Article

European History Quarterly

2015, Vol. 45(2) 315335
Becoming Dangerous: ! The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
Everyday Violence in sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0265691415571525
the Industrial Milieu of ehq.sagepub.com

Late-Socialist Romania

Calin Morar-Vulcu
Oral History Institute, Babes} -Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Abstract
In this article, I examine the extent to which everyday violence was a matter of public
order in the 1970s and 1980s in Romanias industrial milieu. Starting from the assump-
tion that public order is an integral part of a monopoly on the use of physical force,
I analyse unexceptional, nonlethal violence because, as a borderline phenomenon with
both public and private aspects, it can illuminate our understanding of the implemen-
tation of legitimating practices in late socialism. Focusing mainly on cases of violence
among male workers in the 1970s in Calan, a mono-industrial town whose economy
was dominated by a metallurgical plant, I examine how everyday violence was dealt with
by various institutions, including the law enforcement system (the police, prosecutors
and courts), the plant administration and various levels of the party structure. In
this context, everyday violence was apparently linked to the private sphere and to
stereotypical male normalcy, along with alcohol consumption, and consequently it
was not deemed a matter of public order. The situation changed progressively in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, when, after the worker protests in Lupeni (1977) and Motru
(1981), the authorities began to infer a causal link between everyday violence and
protest.

Keywords
Everyday violence, industrial areas, late socialism, Romania, working class

Introduction
In what follows, my main concern is the extent to which everyday violence was a
matter of public order in the 1970s and 1980s in Romanias industrial milieu, that
is, the physical and social space in and around an industrial unit. I argue that

Corresponding author:
Calin Morar-Vulcu, Oral History Institute, Babes} -Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Email: caalinn@gmail.com

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316 European History Quarterly 45(2)

everyday violence, once a relatively unimportant issue, became one of central

importance during this time period, under the inuence of several worker protests.
I concentrate on the changing procedures for dealing with such violence in two
counties (judet} e), Hunedoara and Gorj, in southwestern Romania. The discussion
focuses on a mono-industrial town, Calan, in Hunedoara, where the main
employer was a metallurgical plant. My conclusions are preliminary ones, because
the topic has received scant attention thus far.
By everyday violence or unexceptional violence, I mean physical aggression that,
whilst resulting in bodily harm, is generally perceived as an ordinary or common
event in a given context. It may be contrasted with serious violence, such as
murder or rape, oences that receive greater public and legal attention. In
Romanian criminal law, what I term everyday violence would be classied as
beatings, assault and bodily injury and placed in a category including aggression
that results in bodily harm but excluding sexual aggression and aggression that has
lethal consequences.1
Other useful contrasts distinguish this type of violence from industrial conict or
protest. First, everyday violence diers from the sort of collective violence seen in
the ethnically motivated conicts in the South African mining industry.2 Second,
and as a related point, everyday violence is neither industrial protest nor industrial
conict,3 because dierent actors are involved, private individuals rather than
organized workers. In addition, the nature of the relationship is dierent: not
every industrial conict is violent.4 Thus, everyday violence, which is located on
the fringes of serious violence, also lies on the borderline between the public and
the private. Whilst public violence is the remit of the state, the realm of everyday
violence moves in and out of state control. Everyday violence thus has a multiple
marginality in comparison with other, serious, aspects of violence and conict.
Given this feature, the study of everyday violence can potentially illuminate the
assumptions that underlie the management of public order and thus, implicitly, the
assumptions that support the legitimating practices of a communist regime.
Industrial work, which is substantially related to the existence of the working class,
has been an important reference in communist regimes. Violence was a component of
the early Bolshevik denitions of the working class as a potential revolutionary agent,
especially in the spontaneity vs. consciousness debate,5 in which violence was linked
to the irrationality and impulsiveness of the workers. If we factor in the state as
claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of force,6 an area of interference appears.
It aects various agencies, each asserting a claim to legitimacy: the working class was a
source of legitimacy for the party, which was in turn the sole organizer of the state, that
is, the owner of the monopoly on physical coercion.
Violence can be conceptualized as a form of agency, because it requires an agent
(the perpetrator) and an object (the victim). I would dene agency in a rather
general way, following Laura Ahearn, as the socioculturally mediated capacity
to act.7 Accordingly, it is not enough that an act takes place; it is also important
that in the discursive space surrounding the practice, an actors capacity is recog-
nized as such and is related to its identity, which I would dene for the purposes of

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Morar-Vulcu 317

this article as the totality of the actions in which a social actor is involved and the
discursive representation of those actions.8 I am interested in how this space
between pure physical reality and virtual capacity to act is invested with meaning
and how it is connected to the production of social identities, the working-class
identity in particular.

Violence and Crime in the 1970s

With the exception of alcohol consumption,9 topics such as marginality, deviance
and problematic behaviour in Romanian socialism have thus far received relatively
little attention, or have been only briey touched upon in the studies of anthropolo-
gists and sociologists working in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s.10 These topics
have been usually considered o limits for publishable research in Romania,
although they have been treated in part in the sociological literature concerning
the process of urbanization and social mobility (see endnotes 2428). One exception
is the criminological literature, which has discussed them from a narrow, psychi-
atrically oriented perspective, focusing mainly on the individual and oering little or
no information on the wider social context in which deviance occurred.11
A few words on crime in socialist Romania in the 1970s are needed here. During
Stalinism, the theory of bourgeois remnants had been the standard explanation for
the persistence of criminality.12 The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a departure from that
notion, as it became dicult to explain why crime persisted after a generation of
building socialism.13 In the 1970s, Romanias socialist regime framed small acts of
violence within a legitimating discourse in which, together with alcoholism and other
deviant behaviours, they were regarded as problems outside of [the regimes]
sphere and practices, yet within reach of its prophylactic measures.14 One way to
understand crime in the absence of individual agents of the bourgeoisie was to link it
to the individual psychological or even to the biological features of the perpetra-
tors.15 Another way was to consider it an eect of socioeconomic factors16 whilst
being careful to emphasize that there were no specic causes of crime in socialist
society.17 This theory did not explain crime as a consequence of social organization,
but rather reduced it to a matter of individual action: once corrupted by the wrong
placement in the socio-economic sphere, the individual became psychologically
immune to the educational eorts that were brought to bear on him. One example
of this line of thought was given by Nicolae Ceaus} escu, who, at a meeting with the
cadres from the Securitate and the police (Milit} ie),18 emphasized that one of the
causes of criminal acts was wilful unemployment:

[T]oday, when in our country the conditions are created for all the citizens to do useful
work, the existence of some people who evade work is a negative phenomenon; we
have to seriously concern ourselves that every citizen be employed.19

This concept of wilful unemployment designated a category of people as an

object of concern, particularly after the enactment of the so-called anti-parasitism

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318 European History Quarterly 45(2)

decree 153/1973.20 The domain of economic transactions, including the individ-

uals relationship to employment, seemed to be the root of not only economic
criminality, such as stealing and proteering, but also violent crimes, as a
Securitate colonel emphasized in an article published in a law journal:

Many of those who have no clearly established profession engage in petty trade and
do occasional small jobs and have a very low cultural level. It is known that from
among these persons come many of those who are guilty of insults, beatings and
bodily harm.21

Violence was thus associated mainly with material interest and individual choice:22
one was expected to build healthy social relationships within the framework of
regular employment, so that failing to work was regarded as an individual choice
directly linked to criminality. Industrial work was held to be infertile ground for
harmful behaviours such as parasitism, theft and violence.23 That this was not
actually the case, however, was acknowledged both ocially and unocially.
The Romanian sociological literature emphasized openly or obliquely the negative
eects of the process of industrialization upon social relations, such as the dicul-
ties of internal migrants in adapting to industrial labour,24 the negative eect of
industrial platforms on the neighbouring rural areas,25 new social tensions linked
to new forms of habitation26 and the negative eects of commuting.27 Both vio-
lence and antisocial behaviour seemed to be regular features of new industrial
towns.28 In heavily industrialized Hunedoara County, yearly reports submitted to
the local branch of the Romanian Communist Party signalled an alarming trend of
rising crime, including violent acts, with a particular emphasis on youth
delinquency.29
Violence occurred not only among the countrys youth, but also in a more
problematic group: among adult workers at the core of the industrial milieu. In
the factory dormitories of towns with a large worker population and high turnover,
the police were slow to intervene and to ensure a certain level of order, as shown by
critical reports submitted to the local party branch.30 Thus, besides the classic
peripheries described by Decree 153/1970, there were peripheries in the centre,
for urbanization and industrialization seemed to go hand in hand with rising crim-
inality and violence.

Institutions That Investigated Violence

In the industrial areas, violent acts were investigated by several institutions: the
judicial and law enforcement system, the plant management, the party and the
trade union. Besides being a production unit, the socialist industrial unit was
also a pedagogical entity. Bad behaviour in the workplace and at home, including
violence, was dealt with in two settings: the work collective (the colleagues of the
perpetrator) and the trade union group, under the close guidance of both the fac-
tory ocials and the party secretaries. In these settings, cases of both domestic

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Morar-Vulcu 319

violence and conict between colleagues were discussed. The trajectory of a case
usually began with the police, who notied the factory and requested that the
occurrence be discussed in the work collective or trade union group. Then the
case was closed, with rather mild consequences, usually a 520 per cent cut in
monthly wage for one or more months. The relationship between the police and
the plant management was a cooperative one. The exertion of public peer pressure
(inuent} are publica) on the perpetrator was thought to be the most eective
solution.
In dealing with deviant behaviour, including violence, the industrial unit was in
a double bind: it had to maintain productivity, reduce absenteeism and eliminate
situations that could endanger the physical safety of the workers, but eradicating
conict most often meant punishing violent behaviour often originating in the
conict between the worker and the foreman which meant terminating employ-
ment and breaking the socialist social contract of assured work and assured pay.
This measure was frowned upon by the party, particularly in cases where workforce
turnover was high owing to an arduous working environment, as in Calan. An
informal mechanism of hiring and ring was instituted, by means of which even
someone red for not respecting the norms of social cohabitation would somehow
be rehired or would nd another job elsewhere, because of the personnel shortage.
This approach contributed to a mitigation of the consequences of minor oences
such as everyday violence and drunkenness.31 Even if the factory theoretically
functioned according to an economic and technical rationale, it involuntarily
oered a space where individual strategies to lessen the consequences of bad behav-
iour could be implemented.
The party was also a disciplinary body. It regulated the behaviour of members
by making them internalize a set of rules that supplemented the purely legal ones
(normative control). Further, the party issued guidance and provided monitoring
for other institutions. For example, party secretaries supervised the proceedings in
the factory described above. Moreover, because the areas under study had a large
working-class population, they were particularly important for the party, and it
was at party meetings that all problems of economic and social life, from supplying
raw materials to regulating unruly behaviour, were debated and resolved.
If a violent act was perpetrated by a party member, the matter was discussed
rst at the level of the primary party organization, which imposed a penalty. The
penalty was then either conrmed or rescinded by the county party organization,
acting as an appeal body. This appeal procedure involved not only party sanctions
such as reprimand or exclusion from the party, but also administrative ones such as
ring and pay cuts.
Another institution that dealt with everyday violence was, obviously, the police
force. The regular police were subordinated to the party in a decentralized manner;
that is, the county police received orders from the local party branch, as well as
from the central Ministry of Internal Aairs. Still, the relationship of subordin-
ation between the police and the party was not that of agent and principal, being
instead fraught with competition and tension.

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320 European History Quarterly 45(2)

One aspect of this competition was the way of dealing with violence. In 1970 a
report debated in a Hunedoara County party meeting berated the police for their
liberal use of force against suspects and even clearly innocent persons.32 The county
police chief was severely criticized for failing to discipline his subordinates in their
contacts with regular citizens under the doctrine of socialist legality introduced in
1965.33 Numerous reports and complaints had reached the county party secretariat,
describing in detail the use of beatings, both as an instrument of criminal investi-
gation and as an ad hoc punishment for suspects, along with methods of torture
reminiscent of the Stalinist penal system, such as putting salt into the suspects
mouth, forcing the suspect to maintain an uncomfortable or painful position for
long periods of time and beating the soles of the suspects feet. A local party leader
suggested that, whilst these measures were informally permissible in special circum-
stances, the police had now gone beyond the boundaries of the acceptable:

[Q]uite unpleasant things . . . have been going on in our county for quite a long time,
since the use of such repressive methods has been allowed, albeit for certain categories
of people, but I see now that these are used on other people too.34

It remains unclear for what categories of people these violent methods were
deemed suitable. At the same meeting, the county party secretary argued forcefully
for a rule of law approach in the relationship between the police and ordinary
citizens:

[W]e have to be very careful. We have warned that we do not allow the policeman to
be hit by the citizens, but is he permitted to hit the others? If somebody hits the
policeman, hes a hooligan, but the policeman beating the citizen, isnt he a hooligan?
Doesnt he need to be treated in the same way?35

One of the statements above, the use of such repressive methods has been allowed,
indicates the role of the party in the management of violence, although the use of
the passive voice is an eort to obscure its agency. The statements also suggest that
the party rearmed its right to intervene in the police response to violence, grant-
ing or withholding permission and overseeing the execution of its orders. Thus, in
the relationship between the party and the police, two tendencies seemed to exist:
on the one hand, there was an institutional memory of Stalinism based on the
strategic use of violence against designated categories of enemies,36 and on the
other hand, there was a desire to interpose a distance between the present and
the past by instituting a system of socialist legality (legalitatea socialista) and the
rule of law, but without fundamentally questioning the functioning of the repres-
sive institutions or their hierarchy.
However, socialist legality was put into question by its very promoter, the party.
Very often the local police were admonished for overstepping their authority by
arresting party members or by proceeding with a prosecution without the partys
go-ahead. For party members, a criminal investigation was not automatic, despite

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Morar-Vulcu 321

the seriousness of the case and any police insistence. It depended instead on the
secretary of the party county organization. Some party secretaries went so far as to
call for two party reviews, county and local, of a police request, as in Gorj:

I propose that, before [the police] come with the request for the approval of a criminal
investigation, they should specify whether they have also informed the commune party
committee, which approved it. I think it is better this way. We will not accept any
request for approval of an investigation if it does not have the commune party com-
mittees approval, and in the case of the industrial units, the approval of the bureau of
the party organization, so that we know what we are approving.37

Violent Workers Under Party Scrutiny

It is instructive to see how the party dealt with cases of unexceptional violence
perpetrated by workers. I will look more closely at a series of cases that were
considered by the Hunedoara County Committee Secretariat in the 1970s.
In February 1970, after coming to work late and drunk,38 a Calan worker had
an argument with the foreman, who penalized him with a pay cut for the day.
Failing to persuade the foreman to give him the day o, the worker threatened him
and chased him with a knife. He was immobilized by the other workers, arrested
and imprisoned for two days. After the regular court declared him unt to stand
trial on psychiatric grounds, the primary party organization decided to expel him
from the party and to recommend his ring. At the level of the county secretariat,
however, the situation changed. The hearing considered not only the act itself, but
also the perpetrators situation inside and outside the factory. The worker attrib-
uted his violent reaction to his dicult family life: his wife had recently died and he
needed money to raise his children, so that the loss of a days pay had prompted his
violent reaction. His professional and party past was also discussed. He had been
working at the plant for the last 17 years without major problems. After he was
sent out of the room to await the nal ruling, the discussion focused on the poten-
tial eects of the expulsion and ring on the worker and on his colleagues. It was
revealed that in the employees meeting to discuss the case, a nasty atmosphere
had been created; the decision to re him had been unfavourably received. Finally,
the county party secretary decided against the sanctions for fear of aggravating the
existing problems with the collective in Calan. The worker was called in again and
asked to promise that he would behave appropriately. He was informed of the
decision and reminded of the power of the party:

We will look into your situation to see if the measure taken is right or not. It depends
on you to stay or to go, after we establish whether you have kept your promise to us.39

The case was reopened at the county secretariat level after the surfacing of new
evidence of bad behaviour associated with alcohol consumption. Nevertheless,

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322 European History Quarterly 45(2)

most members opposed expulsion from the party on grounds of potential negative
consequences for the worker: a lower wage and a dicult situation at home. The
crucial argument against his expulsion was the absence of any previous sanction.40
In another instance, a police request to pursue a criminal investigation brought
to the attention of the party secretariat the case of a party member who was
accused of stabbing a man. The victim required 90 days of medical care. The
assailant defended himself by arguing that he was the one who had been attacked
and knocked down, and that he used the knife only as a last resort. He was sub-
sequently beaten and ned by the police, who had stopped the ght, and he then
needed 23 days of medical care. Asked about the circumstances, the protagonist
said that he was attacked because of his role as the leader of a work team, a
position that earned him many enemies. Finally, the party denied the police
request, asserting that the accused was acting in self-defence and that, again, it
was his rst misbehaviour of this kind:

The county secretariats opinion is that he should not be sent to stand trial, because he
defended himself, but he should nevertheless be sanctioned at the party level . . .41

In still another matter, a miner from the same area was summoned to the county party
secretariat after beating a man he had caught with his wife.42 The beating victim
required 63 days of medical care. The ocials dealing with the case asked the miner
a series of personal questions, such as how many children he had and whether he had a
normal life with his wife. After concluding that the attacker was a good party
member and a rst-time oender, the secretariat decided to refuse the repeated
police request to pursue the investigation.43 At the same time, it passed the matter
back to the local party organization and warned the accused that it was up to him to
draw lessons from his mistake. The local ocial who investigated the case concluded:

For the mistake that you have committed, we will recommend to the primary party
organization that they discuss your case; it depends on them and on your position; as
for the criminal investigation proposed by the police, we have decided that they should
not forward your le to the court; but if the man that you had the conict with sues
you, we cannot stop that. Try to reconcile with him. We will stop the le . . . and you
draw conclusions from this mistake.44

Sometimes party members were summoned for misdeeds even if the police did not
refer the matter. Then it became an entirely internal aair, handled by the primary
party organization. In one such case, a workers behaviour was discussed after a
string of conicts with his colleagues culminated in two work-related ghts on the
factory premises.45 The investigation was summary and focused on the personal
deciencies of the accused party member. He was nally expelled from the party,
owing to two separate circumstances: the repeated nature of the oences and,
crucially, the fact that he had lost his party card.46 Nevertheless, he was given
the possibility of re-joining the party after two years of good behaviour.47

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Morar-Vulcu 323

In another case, in April 1972, a worker at the coke plant in Calan was
expelled from the party after several domestic brawls and ghts involving col-
leagues and a policeman. Despite his claims that he was beaten by the police
and that the complaint was lodged merely to obscure the guilt of the policeman,
his arguments were dismissed. At the party secretariat meeting, he was character-
ized as a hooligan and given the following advice, which may also be read as a
threat:

Dont let yourself be pulled down by certain people, so that you get into ghts in
restaurants and in the family. If you continue, there are laws, organs that can
straighten you out.48

As these examples suggest, the party had its own ways of dealing with violence,
based on several assumptions. First, the cause of violence was strictly individual:
there were no causal factors other than individual agency (in general, psycho-
logical traits) to explain violent acts, which were associated with alcohol consump-
tion and with what a party document called a weak political level49 (in reference
to a worker who repeatedly fought with his colleagues).
Second, the degree of seriousness of the oences discussed in party meetings
was signicant. The most important oences were economic crime, lethal vio-
lence and sexual assault. All three types received the same treatment: immediate
expulsion from the party and automatic prosecution by the state institutions.
Next in importance was the oence of belonging to a religious sect, that is, a
neo-Protestant denomination. Such membership resulted in automatic expulsion
from the party. On a lower level of importance was nonlethal, unexceptional
violence, which, as we have seen, carried no automatic consequence. Some per-
petrators were given minor party sanctions; some were expelled from the party
but without permission being granted for police investigation; some were
expelled and prosecuted. Thus it seems that no clear rules existed. The centrality
of economic crimes led to peculiar consequences. The party dealt in the same
way with someone who stole 40 cobs of corn from a cultivated eld near the
factory as with a killer: both were expelled from the party and prosecuted. In
the cases discussed above, however, some of which had quite serious implica-
tions and consequences, the investigation was halted. Everyday violence was
considered less dangerous than stealing, perhaps because stealing entailed delib-
erate, individual agency, while violence was regarded as mere action, not ori-
ented to a signicant goal.
Third, the entire procedure of judgement by the party was not always related to
the procedures of law enforcement. The interaction was highly personalized and
took the form of a confession, with interrogations and threats on the part of the
party and promises on the part of the member. The rst secretary of the local party
acted as a stern but occasionally forgiving paternal gure, warning, threatening,
asking, punishing or absolving the defendant as he saw t. The language that was
used communicated guilt, repentance, forgiveness and the threat of expulsion from

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324 European History Quarterly 45(2)

the party family. All these elements gave the interaction a quasi-religious avour.50
Occasionally, the party meeting became a conclave of ad hoc psychology experts,
summarily oering a diagnosis and estimating the course of the identied aic-
tion. The party punishment was usually an attenuated form of the normal legal
punishment, and the party exercised discretion, moderating the full force of the
state and tempering even the punishment handed out by the primary party
organizations.
Several preliminary conclusions may be drawn from the discussion so far. At
the local level, multiple parties seemingly asserted a monopoly on violence, and
competing claims created relative uncertainty as to who should do what about
acts of unexceptional violence. The normal way of dealing with violence,
through state institutions such as the police, the prosecutors oce and the
courts, constantly intersected with the abnormal way, through the party and
the plant management.51 In these circumstances, party organizations functioned
as legal and administrative bodies but without having the necessary institutional
framework to do so routinely.52 One consequence was that the standards of
judgement were irregular and the measures taken were ineective, as was occa-
sionally admitted.53 This inconsistency in dealing with everyday violence led to a
certain general leniency, perceived as such by the people who were involved in
one way or another in the cases reviewed. Leniency was reinforced by the mas-
culinized culture of the factory, in which it was normal for men to ght from
time to time. Frequently, when a case was more thoroughly investigated, one of
the actors involved would ask, Why make a fuss over this, since in other, similar
cases there was no such reaction?54 Oral testimonies also tend to characterize the
party as softer than other institutions, especially the police. Often, former work-
ers made reference to the brutal and unfair behaviour of the police in maintaining
public order.55 However, we must point out a deviation from the seemingly
regular pattern of treating everyday violence as insignicant. In Gorj, the
approach was dierent: although the police were still required to obtain a go-
ahead from the party, approval was granted almost automatically, regardless of
the gravity of the case. Still, even if a lenient attitude towards small-scale violence
was not common to the entire country, it is noteworthy that the approach was
not a standardized one.56
Starting with the examination of the treatment of everyday violence, we can
sketch a denition of working-class agency. The party considered violent workers
to be both individually responsible and dominated by instinct and impulse, some-
times inuenced by alcohol, and hence frequently incapable of improving their
behaviour. In these circumstances, the party substituted itself as a more enlightened
agent and instituted a system of informal rules and precepts that did not always
promote the functioning of the state institutions, but instead attenuated their full
impact. This optimistic and paternalistic vision of the party helped to reconcile the
individual behaviour of workers, at times deviant, with the identity of the working
class as a virtuous historic agent.

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Morar-Vulcu 325

Everyday Violence: From Insignificant to Central

The signicance of the approach to dealing with unexceptional violence described
above becomes clearer in light of subsequent developments, which can be charac-
terized as a shift to a harsher position. Two events in the two counties under
examination, Hunedoara and Gorj, were the proximate causes of this change:
the strike in the mining town of Lupeni in August 1977 and the Motru riot in
October 1981. The rst event was a typical sit-down, nonviolent strike57 which did
not involve attacks on authorities or ocial buildings.58 In an attempt to discredit
the strike, the regime later tried to frame it as a violent one, as several participants
were convicted for crimes involving violence.59 The strike had a powerful eect on
Ceaus} escu, deeply shaking his trust in the discipline and docility of the workers,
and it signalled the end of the tacit deal between the working class and the
regime.60 It also prompted the standardization of the treatment of everyday vio-
lence in the industrial milieu. Speaking at the Romanian Communist Party con-
ference of 79 December 1977, Ceaus} escu warned the work collectives that they
would have to take responsibility for those who misbehaved at work and in soci-
ety.61 From then on, the industrial units began to be seen not only as places where
the moral virtues of the people were forged, but also, quite contradictorily, as
places where indiscipline occurred frequently and was tolerated by lenient man-
agers. The units were ordered to step up measures to popularize legislation among
workers. In November 1977, the Calan plant leadership, together with the police,
devised an action plan to improve the legality in the plant, which meant increasing
the presence of the police, the prosecutors oce and the magistrates in the factory
in order to publicize party decisions and government measures.62 The document
prompted the work collectives to discuss misbehaviour and crime and to create a
climate of zero tolerance of such acts. The existing mechanism of collaboration
between the police and the industrial unit was strengthened. After police notica-
tion by the plant management, a suspect was tried by the collective of workers63
and by the factory courts, with the possible result being a ne or a reprimand,64
even in the case of domestic violence.65 What is signicant is that, at least in the
Calan plant, this arrangement also applied to party members, for whom the court
of rst instance had formerly been the party.
The 1981 riot in Motru, a newly built town in the mining region of western
Oltenia, was generated by a decree instituting restrictions on the supply of basic
foodstus. Several thousand miners stopped work and converged on the towns
administrative building, which housed the mayors oce and the police oce.
Before they were nally dispersed several hours later, the workers devastated the
building.66 Judging by the minutes of the closed-door meetings in the local insti-
tutions and party organizations in the aftermath of the riot, the authorities were
completely taken by surprise by the events, and had a hard time explaining them.
The most frequent explanations identied as the cause of the riot the were the
actions of marginal people (parasites, hooligans, rowdies and kids),67 the numer-
ous convicts or ex-convicts working in the mines in the area or even the activity of

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326 European History Quarterly 45(2)

religious sects. Emil Bobu, then vice prime minister, thought that the violence was
caused by mismanaged spatial and social mobility, more concretely by the uncon-
trolled arrival in the new towns of a large number of peasants who had not
acquired a worker consciousness. These persons remained attached to their pre-
vious social identity and habits and, he thought, were unable to adapt to their new
social environment.68
One line of action taken by the authorities was to identify, isolate, arrest and
seek to convict and sentence to prison individuals who were involved in protest and
had a criminal record, in a clear eort, as in the case of Lupeni, to discredit the
participants in the riot. We can see at work here the theory of individual respon-
sibility as well as a theory of contamination of a healthy centre by the periphery,
but this time the actors were appraised on the basis of class distinctions, for
example, real workers vs. peasants turned workers.
A more unied approach was signalled by Decree 400/1981, which marked a
dening moment in the trajectory of everyday violence from insignicance to cen-
tral importance as a matter of public order. It was issued immediately after the
Motru riot, and it brought the topics of indiscipline, drunkenness and violence in
the industrial milieu to the centre of attention, joining two previously unconnected
realms: the working class and criminality. The decree nominally targeted improve-
ments in work safety and discipline in industrial units that had a round-the-clock
work regime or operated installations that involved a high level of danger.69 The
part of the decree concerning work safety was supplemented by disciplinary pro-
visions. The decree made the personnel directly responsible for the entire produc-
tion process and for the strengthening of order and discipline in the workplace.
Various acts of indiscipline, such as temporarily leaving the workplace, coming to
work under the inuence of alcohol, drinking at work and disrupting the proper
course of action in the unit or causing material damage, no matter how slight, were
made criminal oences carrying a prison sentence of six months to ve years. The
formulations of terms such as discipline and proper course of action were left
very vague, thus allowing a wide margin of interpretation. At the same time, any
act of what could be classied as unexceptional violence perpetrated by the workers
was regarded as going beyond the private business of the individuals concerned; it
now involved a third actor, the state. Being violent towards someone else in the
industrial milieu meant being violent against the state. This change can be better
grasped if we analyse several similar cases of violent behaviour that took place
before and after the promulgation of the decree.
In September 1981 four Calan workers got drunk at their workplace, began to
ght and were stopped by their work colleagues, who called the police. Because this
event occurred on the premises of the plant, the police requested that the case be
discussed in a work collective meeting. After several weeks, the factory notied
the police, conrming that the case had been discussed in the trade union group
and, with respect to the party members, in the primary party organization, and that
the workers had been reprimanded and ned.70 During these meetings, the protag-
onists expressed regret for their behaviour and promised to mend their ways,

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Morar-Vulcu 327

advising their colleagues not to act as they had done.71 After they were ned, the
case was closed. The procedure was similar to that in other cases already discussed,
and it unfolded entirely outside the reach of the authorized law enforcement
institutions.
In April 1982, a few months after the Motru riot and the issuing of Decree 400, a
worker at the industrial water treatment plant came to work drunk, and when the
armed guards tried to remove him from the premises, he fought back with a knife.
He was nally immobilized and arrested. In contrast to the ght between his col-
leagues a few months earlier, his case was a full-edged criminal oence, not merely
because he threatened and endangered the life of the guard, but because he endan-
gered the smooth running of the process of production.72 His case was debated in
absentia (he was arrested), not by the work collective, as in previous cases of this
sort, but by the general workers assembly (adunarea generala a oamenilor muncii),
a larger body that usually met once a year and comprised delegates from every
section of the plant. This particular meeting was attended by 125 people. From the
notication by the plant director to the police, we learn that, although those who
spoke at this meeting duly castigated the behaviour of the accused, the meeting was
not trouble-free. The speakers agreed that the perpetrator had to be punished, but
regarded the managements proposal to re him as an exaggerated punishment.
However, the plant director assured the police that once the sentence was pro-
nounced, the perpetrator would indeed lose his job at the plant. This dierence
between the workers opinion and that of the authorities (management, police) is
signicant and probably echoes the earlier, lenient mode of treating similar cases.
In its May 1982 issue, the Ministry of Internal Aairs monthly Pentru Patrie
(For the Homeland) presented the case of two workers from the Danubiana tyre
factory in Bucharest who came to work drunk and got into a ght in the locker
room. They were arrested and quickly tried by a regular court in the activity centre
of the factory in a trial with enhanced publicity. They received relatively tough
sentences of six months and one year in prison, respectively.73 During the trial, new
details surfaced about the past of the protagonists: one had a criminal record
(previous convictions for assault and robbery and for breaking and entering) and
was a known troublemaker in the factory dormitories; the other was known as an
alcohol abuser and had repeatedly been warned by the police. What at rst sight
had appeared to be the random misbehaviour of two regular workers thus became
part of a pattern of misdeeds. As in a classic show trial, the defendants normal
identity, that of two skilled workers, fell away and the underlying, true identity
surfaced. The moment of unmasking established a sort of retrospective expectation
that things inevitably had to happen this way, because, after all, being criminal was
the true nature of the perpetrators, and it was used as a warning to the wider
readership, showing how well the violent drunkards had hidden their past.74 We
can recognize here the old Stalinist topos of concealment and unmasking.
As we have seen, similar cases occurring before and after Decree 400 had very
dierent consequences for those involved, conrming a harsher approach to deal-
ing with unexceptional violence. This change was accompanied in the nal months

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328 European History Quarterly 45(2)

of 1981 and the rst half of 1982 by a press campaign that portrayed industrial
workers in an increasingly dualistic manner. On the one hand, we nd the trad-
itional heroic depiction of the workers in their plan-fullling activity; on the other
hand, they are demonized and frequently depicted as an unruly mass of violent
drunkards, gamblers and idlers. For instance, in the rst months of 1982, almost
every issue of the local newspaper in Gorj County, where the above-mentioned
town of Motru is situated, was lled with reports about workers spending their
working hours in restaurants,75 playing poker,76 coming to work drunk or drinking
at work,77 becoming violent once caught and attacking their colleagues with
knives.78 In all these reports, the topos of unmasking, used also in the
Danubiana case mentioned above, was a central feature.

Conclusion: Everyday Violence and Working-Class Agency

I will present some conclusions, which can be only tentative, as this analysis is
based on a small number of cases and has a rather limited geographical scope.
First, unexceptional violence in industrial areas was not considered a major prob-
lem before the beginning of the 1980s, despite evidence that it existed as a side eect
of industrialization and urbanization. It was treated in a non-systematic way and
even with a certain degree of leniency by the party, in clear opposition to the
regular law enforcement agencies. Under the inuence of the worker protests in
the 1980s, the issue of unexceptional violence changed from being relatively
unproblematic to being of central importance. The variable ways of dealing with
violence in the 1970s were now replaced by a more inexible attitude. In a way, the
authorities were victims of their own propaganda. Eager to show that the prime
movers of these events were innately violent individuals, they nished by believing
that interpersonal violence among workers led to disruption of discipline in the
industrial units and, ultimately, disruption of public order and political protest.
Consequently, elimination of the rst stages of this succession of events was a
necessary step to prevent political turbulence. This eort was carried out mainly
through repression and dissuasion, with an increased presence of law enforcement
agencies in industrial units and harsher sentences. This approach tends to suggest
that the regime was less interested in using to employ Katherine Verderys terms
remunerative or symbolic-ideological strategies of control than in using coercive
ones.79 It also shows how the authorities thought about violence. It was deemed a
self-contained phenomenon, detached from the social background in which it
occurred. In terms of causation, violence was considered the responsibility of the
individuals concerned, whilst in terms of eect, it acted on no less than the whole
society, even the security of the state.
Second, as a related matter, this evolution was coupled with a revision of the
social map of violence. The authorities now considered that it originated not only
on the peripheries of the socialist society, but also in its healthy centre. After
several decades of building socialism, the violent predispositions of the workers
represented a sobering discovery for the authorities. In dealing with this perceived

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Morar-Vulcu 329

reality, they resorted to some of the old conceptual and procedural baggage of
Stalinism, which included show trials, the essentialist view of class dierences and
its corollaries and the topoi of hidden danger and unmasking, thus conrming the
status of Stalinism as the main ideological and procedural frame of reference for
Romanian communism.80
Third, all these developments meant a change in what could be called the identity
of the working class as a social actor, including its agency, that is, its socially recog-
nized capacity to act. Workers had previously been viewed in two partially exclusive
ways, in accordance with the public or non-public character of the evaluation. For
the public, workers were presented as the advanced element of society, whilst in the
non-public context of party documents they were treated as the benign children of
the industrial order, occasionally irrational actors who were sometimes unable to
control themselves and readily acted under the inuence of disturbing factors such as
alcohol or momentary psychological disposition. The role of the party and other
institutions was to gently guide the workers in an arrangement that could be
described as pastoral power, in Michel Foucaults term. Through the exercise of
such pastoral power,81 behaviour was regulated in a certain ambit mainly by the
nourishing function of the institutions, rather than forced to conform to a judicial
norm. The institutions looked after the individual, assuring a certain degree of
autonomy, and they required in exchange that no real transgressions take place.
Once the line separating private and public violence was crossed during the workers
protests, the working class was recognized indirectly, through targeted legislation
and hostile media portrayal, as having some capacity to act, but this trait was dan-
gerous and malec. It is signicant that this development took place after decades of
nominal identity between working class, party and state, which meant that the work-
ing class was assigned no real agency or was subordinated to more enlightened
forces, such as the party. The positive and negative images of the workers, previously
kept in separate realms, now entered the public domain, generating a contradictory
picture. This contradiction could be interpreted as a symptom of the nal uncou-
pling, which occurred simultaneously in many socialist countries, of the socialist
bureaucratic state and its putative social base, the working class.

Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was generously supported by the research network Physical
Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism, coordinated by the Centre for
Contemporary History in Potsdam. Thanks to Jan Behrends, Sabine Rutar and an anonym-
ous reviewer for their comments and suggestions, and thanks also to Kathleen Luft for her
language editing; they helped greatly to improve the paper.

Notes
1. See Raspunderea penala pentru infract} iunile contra persoanei (Bucharest 1962); Ion
Dobrescu, Infract} iuni contra viet} ii persoanei (Bucharest 1987).
2. T. Dunbar Moodie, Ethnic Violence on South African Gold Mines, Journal of
Southern African Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1992), 584613; Keith Breckenridge, The

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330 European History Quarterly 45(2)

Allure of Violence: Men, Race and Masculinity on the South African Goldmines, 1900
1950, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (1998), 66993.
3. For example, see Harold L. Sheppard, Approaches to Conflict in American Industrial
Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1954), 32441.
4. Moreover, if we follow Michel Wieviorka, conflict is something that unites those
involved around the importance of a stake, whilst violence is the cessation of any link
between the protagonists. See Michel Wieviorka, La violence (Paris 2005).
5. See Diane P. Koenker, Factory Tales: Narratives of Industrial Relations in the
Transition to NEP, The Russian Review, Vol. 55, No. 3 (1996), 40910, or Ronald
Grigor Suny, Violence and Class Consciousness in the Russian Working Class,
Slavic Review, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1982), 43642.
6. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundri der Verstehenden Soziologie
(Tubingen 1980), 29.
7. Laura M. Ahearn, Language and Agency, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 30
(2001), 112.
8. On the discursive representation of social action, see Theo Van Leeuwen, Discourse and
Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (Oxford 2008).
9. David A. Kideckel, Drinking Up: Alcohol, Class and Social Change in Rural
Romania, East European Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 4 (1984), 43146; Narcis Tulbure,
The Socialist Clearinghouse: Alcohol, Reputation and Gender in Romanias Second
Economy, in Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds, Communism Unwrapped (Oxford
2012), 25576; Narcis Tulbure, Drink, Leisure, and the Second Economy in Socialist
Romania, in David Crowley and Susan Reid, eds, Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and
Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, IL 2012), 25981.
10. David A. Kideckel, Economic Images and Social Change in the Romanian Socialist
Transformation, Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1987), 399411; Steven
Sampson, Feldioara: The City Comes to the Peasant, Dialectical Anthropology, Vol.
1, No. 1 (1975): 32147; Daniel Chirot, Social Change in Communist Romania, Social
Forces, Vol. 57, No. 2 (1978), 457.
11. Dan P. Banciu, Sorin M. Radulescu and Marin Voicu, Introducere n sociologia deviant} ei
(Bucharest 1985); Sorin M. Radulescu and Mircea Piticaru, Deviant} a comportamentala
s} i boala psihica. Sociologie s} i psihiatrie (Bucharest 1989); Petre Branzei, Gheorghe
Scripcaru and Tadeusz Pirozynski, Comportamentul aberant n relat} iile cu mediul (Ias} i
1970); Virgil Dragomirescu, Psihosociologia comportamentului deviant (Bucharest 1976).
12. See, for instance, Mircea Micu, Principiile procedurii penale sovietice, Justit} ia Noua,
Vol. 6, No. 3 (1950), 32832. Referring to the Soviet criminal justice system, Micu gives
a standard definition of criminality for the 1950s: In fulfilling its goal to defend, con-
solidate and help the development of socialist democracy, Soviet criminal procedure
begins with solid organization of the struggle against criminality, considering that crim-
inals are none other than those who are the enemies of the working class or those who
still retain the old bourgeois mentality or remnants of the old bourgeois mentality.
Those who comprehend the gigantic accomplishments of socialism and form a socialist
consciousness are in no danger of committing crimes (330, transl. by author).
13. Constantin Stoica, Contribut} ii la cercetarea sociologica a cauzalitat} ii fenomenelor anti-
sociale, Revista Romana de Drept, Vol. 27, No. 10 (1970), 26.
14. As Tulbure, Drink, Leisure, and the Second Economy in Socialist Romania, 264,
suggests.

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Morar-Vulcu 331

15. Laurent} iu Tamas} , George Antoniu and Toma Hentea, Cunoas} terea cauzelor care
determina s} i a condit} iilor care nlesnesc sau favorizeaza manifestari infract} ionale,
Revista Romana de Drept, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1972), 337. The need to go beyond former
class enemies to seek the roots of social evils was first formulated by Stalin himself, cf.
Amir Weiner, Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the
Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism, American Historical Review, Vol.
104, No. 4 (1999), 111455. One consequence was that the deficiencies were not confined
to one socially identifiable area, but were found everywhere in the healthy society, even
in the depths of the individual psyche. That view accounts for the tendency to seek
individual, psychological causes for crimes.
16. Stoica, op. cit., 27.
17. Constantin Bulai, V. I. Lenin despre fenomenul criminalitat} ii s} i despre politica penala a
statului socialist, Revista Romana de Drept, Vol. 26, No. 6 (1970), 5060.
18. In Romanian, the name of the regular police between 1949 and 1989 was Milit} ia. To
designate this institution, I will not use the Romanian term, but rather the term police,
to avoid potential confusion due to a formal similarity to the English term militia,
which connotes an irregular or paramilitary force.
19. Nicolae Ceaus} escu, Cuv ntare la consfatuirea cadrelor de baza din securitate, milit} ie,
procuratura s} i justit} ie, in Nicolae Ceaus} escu, ed., Romania pe drumul construirii socie-
tat} ii socialiste multilateral dezvoltate (Bucharest 1970), Vol. 4, 737.
20. Decret nr. 153 din 24 martie 1970 pentru stabilirea s} i sanct} ionarea unor contravent} ii
privind regulile de conviet} uire sociala, ordinea s} i linis} tea publica, Buletinul Oficial, No.
33, 13 April 1970.
21. Stoica, op. cit., 29.
22. Ibid., 30.
23. The extensive literature on socialist bloc workers and industrial work paints a much
more nuanced picture. The rapid and centrally planned industrialization brought with it
not only upward mobility, but also discontent. Probably the biggest contradiction was
that between the intention to plan everything centrally and the myriad strategies of
individuals trying to cope the best they could with conditions that were often outside
their control, as Donald Filtzer says in the context of Soviet industrial planning; see
Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern
System of Soviet Production Relations 19531964 (Cambridge 2002), 13. From the exten-
sive literature concerning workers and the industrial environment in the Soviet Union
and other Eastern Bloc countries, see William G. Rosenberg and Lewis H. Siegelbaum,
eds, Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization (Bloomington, IN 1993); Lewis H.
Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and
Identity (Ithaca, NY 1994); Kenneth M. Straus, Factory and Community in Stalins
Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class (Pittsburgh, PA 1998). For
Hungary, see Mark Pittaway, The Workers State: Industrial Labor and the Making of
Socialist Hungary, 19441958 (Pittsburgh, PA 2012); Martha Lampland, The Object of
Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Chicago, IL 1995); Michael Burawoy,
Reflections on the Class Consciousness of Hungarian Steelworkers, Politics &
Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1989), 134. For the GDR, see Christoph Klemann,
Arbeiter im Arbeiterstaat DDR: deutsche Traditionen, sowjetisches Modell, west-
deutsches Magnetfeld (19451971) (Bonn 2007); Sandrine Kott, Le communisme
au quotidien: les entreprises dEtat dans la societe Est-allemande (Paris 2001).

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332 European History Quarterly 45(2)

For Romania, see Daniel N. Nelson, Workers in a Workers State: Participation in

Romania, Soviet Studies Vol. 32, No. 4 (1980), 54260; Daniel N. Nelson, The Worker
& Political Alienation in Communist Europe, Polity, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1982), 182201 and
Chirot, op. cit.
24. Mihai Merfea, Adaptarea populat} iei agricole n mediul de munca industrial, Viitorul
Social, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1970), 80716. P. Grigorescu and Marilena Mis} u,
Funct} ionalitatea s} i dinamica procesului de integrare socio-profesionala, Viitorul
Social, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1976), 7380.
25. Dan Banciu et al., Transformari economice s} i sociale n trei localitat} i rurale
aflate n perimetrul unei platforme industriale, Viitorul Social, Vol. 4, No. 2
(1975), 31121; Nicolae Radu, Carmen Furtuna and Carmen Gramada,
Modernizarea tradit} iei s} i aparit} ia unor structuri culturale noi, Viitorul Social, Vol.
17, No. 1 (1986), 4754; Ion Dragan, Aspects sociaux de lindustrialisation des zones
rurales en Roumanie, Revue Roumaine des sciences sociales, serie de sociologie, Vol. 17
(1973), 77100.
26. Natalia Damian, Efecte sociale ale locuirii la blocuri, Viitorul Social, Vol. 2, No. 2
(1973), 40310; Natalia Damian, Problemele sociologice ale locuirii n marile ansam-
bluri urbane, Viitorul Social, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1974), 60311; Radu Florian, Note speci-
fice ale contradict} iilor societat} ii noastre, Viitorul Social, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1974), 289300.
27. For commuting, see Banciu et al., Transformari economice, 31920; Ion Ghidu,
Implicat} iile navetismului asupra calitat} ii procesului de instruct} ie, asistent} ei sanitare
s} i product} iei agricole, Viitorul social, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1975), 31222.
28. See Liviu Damian and E. Dobrescu, Noile ansambluri de locuit s} i ameliorarea relat} iilor
umane, Viitorul Social, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1974), 394404.
29. See Arhivele Nat} ionale Hunedoara, Deva (National Archives, Hunedoara County,
hereafter ANH), fd. 40, d. 28/1970, 12/1971, 14/1972, 52/1973 and Arhivele Nat} ionale
Gorj, Targu Jiu (hereafter ANG), fd. 26, d. 11/1970, d. 6/1974. The reports identified as
causes not the officially sanctioned ones (parents not working, the influence of a dubious
entourage), but industrial migration, sometimes associated with family disorganization
or employment of both parents, who had no time left for their children. This happened
in a context where construction of proper social facilities had not kept pace with rapid
population growth. In 1972, for instance, the quoted reports showed that around 75 per
cent of the young criminals in urban areas of the county came from stable families, with
both parents working.
30. ANH, fd. 40, d. 6/1974.
31. As a former worker in Calan said, there was also the practice of giving good references
to someone whom the factory wanted to get rid of for reasons of drunkenness and
violent behaviour; then the person in question could get employment elsewhere.
Interview, B. F., former worker at the Calan metallurgical plant, 19 September 2011.
32. ANH, fd. 26, d. 15/1970, transcript of the county secretariat meeting of 14 September
1970, and Informare cu aspecte de ncalcare a disciplinei s} i a legilor statului de catre unele
cadre de milit} ie, 24863.
33. The idea of a new type of legality had its origins in the Soviet Union, in the climate of
Khrushchevs 1956 speech; see John N. Hazard, Laws and Men in Soviet Society,
Foreign Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1958), 26777. In Romania, although the idea of social-
ist legality had been launched before his coming to power, Ceaus} escu made it a defining
element of his rule, wanting to distance himself from the Gheorghiu-Dej era by

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Morar-Vulcu 333

associating the latter with abuse of and disregard for the laws. See Dennis Deletant,
Ceaus} escu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 19651989 (London
1995), 717.
34. ANH, fd. 40, d. 15/1970, 248.
35. Ibid., 252.
36. Peter Holquist, State Violence as a Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet
Totalitarianism, in Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-
Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, CA 2003),
2538.
37. ANG, fd. 26, d. 11/1970, 29.
38. ANH, fd. 40, d. 9/1970, transcript of the county secretariat meeting of 7 February 1970,
34.
39. Ibid., 4.
40. Ibid., 6.
41. ANH, fd. 40, d. 9/1970, transcript of the county secretariat meeting of 14 March 1970,
1617.
42. ANH, fd. 40, d. 9/1970, transcript of the county secretariat meeting of 24 February
1970, 9.
43. In principle, the offence carried a punishment of six months to one year in prison.
44. ANH, fd. 40, d. 9/1970, 10.
45. One fight started when he reproached a colleague for failing to replace chill moulds in
due time (they worked in an iron foundry). ANH, fd. 40, d. 9/1970, transcript of the
county secretariat meeting of 12 August 1970, 65.
46. Ibid., 61.
47. Ibid., 62.
48. ANH, fd. 40, d. 17/1972, transcript of the county secretariat meeting of 29 April 1972, 15.
49. ANH, fd. 40, d. 247/1970, Raportul organizat} iei de baza Turnatorie cu privire la ridicarea
nivelului politic al membrilor de partid, 434.
50. See also Lorenz Erren, Selbstkritik und Schuldbekenntnis: Kommunikation und
Herrschaft unter Stalin (19171953) (Munich 2008); Berthold Unfried, Ich bekenne:
Katholische Beichte und sowjetische Selbstkritik (Frankfurt 2006).
51. Even where police officers overstepped their authority and abused suspects, the
approach to their cases, which were discussed first in a party secretariat meeting, was
similar to that taken in other cases of violence. In the case of a police non-commissioned
officer who had viciously beaten and abused a suspect under the direct supervision of an
officer, the result was an administrative sanction (he was expelled from the party and
fired) rather than a legal one, because a criminal investigation was not allowed. ANH,
fd. 40, d. 9/1970, transcript of the county secretariat meeting of 29 December 1970, 89.
52. See Michel Christian, Le parti et la vie privee de ses membres en RDA,
Histoire@Politique, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2009), 113. In a different context, that of the
party investigating the private life of its members, Christian observes a similar overex-
tension of the party: . . . by its will to better get to know its members and to intervene
in their private life, the party opens an infinite field of action, which overloads the
organs of control with a burden they do not want or cannot assume. Later, he adds:
. . . the idea that the party decides according to a material justice leads to a devaluing
of the formal justice, which is based on the enforcement of the laws (910; transl. by
author).

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334 European History Quarterly 45(2)

53. ANH, fd. 40, d. 30/1976, transcript of the common operative meeting of the county
municipal secretariat of Hunedoara and the municipal party committee of Petros} ani, 5
March 1976, 84.
54. ANH, fd. 40, d. 9/1970, 6.
55. Interview, I. L., former worker in the transport section, Calan metallurgical plant, 20
September 2011.
56. See, for example, ANG, fd. 26, d. 12/1970.
57. Mihai Barbu and Marian Boboc, Lupeni 77: Sfanta Varvara versus tanti Varvara (Cluj-
Napoca 2005); Marian Boboc and Mihai Barbu, Strict Secret. Lupeni 1977. Filajul
Continua! (Petros} ani 2007); Dragos} Petrescu, Workers and Peasant Workers in a
Working Class Paradise: Patterns of Working Class Protest in Romania, in Peter
Hubner, Christoph Klemann and Klaus Tenfelde, eds, Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus:
Ideologischer Anspruch und soziale Wirklichkeit (Cologne 2005), 126.
58. Although the miners took a hostage the then prime minister, Ilie Verdet} in order to
force Nicolae Ceaus} escu to come to Lupeni.
59. Barbu and Boboc, Lupeni 77.
60. Cristina Petrescu and Dragos} Petrescu, Resistance and Dissent under Communism:
The Case of Romania, Totalitarismus und Demokratie, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2007), 330.
61. Vasile Patulea, S} erban Stelu, Perfect} ionarea activitat} ii de prevenire a faptelor antiso-
ciale n lumina lucrarilor Conferint} ei Nat} ionale a Partidului Comunist Roman din 79
decembrie 1977, Revista Romana de Drept, Vol. 34, No. 1 (1978), 1926.
62. ANH, fond Intreprinderea Victoria Calan (hereafter fd. IVC), d. 4/1978, Informare cu
privire la starea legalitat} ii n I. V. Calan, November 1977.
63. ANH, fd. IVC, d. 12/1981, 12122. Incriminated workers usually made a commitment
to their colleagues and to the factory management to rectify their behaviour. Sometimes
they requested the help of the work collective in order to begin a better life and to
eliminate their deficiencies. ANH, fd. IVC, d. 12/1981, 134.
64. The number of cases heard by the factory committees was small: two in 1978, nine in
1979. See ANH, fd. IVC, d. 1/1980.
65. ANH, fd. IVC, d. 12/1981.
66. See Gheorghe Gorun, Rezistent} a anticomunista n judet} ul Gorj reflectata n mentalul
colectiv (19451981) (Craiova 2008), 336441; Gheorghe Gorun, Rezistent} a la comu-
nism: Motru 981 (Cluj-Napoca 2005); Gheorghe Gorun and Hadrian Gorun, Revolta
minerilor din Motru (19 octombrie 1981), Anuarul Institutului de Istorie Orala Cluj-
Napoca, Vol. 6 (2005), 26281; Raluca Nicoleta Spiridon, Revolta minerilor de la
Motru din 19 octombrie 1981, Caietele C.N.S.A.S., Vol. 5, No. 1 (2010), 18396;
Adelina T} nt} ariu, Motru 1981 o revolta a disperarii, Anuarul I.I.C.M.E.R., Vol. 3
(2008), 21535.
67. ANG, fd. 26, d. 6/1981, 36.
68. ANG, fd. 26, d. 149/1981, 234.
69. Decretul Consiliului de Stat nr. 400 din 29 decembrie 1981 pentru instituirea unor reguli
privind exploatarea s} i ntret} inerea utilajelor, instalat} iilor s} i mas} inilor, ntarirea ordinii s} i
disciplinei n munca, Buletinul Oficial No. 112, 1981.
70. ANH, fd. IVC, d. 12/1981, 13134.
71. Ibid., 135.
72. ANH, fd. IVC, d. 6/1982, 251.
73. O judecata la fat} a locului plina de nvat} aminte, Pentru Patrie, No. 5, 1982.

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Morar-Vulcu 335

74. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-
century Russia (Princeton, NJ 2005).
75. An article appearing in the Gorj County newspaper described 300 (!) workers who were
caught red-handed spending their working time in restaurants and pubs. See Marius
Bazalt, Intr-o scurta incursiune prin restaurantele municipiului, am gasit 300 de cheflii
care fugisera din program sau urmau sa intre, Gazeta Gorjului, No. 1505, 9 January
1982.
76. A few suggestive titles in the local Gorj newspaper: We believed them to be miners
working the night shift, but they were tired out from playing poker (Calin Ninica, Ii
credeam mineri n schimbul de noapte s} i ei osteneau juc nd poker, Gazeta Gorjului, No.
1509, February 6, 1982) or Order and discipline in every workplace (Ordine s} i dis-
ciplina la fiecare loc de munca), Gazeta Gorjului, No. 1510, 13 February 1982.
77. See Gazeta Gorjului, No. 1506, 16 January 1982.
78. S} i-a pierdut slujba pentru un pumn, Gazeta Gorjului, No. 1610, 23 July 1982.
79. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in
Ceaus} escus Romania (Berkeley, CA 1991), 856.
80. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons (Berkeley, CA 2003).
81. See Mitchell Dean, Demonic Societies: Liberalism, Biopolitics and Sovereignty, in
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds, States of Imagination: Ethnographic
Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, NC 2001), 45.

Author Biography
Calin Morar-Vulcu studied and worked as a researcher at the Institute of Oral
History of the Babes} -Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, looking at the
social and cultural history of Romania during the second half of the twentieth
century. He has published on the allocation of political identities in the ocial
discourse of the communist regime and is currently researching on the Romanian
industrial milieu, focusing on aspects such as violence and industrial accidents.

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