Centre for Romanian Studies

Guilty:
“You are guilty of the spiritual impoverishment of the individuals, of their intellectual sterility, of the stifling of their personal duty, as well as of the creativity and inventiveness with which our people have been endowed. When they are treated as objects, deprived of their dignity, locked up in existentialist structures which do not suit them, paralized by the fear of the repressive regime, . Human beings end up behaving as objects. You are responsible for the physical debility of millions of citizens whom you have constrained through unheard of deprivations – of foodstuff, of heating, of medicines. The degrading of the human factor (the subversion of values, the egocentrism, the corruption) has jointly contributed, together with your political and economic errors, to the decadence of institutions, to the bankruptcy of trade and Industry, to the ruin of agriculture. Furthermore, you are also responsible for the demolition of churches and of prestigious historical monuments, of the falsifying and destruction of our past and lately of the destruction of our villages and of our rural traditions. In the historical past, our princes were building churches, after each military victory and perhaps sometime even after their defeat. You yourself, you are demolishing them, instead.”
(Doina Cornea (b. 1930), University Lecturer, Dissident)
(Open Letter to Nicolae Ceausescu, 23rd August 1988,
broadcast the same day on “Radio Free Europe” and published in Doina Cornea’s “Liberte?”, Eds Criterion, Paris, 1990)

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