Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police

Chapter 1: An Archive and Its Fictions

31 An Archive and Its Fictions In the socialist bloc, people and things exist only through their files. All our existence is in the hands of him who possesses files and is constituted by him who constructs them. Real people are but the reflection of their files. — Belu Zilber 1 As I noted in the Introduction, after the fall of communism many East European countries created lustration procedures to scrutinize candidates for public office. These procedures, where they were instituted , relied heavily (even if very problematically) on the files of the secret police. Romania, however, was slow to embark on lustration. Whereas Czechoslovakia and Germany were lustrating by 1990-91, in Romania it was only in 1999 that legislation provided access to secret police files and a procedure for vetting public officials, and the process suffered numerous reversals. An organization, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, known by its Romanian acronym CNSAS, was founded in 2000 to administer the archive and mediate public access to the files, which it took over from the various Chapter 1 32 agencies (largely successor organizations to the Securitate ) that had overseen them for the eleven years following Ceaușescu’s overthrow.2 The procedures for taking over the archive were protracted and fraught, as the various agencies transferred their segments only piecemeal and in small numbers until after the elections of 2004, which brought a new political coalition to power. In 2005 over one million files were turned over, with more following thereafter, although the total corpus of the Securitate files is even now not fully under CNSAS control. Inadequate space and technology for managing the material, not to mention purposeful “loss” of files, further hampered its transfer. As of 2013 the CNSAS archive consists of over 1,800,000 paper files in 2,300,000 volumes and a variety of other media; about 70 percent of the total archive is in paper files, 25 percent in microfilms, and 5 percent in audio and video material.3 As for lustration itself, in 2006 the first of several lustration laws was passed and then rejected as unconstitutional, a sequence repeated several times thereafter. Despite these ups and downs of the lustration law, the CNSAS has continued to make files available to many persons who request them—including citizens of NATO countries like myself, who are permitted access to their files.4 33 The Securitate Archive and Its Files The archive is divided into multiple fonds, the principal ones being surveillance files of targets (the term I will use for people under surveillance); files of people who collaborated with the Securitate in one form or another; documentary files on particular problems such as religion, foreign researchers, art, and so forth; files from the Foreign Intelligence Service (DIE, renamed SIE); internal administrative documents and the personnel files of Securitate employees; and confiscated manuscripts. The CNSAS archive’s total volume is approximately twenty-four kilometers5 —surprisingly small, when one considers that the Polish SB files occupy about eighty kilometers and the Stasi files well over one hundred kilometers, for a smaller population.6 At least part of the reason for the differences is that a sizable portion of the original Securitate documents was destroyed, both accidentally and intentionally7 —either through normal administrative procedures during the communist period8 or through events relating to the 1989 revolution, when buildings containing files caught fire and truckloads of documents were found burned and partially buried outside Bucharest.9 More generally, however, it is impossible to say how large the archive was or is. At the time of the revolution it existed in various 34 county offices around the country, sometimes with copies in the central archive in Bucharest but without precise collation. For someone like me to request a file could involve bringing volumes of papers not only from the depository on the city’s outskirts to the CNSAS building in Bucharest but also from several different county headquarters as well. Each such request entailed that someone look through the material and withhold anything considered to be critical to national security; what was then transferred to CNSAS would thus be only a partial file. The endless politicking around lustration as well as other peculiarities of the process of file transfer mean that the archive now under CNSAS control—what is usually meant by the term “Securitate archive”—is a heavily politicized remnant, the result of several...