If Socialism and Communism Are Great, Why 100 Million Victims and So Many Freedom Fighters?

Rostislav, who escaped Soviet oppression, said the following regarding the Millennials and the low information voters. “I remember a really heroic story which was secretly told to me in Arctic Siberia by Moldovan exiles. It was about the Toma Arnautu group of simple peasants, who had more than enough ‘high-information’ to fight against Communists ten long years from their wild hideout deep in the mountains, until some greedy ‘compatriot’ sold them out to be tortured and shot by the Securitate henchmen. So, what I’d like to say? I’d like to say that, whatever any modern voters for theoretical Socialism may say, I don't care about their cheap reasons and justifications: I do know the horrible practices of their precious theories only too well. Hence the memory of great freedom fighters like Toma Arnautu is always helping me to be true to our mutual ideals of freedom.”

The anticommunist resistance in Romania was a popular uprising against the communist dictatorship and the Soviet occupation; it started in Bucovina in 1944 when the Soviet Red Army invaded North Bucovina and lasted through the very repressive Ceausescu years of the 1980s.

The first act of resistance against the Bolsheviks was organized by the Romanian monarchy itself, which established a special battalion in Bucovina to fight against the Soviet invasion. Armed partisans organized as well shortly thereafter. After the partisan support ended in 1946,  the partisans took to the mountains and organized a resistance there where it was harder to track and capture them. But in the 1950s,  the traitors among them enabled the communists to take control of most of those who mounted an armed opposition to communism and executed the leaders and the followers.

When the Russians “liberated” Romania, they robbed and disorganized the country. I remember grandpa telling me that the Russian liberators of their village stole everything that was not nailed down. He had a precious mantel clock stolen; the Russian soldier hung it with a chain around his neck as he was departing.

The two hundred or more Russian communist community organizers, who spoke broken Romanian, appeared overnight and fanned out around the country to spread anarchy and to install people to power who were foreign and did not care about the laws of the country, they only cared about the spread of their ideology – communism. 

Records released after 1989 show that the resisting armed partisans called themselves “haiduci,” causing disruptions to the Communist Party dictatorship. Dispersed but ever-present around the Carpathian Mountains, they caused constant headaches for the communists who presented said “haiduci” as ordinary isolated thieves in the employ of the evil capitalists.

Any “structural opposition of the cultural and intellectual elites” was eliminated with the help of the Security forces and the Soviet agents working in Romania. The state, with centralized power in the hands of uneducated and ignorant Communist Party apparatchiks, was in shambles due to the inability of the communists to plan for a successful economic outcome. The extraordinary numbers of informers among the population propped up the pillaging communists who remained in power through coercion, fear, and population starvation.

The intensive surveillance, repression, and oppression started with Teohari Georgescu, “the head of the Ministry of the Interior between 1948 and 1952. That period was a stage of adjustment of the Securitate’s leaders to the staff policy of the newly created institution.” Georgescu’s Securitate goons became the weaponized arm of the Communist Party. He used the Securitate police forces to maintain the power and control of the Communist Party and of the oppressive state. 

There is a long list of doctors, engineers, teachers, priests, lawyers, painters, farmers, even socialists themselves who were deemed not socialist enough, and other professionals who were executed by communists because they dissented and refused to be oppressed by the Russian Bolsheviks and their new communist recruits in Romania. 

Cicerone Ionitoiu wrote, “For 12 years (1946-1958) anti-communism fighters, supported by the population from the villages nearby, resisted heroically to attacks by Securitate troops. Thousands of people were involved in this fight. The population of villages at the bottom of the mountains who provided them [patriots] with food and clothing, if not executed themselves right away, filled the jails and concentration camps.” Cicerone memorialized events, names, and villages.

The resistors fought hard against the Soviet-aided communist theft and confiscation of property, arrests and crimes committed by Bolsheviks and their newly indoctrinated recruits. These communist crimes lasted for forty years. The Romanian people never collaborated with the dictatorship, but traitors existed who sold their families for extra food and other privileges. 

Millennials in America will never understand what socialism and communism are because their history textbooks gloss over that part of history and glorify murderous individuals like Che Guevara, Castro, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu

By the time communism “fell” in 1989, few dissidents were still alive, and the former communists regrouped into a liberal class of entrepreneurs who stole funds from the former communist regime, a class of prosperous men and women with no scruples and a conscience.

Executed in front of their families, thrown from church towers, or shot en masse in front of the entire village or neighborhoods in order to make an example of them and stifle any possible future resistance, these victims deserve to be remembered in a memorial dedicated to their sacrifice in the fight against communism. The victims of the communist regimes around the world over decades have grown to 100 million.  When will they have their museum and a Nuremberg-style trial to reveal the horrors of communism?

Unfortunately Millennials in America will never understand what socialism and communism are because their history textbooks gloss over that part of history and glorify murderous individuals like Che Guevara, Castro, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, and other communist dictators who were responsible for the death of millions of dissenters to communism.

In a positive step, President Klaus Iohannis of Romania inaugurated in May 2016 a monument dedicated to the communist resistance and had it placed in front of the Free Press House, the very place formerly adorned in 1960-1990 by a huge statue of Lenin.