Bărăgan – The land of the exiles (en)

The vast desert, the steppe, towards the East. If the East means hope, in communism the road is the opposite, towards degradation, “pohod na Sibir”. In Russia you hear: “they sent him to Siberia”. In Romania they said: “The Romanian people took him to Bărăgan”. The meaning is the same: without judgement, without guilt, to extermination. It began in 1949 and reached its climax in 1951. One train after the other, loaded with troops and armaments, twinned with the Soviet one, moved day and night towards the border with Yugoslavia, a country that dared to withdraw from the Cominform. Other […]

More

The terror unleashed by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej became even more bitter after 1948. Inspired by the Soviet Union, the extermination of anti-communist fighters spread rapidly and became a kind of proletarian virtue, the numbers of whom were reported to Moscow on a weekly basis. As the Danube-Black Sea Canal only partially solved the mass destruction of the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, numerous labour camps were set up. Thus the Romanian Bărăgan was populated with deportees, mainly ‘landlords’, ‘enemies of the people’, ‘bandits’, ‘criminals’, etc. Massive labour forces were concentrated under absolutely free skies, with the deportees reserving the right to suffer […]

More