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  • The Paris Review

    Making Art in Communist Romania

    by Anna Codrea-Rado Dec 15, 2017 5 minutes

    A design sketch from Codrea’s production of Zamolxe.

    Forty-four years ago, in dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, my grandfather produced an opera that could have landed him on the wrong side of the Communists.

    When World War II ended, Romania emerged from the conflict under Soviet occupation. The Russian troops left in 1958, but Communism remained; in 1965, Ceausescu seized power and imposed a brutal totalitarian regime that didn’t end until the bloody revolution of 1989. There was a brief window between 1960 and 1970 when Romania seemed open to the West, but in 1971, Ceausescu delivered his infamous July Theses, denouncing Western culture. The speech ushered in the return to socialist realism, a movement that limited artistic expression to realistic celebrations of the state’s communist values. From then on, dissidents were persecuted and culture once again became little more than a vehicle for propaganda.

    To be an artist in Communist Romania meant either

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