scholar in the eleventh century, provides an important account of the folkloric history of Ireland from the creation of the world until the Middle Ages. The Celtic myth had been introduced into Galicia in 1838 by the historian José Verea y Aguiar in his Historia de Galicia, in which he claimed that everything in Galician is in fact Celtic (de Toro 1995, 230). This argument was further supported by the historian Manuel Murguía in his Historia de Galicia of 1865. The Irmandades de Fala found further inspiration in their Irish counterparts in the Gaelic League which was founded in 1838. The association was an amalgamation of nationalistic and political sensitivity combined with a patriotic pride in the Irish language and the Gaelic literary tradition. Central figures in the Irish literary revival were activists such as W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Richard L.M. Synge, George Russell, Lord Dunsany, Padraic Colum and James Stephens. The Nós magazine closely followed the Irish struggle for independence, and the people involved in the Nós Generation were sympathetic to the events taking place at the time in Galicia’s sister nation. Early evidence of this sympathy is evident from the fact that issue number 8 of the magazine (December 1921) was devoted entirely to honouring the writer and mayor of Cork city who had been martyred in Ireland after he died while taking part in a politically motivated hunger strike in 1920. Castro was born in Corcubión on the western coast of Galicia in 1902. In 1980, at the age of six, he was sent to study at Scarborough School in Glasgow, and his education was to serve him well in his role as a translator in years to follow. While in Britain, he remained in close contact with his contemporary intellectuals in Galicia and became central in the effort to translate English literature, and especially Celtic literature, into his native Galician. He was a member of the National Book League in London, of the Society of Foreign Journalists, of the Foreign Press Association in London, and as he also had a particular interest in the theatre he was a member of the Royal Court Theatre of London. While based in London he also worked as a foreign correspondent for a number of newspapers, including La Nación (Buenos Aires), Informaciones (Madrid), O Jornal de Noticias (Porto) and El Pueblo Gallego (Vigo). Castro returned to Galicia in 1930 where he intensified his efforts in the

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Galician cultural and literary revival and in 1935 he was elected as president of the Irmandades de Fala. Castro’s political beginnings and his belief in the need to look to other Celtic nations for the inspiration for the Galician Revival movement may be traced to two articles he wrote in 1928, the first of which was entitled “Homesickness and art in the Celtic countries” (“La saudade y el arte en los pueblos célticos”) and in which he wrote about a “redeemed Galicia, which in similar terms to Ireland, finds an ideal reality” (Castro 1928, 48). In the second article, which was published in A Nosa Terra (25th July 1928), he stated that “the orientation towards the Northern Celtic lands has to become essential and an important part of our intellectual foreign politics” (Castro 1928, 11). He believed that the creation of links with the Celtic countries of the north should form an integral part of the intellectual foreign policies of Galician nationalism, and his particular admiration for the revival of Gaelic literature and the Irish language in Ireland is evident; “we have a lot to learn in every aspect from Ireland” (11). Castro’s love of the theatre was manifested in his assertion of Galician culture as he urged for the creation of a new Galician theatre whose inspiration could be found in the cultural revival taking place through the efforts of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; There is a rich artistic tradition at our disposal which, apart from these essential qualities, is quite similar to ours, since it exemplifies the spirit of our race – Irish Theatre –. Inspiring our drama [on Irish theatre] will not be copying it; it will be studying our sister nation’s sorrows, as well as their dreams come true [independence], waking up our latent sensibility, which was foreshadowed for centuries of intellectual slavery... (quoted in de Toro 2007, 57)

The foundation of Ireland’s national theatre was part of the much broader Gaelic Revival, yet it played a fundamental role in the resurgence of interest in the Irish language and culture, including songs, literature and art. The Gaelic Revival dominated the literary scene in Dublin at the time and Irish language revival societies such as the Gaelic League, founded by Douglas Hyde, helped to bring forth a new generation of Irish writers. A prominent figure among these new writers was Padraic Mac Piarais (Patrick Pearse) who went on to lead other prominent figures of the Gaelic Revival in the political rebellion of Easter 1916. Galician writers and activists were undoubtedly aware of the fusion of literature and politics in Ireland, and Castro, as a fluent English speaker and translator, was in a unique position to understand the events which had unfolded across the Atlantic. In praising the Abbey Theatre and in an attempt to link the

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literatures of what he believed were two Celtic nations while distancing Galicia from the rest of Spain, he stated that: In the Irish theatre you will see charms, treasures, witches, goblins, fairy tales’ princesses, mysterious lands, the tragic and eternal Celtic fight between reality and imagination. What an enormous distance there is between this and Madrid! (quoted in de Toro 2007, 57)

Many of Castro’s contemporaries shared these sentiments and, in their admiration for Irish writers, they began to translate and publish many works. Castro, in conjunction with the Villar Ponte brothers, published Dous dramas populares de W.B. Yeats in 1935. The works which made up this publication were Catuxa de Houlihan (Cathleen ni Houlihan) and O país da saudade (Land of Heart’s Desire). W.B. Yeats, who through his writings helped to initiate the Celtic movement in Irish literature, was at the time considered to be of the most notable contemporary poets in English-language literature. Castro’s admiration for Yeats’s contributions to the cause of Irish nationalism is evident from the opening pages of Dous dramas populares de W.B. Yeats, where he states: We could have chosen some of the best Irish plays to start a serial translation in Galician language, modern plays easily adapted to our interests and our stages. […] The translators decided to start with these ones, not only because of their artistic value, but also for the importance of these plays in the consolidation of Irish drama. The Irish drama was identified in early stages with the Celtic spirit of the Literary Revival and their incorporation to the universal letters. Yeats was possibly the most important follower of this tendency with plays such as “Cathleen ni Houlihan” and “The Land of Heart’s Desire”, opening the eye of the Irish audience first, and then the whole world’s, to the immense richness of their ‘folk-lore’... (Arias 2005, 207)

Castro realized the nationalistic importance of the play and was also aware of the crucial part that the work played in the resurgence of Irish home-grown productions. Irish theatre, much like its people, had long been colonized by England and the production of Yeats’ play marked a dramatic shift in this trend while calling on Irish artists to seek out Ireland’s folk tradition and folk memory as a new means of artistic, and nationalistic, expression. Indeed, Cathleen ni Houlihan, more than any other plays by Yeats, is a clear expression of the cry to break free from both the political and artistic shackles of England. The debut of the one-act play, which was written in collaboration with Lady Gregory, took place in Dublin on the 2nd of April 1902 and received a rapturous welcome while its revolutionary message was also well-received by militants. The play,

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set simply in a peasant family cottage, portrays Cathleen ni Houlihan as Mother Ireland and it seems to encourage young Irish men to sacrifice their lives, if necessary, for the heroine who represents a separate and independent Irish state. In one part of the play Cathleen expresses her sentiments for those who have given their lives for their country and says that they had not done so in vain: They shall be remembered forever / They shall be alive forever / They shall be speaking forever / They people shall hear them forever. (Yeats 2001, 92)

This publication, while being probably the most significant of Castro’s translations, was but one of the many works he focused on in an attempt to awaken the Celtic identity of the Galician people. He also wrote numerous articles about Ireland and her people and in 1920, the year in which Ireland gained her independence from Great Britain, he visited Ireland and travelled to the remote Irish-speaking Blasket islands in search of the true roots of Celtic Ireland. His memoirs of this trip were published under the title Impresións de Irlanda in the summer of 1928 in the newspaper El Pueblo Gallego. De Toro (2007, 41-42) highlights the long list of publications, by members of the Nós Generation, which discussed Irish politics and culture, among which appeared authors such as Castro, Ramón Cabanillas, Vicente Risco and Ramón Cabanillas. Other important translation of English-language poets by Castro included the works of authors such as George William Russell (AE), Robert Burns, Raftery, Egan O’ Rahilly, Seamus Cartan, Thomas Moore, Alfred Edward Housmon, Christina Rossetti, William Henry Davies, John Masefield, Walter John de la Mare, Dowson, William Blake, James Stephens, Aubrey de Vere, Thomas Hardy, Padraic Colum, Lady Dufferin, Fanny Parnell, to name a few (Lugrís 2005, 223). Otero Pedrayo’s translations into Galician of parts of James Joyce’s Ulysses marked a new stage of modernity in Galician writing and were the first translation of Joyce’s masterpiece into one of the peninsular languages. Indeed, as Clark (2010, 18) highlighted, the translations of the works of both Joyce and Yeats were made in an attempt to point to a future path for Galician literature. Pedrayo’s own fictional writings, such as Devalar (1930) and Arredor de sí (1935) were also heavily influenced by Joyce while Risco wrote an account of an imaginary visit by Stephan Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses, to his own study in Santiago de Compostela. This text was published in Nós in 1929 under the title Dédalus en Compostela (Pseudoparáfrase). Risco, who looked to the

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Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean as a cradle for Galicia, alongside her Celtic sister nations, wrote: Was Atlantis a historical continent? It doesn’t matter. Atlantis, covered by the salty waves of the ocean, is a symbol; a symbol of our Celtic civilization obscured and repressed by a foreign and antagonistic society, which is the Mediterranean civilization. [...] The disappearance of Atlantis perhaps has nothing to do with our origins, but its resurgence is connected with our future. We should restore Atlantis’s essence and […] civilization. (Risco 1984, 92)

Despite the fact that Joyce was by no means a fervent nationalist and supporter of the struggle for Irish independence, Galician authors such as Pedrayo and Risco saw him as a defender of Celtic values and traditions and therefore worthy to be translated alongside the works of more prominent nationalists such as Yeats. Indeed as Rodríguez Sánchez stated in Definición, características e periodización da literatura galega “Before, during and after the Independence of Ireland, this nation represented a model for Galicia, even though its best known and admired literature was written in English […] and even had a certain nationalist bent (the case of Joyce himself)” (Clark 2010, 27). The fascist uprising in Spain in 1936 effectively led to the disintegration of the Nós Generation as they were silenced by censorship with many fleeing to England and South America. Risco was one of the few members of the Nós Generation to embrace the Francoist regime and its politics as he saw it as a defence of Catholic values (Casares 1981, 116118). Pedrayo was accepted as a critical presence and remained in Spain, while other such as Castro and Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao were forced into exile. Many fled to Buenos Aires (Argentina) and to Montevideo (Uruguay) from where they continued their struggle for Galician nationalism through writings and the foundation of Galician associations. Exiled in the United Kingdom until 1952, Plácido Castro continued to promote the Galician language and culture and played an important part in the criticism of Francoist repression from abroad. Castro became central to the diffusion of Galician culture through his BBC radio programme which was broadcasted in the Galician language between the years 1947 and 1956, and through the publication in Argentina of Poesía inglesa e francesa, vertida ao galego (1949) (Jarazo 2010, 2). The Galician language within Galicia regressed to a purely oral use during Francoism, while it was secretly keep alive as a literary language abroad. Societies of emigrant Galician, such as the Centro Gallego de Buenos Aires and the Patronato de Cultura Galega in Mexico published magazines in the Galician language such as Galicia Emigrante and Vieiros

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(Rodríguez Alonso 2002, 65). Galician editorials abroad played an important in the conservation of Galician literature through their publication of classical and modern authors. Some of the most prominent names amongst these figures include Luís Seoane, who was director of editorials of Galician books such as Hórreo (1940) and Dorna (1940), Lorenzo Varela (1916-1978), the writer and journalist Eduardo Blanco Amor (1897-1979 and Xosé Neira Vilas (1928-). In 1950’s Galician editorial houses such as Monterrei, Bibliófilos Gallegos, Benito Soto and Xistral were created, all of whom once again began to collect and publish works in the Galician language, the editorial Galaxia, founded in Santiago de Compostela in 1950, was fundamental in the diffusion of Galician thinking and literature and its magazine Grial is still in still widely read today. In the end, Ireland and the Celtic connection once again became the focus of Galician writers in the sixties with the relaxation of Francoist censorship, as Domínguez’s and Jarazo’s chapters have proved, and with the publication of Galician works in the exile in Latin America. Writers once again turned towards Ireland for inspiration and relied heavily on the links which had already been highlighted and romanticized by the Nós Generation. As a consequence, many intellectuals in Galicia nowadays still evoke the myths and legends of the other Celtic nations in their writings which have left an indelible imprint on Galician literature and culture; a culture which have survived Francoist repression and censorship for almost four decades.

Works Cited Arias, Valentín. 2006. Plácido Castro e a tradución ao galego. In Congreso sobre Plácido Castro e o seu tempo. Actas das xornadas realizadas pola Dirección Xeral de Creación e Difusión Cultural na Coruña, os dias 16, 17 e 18 de novembro de 2005. Santiago: Xunta de Galicia. Casares, Carlos. 1981. Otero Pedrayo. Vigo: Galaxia. Castro, Plácido Ramón. [1928] 2002. Cosmopolitas ou “casteláns de imitación”, in Castro del Río (2002), pp. 92-102. —. 2002. Plácido Castro del Río. Unha escolma xornalística. Selección e prólogo de Xulio Ríos. Sada: Edicións de Castro. Clark, David. 2010. “Sons and Daughters of Breogán: Scottish and Irish influence on Galician Language Literature.” In “What Countrey’s This? And Whither Are We Gone?” Papers presented at the Twelfth International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation

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(Aberdeen University, 30th July – 2nd August 2008), edited by J. Derrick McClure, Karoline Szatek-Tudor and Rosa E. Penna. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. García Tortosa, F. and A.R. de Toro Santos. eds. 1999. James Joyce en España (I). A Coruña: Secretaria de Publicacións. Jarazo Álvarez, Rubén. 2010. “Plácido Castro del Río e o xornalismo galego: tradución e apropiación literaria na prensa galega do século XX.” In Xornalistas con opinión II: 20 biografías, edited by Rosa Aneiros Díaz, Xosé López García, Marta Pérez Pereiro, Víctor F. Freixanes, 233-249. Vigo: Galaxia; Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega. Lugrís, Alberto Álvarez. 2006. “Nación e tradución en Plácido Castro.” In Congreso sobre Plácido Castro e o seu tempo. Actas das xornadas realizadas pola Dirección Xeral de Creación e Difusión Cultural na Coruña, os dias 16, 17 e 18 de novembro de 2005. Santiago: Xunta de Galicia, 2006. McKevitt, Kerry Ann. 2006. “Mythologizing Identity and History: A Look at the Celtic Past of Galicia.” e-Keltoi 6: 651-673. Risco, Vicente. 1984. Mitteleuropa. Vigo: Galaxia. Rodríguez Alonso, Manuel. 2002. Historia de la literatura gallega. Madrid: Acento Ediciones. Toro Santos, Antonio Raúl de. 1995. “Literature and Ideology: The Penetration of Anglo-Irish Literature in Spain.” In Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 8: 229-37. —. 2007. La literatura irlandesa en España. A Coruña: Netbiblo. Villares Paz, Ramón. 1995. A Historia. Vigo: Editorial Galaxia. Yeats, W.B. 2001. Cathleen ni Houlihan. In The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol II: The Plays, edited by David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark. New York: Scribner.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE RISE OF SYNDICALISM IN THE UNITED STATES (1933-1945) AS REFLECTED IN THE SPANISH PRESS MARÍA LUZ ARROYO VÁZQUEZ

Introduction The emergence of a strong trade union movement was one of the most important social developments in the history of the United States. The revival in the second quarter of the twentieth century of the idea of associated labour came about as a result of government support for the workers during this period, the union-friendly measures adopted as part of the New Deal, and various changes within trade unionism itself. According to David Brody, the factors that influenced the resurgence of the American labour movement most were: 1. the political context, in the form of the New Deal and its legislative support of trade unionism; 2. the impact of the stock market panic in 1929; 3. trade union propaganda; and 4. working-class unrest (Brody 1993, 129). Examining membership growth within the trade union movement in the US for the first third of the twentieth century, we find that the trend was not always upward. Membership increased gradually in the period 1900-1915, before reaching a peak in 1915-1920 when affiliations to the unions almost doubled owing to the economic expansion created by the war and the immediate post-war years. Growth during this period was linked to ideology, greater trade union consciousness and war rhetoric; the labour shortage in the US stemming from the interruption of immigration from Europe; and the urgent need to increase production. Union membership decreased after 1920, and declined sharply in the period 1929-1933 (Galenson and Smith 1985, 45). World War I saw the emergence of the idea of the right of workers to be represented and a belief in the necessity of achieving “industrial

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democracy” (Brody 1993, 56). The situation was one of full employment and demand for labour was high, which gave workers a strong advantage when negotiating improvements in labour conditions. The two trade unions at the time were: the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was organised into crafts unions to the exclusion of unskilled workers; and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which brought together socialists, communists and revolutionary trade unionists. The downturn in support for the trade unionist movement in the 1920s reached its nadir in 1933. Some of the factors responsible for this decline included: increased salaries, leading to lower union loyalty; obstruction of the unions by employers; and shortcomings on the part of trade union leaders, who represented the interests of skilled workers while failing to attend to those of unskilled, assembly-line workers. In contrast to the falling membership of the workers’ unions, the period 1920-1933 was a flourishing time for the “open shop” system of labour relations, which offered workers the option of representation by a “company union” (controlled by the employer company) with the aim of undermining the workers’ unions and obstructing union organisation by illegal means. By 1930, with trade union members accounting for only 12 per cent of all workers, the weakness of organised labour was clear. The New Deal turned this trend around in spectacular fashion, and introduced a fundamental change in labour relations by legislating for decisions about employment rights and conditions to be based no longer on the benevolence of the employer, but on the outcome of a collective bargaining process (Brody 1993, 49).

The Resurgence of Union Membership in the Industrial Sector during the Roosevelt Era The unionisation of workers in the secondary sector expanded greatly during Roosevelt’s time in office. This was a particularly important development in relation to the labour movement given that, in the period 1933-1945, the percentage of people employed in the secondary sector was greater than that of the primary and tertiary sectors combined.

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Table 8-1. Union membership in the USA: 1900-1945 (in thousands) Year 1900 1915 1920 1925 1930 1933 1934 1935 1938 1940 1945

Total 791 2,560 5,034 3,566 3,632 2,857 3,249 3,728 8,265 8,944 14,796

A.F.L. workers

C.I.O. workers

548 1,946 4,079 2,877 2,961 2,127 2,608 3,218 3,623 4,247 6,931

------------------------4,038 3,625 6,000

Source: US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (97).

Trade union membership – including Canadian and American – fell during the years of the Depression between 1929 and 1933: in 1930 and in 1932, the unions comprised fewer than 3 million workers – half a million fewer members than in 1929 and 2 million fewer than in 1920. In the summer of 1933, the tide turned. Between 1934 and 1940, the number of unionised workers grew almost threefold. A similar recovery in strength and size was observed across most of the trade unions, as total membership rose to nearly 9 million. New labour organisations emerged, such as the steel workers’, auto workers’ and rubber workers’ unions. World War II initiated a second phase of growth that saw membership rise to 65 per cent of all workers. By 1945, total union membership was 4.5 times higher than it had been in 1933 (Galenson and Smith 1985, 45). The recovery and expansion of the trade unions following the introduction of the New Deal in 1933, was spurred on by a number of important legislative measures. Article 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 6/1933) was a key part of that programme, dealing with support for the unions, protection of workers’ rights, and guarantees of collective bargaining. Industry-based unions thrived throughout this period, as evidenced by the expansion of membership in the mining (United Mine Workers), textile (United Textile Workers), female hosiery (International Ladies’ Garment Workers) and clothing sectors (Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America).

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Another of the measures adopted in support of trade unionism was the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, or Wagner Act). The act was designed to regulate relations between employers and the unions, specifically in response to labour demands for freedom of association and self-organisation, and collective agreement. The Supreme Court’s ruling in favour of the act in 1937 was followed by a further period of union growth. Up until 1938, the position of workers was also strengthened by unity within the labour movement. That unity was broken in the years before World War II by a split within the main federation, prompted in part by the emergence in 1935 of a new conception of self-organisation among union members. While most accepted that union representation should be extended to assembly-line workers, the question was whether to organise them by craft or by industry. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), created in 1886, was the largest and most important union grouping in the United States for most of the twentieth century, with the exception of the period following the secession of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) (1938-1955) when that dominance was challenged. Until the introduction of the New Deal, the AFL was a conservative federation of craft unions representing the interests of skilled, white, male workers, to the exclusion of unskilled immigrants, black workers and women. The schism occurred on 9 November 1935 with the foundation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) as a separate group of industrial unions within the AFL. The American trade union movement enjoyed a major upsurge between 1936 and 1937, which was reflected in the membership of both the AFL and the CIO. This groundswell in support was the result of a number of factors: 1. the improvement in the economy created by the New Deal; 2. the refusal on the part of employers to recognise the unions and the right of workers to collective bargaining; 3. the secession of the industrial unions from the AFL and the formation of the CIO; 4. the continued protection of workers’ rights by the federal government promised by the re-election of Roosevelt in November 1936 (Guerin 1972, 78-79). The AFL and the CIO experienced rapid growth across different areas of the economy: while the CIO focused its energies in manufacturing, the AFL, under pressure from its rival federation, organised unions across a number of other sectors. On 14 November 1938, the Committee for Industrial Organization was renamed the Congress for Industrial Organization, with John L. Lewis as its president. The most notable characteristics of the new federation were:

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support for industrial unions; participation in electoral campaigns; and a desire for greater involvement in the legislative process. Many authors have applauded the CIO leadership for extending union representation to unskilled industrial workers, and for including immigrant and black workers. Nevertheless, the CIO continued to discriminate against women who joined the waged workforce in the 1930s (Cooper 1991, 570). The CIO ceased to exist as a separate entity in 1955 when the two federations were merged and agreed to unify the coordination of the labour movement. On the political front, the CIO president John L. Lewis changed allegiances between 1932 and 1936. In 1932, he voted for Hoover and, even though the Republican president was not supported by the unions, he received a huge vote from industrial workers. In the 1936 election, however, the support of the CIO unions for the New Deal coalition played a decisive role, as unions and Democrats formed a political alliance to ensure the extension of trade union and workers’ rights. Despite the CIO’s status as an independent, national workers’ movement, Lewis subordinated the organisation’s trade union role to its political utility (Dubofsky, and van Tine 1979, 184). His support for Roosevelt was based on personal interest, as demonstrated, for example, by the foundation in April 1936 of Labor’s Non-Partisan League. Outside of the leadership, many ordinary members also saw the CIO as an opportunity to organise not just a trade union movement, but a political one, or even a labour party. That aspiration was not achieved, however; indeed, some authors argue that the split between the AFL and the CIO might be what prevented the formation of a labour party.

The Resurgence of Union Membership in the Industrial Sector during the Roosevelt Era In surveying the stories covered by the press in Spain during the Second Republic, one of the most notable absences one observes is the subject of the American trade union movement. The scarcity of references to the issue during the conservative period appears even more marked when contrasted against the type of news that was reported during Azaña’s presidency. Certain legislative achievements were ignored completely, such as the 1935 Wagner Act, which gave such an important impetus to the American labour movement. The New Deal measure that received the most attention was the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which inspired a substantial number of articles both in favour of it and against.

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The publications in which the NIRA was received positively were mainly liberal outlets, with all of them highlighting the act’s crucial importance in relation to the rest of the New Deal programme. The conservative and working-class press were more sceptical about the measure and more negative in their responses, albeit from very different perspectives. The analysis offered by the republican politician Ricardo Samper regarding the NIRA is an opposite example of the type of treatment the subject received in the liberal newspaper, La Libertad. Though he confessed himself not sufficiently acquainted with the legislation to offer a qualified opinion on the matter, he praised the measure and expressed his personal view that it represented a fundamental part of the New Deal project in terms of the right to self-organisation, because “workers cannot be differentiated [sic: workers cannot be discriminated against] based on their membership of a given organisation or on their leaving it; whatever else, the right to collective agreement is guaranteed” (La Libertad 24 Nov 1934, 1). Samper’s observations tended to echo the claims of Roosevelt’s government, particularly in his references to the legal protections governing the collective bargaining process; in fact, those safeguards were not guaranteed in practice owing to the ambiguity of the terms of the act. La Libertad was, obviously, in favour of freedom of association and self-organisation for workers. The image the newspaper represented of the United States was one of “rigorous” respect for union rights and the NIRA, and that legislation there was followed to the letter – which, of course, was not always the case. The aim may have been to suggest that, if the United States could do it, maybe Spain could, too: “A copy would do as well for Spain, where today the constitution – and its spirit – are dead” (28 Nov 1934, 10). The conservative newspaper Informaciones, by contrast, openly opposed the NIRA because it went against the interests of employers. The latter viewed the regulation of labour and the promotion of trade unionism under article 7(a) of the act, with its new oversight of the wages, hours and working conditions of industrial workers, as barriers to business (3 Jul 1934, 7). In reference to the United States, the Spanish right-wing press often emphasised qualities such as unity and social conformity, though their commendation of these values was tinged with the fear of class conflict that inspired it. Conservative writers intimated that the State should define and limit the power of the unions to prevent them from making demands that might damage the interests of employers. The following reflection

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published in the journal, Acción Española, offers an illustration of that attitude: For this is the lesson. […] It is all well and good to talk of corporatism, of unions and of guilds. But it would certainly be better to delineate our ideas clearly and to know precisely what we are talking about, and from what moulds they have been cast, these corporations, these unions and guilds. They will not help to solve any of the nation’s economic problems, for sure, if they are permitted to become agents of disunion within the State. (1 Aug 1934, 494)

Although the author does not reject outright the principle of organised labour or the right to collective bargaining, he makes it very clear what his priority is: to monitor the power of the unions carefully. In keeping with its traditionalist outlook, El Debate remarked that “Yankee society is not ready for unionised labour, and much less so in its corporatist form” (20 Sep 1933, 1). It went on to describe how Roosevelt’s government was encouraging union membership in its efforts to achieve “an equitable balance between the rights of capital and labour”, and that in so doing it was “losing sight of the rules of economic liberalism”. The newspaper explained that: The greatest obstacle in the road to recovery has been the unwillingness of employers to recognise the workers’ unions. There are a number of reasons for this, first among which is the weakness of the unions themselves and indeed the absence of representation among many of the crafts. The prosperity of recent times has allowed the United States to experience the kind of social change that Europe has not seen for fifty years. The workers there did not feel the need to associate or to fight with the other classes. (20 Oct 1933, 1)

Finally, working-class newspapers were openly in favour of freedom of association and self-organisation. In the extract below, for example, El Socialista professes solidarity with the American proletariat, though it also uses the occasion (as it almost always does) to criticise yet again the capitalist system by which the United States is governed: When the proletariat of the International of Labour Unions expresses its moral solidarity with the union movement in the United States at this important time for human rights, it is not so much concerned with the justice or falsity of the economic theories applied in America, as with the defence of the supreme good of syndicalist organisations in a world that is moving on the path of progress: the path of syndicalist freedom. (15 Oct 1933, 6)

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This extract illustrates that the most precious ideal and present priority for socialists was freedom of association and self-organisation, worldwide and in Spain. El Socialista depicted a country in the midst of a class war, and highlighted the employers’ rejection of article 7(a), hard-won by the AFL, because it prevented them from firing workers on the sole basis of their membership of a union. The paper explained, perhaps as a warning to employers, that what caused the strikes in America was the failure to respect trade union rights (5 Oct 1933, 16). The propagandist anarchist newspaper, the CNT, applauded workers for disobeying their union leaders and the State: We must recognise as a symptom of progress above all the disobedience displayed by AFL workers towards their bosses; the open struggle of workers against the State, and the Unification of the forces of labour fighting for their demands. (1 Sept 1934, 17)

In reference to the Democrat Party’s efforts to win the support of the unions, the conservative independent newspapers reported that Roosevelt had made overtures to the AFL, and they applauded the labour federation’s collaboration with the Democrat government. They also implied, however, that this meant the AFL accepted the intervention of the State (Ahora 13 Feb 1935; La Vanguardia 13 Feb 1935, 27; and 3 Sep 1935, 29). On the subject of AFL membership, the conservative newspaper La Vanguardia reported that as of October 1934 the number of workers represented by the federation stood at 2,600,000. It also criticised the National Recovery Administration (NRA) for the ineffective implementation of the 1933 act and reiterated the need for greater trade union representation (La Vanguardia 2 Oct 1934, 33). Reflecting on the role of the AFL, La Vanguardia presented its readers with the image of a strong federation, explaining its preference for the organisation of unions according to crafts, rather than industries (28 Nov 1934, 31). The reporter Aurelio Pego, writing in the centrist Ahora newspaper, described the AFL as a wealthy, powerful, bourgeois organisation, all but “an official body”, loyal to Washington’s laws and its government, and that was the reason why it recommended its member unions to expel any communist workers from their ranks (20 Oct 1935, 35). La Vanguardia also reported the AFL’s attempts to remove communist members and reproduced the opinion expressed by the federation’s president, William Green, that American workers were opposed to both fascism and Communism (2 Oct 1934, 33). On the subject of the split in the union movement, La Vanguardia claimed that the creation of the CIO in 1935 was caused by a leadership

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struggle within the AFL (28 Nov 1935, 29). The Spanish press also chronicled threats of further rifts within the AFL. According to Aurelio Pego, the miners were tired of being the “Cinderella of the American Federation of Labor”, since “it was they who bore the brunt of the struggles and the worst devastation of the strikes” (Ahora 16 Feb 1936, 13). Writing about the union leaders, Pego described William Green as “a formidable politician who has managed to hold onto the presidency for 13 years in succession, and looks like is not going anywhere yet” (13). Mundo Obrero criticised Green’s conduct, observing that the AFL was “governed by a group of individuals, pre-eminent among them their president Mr William Green, who have found in their Union jobs a quiet, comfortable style of life” (5 Feb 1936, 2). The message readers were intended to draw from this criticism was that socialist trade union leaders did not stand up for their rank and file members.

Conclusions The period 1933-1945 was a crucial time in the evolution of organised labour in the United States. The trade union movement was revitalised by the support it received from Roosevelt’s government and the official action it undertook in relation to the principle of collective bargaining in the form of a series of measures establishing the legal right of workers to be represented by a union. The expansion of the trade union movement may be interpreted from a number of different perspectives. New Left historians suggest the development of trade unionism during this period should be viewed as an attempt to become part of the corporatist system. Others see it as an early manifestation of social democracy, on the basis that in 1936-1937 some unions talked of organising a labour party. There is also the view that the expansion of organised labour was merely a continuation of the existing trade union movement (Brody 1993, 127). According to historians such as Irving Bernstein (1970), the period between 1933 and the early 1940s was one of social turbulence, mobilisation of workers, conflict and fighting. Others, in contrast, such as Melvyn Dubofsky (1979), maintain that there were neither radical trade unionists enough nor a significantly large distinction between union members and their leaders, for any major social unrest to materialise. Structurally, moreover, union leadership was gradually becoming more and more bureaucratised. The expansion of the labour movement in the second quarter of the twentieth century, which grew out of the struggle for union recognition, was distinct from the labour campaigns of the nineteenth century or World

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War I insofar as it generated a large number of permanent organisations “capable of asserting and defending workers’ rights on both the political and economic fronts” (Zieger 1994, 27). The schism in the AFL forced the labour movement to evolve from a conservative, craft-based system of organisation towards an industrial unionism that included workers who had previously been denied representation. Despite their differences, however, both federations agreed that government measures should only be applied with the approval and participation of union representatives. Both sides supported Capitalism; but not revolution (Brody 1993, 244). What is surprising about the treatment of the American labour movement in the press in Spain is the lack of any journalistic comment in reference to the Wagner Act or to the charismatic union leader, John L. Lewis. Articles dealing with the trade union movement in the United States are rare in any case, especially in comparison with the huge amount of coverage devoted to workers’ strikes and confrontations. All these vicissitudes in International Affairs were mirrored in the Spanish press, especially after the Civil War when the Francoist regime strengthened its orientation against the Allies. In addition, the U.S. ambassador to Spain during the Civil War, Claude G. Bowers informed the U.S. State Department in a long report in March 1939 the dangers of this new regime (Bowers 1978, 424). One of the main American-Spanish arguments during 1933-1945 focused on the relations between Germany and Latin America; the Fascists tried to use the privileged position of Spain in South America to spread Nazi propaganda. Thus, newspapers such as El Observador published a specific entitled “Latin American Newsreel” focused on articles such as “The new German Ambassador in Rio de Janeiro”, “First Congress of Latin American students in Berlin”, “Germany and the Yankee-Brazilian agreements”, to name a few... (El Observatorio del Reich 1937 43, 23). The Francoist apparatus wanted to “help” the Hispanic countries in their struggle to preserve the Spanish culture against the States’ penetration exerted on Central and South America, with the consequent loss of identity for the Francoist Empire (El Imperio España 1936, 11). Juan Aparicio, in fact, responsible for the future National Press Delegation, stated on President Roosevelt: Roosevelt has won [the elections] again because it guarantees another victory over the monster he has created. Basically, this old Jewish descendant is not interested either in war or peace but in himself. (1940, n.pag.)

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As the United States intensified its collaboration with Britain, more space was devoted against the United States in the Spanish press. U.S. interventionism in European affairs was particularly criticised by Falangists: “The Yankee meddling in European affairs is so provocative” (“Un Gran Europeo” 1941, 25-6). Along with these affairs, we must add the protests of U.S. Ambassador Alexander Weddell, months after his arrival in Madrid (May 1939) (Halstead 1974, 3-38). This was especially evident with the arrival of Serrano Súñer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1940 (Halstead 1974, 445-471). The disagreement with several international affairs led the American ambassador to brand Serrano as a “Fascist minister” (449). A gruelling confrontation began between Weddell and Serrano Súñer, which resulted in the bitter propaganda campaign against the United States, which will not cease until the entry of Spain in the Cold War against Communism (Thomàs 2007, 115-493). After the crisis of May 1941, Francoist government alleviated this situation following the U.S. entry into the war. Francoism changed his political agenda and placed greater emphasis on its relation with the Catholic tradition as a sign of differentiation from other totalitarian regimes. The synthesis of tradition, Catholicism and anticommunism, served to vindicate the specificity of the regime against Fascist movements, and to attract Spanish emigrants and American Catholics (Delgado 2003, 143). This was of course reflected in the politics of the National Press Delegation (Lequerica 1945, 12-3), changing the course of American news in the Spanish Francoist press forever.

Works Cited AGA, Presidencia, SGM, caja 21105. 1937. El Observatorio del Reich 43, July 23. Aparicio, Juan. 1940. “Cesarismo en EE.UU.” Pueblo Nov 8: n.pag. Bernstein, Irving. 1970. The Turbulent Years. A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bosch, Aurora. 1991. “Estados Unidos en los años treinta: ¿un socialismo imposible?” Historia Social 11 (Fall): 39-56. Bowers, Claude G. 1978. Misión en España. Barcelona: Ediciones Éxito. Brody, David. 1993. Workers in Industrial America. Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle. New York: Oxford University Press. Cooper, Patricia. 1991. “Which Workers Built What?” Labor History 32: 566-573. Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, Lorenzo. 2003. “La política latinoamericana de España en el s. XX.” Ayer 49: 121-160.

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Dubofsky, Melvyn. 1979. “Not so Turbulent Years: Another Look at the America of 1930s.” Amerikastudien 24: 5-20. El Imperio de España. 1936. México: Servicio de Prensa y Propaganda de Falange Española y de las JONS. Galenson, Walter, and Robert S. Smith. 1985. “Estados Unidos.” In El trabajo en el siglo XX, edited by John T. Dunlop and Walter Galenson, 21-105. Madrid: Ministerio de trabajo y seguridad social. Guerin, Daniel. 1972. EE.UU. 1880-1950. Movimiento Obrero y Campesino. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Arayú. Halstead, Charles R. 1974. “Diligent diplomat: Alexander W. Weddell as American Ambassador to Spain, 1939-1942.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 82 (1): 3-38 —. 1974. “The dispute between Ramón Serrano Súñer and Alexander Weddell.” Rivista di Studi Politici Internazionali 3: 445-471. Lequerica, José Félix de. 1945. La posición de España en la política internacional. Madrid: Dirección de América. Perkins, Dexter. 1967. La Era Revolucionaria de F.D.R. Buenos Aires: Marymar. Thomàs, Joan Maria. 2007. Roosevelt y Franco. De la guerra civil española a Pearl Harbour. Barcelona: Edhasa. “Un gran europeo.” 1941. Madrid April 7, 25. United States Bureau of Census. 1975. Historical Statistics of The United States, Colonial Times to 1975. Bicentennial Edition. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office. Zieger, Robert H. 1994. American Workers, American Unions. Baltimore: Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

PART III: COMMUNISM AND 1950S ROMANIAN CULTURAL PRESS

CHAPTER NINE PERIODICALS, PROPAGANDA AND POLITICS IN ROMANIAN CULTURE: MEDIA DISCOURSE STRATEGIES IN THE 1950S ROMANIAN CULTURAL PERIODICALS. CASE STUDY: FLACĂRA AND CONTEMPORANUL ANDRADA FĂTU-TUTOVEANU1

Introduction The sovietisation of culture was one of the first major processes characterising the instalment of the Communist regime in Romania and was based on a complex yet very typical combination of actions based on propaganda and censorship (the latter being defined as “the knot that binds power and knowledge”, Jansen 1991). Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century have created the most complicated and all embracing machineries of manipulation information and public opinion by using the mass media and censorship. (Lauk 1999, 19)

This appropriation of culture was meant to have a central place and role within a political system in need of legitimacy and in search of total control.2 Jacques Rupnik’s definition (1989) gathers the features of the concept of sovietisation particularly around the idea of control, arguing that “the sovietisation of East-Central Europe meant total control of society by each country’s Communist Party, but also total Soviet control of the Communist Parties themselves” (quoted in Connelly 1999, 295). Thus, the Soviet model or blueprint was transferred to post-war Romanian culture in late 1940s following the strategy designed for Eastern Europe, which meant “transforming national political cultures into carbon copies of the USSR” (Connelly 1999, 107).

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Sovietizing culture was a work in progress, and various experts of cultural production had an influential voice when it came to defining an adequate “Soviet style”. Participants sometimes “worked towards the leader” by acting in ways they imagined to be expected by the political center. (Rolf 2009, 603)

As previously argued (Fătu-Tutoveanu 2012, 77–93), there are arguments supporting the idea of a cultural colonisation based on informal imperialism strategies, which involved the mediation of local elites (see Horvath 1972, 49). Thus, the process accepts the comparison with classical colonialism, also implying “a canon that depends on discursive criteria established in the metropolitan centre” (Mignolo 1993, 125). A series of concepts used by theorists of colonialism and post-colonialism can be adapted and applied to Communist studies: the Soviet paradigm implemented as a set of hegemonic narratives on a new “imagined” collective identity (Anderson 1983), while the concept of mimicry can be applied in the case of sovietisation.3 The export and/or transfer of the Soviet cultural paradigm to the Eastern European countries (Romania among them) can be characterised as substantial and exercising a monopoly during the first decade of the Cold War. The ideological texts present in Romanian press in the late 1940s never ceased to praise the priceless Soviet help and model. The “model” was more than a figure of speech, being turned into a religiouslike canon – based on Zhdanov’s socialist realism principles – which had to be most faithfully obeyed. Power and culture were inevitably interwined in Soviet Russia in the first two decades after the Bolshevik Revolution. […] In Soviet usage “power” (vlast’) meant state power and its exercise by the Ruling Bolshevik Party. For the Bolsheviks, the form of state power they had introduced in Soviet Russia was a dictatorship of the proletariat […]. “Culture” (kul’tura) meant high culture in the usage of the 1920s. The concept embraced literature, scholarship and the arts….; and it was generally accepted that the Russian intelligentsia was the guardian of culture and of “cultural values” [emphasis added]. (Fitzpatrick 1992, 1)

Sheila Fitzpatrick argues that culture was a multileveled phenomenon in the Soviet society and we shall inquire if this was also the case of the Romanian society. Thus, Fitzpatrick speaks of a basic level of “the culture of basic hygiene”, “a combination education-and-propaganda” (Fitzpatrick 2000, 80) mentioned in Soviet press. The second level also involved education, behaviour and table manners4, as well as “what Stephen Kotkin has called ‘speaking Bolshevik’, that is, learning the mores and rituals of

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the Soviet workplace, the rules of meetings, and the public language of newspapers” (Fitzpatrick 2000, 81). The third level was closer to the previous elite culture (now labelled as “bourgeois” or “petty-bourgeois” culture5), involving in addition the knowledge and “appreciation of the high culture of literature, music, and ballet. This was the level of culture implicitly expected of the managerial class, members of the new Soviet elite” (80). The intermixing of culture and education went further on as the previous high/elite culture was now subordinated to the people and therefore the writers and artists as well as all cultural periodicals or book collections were oriented towards educating their readers. But in order to be able to do that these cultural agents were supposed to be “re-educated” themselves with the use of Soviet works (ideological materials as well as theoretical studies, guidelines, literary works).

“Mirroring Essential Realities”: Restructuring Media The press (described by Peter Kenez as the “blood-circulation system” of the Soviet regime, 1985, 222-3) played an essential role for the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Romania among them. The emphasis the system placed on media could be justified at two different levels. In a wider context, the post-war culture can be characterised in general as marked by the evolution of the technology of production, reproduction and distribution of information. Written press has been enriched by a wide range of visual messages, increasingly complex, which, together with the development of radio, cinema and later television, changed the process of communication and mass impact and influenced significantly post-war culture (“Increasingly, we look not to written texts […] but rather to visual culture”, Ryan and Ingram 2010, 137). This increasing variety, quantity and speed of distribution in relation to information offered press a great power due to its huge impact over the population, shaping values, mentalities, opinions and thus becoming an alternative (or, in some cases, addition) to mainstream education or influential institutions such as the church. In one of his seminal studies on media culture, Douglas Kellner (2010) emphasised the importance of the impact of media on the human mind, illustrating the significant role played by the former within the power paradigm replacements taking place within post-war culture: Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of […] “us” and “them”. Media images help shape our view of

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the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed. We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages. The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire -- and what not to. The media are forms of pedagogy which teach us how to be men and women. (Kellner 2010, n.pag.)

This huge power potential of media was at least partially anticipated by the Soviet regime (if we consider how early Lenin theorised the important function of the media, which were supposed to “serve as an instrument of socialist construction”, Lenin. The Tasks of the Soviet Power Next in Turn, quoted in Lauk 1999, 19). With the beginning of the Cold War and the evolution of media towards more and more sophisticated instruments of mechanical production, reproduction and distribution, press became more and more a key-instrument for the Communist regimes. Being “used as the most efficient means for developing and spreading the Communist ideology” (Lauk 1999, 19), press was directly connected to the propaganda and censorship apparatus controlled by the political system. In the case of the Romanian Communist regime, press was appropriate in the late 1940s and directed towards supporting and strengthening the system and most of all to legitimise it and its policies. Similarly to the rest of the countries in the Communist bloc, the new monolithic press was to mirror/reflect the new – rapidly improving - realities, actually offering an Orwellian image of an ideologically distorted or “alternative reality, “an ideologically correct symbolic environment, filled with content designed to socialize the audience to the ideas and values of Communism” (Jakubowicz 1995, 23). The press was, similarly to the Western publications, a standard-setter, yet in this case the message – common for all remaining periodicals – was exclusively controlled by the political system, while the role of press in shaping the readers’ values or instructing them to behave “properly” and say the “right” things (Lauk 1999, 19) had inevitable political implications. Though the post-war evolution of technologies of production, reproduction and distribution of information affected in parallel Eastern European and Western press (“a revolution in the mass distribution of

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information accompanied the increased speed of news transmission”, Lenoe 2004, 2), the case of media within totalitarianism is unique. We can speak of the latter as reflecting a “shortage culture” (paraphrasing the formula “shortage economy”/ “economies of shortage” coined and used by Kornai [1980] and Verdery [1993]), meaning that press went through a process of constant limiting and controlling information (a paradoxical situation, as the purpose of press is to disseminate information as extensively as possible6). Another relevant characteristic for totalitarianism is that the manipulation involved by this transmission of information is extensive and unidirectional. By contrast, the diversity of Western media and inflation of information, typical itself to consumerism, essentially opposes the monopoly exercised over press by political systems such as those characterising Eastern European Communism. The monopoly was exercised through a sophisticated system (“a huge mechanism of censorship continuously watched over the work of editors and scrutinized the content of all publicly distributed texts and images”, Lauk and Kreegipuu 2010, 168). The specific development of press within this control apparatus which manifested in Romania and the rest of the satellite countries had started in the USSR during the First Five-Year Plan. In his studies on Soviet press, Lenoe describes it as sui generis process, oriented toward legitimising the regime (Lenoe 2004, 248). Moreover, he argues that the story of the transformation of Soviet newspapers […] is a story of purges, political intrigues, transformation of language and social upheaval but it is above all a story about the origins of Stalinist culture […].The images and metaphors created by the NEP journals [New Economic Policy] became de core of the Stalinist culture in the mid 1930s and strongly influenced the development of socialist realism, Stalinism’s official literary genre […]. Homogenizing the NEP press network, which had previously included newspapers differentiated according to target audience. (2004, 2)

Homogeneity and monotony7 characterised not only media but the entire Soviet culture, a “hall of mirrors” (to use the metaphor employed by Malte Rolf, 2009) in which the same images, symbols and messages (“defined as ‘Soviet’”, Rolf 2009, 604, therefore “orthodox”, legitimated and sacred) were intensively and extensively reproduced. If in general “ideologies are typically, though not exclusively, expressed and reproduced in discourse and communication, including non-verbal semiotic messages, such as pictures, photographs and movies” (Van Dijk 1995, 17) the difference in a totalitarian system is that there is a monotheistic ideology (the religious terminology is justified by the

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obsession of faithfulness to the Ideology) and alternatives are not possible (repression being used to counterattack any potential dangerous messages). Press was the visible interface used by the regime, multiplying again and again the same stereotypical images (even humour had turned predictable, the caricatured representations of negative characters – enemy countries or classes - being stereotypical, see Fătu-Tutoveanu, 2010; 2011b). The same limited set of messages was expressed in a typical – so called wooden - language emerging from the main ideological texts and the slogans repeated in speeches and articles, the control and limitation of vocabulary and imagery making safer (and thus faithful) the messages distributed to the masses: These phrases, generally derived from Stalin’s obiter dicta, tended to be infinitely repeated in newspapers and propaganda speeches, sometimes even written up on banners. “Life has become better”. “Technology decides everything.” “Cadres decide everything.” “Catch up and overtake the West.” “There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm”. Like advertising jingles, they were easy to memorize and also easy to despise and satirize. (Fitzpatrick 2000, 184)

Developing the model in the satellite countries resulted in increasingly rigid and stereotypical versions. Through a hierarchical system of institutions and agents (responsible with “the preliminary and postpublishing censorship, which are both preventive and restrictive by nature”, Lauk 1999, 20), the Party controlled media and distribution of information. Supervision and, moreover, manipulation towards the “right” ideological directions8 focused on the important segment represented by the cultural materials and which had been specialised periodicals, literature and other types of artistic expression being considered particularly dangerous (“all kinds of printed matter, film production, theatre and cinema performances, exhibitions, advertising”, Lauk 1999, 19). Thus literature, fine arts (art was to serve an educative, not aesthetic purpose), education, research, theatre, cinema, exhibitions, advertising, all publicly accessible printed matter (down to public transport timetables, confectionary wrappers, tickets, postcards, and calendars), and even statistics were all targets for the propaganda machine and censorship (Lauk 1999, Lauristin, Vihalemm 1993, 180): “every social activity acquired symbolic meaning related to Communist ideology. Penetrating the minutest [sic] routines of everyday life, this ideology came to possess a religious character in Soviet society”. The Soviet ideology thus formed the basis for control of all modes of expression: as all activities had meaning, these had to be regulated so that people would know how to behave in an appropriate manner, and the media in general, and journalism in particular,

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Besides the limited range of publications and controlled content, the readers, spectators and subjects of this complex and aggressive long term manipulation campaign, faced other restrictions, such as the freedom of speech, despite the obsessive publishing of “people’s letters” and proletarian freedom. “Ordinary people could not publish anything. Only certain institutions under strict control were entitled to publish. Underground publishing and a practice of the ‘double speak’ can be seen as effects or reflections of such regulation, e.g., ‘samizdat’ publications in Soviet Russia, Lithuania etc.” (Lauk 1999, 19). Ignoring these limitations led to repercussions (some of them represented in the form of symbolic “executions” of “heretics”, either in politics and within the cultural environment): “As a mechanism of control, censorship can also be repressive: it can destroy literature, films, paintings etc. and persecute people who create and/or distribute what is forbidden by authorities” (20). Media (cultural periodicals, considered to “mirror the realities”, among them) represented a key-level of this control based system in which fear and privileges were thoroughly and efficiently distributed by the hierarchical structure. The system institutionalised its control and censorship over media (despite the persistence within media of a paradoxical discourse on the freedom of speech of all classes, with examples of people belonging to previously oppressed categories, such as proletarian women, who were now represented writing enthusiastic letters to newspapers or as examples for their new outspoken language and behaviour). Thus, the censorship apparatus was extremely well structured and implemented, despite being relatively secret (“institutionalized censorship always tries to hide itself: the words censorship and censor belong to the lists of prohibited data, and the freedoms of speech and the press are usually publicly declared”, 22). The Soviet censorship system included, in general, two big sectors: the Communist Party authorities and KGB, which constituted the “brain” of the system, and the state censorship administration, operating as an “executive hand”. The editors-in-chief of periodical publications and all publishers were accountable to and controlled by the Propaganda Department, the local (city or district) party committee and Glavlit. [Chief Administration for the Protection of State Secrets in Print (from 1990 – in Press and in the Other Media) of the USSR. The institution was generally known by the abbreviation of its name in Russian – GLAVLIT.]. (Lauk 1999, 22-3)

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The number of periodicals was limited, facilitating the thorough control applied to all levels, from the staff selection to content (particularly the choice of subjects and language) and last but not least, to the extensive distribution. Lauk observed that this limitation prevented the emergence of alternative discourses9 (and thus confining the range of choices in the adoption of the models, values, believes and behaviours Kellner was mentioning), this function coexisting with the one to manipulate the public information in order to “create the ‘right’ model of thinking and contribute to adoption of preferred constructions of reality” (23). The lack of alternatives strengthens the approximation between the Communist and religion, as the limited information presented to the public reveals a unique way and system of believes, not allowing critical or alternative thinking.

Discursive Strategies and Propaganda The export of the political and cultural Soviet model to the so-called satellite countries was a complex process affecting all media and all types of content, from ideological texts to literature. Faithfulness or “cultural orthodoxy” (Fitzpatrick 1992, 238-256) was vital, as the model had to be copied similarly to a religious canon when implemented in the satellite countries (we can speak of a similarity to religious practices, the unconditional acceptance of the superior, “sacred” model being obvious in the tone adopted by press and similarly by the politicians and intelligentsia whenever mentioning the Soviet model and set of cultural rules or guidelines). Delaney Michael Skerrett speaks of “myths [which] were created so that people would believe in a new order—a “holy” empire and a common past— establishing the necessary conditions to believe in the positive future (Richards 1996). The Communists were of course atheists but the Communist ideology assumed a religious quality (Lauristin, Vihalemm 1993)” (Skerrett 2010, 263). Press was, of course, the main instrument in propagating these myths, which developed to into a complex political mythology and specific pantheon (besides the political figures, “sanctified” by press, posters, manifestations etc., the emphasis on positive heroes10 was one of the basic requirements of socialist realism, as “this is an age of heroism, the song claims, in which even ordinary people become heroes”, Fitzpatrick 2000, 71). Ignoring the differences between the Soviet cultural paradigm and the other national cultures the model was artificially applied onto the latter (Romania among them). The export (or “cultural colonisation”, FătuTutoveanu, 2012) was organised and achieved in a controlled and yet aggressive manner, with the significant contribution of cultural

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institutions, some of them especially designed for these purposes (such as the Writer’s Union in Romania, centralising and controlling writers’ activities, but also the cultural events, funding and so on). The pro-Soviet imposed attitude affected the policies of publishing houses (some of them explicitly oriented towards the Soviet Union, such as Cartea Rusă [The Russian Book],11 a publishing house dealing solely with Russian books or ARLUS - The Romanian Association for Strengthening Relations with the Soviet Union), cultural periodicals, educational institutions (the Russian language studied in schools being just one example) and others. This circulation and expansion (in other words the cultural transfer) of the culture of the centre had two embodiments: what we can call the direct transfer – through a massive export of literature (process detailed below), translated or not – and the indirect transfer, resulting from the local literature, produced as a consequence of the “colonial” model exposure. While a further comment will be made on the direct cultural export or transfer, a few excerpts (repetitive themselves and yet just a small part of the massive production of similar texts of the time) from the ideological texts – translations or local productions – invading the Romanian 19481949 press and volumes can offer a clear image of the ideological level of the Soviet cultural “colonization”. (Fătu-Tutoveanu 2012, 88)

Furthermore, we can speak of this implementation of Soviet carbon copies in terms of mimicry both related to the adoption of a cultural system and its structures (cultural institutions organisation, designing specific periodicals and so on) as well as, more deeply, the adoption of typical cultural contents and language. Despite the differences in the East European bloc between the languages spoken, differences sometimes significant, such as in the case of Romanian (belonging to the Romance linguistic family), the language had to adapt to the Soviet stereotypical expressions as well as abbreviations. Thus, a new Orwellian language was emerging due to literal and thus artificial translations of slogans and clichés, confining journalistic language to several typical phrases and insisting on abbreviations (“autochthonous language suffered under the stringent control of the mechanisms of censorship and repression”, Skerrett 2010, 261). This intrusion into the field of language was intentional (in propaganda terms, with the purpose to “shape” and “renew” it) and was part of the manipulation practices adopted by most of the authoritarian/ totalitarian regimes: “the system of political propaganda, in both the Francoist and the Soviet cases, required the censorship and manipulation of the linguistic domains already in existence.” (Skerrett 2010, 263)

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We can speak here of the implementation of a series of discursive strategies, which can be approached based on a few directions and concepts used by Van Dijk in his theories on discourse analysis (precisely in connection to manipulation). The latter is essential for the totalitarian regimes such as Communism as they needed it in order to legitimise and strengthen their power (Van Dijk uses the concept of power reproduction) and counterbalance any negative perceptions related to the repressive methods applied or non-democratic policies (such as the nationalisation of properties). Van Dijk defines manipulation in relation to power and moreover, with the abuse of power (which is the case in the above mentioned systems). Manipulation not only involves power, but specifically abuse of power, that is, domination. More specifically, manipulation implies the exercise of a form of illegitimate influence by means of discourse: manipulators make others believe or do things that are in the interest of the manipulator and against the best interests of the manipulated (of the many studies on discourse and legitimation, see, e.g., Chouliaraki, 2005; Martín Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997). In a broader, semiotic sense of manipulation, such illegitimate influence may also be exercised with pictures, photos, movies or other media (Van Leeuwen 2005). (Van Dijk 2006, 360)

Van Dijk enumerates a series of strategies which could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the Communist regimes, with the necessary adjustments to the context. What he calls “authority fallacy” is an essential “manipulative prototype” (375) (Van Dijk mentions as examples the use of the name of the Pope or the mentions of the Koran in order to suggest that certain actions are recommendable). Within Communism, such a role was played by the reference to the Party, the highest and indisputable authority within these regimes, monopolising all areas of existence and expression. Besides the explicit recommendations and guidelines, the implicit strategies used by these regimes are rather common within manipulation mechanisms, as they have correspondents in Van Dijk’s list of manipulation techniques (of course, the proportions, contexts and intensity of use were specific). Thus, the most significant was the already mentioned limitation of information (“incomplete or lack of relevant knowledge – so that no counter-arguments can be formulated against false, incomplete or biased assertions”, 375), associated with the imposed Party ideology (“fundamental norms, values and ideologies that cannot be denied or ignored”, 375). Particularly in the immediate post-war media (in the case of Romania but also previously, during the world conflict, in the Soviet Union) the third technique (strong emotions, traumas, etc. that make people vulnerable) was used in connection to the image of the

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enemy and the traumatic event of the war, in order to increase on the one hand the fear and rejection towards the US and the Western countries (a “macro speech act implying Our ‘good’ acts and Their ‘bad’ acts, e.g. accusation, defence”, 373) and on the other hand to increase the trust in the local regime. Finally, we can mention the use of elites (particularly cultural elites, such as writers) in order to give credibility to the manipulated information (“social positions, professions, status, etc. that induce people into tending to accept the discourses, arguments, etc. of elite persons, groups or organizations”, 2006, 375) Thus, the press used a series of specific manipulating techniques (directed towards the audience’s beliefs and behaviours), techniques which could illustrate the political control exerted over the production and reproduction of information. The complexity of the manipulation mechanism was proven by the fact that all levels of explicit or implicit communication were used in order to emphasise (or de-emphasise, when necessary) the positive or negative messages transmitted. The choice of vocabulary was a first range element (as shown above, during Communism the limited accepted vocabulary created a typical Orwellian language adopted by the press, cumulating a number of clichés). Besides the vocabulary, syntax and rhetoric were also used in order to support the implicit messages, together with the use of “hyperboles vs. euphemisms for positive/negative meanings, metonymies and metaphors emphasizing Our/Their positive/negative properties” (373). Other strategies related to language involved the contextual choice of many or few details, general or specific, vague or precise, explicit or implicit language (373). In addition to this, the press used mixed procedures, some involving visual messages with a typical imagery (such as political cartoons), together with what we can call a form of graphical manipulation (through additional visual elements such as the design and dimension of headlines etc.). The techniques associated to language were therefore associated with the manipulation of/through visual discourse, photos, drawings or political cartoons (see Fătu-Tutoveanu 2010), due to their larger emotional impact. These strategies of controlling and manipulating information are however context-dependent (the circumstances being essential in manipulation, while discourse can be “defined to be manipulative first of all in terms of the context models of the participants” (372), and even the same discourse as “manipulative in one situation, but not in another situation” (Van Dijk 2006, 372). However, in a totalitarian society such as Communist Romania these strategies were used in a convergent, unidirectional and articulate manner, dominating the sources of information and leaving no room for alternative discourses.

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Given these contextual constraints, we may focus on those discourse structures that specifically presuppose such constraints: (a) Emphasize the position, power, authority or moral superiority of the speaker(s) or their sources – and, where relevant, the inferior position, lack of knowledge, etc. of the recipients. (b) Focus on the (new) beliefs that the manipulator wants the recipients to accept as knowledge, as well as on the arguments, proofs, etc. that make such beliefs more acceptable. (c) Discredit alternative (dissident, etc.) sources and beliefs. (d) Appeal to the relevant ideologies, attitudes and emotions of the recipients. In sum, and in quite informal terms, the overall strategy of manipulative discourse is to discursively focus on those cognitive and social characteristics of the recipient that make them more vulnerable and less resistant to manipulation, that make them credulous or willing victims to accept beliefs and do things they otherwise would not do. It is here that the essential condition of domination and inequality plays a role. (376)

The manipulating strategy of discrediting “alternative sources and beliefs” (376) was perceived and used in a radical manner during the sovietisation of Romania and was implemented through the limitation of the number of sources of information (periodicals etc.) to those controlled by the system, as mentioned above, while contradicting and making appear as unreliable all other (external) sources. Thus, the readers were converted into “captive audiences” (due to their access to the unique discourse) and moreover, into “victims of manipulation” (Van Dijk 2006, 361) as in the case of manipulation as power abuse, the readers or audiences are not free to believe and act as they choose (as it happens, the author argues, in the case of persuasion, in which they can accept or not the arguments). Thus, readers are “trapped” due to their lack of knowledge and converted into passive audiences, vulnerable due to their constant exposure to an intentional control of mind, with the purpose to be followed by “a control of the actions of recipients based on such manipulated beliefs. (Van Dijk 2006, 362, 371) The purpose was therefore to make audiences behave according to certain expectations, remaining passive to some aspects while being “mobilised” towards others: “the propagandist’s task is to intensify attitudes favourable to his purposes, to reverse obstructive attitudes, to win the indifferent or at least to prevent them from becoming antagonistic” (Lasswell 1995 [1934], 18). The behaviour thus had to accompany the “right” way of thinking which, in some cases such as the totalitarian regime, was imposed by fear (and the Romanian Communism, which lacked public support at its instalment, is probably a good example). These constraints turned this artificial public behaviour into a collective pantomime, the community mimicking the imposed principles and actions.

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The situation in Romania, particularly during the 1980s, (when the erosion and vulnerability of the system became maximal) is typical for such a case of collective (dis)simulation. Nevertheless, disbelief was present during the decades of Communism, attempts to resist to the practices of manipulation and reading between the lines of the propaganda texts existing as early as the first decades of the Soviet regime. Aesopian reading of texts was as deeply ingrained in Russian/Soviet culture as Aesopian writing, and practiced by a much larger community. Some texts were written for Aesopian reading by journalists and politicians trying to convey a message that the censors or the Politburo were likely to block. But that was not a prerequisite for Aesopian reading: Soviet readers did their best to discern the hidden meaning behind texts that were not written with the intention of communicating anything beyond their face value. The Aesopian reader used his skills to try to work out what was happening on the international scene, in the Soviet Union, and even in the Politburo. He looked for hints and subtexts to divine exactly what was intended by the often obscure “signals” that came down from on high. Although he assumed that the regime was often trying to deceive him, he also assumed that there was a possibility of reading through the deception and getting at some kind of truth. (Fitzpatrick 2010, 188)

Sheila Fitzpatrick notices that by trying to decode the stereotypical messages dominating the press, the people “practiced their own form of surveillance on the regime” (187), due to the disbelief in the information presented by the press (itself extremely limited within what we called above, paraphrasing Verdery, “shortage culture” of information). This disbelief could oscillate from total rejection12 of the information (due to the lack of credibility this censured press had in front of its audiences) to the questioning mentioned above, of the “real” meaning hidden behind the propaganda stereotypes.

“Words and Reality”: The Romanian Cultural Periodicals in the 1950s The 1950s and especially the period between the late 1940s and early 1950s are essential years when speaking of the appropriation of cultural products, institutions and cultural actors in Communist Romania. After its ascension to power, the regime (which lacked public support) found an expected solution in the control of media, following the Soviet model. The situation is paradoxical, as within this context media “served not the ascension to power, but to its consolidation and legitimacy” (Osman 2004, 48) and thereof press was meant to persuade people about the benefits of a

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new political regime which was not to be elected but was already a fait accompli. Sorin Toma, senior editor – between 1947-1960 – of Scânteia, the official newspaper of the Party, confessed in a post-Communist memoir volume that the newspaper had not been designed to inform but “had the part to justify the politics of the Party and form public opinion in its spirit” (2004, 310). The importance of the task can be connected to the dimensions of the distribution network (Scânteia was printed in millions of copies) as well as to the fact that the periodical was not produced by the institutions responsible of propaganda (as periodicals usually were) but directly subordinated to the Party. “By monopolising information, the Power creates and distributes a bastard entity, a mixture of partial truths and credible lies, of reality and illusion: […] official information” (Coman 2007 [1999], 134). This need of control and legitimising instruments were essential for the decade 1948-1958 in which not only the Communist regime was very recent and needed press and culture to help it project a positive image, but there were Soviet troops present on Romanian territory and thus the sovietisation of culture was considered an essential project of propaganda (nevertheless, performed under a sort of military siege). The leaders in Bucharest formed a puppet-regime ruled by Moscow and all “directions” applied in culture, economy and so on were decided there, with little compromise to the local leaders. However, the image promoted was that of “voluntary” or self-sovietisation (Connelly, 1999), idea contradicted mainly by the military conditions mentioned before (many authors, among whom Malte Rolf (2009) do not agree that this process was accepted voluntarily). Therefore, ideological “orthodoxy” (Fitzpatrick 1992, 238-50) was required, while the message was uniform, irrespective of the instrument. Thus official information was carefully controlled and filtered before reaching the masses (the small number of periodicals were distributed in millions of copies and almost imposed to the people – such as the official newspapers, Scânteia). A general principle of the Soviet censorship practice (as well as widely also of the everyday reality!) was: what was not explicitly allowed was certainly forbidden. However, only a limited circle of people were in the know of what exactly was allowed and what was forbidden. Concealment was largely used as an efficient means of intimidation in order to make people obedient to the regime. (Lauk 1999, 23)

One of the first projects designed by the new Communist cultural periodicals (together with presenting full transcripts of political decrees and laws concerning culture or key ideological texts) was to explicitly reconstruct the principles of culture in order to supposedly better reveal

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reality. This meant reconsidering the present and more surprisingly, the past, the historical information and interpretations. The explicit aim was to “correct”, to “make right” both the perspective on the present and past “realities” (versus the “falsity” of past representations and of the alternative discourses of Western cultures). The priority of cultural periodicals was therefore to (re)present the realities of the time (as in bourgeois culture “there [was] a gap between reality and its expression in art”). This direction was deeply connected with the promotion of the cultural monopoly of socialist realism, the “method above all methods” (Selejan 2008, 5). The discourse was oriented towards discrediting any alternative perspectives (i.e. the bourgeois culture) as false and wrong, while convincing the readers to believe in the “right path” promoted by the Party within ideology, culture, art or education. Petru Dumitriu, an emerging writer in the late 1940s and soon to enter the group of the privileged by the regime due to his enthusiastic socialist realist novels, was named an editor for ideological matters at the new cultural periodical Flacăra. Dumitriu made use of his Western philosophical education (son of a bourgeois family, with aristocratic roots, Dumitriu had studied abroad before the installment of the Communist regime) in order to deconstruct Western artistic principles as decadent, contradictory and wrong (he writes articles entitled “Requiem for a False Philosophy”, “Words and Reality in Bourgeois Culture” or “Mirroring the Essential Realities” (arguing in favour of the new ideology: “the historical moment which we are living is one of struggle, of finding the roads and the germs of future”, “Oglindirea realităĠilor…” 1948, 8). The idea of crisis of the Western culture, approached extensively by Dumitriu, was in fact a cliché within the Romanian cultural periodicals of the time and its use as one of the main elements in his attempt to deconstruct the principles of Western criticism, philosophy or literature means following the mainstream discourse (that of propaganda) : the crisis of the bourgeois society, crisis that can be solved only by the disappearance of this society and its replacing it with a socialist one, whose ideology includes moral values appropriate for creating heroes who, through their victorious humanity will reach the highest heights of art. (“Eroul….” 1948, 10)

The solution offered by the author, accordingly to the mainstream discourse was the “progressist” and truly humanist culture, designed after the Soviet model. Besides the explicit ideological articles, the attempt to impose the “realities” of the time (one of the most persistent clichés of the time, as propaganda was meant to convince the audiences the society was

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undergoing a positive change) led to the development of the literary reportage. The latter was encouraged as it was supposed to directly reflect or reproduce reality and therefore to be more faithful than other literary genres: Today the writers and journalists have taken upon themselves the task to present the country as it is, with its magnificent beauty, the abundance of its wealth and especially with its gifted working people. Their work was initially supported by the Party, who encouraged and helped spark the development of literary reportage. (Selejan 2008, 330)

Another cultural project visible in the press of the late 1940s-1950s possesses Orwellian features as it was oriented towards changing the past. The pretext for this reconsideration was the need for a correct interpretation of the history of literature (in parallel with history itself), the accuracy being established based on political criteria. The Romanian literature, having been previously influenced by the Western models, had to be purged and all the remaining reinterpreted “from the point of view of the widely understood current needs of our culture” (Câmpina 1948, 8). Another author, Mihail Novicov went even further in the illusion of influencing the future, by imagining later interpretations of post-war culture. He envisioned a student in a virtual 1999 Communist Romania studying the literature of the late 1940s. The imaginary student of the future would conclude – in Novicov’s perspective - that the factors influencing the progress of post-war Romanian literature were “first, the constructive and relentless example and support of Soviet culture […]. Second, the reality itself, the rapid pace of the revolutionary transformations, Thirdly: the help and guidance of the party which continually drew attention to the mistakes and shortcomings, showing them the right way to socialist realism literature” (quoted in Selejan 2008, 342). Finally, the victory of the Romanian writers in the immediate postwar years was unquestionable in Novicov’s perspective. The vocabulary related to war and conflicts (also present in this article: victory, fight, front13 and so on) was persistent in the mid and late 1940s in cultural periodicals, suggesting the permanent combat developed on the “cultural front” with all sorts of enemies sabotaging the revolution and the progress: Who are the enemies […] that threaten the purity and specificity of the socialist realist, literary production, undermining and emotion and ideological militancy? They are all bourgeois remains. They are the result of ignorance of reality, of not enough-deepening-the-Marxist-Leninist teaching, the lack-of-party-spirit, the slip-on-dangerous positions. (Selejan 2008, 7)

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More than a strictly cultural “fight”, the culture was a front to be conquered through aggressive methods: arrestments or professional purges (people accused of collaboration and so on), forbidden to publish and so on. “Book stores, publishing houses and libraries14 the purge of older books is radical. [...] Many private or public libraries were burned, tens of thousands of books were thrown away, transported in dark basements and cellars, some of the most important archives were given fire” (M. Popa 2001, n. pag.). Repression alternated with privileges, as mentioned above. These privileges were attributed by the system through the cultural institutions (the importance of which has been already mentioned), centralising the activity of the writers turned into members in a special form of control (particularly the Writers’ Union created in 1949 was exerting this control by centralising important resources, including financial, through a special fund, as well as the publication mechanisms, together with periodicals, publishing houses and offering a particular type of employment to writers). This policy of “stimulation of scientific, literary and artistic activities” (Selejan 2007, 171; Ionescu-Gură, 2005), showing the importance attached by the Party to the writers was concretised in 1949 by the issuing of specific decrees and official decisions. A complex system of awards, subventions, access to different privileges or “professional opportunities with a stimulating role” (Macrea-Toma, 5). We referred to a system of benefits because a writer employed in a literary magazine or publishing house, could not only earn a salary a few times larger than the national average, but also be paid large honoraries for his books, be granted money awards or offered loans with no obligation to be paid, pensions and so on (see Macrea-Toma, 51-65). They had specific (and privileged) spaces to meet (from the “House of the Writers”, an elegant mansion in Bucharest, with a fine restaurant etc. to other residences in the country, in mountain or sea resorts, with “creative” purposes). (FătuTutoveanu 2010, 216)

These privileges, as complements to the absolutization of control and censorship, explain many adherences (“We can say that at the calling of the party to develop our national culture and a new literature a united block of all generations of writers responded”, Selejan 1998, 11), some of them extremely valuable for the regime, due to their potential, prestige or talent (such as the case of the cultivated Petru Dumitriu and Mihail Sadoveanu). Sanda Cordoú, an attentive researcher of the period, groups into several categories these adhering writers, members of different generations as mentioned above and yet presented by the press as forming one homogeneous group. Thus, she speaks first of the category of flagmen

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[stegari], designing the coordinates of the new literary front, by contributing with ideological texts: “they had a decisive part in imposing socialist realism…working with insignificant variations to the unique text of the dogma, establishing the rules for the literary works elaborated in conformity with the socialist realism” (Cordoú 2012, 25-26). A second category was entitled by the author coryphaei [corifei], containing the “already consecrated writers who through the prestige of their name support and legitimate the new power and artistic ideology” (32). Finally, the innovators [înnoitori] (with a paradoxical name, as Cordoú also notices, as the rigid set of rules “claim unconditional obedience from the writers practicing it”, 37), who are represented particularly by younger writers such as Petru Dumitriu or Marin Preda and in general by all those attempting or some cases simulating the attempt to find innovative directions (within the fixed system whose rules they were obeying). The cultural press and particularly Flacăra promoted the involvement of all these generations into the political cause, their presence and participation in the public space being justified by articles, interviews, inquiries or transcripts of debates, while their contribution was marked by signs of recognition (awards, medals etc.). Fitzpatrick noticed the same procedure in Soviet press, where the promotion of intelligentsia privileges was exceptional (as in general privileges were not mentioned by media). She finds a possible explanation in the fact that this was a form of diversion of the audiences from focusing on the privileges of the political elites (“Perhaps this was a strategy to deflect possible popular resentment of privilege away from Communists. Although it does not appear to have had that result, it did imprint on popular imagination the notion that some members of the creative intelligentsia were the most fabulously privileged people in the Soviet Union”, Fitzpatrick 2000, 96). In parallel a real campaign regarding the disappearance of the differences between intellectual and physical work was visible in that Romanian cultural press shaped after the Soviet model. Intelligentsia was thus in the same time presented as just one more category of workers, whose activity and recognised contributions were deeply connected with the proletarians, by whom they had to be inspired and in their turn educated: Workers work […], peasants work […] and progressionist intellectuals work and the same do the writers, animated by their great mission to contribute to the education of working people in the spirit of socialism, to depict the new reality in valuable artistic achievements, the working class struggle, the victories of the people, the moral beauty of the free man. […] Assimilating the Marxist-Leninist learning is a task given to the writers. Enlarging their theoretical knowledge, which will help them observe life in

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After imposing this series of cultural directions (politically supervised) and a clear ideological programme, together with a specific language, cultural periodicals continued this cultural campaign (with a term paraphrasing Selejan 2008, 6), with just slight variations suggested by the context. The diagram of these variations can be recovered by analysing the evolution of the cultural periodicals of the decade. Selejan made one of the first attempts to systematise this evolution in her consecutive volumes and her conclusions are that the main tendency in 1948-49 was the imposing of a new method and vision on literature. This was followed in 1950-52 by the encouragement of writers to persist in this direction, with specific attention to the “vulnerable” areas of either poetry or prose. In 1953, periodicals were filled with texts dedicated to Stalin, following his death, while the following year was a festive year, celebrating the “glorious decade” of “new literature”, followed by “years of congresses and conferences, which have as an effect in publication the multiplying of adhesions and echoes of these events, though species such as the interview, bookmarking, discussion, balance, review monographs” (Selejan 1998, 7). However, as complex and homogenous, this press campaign focused on socialist realism proved to be “the longest critical campaign to lack glory and posthumous results. As none of the then called ‘literary successes’ have not resisted in time” (6).

Conclusions Due to the importance assigned to press by the Communist regimes, as a key tool for propagating the official ideology and propagandistic messages, Soviet press developed in a specific manner, based on limitation, control and censorship. Once defined and developed, the model was exported to the satellite countries (such as post-war Romania). Despite the cultural or linguistic differences, the model was faithfully copied and a complex apparatus was designed, focusing (paradoxically) on disseminating the limited and rigid set of values, rules and models. The adjustment had to be sudden though radical (total restructuring of the system of production, reproduction and distribution of information, together with the radical change in content), which involved simulation

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and imitation both from the cultural agents and the target audiences. Sheila Fitzpatrick speaks of “Aesopian readings” (Fitzpatrick 2000, 188) of the periodicals limited to a small number and a uniform tone. Actually, the strict limitation to a “safe” vocabulary or set of themes was the only advisable approach, as previously mentioned, those in power to decide or set the direction were few (see the above flagmen category designed by Sanda Cordoú) and the many followed the silent rule “what was not explicitly allowed was certainly forbidden” (Lauk 1999, 23). Though focused on “mirroring essential realities” (as explicitly states a title in Flacăra periodical), fact proven by the flourishing of the literary reportage (as a more faithful literary genre), the dominant direction being to confront the “new” realities and fight the deceitful alternative discourses (belonging to the past or to Western cultures), the periodicals of the time reflect what we called “a shortage culture” (paraphrasing Katherine Verdery’s concept of “shortage economy” applied to Communist societies). Thus, the periodicals transmit an extremely limited amount of information, which is in its turn edited to the extreme, with the help of a series of manipulation techniques. As shown above, based on Van Dijk’s discourse strategies theories on manipulation, the propaganda used a series of explicit and implicit techniques in all the pieces of information distributed to the population in order to persuade the latter to believe and act as the regime wanted them to. The absolute control of the regime over the press, leading thus to a monopoly over the information, transformed these audiences into captives or victims (Van Dijk actually separating persuasion of manipulation of the principle that the latter represents an abuse of power and domination, which in the case of the totalitarian regimes and their strong propaganda apparatuses go the extreme). This manipulation of information was extended from elements characterizing the present of the time towards the interpretation of the past, reconsidering history,15 as well as history of literature, the latter being submitted to a radical purge and the imposing of a new (“right”) interpretation of the remaining elements. The intelligentsia represented an authority in propagating the ideological messages, though their authority was established rather implicitly (explicitly they were equal to the proletarians and even acting in their service), and therefore it represented an essential category in the cultural campaign of change developed in post-war Romania. Through an alternation of repressive measures and privileges (performed with the help of a new legislation and particularly a series of decrees meant to “stimulate the creation”), the intelligentsia was either purged or attracted on the side of the regime and the “cultural front”, fighting for the victory of the new

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cultural paradigm. However, despite the optimistic propaganda and the projections in a Communist future recognising their achievements (see Novicov’s article mentioned above), this cultural reorganisation “campaign” proved eventually to be a huge failure, as the large amount of ideologically “faithful” works written during this decade and promoted by the cultural press proved nothing more than useful contextual tools of propaganda, totally lacking artistic value. The only (very few) surviving works represent ideological compromises for privileged writers (see FătuTutoveanu 2010), the limited deviations from the ideological (almost religious) convention.

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Notes 1

Acknowledgement: This paper is supported by the Sectoral Operational Programme Human Resources Development (SOP HRD), financed from the European Social Fund and the Romanian Government under the project number ID59323. 2 “Channels of communication between ordinary people and the regime existed in the Soviet Union, but because they were embedded in complicated processes of surveillance and control they can scarcely be considered neutral. People knew they could get arrested for expressing “anti-Soviet” opinions; thus they tended either to refrain from doing so or to express such opinions outside the range of state surveillance (as they hoped) (Fitzpatrick 2000, 166). 3 See also Adrian Cioroianu 2000, 591-610. 4 “Emphasizing such things as table manners, behavior in public places, treatment of women, and basic knowledge of Comunist ideology, was the level of culture required of any town-dweller” (Fitzpatrick 2000, 80). 5 Fitzpatrick 2000, 80. 6 “Therefore, Soviet journalism lacked all the traditional functions that journalism has in a democratic society” (Lauk and Kreegipuu 2010, 167-168). 7 Rolf 2009, 601. 8 Bernhard C. Cohen's famous statement on the impact of modern mass media can easily be applied to the Soviet case: “[The Press] may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” (Rolf 2009, 603). 9 “As Van Dijk has demonstrated (Van Dijk 1993 and 1996), lack of alternative discourses contributes to adoption by the audience of models persuasively presented by the authorities through the mass media” (Lauk 1999, 23). 10 The First Five-Year Plan inaugurated the heroic age, launching the country on a make-or-break effort to transform itself. A heroic age called forth heroic personalities and feats, and gloried in them. In Maxim Gorky’s Nietzschean formulation, Soviet man was becoming Man with a capital letter (“Superman” for Nietzsche). Free from the burden of serf consciousness inculcated through past exploitation and deprivation, the contemporary hero—“man of the new humanity”—is “big, daring, strong.” He pits the force of human will against the forces of nature in a “grandiose and tragic” struggle. His mission is not only to understand the world but also to master it.21 (Fitzpatrick 2000, 71). 11 In English, “The Russian Book”. 12 Skepticism about the reliability of what was written in the papers—as ex-pressed in the joke that there was no truth in Pravda (which means truth) and no news in Izvestiia (which means news)—was widespread. The reaction that “It’s all lies” was not uncommon: for example, “There are no real Stakhanovites, all that is just written in the paper, but doesn’t exist in life, they make it all up.” But most newspaper readers, while distrusting the press, assumed that some of what appeared in the papers had a relationship to reality. One Harvard Project respondent, a skilled worker with a high-school education, said that he did not

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believe the boasting about economic achievements in the Soviet press, but he did believe the articles that described “disorder, nonfulfillment, and spoilage of production.” If the press published a denial by TASS, the Soviet international news agency, of a foreign report, he believed it, for “if they deny something [there] must be [something] to it.” (Fitzpatrick 2000, 187-8). 13 “în literatura nouă, realist-socialistă, nu există peisaj literar, ci front, iar creatorii de inefabil úi imaginar sunt ostaúi, ‘înregimentaĠi’ într-o ideologie bazată pe ură úi luptă de clasă, opera fiind armă de luptă” (Selejan 2008, 5). 14 For this topic see Chapter Thirteen in this volume. 15 For this topic see Chapter Eleven in this volume.

CHAPTER TEN ASCRIBING A NEW POLITICAL IDENTITY: WOMEN DURING THE 1950’S. A CASE STUDY ON SĂTEANCA MAGAZINE1 MANUELA MARIN

The establishment of Communist rule in Romania in 1948 marked the final step in bringing the country into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Two major processes characterized the performance of the new Romanian regime after this moment. The first aimed at strengthening the political alliance with the Soviet Union. This transformed Romania, along with other countries of the Eastern bloc, into a political satellite whose decisions were made in accordance with the Soviet strategic interests in the region. The second process pointed to a fundamental reorganization of the economic structure in order to fit into a Soviet-inspired model. This involved the nationalization of all means of production in order to support the functioning of the centralized model. The latter meant extracting and allocating economic resources according to the highly prioritized targets of the regime. Also, the necessary economic resources were to be extracted as a result of collective effort, which entailed the common use of all material goods under the direct leadership of the Party. The declared purpose of the Romanian Party’s economic strategy was to employ the Soviet socialist solution for solving the country’s problem of underdevelopment. Industry and especially heavy industry played a key role in the new developmental strategy of the Romanian Workers’ Party (hereafter abbreviated as RWP). This endorsement of the industrial model was explained through a Soviet translation of an essentially Marxist rationale. Therefore, high rates of investment for the industrial sector of the Romanian economy were supposed to assist the successful socialist transformation of the country and ensure that economic advancement confirmed the viability of the socialist alternative of development.

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Consequently, the industry was to provide the other economic sectors with the necessary technological support in order to increase their contribution to the national economic growth. The socialist transformation of the economic structure of the country also targeted the countryside. The collectivization of agriculture was meant to replace the old structure of the rural world (private property, traditional social hierarchy) with a new one, which was supposed to mirror the collective ethos and the centralized organization and distribution of common goods typical for the Communist rule. Moreover, the socialist modernization supposedly brought about by the collectivization of agriculture would have influenced positively the organization of rural labour, the lives of those living in the countryside and above all would have increased the agricultural output in order to cover both the consumption needs of agricultural producers and those of the working class in the newly created city centres. The importance attached to the economic factor in preparing the transition to the socialist development of the country can be explained from two distinct perspectives. One is that of the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which explained the evolution of things in world history as mainly motivated by economics. Related to this, the second perspective identified in the economic factor the main trigger of changes in the material conditions of life. Thus, these material changes were pointed out as responsible for the creation of a new human type. In other words, the socialist transformation was supposed to not only change the economic structure (mainly through industrialization, collectivization) but also to influence the birth of the new socialist man. But this rationale presupposed a double-sided process. The material conditions generated by the socialist revolution would have been responsible for the creation of the new man. However, the same new man was supposed to make his conscious contribution to the socialist development of the country and, therefore, to the change in his living conditions. Because the construction of socialism was an ongoing process and the Party’s leadership considered that human consciousness fell behind the country’s economic transformations, considerable attention was given to educating people according to the ideological priorities of the Romanian regime. Here the term education does not refer to the organized process that took place within the national educational system. On the contrary, it means political socialization. Although the term is usually used in relation to learning processes targeting the youth, in the present chapter I have chosen to extend its target group to include the entire population. The motivation supporting this option is related to the meaning attached to political socialization, on the

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one hand, and on the other hand to the general political context in Romania during the 1950s. Political socialization was defined as a “learning process by which political norms and behaviour that are acceptable to an ongoing political system are transmitted from generation to generation” (Renshon 1977, 5). The main purpose of this practice is both to familiarize the subjects with the characteristics of the political system (for example, allegiances and alliances, rules and rituals, symbols and type of behaviour, personalities) and to create, based on them, a complex of beliefs, feelings and information meant to help individuals comprehend, evaluate and relate to the political world around them (Dawson and Prewitt 1969, 16-17). Within the Romanian context of the 1950s, the need to politically socialize the entire population was even more vital given the novelty of the regime itself and its professed socialist values. Based on the Soviet experience, RWP’s main instrument used in the political socialization of the Romanian population was propaganda. The understanding of propaganda in the current chapter is that of an organized and deliberate process of communicating ideas and values. It is meant to persuade the people to think and behave in a certain manner in order to achieve specific goals from which those organizing the process would benefit (Taylor 2003, 6). In the case of the Romanian regime, its ideological message reached its target audience through various means that included party education, radio, newspapers and magazines. Additionally, different mass and communal organizations adjusted these official mass media products to the specific educational needs of their members. Săteanca [The Countrywoman] was the official periodical of the women’s mass organization in the People’s Republic of Romania (in Romanian Republica Populară Română). During the 1950s, the name of this organization changed from the “Union of Democratic Women from the People’s Republic of Romania” (in Romanian Uniunea Femeilor Democrate din Republica Populară Română) to the ‘Committee of Democratic Women from the People’s Republic of Romania’ (in Romanian Comitetul Femeilor Democrate din Republica Populară Română). (MorarVulcu and Virgiliu ğârău 2002, 179) The magazine was published monthly between 1948 and 1974 and it was a publication designed for ordinary women living in the countryside. The interest in this periodical is related to its contribution to ascribing a new identity for countrywomen during the 1950s. I chose the term “ascribe” because the intended purpose of the articles published by this magazine was to identify and popularize specific qualities or characteristics

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that were to distinguish the performance of the new woman living in the countryside. In other words, the published materials aimed at establishing certain traits of character and behaviour of the new female model, which should both reflect the ideological imperatives of the regime and become a necessary point of reference for countrywomen. Moreover, as the title of indicates, the chapter focuses on those qualities or characteristics ascribed to women that formed their new political identity. As the chapter will detail in the following, almost every aspect in the countrywomen’s behaviour and actions was assigned a political meaning. Departing from the concept of narrative identity (Ricoeur 1992, 113-168), I argue that women were both agents and subjects of the actions described by official discourse. As such, their political identity was defined through what they did instead of what they were, and this identification was an on-going process that constantly defined and redefined women’s identity (MorarVulcu 2007, 37). Another element involved in structuring the political identity of the countrywomen is gender. Despite the Romanian regime’s ideological commitment to the full emancipation of women and eradicating gender differences, its discourse about women’s role in the new socialist society reinforced the gendering perspective on the private and public realm this time within the socialist emancipating rhetoric (Morar-Vulcu and Virgiliu ğârău 2002, 173-174). Even the fact that during the 1950s there were three specialized periodicals for women (Femeia, Muncitoarea and Săteanca [The Woman, The Woman Worker and The Countrywoman]) and no similar publication for men suggest the same gender differentiation and emphasis. Related to this, the special attention given to associating women to political values revealed the regime’s concern that the political backwardness of its female population might delegitimize their participation to the socialist transformation of the country. Consequently, the current chapter will explore the ways in which the articles published in Săteanca aimed at creating a new political identity taking into consideration women’s performance both at work and at home and also the gender factor. One of the most important topics intensely covered by this periodical was women’s participation in the economic and political life of their country. Their involvement targeted two main domains of public life: the political and the productive sector. The participation of women to political life was unanimously presented in the articles published by Săteanca as the best example of the sharp contrast between the “prerevolutionary” society and the new socialist one. Women gained not only the right to vote and elect their female deputies but also that of gaining a certain degree of political knowledge. The need

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to politically socialize women and familiarize them with the socialist principles was an important theme of the published materials. This was because a “correct” political consciousness helped women to make the right decisions regarding their voting options and, most importantly, it helped their participation and support for the socialist transformation of the countryside (the collectivization of agriculture). Moreover, the examples popularized by this periodical consisted of successful stories of women whose ambition and determination helped them to rise above their “prerevolutionary” condition and become inspirational models for their peers. An example of such an inspirational model was the advisor.2 The advisor was a type of political activist belonging to the women’s communist mass organization. One of her main roles was to persuade women of the advantages of the new socialist organization of agriculture. This involved arranging small gatherings for women, during which their advisor read and explained to them the latest official decisions and also tried to convince them to join the collective farms.3 One of these advisors recalled her experience during such a meeting: Then I read to them from a brochure about what it meant to work on a collective farm and I explained to them what I had just read. At the beginning they did not believe me and told me they would better die than join a collective farm. I worked hard with them, patiently showing them the benefits of collective work. I showed them that what chiaburii4 said were all lies and only through collective work would we be able to lead a happy life. (Săteanca 1950 1, 14)5

This explanatory work attained its goal as the women participating in the gathering agreed to join the collective farm (14). The other activities organized by the advisors aimed at the same objective, that of convincing women to accept the reorganization of agriculture according to the collective principle. What is interesting to note is that this purpose was usually disguised under the generous principle of educating the female masses. Accordingly, the political activists used some of the traditional forms of communal gatherings of the rural world, such as evening gettogethers of village women (in Romanian úezători) and choirs; they also organized classes for eliminating illiteracy (in Romanian ore pentru eliminarea analfabetismului) and reading circles (Săteanca 1950 1, 11; Godeanu 1950, 11). For example, one article mentioned that 10 reading circles functioned in Cernatu, a village in Braúov county. During these activities, the advisors read the official newspapers and magazines or brochures regarding the Soviet successful experience of collectivizing the agriculture. For instance, such a circle usually gathered at the weekly

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meetings 15-18 women who “read and discussed the magazines Săteanca and Dolgozo Nö6 and other brochures about the life of the members of Soviet kolkhoz” (Cere 1950, 4).7 In order to highlight the impact these reading circles had on women’s performance at work Săteanca published some of their testimonies. One of them mentioned that her participation was motivated by the fact that she could always learn something new and useful for her work: I have a lot of work and I would not have come but I want to listen to something new, for only this way we can enlighten our mind. (Dacă 1950, 17)8

Another participant to the same reading circle acknowledged that: we learn many useful things by reading together. Here for example, we wouldn’t have known that, if we planted forests, we could have more rain, had we not read it in the brochure in which it was written how Soviet people fought against the drought. (17)

The article ended with the women’s voluntary commitment to follow the Soviet experience and plant acacias on the surrounding hills and in the vicinity of the communal pasture in order to protect their village from the drought (17). At the beginning of the 1950s, a preliminary step in the creation of collective farms was the imposition of strict surveillance of agricultural work. Consequently, the peasants were forced to adjust their farming work according to the economic objectives of the national plan and also to fulfil the plan quotas assigned to them (Borúa and Mihai Croitor 2009, 47-48). Some of the articles published by Săteanca highlighted the ways in which the same advisors accomplished these tasks. Their mission was to mobilize women to take part in the agricultural works and also to persuade them to follow the official regulations regarding the organization of the farming production. Above all, the advisors also sought to convince women that all these measures that RWP took for the socialist transformation of the countryside were beneficial for them and also for the general development of the country (Cere 1950, 4; Tălăngescu 1950, 5; Vlădulescu 1950, 12). The mentions of these advisors in the articles published by Săteanca and their importance for the ascription of a new political identity to peasant women can be discussed from two main perspectives. One of them considers the advisor as a necessary model to be emulated by countrywomen. This is because the former was suppose to have that political consciousness that allowed her to fully comprehend the

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importance of the Party’s program and share her knowledge with other women. The other perspective uses the advisor for creating certain situations that would allow the female readership/audience to assimilate, by reading between the lines, those political traits highly praised by the regime such as political literacy, incessant struggle for fulfilling the Party’s directives and full commitment to ensuring the collective good. The magazine also featured articles allegedly signed by womencorrespondents which pictured an idyllic image of life on the collective farms. The stress was laid on presenting the material benefits brought by the collective work to the life of the community and especially on how the local plan targets decisively contributed to its welfare (Săteanca 1951 1213, 15; Săteanca 1952 3, 2; Gorun 1953, 14-15). It is important to mention that the signs of this collective welfare identified by these femalecorrespondents were restricted to their maternal concerns and also to their life at home. For example, one of these women describes the collective farm as “a family who enjoys alike all our accomplishments” (Muja 1950, 13) and exemplifies what she considers to be the defining elements of this collective family life: the functioning of a crèche where mothers could leave their offspring while they were working in the field and the existence of qualified personnel that could offer the necessary medical care for the children: Our collective farm has now a nurse who takes care of the sick. When PătruĠ, Maria Motronea’s child got sick, the nurse stood at his bedside for three nights, (and) the doctor came all the time to see him. Now the child is fine and healthy again. He is at the crèche playing. (Muja 1950, 13)9

Also at home, women identified the signs of material prosperity brought by collective work: radios and loudspeakers to which they could listen … to conferences, plays, our beautiful folk and Soviet music without having to go to the club in bad weather. (13)10

Life on the collective farm also stirred women’s interest in selfimprovement. This usually concerned fulfilling some sort of social mission that aimed at improving the life conditions of the members of their community. Although official propaganda insisted that the collective farm offered women new opportunities for materializing their initiatives, in fact this seemingly emancipated discourse revived the old gendering of the private and the public and integrated it within the socialist rhetoric. For example, on the eve of the national holiday on August 23rd, a group of women from an unnamed commune decided to do some voluntary work and repair, paint and clean the school’s building and its surroundings. The

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same selfless mission for the common good triggered the career decision of a young woman. She made a commitment to herself to raise her “political and cultural level” of knowledge because she wanted to “attend the Normal School, become a teacher, (and) educate children” as she understood it (Godeanu 1950, 11). The magazine also informed its readers about the successful stories of women who succeeded in emerging as full members of the new rural society. This usually involved a comparison that favoured the socialist period at the expense of the “prerevolutionary” one. One of the main examples of women’s socialist emancipation concerned their access to education. An article published by Săteanca told the story of an illiterate woman whose destiny was presented as symptomatic for the life of women during the old regime. The chiabur, whom she worked for, destroyed one day her spelling book telling her that she did not need any kind of education for performing her job as a servant. With the advent of the new communist rule, this young woman attended literacy classes and even managed to become the leader of the village club’s drama team. Her supreme revenge on the former regime was the use of her newly acquired literacy against the chiabur. Therefore, she organized with her drama team shows in which she poked fun at the chiaburi as a way to counter the hostile rumours spread by them against the socialist organization of agriculture (Amărescu 1950, 23). The lack of any kind of education was also blamed for women’s reluctance to join the collective farm. In some of the articles found in Săteanca, women who were recently “enlightened” by the socialist educational values recognized that their political backwardness influenced them and led them to give credence to the rumours spread by the chiabur about collective farming. Thus, one correspondent recalled her own experience: We fought hard with chiaburii who concocted all kinds of false rumours. Guided by the Party, we engaged in explanatory work showing that chiaburii wanted to pit us against one another, because if we unite to work together, they won’t get the chance to fleece us ever again. (Stoica 1951, 5)

Another one also remembers that: I sometimes regret that only with difficulty did I agree to join the farm. […] When comrades from our organization came, I left and did not want to listen to them. This was because I did not know anything about the collective and it did not cross my mind what the farm was like. I did not really read. I just learnt from the book and I listened to the neighbours’, relatives’ tales and even to the chiaburi’s rumours. Only after I started to

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Moreover, the identification of actions on the part of chiaburi who meant to undermine the local economy was also present in the pages of the magazine as an obvious sign of political consciousness on the part of women. In fact, a characteristic trait of the new political identity designed for countrywomen by Săteanca was the constant awareness of subversive and dangerous potential represented by these so-called remnants of the old regime. For example, an article that described how the peasants of Zorleni commune delivered their quotas for the state fund also featured a secondary story about how a vigilant woman exposed a female chiabur who had diluted with water the milk that she was supposed to give tothe same state fund (ùtefan 1951, 14). Another countrywoman mentioned that after she had read in Săteanca and Scânteia [The Sparkle]11 about the organization of work on collective farms, she decided not only to join the one created in her village, but also to show to other peasants the beneficial consequences this could have on their life. This was done with the purpose of countering the hostile rumours spread by the chiaburi against the collective farm: I went every day into the field to explain to people and ask them to keep an eye on the chiaburi, to hasten the sowings and work the land with love and power, because we work for our welfare, of the working peasantry and workers in the city. Now the landlord and chiabur could no longer exploit us as they wished. (Săteanca 1950 4, 7)

Săteanca also featured several stories about women whose biographies were supposed to reflect the latest changes in the country’s evolution. Therefore, these were narratives about females who left the countryside and managed not only to get a job in the city working in a factory but also to significantly change their lives as a result of it. They became leaders at their work places, usually in the textile industry, they discovered new methods of organizing their work that helped them to become Stakhanovists and they also trained other women at work. Moreover, these women used their leisure time not only for taking care of their own house and family but also for raising their political and technological level of knowledge. The articles mentioned that, among their readings, these women included newspapers, the magazines for women and socialist realist novels, both Romanian and Soviet, such as Petru Dumitriu’s Road without Dust, Vilis LaĠis’s The Storm, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel was Tempered or M. Socolov’s Sparks

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(Săteanca 1953 11, 4; Cinca 1952, 6; Săteanca 1953 5, 5; Săteanca 1952 2, 5). The magazine underlined that women also conquered several professions that during the old regime were performed exclusively by men, such as that of welder, driller, machine servicer, tractor driver or other qualified jobs in heavy industry. This was obviously presented in the published materials as evidence of the communist regime’s concern for ensuring equal conditions for women and men (Săteanca 1952 7, 4; Vâlceanu 1950, 16-17, Epureanu 1955, 8-9; Manda 1955, 3). This egalitarian rhetoric that aimed at masculinising the image of women did not extend beyond their working place. After fulfilling their masculine tasks, women regained their femininity. For example, the group of female machine servicers and tractor drivers spent the evenings together singing, making plans for setting up their own artistic brigade or thinking about what they wanted to buy with the money they had earned. Also, some of the articles published by Săteanca mentioned that women’s work continued at home, their primary concern being to take care of their houses and families (Epureanu 1955, 9; Săteanca 1953 5, 5). The female worker’s character played the same part as the abovementioned advisor. Her role model as an exemplary performer both at work and at home highlighted even more vividly the importance of political consciousness as an identity label of the new woman. As such, every woman that formed the subject of an article considered that their work was part of the general effort at constructing the socialist future of the country. For example, a woman working at a foundry imagined that: the pieces her team help to make will be part of the machines that will work in the country’s fields […].Through the workshop’s window, she could seemingly see the harvesters, the harrows and the threshing machines from the factory’s yard scattered along the country, she could see the cornfields and endless golden grain crops in all the country. (Manda 1955, 3)

Besides this awareness of their contribution to the economic development of the country, women justified their wholehearted involvement in fulfilling and exceeding the plan targets in terms of political choice. Asked by a reporter from Săteanca what fuelled her determination to become a leader at her work place, one woman answered: I have strength…because we got rid of exploitation. Today, from what my husband and I earn […] we have all we need in the house. We are free in our work, and our endeavour is highly appreciated. (Săteanca 1953 5, 5)

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Another characteristic of the new political identity proposed by Săteanca was women’s involvement in supporting the peace campaign of the communist regime. This pro-peace policy was another Soviet policy imported to Romania and it represented an ideological layer that justified the division of the world into two different camps during the Cold War. According to the Soviet-sponsored perspective, at the end of the World War II, the world was divided between the peace loving forces lead by USSR and the Western capitalist countries’ bloc guided by the other superpower, USA. The same perspective argued that the capitalist world was about to be torn apart by a series of acute economic crises that would eventually lead to wars between these countries. This conflicting world contributed to the antagonistic “capitalist encirclement” and, therefore, threatened the very existence of the Soviet state and of its ideological allies. Moreover, the Soviet propaganda also emphasized that the advancement of the socialist project was the only practical way of resisting the alleged war unleashed by the capitalist world against its inimical ideological counterpart (Winkler 2000, 20-23). Săteanca subscribed to this Soviet ideological interpretation of the Cold War world. Its articles interpreted every major initiative or political decision-making of the Romanian regime as a necessary step in strengthening the national state and, thus, in bringing its own contribution to defending the socialist cause of world peace. In addition, this opposition between the socialist and capitalist forces was also mirrored in the internal ascription of identities according to communist ideological rigors. Consequently, the chiaburi became not only an ominous remainder of the old regime but also the main internal ally of capitalist warmongering forces. This was because they were supposedly trying to sabotage the new socialist regime and, therefore, came to indirectly further the cause of hostile capitalist forces. From this perspective, every aspect of a woman’s activity as described by Săteanca was given a political significance. Firstly, her involvement in the production process was given a new meaning in addition to that of emancipation. Her work was equated with a brick placed at the socialist foundation of the state. For example, one of the articles makes reference to a female worker who knows “that working for fulfilling the plan helps the building of socialism and bringing about that happy life” she always has wanted: She knows that building socialism means strengthening peace. She knows all this; she tells those around her, she tells everyone she meets. (Vâlceanu 1950, 17)

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Similarly, a slogan from the pages of the magazine reads as follows: Long live the leaders of production, who, struggling to fulfil and exceed the state plan, strengthen the fight for peace! (17)

For another woman, a war widow, the thought of a potential war that could take away her only son triggered her motivation to work “zealously to raise the village, knowing that through this she strengthens our Republic, which fights resolutely for peace” (Săteanca 1950 1, 14). Secondly, even raising offspring ceased to be a private matter and became a way of supporting a political action such as the fight for peace. One woman wrote to Săteanca about her election to the local Fight-for-Peace Committee (in Romanian Comitetul de luptă pentru pace), also citing from her speech which she delivered on the same occasion: The fight for peace will guide me till my last breath, because I have to defend five young lives and with this the lives of all our children. I’ll be tireless at work, in the field, just as I was among the firsts who joined our collective farm. I’ll fight against the chiaburi and all those who try to stop us from our journey. I know what war and exploitation is… (Pătraúcu 1950, 5)

Another element of women’s newly acquired political identity was their involvement in the political life of the country, both as candidates and electors. Consequently, Săteanca paid great attention to preparing women for national and local elections. Several articles presented in an accessible manner the content of the new electoral law and the changes it brought to women’s political status, such as, political rights equal to those of men or the right to vote. An additional point of interest for the authors of these articles was the presentation of the significance of elections for both the country’s future evolution in general and women’s role in public life in particular. With the help of sundry characters familiar to countrywomen, such as the advisor or the simple woman willing to understand as much as she could about political decisions directly affecting her life, the materials published in Săteanca explained to women that their election of deputies carried an important responsibility. Due to their voting, those elected would organize the entire economic and social life on the collective farm or influence political decisions concerning them at higher decision-making levels. In addition, these local representatives were also to get involved in solving people’s current problems. Related to this, women’s opinions as expressed in the pages of magazines underlined their awareness of the fact that through their voting they finally succeeded in making themselves heard in the political realm and in influencing

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decisions concerning their lives (Arghirescu and ğucudeanu 1950, 6-7; Săteanca 1950 5, 15; Săteanca 1950 7, 4; Badea 1950, 5; Săteanca 1950 7, 4-5; Săteanca 1952 8, 5). As one woman put it: I will vote for deputies to the Popular Council12 and I will come to work to help them to do a good job because all things are done for our welfare. (Săteanca 1950 5, 15)13

Women’s involvement in political life also placed them in the position of candidate not only that of a conscious elector. On the occasion of deputy elections to the Popular Council or to the Great National Assembly,14 Săteanca published different materials concerning the women elected by their community to represent its interest at the local or central level. These were usually short biographies accompanied by pictures of those female candidates or, in some cases, pieces of opinion written by magazine correspondents about their representatives in the local elections. The portrait that these contributions depicted of the candidates was made up of a number of personal details that established certain patterns of traits and deeds that should commonly characterize their public performance. First of all, given their ambition, all these women succeeded in becoming leaders at their work place and they were very often awarded special distinctions or decorations that acknowledged these merits. Secondly, the communist regime took credit for the professional and the personal evolution from an unfortunate and uneducated person to the successful worker and political activist that they eventually became. Thirdly, the implications of their role model extended beyond their workplace to include activities performed for the common good of the local community (Săteanca 1953 11, 5; Săteanca 1954 6, 6; Săteanca 1956 2, 3; Săteanca 1952 11, 2-3). A letter sent by the electors from Orlat commune, in Sibiu county, to Săteanca offers a detailed account of the full range of activities their deputy was involved in. She was “a diligent woman” who was active in the UFDR organization and also in the local branch of state administration. Despite the fact that she had a large family who needed her permanent attention, she was fully dedicated to her social mission: Comrade Găină is no longer a young woman; she has 5 children and enough difficulties. But you’ll never see her complaining about them. Communal interests come first and only then she takes care of her own. She is present at the Popular Council every day. […] And she takes care of everything; all our problems are her concern. (BărbuĠ 1951, 12-13)

Among the achievements of her mandate was the reconstruction of the communal road, the cleaning of the communal pasture, the reparation of

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the communal club where she got involved in organizing cultural events and finally the setting up of a seasonal kindergarten for children whose mothers worked in the field. The personal example of this deputy increased people’s trust in their representatives and their willingness to get involved and change things around them: We trust our Popular Council, our deputies, because they work side by side with us for a better life and for peace. (12-13)

Several conclusions can be drawn from previously exposed remarks about countrywomen’s involvement in political activity, conclusions that could be considered important for revealing the meaning of official concern for ascribing women a new political identity. There is no doubt that all the articles published by Săteanca on this subject indicate to its female readers the main guidelines according to which they should organize their understanding of political life and their role in it. Consequently, the new regime asked women to become politically conscious actors that would make full use of their recently acquired roles by involving themselves in all sort of officially sanctioned activities, such as elections or fulfilling the specific duties required by an official position. What is more important is the very fact that the great majority of these articles had an obvious educational purpose. They were intended to show the readers what politics was, what the purpose of an election and of their voting was, and how their vote could influence their lives. Moreover, the way in which the magazines chose to make known to their female audience the required political information betrayed the same pedagogical function. The articles that were meant to familiarize women with their new political role described staged ordinary situations, for example the discussion between women and their advisor, a situation in which they might have easily found themselves. In conclusion, despite the official rhetoric that emphasised women’s political equality with men or the new opportunities created for them to take part in the political life, the fact that most of the materials published on this subject had an obvious educational content and purpose highlights that at some level the regime continued to consider its female population as needing guidance in order to fully comprehend political matters. The current chapter analysed the contribution of the periodical Săteanca to ascribing a new identity to countrywomen during the 1950s. Consequently, the analysis aimed to identify those specific qualities or traits that reflected the official ideological imperatives and that from the point of view of the Romanian regime should have characterized women’s performance within the political realm. In order to do this, the chapter

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focused on women’s roles and activities both at work and at home and also on the gender issue as reflected in the magazine. It also aimed at approaching the women’s involvement in those activities identified by the magazine as having political significance. The analysis concluded that, despite the communist regime’s discursive commitment to ensuring women’s equality to men, the former only succeeded in adapting older gender distinctions to the new socialist discourse.

Works Cited “Alegem cele mai bune dintre noi.” 1954. Săteanca 6: 6. Amărescu, Constantin. 1950. “Din analfabetă, activistă de frunte a căminului cultural.” Săteanca 8: 23. Arghirescu, V. and P. ğucudeanu. 1950. “Votez, maică, votez.” Săteanca 4: 6-7. Badea, Tudora. 1950. “Votez cu încredere.” Săteanca 7: 5. BărbuĠ, Maria. 1951. “Sătencele despre deputatele lor. Ne mândrim cu deputata noastră.” Săteanca 10: 12-13. Bolocan, Maria. 1951. “De ce sunt astăzi fericită.” Săteanca 9: 7. Borúa, Sanda and Mihai Croitor. 2009. Colectivizarea agriculturii în România: mecanisme legislative ale subordonării lumii rurale (19491962). Cluj-Napoca: Mega. “Candidate în alegerile de deputaĠi pentru sfaturile populare.” 1953. Săteanca 11: 5. “Candidatele democraĠiei populare.” 1956. Săteanca 2: 3. “Candidatele în alegerile pentru Marea Adunare NaĠională.” 1952. Săteanca 11: 2-3. Cere, ùarica. 1950. “Din munca comitetelor săteúti UFD.” Săteanca 3: 4. Cheng, Yinghong. 2009. Creating the “New Man” From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Cinca, Maria. 1952. “Cum am devenit stahanovistă.” Săteanca 4-5: 6. “Cu mare bucurie votez.” 1950. Săteanca 7: 4-5. Dacă, PetruĠa. 1950. “Aúa ne luminăm mintea.” Săteanca 5: 17. Dawson, Richard E., Kenneth Prewitt. Political Socialization. 1969. New York: Little, Brown. “Din experienĠa unei îndrumătoare.” 1950. Săteanca 1: 14. Epureanu, Lia. 1955. “Mecanizatoarele.” Săteanca 2: 8-9. “Faptele vorbesc.” 1951. Săteanca 12-13: 15. “Femeile din Republica Populară Română are drepturi egale cu ale bărbatului.” 1952. Săteanca 8: 5. “Fire trainice.” 1953. Săteanca 5: 5.

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Godeanu, Lucia. 1950. “23 August să ne găsească în plină muncă.” Săteanca 9: 11. Gorun, Elisa. 1953. “Fruntaúi la recoltarea úi predarea cotelor.” Săteanca 8: 14-15. Manda, S. 1953. “Turnătoarea.” Săteanca 4: 3. “Merg úi eu să votez.” 1950. Săteanca 7: 4. Morar-Vulcu, Călin and Virgiliu ğârău. 2002. “Ipostaze ale femeii în presa comunistă. Muncitoarea úi Săteanca (1948-1960).” In CondiĠia femeii în România secolului XX, vol. 2, edited by Ghizela Cosma and Virgiliu ğârău, 173-190. Cluj-Napoca: Nereamia. Morar-Vulcu, Călin. 2007. Republica îúi făureúte oamenii. ConstrucĠia identităĠilor politice în discursul oficial în România, 1948-1965. ClujNapoca: EIKON. Muja, Maria. 1950. Cele înscrise în statutul model a gospodăriilor agricole colective capătă viaĠă.” Săteanca 9: 13. “Munca este arma mea în lupta pentru întărirea leului nou.” 1952. Săteanca 2: 5. Pătraúcu, Zamfira. 1950. “Am de apărat cinci vieĠi tinere.” Săteanca 3: 5. “Pe drumul bunei stări.” 1950. Săteanca 12: 16. “Pentru izbânda în bătălia însămânĠărilor.” 1952. Săteanca 3: 2. “Pentru noi se fac toate.” 1950. Săteanca 5: 15. Renshon, Stanley Allen. 1977. “Assumptive Frameworks in political Socialization Theory”. In Handbook of Political Socialization: Theory and Research, edited by Stanley Renshon, 5, New York: Free Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. “SondoriĠa.” 1952. Săteanca 7: 4. “Stahanovistă cu ajutorul metodelor sovietice.” 1953. Săteanca 11: 4. Stoica, C. 1951. “Să fim necruĠători faĠă de uneltirile duúmanului de clasă.” Săteanca 2: 5. ùtefan, Coca. 1951. “Datorie de cinste.” Săteanca 15: 14. “ùtiri din Ġară.” 1950. Săteanca 1: 11. Taylor, Philip M. 2003. Munitions of the Mind. A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tălăngescu, Maria. 1950. “Despre munca de îndrumare.” Săteanca 5: 5. Vâlceanu, Ioan. 1950. “Sovromtractor, o uzină în care zeci de femei luptă pentru pace úi construirea socialismului.” Săteanca 3: 16-17. Vlădulescu, ùtefania. 1950. “Sarcinile îndrumătoarelor în legătură cu strângerea la timp úi fără pierderi a recoltei úi a predării cotelor pe anul 1950.” Săteanca 9: 12.

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Winkler, Allan M. 2000. The Cold War. A History in Documents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Notes 1

Research for this paper was supported by CNCS-UEFISCSU, project number PN II-RU code 410/2010. 2 In Romanian îndrumătoarea. 3 In Romanian gospodării agricole. This was the Romanian equivalent of the Soviet kolkhoz. 4 Chiabur is the Romanian version of the Soviet kulac. According to the party documents, chiabur was a rich peasant who supposedly personified the source of all the economic evils in the life of the countryside before 1948. For a detailed account of the official significance attached to this term see Borúa and Mihai Croitor, 2009, 42-47. 5 In Romanian “Apoi le-am citit dintr-o broúură ce înseamnă munca în colectiv úi am prelucrat cele citite. La început nu mi-au dat dreptate, spunând că mai bine vor să moară decât să facă o gospodărie colectivă. Am muncit mult cu ele, arătându-le cu răbdare foloasele muncii în colectiv. Le-am arătat că ce spun chiaburii sunt minciuni úi că numai prin muncă colectivă vom ajunge să ducem o viaĠă fericită”, Săteanca 1950 1, 14. 6 Dolgozo Nö (in English, The Woman Worker) was a periodical published for Hungarian women who were members of the women’s communist mass organization in Romania. 7 In Romanian: “care citesc úi discută revista Săteanca úi Dolgozo Nö úi alte broúuri despre viaĠa colhoznicilor sovietici”. Cere 1950, 4. 8 In Romanian: “Am o mulĠime de treabă úi n-aú fi venit dar vreau să ascult si eu ceva nou, că de, numai aúa ne luminăm mintea”, Dacă 1950, 17. 9 In Romanian: “Gospodăria noastră are acum infirmieră care acum se îngrijeúte de bolnavi. Când s-a îmbolnăvit PătruĠ, copilul Mariei Motronea, infirmiera a stat trei nopĠi la căpătâiul lui, doctorul venea mereu să-l vadă. Acum copilul e bine, sănătos. Se joacă la creúă”, Muja 1950, 13. See also Săteanca 1950 12, 16. 10 In Romanian: “asculta… conferinĠe, piese de teatru, frumoasa noastră muzică populară úi muzică sovietică, fără a mai fi nevoiĠi să mergem pe orice vreme tocmai la căminul cultural”. Muja 1950, 13. 11 The RWP’s official newspaper. 12 In Romanian Sfatul Popular. It was the main administrative institution active at the local level. 13 In Romanian: “oi vota úi eu deputaĠii în Sfatul Popular úi-oi veni úi eu la muncă să-i ajut să facă treabă bună, că doar pentru noi se fac toate.” Săteanca 1950 5, 15. 14 In Romanian Marea Adunarea NaĠională: this assembly played the role of parliament during the communist period in Romania.

CHAPTER ELEVEN BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: RIVAL DISCOURSES OF IDENTITY IN ROMANIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY (1954-1964) ANDI MIHALACHE

The creation of the “socialist camp” when the Soviets occupied the eastern half of Europe entailed, among others, the construction of a new cultural and historical identity. The countries under the Kremlin’s control were imposed a different past, in which their ethno-genesis along with their entire evolution over time had been marked by their friendship with Russia, as well as by the ever evil influence of the capitalist West. Following the ideological imperatives launched by Andrei Zhdanov, each field of intellectual life in the “democratic popular” countries had to discover its ancient affinities with the Russians and its great rivalries with the Occidentals. In Romania, the process of Russification and of enforcement of a new identity, a strictly Eastern and anti-Occidental one, was directed by Mihail Roller. He was an old member of the Communist party, of Jewish origin. He was born in Buhuúi, in May 1908, and spent his first school years in Bacău. Legend has it that he pursued his higher education in Moscow. The hagiographers made him adhere to Communism from 1926, when he was only 18. The inter-war span of his career was dominated by militant journalism and illegal press. As one could not be a revolutionary without being subversive, he wrote, under different pseudonyms, in (more or less) Left-wing newspapers all over the country. In Bucharest (Cuvântul liber, Arena, etc.) he signed as “Petre Mihail”, in Piatra NeamĠ (Frontul Muncii) – “Mihail ùora”, in Botoúani (Soarele, Valul, Raza, Clopotul) he was “Mihail Rotaru”. He sometimes wrote under the name of “Bistriceanu”. His first historiographical preoccupations date back to 1938 and were

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related to the history of the Workers’ movement. His recognition, so to speak, occurred after 23rd August 1944. Starting with 1948, at only 40 and with no noteworthy scientific activity, Roller became a member of the Academy of the Popular Republic of Romania (PRR) and subsequently its vice-president. Until 1955 at least, he was the mentor and ideological censor of the new historiography. Attempting a “personal way” of Communism, the leader of the Romanian Communists, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, embarked on an ample and long process of renewal (and ethnicization) of the leading staff of the Romanian Workers’ Party (RWP). The fact that Roller was not included in the delegation sent to the Congress of Historians in Rome (1955) was already a sign of his decline. Eventually, he had to content himself with the position of deputy manager of the Institute of History of the Party. The scientific/political condemnation of his dilettantism occurred in June 1958, on the tacit agreement of the Soviet delegation run by L.V. Tcherepnin. Only a few days later, on 21st June 1958, he died in unclear conditions, his death being motivated by a “long period of pain”. His posterity was briefly summarized in an obituary published by the Studii review (3, 1958). No one wanted to take responsibility for the signature, so a collective pseudonym was preferred – “a group of comrades”. Stepping beyond the stage of a total ideological war (1948-1953), Stalin’s followers – N.S. Khrushchev first of all – attempted a new strategy, based upon the idea that the Communist and the capital systems, though incompatible from the doctrinal point of view, could however cohabit peacefully, with minimal concessions that would not endanger their constitutive existence. “Cohabitation” certainly did not mean the end of any “conflict”, but only the replacement of the idea of war with that of “competition”. In the span of 1954-1957, we find the signs of a relaxation that was carefully hampered from exceeding the initial phase. A liberalizing measure was usually followed by another one, at a different level and apparently not related in any way to the first, but which annihilated, in the long run, its effects. Compared to the previous period and to the one that began in 1958, we can however notice a predisposition to dialogue and a few ideological concessions. A role here was played by the “spirit” of Geneva (July 1955), the 2nd Congress of RWP (December 1955), the 20th Congress of CPSU (February 1956) and, not least, the events in Hungary (October 1956). From a historiographical point of view, the timid relaxation of these years was mirrored in a discourse that avoided the anti-Occidental imprecations and tried to de-emphasize the Sovietomania as timidly as possible.

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From 1954, the first signs of “reconsideration” of the former slogans appeared. An article is published, signed by G. Vaida: Lenin úi coexistenĠa paúnică între cele două sisteme – sistemul socialist úi cel capitalist: “The question asked in front of Lenin, in front of the Soviet government was: whether, starting from the necessity of cohabitation of the two systems, a peaceful cohabitation could be possible. Undoubtedly, Lenin’s answer was yes…” (Vaida 1954, 101). So after the 1921 foreign intervention was defeated, Lenin self-assuredly talked about the balance established between the two “worlds”. The updating of the affirmations made by the “great Ilyich” under the cover of “peaceful cohabitation” proposed, in fact, the same objectives: to maintain the status quo of the territories annexed after 1945. The possibility of cohabiting relied on the fact that the anticolonial movement of that time was regarded as the fulfilment of the catastrophist forecasts that Lenin had made about the Occident (Campus 1956, 27-54). Moscow could pose as a winner, who could now afford to be generous with the defeated. The old reasons of the anti-imperialist discourse cohabited with a series of ideas – unacceptable until recently – in agreement with the “new trend”. Gheorghiu-Dej avoided any sudden doctrine modifications, which could insinuate that in the past the party might have taken a wrong “path”. Thus, the limitation of the anti-Occidental sphere in historiography – adapted, as much as possible, to the “relaxation” – was balanced by a scrupulous Slavophilism, meant to perpetuate the Stalinist vulgate. In 1954, making a survey of the ten years of “progressive” historiography, V. Cheresteúiu and E. Stănescu admitted that Roller’s manual had endeavoured to underline the traditions that Romanians and Russians had in common, and to emphasize the “community of historical existence of the peoples in Central and Eastern Europe” (Cheresteúiu and Stănescu 1954, 163). In 1948, the regime of Bucharest isolated itself, politically and culturally, by denouncing, among other things, the Romanian-French cultural agreement of 1939. But now, in a rather anti-imperialist and less anti-occidental manner, the Zhdanov-like discourse became rather formal and superficial. France’s “rehabilitation” was entrusted to M. Ralea, who, starting from the Stalinist meaning of the concept of nation, eulogized its history in terms that could have been hard to accept at that point in history: “Few countries have proven, throughout their past, a more vigilant, more aware national consciousness than France” (Ralea 1954, 83). This surprising panegyric was not exactly a disinterested one, it had, on the contrary, a deeply propagandistic nature. The fact that, for France, it was a matter of honour to oppose both the “Atlantic” integration of FRG and the

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creation of a European army under American command suited to a great extent the Soviet interests. Therefore, the French attitude was interpreted by Ralea as a “plenary” manifestation of the national consciousness: “The overthrow of the Laniel-Bidault cabinet, integrally engaged in the ratification of the project of the European army, the signing of the armistice in Indochina, the rejection by vote of the National Assembly of the project of the European army and, since then, the major agitation of the French public opinion as regards the ratification of the agreements all show an impetuous awakening of the French national consciousness” (Ralea 1954, 83-84). He looked for antecedents to bring them “up to date”, in a discourse predictably maintained between the limits of the political reportage. Discussing, not accidentally, a Latin country, Ralea’s intervention was subordinated to a propagandistic campaign that was useful not only for the general interests of the Socialist bloc, but also for the attempts to outline the “personal way” of Communism: a restricted openness to the West, able to mitigate the suffocating friendship with USSR. Ralea’s statements were symptomatic for a policy that the RWP would resume only in the sixties, when the rediscovery of Latinity preceded the progressive reassessment of the Romanian-Soviet relations. We can already see – episodically, it is true – the de-Sovietizing inclination of some historians, decisively reaffirmed in the decade to come. The offensive of the Soviet army in august 1944 is sometimes presented as a rather helpful framework – “contributed to…”, “created a favourable situation…” –, while the decisive role is assigned to the “internal” group of the RCP, under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s leadership (Kolker 1954, 53). By overemphasizing the “internal” factor – the Communist militants in the country during World War II –, Dej’s mythographers proved to be both patriots and good Marxists. The essence of this manner of interpretation was to be found in the RWP’s attempt to become, especially after the 20th Congress of CPSU (1956), a selfsufficient source of legitimacy. At the same time, it was theoretically justified that the “patriot” activists gathered around Gheorghiu-Dej had managed, in 1952, to remove from power the rival group, of “foreigners” come from Moscow in 1944 and directed by the Jew Ana Pauker. Though it significantly decreases in intensity and frequency, the antiOccidental historiographical discourse persists in the idea that the possible changes in the hegemonic framework of Moscow or in the strategy of the Cold War should not catch the Romanian Stalinists in the fatal position of “non-aligned”. The criticism of the “Normanist theory” – the rejection, therefore, of the idea that the Vikings could have played an important part in the foundation of the Russian medieval states – remains a topical issue;

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just like the well-known theory of the Romanian-Slavonic condominium on the territory between the Carpathians and the Danube (Frances 1955, 65-80): the fact that the Slavs could have controlled this region at the end of the 1st millennium A.D. made them the “founding fathers” of the Romanian nation and predecessors of the “Romanian-Soviet friendship” in the mid-Twentieth century. The key points in the history of the RomanianRussian relations were not submitted to interpretative modifications or they were still hushed up (Liveanu 1954, 127-160). The more moderate aspects of the historiographical discourse certify the existence of divergent tendencies in the Romanian nomenclature, confirmed by Mihail Roller’s removal from the Academy’s leadership position. In the context of the anti-Semitism promoted by Kremlin itself, the Romanianization of the Party apparatus (replacement of the activists of Jewish or Hungarian origin with Romanian ones) was also felt in the historiographical field, more at the organizing level and less from a doctrinal point of view. Until recently, the “proletarian internationalism” – imposed as an evaluative criterion in historiography as well – had determined the condemnation of the Transylvanian revolutionaries of 1848 (and particularly of Avram Iancu and of Simion BărnuĠiu) because of their open conflict with the Hungarian revolutionaries. In these transition years (1954-1957) some better balanced interventions in this topic were possible. Translated in the Zhdanov key, the history of the 1848 revolution necessarily involved the condemnation of the bourgeoisie of that time accused of “chauvinistic nationalism”, of the betrayal of the revolutionary ideals and of fraternizing with the “reactionary” Austria. But after 1953, the nuances became obvious: “The overwhelming majority of Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania – Victor Cheresteúiu noticed – welcomed with enthusiasm the news coming from Pest, about the 15 March Proclamation of the 12 revolutionary points” (Cheresteúiu 1954, 180). So the majority of the Transylvanian revolutionaries were absolved of the sin of nationalism. The pact with Vienna was made – in Cheresteúiu’s opinion – only by a “small part of the Romanian bourgeoisie, the few Romanian officers of the imperial army, Romanian officials waiting for their advancement from Vienna…” (Cheresteúiu 1954, 183). The priorities of the moment – the relaxation of the relationship with the West and the reconciliation with Tito’s Yugoslavia – are also present in the appeasement of the comments regarding the so-called complicity between Belgrade and the capitalist “camp”. There are enough articles which, albeit anti-Occidental in their title intention, maintain a balanced content, more dispassionate in relation to the old phobias. It was high time

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for retrospections on the history of the Balkans, on the elements that could draw Romania closer to Yugoslavia, to make the former hostility disappear. Thus, as for the Semi-colonial regime of the Danube imposed by the Anglo-French [Regimul semicolonial al Dunării impus de anglofrancezi], N. Fotino underlined that “…the riparian countries, but also Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, rallied round the British standpoint. Yugoslavia and Romania remained the only opponents” (Fotino 1955, 17). Until then, Yugoslavia had been constantly attacked by the propaganda of the neighbours from across the Danube. Yugoslavia had been rehabilitated historiographically speaking, but very carefully as the anti-Tito-ist zeal of the Romanian Communists had been unequalled. As they were trying to improve the relations with Yugoslavia, it seemed easier to speak about the past from long ago than about their current situation. The new historiographical discourse had to avoid a too violent contrast with the years 1948-1953, in order not to endanger the authority of the leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. In order to please Stalin, he had taken the role of leading critic of the ideological “deviations” that Tito was guilty of. In the conciliatory context of the Conference of Geneva (July, 1955), the “capitalist” historian was no longer, for the time being, the enemy of the class, but a colleague and up to a point a discussion partner. His opinion was recorded in an almost neutral style, without the former labels. And the Romanian participation in the Historians’ Congress of Rome was a sign that Romanian historiography started to count at an international level. A general perspective on the tendencies existing in the world historiography of the fifties was offered to the Romanian historians after the translation from Italian of an article signed by Gastone Manacorda, Curentele istoriografiei contemporane la Congresul al X-lea al útiinĠelor istorice [Trends of contemporary historiography at the 10th Congress of historical sciences], published in Rome in “Rinascita”, 9/1955. Without trying to draw a conclusion – which would have involved criticizing western historiography – the author made several comparative suggestions, contenting himself with making an inventory of the two historiographical “schools”. The political current issues, mainly that of the Cold War, were however present: Manacorda thought that the participation of the socialist historians “was not only a political event that contributed to the consolidation of the so-called ‘spirit of Geneva’, but it also enlarged and enriched the content of the debates” (Manacorda 1956, 167). The best proof of the ad hoc adaptation to the requirements of a “peaceful cohabitation” would be the theorization – on the occasion of the 2nd Congress of RWP (December 1955) – of the two phases of the socialist revolution in Romania: the former, of an “agrarian, anti-feudal, bourgeois-

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democratic and anti-imperialist” nature; the latter, a peaceful phase, of the actual socialist revolution (Anale P.M.R. 1956, 2, 3-4). From this phasing, that the “top” voices enforced, emerged a different perception of the “bourgeois” historiography. For the moment, it was no longer necessarily the accomplice of imperialism: the “science of history in PRR has the noble mission to critically reconsider the historiographical inheritance of the past” (8). The limits of the old historiography were not those of the class it would have served – as Mihail Roller thought – but they are to be understood as the limits of the epoch. The changes were maintained however at the level of the general validity, of well-intentioned declarations: “a climate favourable to the exchange of opinions”, the elimination of the outcomes of “dogmatism and doctrinism” etc. (Studii 1956 4, 148-149). Romanian historical writing remains dependant on circumstances. The history of the good Romanian-Hungarian relations was entrusted – after the revolt in Hungary (1956), where the anti-Romanian slogans did not go without being noticed – to Hungarian historians in Romania and historians beyond the Tisza. They were charged with guaranteeing, as usual, at least on paper, the traditional friendship between the two peoples, now fraternized in line with Communist internationalism. As far as the Suez Crisis was concerned, the history of colonialism and particularly the Romanian-Egyptian relations were paid attention to (Gyorgy 1956, 73-86; Karoly 1956, 7-26; Banyai 1956, 97-106; Giurescu 1957, 91-110). Opinion clashes were possible, though the last word – at the editorial level, of course – belonged to the “Orthodox” historians. Furthermore, the protagonists of this short period of ideological relaxation (1954-1957) were to become the victims of the new anti-intellectual repressions launched in 1958. The ideological defensive in 1954-1957 should be especially understood in the context of the events in Hungary or, more precisely, of the signification of the date of the Hungarians’ revolt: the passivity of Occident was interpreted by Moscow as a definitive acknowledgement of the post-war status quo, in the sense that the Russians were tacitly acknowledged the rule over the eastern half of the European continent (Feijto 1969, 151). That is why the counter-mythology formulated to fight the myth of the Occidental saviour loses its usefulness (Feijto 1969, 151). The old epithets were preserved symbolically, so one would not think that the Party might have been wrong or that the danger was forever removed. Thus, in the period of 1956-1957, the “bloc” politics – reflected in historiography as well – were limited to declaring the attachment to the Soviet Union and the admiration for its history. The conference of Moscow (14th-16th November 1957) marked the return to the strategy

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“class against class”, “camp against camp”, from the 1948-1953 period. On this occasion, the “struggle against the internal enemy” was emphasized again. The war was not unavoidable, but the assumption was that as long as imperialism existed, there was also the risk of a war. In 1958, the consequences started to emerge: 1) the return to the old sectarianism by reopening the Berlin issue; 2) the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Romania, accompanied by a zealous campaign of ideological terror, meant to assure Khrushchev about the solidity of the “popular democracy” west of the Prut river. The purges started in 1958 – under the accusation of being “inadequate”, “ideologically maladjusted”, “revisionist” – expressed the discontent of the regime towards the intellectual elite that it had created itself (Doboú 1993, 4). This was a critical eye on the level the “socialist transformation of the Romanian society” had reached, in a moment of passage from the rigid application of the Soviet model to the well-dissimulated initiation of a “personal way” to Communism. On 13th September 1958, the new editorial board of the Studii review acquired Petre Constantinescu-Iaúi as their director. Under the conditions of the new ideological “purism”, this reorganization had as a pretext the “serious mistakes of scientific and ideological orientation noticed lately in some history publications” (Studii 1958 3, 125). From the “horizontality” of the dualist and moralizing interpretations, the transition was made towards the “verticality” of the social structures and to the explanation of history by “class struggles”. The emphases of interpretation were thus moved from the Manichean vision of Zhadanovism (anti-Occidentalism and pro-Sovietism) to the structural analysis on Marxist-Leninist bases. The “class” being now imposed as an absolute hallmark of any interpretative action, the “democrat-popular” historiography had to obey the new slogans: the fight against “formalism” in the Marxist-Leninist historical writing and the need to make a “qualitative leap” in ideological training. The new editorial team of the review had to “strengthen and develop the ideological-combative nature of the contributions. But it is not enough for the review to publish scientific papers (…), it should also publish as many ideological papers as possible” (125). The changes that occurred during the Cold War did not lead to peremptory historiographical evaluations of the history of the West. On the one hand, on 1st January 1957 a new department of the Institute of History was established in Bucharest, that of universal history (Studii 1957 1, 244). On the other hand, the historical discourse in “democrat-popular” Romania had to save the appearances of its good relations with the Soviet Union. Thus, the exuberant Slavo-mania of the years 1948-1953 (when the Romanians’ whole past was presented as a mere by-product of the Russian

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history) was preserved, but restricted to an obliging philo-Sovietism, rather reduced in recent history. The story of the century started in 1917, based around Bolshevik Russia, around which the entire historical evolution was organized. In the scientific session dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the events of 23rd August 1944, most of the speakers – like for instance General Gh. Zaharia – took the “decisive attitude, making overwhelmingly clear demonstrations, against the revisionist calumniators who tried to minimize the role of the Soviet army, the liberating army for the peoples invaded by the fascists, an important, decisive factor in the crushing of the Nazi troops” (Zaharia 1959, 362). From his words, one can understand the existence of reserves towards the cult of the “great friend” from the East. There were tendencies minimizing the Sovieto-centrism, lowering it from the status of an omnipresent and compulsory historiographical motive to the more modest position of an orientation, still privileged by the officials. Adhesion to the politics and culture promoted by Moscow was no longer a necessary complement to the anti-Occidental attitude. The purpose of this fidelity – no other than an ideological alibi – was to be found in the wish to not raise any suspicions at the Kremlin, which would have led to “top” reshuffles in the Romanian Workers’ Party. The presence of Khrushchev in the 3rd Congress of RWP (June 1959) was a serious impetus in this line. On that occasion, Dej admitted that the “history of Romania had to be studied and presented in high quality scientific works not as something isolated, but as a constitutive part of the history of Europe and of universal history” (Gheorghiu-Dej 1960, 103). Thus, the sycophant attitude towards the history and values of the Soviet Union was still the most important one, and still had the last word in a dispute, though some nuances were now accepted, placed, for the beginning, under the guarantee of the “classics” of Marxism-Leninism. Such a course of things was underlined on the occasion of the debates related to the preparation of Romania’s treaty of history. In the discussions referring to the first volume of the treaty, Constantin Daicoviciu allowed himself to write a comparative reference, something that would once have been rejected as “cosmopolite”: “ruralization and adoption of grazing places in the Roman provinces is not an isolated phenomenon that characterizes Dacia alone. The phenomenon occurred with the same intensity in other regions like Gaul, North Africa and Spain.” (Studii 1960 3, 34) Mihail Roller had talked for several years about the negative role of the Roman conquest and Daicoviciu had been, first of all, one of the conformists. But when he edited the first volume of the Treaty, published in 1960, his opinion seemed to be the complete opposite, discovering that the Roman occupation “did not have a destructive nature. On the contrary,

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the epoch of the Roman rule in Dacia was, undoubtedly, a progress from the point of view of the general evolution of society compared to the previous epoch” (Istoria României 1960, 345). As far as the Middle Ages were concerned, the polemics were much more heated, due to the different opinions that the historians had about the implication of the Slavonic element in the culture of that time. First of all, the dissociation emerged between the Slavonic languages as a mere accessory of the written culture, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, its abusive identification with the Romanian medieval spirituality itself. As regards this aspect, B. Cîmpina, M. Berza and A. OĠetea “showed that there could be no question of a wide spreading of Slavonic, which was not a living language, used by the people, but an official language of the State and of the Church, like Latin was in the West” (Studii 1959 6, 135). Secondly, the idea that the first texts written in Romanian had come from Maramureú (a region in north Romania now) – supported by the historian P.P. Panaitescu with a view to emphasizing the much invoked “internal factor”, primordial in any Marxist analysis of history – was questioned by Andrei OĠetea, Alexandru Elian, Ioachim Crăciun and Ioan ChiĠimia, who showed the importance of the Lutheran or Calvinistic influences (135). After the fall of the Communist regime we found out the truth behind the reason for Panaitescu’s theory: he had been a member of the far-right organization called the Iron Guard [“Garda de Fier”]. Because of this episode in his biography, after the Communists came to power, he lost the right to sign any writings with his name. For a few years, he used the pseudonym “Vasile Grecu”. He was investigated by the Securitate all the time, and called upon to affirm the “new history” of Romania, a Marxist-Leninist one. On the occasion of the historiographical retrospective of 1962 – the first step in a decisive “reassessment”, in the national line, of Romania’s past – C. Daicoviciu took the debate from the strictly eastern history dating from Stalin’s years to a more balanced vision, in which the Romanian specificity lay somewhere in the middle between the Balkan and the European identities. “Romania’s history, as a European and southeastern one, reveals – Daicoviciu noticed – the complex of identities and similarities that we can find in the history of our country and of that of most of the European countries” (Daicoviciu and Stănescu 1962, LXXXVII). The official opinion, hostile to the direct “imitation” of the Occident, left room in the subsidiary area of the historiographical discourse, for some not quite orthodox propensities: “…Romanian historians demonstrated, through their researches, the mistaken character of the theory of ‘model and imitation’ in history, according to which the countries that are part of a given area of civilization do nothing else but

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imitate, more or less thoroughly, a historical model mainly embodied by a great State with a strong civilization” (Daicoviciu and Stănescu 1962, LXXXVII-LXXXVIII). In these words, Daicoviciu referred to the Byzantine imperial model, but considering the way in which the Second volume of the Treaty – published the same year, in 1962 – saluted both the return of the Byzantium at the Danube (the Eleventh – Twelfth centuries) and the continuity of the relations with the Romanian area, we could interpret an anti-Soviet meaning in the fragment above. The Slav civilization was now – however surprising it might seem – just a “second mirroring” of the Byzantine one: “Both the Bulgarians and the Serbs and the Russians had reaccepted in their written culture and in art many Byzantine elements, and the Byzantine rule in the Eleventh – Twelfth centuries strengthened this influence”. (Istoria României 1962, 83). Furthermore, the “dark millennium” – regarded, until recently, only from the standpoint of a pax slavica – received a prolonged Romano-Byzantine citizenship: “The rule of Byzantium in Dobrudjea and even – for shorter or longer periods with interruptions – as far as the left bank of the Danube created the ground for the penetration of the Romanian-Byzantine civilisation, which slowly seeped into the still strong tradition of the provincial Roman civilisation” (Istoria României 1962, 83). This was the moment when Dej tried to oppose another “model”, the one promoted by Khrushchev in the CMEA, where it was stipulated that part of the socialist countries, Romania included, had to stay preponderantly agrarian states, the industrial development being the objective of the German Democratic Republic and of Czechoslovakia. For the Romanians, it was the time of an amiable “divorce”, which ended the obedience to the strategies prescribed by the Kremlin. More telling in this sense is the fact that, in the third volume of the Treaty of History, the annexation of Bessarabia is mentioned (the territory between the Prut and the Dniester) by the tsarist Russia (1812), one of the major historiographical taboos until then (Istoria României 1964, 611). As for the modern epoch, the discordant notes are easy to find in the discussions on the revolutionary movement in 1848 Moldavia. In the meeting of the 6 February 1959, Valerian Popovici revealed the “influence exerted by the ideas of French revolution of 1789” and explained Austria’s benevolence towards the Moldavian emigrants by showing its interest in “counteracting the influence of tsarist Russia, on whose side were the conservative high boyars, lead by Mihail Sturdza” (Studii 1959 3, 225). The change seemed obvious, as in the first years of the decade the “import” of revolution was absolutely not accepted, and Russia could not be mentioned in the coalition of the “reactionary” states. In its turn, Victor

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Cheresteúiu’s text was criticized by T. Bugnariu for treating the relations between the Hungarian revolution and the revolution in Transylvania in the spirit of the old traditionalism, in a self-blaming manner. Surprisingly, the “chauvinistic nationalism” of the Transylvanians was no longer condemned, but, on the contrary, the Romanian peasants’ massive participation in Avram Iancu’s actions was explained by Bugnariu by referring to the mistakes and excesses of the Hungarian revolution: “…It is quite clear for any researcher – T. Bugnariu said, referring to the Romanian-Hungarian conflict of 1848 – that Vienna’s whispers alone, that is only the propagandistic action related to the 1848 Revolution, could not represent the motive for such an ample action as the one that took place between the revolutionary Hungarian and Romanian forces”(Studii 1959 235). As regards the external influences on the Romanian revolutions of 1848, Petre Constantinescu-Iaúi, one of the most important ideological censors of the fifties, concluded: “We should mention the relationships that the revolution leaders had with the other revolutionaries of Europe” (243). Finding the compatibilities with Western Europe was a gradual process, concerning more remote periods, less exposed to politicization. In the field of recent history, this was not yet possible, the myth of the Romanian-Soviet friendship not being questioned yet. For instance, the national idea in the Twentieth century was still associated with imperialism. Consequently, nationalism was only seen in excess, in expansion, as an ideological spring of colonialism. Its identity connotations were not discussed. World War I and the State entities ensued from it were circumscribed to the process of the imperialist division of the world. The only opponent was the Soviet Union. That is why, in the economy of any interpretative process regarding contemporary history, this remains a criterion of evaluation and not an ordinary historical fact. At the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, a voluntary ambiguity was practiced: the dominating orientation (the philo-Soviet one) was occasionally marked with contrary but fugitive assertions that, at the moment of the “turning point” of 1963-1964, were invoked as precedents that legitimated the new orientation, the autonomist one. Playing, for the moment, the Chinese “card”, “democrat-popular” Romania looked to the Far East for the necessary support in a personal ideological option – national-Stalinism – and, implicitly, for a dogmatic support against a Khrushchev-like “relaxation”, which it was not yet ready for. But starting in 1962, Romania outlined a foreign policy that was more and more receptive to the West’s overtures. This was an approach orchestrated as a

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reaction to the Soviet Union, which seemed more and more withdrawn behind the famous wall built in Berlin in 1961. Romania’s open attitude towards the Occident was obvious in the “special” relationship they developed with France and Italy, under the pretext that their languages were Latin ones and under the cover of the good relations with the leftist parties of those two countries. The desire to come out from under the Slavic culture was thus disguised.36 On 16 October 1960, in Palermo, in the “Congress for the History of Italy’s Unity”, Andrei OĠetea presented the paper “Lupta comună a popoarelor italian úi român pentru unitate úi independenĠă naĠională” (Common Struggle of the Italian and Romanian Peoples for Unity and National Independence), published in Studii, 6, 1960. From the same point of view, the first three issues in 1961 of the Studii review had a special column dedicated to the centenary of Italy’s unity and, moreover, in the month of October, the same year, a scientific meeting entitled “Risorgimento and Unification of the Principalities” took place. In the case of France – with or without direct connection with the Romanian prime minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer’s visit to Paris – common points were searched for in the historiographical conception of the two “schools”, left-wing historians were discovered (like Albert Soboul), while the ideas of the 1789 Revolution were kindly translated into the Marxist language. Present in the General Assembly of the International Committee of the historians in London, Petre Constantinescu-Iaúi also appreciated the interest for the extra-European history, for the geographical discoveries, for the cultural relations between the Orient and the Occident and for the role of the leading elites, etc (Studii 1962 4, 994-8). By separating ourselves, tacitly, from the “line” followed by Moscow, the isolationism of 1948-1953 was gradually left behind, the Marxism practiced by the Romanians resuming its universal references. Formerly identified with the major ideological sin called “cosmopolitism”, the comparative studies were rehabilitated as a research method through stances like that of M. Berza: “The Marxist history is in itself universal history, because it is related to the evolution of humankind as a unique process of the passage of society to continuously higher steps. Under Marxism, a historical phenomenon could not be understood in its essence unless it was related to a sum of similar phenomena, as this very relation highlights the legitimacy that supports it” (Berza 1962, 1249). While the specialized publications reserved more and more generous spaces to universal history, the Romanian-Russian Museum, the “Cartea Rusă” publishing house and the Romanian-Soviet Annals disappeared, one after the other, starting in 1963.

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After Stalin’s death, in the span of 1954-1964, the pro-Sovietism and anti-Occidentalism attitudes were put into perspective by some colloquial predispositions, promoted by both camps. Pro-Sovietism did not necessarily entail anti-Occidentalism anymore, thus losing its axiomatic profile and limiting itself to its first term. Obviously, anti-Occidentalism (translated by anti-Capitalism and anti-imperialism) – meanwhile transformed into an independent system of interpretation – could not be simply retracted, without affecting the authority of the Party and of the historians who had followed it. Until the 20th Congress of CPSU in February 1956 – which annihilated Stalin as a source of legitimacy of the new leaders – the fundamentally anti-occidental Zdhanovism had been established as the only ideological guarantor of “democrat-popular” regimes. The anti-imperialist invectives were “forgotten” when the right time came – in 1955, for instance, on the occasion of the meeting of Geneva – or kept as a memento, without being maintained as a subsystem of interpretation in the Marxist-Leninist pattern. Even when the Occident was used as a reaction to Khrushchev’s authoritarian politics, at a cultural/historiographical level one could not talk about proOccidentalism. The reticence with which the policy of “relaxation” was first welcomed could also be found in historical publications, in the ambivalence of the approaches dedicated to the history of the West: the Occidentals’ opinions had access to the publications of the time only if they were accompanied with the Marxist corrections of our historians. Anyway, the accusation of “dogmatism”, of opposition to “dialogue” was avoided. Criticizing the Occident was not relevant any more, once it became certain that it was not going to intervene in the sphere of Soviet influence. At the historiographical level, the emphasis was moved to the “internal” economic and particularly social factors, to the “historical rules” that decided the Romanians’ evolution. The so-called “external factors” were invoked more as the background for some events. By 1963-1964, the reflection of the policy of “camp” in historiography was gradually confined to a routine pro-Sovietism, but less and less marked by the Slavophilism that once decided the apologetic tone of the references to ethno-genesis, to the Romanian language, to the Middle Ages or its culture. The Marxist enthusiasm became prominent, being coupled with a prudent but certain revival of the Latin pride. These discourse orientations had been brought forth and then removed by the circumstances of the same Cold War. The eclipse of the discourse subordinated to the “camp” strategy in international relations occurred along with the rejection of ideological hegemony of Moscow and the invention of a “Romanian way” to Communism. Analysing the past first

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through the lens of the Zhdanovist propaganda, Romanian historiography subsequently excelled at giving social interpretations of history, and then, shortly after, gave Stalinism a nationalist charge that was hard to anticipate.

Works Cited “

Activitatea útiinĠifică a secĠiei de istorie modernă úi contemporană a Institutului de Istorie al Academiei R.P.R. din anul 1955.” 1956. Studii 4: 148-149. Banyai, Ludovic. 1956. “Congresul al V-lea al Partidului Comunist din România úi lupta pentru crearea organizaĠiei naĠional-revoluĠionare maghiare condusă de partid.” Studii 6: 97-106 Berza, Mihai. 1962. “Cercetările de istorie universală în U.R.S.S.” Studii 5: 1249. Campus, Eliza. 1956. “Blocul balcanic al “neutrilor” (septembrie 1939martie 1940). Studii 4: 27-54. Cheresteúiu, Victor, and Eugen Stănescu. 1954. “Despre dezvoltarea útiinĠei istoriei în 1944-1954.” Studii 3: 163. Cheresteúiu, Victor. 1954. “Pregătirea úi obiectivele Adunării de la Blaj din 3-15 mai 1848.” Studii 4: 180. Daicoviciu, Constantin, and Eugen Stănescu. 1962. “Problemele principale ale cercetării istoriei României în anii puterii populare.” Studii 6: LXXXVII. “ Dezbateri asupra problemei culturii medievale din ğările Române.” 1959. Studii 6: 135. “ Dezbateri asupra problemelor RevoluĠiei de la 1848.” 1959. Studii 3: 225, 235, 243. Doboú, DănuĠ. 1993. “Comunizarea învăĠământului superior. Homo sovieticus – idealul regimului comunist-totalitarist (II).” Cronica 1630.X: 4. Feijto, François. 1969. Histoire des démocraties populaires. Vol. II. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Fotino, N. 1955. “Regimul semicolonial al Dunării impus de anglofrancezi.” Studii 2: 17. Frances, E. 1955. “Slavii pe pământul patriei noastre în veacul al XII-lea.” Studii May-June: 65-80. Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe. 1960. Raport la cel de al III-lea Congres al P.M.R. Bucureúti: Editura Politică. Giurescu, Constantin C. 1957. “Despre relaĠiile româno-egiptene úi contribuĠia României la construirea canalului Suez.” Studii 1: 91-110.

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Istoria României. 1960. Vol. I. Bucureúti: Editura Academiei R.P.R. —. 1962. Vol. II. Bucureúti: Editura Academiei R.P.R. —. 1964. Vol. III. Bucureúti: Editura Academiei R.P.R. “ Însemnătatea istorică a documentelor Congresului al II-lea al P.M.R.” 1956. Analele Institutului de Istorie a Partidului de pe lângă C.C. al P.M.R 2: 3-4. Karoly, D. 1956. “Desfăúurarea reformei agrare din 1945, în fostul judeĠ Sălaj.” Studii 6:7-26. Kolker, B.M. 1954. “Lupta de eliberare naĠională în România în anii 19411944.” Studii 4: 53. Liveanu, Vasile. 1954. “ArmistiĠiul de la Focúani.” Studii 4: 127-160. Manacorda, Gastone. 1956. “Curentele istoriografiei contemporane la Congresul al X-lea al útiinĠelor istorice.” Studii 4: 167. Mogos Gyorgy. 1956. “Tratativele franco-ungare din 1920.” Studii 5: 7386. Ralea, Mihail. 1954. “Lupta poporului francez pentru independenĠă úi unitate naĠională.” Studii 4: 83. Studii 1(1957): 244; 3 (1958): 125; 3 (1960): 34; 4 (1962): 994-998. Vaida, G. 1954. “Lenin úi coexistenĠa paúnică între cele două sisteme – sistemul socialist úi cel capitalist.” Studii 2: 101. Zaharia, Gheorghe. 1959. “Rolul istoric al armatei sovietice în eliberarea României de sub jugul fascist.” Studii 4: 362.

CHAPTER TWELVE CENSORSHIP AND THE LOCAL PERIODICAL GAZETA TRANSILVANIEI (1943-1945)1 RUXANDRA NAZARE

The lack of the freedom of speech and thinking stirred the interest of Romanian intellectuals and made them reflect on the issue of censorship, especially given that Romanian witnessed several authoritarian and dictatorial regimes during its history. Recently, it became the focal topic of several general works. Among them, Marian Petcu’s excellent and welldocumented book as well as Adrian Marino’s introductory book,2 a meritorious attempt to synthesize and analyse the manifold aspects of censorship in Romania throughout history. In the last years, some anthologies were edited containing documents and excerpts from the official act regarding the regime of censorship in Romania (Lăcustă 2007; Mocanu 2008). 1933 was a milestone in the history of censorship in Romania. Following the strikes that took place in February 1933, the leftist press started to be closely supervised. The assassination of Prime Minister I. G. Duca later that year triggered the introduction of censorship. As a result, extreme right newspapers such as Calendarul [The Calendar] and Cuvântul [The Word] were suspended. The Constitution promulgated by King Carol II in February 1938 included further restrictions regarding the communication of ideas and opinions in the press. The following political regimes radicalized censorship. The Propaganda Ministry elaborated the official directives through the Normative Department and controlled the entire press through the censorship offices. In spite of the toughness of the censorship regime, the state allowed room for free expression (Marino 2000, 59-62). The chapter focuses on discussing censorship in relation to the local periodical Gazeta Transilvaniei [The Transylvanian Gazette], published in Braúov, Romania, and having a long tradition in the region of Transylvania. Beginning with 1941, the periodical came under the administration of the

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ASTRA Association3, and Ion Colan was appointed its editor-in-chief. As a result, it was changed from a political newspaper into a cultural and national one that promoted the reunification of Romania within the boarders before the World War II4. As a platform for nationalist ideas, the Gazeta included many articles signed by journalists and intellectuals from Braúov and other regions. Among them, Ion Colan, Valeria Braniúte5 (Căliman), Ion Bozdog, Ion Berciu, Lucian Valea, ùt. Simionescu-Svensk, C. Rădulescu-Motru, Eugen Hulea and Gh. Dragoú, all known for their cultural merits and their strong patriotic feelings. The cultural-nationalist orientation of the gazette clearly reflected in its content. The editorial board decided for opinion journalism at the expense of informative journalism. Therefore, the published articles were quite vague with respect to the events that generated them. Conversely, they bore the mark of harsh criticism and pamphleteering, lashing out at the detected negative aspects. Apart from this type of articles, the periodical hosted primarily patriotic literary pieces and poetry, a war chronicle (the only informative column), articles with a social character, advertisements and various other pieces of information. In conclusion, background and opinion articles were predominant in the gazette during the period we are looking at. In the period that lasted from 1941 until January 1945, when the Gazeta Transilvaniei was suspended, there were several periodicals published in Braúov. They were of a diverse nature: cultural publications, academic journals, yearbooks published by education institutions, cultural supplements as well as bulletins issued by the administration and lawyers. Nevertheless, there were very few political publications, one of the most prominent being the daily Tribuna [The Tribune] which published political and cultural articles, and acted as a competitor to Gazeta Transilvaniei. Tribuna was published between April 1941 and November 1944. After 23 August 1944, it became the official organ of the National Peasant Party [Partidul NaĠional ğărănesc], being replaced in this capacity by Avântul [The Impetus] in November 1944. The latter distinguished itself as a promoter of the Party’s democratic struggle. In September 1944, Drumul Nou [The New Path] – a political daily newspaper of communist persuasion – was founded and soon it became engaged in a fierce polemic with Avântul. The authorities decided the fate of all above-mentioned periodicals: in January 1945, they suspended Gazeta Transilvaniei (further on, abbreviated GT) and in February Avântul, while supporting the publication of Drum Nou until the fall of communism. Thus, through its history, GT was published under the difficult circumstances caused by war, censorship, a dictatorial political regime as well as competition from other publications.

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The aim of this analysis is to present the functioning mechanism of a periodical with nationalist tendencies in the context of the censorship imposed by successive political regimes and the special circumstances of war. Such a context did not allow room for freedom of expression, but involved censorship and self-censorship at the same time. The chapter is based on the comparison between the gazette’s drafts and its printed issues. The former are presently kept at the “Special Collections” section of the “George BariĠiu” County Library in Braúov; before printing, these proofs were submitted to censorship and control institutions. Additionally, they contain numerous marks, rewritings, changes and censorship stamps, which are all indicative of the criteria applied by the censorship on certain types of information. The latter are indicative of what managed to survive censorship and what has changed as well as of the manner in which the final version of the gazette was created. One of the recurring problems within the columns of GT was the recovery of the territories lost in 1940, especially North-Eastern Transylvania. Due to the military-political context and the fact that Romania was allied to Germany and Hungary at the time, the articles on topics related to Transylvania were submitted to censorship. The main targets were the editorials that concentrated on the topic of war and national interest. Therefore, passages with a nationalist tone, which targeted Romania’s allies, especially Hungary, had to be rewritten. Background articles with a nationalist tone could be divided into two categories: general articles containing principles and reflections on the nation and occasional articles that formed the majority. Certainly, a daily or semi-weekly paper discusses current events and the journalists’ opinions and attitudes towards them, being less concerned with elaborating general reflections. Therefore, most articles take a stand on contemporary events, but without providing details on them. Albeit less numerous, the articles in the first category formed the main target of censorship, being severely restricted and even completely removed. The texts evoking historical events such the Memorandum movement, Horea’s uprising6, the 1848 Revolution, poems directly referring to Transylvania, reviews of historical books (for instance those on the continuity of Romanians in Dacia7) could no longer be found in the final issues, having been replaced by neutral pictures. The memoirs provide valuable information on the collection of visual clichés created with the sole purpose of substituting censored articles. In her autobiographical novel, ExerciĠiu de suferinĠă [Exercising Sufferance], Valeria Căliman recounts how GT fought against censorship:

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Chapter Twelve It is war. Transylvania has been cut in half by an arbitrary diktat. […] A merciless censorship mutilates Gazeta. This time, blank spaces are forbidden. Each line, passage or article has to be replaced by something. The eyes of the reader are not allowed to stumble upon empty spaces left in the wake of the censor’s scissors. The chief editor of Gazeta, Ion Colan, devised a small collection of images: [the picture of] a grouse from the region of Rodna, Transylvanian roadside crucifixes, the silhouette of a skier and, for the front-page editorial, an overwhelming portrait of Michael the Brave [Mihai Viteazul]. Every time censors removed something from the columns of Gazeta – the only publication that protested against the shameful censorship of the press at the time – one of the aforementioned pictures would replace the removed text. The readers could discern their significance and grasp their meaning beyond the text. They understood the great battle that Gazeta fought for the reunification of Transylvania (Căliman 2000, 64).

However, there are also cases when censorship was avoided by means of allegorical or cryptic articles. Such is the case of Ion Bozdog’s article “Prezentări” [Presentations] (GT, May 29, 1943, 1) on the topic of opposite behaviours, honest-dishonest, actually an allusion to Romanians and Hungarians, text which was published after the editor-in-chief Ion Colan assumed responsibility. The successful bypass of the strict censorship rules was made possible by the intelligent elaboration of the article in the form of a parable, by avoiding the use of straightforward language or accusations. A limited number of articles managed to survive censorship after the authors agreed to edit or adapt them. The series of articles that Eugen Hulea and Gh. Dragoú wrote in order to outline the national features and elaborate the criteria for the assessment of a nation’s superiority according to its spiritual qualities instead of the territory’s surface or demographic potential, were published with only minimal changes, that is without the passages referring to Hungarians.8 A suggestive example for the tumultuous relationship between censorship and freedom of speech, for the stylistic negotiations and concessions as well as for the defence technique used by the press is Ion Colan’s article “Calendar pentru neam” [Calendar for the Nation]. In making a retrospective of the Romanians’ national expectations, Colan noted the postponement of the fulfilment of their national aspirations and wrote the following (unpublished) initial version: There are as many postponements as deadlines, there are as many deadlines as disappointments… Within the moment’s edges, everything we wished for could have been materialized. It would have been fair. Against whom should we bring accusations given that others were granted a delay

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on illusory technical irregularities at the Court of epoch? […] However, justice does not die. She can be late, but nobody has buried her yet! Justice moves according to laws, the same as [destiny]. 1942 did not bring her. We observe without settling the score. And nobody can settle it without us. Only the nation knows the extent of the limits of these boundaries. (1)

The initial draft, filled with harsh words highlighting ideas such as transience, justice, and reckoning, was heavily edited. The emphasised words were censored and were to be removed from the printed article. As a result, these words were replaced with evasive and harmless neologisms. Following the changes, the printed version of the text was the following: There are as many postponements as deadlines, there are as many deadlines as defeats or victories... Within the moment’s edges, everything we wished for could have been materialized. It would have been normal for it to materialize. Against whom should we bring accusations given that a delay was granted for probable technical irregularities of the Court of the time? However, the ideal9 does not die. It can be late, but no one can bury it. 1942 contradicted us. We observe without squaring up. Only historians know the extent of the limits of these boundaries. (Colan 1943, 1)

Occasional articles were only partially censored. The censors’ intervention focused especially on certain recurring expressions. An index of the terms or themes rejected by censorship would definitely contain the references to previous ethnic or geographic boarders, cardinal points, Greater Romania and the recent territorial losses, toponyms from the lost territories,10 adjectives alluding to the transience of the political organization in North-West Romania, epithets employed to describe the future victory and recovery of North-East Transylvania,11 various ethnonyms and ethnic expressions referring to Hungarians, any allusion to the neighbours’ policies, including the negotiating table on which the arbitration document was signed in Vienna in August 1940, as well as encouragements to make justice through sacrifice on the front; all such references were removed or replaced by ellipses.12 The articles pointed out the shock suffered by the Romanian society after the Second Vienna Award and emphasize the Romanians’ firm conviction that the loss of North-East Transylvania to Hungary was merely a transitory and tragic accident of history. Additionally, they also mention the tense wait for the return to Romania of the lost territories. As an example, we would like to mention a few articles immediately sanctioned by censorship. Journalists directed much of their criticism towards the use of Hungarian words and language in public, in everyday conversations and in the private correspondence.13 A suggestive example for this is Ion Colan’s article

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“Borviz”. In noting the persistence in the use of the term “borviz” (in Hungarian) instead of “apă minerală” (in Romanian “mineral water”), he argues: “Those who like it can eat as much papricaú [Hungarian dish] as they please or they can gorge themselves on gulaú [another Hungarian dish]. It’s up to them! Then, if the paprika incites them, they can also start a ciardaú [Hungarian dance]14 in order to calm down. However, we cannot comprehend a peculiarity: the persistence of the inhabitants of Bucharest to drink only borviz, not apă minerală.” (GT, June 5, 1943, 3) In emphasizing that “from another nation... it is better for us to take only what belongs to us,”15 (GT, June 5, 1943, 3) Colan voiced his opposition to censorship and decided: “It will be modified as it reads below on my own responsibility. I did not write against Hungarians, but against our imbecility” (GT, June 5, 1943, 3). Allegories hinting at real situations represented the favourite manner of writing and the favourite journalistic procedure of the period. This is the manner in which Valeria Braniúte elaborated her article entitled “Airagnu” which focuses on the reprehensible behaviours of a state, a word she later replaced with “tribe” in order to avoid censorship. The final part of the article offered readers the decoding key of the text: “It is hard to understand their speech since their name, the same as their deeds, is understood and read backwards.” (GT, March 15, 1944, 1). Censors read the title backwards and deciphered it correctly as Ungaria [Hungary]. As a result, they authorized the publication of the article with the title modified as “Agnuria” (GT, March 15, 1944, 1). The editorial board intended to publish in the next issue the following mention: “‘Airagnu’. This is the [correct] title of Valeria Braniúte’s article from the previous issue of our gazette, page 1, column 1, and not the way it was published due to a lastminute change for which we cannot be held responsible.” (GT, March 18, 1944, 8). Thus, the original thought of the author was preserved beyond censorship. Obviously, censors removed the last words and had them replaced with “due to a printing error” (GT, March 18, 1944, 8). In spite of this, the message reached the readers, albeit with certain delay. Another article containing caustic irony and having the character of an antiHungarian diatribe is “Vitejie, 90% celofibră” [Bravery. 90 per cent Staple Fibre] which was completely censored. It was replaced on the first page by a stereotypical image, namely the portrait of Michael the Brave. However, the following short remark informed the readers: “The ‘Invincible Armada’ or ‘Bravery, 90 per cent Staple Fibre’16 by Ion Colan is the content of a thought that did not fit into the excessively small space of our gazette. This article will be published as soon as the ethnic space will allow it.” (GT, 1944, February 16, 1) The editorial “În loc de cronică

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agricolă. Ceva despre oiúte” [Instead of an Agricultural Chronicle. Something on the Drawbar] written by the same journalist, shared a similar fate. The text was a parable between a directionless cart and the villager constantly at odds with his neighbours due to the lack of the necessary mutual understanding. (GT, July 21, 1943, 1). The relationship between censors and the censored, between the institution of censorship and the press had a sinuous evolution, with victories and defeats on both sides. Many passages and articles were victims to the censors’ scissors. However, journalists and writers were also able to claim a number of victories on this invisible front. Such was the case of the special issue that GT prepared for 30 August 1943. The editorial board showed special interest in the date of 30 August, because on that day in 1940, North-East Transylvania was ceded to Hungary following the Second Vienna Award. The sample issue that was submitted to censorship included Lucian Valea’s poem Cântec de Bunăvestire [Annunciation Song] framed with a black boarder on the first page, while page three contained three articles with mobilizing titles and content: “Luptăm” [We Fight], “Nu cedăm” [We Don’t Give In] and “Murim” [We Die], written by Valeria Braniúte, I. Bozdog, respectively I. Colan. Censors prohibited the publication of the poem and removed several passages from the articles. On 27 August 1943, after agreeing to several modifications, Ion Colan gave the green light to the publication of the poem saying: “It will be published at my own risk. We are talking about the Transylvania that is entirely ours, not about Northern or Southern Transylvania. We cannot be accused of bad intentions” (GT, August 30, 1943, 1). Years later, Valeria Căliman remembered this episode and recounted the consequences of this courageous decision. The gazette received warnings from the censorship office and faced possible suspension. Moreover, N. Căliman and I. Colan were summoned to Bucharest by Nichifor Crainic (Căliman 2000, 65) to be held responsible for serious breaches of censorship laws. Nonetheless, the editorial board did not change its attitude and continued to advocate the national cause. Self-censorship was another significant aspect within the relationship between censorship and the press. Often, the journalists themselves intervened in their own texts by softening the language, adapting the style to the norms of the censorship and replacing certain harsh terms with neutral euphemisms. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, between censorship, personal convictions and the readers, editors sometimes pondered on the appropriateness or inappropriateness of publishing a certain article. For example, Ion Colan’s article “Aúteptând Floriile” [Waiting for Palm Sunday] was preferred to another one as we can see

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from a note that the author attached to the proofs of the issue: “Initially we intended to publish an article entitled ‘Why so Much Lamentation?’ Because we deemed it inappropriate for the tender Palm Sunday, we hereby replace it with these recollections.”17 The social and political aspects approached by the journalists were always targeted by a censorship excessively sensitive to unequivocal terms, susceptible expressions, and criticism. The question of refugees and pensioners,18 their poverty as well as the sad state of society are all discussed in GT. In the article “Timbrul Andrei Mureúanu” [The Andrei Mureúanu Stamp], Valeria Braniúte criticised the bureaucracy which was slowing the collection of the revenues generated by the sale of this stamp, which were intended for the refugees from North-East Transylvania: When you see the offspring of peasants from the Someú, Bihor or Maramureú regions walk the streets of our big cities summarily clothed, looking to give purpose to their lives, and when you listen to their stories, your heart melts like an icicle weary of the sunlight, even if it were made of stone. Your heart breaks at the sight of uprooted peasant families cast into the promiscuity of city outskirts. (1943, 2, 6)

Censors deemed this passage as too outspoken, thus removing it from the final version of the issue. The concluding phrase mentioned the unsolved difficulties of refugees and the incapacity – provoked by bureaucracy - of those around them to alleviate their misery: “It is snowing outside, the refugees are begging and we are writing petitions.” (6) Once again, the censors intervened and deemed the word begging as unprintable. After being warned in this regard, the author replaced the overly harsh and direct word with a circumlocution. Therefore, in the final version, the word “begging” was replaced with “they feel the inevitable discomfort of their situation.” (6) Besides, this was a most common practice, uncomfortable words and opinions being removed or substituted in order to mould the articles according to the required norms. For instance, the terms directly referring to the state of society (poverty and the synonyms the destitute, worries, shortages accompanied by the adjectives ravaged by or burdened by) were considered taboos by the authorities.19 The expression “to feed hungry mouths” was replaced with “cannot fill the empty spaces in the house”;20 in other instances, entire phrases were definitively suppressed because they did not meet the requirements of the censorship. In summarizing a letter received from a teacher, the editor wrote: “In the country where loaves and white bread are mandatory in restaurants, while a war is raging on a twenty-eight-year-old man talks to me about hunger.” (GT,

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September 8, 1943, 1). Such a phrase was considered unacceptable by the censors.21 Supply difficulties did not affect only basic items. At one point, the gazette faced a shortage of printing paper. As a result, they issued the following appeal: “Our contributors are requested to send us only short articles. The ever stronger shortage of paper does not allow us to increase the number of pages.” (GT, March 17, 1943, 2). Such an apparently harmless appeal came to the attention of censors who removed the explanatory phrase, thus preventing the readers from learning of the shortages and attempting to control the situation (GT, March 17, 1943, 2). Those exempted from war, the nouveaux riches and profiteers as well as the flaunting of luxury were also favourite targets of the journalists’ diatribes. In talking about the mobilization panic, Ion Colan emphatically noted: “the godfather, uncle, and omnipotent acquaintance, the friend of a friend, hidden connections, money, big presents and women always manage to make the staunch patriot regain his peace of mind disturbed by the ominous approach of the day of April 1st.” (GT, March 17, 1943, 1). The consequence was the reversal of standards and hierarchies, which meant that the country’s leadership would be taken over by those who flirt with a regime in which chickens will be attributed the same qualities as eagles, oaks will be placed on the same level with roadside thorns, and we will all be institutionalized and instead madmen will be allowed to work with the plough, in workshops, factories, government institutions and positions of responsibility. (GT, March 17, 1943, 1)

The overly critical language always attracted the attention of censorship. Social mores, more reprehensible as the war required greater sacrifices, provided journalists the opportunity to demand harsh sentences. Thus, in his article “Dac-aú putea” [If I Could], Dr. N. Căliman recommended public executions for all those who became rich overnight by illegal means: “I would hang in public squares all those who today, as in any period, have become rich on the back and suffering of others, not by honest means. I would line up against the wall all the traitors of Romania’s national and economic interests.” (GT, June 9, 1943, 1) This passage was swiftly removed following the intervention of censors. Aware that he could not do everything, the journalist limited himself to demanding sentences of hard labour to gamblers whom he otherwise harshly criticised (GT, June 9, 1943, 1). The sight of luxury fuelled by money from the state budget gave rise to the question “When will someone put an end to this terrible plunder?”22 The turning of charity balls for war widows and orphans into entertainment events clearly indicated by the remark “There will be dancing until the early hours!” (GT, March 1, 1944, 1) written on

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the invitations, was also severely criticised. The author included the above line in the title of his article and unequivocally concluded: “If it is about prostitution, let us prostitute ourselves on our own and leave the orphans and widows alone.” (GT, March 1, 1944, 1) Additionally, he firmly requested an end to the “yearning for drunken choreography.” (GT, March 1, 1944, 1) Once again, censors intervened and removed the fragment as well as the word “drunken,” because it hinted at promiscuity, ultimately forcing the author to replace it with the less strong word “showy.”23 Finally, the suppliers of bad-quality equipment to the Army caused indignation as well. It was voiced in editorials that demanded prison terms and even death sentences to those found guilty of such a crime. Censorship swiftly targeted such unconventional articles, but the editor-in-chief, who was also their author, reserved his right to go beyond the letter of the law. On the margin, Colan wrote: “It will be published unchanged at my own risk!” (1943, August 21, 1). These articles reveal a state of extreme uneasiness and social discontent. In this atmosphere, any public gesture or even lack of respect shown by those holding any official position could spark an upheaval (“when all it needs the dynamite fuse is a match to set it alight”).24 Certainly, we are dealing here with feelings conveyed from the journalists’ perspective and through the filter of their own sensitivity. There is a difference between the feelings of the population and those of the press. As civic and intellectual elite, journalists express and synthesize social ideals, formulate ideas, as well as influence and shape public opinion, and from this perspective, they sometimes react too harshly. This may be case with the above exaggeration containing a significant amount of strong, military language, used to condemn a minor gesture. Albeit less present within the pages of GT, articles mentioning political issues were also closely monitored by the censorship. As for the political life prior to 1938, it was discussed mainly with regard to its negative features, namely political divisions and internal disputes, which undermined public interest and ultimately jeopardized the unity of the Romanian state. It is also argued that the national ideal (the unification of all territories), achieved in 1918, was not replaced with a new one, but instead, the way was opened to politicking25 with disastrous consequences: We wallowed in mud. We besmirched everything that was sacred. We became brothers and rubbed shoulders with the greatest enemies of our nation. And we would have rubbed shoulders with the devil himself had the political interest requested it. (Căliman, “PermanenĠele româneúti”, 1943, 3) 26

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The last sentence was removed upon the intervention of censorship. Additionally, journalists often emphasized “this paroxysm of discord, which we all know to what degree it imperilled us.”27 Ion Colan’s article “La umbra unei cruci cu cască” [In the Shadow of a Cross with a Helmet], dedicated to the memory of Petrescu D. Tocineanu, the former prefect of Braúov, contains strong criticism against corruption in interwar Romania: [Between 1933 and 1940], there was talk of a “strong arm” which ultimately proved to be a “long arm”. We are now silent about the criminal trickeries of those years. A prefect [working] in such a chaos of altered consciousnesses either had his soul burdened with sins, or was caught between a rock and a hard place, lying at the mercy of others. Many committed sins, but the sin of the functionary forced to carry out an order is one thing, while the undying ambition to go beyond the order for the sake of pleasing the sultan, for promotions or personal gains is entirely another. (Colan, “La umbra…”, 1943, 3)

Obviously, the above-quoted fragment was completely removed from the final version of the gazette. Political parties were also rarely mentioned, but when the case, they were described in negative terms. Journalists condemn the party members having contempt for the needs of society as opposed to a family of landlord-philanthropists. Censors opted to maintain the criticism, but decided to remove the reference to the party members “who, let us say, are out of sight at present.” (HaĠeganu 1943, 4) The censorship of the regime prohibited that the dissolution of political parties be openly declared and, implicitly, left to fall in the government’s responsibility. Valeria Braniúte’s article “Onoarea neamului” [The Nation’s Honour] is a severe criticism of the Romanian political class28 that was only interested in hanging on to power. The author speaks of their collective responsibility for the disaster in 1940, when the Romanian government lost, among those territories, North-Eastern Transylvania: Because they were leading the country and pursuing one goal: that of staying in power at all cost. We, the many, were also responsible in spite of being removed from official responsibility. We were responsible for the simple reason that we formed a healthy public opinion, capable of challenging the actions of those who put our country’s territory under the hammer. It is painful, tragically painful, to think about the country’s attitude of detached expectancy at best toward a clearly-disastrous leadership, not to mention the quite frequent cases of servility and liberalism. This is how we let everything we held dear and sacred be taken away from us, this is how we tolerated to be represented in difficult times by elements unprepared for the task they took upon themselves, and this is

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Upon the intervention of censors, this paragraph was removed and replaced with the picture “Speeding skier”. Additionally, the pre-war discord was castigated for its disastrous political, military, and national effects because then, in 1940, the country would not have become intimidated by any shouting and would not have placed its signature on any document. And in case someone would have done it nonetheless, forced by circumstances, they would have come out of the palace and put a bullet in their head to protest publicly against a document signed under duress29 (Colan, Concluziile unei sărbători, 1944, 3).

An article aptly entitled “Nu de război, ci de pace mi-e teamă” [I Fear not War, but Peace] argues that, based on this strong, almost innate, mistrust of politicians, there would be a return to the well-known division of society on partisan criteria after the war.30 It is clearly revealed that national unity was the main criterion by which Ion Colan assessed the political life, and certainly not the principles of democracy, a system of government that he otherwise condemned for its weaknesses. Furthermore, we have to take into account the complex political-military context in which these articles were written, which required focus on the recovery of North-Eastern Transylvania. Remembering the pre-war political system was officially not desirable, and criticism of the inaction from that period appeared normal from this perspective. This is why the editor-in-chief’s de plano as well as de facto position was the re-creation of national unity, which was in his opinion more important than reforms31 or even the country’s future political organization. In arguing that the national interest must be placed above ideologies and that the ideological option depended on national interest, Colan wrote: “The future itself will indicate the ideology of the time and the country will adapt to it, not revolutionarily, but evolutionarily.”32 Evidently, he was right in underlining that general interest comes before group interest, but made a serious error when he separated the country’s future from the democratic political system. Thus, the path to authoritarianism was opened and it was possible for any extremist ideology to gain legitimacy in the name of the nation, a commanding criterion and source of legitimate authority. From the perspective of state institutions, GT demonstrated certain political inappetence, an attitude of disappointment with and distancing from the public life. Perhaps our interpretation is erroneous and it did not go beyond the criticism of politicking and of the vulnerability of

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democracy. However, we cannot help asking ourselves whether the above statement did not favour somehow the rise of national-communism. A preferred reflection topic in GT was the status of the press. A great number of articles discuss this issue and for this reason, they often came to the attention of censorship. Editorials that showed support for the patriotic and morally-upstanding professional journalists or criticised the practice of providing politically-motivated subventions from the state budget were completely censored and replaced with neutral, stereotypical pictures.33 In writing about the Press Convention in Sibiu, I. Berciu noted the basic shortcomings of journalism: As the fourth power in the state, the opinion-making press had and continues to have a precarious existence either because of political circumstances, most times forced “to put the gag on” by the most bizarre ideologies, or because of the lack of training of those who had the courage to write to the “great anonymous”. (GT, January 5, 1944, 2).

Furthermore, he pointed out the need to regulate the press by means of a special law. We chose to illustrate the journalists’ lack of training and corruption by using only one fragment out of the many that make up the article.34 Ultimately, this article was published almost in its original form except for a few changes. We encounter a similar situation in the case of Valeria Braniúte’s article “Chemarea presei” [The Call of the Press] from which the precept of objective journalism was removed.35 Under these circumstances, the process of self-censorship and the defence of professional standards were difficult to undertake and maintain. Suggestive in this respect is Ion Colan’s article that criticises self-censorship, describing the gruelling task of writing and the everyday effort to find the proper word. He described the difficulties accompanying the profession as a journalist as follows: They wanted to write one thing, but ended up giving a different meaning to their words. Every time, the legend of the Argeú Monastery comes to mind, and every newspaper issue appears to you as demolishing walls you thought completely raised. […] We write difficultly. This is the fate of the Transylvanian press, which few understand, since this is the only province where journalists were forced to write with the policeman on their back and the penal code in front; this was true in the time of Valeriu Braniúte36 or that of Aurel and Iacob Mureúianu, of Gh. BariĠiu, of those who worked for the Românul and Tribuna, and of those in the circle of Father MoĠa in Orăútie. Octavian Goga, in making the apology of Aurel Mureúianu, said: “Let us instil in the columns of our gazette the historical formula of the original Romanian journalism whose piety we want to salvage”. The words of the poet from Ciucea rebuked the “embarrassing state of degradation in

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The article was heavily censored, but the editor-in-chief noted on the side: “It will be published in its entirety on my own responsibility.” (GT, July 14, 1943, 1). Eventually it was published in its original form. Certainly, by invoking the tradition of the Romanian-language press in Transylvania and the former censorship, the author indirectly and implicitly attacked the ongoing censorship that forced him to weigh his every word. Censorship not only made it difficult for journalists to elaborate their articles, but it also affected the regular publication of the gazette. In order to illustrate the latter assertion, one should mention a short informative note written by the editorial board, which read: Our gazette’s issue of Tuesday, June 15, could not be published. We ask our readers to believe that we had nothing to do with it. We do not invoke either the lack of paper, or a malfunction of the machines... All we say: times are not subservient to man, but man is subservient to times. (GT, June 16, 1943, 8).

The initial formula was modified in the sense that the explanations were removed. However, the paraphrase of Miron Costin remained untouched following Colan’s decision that he wrote on the margin: “This stays” (GT, June 16, 1943, 8). The research of the proofs or sample issues ascertains to a certain extent that there were two issues numbered 45 that were prepared for 15 June. The first is incomplete, because in the copy that we have, only the editorial in the middle column37 was preserved, while the other columns were cut out. Therefore, we cannot know the content of the other articles. The second displays a different arrangement. Thus, D. Chirculescu’s editorial was moved to another page and replaced with a patriotic poem written by Lucian Valea (GT, June 16, 1944, 1). Only this issue managed to pass the draconian censorship test, and the Tuesday issue was ultimately published on the following Wednesday together with the note from the editorial board, which was also censored. Albeit more rarely featured in the gazette, articles focussing on the international military and political situation were also targeted by censorship office. As a result, censors prevented their more unconventional passages from being presented to the public. As a rule, military information was never mentioned due to its classified nature,

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while items referring to the Army were innocuous in content: obituaries, concerts organized for the Army’s benefit, the distribution of Christmas presents, etc. Information regarding the number of military units or the place and date of death of those fallen on the front, even a report on the Palace of Invalids [Palatul Invalizilor] in Bucharest were entirely removed.38 However, one should mention that most articles were censored only with regard to certain details, being eventually published with edits in the final issues. During 1944, as events on the front turned to the worse, defeatist comments started to become more frequent in the press. Thus, in May 1944, in the article “La nord de Iaúi” [North of Iaúi], Valeria Braniúte commented on Romania’s role in the war and its responsibility for it: The strength of our nation is wasted in a war that we did not start and will not end. We did not start it because we first bled and then joined the dance of fire. First, our boarders collapsed neither because of our fault, nor for our peace, but for the benefit of others […]. And we will not end it because weapons will never be able to fulfil the righteous claims of Romanians […] Until then, however, more of our sons will fall to the north of Iaúi. (Braniúte 1944, 1)

Such (un)diplomatic remarks and revelations of the military situation were impossible to be allowed for publication. Consequently, the entire article was removed and replaced with the harmless text “Fenomene sufleteúti” [Spiritual Phenomena] written by the same journalist on the state of mind of the population being threatened by bombs. Censors ruthlessly targeted articles and editorials on foreign policy as well. Therefore, they removed any comment related to the breaking of alliances and violation of international treaties signed with countries that were subsequently attacked, such as Yugoslavia,39 the analysis of the division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin,40 the criticism of the policy to conquer the so-called living space,41 the exposure of the widespread deception in the press, diplomacy and politics as well as allusions to the acceptance of concessions for the sake of alliances.42 Due to the nature and general character of the latter issue, the editor-in-chief decided to ignore the decision of the censorship; for this reason, he wrote on the margin: “It will be published at my own risk. I do not understand how this article can be deemed harmful since it discusses a matter that goes beyond the boarders of our country.” (GT, December 8, 1943, 1) Articles focussing on the progress of the war, the reversal of the situation on the front and the problem of peace were carefully monitored. Censors prohibited the publication of information of general interest in a form that could allude to the difficulties of war, because it clashed with the official point of view. For this reason, passages were regularly edited and words replaced or

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removed in order to fit the variable length of the Procrustean bed of censorship. For example, comments on the regime that succeeded the fall of Mussolini were totally unacceptable to censorship and the Romanian government: no official statement has been made regarding the maintenance or fall of the Fascist regime. However, the fact that at the beginning and end of Italian radio broadcasts they do not play the Giovinezza – the Fascist national anthem – any longer, one can assume that the Fasci disappeared. In other words, a new regime was installed in Italy. It might be that at the time of our gazette’s publication, the situation in Italy will have stabilized […] The coming days will be decisive to the fate of Italy. (Mateescu 1943, 4)

The term “peace” also caused much malaise among censors, being quickly replaced in the titles of articles published under the section Cronica războiului [War Chronicle].43 Additionally, articles with a pacifist message were completely removed (Berciu, “Prea e ‘hidos’!” 1944, 2). As the course of the war turned into the favour of the Allied Powers, the question of the responsibility for the start of the war was raised by the belligerents. As an echo of these mutual accusations, Romanian journalists expressed their opinions in the matter as well. To the question Who started it?, Ion Colan replies: “The question concerns only two great countries: Germany and England” and argues that somebody had to start the war, because otherwise the current discussions – this Pilate-like washing of hands – would be pointless. The English claim that the Germans inaugurated it, providing the date and time. The Germans, in turn, are just as confident that the première was performed by the English, providing the date and time as well. (GT, June 24, 1944, 1)

He concludes: “We understand that, while they are at it, England and Germany can terrorize each other. They can afford this luxury, because they have a reason to” (GT, June 24, 1944, 1), while he absolves Romania of any responsibility in the war. These positions broke the rules of the censorship and, as a result, were removed from the final issue. Finally, comments on the post-war situation and the consequences of the future division of the world were also cause for concern. In his article “Sărăcirea Europei” [The Impoverishment of Europe], Dr. M. Suciu-Sibianu wrote: The United States of America especially, already enjoying the success that is painted on the horizon, will be rewarded for its contribution to the Allied victory with a proletarianised Europe with limited purchasing power, no vital force […] and swamped in social discontent […] because of this

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widespread impoverishment, and we know for a fact that the bigger the size of the proletariat, the more a given state is exposed to internal convulsions. (Suciu-Sibianu 1944, 4)

It was unacceptable to break the severe norms of censorship by presenting military and social aspects and voicing the conviction that the victory of Romania’s adversaries was approaching. Obviously, censors did not hesitate to remove the above-quoted fragment in its entirety. Albeit the historical profession excludes the principle of predictability and teleological retrospective, one cannot help noting that the political-social diagnosis the author established proved correct for the Eastern part of Europe. Significant articles published in the first half of 1944 focused on issues pertaining to politics, the military, and nationalism. As the war progressed and the news on the retreat of German and Romanian troops on the Eastern Front spread, defeatist attitudes became more frequent. Furthermore, the press resonated to the reigning state of confusion. In reacting to the panic that gripped Romanian society, Colan makes a critical analysis of the psychology of citizens who were living behind the front line and listening to the newsreels that spread more confusion than certitudes. In his view, the media war supported by the foreign radio stations depicted reality as a “steamy window,” and the state of confusion was further augmented by “those well-informed people who imaginarily visited the audience rooms of Mr. Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt or Stalin” and who were well informed “of [Romania’s] state secrets, other mysterious, and more precise sources being added in this respect to the radio receiver.” (Colan, “Neguri”, 1944, 1) The names of politicians were censored, being replaced by the editor with the circumlocution “of all leaders,” while the rest of the comment was self-evidently removed. In the concluding phrase, the author emphatically states the guiding principle of the citizen who had to decipher from the avalanche of information only what his national consciousness required. This statement was relevant because it was illustrative for the journalist’s perspective of the role that press took upon itself: If you haven’t designed your own soul to emit and receive on only one frequency, which is all that your faith needs in order to remain focused on the victory of your nation, then you are turning the knob of the radio receiver in vain, feeding your curiosity with what the waves carry from outside. (GT, February 2, 1944, 1).

Therefore, in Colan’s opinion, what mattered was the strengthening of one’s faith in the power of the nation at any price, despite the turn of

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events. The purpose of the press, the radio and newsreels was not necessary to inform the public, but to act as psychological support for it and manipulate it in order to maintain its belief in the nation’s victory. In another article suggestively titled “Eu cred!” [I believe!], Colan returned to the issue of the strength of one’s faith in the future of the nation. In criticising the speculation over the course of the war, based on official communiqués, Colan reasserted his profession of faith by arguing: That is why switching sides cannot spare a nation engaged in warfare of the hardships it is bound to suffer especially given that, in our case, there is only one great danger irrespective of the rail on which we drive our train. (GT, March 29, 1944, 1)

The expression “switching sides” clearly alluded to the changing situation on the front. Aware of what he acknowledged by such an expression, the author himself replaced it with a circumlocution that may have altered the initial meaning: “the lamentation of man with his convictions built on sand.” (GT, March 29, 1944, 1). In order to illustrate the emphasis laid on the national aspect in the Gazeta, it is worth mentioning the editorial board’s reaction following Romania’s decision to switch sides on 23 August 1944. Thus, the front page of the August 26th issue contained editorials on the bureaucracy, while the comments on Romania’s change of external policy were included on the back page, in the special section dedicated to the war, which also contained a summary of the King Michael’s official communiqué.44 The editor-in-chief gave the impression that he did not perceive the great significance of this event that would have major consequences for Romania’s future. This suggests the existence of parallel histories and various levels of perception of the same chronological reference point according to the applied evaluation criteria. From the gazette’s perspective, Romania’s courageous and risky political and diplomatic move of 23 August 1944 did not have any significance unless it ultimately led to the recovery of the lost territories, which represented its main national objective. This is the only explanation for the gazette’s apparent lack of reaction toward this event, while the recovering of Cluj and Carei, two key cities in North-Western Transylvania, made front page news. After the 23 August, censorship stopped making its presence felt within the pages of the Gazeta Transilvaniei. Things went back to normal for a short while until January 1945, when the gazette was suspended. Therefore, in this short interval the fonts recovered their regular smaller size, the spaces between the lines were reduced, and stereotypical photos were no longer used. Journalists could freely criticise the serious political

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events that took place in the Romanian society, the Communist machinations, the power struggle, the start of purges and the emerging institution of Communist dictatorship. A new chapter in the history of Romania began as another ended in the history of the gazette in Braúov. The attempt to analyse censorship in connection with the particular case of Gazeta Transilvaniei reveals the criteria of control used by the institutions of censorship over certain types of information: social, political, military and diplomatic. Romania’s system of alliances in the World War II required the censorship of nationalist attitudes and overly anti-Hungarian positions. Especially targeted were the excessively harsh comments, while most of the content remained unchanged. The study of sample issues brings to light a less-known period in the history of the gazette. At the time, GT was a platform for nationalist ideas, supporting and advocating the Romanian national cause in the difficult context of the war and authoritarian regime. That is why articles limited themselves to recording attitudes, reactions and points of view and resorted to allegorical and metaphorical ways of expression, to figures of speech, allusions and irony. Journalists at the GT practised the French model of feuilleton journalism rather than the Anglo-Saxon model of informative journalism. It is true that the survival of a paper was very difficult under those circumstances. Thus, the gazette was a reflection of the editorial board’s policy, the pressure of censorship and the prevailing political regime. It is worth mentioning that, in this context, Ion Colan’s courage to confront censorship at his own risk indicates, by personal example, that times can also be subordinate to man. Due to his intimate knowledge of the mechanisms of censorship, his diplomacy, professionalism, morality and attachment to the Romanian cause, Colan managed to impose a journalistic model and avoid censorship in certain instances. At the same time, due to its combative stance, the Gazeta became involved in the influencing and manipulation of its readers through the reception and dissemination of those ideas that served its national credo, such as the unshaken belief in the ultimate triumph of the nation. One could argue that this way, the Gazeta tried to contain panic and doubts and to censor, in turn, the message of reality. There are arguments to support this claim. This basically summarises GT’s activity during the examined period with all the lights and shades. Beyond the deontological questions raised during the analysis, we often discovered current obsessions and problems as well as self-images and images of others mirrored in the past. However, there was not the aim of this chapter to discuss the latter aspect, but only to recall it in order to put forward new lines of investigation regarding the history of the Romanian press.

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Works Cited Berciu, Ion. 1944. “Misiunea presei.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, January 5: 2. —. 1944. “Prea e ‘hidos’!” Gazeta Transilvaniei, June 24: 2. Bozdog, Ion. 1943. “Prezentări.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, May 29: 1. —. 1943. “Nu cedăm.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, August 30: 1. Braniúte, Valeria. 1943. “Timbrul Andrei Mureúanu.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, January 9: 6. —. 1943. “Reveica din Dobârlău.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, January 30: 1. —. 1943. “Luptăm.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, August 30: 1. —.. 1944. “Airagnu.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, March 15: 1. —. 1944. “Chemarea presei.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, January 5: 1. —. 1944. “Onoarea neamului.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, January 26: 1. —. 1944. “La Nord de Iaúi.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, May 27: 1. Căliman, N. 1943. “Dac-aú putea. ” Gazeta Transilvaniei, June 9, 1. —. 1943. “PermanenĠele româneúti. ” Gazeta Transilvaniei, October 13: 1, 3. Căliman,Valeria. 2000. ExerciĠiu de suferinĠă. Bucureúti: Cartea Românească. Chirculescu, C. 1943. “ÎnĠelegere?”. Gazeta Transilvaniei, December 8: 1, 3. Colan, Ion. 1943. “Borviz.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, June 5: 3. —.1943. “Calendar pentru neam.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, January 1: 1. —. 1943. “Crucea.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, November 17: 1. —. 1943. “Furnizorii.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, August 21: 1. —. 1943. “Îmi scrie un învăĠător.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, September 8: 1. —. 1943. “În loc de cronică agricolă. Ceva despre oiúte” Gazeta Transilvaniei, July, 21: 1. —. 1943. “La umbra unei cruci cu cască.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, March 13: 3. —. 1943. “Mi-e frică de bine.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, October 16: 3. —. 1943. “Murim.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, August 30: 1. —. 1943. “Panica.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, March 17: 1-2. —. 1943. “Scriem greu!” Gazeta Transilvaniei, July 14: 1. —. 1944. “Cine a început?” Gazeta Transilvaniei, June 24: 1. —. 1944. “Concluziile unei sărbători”. Gazeta Transilvaniei, February 26: 1, 3. —. 1944. “Cu cine”. Gazeta Transilvaniei, February 9: 1. —. 1944. “Eu cred!” Gazeta Transilvaniei, March 29: 1. —. 1944. “Neguri.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, February 2: 1. —. 1944. “Se va dansa până în zori.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, March 1: 1. —. 1944. “Vitejie, 90% celofibră.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, February 16: 1.

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Gherghel, Ion. 1944. “Sfidare”. Gazeta Transilvaniei, January 19: 3. HaĠeganu, I. 1943. “Două exemple”. Gazeta Transilvaniei, January 27: 4. Hulea, Eugen. 1943. “NaĠia văzută de la provincie”. Gazeta Transilvaniei, February 13: 1. Lăcustă, Ioan. 2007. Cenzura veghează – 1937-1939. Bucureúti: Curtea veche. Marino, Adrian. 2000. Cenzura în România. SchiĠă istorică introductivă. Craiova: Aius. Mateescu, Mardare. 1943. “Demisia ducelui Mussolini.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, July 28: 4. Mocanu, Marin Radu. 2008. Cenzura a murit. Trăiască cenzorii. Bucureúti: Euro Press. Petcu, Marian. 1999. Puterea úi cultura. O istorie a cenzurii, foreword by Mihai Coman. Iaúi: Polirom. Suciu-Sibianu, Mircea. 1944. “Sărăcirea Europei.” Gazeta Transilvaniei, June 3: 4.

Notes 1

This paper was initially published, in a partial version, in Romanian, in the journal ğara Bârsei, 2003, 2: 33-46. 2 Petcu, Marian. 1999. Puterea úi cultura. O istorie a cenzurii, foreword by Mihai Coman. Iaúi: Polirom; Marino, Adrian. 2000. Cenzura în România. SchiĠă istorică introductivă. Craiova: Aius. 3 ASTRA (The Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and Culture [AsociaĠia Transilvană pentru literatura română úi cultura poporului român]) was founded in 1861, in Sibiu, as a cultural society reuniting the Romanian intellectual elite in Transylvania. Its aim was to support Romanian culture, literature and science in Transylvania. For this purpose, ASTRA has been involved in the writing and publication of encyclopaedias, periodicals, organizing of conferences, as well as the opening of libraries and museums. 4 Following the Second Vienna Award (August, 30, 1940) Romania and Hungary had to accept the decision taken by Germany and Italy concerning the new boarder between the first two countries. Thus, Romania conceded North-Eastern Transylvania (43 492 square kilometres) to Hungary. 5 The paper mentions two authors with similar names, Valeriu and respectively Valeria Braniúte (Căliman). 6 The 1784 Uprising, also named Horea’s, Cloúca’s and Criúan’s Uprising (after its leaders) was an important peasants’ uprising of peasants against their numerous obligations towards the noblemen they were dependent to as well as the latter’s abuses. As the uprising brought to the fore the Romanians’ status as tolerated people, the social movement also had a national feature. 7 Berciu, Ion. 1943. “Nota dominantă a revoluĠiilor ardelene”. Gazeta Transilvaniei

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(further on GT), February 27, 1; Ianculescu, C. D. 1943. “De vorbă cu visul”. GT, March 10, 2; Berciu, Ion. 1943. “O cărticică de căpătâi”. GT, March 20, 1, 3; Hulea, Eugen. 1943. “Pe urmele străbunilor”. GT, March 24, 3; Braniúte, V. 1943. “La Bacău”. GT, April 7, 1. 8 Hulea, Eugen. 1943. “Legea pământului nostrum”, GT, March 18, 1, 3; Dragoú, Gh. 1943. “NaĠiune generoasă”, GT, March 13, 1, 3; Dragoú, Gh. 1943. “NaĠiune mare”, GT, March 20, 1, 3. 9 After certain hesitations, the journalist gave up the word “hopes” because it was also deemed subversive, and replaced it with “ideal.” 10 For instance, the word “Transylvania” was replaced with the Romanian circumlocution for the Latin name, “the country beyond the forests” [Ġara de dincolo de păduri], whereas the region of Năsăud was designated through the metaphorical expression “the land of dark soldiers” [Ġara cătanelor negre]. 11 Special emphasis was laid on adjectives referring to the fulfilment and legitimacy of Romania’s claims, such as total, complete, comprehensive, just, genuine, and honourable. 12 Mateescu, Mardare. 1943. “Cronica războiului. Frontul diplomatic”, GT, January 16, 6; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Presa străină”, GT, January 20, 1; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Aprecieri liniútitoare”, GT, January 20, 1; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Se răresc rândurile”, GT, January 23, 3; Braniúte, V. 1943. “InvitaĠie”, GT, January 27, 1; Berciu, Ion. 1943. “Temelia biruinĠei”, GT, January 27, 1; Braniúte, V. 1943. “FraĠii Cornea”, GT, February 3, 2; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Lumina cea mare”, GT, February 6, 1; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Eroii de pe Volga”, GT, February 10, 1; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Autohtoni”, GT, February 20, 1; Dan, Tudor Al. 1943. “Scrisoarea feciorului de domn (poem)”, GT, February 20, 2; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Dr. Valer Braniúte (18691928)”, GT, March 24,1, 3; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Monumentul de la Ieud”, GT, March 24, 1; Dr. Suciu-Sibianu, M. 1943. “Apelul sibian”, GT, March 24, 2; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Cei sărutaĠi cu moartea”, GT, March 27, 1; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Obiceiul pământean”, GT, April 5,1; Mateescu, Mardare. 1943. “Cronica războiului. Ieri úi azi”, GT, April 5, 6; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Să nu dea Dumnezeu cel Sfânt”, GT, April 14, 1; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Încă o pereche”, GT, April 14, 4; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Nenea CuliĠă de la Cluj”, GT, April 24, 1; Berciu, Ion. 1943. “Înapoi spre naĠiune úi aleúii săi”, GT, April 24, 3; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Temelia Învierii”, GT, April 24, 4; Bozdog, I. 1943. “În faĠa hărĠii”, GT, May 1, 3; Florea, Alex. 1943. “Toate-s vechi úi nouă toate”, GT, May 8, 3; Bozdog, I. 1943. “3/15 mai. Lângă ‘Piatra LibertăĠii’” GT, May 15, 1; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Revendicări úi tratate”, GT, May 26, 1; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Dumineca după slujbă”, GT, May 26, 1, 3; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Aúteptări româneúti”, GT, June 12, 1; Colan, Ion. 1943. “22 iunie 1941 – 22 iunie 1943. Predoslovie de cronică”, GT, June 23, 1; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Valea Plângerii”, GT, June 26, 1; Nichifor, Dragomir. 1943 “Spune Doamne!”, GT, July 3, 2; Dr. Chirculescu, D. 1943. “Fãrã pripire”, GT, July 3, 3; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Golgota Botoúanilor”, GT, July 7, 3; Gârbacea, I. 1943. “BăncuĠele noastre”, GT, July 10. 1; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Hoinar prin munĠii noútri”, GT, July 10, 3; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Ardeleană úi ciardaú”, GT, August 4, 1; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Ori ei, ori noi!”, GT, August 11, 1; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Dureri transilvane”, GT, September

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11, 1; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Omenie”, GT, September 22, 1; Steriopol, Ion. 1943. “Românii din Secuime. FraĠii, care úi-au pierdut graiul”, GT, October 16, 1; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Să ne aducem aminte”, GT, October 23, 1; Bozdog, I. 1943. “ùi… Craiova”, GT, October 23, 1; Braniúte, V. 1943. “RevoluĠia din 1918. Consiliile naĠionale”, GT, October 27, 1; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Zile de noiembrie”, GT, November 17, 1; Braniúte, V. 1943. “Ultimul memorandist”, GT, November 27, 1; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Cu paúaportul în propria-ne Ġară!”, GT, December 15, 1; Braniúte, V. 1944. “Despre Transilvania”, GT, January 15, 1; Ghibu, O. 1944. “O precizare úi o întrebare”, GT, January 19, 1, 2; Colan, Ion. 1944. “Vorbeúte pământul. Cumidava”, GT, January 29, 1; Braniúte, V. 1944. “Mitul dacic”, GT, February 19, 1; Colan, Ion. 1944. “LeliĠele”, GT, March 25, 1; Bozdog, I. 1944. “Cu orice mijloace”„, GT, April 1, 1, 3; Bozdog, I. 1944. “Împietrire”, GT, June 10, 4; Hulea, Eugen. 1944. “Lângă ale noastre…”, GT, August 5, 1. 13 BănuĠ, A. P. 1943. “O pacoste naĠională”, GT, January 27, 1, 3; Bozdog, I. 1943. “Scăderile noastre”, GT, January 30, 1, 3; Popa, Octavian. 1943. “Prostie sau maimuĠăreală”, GT, June 26, 1. 14 The word “ciardaú” was censored and, next to it, I. Colan noted his reaction to the censorship and the impossibility to replace it with another word or circumlocution: “And this is for the simple reason that we do not have its equivalent in Romanian.” 15 On the side, it is indicated that the underlined text was replaced with the expression “such designations.” 16 The bold characters were present in the original. 17 GT, 1943, April 17, 1, where the explanation to the readers is reproduced. The article “Ce atâta bocet?!” was published in GT, 1943, June 5, 1. 18 Popa, Octavian. 1943. “Pensionarii”, GT, August 4, 3. The author discusses the Law on the Harmonization of Pensions and criticises bureaucracy. Despite having been completely censored, it was ultimately published. 19 Colan, Ion. 1943. “ÎnvăĠătorii úi Ġăranii”, GT, February 10, 1, 3; Bozdog, I. 1943. ùcolile Ġărăneúti, GT, February 13, 1. 20 Braniúte, V. 1943. “Reveica din Dobârlău”, GT, January 30, 1. 21 Colan, Ion. 1943. “Îmi scrie un învăĠător”, GT, September 8, 1. 22 Gherghel, Ion. 1944. “Sfidare”, GT, January 19, 3. 23 Article written by Colan, Ion, GT, 1944, March 1, 1. 24 Colan, Ion. 1943. “Crucea”, GT, November 17, 1. The author argues that a few scholars’ refusal to cross themselves while attending mass was an insult and could be emulated by others. He condemns this gesture as a serious political and social blunder that could have unforeseen and far-reaching consequences. 25 In Romanian, politicianism 26 The editorial evoked the meeting of the ASTRA society and proposed the establishment of certain guiding principles after the war in order to avoid a return to the pre-war political climate. 27 Hulea, Eugen. 1943. “NaĠia văzută de la provincie”, GT, February 13, 1. 28 Criticism of the political elite was constant in Valeria Braniúte’s writings. See the article “Pentru Basarabia”, GT, 1943, March 31, 1, which discusses the agreement

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to cede the territory by “unwelcome representatives of the nation” and the silence imposed by the authorities, the proverbial “ostrich policy.” 29 By starting with the celebrations in the honour of Ion Lupaú, the author notes the solidarity among the participants irrespective of their political affiliation in contrast with what had happened in the past when they avoided taking part in cultural events due to political adversities. 30 The article was published under Ion Colan’s signature and with a slightly modified title upon request from censors who were allergic to terms such as “war” and “peace.” Colan, Ion. 1943. “Mi-e frică de bine”, GT, October 16, 1. 31 Colan, Ion. 1944. “Păsul lui Ion”, GT, August 12, 1. 32 Colan, Ion. 1944. “Cu cine”, GT, February 9, 1. 33 Berciu, Ion. 1943. “Fiecare la locul său…”, GT, March 27, 1; Colan, Ion. 1943. “Presa transilvană úi temeiurile ei economice”, GT, June 12, 1; Popa, Octavian. 1943. “Degradarea gazetăriei”, GT, November 27, 1; Colan, Ion. 1944. “Cine dă?”, GT, January 5, 1. 34 Berciu, I. 1944. “Misiunea presei”, GT, January 5, 2. 35 Braniúte, Valeria. 1944. “Chemarea presei”, GT, January 5, 1. 36 See above, note 5 37 Dr. Chirculescu, D. 1943. “În loc de alianĠă”, GT, no. 45, 1 (originally listed as no. 44 and later changed into 45 in pencil), June 15. 38 “Moú Crăciun printre soldaĠii Bat. III VM din Braúov”, GT, 1943, January 9, 5 published without the Roman numeral III; “Operele sociale ale C.E.C.-ului. 20 de milioane pentru Palatul Invalizilor din beneficiul anului 1942”, GT, 1943, January 30, 5 published without subheading. 39 Bozdog, Ion. 1943. “Acorduri culturale”, GT, April 17, 3. 40 Clujanu, Ion. 1943. “Guverne fără Ġară”, GT, May 5, 1. The author argues that Poland served as an experiment in the “slaughterhouse of European diplomacy” and as “dissection material either on battlefields or at the negotiating table.” The latter phrase was censored and replaced with the formula “in the vast laboratory of nations on the Old Continent.” 41 Dr. Suciu-Sibianu, M. 1943. “Articole de primă necessitate”, GT, June 23, 1. 42 Colan, Ion. 1943. “Criza de sinceritate”, GT, September 1, 1; Dr. Chirculescu, D. 1943. “ÎnĠelegere?”, GT, December 8, 1, 3. 43 Mateescu, Mardare. 1943. “Pacea…”, GT, June 23, 3. The article was published under the title “Svonuri…” in the printed version. 44 The editorials published in this issue are: Hulea, Eugen. 1944. “Două aniversări”; Colan, Ion. 1944. “Birocratism”; Braniúte V. 1944, “Monumentul lui George Coúbuc”, GT, August 26, 1.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN PRESS, LIBRARIES AND SECRET FUNDS IN ROMANIA (1945-1989): CASE STUDY1 DANIEL NAZARE

Introduction In its contemporary form, censorship (which, as a form of political control was used as early as the eighteenth century2) has been applied extensively in totalitarian states, such as post-war Romania. Following the Soviet model, in communist Romania censorship affected not only the freedom of publication and speech but also involved the purge of the books belonging to libraries, bookstores and antiquarians, as well as to people perceived by the regime as personae non gratae. The current chapter focuses on the purge of libraries, involving both book destruction and the creation of special book funds or collections, to which access was restricted. The case study refers to the “George BariĠiu” County Library in Braúov (which for a decade, 1950-1960, was officially named the City of Stalin). The library continues the work of several institutions such as the Astra Library (1930-1949), The Regional Library of Braúov (1950-1967) and finally the City Library of Braúov (19681989). In 1993, the library was named after the local cultural personality, George BariĠiu and currently offers access to readers from the entire county of Braúov. In 1963 the library contained over 160 000 volumes, more than half a million in 1985 and currently almost 800 000, being among the top fifteen libraries in Romania due to the number of library units. The library catalogue records still retain traces of books being placed into secret funds. For historians this is a great advantage, given that in the great libraries in Bucharest, these traces were wiped out. (Caravia 2000, 22).

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The Post-War Romanian “Lesen Revolution” In Romania, especially after 1950, efforts were made by the state to establish libraries in rural areas as well as to eradicate illiteracy3. As a consequence, in the post-war period the percentage of literate population increased significantly. Previously, illiteracy was dominant in the Balkans (70-80 percent of the population in 1910, compared to 1% in England, Europa Centrală 1997, 134), as Western Europe had already witnessed the so called “lesen revolution” in the 18th century (Darnton 2000, 214). Post-war Romania, promoting the forced modernization model, increasingly needing educated people and readers for an expanding book market, supported the process of eradicating illiteracy. But this approach had a negative effect on the stability of the regime: encouraging education and reading meant allowing everyone to get a personal idea about the world they lived in, the solitary activity of reading offering an escape from the communist physical and psychological control. Libraries supported such escapes, whereas other public spaces are “open areas”, libraries remain “confined spaces”, where otherness is only to be found within oneself, under the impulse of others’ thoughts and perspectives (Kuhlmann et al. 1999, 122). The importance of such an evasion was increased by the fact that the moments of solitude were scarce in communist Romania, in which the individual lived in a fishbowl, constantly scrutinized by others and particularly by the regime, which was determined to control both the public and the private sphere and even penetrate people’s thoughts. The community was also meant to control the readings (after 1947, the newspapers were read aloud at the workplace). However the phenomenon also betrays the persistence of illiteracy, particularly in the rural areas (similarly to eighteenth century France in which community reading practices were typical, in parallel with literacy progresses). The libraries played at the time a fundamental role, supporting those who had no books or very few; however the offer of these libraries was carefully controlled (particularly in small libraries4). Previously, only the former elite enjoyed the privilege of owning books, but after the expulsion of King Michael I (1948) the dramatic situation forced them to donate these books to libraries5 or sell them to antiquarians (usually for financial reasons), if not hide them at the countryside, where the potential interest in them was lower.

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The “Book Holocaust” (1945-1964) The burning of books represents a special form of censorship. Its history is connected to the religious purge, as church representatives used to travel to cities and request the local elites to give all the immoral books to be publicly burned. The power of the Romanian Communists was however much higher, although the Catholic monks also had access anywhere, even on ships that sailed with forbidden books on board. During the communist regime, in some Romanian libraries books were burned by those meant to preserve them, however not in some impressive processions such as in Hitler’s Germany,6 but secretly. Paradoxically or not, some of the authors censored in such a violent manner under Hitler’s regime were also forbidden, totally or partially (based, however, on different reasons) by the Romanian communists. To continue the comparison, in 1933, in Germany 346 authors were forbidden, additional names being constantly added to the published lists, such as in July 1933, when 291 more titles were added (the lists were published twice a year, similarly to the communist states). In comparison, the first list to be published in Romania (1945) contained 616 titles (so almost double if compared to 1933 Germany). However, the list also respected and developed the lists of publications banned internationally by the winners of the World War II. (Petcu 1999, 45-46). The metaphors used by journalists (“book holocaust” in Newsweek or “bibliocaust” in Time) describe very well the violence and dramatic aspects of the gesture. The burning of books at the “George BariĠiu” Library in Braúov (the City of Stalin at the time) is still controversial. There are verbal testimonies about this, as the moment seems to have been extremely emotional for the employees. A history of the library (160 de ani… 1996) also mentions the event, in the following terms: “between 1953-1957 the head of the library was a tailor, Mr. Hirschhorn, who [...] started a purge on the book fund; personally or indirectly, he burned particularly the books on Jews and [...] famous women” (91). Other witnesses denied the burning of books, mentioning it as a legend related to the removal of the head of the library, believed to be a Zionist. Moreover, many books were stored in unsanitary areas of the Central State Library in Bucharest, leaving Brasov loaded in a full truck. The transport could not be prevented by the historian Constantin Stoide, who interceded with the same head of the library. The “George BariĠiu” Library retains several brochures on the purges taking place between 1945 and1989: two dated 1945 (number I and II) and 1946 (two identical copies) and the 1948 Supplement, all currently

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archived at the Special Collections Department. The brochures published in 1948 and 1949 are also currently available to the readers for consultation within the library. The first one dated in 1945 (number I) has no stamp on it, but contains some corrections made with a blue pencil (signalling both some mistakes, mostly when words from foreign languages appeared, but also emphasising the names some local writers; among them one of the leaders of the National Peasants’ Party, Victor Jinga, whose books were also burned a few years later). The second brochure (Number II, 1945) bears two stamps, with two consecutive names of the library7 and contains a series of checked titles, most probably signalling their purge. A comparison with the library records took place for the Romanian fund:8 despite the existence of record numbers or inventory numbers in the brochure, we could not identify them in the records, nor in the book fund itself, which proves that the purge was thoroughly performed. There was another brochure published in 1945 which could not be found at the public library in Braúov. The two copies dated 1946 are stamped,9 one of them containing eight empty pages. The titles were in Italian, and the library did not have them. The 1948 supplement is organised alphabetically and not, as before, by language;10 the cover has a blue stripe, on which a label with a number is attached (the number 349, written in with red ink). This supplement came in addition to a volume of over 500 pages, published also in 1948, just months after the removal of the monarchy. Unfortunately, the latter was preserved only partially (the last fifth) in the library, the fragment being placed among the pages of the brochure published in the following year.11 In the preface of the large volume published in 1948, annual supplements were announced (which were supposed to contain a thousand titles) but such a supplement could only be identified for 1948 (Caravia 2000, 24). In 1949 a new brochure is published (PublicaĠii nedifuzabile. Liste de circulaĠie internă [Publications with Limited Distribution. Internal Circulation Lists]), which, in spite of the title, was accessible in the Braúov library catalogue after 1965, bearing however the red strap of secret publications.12 On the 1949 copy, some dozens of titles are underlined with a red pencil (among the authors, A. Christie, K. Kautsky, J. Verne). Thus, the conclusion is that the situation changed from banning the publications in 1945 into their being labelled as confidential in 1949.13 If the first lists were focused only on the publications located in institutions (libraries included), the 1948 brochure also referred to personal books and therefore the brochure was publicly distributed (Costea et al. 1995, 39), sold for the price of 200 lei.

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An attempt to summarize these brochures belongs to Bogdan Ficeac (1999), containing however some serious confusions, such as mentioning one brochure (printed in 1949) as the sole list of banned publications and ignoring the others. In fact, the title mentioned by him appears on the 1948 brochure, while those published earlier (1945-1946) referred to publications withdrawn from circulation during the mentioned period. The book also mentions incorrectly: “This is a 70 page brochure14, containing more than 2000 authors and tens of thousands (sic!) of forbidden books”, while the appendix contained “tens of thousands (sic!) of collections withdrawn from circulation” (Ficeac 1999, 38). The numbers are exaggerated for Romania (and we dare say, even for Europe). The brochures prove that the selection of the purged books was heterogeneous and sometimes inexplicable (such as banning apparently harmless agriculture books15). The internal brochures contain even works of communist leaders, which could not be publicly forbidden but were secretly withdrawn from circulation. This happened particularly after 1953 when the traces of Stalinism were to be erased (Costea et al. 1995, 42) and while most of the previous leaders were forbidden after leaving the power, Ceauúescu appears on the lists while in full glory (Caravia 2000, 117), similarly to G. Gheorghiu-Dej. Books have a different regime in the Romanian libraries: some works could be found at the State Central Library whilst being forbidden in libraries such as the one in Braúov. Other differences also appear: in the record of the 1960 inventory, the same volumes appear to be in the secret fund at the State Central Library as well as the Central University Library in Bucharest (Caravia 2000, 265, 559). There are also cases in which books are purged without appearing in the brochure (such as works by Nicolae Iorga, the most important historian of the time and one of the most important victims of the book purge), a sign that censorship sometimes acted locally (sometimes the entire work of a writer was forbidden, despite not appearing as such in 1945-1949 in the brochures). In many situations the local censors took the initiative and besides consulting the brochures, catalogues, inventory records or book records, sometimes went directly to the shelves (VIII), deciding on the spot.16 This superficial browsing, performed by incompetent staff, led to the purge of many works, as it is easier to remove than to select. The brief formula “it is of no use to the democratic regime” was enough, whoever uttered it, to ban a book in a secret fund and lead sometimes to its disappearance, being difficult to recover some of the titles later. Interestingly enough, some volumes were forbidden in libraries with the mention they could still circulate in bookstores or be sold by the

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antiquarians. For instance one of Felix Aderca’s works17 was signalled in the 1949 brochure (page 5) with the mention “Free only in bookstores”, a sign that the libraries were the first to be controlled, before bookstores. The antiquarians’ stores had also a better situation, some of the books being banned from libraries and bookstores but being allowed to circulate through the antiquarians. Paradoxically, some of those sent from the centre to supervise the purge proved tolerant, being sometimes criticised by the more vigilant colleagues. Thus, a report mentions that fact that a comrade Maksutovici had a “familiarist (sic) and thus unprincipled attitude at the Regional Library of Braúov, which may lower the specificity of the institution (sic!)” (Mocanu 2001, 245-246). A similar fact happened around 19501952 at the ARLUS18 library in Bucharest, where one could read works still not eliminated from public access, some of a “fascist” nature (Caravia 2000, 21). We cannot entirely explain why these books were still partially accessible. Was it just the slow rhythm of the purge or rather a scheme to attract readers and then identify those tempted to study such books? About the second hypothesis, confessions such Zigu Ornea’s (detailed below) prove that these readings, even when allowed, were accompanied by tension and fear. In 1966, Ornea published a book dedicated to the nineteenth century Junimea literary circle and two decades later he confessed some details on the writing of the monograph. In the 1986 volume he offers a powerful testimony, defying the still extremely powerful dictatorship, on the mechanisms of censorship and selfcensorship within a repressive regime. Often intimidated (in fact, to confess the whole idea, I was always taking (necessary) precautions; I would respond that I read just for my simple enjoyment, information and knowledge. (...). I actually started to work in 1959 (...) I used to work daily, for the entire day, at the Academy Library. I started to write chapters and so (...) for a few years I sat motionless, daily, at the last desk in reading room no. 1 (...) fearing not only for what I read, but especially for what I wrote. (Ornea 1986, 5-6)

During the breaks he took, temporarily leaving the desk, Ornea confessed he used to cover the books he read with others with neutral titles, so as to hide his real readings from the public.

“The Golden Age” (1965-1989) The public library in Braúov centralised the book funds of several libraries of undesirable institutions (including ecclesiastical), the origin of

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these books being revealed by the stamps on their pages. A part of them are still in excellent condition, the years spent in the secret funds leaving some of them perfectly untouched. At the library in Braúov, the purged books were stored in a basement, protected by a metal door equipped with a lock for which only the head of the library had the key. In 1965 the public library in Brasov acquired a new space in the building that had housed the interwar Chamber of Commerce and Industry, disbanded after 1947. In between, the building hosted ARLUS (The Romanian Association for Strengthening Relations with the Soviet Union), the conference room having been turned into a cinema, presenting Stalin’s propaganda films. In the rest of the rooms politically obedient newspapers were edited. In 1965, however, due to the political shift, the building was turned into a public library, and the access to books was relaxed. The new directions, issued in 1960, imposed the following classification of book funds: common fund, documentation fund and special fund (Costea et al. 1995, 272-273, 302, 318). The documentation funds were formally abolished in 1968 (however, this was not the case in the public library of Brasov), but the secret (special) funds were maintained until 1989. The phenomenon was a mutato nomini, the “secret fund” being replaced by a “special fund”, while their essence remained the same. The guidelines designed in 1968 only recognize the current traffic funds and the special traffic funds, a classification maintained in the rules given in 1981. Prior to 1965, few people assumed the risk of reading the forbidden books without a pass for accessing the special fund. After 1970, the consultation became permissive, the restrictions being maintained particularly for the potential foreign readers. The writer and Professor Mircea Zaciu offers a testimony proving this relaxation, confessing in his diary that he took home, supported by a librarian, a book from the secret fund (Emil Cioran’s Schimbarea la faĠă a României [The Transfiguration of Romania], which was, accidentally or not, among Nicolae Ceauúescu’s own favourite readings). The hypothesis must however be tested with quantitative methods, requiring a broadening of the context of analysis. In this respect, the lists of those who had access to these funds can be revealing, as well as the index of citations of forbidden books. But even here precautions are necessary. Because, to give just two examples, in writing their synthesis, M. Muúat and I. Ardeleanu had several collaborators. At the Institute of History in Cluj the academician ùtefan Pascu, who was close to the

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regime, was however the only one who approved the consultation of books from the restricted fund (Costea et al. 1995, 329). As the context changed, many books which had been previously banned were reprinted after 1965 (containing, however, justifying prefaces and eliminated passages). The period involved a gradual decreasing of control over reading, although one could expect, especially after 1971,19 such measures to have been increasingly severe. For example, three writers, famous in communist Romania, but forced to take exile (Dumitru ğepeneag, Ben Corlaciu, Petru Popescu, to mention just three examples) had all their works forbidden once they left the country. Thus, at the “George BariĠiu” Library, their books were reinserted in the catalogues only after 1989. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the records are handwritten by a few people whose handwriting could be easily recognised. The records do not contain the usual red stripe marking their placement in the secret fund. We can thus assume that the operation took place under time pressure during the first months after December 1989. Most probably these books, as well as their catalogue records, were stored in a separate place. By contrast, books whose writers left the country a few years later (Gabriela Melinescu, Ion Caraion and George Astaloú, to offer just three examples), underwent a different situation. The records – in printed version – were maintained in the catalogues, marked at the top left with a blue stripe (not red, as before). In the last decade of communism there were not many books in the catalogue of the Braúov library to be listed for the special fund. The fact is surprising, because in July 28th 1983 and July 9th 1988 lists containing 36, respectively 152 banned authors were issued. Thus, Dorin Tudoran’s books (another writer forced to leave for exile) were not marked in any way in the catalogue, although the whole work of the writer was prohibited. Other examples for similar situations are Emil Hurezeanu and Vlad Georgescu, who were also abroad, acting openly against the communist regime at Western radio stations in order to maintain the Romanians’ hopes. Corneliu Vadim Tudor’s Saturnalii [Saturnalia] was also a tolerated volume, although it had been indexed following international protests (Caravia 2000, 518, 529), as it contained antiSemitic lyrics. Analysing the context (in the 1980s Romania’s basic provisions were scarce and precisely in Braúov a violent protest had contested in 1987 Ceauúescu’s regime), the matter seems almost irrelevant (particularly the banning of authors already living in “the free world”). In fact, things were more complicated. The purge was still a significant process in the 1980s. A number of documents related to the book purge have been identified for the period, although it is likely that the guidance

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on the process was mostly verbal. Those who fulfilled such orders were people of maximum confidence and scared enough not to disclose the operation. In some occasions, the librarians could take the initiative themselves: Adrian Marino, in a recent synthesis, gave credit to a radical formulation found in a document: “any librarian can purge ‘at any time he finds it fit’ a book considered not to correspond” (Marino 2000, 69). In the last years of dictatorship important changes took place in the readers’ behaviour, some of them predicting the end of the dictatorship, despite the fact that, as the historian Marius Oprea (a specialist in the methods applied by the Securitate, the Romanian communist secret services) argued in a TV program broadcasted by România Cultural TV channel, that the inquiries were equally brutal in the 1950s and in the final years of dictatorship. However, the readers’ behaviour during the late 1980s and their more overt opposition towards the system can be discovered due to some verbal testimonies of older librarians. A female museum curator referred to N. Ceauúescu’s books from the loan department, saying that they were to be purged to leave room for others. Banned authors were required openly by a physician, while a railway clerk used to come to the library each time with the same meaningful question. This habitual question (“Do you have Pacepa’s Orizonturi roúii [Red Horizons]?20”) was uttered in a loud voice for readers as well as the librarians to hear. Other readers used to cut out photos of the royal family from magazines and closely study the interwar period. There was probably some complicity on behalf of the librarians, lending subversive materials and remaining silent on these anti-system behaviours. Later inventories revealed that the most unused books belonged to the Marxist-Leninist classics. Marx was actually never properly and fully translated into Romanian and the Romanian students leaving abroad after 1990 noticed with amazement how much attention had been given in the West to his books, which used to be just quoted by the Romanian communists (without actually having read his work).

Conclusions After the demise of communism in 1989, its legacy survived in many ways. The scarcity of information, typical to communist press, was maintained after the Revolution: the events of the 13th to the 15th June 1990 can hardly be reconstructed from the press of the time, still subject to a complex manipulation process. Many issues from June 1990 (including the former official newspaper, Scânteia, maintained by the new regime and proving to be the main diversionist) cannot be found in the Romanian

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libraries (with the exception of Covasna and Harghita, Romanian counties where the Hungarian population is dominant), proving that censorship persisted. This happened only a few months after in many Romanian cities Ceauúescu’s works were burned. At the “George BariĠiu” Library in Braúov they were however preserved, paradoxically, by the same librarians who had witnessed the book purge in the late 1940s-1950s. The books thus protected can be used by historians to study the communist era. An interesting phenomenon connected to this is that the records in the early 1990s library catalogue did not include the name of the former president. In the same period however, in other libraries, an attempt was made to purge the writings of the collaborators of the regime (Dumitru Popescu-Dumnezeu,21 Dinu Săraru, etc.), a process taking place in parallel with the public recoveries of previously forbidden books. This mutual censorship seemed to have been typical for the entire Cold War period and still be maintained after it: in the U.S., for instance, the “communist” books disappeared from the libraries, even those printed by the United Nations or UNESCO. The Communist Manifesto could be read with difficulty and after Reagan’s election, the readers’ requests on the withdrawal of these books from libraries increased from 3-5 per week to 35 per day. More recently the readers are more preoccupied to obtain the withdrawal of the “obscene books” (the so-called “chaste libraries”) and low quality books (the so-called “contempt censorship”). The selection criteria was however problematic if even G. Orwell’s 1984 was blacklisted (Kuhlmann et al. 1999, 328, 329, 340). However, censorship within libraries often remains clandestine and difficult to study in all its details by historians (Kuhlmann et al. 1999, 237). Nonetheless, the attempt needs to be made and these books, no matter the period or reason for being censored, restored to public libraries.22

Works Cited 160 de ani de la înfiinĠarea primei biblioteci publice la Braúov 1835-1995. 1996. Braúov: Biblioteca “George BariĠiu”. Anghelescu, Hermina G.B. 2000. Public libraries in modern and contemporary Romania: Legacy of French patterns and Soviet influences, 1830-1990. PhD thesis (The University of Texas at Austin). —. 2001. “Romanian Libraries Recover after the Cold War: Communist Legacy and the Road Ahead,” Libraries & Culture 36: 233-252. Barthes, Roland. 1984. Le Bruissement de la langue. Essais critiques, IV. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

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Caravia, P., ed. 2000. Gândirea interzisă. Scrieri cenzurate România 1945-1989. Bucureúti: Editura Enciclopedică. Cartea CărĠilor interzise. 2003. Bucureúti: Victor Frunză. Chartier, R. 1998. Originile culturale ale revoluĠiei franceze. Timiúoara: Sedona. —. 1997. Lecturi úi cititori în FranĠa Vechiului Regim. Bucureúti: Editura Meridiane. Cornea, Andrei. 1988. Scriere úi oralitate în cultura antică. Bucureúti: Cartea Românească. Corobca, Liliana. 2010. Epurarea cărĠilor în România (1944-1964). Bucureúti: Tritonic. Costea, I., I. Kiraly, D. Radosav. 1995. Fond secret. Fond ,,S” special. ContribuĠii la istoria fondurilor secrete de bibliotecă din România. Studiu de caz. Biblioteca Central Universitară ,,Lucian Blaga” ClujNapoca. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia. Costea, I., I. Kiraly, D. Radosav. 1995. Fond secret. Fond S special. ContribuĠii la istoria fondurilor secrete de bibliotecă din România. Studiu de caz. Biblioteca Central Universitară “Lucian Blaga” ClujNapoca. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia. Darnton, Robert. 2000. Marele masacru al pisicii úi alte episoade din istoria culturală a FranĠei. Iaúi: Polirom. Eco, Umberto. 1996. Limitele interpretării. ConstanĠa: Pontica. Europa Centrală. Nevroze, dileme, utopii. 1997. Iaúi: Polirom. Ficeac, B. 1999. Cenzura comunistă úi formarea omului nou. Bucureúti: Nemira. Kuhlmann, M., N. Kuntzman, H. Bellour. 1999. Cenzura si bibliotecile în secolul XX. Timiúoara: Amarcord. Marino, A. 2000. Cenzura în România. SchiĠă istorică introductivă. Craiova: Aius. Mocanu, Marin Radu. 2001. Cenzura comunistă – documente. Bucureúti: Albatros. Ornea, Z. 1986. ViaĠa lui Titu Maiorescu, vol. I. Bucureúti: Cartea Românească. Petcu, Marian. 1999. Puterea úi cultura: o istorie a cenzurii. Iaúi: Polirom. Sora, Simona. 2008. “Bibliotecile spitalelor mele.” In Tovaraúe de drum. ExperienĠa feminină in communism, eds. Radu Pavel Gheo, Dan Lungu, 261-274. Iaúi: Polirom. Zaciu, M., M. Papahagi, and A. Sasu. 1998. DicĠionarul scriitorilor români, D-L. Bucureúti: Editura FundaĠiei Culturale Române.

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Notes 1

This paper was initially published, in a partial version, in Romanian, in the journal Xenopoliana, 2004. 2 Censorship has a long history, impossible to summarize in few lines. We will mention only two moments which offered the model for the twentieth century: in 1563 Pope Pius IV initiated the first catalogue of forbidden books, (Index librorum prohibitorum) published regularly until 1948 and suspended as late as 1966. In 1571 an Index expurgatorius librorum is also edited, explaining how suspicious fragments of tolerated books should be purged (Petcu 1999, 51). 3 For the issue of illiteracy, see also Chapter Ten in the current volume 4 This is however, debatable, as it depended on the local context. For instance, in a collection of female communist memoirs, Simona Sora writes about small libraries in her native town, Deva (hospital libraries, high school libraries etc.) as being privileged places, see Simona Sora, “Bibliotecile spitalelor mele”, in Radu Pavel Gheo and Dan Lungu, eds. 2008. Tovaraúe de drum. ExperienĠa feminină in communism, 261-274. Iaúi: Polirom. 5 There are moments in the history of libraries when such donations are invaluable. Thus, in Brasov, the descendants of the Muresianu family, a symbol of the local cultural elite, donated thousands of books and an almost complete archive of the newspaper Gazeta de Transilvania [The Transylvanian Gazette], the traditional local periodical. These were all transported to the public library during the night, with the complicity of then-library director (Ion Colan), “rewarded” later by the authorities (ğara Bârsei 2003, 12). The gesture was precipitated, as the authorities had suggested the family surrender the books to the paper mill in Zărneúti, in order to be destroyed. 6 When Hitler took over the power, students in Berlin organized a march with torches behind a truck loaded with 25,000 books. The procession reached the Operaplatz, where, in a symbolic gesture and uttering incantations, they burned these books on a pyre of logs. Thousands of people witnessed this, just like in Munich, where 70 000 people attended. The flames swept Emil Ludwig’s book, H.G. Wells’, along with the writings signed by the ideological opponents: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Kautsky. 7 The first mentions “Casa de citire Al. Bogdan” [The Al. Bogdan Reading House], a previous name of the library and the second “Oraúul Stalin Biblioteca Centrală Regională” [The City of Stalin: The Central Regional Library]. 8 Except for the titles in Hungarian, which were totally ignored, despite the fact that the library also had an interesting Hungarian fund. 9 The first mentions “Lupta poporului. RedacĠia. Suceava” [People’s Fight. The editorial board. Suceava] (mentioning number 17 in red ink on the cover), and the second “Biblioteca Cercului de Studii úi Documentare a Comitetului JudeĠean al P.C.R. nr. 32382” [The Library of the Circle of Study and Documentation of the Romanian Communist Party County Committee].

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Titles in Spanish also appear; the Hungarian titles were translated, being the only foreign language for which translations into Romanian were performed, more or less accurate. 11 The first pages are missing, including the famous preface often cited in studies written after 1990 and 402 pages containing titles of prohibited books. Instead, on one of the last pages it says: “Published in 1948, The Ministry of Arts and Information, Bucharest”. This was likely the most important list used in the book purge between 1945 and 1989. Moreover, given its importance in the history of censorship in Romania the 522 pages were recently reprinted in a book entitled Cartea CărĠilor interzise [The Book of Prohibited Books], Bucureúti: Editura Victor Frunză, 2003. The ideal expressed in the preface of the 1948 volume was a thorough purge, which meant those books should only remain in a few “official documentation libraries”, preserved for future historians. 12 On the inner cover there are five inventory check marks and a number (167104), given in handwriting, without a library stamp. 13 Until 1949 we cannot speak of secret library funds but just of forbidden publications, because the years 1945-1948 were of an obviously public nature. (Costea et al. 1995, 7, 38). Thus, in the titles of the 1945-1948 brochures the word “withdrawn” is used, while in 1948 it is replaced by “forbidden” and in 1949 by “not to be distributed”. 14 It actually contained 102 pages. 15 Th. Nica, Oaia de rasă Karakul, Bucureúti, 1941; N. Bălúanu, Nu înjuraĠi. Împotriva: hulelor, injuriilor, ocărilor, blestemelor, poreclelor, Bucureúti, 1943; D. Contescu, Hrănirea vacilor de lapte, Bucureúti, 1944; Oct. RaĠiu, Plantarea pomilor roditori, Bucureúti, 1943; Mulgerea raĠională úi îngrijirea (!) laptelui în micile gospodării, Bucureúti, 1944; Ajutorul URSS pentru România obĠinut de guvernul Groza, Bucureúti, Ministerul Propagandei, f.a.; Să alegem pe cei mai buni oameni ai muncii în consiliile de conducere a (!) cooperativelor, Bucureúti, Editura P.M.R., 1951; Adevărata faĠă a democraĠiei burgheze dezvăluită de scriitorii noútri, Bucureúti, Editura de Stat pentru Literatură úi Artă, 1952; Sărăcirea oamenilor muncii din Ġările capitaliste úi coloniale ca urmare a pregătirilor de război, Bucureúti, 1952; I. Adameúteanu, IntoxicaĠiile animalelor domestice, Bucureúti, Editura agro-silvică de stat, 1955; M. Iordache, ğesături pe gustul oamenilor muncii, Bucureúti, 1955; M. IoniĠă, Cum combatem rîia neagră a cartofului, Bucureúti, 1956; C. Adam, Pentru o producĠie de 50000000 hl lapte, Bucureúti, Ed. Politică, 1962; A. Ionete, Creúterea porcilor, Bucureúti, Editura agro-silvică, 1962; Ioan Baieú, Combaterea ciorilor (Cărticica plugarului nr. 17), f.a. 16 As an example, the 1948 brochure mentions the book Neamul românesc în Basarabia [The Romanian People in Bessarabia], Bucharest, 1905, which did not exist in the Braúov library. However, there was the volume Neamul românesc în Bucovina [The Romanian People in Bukovina], Bucharest, 1905, which did not appear in any brochures; however, the existing book was placed in the secret fund by the local censor. 17 Domniúoara din Strada Neptun [Little Miss on Neptune Street].

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18 ARLUS- Asociatia Romana pentru Strangerea Legaturilor cu Uniunea Sovietica (The Romanian Association for Strengthening Relations with the Soviet Union) 19 In 1971, Nicolae Ceauúescu issued the so-called July Theses, strengthening censorship and other control mechanisms. 20 The book, in English Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, by I. M. Pacepa (1987), was known to the Romanians due to Radio Free Europe. 21 Dumitru Popescu, nicknamed “Dumnezeu” [God] due to his influence and power of decision. 22 Some try even to create entire libraries dedicated to censored books, such as the son of a Nazi leader is attempting to do, with the complete works of the authors forbidden during the “bibliocaust”, over 10,000 books.

CONTRIBUTORS

Florin Abraham (PhD in History) is Senior Researcher at the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism (of the Romanian Academy) and a member of the Collegium of The National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (C.N.S.A.S.). Areas of interest: history of communism, methodology of scientific research, international relations. Recent works: Romania 1945/1989. The Encyclopedia of Communist Regime. Repression, volumes 1-2, The National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism, Bucharest, 2011-2012 (co-author). Àlex Amaya Quer (PhD in History) defended his doctoral thesis at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, UAB. He received the Miguel Artola Award from the Spanish Association of Contemporary History in 2011 and the Extraordinary Doctorate Award of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of the UAB in 2012. Currently a member of the Institute of International Studies at the “Babeú-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Amaya Quer is a specialist in press and propaganda in contexts of dictatorship, having published in major journals such as Hispania, Ayer and Historia y Política. María Luz Arroyo Vázquez, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at the National University of Distance Learning UNED in Madrid (Spain). Her main research interests are focused on the reception of American culture in twentieth century Spanish periodicals. Amongst her most interesting publications are “La llegada al poder de F.D. Roosevelt en 1933: su eco en la prensa madrileña.” (1994), along with Antonia Sagredo. “Mujeres en el espacio de poder político estadounidense” Mujeres, espacio & poder (2004), “La retórica de la prensa conservadora y obrera de la Segunda República española ante la conflictividad huelguística en los Estados Unidos.” Usos públicos de la Historia: Comunicaciones al VI Congreso de la Asociación de Historia Contemporánea (2002), “El poder de la oratoria: el impacto del discurso de Barack H. Obama en la opinión pública.” Epos: Revista de filología (2008), or the comprehensive volume History and culture of the United States (Antonia Sagredo Santos & María Luz Arroyo Vázquez eds.) (2007).

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Elena Domínguez Romero, PhD, is Lecturer at the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). Domínguez’s current research deals partly with Early Modern English Literature and its reception in Spain, as well as Elizabethan Miscellanies and translation. Her book La miscelánea poética como narración implícita en el Renacimiento Inglés: Los casos de “Englands Helicon” (1600-1614) was published in 2005 by Huelva University Press, and she is soon to publish a critical edition of the pastoral anthology England’s Helicon (1600, 1614). A selection of recent publications in this field includes: “Reading the Helicon Collage: Hidden Stories in the Collected Fragments” (2011), “Elizabeth’s Visual Speeches and the Political Power of Self-Representation and Chastity in Sixteenth Century Female Rulers” (2011), “Caliban and Ferdinand’s blending: two ways of servitium under the same speech model in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest” (2011), “Queen Elizabeth: The Hero-Politician / Lady of Helicon” (2010), “Is it the Editor’s Taste or the Word’s Life?” (2009), and “Some Considerations on William Shakespeare’s “editorial hand” in the pastoral anthology Englands Helicon (1600-1614)” (2008). Dr. Domínguez is also author of “Shakespeare and the Achievement of Love in Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana and Gaspar Gil Polo Diana Enamorada” (2007), “Some Considerations on the Pastourelle in Shakespeare's As You Like It” (2004). Joám Evans Pim, PhD, is Senior Researcher at the Center for Global Nonkilling in Hawaii (United States). Evans completed graduate and undergraduate studies in Journalism, Anthropology and Political Science (Peace Studies and International Security). After lecturing on Media Studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), he was appointed Director of the Arab and Islamic Studies Program at Menéndez Pelayo International University until moving to the Center for Global Nonkilling, a Hawaiian-based nonprofit organization. He is also President of the Galician Institute for International Security and Peace Studies, editor of the journal Asteriskos, and founding member of the Galician Academy of the Portuguese Language. His recent publications include Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm (2009), and Nonkilling Societies (2010). Adrian Healy is Researcher at the University College of Cork (Ireland). Adrian Healy, Gaeltacht native speaker in the area of West Cork, lectured at the University of A Coruña (Spain) after completing his postgraduate studies at the University College of Cork in 2007. His is currently researching on Frei Martín Sarmiento at the University of Santiago de Compostela, versatile Galician Enlightenment writer and the

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impact of Enlightenment in Atlantic peripheral communities such as the North-Western regions of Spain and Ireland. He is also a research contributor at the University Institute of Research in Irish Studies, University of A Coruña (Spain). Manuela Marin, PhD is a postdoctoral researcher at the “BabeúBolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She got her PhD in Romanian contemporary history in 2008. Her main research interest is related to Nicolae Ceauúescu’s regime and his cult of personality, on which she published a book, Originea úi evoluĠia cultului personalităĠii lui Nicolae Ceausescu 1965-1989 [The Origin and the Evolution of Nicolae Ceausescu’s cult of personality]. She is currently working on a book on popular resistance to Ceausescu’s cult of personality. Andi Mihalache, PhD, is a researcher at the “A. D. Xenopol” History Institute, Iaúi, Romania (at the History of Culture Department). He defended his PhD thesis in 2001 on history and discursive practices in communist Romania (1948-1965), work which received an award from the Romanian Academy. His studies also cover the history of historiography, history of communism and the history of patrimony awareness. He received two Alexander von Humboldt fellowships. Other volumes on communism, respectively on the Romanian royal dynasty are Pe urmele lui Marx. Studii despre comunism úi consecinĠele sale (2005) and Mănuúi albe, mănuúi negre. Cultul eroilor în vremea dinastiei Hohenzollern (2007). Daniel Nazare, PhD, defended his doctoral thesis in History at the University of Iaúi, Romania, in 2007. He is the head of the Public Library “G. BariĠiu” since 2008. His studies and areas of interest cover cultural history, Slavic Studies and local history, including censorship in Romania and censured books in the libraries under the Communist Regime. Ruxandra Moaúa Nazare, PhD defended her doctoral thesis in history at the University of Bucharest (2005), on an analysis of cultural history. The book, on the Commercial Education in South Eastern Transylvania in the Early Modern Age was later published by the Romanian Academy publishing house in Bucharest. She works at the Special Collections Department at the “G. BariĠiu” Public Library of Brasov. Her work covers the history of local press and she wrote some articles focused on Gazeta Transilvaniei, particularly during the interwar period and the Second World War (discussing press under a military authoritarian political regime).

INDEX

ABC, 59, 62, 63, 67, 75, 93, 99. Acción Española, 67, 123. Advisor, 160-162, 165, 167, 169. Alfonso XII, 58. Allies (Allied), 6, 41, 42, 54, 63, 80, 88, 89, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 126, 166, 191, 204. Anglophilia, 80, 82, 88-89, 93. Antonescu, Ion, 23, 25, 39, 40, 53. Arias-Salgado, Gabriel, 37, 52. Arriba, 36, 51, 63, 67, 83. Atlantism, 71, 109. Basque Country, 68, 78, 85, 86. Bibliocaust, 215-216, 226. Book burning, 216. Bourbon (Borbón), 3, 13, 51. Bourdieu, J., 56, 68. BBC, 88, 90, 114. Byron, Lord, 64, 78, 81. Carlists, 34, 51, 52. Castile, 67. Castro, Plácido Ramón, 106, 109, 110-112, 114. Catalonia, 64, 68, 70, 72, 78, 79, 85. Ceauúescu, Nicolae, 10, 12, 25, 26, 45, 217, 219, 220, 221-222, 226. Cela, Camilo José, 64, 67, 79. Celticism, 68, 71, 79, 106-107. “Chiabur”, 160, 163-164, 166, 167, 172. Chiúinevschi, Iosif, 41, 42, 44, 4647, 53, 54. Cold War, 17, 19-20, 23, 27, 41, 65, 80, 88, 127, 131, 133, 166, 172, 176, 178, 180, 186, 222. Collectivization, 7, 8, 9, 157, 160. Comparative Studies, 28, 185. Competing identities, 21, 25. Consensus, 4-5, 19, 32.

Constantinescu, Miron, 9, 42, 44, 53. Constantinescu-Iaúi, Petre, 41, 53, 180, 184, 185. Contemporanul, 130. Counter-propaganda, 87. Coup d'état, 39, 60. CPR/Communist Party of Romania, 5-6, 13, 39-43, 53. Cultural Supplements, 63, 65, 70, 190. Cunqueiro, Álvaro, 64, 66-67, 78, 79, 100. De Arrese, José Luis, 37. Defascistisation, 44, 63. Delibes, Miguel, 67. Depression, 119. Dumitriu, Petru, 144, 146, 147, 166. El Debate, 59, 99, 123. El Pueblo Gallego, 69, 83, 84, 107, 110, 113. El Socialista, 84, 123, 124. Ercilla, Jesus, 38, 52. Even-Zohar, I., 69, 71, 72. Falangist, 3, 34-38, 46-47, 51, 52, 61, 127. Phalange, 4, 13, 20, 23, 26, 33-38, 51, 52, 63, 69, 83. Faro de Vigo, 69-70. Fascism, 3, 4, 13, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 37, 39, 40, 46, 47, 61, 124. FE, 35. FET and JONS, 3, 4, 26, 33, 34-35, 37-38, 47, 51, 52. Flacăra, 130, 144, 147, 149. Folklore, 65, 66, 100, 107. Fraga, Manuel, 59.

Press, Propaganda and Politics Franco, Francisco, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 46, 49, 51, 52, 60, 66, 80, 81, 87, 90, 92, 93. Francoism, 4, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 62, 80, 114, 127. Fundamental Laws, 3. Gaelic League, 108, 110, 111. Galicianism, 107. Gazeta Transilvaniei/GT, 189-212. Generalísimo, 2. Generation of ’98, 60. Georgescu, Teohari, 7, 10, 41, 45. Germanophilia, 89. Germany, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 16, 18, 23, 24, 26, 34, 37, 39, 41, 46, 52, 62, 80, 88, 89, 96, 100, 101, 102, 102, 104, 126, 178, 191, 204, 209, 215. Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 9, 10, 25, 39, 41, 43, 174, 175, 176, 178, 181, 217. Gibraltar, 81, 90. Giménez-Arnau, José Antonio, 35, 36, 52. Great National Assembly, 168. Groza, Petru, 6, 40, 41, 42. Historiography, 5, 23, 42, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 186, 187. Hitler, Adolf, 3, 13, 22, 62, 203, 205, 215, 224. Hölderlin, 100. Ibárruri, Dolores (Pasionaria), 45, 54. Italy, 3, 4, 5, 13, 16, 18, 24, 26, 34, 37, 46, 52, 62, 80, 97, 185, 204, 209. King Michael I/Mihai I, 39, 43, 214. La Vanguardia, 63, 67, 70, 124. Lenin(ism), 7, 25, 26, 27, 28, 62, 133, 145, 148, 157, 175, 180, 181, 182, 186, 221, 224. Leonte Răutu, 42, 51, 53.

231

Linguistic communities, 64, 68, 71, 72. Linguistic repression, 65, 114-115. Literary column, 58, 69, 70, 79. Luca, Vasile, 9, 41, 45. Lupta De Clasă, 45, 155. Manipulation, 130, 134-142, 149, 207, 221. Marx(ism), 7, 10, 25, 26, 27, 30, 72, 181, 185. Mitteleuropa, 100. Mussolini, Benito, 3, 13, 20, 22, 23, 46, 62, 90, 204. Narrative Identity, 159. Nationalism, 10, 22, 26, 27, 28, 39, 41, 63, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 114, 177, 184, 205. NATO, 81. Neutrality, 24, 80, 89, 103. New Deal, 117-127. New Journalism, 65, 66, 84, 85. New Man, 8, 12, 19, 25, 148, 157. NIRA, 119, 121, 122. Nós, 68, 69, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115. Nós Generation, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115. Pătrăúcanu, LucreĠiu, 9, 12, 41, 45, 47. Pauker, Ana, 9, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 176. Peripheral, 5, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72. Political socialization, 8, 157, 158. Popular Council, 168-169. Pre-publication censorship, 60. Press Act of 1966, 60, 67. Primo de Rivera, 23, 33, 51, 61, 62, 91. Proletkult, 42, 54. Pueblo, 38, 52, 63, 83, 84. Purge, 42, 43, 52, 146, 149, 213, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 225. Rădescu, Nicolae, 40. Regionalism, 78, 101, 104.

232

Republican Government, 60. Ridruejo, Dionisio, 36, 52. Risco, Vicente, 100, 107, 109, 113, 114. Roller, Mihai, 42, 53, 173, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181. Romanian Historical Discourse, 180. Romanian Workers’ Party, 6, 43, 156, 174, 181. Romanticism, 58, 81. Salvador Merino, Gerardo, 36, 37, 38, 47, 52. Sănătescu, Constantin, 40, 53. Sanjurjo, 60. Sanz Orrio, Fermin, 38. Săteanca, 156-173. Scânteia, 42, 43, 44, 45, 53, 54, 143, 164, 221. Secret Funds, 213-226. Self-censorship, 52, 191, 195, 201. Serrano Súñer, Ramón, 34, 35, 36, 52, 127, 128. Shakespeare, William, 64, 73, 78, 80-95. Social Control, 32, 37. Socialism, 19, 21, 32, 40, 47, 147, 148, 157, 160. Sovietisation, 7, 10, 130, 131, 141, 143. Spanish-American War, 103. Stakhanovist, 164.

Index

Stalin(ism), 9, 12, 18, 19, 20, 28, 30, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53, 134, 135, 148, 174, 175, 176, 178, 182, 184, 186, 187, 203, 205, 213, 215, 217, 219, 224. Studii, 173-188. Toma, Sorin, 44, 54, 143. Totalitarianism, 4, 17, 18, 19, 20, 28, 134. Tovar, Antonio, 35, 36, 52. Translation, 63, 67, 70, 71, 78, 79, 81, 82, 106, 109, 110, 112, 113, 138, 156, 178, 225. United Nations, 24, 81, 89, 222. United States, 18, 24, 26, 52, 66, 72, 80, 81, 88, 89, 91, 103, 117, 119, 120-128, 204. USSR/Soviet Union, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 26, 30, 39, 40, 45, 46, 53, 54, 80, 130, 134, 136, 138, 139, 142, 147, 154, 156, 166, 176, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 219, 226. Vyshinsky, Andrey, 41, 42, 46. World War I, 16, 62, 117, 184. World War II, 4, 13, 17, 23, 24, 26, 42, 46, 54, 63, 64, 72, 79, 80, 82, 88, 119, 120, 166, 176, 190, 207, 215. Ya, 60, 63. Yzurdiaga, Fermín, 34, 35, 47, 51.