There was a report in Saturday’s Guardian concerning the recruitment of thousands of Romanian children by the Securitate to spy on schoolfriends, parents and teachers. I have read this article again and I still find it hard to contemplate the sheer callousness and paranoia of a state that would engage in such blatant child abuse..
According to communist-era archives the children were blackmailed into becoming informers in the late 1980s, as the whiff of liberalisation in the Soviet bloc prompted Ceausescu to tighten his grip on the country.
The files have shocked Romanians and prompted calls for an inquiry into why many of the agents who allegedly recruited the child spies continued working for the security services after Ceausescu was toppled and executed in 1989.
Romanian historian Marius Oprea unearthed a cache of such files in the Transylvanian town of Sibiu, which was run like a fiefdom in the 1980s by Ceausescu's son, Nicu. "In Sibiu in 1989, the Securitate recruited 830 informers and of these 170 were under 18," said Mr Oprea. "On the basis of Sibiu, you could say that perhaps 15% of the whole country's informers were children."
Historians believe the Securitate had hundreds of thousands of collaborators on its books by 1989, as Soviet power faded across eastern Europe. "What kind of information could these children give, except on family, teachers and so on?" asked Mr Oprea. "This shows that, by then, the Securitate was being used to control its own, ordinary people."
The children were expected to tell their Securitate handlers about their friends' and families' opinions on the Communist party, and whether they listened to western radio stations, had contact with foreigners or made jokes about Ceausescu.
The secret police targeted intelligent and sporty children, whose participation in teams and clubs gave them access to many teachers, other children and their parents. everal alleged recruiters were promoted through the ranks of the secret police after 1989, and some brought their young spies to work alongside them when they left school.
Mr Oprea found evidence of the child-spy programme soon after 1989, but found no appetite for such revelations among the ex-communists who seized power after Ceausescu's demise, and stayed quiet for 15 years. Only when reformers ousted the old guard in 2004 elections did the Securitate archive begin opening.
Romania
Securitate
Informer
7 comments:
"The files have shocked Romanians" - not really, they knew it. I hope _these_ files will never be made public, ever.
I am fortynate to live in a country where this has not happened. I find the idea of using children like that revolting. I shudder to think how these children live with the consequences
Ceausescu's regime wasn't the only one to use children as informers. Stalin's regime did the same. A particularly sordid was the tale of Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his own father in 1932, and was killed in turn by his relatives. For decades, he was hailed as a Soviet hero.
Little Pavlik, that story always appealled to me, though it was a bit different: and as I read he is still hailed by some. Heil...!
Thanks for this post Sonia, I was racking my brains trying to remember the name of that boy. Cheers!
My Bulgarian friend often recounts the tales of growing up under a Communist regime, and the childhood baggage she'll always have from it. Reminds me of Animal Farm, where the pigs spirit away the young puppies and indoctrinate them to do their bidding and kill anyone who dares to disagree.
How genius was Orwell?
And yet there are too many in the west who will not see the communist regimes for what they were elasticwaistbandlady
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