Ceaușescu And The Securitate: Coercion And Dissent In Romania, 1965 1989

"This is the first extensive work in any language on Ceausescu's secret police, the Securitate. From the imposition of Communist rule in Romania in 1945, the organisation and activity of the Securitate remained shrouded in secrecy, and only since the overthrow of Ceausescu in December 1989 has some information become available. This has been published in the Romanian press, but there has been no systematic study of the Securitate's history. Dennis Deletant is the only non-Romanian scholar to have been granted wide access to the Securitate archives and this book is based partly on the fruits of his labours there. He has also drawn on the memoirs, some unpublished, of several victims of the Communist terror of the 1950s, and conducted interviews with many of the prominent dissidents of the Ceausescu regime, some of whom he got to know well during 1980s."--Jacket Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Acknowledgements -- Table of Contents -- Map -- Preface -- 1. Police Terror and the Imposition of Communist Rule -- 2. The Securitate and the Removal of Opposition, 1948-1965 -- 3. From Terror to Fear: Nicolae Ceauşescu and the Securitate, 1965-1978 -- 4. Ceauşescu's Appeal to National Sentiment: The Case of Transylvania -- 5. Cultivating Support: The Role of Bessarabia -- 6. Compliance -- 7. Dissent -- 8. Central Planning as Coercion: Systematisation -- 9. The Securitate and Repression, 1978-1989 -- 10. Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index First Published in 2017. This book contains Deletant's research and view that an inescapable feature of life in Romania under Ceausescu was the ubiquity of the Securitate or the security police, known officially for much of the period as the Department of State Security of the Ministry of the Interior. He seeks to right the omission in Romanian literature, until now, of the mechanism of terror which Stalin used in Romania to enforce his will and about the organisation of the Department of State Security.