Gheorghe Ursu
Gheorghe Emil Ursu (known to friends as Babu; July 1, 1926 – November 17, 1985) was a
Ursu anonymously denounced the policies of
Ursu's death was a matter of international scandal and, after the
Biography
Early life and left-wing activism
Ursu was born in the
Ursu was a person noted for his left-wing convictions.
Gheorghe Ursu joined the Union of Communist Youth in 1944, and became one of its secretaries.[1] From 1945 to 1950, he was a civil engineering student at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, joining the Romanian Communist Party during this time and, together with future physician and historian of medicine Gheorghe Brătescu, editing the pro-communist student magazine Studentul Român.[4] Growing disillusioned with the communist doctrine after 1949,[3] he was repeatedly sanctioned for disobedience[1] and ultimately expelled from the party in 1950.[5]
Dissidence
It was during his university years that Ursu began keeping a diary, in which he expressed strong criticism of the Communist regime.[1][5][6][7] When Ursu stopped writing, the manuscript comprised 61 notebooks, covering a period of 40 years.[5][8] From 1950 to 1985 he worked at the Bucharest-based Institute for the Study and Design of Communal Households.[2] He personally designed a large number of lodgings; according to his own estimate, by 1977, 30,000 to 40,000 people were housed in buildings he had planned.[7] The Ursu family moved into the newly developed area of Drumul Taberei.[3]
In 1970,
Ursu was placed under surveillance during the 1960s, when he first traveled beyond the Iron Curtain, where he met with prominent anti-communist intellectuals such as Virgil Ierunca and Monica Lovinescu.[5] However, the most important stage of his conflict with the authorities came immediately after the major earthquake of 1977.[5][7] It was then that, as an engineer, he sent a letter to the West German-based Radio Free Europe, protesting against Romanian construction policies.[5][7] The anonymous piece was read by Ierunca over four successive broadcasts.[7] Earlier in 1977, Ursu had been one in a commission tasked with consolidating Bucharest's oldest tall structures.[7] At the time, he had witnessed and recorded a meeting of the commission, attended and supervised by Ceaușescu, during which the dictator allegedly ordered all consolidation works to cease, supposedly claiming that they caused panic and could not hope to repair structural faults.[7] In his rendition of the meeting, Ceaușescu is quoted proposing instead solutions involving "concrete and chemical substances" to be tried out.[7] Ursu refused to sign the motion endorsing the new guidelines, which caused a minor scandal.[7] In 1984, he wrote that the meeting had convinced him that Romania's leader was "paranoid".[7]
According to Andrei Ursu, at a later stage his father also considered drafting a protest document which he intended to read inside the
He caused the Communist authorities further irritation after sending numerous protest letters to the Communist Party organ
Denunciation, interrogation, and death
In 1984, two female subordinates denounced Ursu to the Securitate for his diary.[5] On orders from General Eugen Grigorescu,[5] his home and office were searched and the notebooks seized, along with other manuscripts.[8] Interrogations and an investigation followed, with the Securitate intending to depict him as the head of an anti-government conspiracy.[5][9][11] Ursu was allowed some freedom of movement: he took a vacation to 2 Mai, on the Black Sea coast, where he met with Cassian and G. Brătescu.[11] Brătescu recounted that, during the trip, Ursu was avoiding discussions, but discreetly confessed his fears that the Securitate was using his notes to organize a round-up of his friends.[12]
Ursu was arrested on September 21, 1985. The accusation was one of concealing foreign currency: the equivalent of $16 (
Held at the Miliția quarters on Calea Rahovei in Bucharest, Ursu was subjected to repeated violent assaults. On November 17 he was transferred to the Jilava Prison hospital, where he died of peritonitis later that day.[6][8][9][13][16] His body was released to the family and, after a funeral service, cremated.[12] Several intellectual figures, including Chimet and philosopher Sorin Vieru, attended the ceremony in defiance of continued Securitate surveillance.[3] Also present were G. Brătescu and theater critic Radu Albala, the latter of whom, doubting the official account, raised the possibility that Ursu had been killed by an inmate.[12]
Several relatives expressed suspicions that Gheorghe Ursu was killed because of his refusal to incriminate other literary figures,[1][5]—in support of this notion, Andrei Ursu quotes his father's Securitate file, which investigated in part "close links with certain writers who, due to their hostile beliefs, are kept under watch by Securitate organs".[5] Ursu's sister claimed such authors included Bogza, Chimet, Cassian, and Albala.[1]
Legacy and controversies
Legal case and lost diary
Gheorghe Ursu's death, alongside the persecution of Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa, contributed to an international scandal, and, as a direct result of these cases, the United States withdrew Romania's "most favoured nation" status.[5] His killing also outraged members of the intellectual elite. Bogza would thus write: "One could not say of Gheorghe Ursu that which poets generally like to be said about them: that they are great poets. Killing such a person is equivalent to killing the King of Butterflies. It would be appropriate for the whole Romanian culture to stand up and salute Gheorghe Ursu's memory."[7] Brătescu recalled: "Gheorghe Ursu's drama helped me to better understand what world we live in."[12] In her assessment of Ursu's conflict with the regime, University of Ottawa professor Gabriela Blebea Nicolae concluded: "Gheorghe Ursu counts as one of the «martyrs» who make moral values triumph. The lives of all these persons form a bridge supporting the moral values that risk being engulfed by the murky waters of an aberrant political regime of the kind Romanian communism was throughout its history."[1]
In March 1990, after the
Suspicion rose that the
In July 2003, former police colonels Tudor Stănică and Mihail Creangă were sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment each for having instigated the murder of Gheorghe Ursu.[5][13][17] The two were found guilty of deliberately assigning Ursu to a cell where two recidivist and violent common criminals were serving time, and of having prevented their subordinates from intervening when the prisoner was being beaten.[13][17] Three years earlier, Ursu's cell mate Marian Clită had declared his full responsibility for the murder, and had been sentenced to 20 years in prison (eventually commuted to eight years, of which he served two).[17] Clită's move was seen by Olaru as an attempt to cover up for the officials later sentenced.[17] Stănică and Creangă went into hiding for several months, and turned themselves in only after the Supreme Court reduced their sentences by one year.[17] Their temporary flight and the Supreme Court's decision caused some consternation abroad: in September 2003, Finnish MEP Astrid Thors asked foreign embassies in Bucharest to closely monitor the case.[17]
Outside of the indictments related to the Revolution and pronounced in early 1990, the Ursu trial was the only case in which former Romanian officials were held accountable for a murder committed while in office.[19] Stănică was released in 2004, after it was ruled that he had significant health problems.[5][13]
In October 2001, SRI, in a press release, announced the existence of 50,000 manuscript pages confiscated before 1989. Among these were 811 pages of Ursu's diary. Ursu's son Andrei is trying to find the diary pages in the archives of the
Other issues
Romanian film director Paul Barbă Neagră, who was an acquaintance of Ursu, repeatedly claimed that the latter had actually been an important collaborator of the Communist regime, whose conflict with the authorities came as a result of personal dissatisfaction. Additional claims he made depicted Ursu as a Securitate operative.[20] Such comments rose controversy, especially after writer and theologian Cristian Bădiliță decided to include them in his 2006 book Tentația mizantropiei ("The Temptation of Misanthropy").[20][21] Both Bădiliță and the publisher, Polirom, apologized for the unverified information, and pledged that it would be stricken out of newer editions.[21] Speaking during the same year, Ursu's son argued that Barbă Neagră's accusations were in effect marked by a conflict of ideas between his father and the filmmaker.[5] He opined that Gheorghe Ursu had opposed "fundamentalist Orthodoxism and any other form of mysticism", an attitude which Barbă Neagră allegedly did not approve of.[5] Mircea Săucan also expressed disappointment in relation to Paul Barbă Neagră's allegations, and argued that they were equivalent to "a second killing" of Gheorghe Ursu.[22]
In summer 2007, in an interview with Cotidianul newspaper, Tudor Stănică alleged that Gheorghe Ursu was in fact a Securitate informant, whose mission involved reporting on the exiled dissidents and their activities.[2][8] Both he and Creangă had previously taken this stand during their trial.[2] Their claim was dismissed by the CNSAS, who noted that it contradicted available data (and in particular the fact that Ursu's alleged patrons had eventually banned him from leaving Communist Romania).[8] Germina Nagit, chair of the CNSAS' Investigation Directorate, stressed that "the notion that anybody going abroad was an informant is a legend."[8] Ursu did in fact author informative notes on the people he contacted abroad, which were subsequently made available to the press, but the CNSAS indicated the Securitate had required such information from any person allowed to travel outside Communist Romania.[8] Upon reviewing the notes, journalists at Cotidianul concluded that the information they provided was mostly trivial, and that Ursu made efforts not to disclose any detail of the conversations he had with his friends.[2][8]
Gheorghe Ursu's book of travel writings, originally censored by the Securitate, was first published in 1991, as Europa mea ("My Europe").[8] In 2006–2007, Chimet published two volumes of the correspondence between him, Ursu, and Camil Baciu, under the title Cartea prietenilor mei ("My Friends' Book").[3][23] Ursu's life was the subject of a 2007 film, Babu - Cazul Gheorghe Ursu ("Babu - The Gheorghe Ursu Case").[7][24] Directed by Cornel Mihalache and featuring recordings of Ursu's voice, it premiered in Sibiu during the events marking the city's selection as the year's European Capital of Culture.[24]
Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k (in French) Gabriela Blebea Nicolae, "Les défis de l'identité: Étude sur la problématique de l'identité dans la période post-communiste en Roumanie", in Ethnologies, Vol. 25, Nr. 1/2003 (hosted by Érudit.org); retrieved November 19, 2007
- ^ a b c d e f g (in Romanian) Cristian Teodorescu, "A doua asasinare a lui Babu Ursu", in Cotidianul, July 12, 2007
- ^ a b c d e f g h (in Romanian) Andrei Ursu, "Despărțire de Iordan Chimet" Archived 2007-10-16 at the Wayback Machine, in Revista 22, Nr. 849, June 2006
- ^ Brătescu, p.381
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y (in Romanian) Armand Goșu, "Andrei Ursu: Cazul Gheorghe Ursu. SRI a ascuns crimele Securității" Archived July 18, 2006, at the Wayback Machine, in Revista 22, Nr. 852, July 2006
- ^ ISBN 1-56324-633-3
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l (in Romanian) Christian Levant, "Disidentul Gheorghe Ursu, anchetat și pentru cutremurul din '77" Archived 2008-02-09 at the Wayback Machine, in Adevărul, February 3, 2007
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n (in Romanian) Mirela Corlățan, "Istorii. 'Notele' către Securitate ale disidentului Gheorghe Ursu", in Cotidianul, July 10, 2007
- ^ ISBN 0-691-04826-6
- ^ Blaga, p.79-80, 81-82, 105-106, 118, 254
- ^ a b Brătescu, p.381-382
- ^ a b c d Brătescu, p.382
- ^ a b c d e (in Romanian) George Tărâță, "Torționarul Stanică rămâne liber", in Ziua, November 9, 2006
- ^ Olaru, p.41
- ^ (in Romanian) "Simțeam nevoia unei evadări într-o zonă în care se mai putea strecura feeria" (interview with Nina Cassian) at the Memoria Digital Library; retrieved November 16, 2007
- ^ Olaru, p.41-42
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Olaru, p.42
- ISBN 2-7351-1084-2
- ^ Olaru, p.32, 40-41
- ^ a b Blaga, p.103
- ^ a b (in Romanian) "Conflict" (press review), in Observator Cultural, Nr. 14, May–June 2000
- ^ Blaga, p.103-104
- ^ (in Romanian) "Cartea în 100 de cuvinte" Archived 2007-11-15 at the Wayback Machine, in Ziarul Financiar, January 26, 2007
- ^ a b (in Romanian) Detaliu eveniment. Cinemateca Astra Film. 365 de ferestre spre lume: "Babu - Gheorghe Ursu", un film de Cornel Mihalache - România, at the Sibiu European Capital of Culture 2007 official site Archived 2004-08-30 at the Wayback Machine; retrieved November 18, 2007
References
- Iulia Blaga, Fantasme și adevăruri. O carte cu Mircea Săucan, LiterNet, Bucharest, 2007. ISBN 978-973-7893-65-9
- ISBN 973-50-0425-9
- Stiftung für Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Berlin & Bucharest, 2004, p. 11-50