Rock 'n' roll nation: counterculture and dissent in Romania, 1965–1975

Abstract

A vibrant countercultural and dissident movement developed in Romania between 1965 and 1975. Young Romanians combined elements of the global youth movement with local cultural and political practices. Thus, Romanian counterculture and dissent shared the era's hippie aesthetic and anti-authoritarianism, but was highly isolationist, vehemently antisocialist and heavily couched in the language of the nation and nationalism. Furthermore, during this early Ceauşescu period, the socialist regime attracted some level of nonconformist support through a program of reform, opposition to Soviet interference, and nationalist rhetoric. These conclusions demonstrate that the rubric of 1960s counterculture needs to be extended to include a variety of ideological and cultural positions beyond the New Left that scholars generally emphasize. Furthermore, scholarly avoidance of Ceauşescu's early period has obscured the existence of an alternative culture, and has led to an un-nuanced interpretation of Romania's postwar history.

Keywords:

• counterculture
• dissidents
• 1960s
• nationalism
• Romania

Notes

In 1968, Laurenţiu Toma was the director of the Grigore Preoteasa student center where the demonstrations originated. As a firsthand witness and participant, his interview (Toma) is an important source for understanding this event.

This article is unusual in examining the early, relatively liberal Ceauşescu era of the mid- and late-1960s. Scholars usually ignore this period in favor of discussing Ceauşcscu's repression during the 1980s, or Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's totalitarian dictatorship of the 1950s. This tendency has seemingly resulted from a reluctance to acknowledge nuance in the Ceauşescu regime, but has also ensured that Romania's dissidents and nonconformists have gone all but unnoticed.

For an example of the argument that there was no counterculture in Romania during the 1960s, see Klimke and Scharloth 199.

Paulina Bren has made a similar argument about Czechoslovakian students. “being ambivalent towards Western student movements” (125).

By contrast, much of the literature on 1960s counterculture emphasizes the transnational “universal dimension” of the global movement. For example, see Fink et al. 21.

The hippie movement appeared in many Eastern Bloc countries, including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland. However, Romanians appear to have been uninterested in examples of the hippie movement anywhere besides Western Europe or America, which served as their models.

Official Romanian youth culture was a highly regimented, tightly controlled effort to construct the next generation of loyal, socialist citizens. Through the Union of Communist Youth (Uniunea Tineretului Comunist) and its subsidiary branch, the Union of Communist Student Associations (Uniunea Asociaţiilor Studenţilor Comunişti din Româniă), the Communist Party provided funding and structure for almost every conceivable youth activity, ranging from camping trips to photo exhibitions and literature competitions. (For more information, see: Ministry of Education 39) Romanians were supposed to be inculcated with the ideology of socialism, a patriotic spirit and the moral values appropriate to the new socialist man. (For more information, see: the “Statute of Communist Students' Associations” collection).

Andrei Codrescu presents an interesting argument about the creative possibilities of culture production along the margins of official society in his The Disappearance of the Outside.

A number of scholars have questioned the extent to which Western 1960s counterculture was actually antithetical to mainstream culture, since listening to rock music or wearing blue jeans required participation in the very capitalist system that young people claimed to oppose (Caute xiii). Romanian counterculture involved a similar ambiguity between behaving rebelliously and literally working against the socialist state. Attending rock concerts, for example, necessitated patronizing a student center or concert hall owned and operated by the state.

The Communist regime adopted a more politicized interpretation of counterculture. Although authorities were forced to make some concessions to popular youth culture, especially in the area of rock music, they remained highly suspicious of the subversive potential of all nonofficial culture.

Paul Goma was perhaps socialist Romania's best-known dissident. After being imprisoned for two years for supporting the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Goma gradually rose to prominence in Romania's academic and literary world. He became the center of controversy in 1971 after the West German publication of his novel, Ostinato, which discussed Romanian police abuses. Goma further incurred the wrath and harassment of Romanian authorities by complaining to the foreign media about conditions in Romania, and his treatment by the police and censors. He renewed his controversial reputation in 1977 by signing the Czechoslovakian dissident manifesto Charter 77, and publicly urging other Romanians to do the same. Goma was swiftly arrested and tortured by the Romanian secret police (the Securitate), before an international campaign led to his release and exile in France. For more information see Dennis Deletant's Ceauşescu and the Securitate.

Doru Ionescu is a researcher and producer at Televiziunea Română in Bucharest, Romania. He has written a book and produced numerous television series on the topic of rock music in Romania. Through his research and interviews he has become an authority on the topic of Romanian rock music.

Official documentation of the Romanian countercultural movement is limited. Thus, this article necessarily uses personal interviews as an important source. George Stanca was an enthusiastic participant in the Romanian hippie movement, and possesses a large body of knowledge about counterculture.

Cornel Chiriac was a Romanian radio DJ and music producer from 1967 until 1969 when he defected to West Germany, where he worked as a commentator for Radio Free Europe. Chiriac's broadcasts from Romania, and later from Germany, played an important part in popularizing Western counterculture among Romanian youth.

Lidia Creangă Rich provided a personal interview that was an important source for this article. Rich was a hippie and drummer for the all-female rock band, Catena Grup from 1968 to 1977. She possesses extensive knowledge about Romanian rock music, and about the hippie movement.

The hippies were one of several related, Western subcultures and groups in the 1960s and 1970s that could be considered countercultural or dissident. Other examples include gay subcultures, the Black Power movement and the Yippies. Research for this article has only provided evidence of a hippie subculture in Romania, though others most likely existed. This research also did not produce evidence that the 1950s Beat Generation subculture existed separately from the 1960s hippie movement in Romania. Romania was extremely repressive and isolated during the 1950s, making it highly unlikely that young Romanians were able to access Beat culture before the mid-1960s. In fact, former hippies discussed reading Kerouac around the same time that they heard their first Beatles album, making what were two distinct, if spiritually linked subcultures in the West part of the same counterculture in Romania. See Underground Remix.

Jan Palach was a Czechoslovakian student who publically set himself on fire in January 1969, as a protest against the 1968 Soviet invasion. Palach died of his injuries a few days later, but is considered a national hero. See Chapter 8 in Padraic Kenney's A Carnival of Revolution.

See the writings of Abbie Hoffman, for example.

Herta Müller has received international acclaim for her books exploring life under authoritarianism. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, in recognition of her body of work.

The New Left was an intellectual and political movement specific to the 1960s and 1970s that originated in disappointment with the bureaucracy and authoritarianism of the traditional Communist parties. The New Left tended to embrace spontaneous action and an anarchic distrust of institutions, ideology, and power. See Caute (33).

Romania's early socialist period was characterized by a police state that terrorized the population with purges, show trials, imprisonment and torture. See Vladimir Tismăneanu's Stalinism for All Seasons.

It should be noted however, that the film's ultimate conclusion was not a rousing indictment of the socialist system. Rather, the film's dictator eventually comes to a grudging understanding with the Party member he once condemned to a prison camp, and it is implied that a new, more open era is about to begin under the leadership of a character meant to represent Ceauşescu.

For example, Alexandru Ivasiuc's Knowledge of Night or Paul Goma's Ostinato.

American counterculture showed a similar interest in utilizing folk traditions as a way of challenging the class and racial hierarchies associated with the concept of “high art,” or as a subversion of mainstream art forms and aesthetics. See Harding and Rosenthal (6).

Much of the work of nineteenth-century poet Mihai Eminescu was fiercely nationalist. Romania's World War II-era fascist movement, the ultranationalist Iron Guard, considered Eminescu to be an early contributor to their movement. See Nagy-Talavera (249–50).

Since this poem does not have political lyrics, it is unlikely that Mondial was trying to promote a fascist agenda. Still, the band members' willingness to borrow unhesitatingly from one of their country's ugliest eras showed that the extreme nationalist past held a definite attraction as a means of rebellion against the socialist regime.

Here, Păunescu means the Romanian nation.

Research conducted for this article produced no evidence that Romanian counterculture had a significant connection to countercultures in other socialist countries. Neither interviews nor the contemporary student press revealed any serious attention to youth cultures outside of Western Europe or America.

For example, the film Reconstituirea as previously cited in this paper.