Table Of ContentAdvance Praise for Claudia Moscovici’s Velvet Totalitarianism
A deeply felt, deftly rendered novel of the utmost importance to any reader interested in
understanding totalitarianism and its terrible human cost. Urgent, evocative, and utterly
convincing, Velvet Totalitarianism is a book to treasure, and Claudia Moscovici is indeed a
writer to watch, now and into the future.
--Travis Holland, author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Archivist’s Story, a
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.
Claudia Moscovici’s first novel, Velvet Totalitarianism, triumphs on several levels: as a taut
political thriller, as a meditation on totalitarianism, as an expose of the Ceausescu regime, and
as a moving fictionalized memoir of one family’s quest for freedom.
--Ken Kalfus, author of the novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006 National
Book Award nominee), of The Commissariat of Enlightenment (2003) and of PU-239 and
Other Russian Fantasies (1999).
Western intellectuals have often blurred the fundamental differences between the imperfect free
world they have been fortunate to enjoy and the totalitarian world of communism they never
had the misfortune to endure. Claudia Moscovici’s Velvet Totalitarianism is a powerful
corrective to that ivory tower distortion of reality. Moscovici makes her readers viscerally
feel the corrosive psychological demoralization and numbing fear totalitarian regimes impose
on those who live under them. At the same time, with style and wit, and informed by her
experiences as a child in communist Romania and then as an immigrant in the United States,
she tells a story of resilience and hope. Velvet Totalitarianism is a novel well worth reading,
both for its compelling narrative and for its important message.
--Michael Kort, Professor of Social Science at Boston University and author of the
best-selling textbook, The Soviet Colossus: History and Aftermath
This vivid novel by Claudia Moscovici, historian of ideas and wide-ranging literary critic,
traces a family of Jewish-Romanian refugees from the stifling communist dictatorship of their
homeland through their settling in the United States during the 1980’s. This fascinating and
compelling story is at once historically accurate, exciting, sexy and a real page-turner. Ms.
Moscovici is as sensitive to the emotions of her characters as to their political entanglements.
--Edward K. Kaplan, Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities at
Brandeis University and author of Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America,
1940-1972, winner of the National Jewish Book Award
Moving between extraordinary and ordinary lives, between Romania and the United States,
velvet totalitarianism and relative freedom, dire need and consumerism, evoking her Romanian
experience in the seventies, the emigration to the U.S. of her family in the eighties, and the
1989 uprising in Timisoara and Bucharest that marked the end of Ceausescu’s regime, Claudia
Moscovici offers her readers a multifaceted book—Velvet Totalitarianism—that is at once a
love story, a political novel and a mystery. Love is the last resort left to people in order to
counter totalitarianism under Ceausescu’s rule. It keeps families united, allowing them to resist
indoctrination and hardship and to make sure their children enjoy the carefree beautiful years
that are their due. Love gives the protagonist of the novel the strength to overcome cultural
differences between Romania and the U.S. and to invent in turn a form of personal happiness in
a context that, while far from being as harsh as her initial one, does not lack its own problems.
--Sanda Golopentia, Professor of French, Brown University
Cold historical facts and figures tend to leave us emotionally indifferent. The impact of a
nation’s tragic events on one single person or family is much better understood and more
profoundly felt. This is what makes Claudia Moscovici’s book, Velvet Totalitarianism, so very
special. Her novel is prefaced by a well-researched history of Romania under communism.
Depending on one’s point of view, Moscovici’s work could be considered as the fictionalized
story of a real Jewish-Romanian family under communism, based on her own recollections and
that of her family and supported by true historical facts; or a brief history supported by the
fictionalized story of a real family. It’s a book well worth reading. The novel is a page-turner,
witty and well written.
--Nicolae Klepper, author of the best-selling book, Romania: An Illustrated History.
Velvet Totalitarianism
Post-Stalinist Romania
Claudia Moscovici
Copyright © 2009 by
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All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009927837
ISBN-13: 978-0-7618-4693-2 (paperback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7618-4693-X (paperback : alk. paper)
eISBN-13: 978-0-7618-4694-9
eISBN-10: 0-7618-4694-8
Cover art: “Red Amy,” oil on canvas, Edson Campos, 2009
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992
With love and gratitude to my parents, Henri and Elvira Moscovici, whose life
stories are the inspiration for this book
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Romanian Stalinism and Post-Stalinism
3. Nicolae Ceausescu and his Rule (1965-1989)
4. The Secret Police, or Securitate
5. Birth Control Policies and the Romanian Orphanages
6. The Romanian Revolution of December, 1989
7. Writing Politics
8. Bibliography
Reincarnations of Love: a novel
Part I
Part II
Part III
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Reincarnations of Love is a novel about a family surviving difficult times under a totalitarian
regime due to the strength of their love. This work was made possible by the love I felt from
my own family. First of all, I’d like to thank my parents, Henri and Elvira Moscovici, for
sharing with me their life experiences and for consistently encouraging my artistic and
intellectual endeavors. I’m also very grateful to my grandparents, Gina and Mitica Buzulica
and Surica and Avram Moscovici, who helped raise me during my childhood in Romania.
Without their patience and devotion, I wouldn’t have had such a beautiful childhood in those
trying circumstances. Through his unwavering loyalty, friendship and love, my husband, Dan
Troyka, has shown me what a real reincarnation of love is all about. I treasure him and the
rebirth of our marriage. This book is written above all for our children, Sophie and Alex, so
that they discover part of their cultural heritage and come to appreciate even more the rights
and freedoms they enjoy here.
Introduction
Velvet Totalitarianism: Post-Stalinist Romania
Totalitarianism is a modern phenomenon. It is stronger and more intrusive than dictatorship
or autocracy. Totalitarian regimes control not only the state, the military, the judicial system
and the press, but also reach into people’s minds, to dictate what they should say, think and
feel. Hannah Arendt has argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism that one of the key features
of the totalitarian state is its system of indoctrination, propaganda, isolation, intimidation and
brainwashing—instigated and supervised by the Secret Police—which transforms classes, or
thoughtful individuals able to make relatively sound political decisions, into masses, or people
who have been so beaten down that they become apathetic and give their unconditional loyalty
to the totalitarian regime. Although scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Robert Conquest and
Vladimir Tismaneanu have elegantly explained the rise (and fall) of communist governments in
Eastern Europe, it’s the vivid descriptions we find in the fiction and memoirs of the epoch--
George Orwell’s 1984, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Natalia Ginsburg’s Journey into
the Whirlwind and Lena Constante’s The Silent Escape—that take readers into the daily
horrors, the dramatic Kafkaesque show trials, the physical and psychological torture and the
general sense of hopelessness that characterizes life under totalitarian regimes. The writers I
have just mentioned tend to focus mostly on the Stalinist period, during which the state
governed through arbitrary displays of power and terror, sending millions of people to their
deaths in labor and concentration camps. Yet as many who lived under totalitarian rule in
Eastern Europe during the post-Stalinist era would claim, the milder, “velvet” form of
totalitarianism was depressing and depleting in its own way, killing people’s hope and
humanity even though it did not physically claim as many lives.
This book introduces students and the general public to the post-Stalinist phase of
totalitarianism, focusing on Romania under the Ceausescu dictatorship, through the dual optic
of scholarship and fiction. First I provide information about the Ceausescu regime: its feared
Securitate (or Secret Police); the human rights abuses and outrageous domestic policies which
left the Romanian people hungry and demoralized; the dictator’s narcissistic personality cult;
the infamous orphanages, which were a direct result of the regime’s inhumane and irrational
birth control policies, and the events that led to the Romanian revolution, first in the Timisoara
uprising and then in Bucharest, where the dictator and his wife were deposed, put on their own
show trial and executed in December, 1989. To do so, I synthesize information presented by
other scholarly works, memoirs and textbooks on the subject, including Vladimir Tismaneanu’s
Stalinism for all Seasons (2003), Peter Cipokowski’s Revolution in Eastern Europe (1991),
Andrei Codrescu’s A Hole in the Flag (1991) and Ion Pacepa’s Red Horizons (1987).
Then I translate these events into fiction, to give readers a more palpable sense of what it
felt like to live in Romania under the Ceausescu regime. I also attempt to capture the mixture of
cynicism and hope that characterized one of the most bloody anti-communist revolutions in
Eastern Europe. My novel, Reincarnations of Love, depicts the experiences of a family living
under the Ceausescu regime whose son gets entangled in a web set up by the Securitate. The
story then traces the family’s difficult process of immigrating to the United States as well as the
sometimes comical cultural challenges of adapting to America. The main characters arrive in
Eastern Europe on vacation during the period of revolutionary upheavals in both
Czechoslovakia and Romania, whose events they witness first-hand.
The parts of the novel that focus specifically on Romania constitute more of a fictionalized
autobiography or a memoir in that they’re partly based on my family’s personal experience of
communism. I say “fictionalized” since having left Romania at the age of eleven, my memories
are undoubtedly skewed by a childlike perspective as well as by the passage of time. The
factual information about the Securitate, Ceausescu’s policies and the Romanian revolution I
depict here, however, is also based on research rather than just on memories and anecdotal
accounts. The fiction inspired by real life helps individuate a mass phenomenon. In a post-
Cold War era where totalitarian communism has become just another page in history books,
fact and fiction are complimentary rather than opposites. Fiction can make what may now seem
like a long-gone, dead epoch, and the anonymous suffering of millions of people, seem vivid,
significant and real again.
Yet whichever perspective one chooses, fact or fiction, what is being described here is
essentially the same reality: conditions in Romania during the so-called “Epoch of Light” were
notoriously miserable. People had to wait in long lines for meager supplies of food, clothing
and household goods. There was limited heat and hot water. By the late 1970’s, the Secret
Police had installed microphones in virtually every home and apartment. The whole population
lived in fear. As a Romanian citizen said to a French journalist following the fall of the
Ceausescu regime, “It was a system that didn’t destroy people physically—not many were
actually killed; but it was a system that condemned us to a fight for the lowest possible level of
physical and spiritual nourishment. Under Ceausescu, some people died violently, but an entire
population was dying.”
Although this book focuses mostly on Romania, hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans
led similar lives to the ones I describe, struggling daily against poverty, hunger, state
indoctrination, surveillance, censorship and oppression in post-Stalinist communist regimes. In
actuality, “velvet” totalitarianism was insidious rather than soft and gentle, killing your spirit
even when it spared your life.
