CNSAS: 1980-1989 Marked Record High Securitate Recruitments

The Securitate, the former Romanian communist secret police, recruited, in the period 1980-1989, the largest number of informants from the communist period. Almost 80% of them were men, most of them from urban areas. Thousands of priests, teachers and doctors are among the recruits, according to data released by the National Council for the Study of Security Archives (CNSAS).

The answer of the dictator of the last decade of the Ceausescu’s communist regime to the tensions in society was the increase of repression and surveillance and an unprecedented intensification of the control measures over the population, CNSAS pointed out.

“Thus, in the period 1980-1989, the most informants were recruited in the entire history of communist Romania, over 200,000 people. In 1989 alone, more than 25,000 recruitments were carried out, in the context in which the communist regimes were collapsing one after another around Romania. (…) A third of the total number of Security collaborators from the entire communist period was recruited in the last years of the regime”, stated CNSAS.

Of the 200,000 new recruits, 158,000 were men. About 30,200 had higher education and more than 4,300 were students. Most collaborators came from the education area, approximately 8,500, and in second place were members of the clergy, nearly 4,200 from all the cults recognized by law at the time.

In the field of health, more than 3,600 doctors and nurses were informants. 800 people were active in the legal environment. In the arts sector, over 1,000 recruits included 110 actors, 50 directors, 120 “artists”, 410 instrumentalists, 210 painters and 55 sculptors. Less than 5% of the number of new informants came from rural areas, over 8,500.

At least 320,000 people were recruited in the last 20 years of the Ceaușescu regime, i.e. half of the estimated total of 650,000 collaborators since the establishment of the Securitate in 1948. Of the 650,000 people, less than 4% (23,000) chose not to provide information to Security, but very few said “no” from the start.

“The figures presented are further proof that the theory according to which the late period of Romanian communism marked a <> period is false,” CNSAS concluded.