Just looked in Wikipedia for the page of Leonte Timsnăneaun (born Leonid Tisminetski)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonte_Tism%C4%83neanu
"In 1948, Tisminetski and his family were sent to Soviet-occupied Romania, where he changed his name in 1949 to Leonte Tismăneanu, at the request of the PCR(Romanian Communist Party).[5] He was named deputy director of Editura PMR (Romanian Worker's Party's), later Editura Politică, the publishing house of the Communist Party[6] and also held the Chair of Marxism-Leninism at the University of Bucharest.[1]"
He used to be the head of Communist Romania's main publishing house as stated above. Teacher of Marxism-Leninism at the University. We know at least one case where he was an investigator into a high profile case resulting in the imprisoning of a Romanian student that later became a known dissident and writer although controversial after year 2005 Paul Goma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Goma
"Controversies
Some of Goma's post-2005 articles and essays have been criticized for their strong
antisemitic nature.
[10][11] Goma rejects these criticisms
[12] and claims that he has filed
libel lawsuits against his accusers.
[13] He asserts that his wife is Jewish and states that similar arguments were used against him by the
Securitate in the 1980s.
[14] On January 30, 2007, Goma was awarded the "Citizen of Honor" distinction by the Municipal Council of
Timişoara. In February 2007, the
Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania and the
Israeli Embassy protested against the distinction, arguing that Paul Goma is the author of multiple antisemitic articles.
[15]
On April 5, 2006 he was invited to become a member of the
Tismăneanu Commission,
[16] a body charged with researching the crimes of the communist dictatorship in Romania. Nine days later he was dismissed by the Commission's president,
Vladimir Tismăneanu, who explained the exclusion based on Goma's questioning the moral and scientific credibility of the president of the Commission, and disclosing of their private correspondence.
[16][17]"
In 1952 when in 10th grade he was detained by Securitate for 8 days for speaking out about
Romanian anti-communist partisans and for keeping a
coded personal journal...
http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Paul_Goma#Dissident_in_Romania
In 1956 was arrested for being "part of the
Bucharest student movement of 1956:
during a seminar, he read out to other students parts of a novel he had
written about a student who establishes a movement that is similar to
the ones in Hungary" He did 2 years of prison in Jilava and Gherla, where Vişinescu was apparently inspector in that period of time. Tismăneanu was among those who inquired him.
Vişinescu does not have a Wikipedia page but Leonte Tismăneanu does. Why? Vişinescu was a low level semi-literate prison inspector and later prison manager doing the dirty jobs Tismăneanu and others of his kind ordered.
23 years after the revolution, Tismăneanu's son, Vladimir, now a
teacher of Comparative Politics at Maryland University who has a much bigger page in Wikipedia suddenly remembered of Vişinescu, now 88 and started accusing him of executing his father's orders as himself plainly states:
"Securistul nu are convingeri, el sau ea executa (la propriu si la figurat)."
"The Securist does not have convictions, he or she executes (literally or figuratively)"
http://www.revista22.ro/articol-29549.html
(The word Securistul is hard to translate into English. Part due to the confounding with the English word security that the first one has little to do with.)
Securist is the word used to describe the most villain characters in the time of communism, the most hated, the most infamous, often killers and torturous, at least in the first years. Also the most visible. Recruited from the lowest levels of the social hierarchy in Romania. Often illiterate. Often rudimentary nationalists themselves. Most likely brainwashed, into loosing basic human reflexes, as ironically shown above by one who knows.
Later just hearing of them was convincing enough. Further later, they softened as they got used to luxury and comfort and into the traps of corruption. Some of them realized how much they were hated. Nowadays them and their inheritors caught in network of blackmail that paralyses most of the political life of that country.
From prison guards to heads and the lower ranks of the Minister of the Interior to military and militarized police and special forces, etc., they were all securişti. I think etymologically it's coming from the Ministry of Interior and State Security.
However, this is the perception. The real "politicians" - apparatchiks - used them to do the dirtiest tasks and instill fear into population without getting themselves involved. The most interesting part is they used brainwashed nationals into killing their own, with the multiple purposes of not carrying the historic responsibility themselves but also to show Romanians are killing Romanians.
Fear or the memory of it is exploitable to the day since the generations witnessing those events are still alive and vote worthy.
Vişinescu was a jail inspector before becoming a jail manager. That proves inspections were done and they knew at any level what was going on.
Although he directly might have been responsible for some of the inhuman conditions of the prisoners or the killing of some, that could be in the hundreds, they were figures with no other power except the one given to them by their superiors. Who by the way are responsible of the killing and imprisoning of hundreds of thousands comprising mostly of the Romanian elite, often nationalists, like Goma, mostly just patriots or rich or educated.
Tismăneanu's son, Vladimir (i know, another weird coincidence) lately became (by some) the de facto leader of the Romanian intellectuals.
Teacher of Comparative Politics at Maryland Universtity, he constantly mixes, implying that authority, with the hot subjects of the day in Romania, from a distance, and if there is none or none he can touch he creates one on the fly, with all the needed and necessary arguments so he can get involved.
However, at least in the last article he uses the language of the 60s and 70s and at times unexpected and rare neologisms that i for one just gave up looking for in the dictionaries. The only thing that makes the articles attractive is the evocative emotions for many as Romania is getting deeper into a hopeless poverty for most and a scene of daily scandals featuring a few, with millions working outside borders and still having a 7% official unemployment rate and on the list of the first ten countries in the world for remittance, or money sent home by migrant workers with the fear that they will forever settle in those countries (mainly Italy and Spain) and the country will be severely depopulated.
23 years after Revolution very few Romanians are interested in justice for their grand or grand grand parents long gone but this can be easily substituted, at least for a day or two, until something else comes up, for the myriad of crimes in the area of economics and politics on an unprecedented scale for that country that occur even as i write this here.
But about the current image and status of Romania there is enough information everywhere.
There are some other, more subtle aspects that occurred to me as i read Vladimir Tismăneaun's
biography in Wikipedia.
"In September 1981, a short while after the death of his father, he accompanied his mother on a voyage to
Spain, after she had been granted a request to visit the sites where she and her husband had fought as young people.
[10][12] Unlike Hermina Tismăneanu, he opted not to return, and soon after left for
Venezuela, before ultimately settling in the United States in 1982."
As i just read in that section (honestly i did not read it all, it seems very interesting, i will make some time later) it occurred to me that besides not agreeing with the
Protochronism theory, that was probably way out of the European cultural mainstream and visibly exaggerated and self flattering for the National Communist regime of Ceauşescu, i don't see a great deal of dissent against his father's old comrades whose sons he probably befriended and with whom he enjoyed all the privileges of being a son of an apparatchik.
Unlike others he did not waste his time and accessed the information and accumulated a great deal of culture reading whatever was available in those libraries that not many could enter. For that, he will be judged accordingly by those who have time to read his works.
The most intriguing part is that his unique biography seems conceived as a string of dilemmas and carefully laid out traps, by many contributors, untouchable, at least in Romania, by those who don't want to risk their careers and start discussing or controversing even parts of it. Even this article i'm writing about it is an obvious, well conceived recurrent
trick taken out of a Science of Politics book, with some understanding
for some readers and different understanding for others, depending of
their "degrees of understanding", and about this and other aspects of it
i hope i will write about later as i will try to treat it dually as
well.
In Romania, the only that could even read this English page from Wikipedia are teachers or students or some of the journalists that depend on the current government, that is in Tismăneanu's likeness. He even made a list with those agreed.
http://www.cotidianul.ro/lista-lui-tismaneanu-216344/
But there should be, at least some degree of controversy about a guy who has a degree in sociology since 74 and a Ph.D since 80 at the University of Bucharest (although self-corrected through his numerous individual unsupervised by... Securitate! - of which he was above through his father - studies) with the title ("The
Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and
Contemporary Left-Wing Radicalism").
[6][7] and now teaches American students at the University of Maryland.
