Word: romanians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Vlad Georgescu, a Romanian historian, had more opportunities than most of his countrymen. As a professor in Romania, he was able to travel to the West and meet regularly with intellectuals and scholars at American universities such as Columbia and Berkeley. This contact with Western thinkers gave him unique support when he was expelled from his country this spring. The Romanian government did not like his attempt to create a movement for democracy and a Free Romanian University, which were considered signs of discontent and upheaval among intellectuals. Georgescu was arrested and exiled. While at Harvard this summer, Georgescu commented...
...Romania, very few people have access to material, information and ideas coming from the West. "Students are cut off from European culture and civilization which has been the traditional form of evolution in Romania," he says, adding that "stagnation and indoctrination are taking hold." Yet today the average Romanian scholar is unable to travel or study abroad...
Georgescu's message to Romanian intellectuals is "to speak out: intellectuals have the duty to speak up when they are there." There is a faint hope given by a few courageous dissidents, but in general the prospects for changes are just plain bad. "The only way is to leave," he concludes...
...Romanians accept a rigid party control and internal monopoly of power by Ceaucescu and his entourage including a fulsome personality cult) in return for a sense of national pride and independence unique in their history of foreign domination. The Russians put up with the luxury of a separate Romanian 'place in the sun', secure in the knowledge that no Prague spring of liberalisation will appear on the streets of Bucharest. With Ceaucescu playing the nationalism and religion cards so skillfully, dissident opposition is weak...
...autonomous Romanian Orthodox Church, historically a focus for national identity, is allowed a privileged if not official role in the State: in return, the Patriarch and his fellow bishops acknowledge their part in "building up Socialism," and confine their interests to liturgical and non-political activity. The regime remains one of the tightest and most Stalinist in the Communist world--and it is there that the trade-off lies...