Tyragetia (Oct 2019)
Epurarea şi expurgarea cărţilor în România comunistă: cazul lui Ion Ionescu de la Brad / Removing and censoring books in communist Romania: Ion Ionescu de la Brad’s case
Abstract
One of the many consequences that the countries under the Soviet domination had to suffer after the Second World War was the rewriting of history in order to be useful to the Bolshevik ideology. The first affected by the censorship were the books that were subjected to removal and banning. Ion Ionescu de la Brad, a great agronomist, scientist and political figure whose ties with Bessarabia were systematically hushed up, was a victim of communist censorship. His biography hid the fact that he was the prefect of Bolgrad County in 1857-1858, after the south of Bessarabia was returned to the Moldavian Principality by the Treaty of Paris (1856), and his protest in the Romanian Parliament of 1878-1880 against the new seizure of this territory by Russia under the Berlin Treaty (1878). This happened because after 1945, Romania was forced to exclude from the public consciousness any mention of the territories taken from it: Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and South Dobrudja. The censorship applied by the Romanian communist regime in relation to the works of Ion Ionescu de la Brad was expressed in three forms: a) his lifetime publications on Bessarabia were seized and kept in closed library collections; b) works with a mention of this scientist, published before 1944, were banned for researchers and sent to closed or documentary library funds; c) excerpts related to Bessarabia were cut from the works published after 1950. It is necessary to publish a monograph based on the research in Cahul, Bolgrad, and Ismail counties in 1857-1858, as this will help destroy the clichés imposed by Russian propaganda, restore the historical truth and get a correct and complete description of this area.
