On the “counter-revolutionary” front stood the flower of. The Romanian nation. with the front ranks occupied by students and young intellectuals. Mostly of peasant or middle-class origin. The young people had been anti-Communist for years prior to the direct confrontation with the invaders . For the Russians have always been looked upon as such — possibly because of the national instinct. or their education. or a natural pride. The reasons for this anti-Communist posture are. As various as are the forms taken throughout the whole anti-Communist struggle.
Confronted by this situation
Completely disregarding all principles of social ethics. human decency. and the Peace Treaty of Paris. which supposedly guaranteed freedom of speech. they unleashed a wave of arrests. Every social stratum of Romania contributed its share of victims. but the hardest hit were the students. How many of them passed under the “protection” of the police. one cannot tell. From 1948. then. until the present time. violent repression of discontent has continued.
Its intensity depending on the perspicacity of the Securitate’s informers or on increase or decrease of the people’s resignation to their fate. For manner and magnitude. The arrests of the night of May 14/15. 1948 remain memorable. For on that one night. in the three most important university centers (Bucharest. Iasi and Cluj) no fewer than 1.000 students were arrested. This figure represents about 2% of all students at the time.
Used by the in the interrogation of prisoners
For months. the military tribunals pronounced sentences prepared by the Ministry of the Interior in advance of the “trials”. either behind job function email list closed doors or in public for the benefit of journalists and Party activists. Sentences ranged from hard labor for life down to five years’ imprisonment. Sentences of only two or three years were extremely rare and given only where there was no evidence at all against the accused.
Using a method long practiced in the U. S. S. R.. that of segregating prisoners according to their professional background and intellectual capacity. the Communists in Romania grouped the students in a category apart from the others. and you are a doctor and you don’t know how to answer all these questions designated as their place for detention the prison at Pitesti. This measure served another purpose. also — that of preventing them from exercising their influence (which was considerable) over the great number of peasants and workers who continually swelled the ranks of political prisoners. The influence of the students in Romanian society after the Second World War was as great as it had been before the war.
One single fact is worthy of note here
Among the large numbers of arrested virgin islands mobile data students. hardly any were of minority origin! The “class struggle” theory here was undeniably violated. According to the theory. of course. the enemies of Communism would have included large numbers of the foreign ethnic groups that enjoyed a favored economic position prior to the takeover and had presumably suffered correspondingly great economic losses with the liquidation of “capitalism. “