Deletant (Romanian studies, U. of London) provides an extensive history and examination of the Securitate, Ceausescu's secret police. The first two chapters address the methods used to impose Communist rule in Romania and revolutionize Romanian society. Subsequent chapters deal with Transylvania and Ceaucescu's appeals to national sentiment, the role of Bessarabia in cultivating support, compliance and dissent, central planning, repression in the years 1978 to 1989, and the present state of affairs. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

First Published in 2017. This book contains Deletant's research and view that an inescapable feature of life in Romania under Ceausescu was the ubiquity of the Securitate or the security police, known officially for much of the period as the Department of State Security of the Ministry of the Interior. He seeks to right the omission in Romanian literature, until now, of the mechanism of terror which Stalin used in Romania to enforce his will and about the organisation of the Department of State Security.

From the imposition of communist rule in 1945, Ceausescu's secret police, the Securitate, remained shrouded in secrecy. This work benefits from access to the archives of the Securitate.

A former chief of Romania's foreign intelligence service reveals the extraordinary corruption of the Nicolae Ceausescu government of Romania, its brutal machinery of oppression, and its Machiavellian relationship with the West. An in side story of how Communist Party leaders really live.

The imposition of Communist ideology was a misfortune for millions in Eastern Europe, but never for Dennis Deletant. Instead, it drew him to Romania. The renowned historian’s association with the country and its people dates back to 1965, when he first visited. Since then, Romania has made Dennis appreciate the value of shrewd dissimulation, in the face of the state’s gross intrusion in the life of the individual. This vivid memoir charts his first-hand experience of the Communist era, coloured by the early 1970s surveillance of his future wife Andrea; his contacts with dissidents; and his articles and BBC World Service broadcasts, which led to his being declared persona non grata in 1988. In Search of Romania also considers how life went on under dictatorship, even if it was largely mapped out by the regime. How did individual citizens negotiate the challenges placed in their path? How important was the political police, the Securitate, in maintaining compliance? How did dissent towards the regime manifest? How did all this affect the moral compass of the individual? Why did utopia descend into dystopia under Ceaușescu? And how has his legacy influenced the difficult transition to democracy since the collapse of Communism?

Inside Ceausescu's Romania: An unquestionably efficient Police State In 1989, when peaceful revolutions were sweeping across Eastern Europe, the fall of communism in Romania was marked by a higher level of violence and bloodshed than elsewhere in the region. This was due, at least in part, to the repressive nature of the regime established by Nicolae Ceausescu (1965-1989) and his loyal secret police, the Securitate. Estimates suggest that the Securitate had a higher proportion of representatives per population than anywhere else in the communist block and that by the 1980s as many as one person in thirty had been recruited as a Securitate informer. In this pages, the author considers the deadly combination of Ceausescu's distinctive style of dynastic socialism with the establishment of a brutally efficient police state, which enabled him to maintain an iron grip on power until the dying days of communist rule across Eastern Europe.