This collection constitutes the most important selection of documents relating to the events in 1977 which transformed Paul Goma from a writer, who was censored in Romania but successful abroad, into a dissident and a defender of human rights. At the beginning of February 1977, inspired by Charter 77, Goma effectively made a public appeal – via Radio Free Europe which he had reached with the support of foreign diplomats – with the purpose of protesting against the violation of human rights in Romania. Around 200 people had responded to this appeal and signed a collective open letter by the time of Goma’s arrest on 1 April 1977. The arrest was followed by the confiscation of all items found in his home relating to the emerging protest for human right. Thus, the core of the collection traces only the first phase of this ephemeral movement for human rights, which relates to its rapid development in only two months mostly due to Goma’s personal efforts. After Goma’s arrest, in the second phase, the Securitate quickly manged to disband the movement, which came to be popularly known as the Goma Movement. However, evidence about this second phase is to be found only in the documents created by the secret police, namely in the Goma Movement Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS, defined as such by COURAGE research.
Effectively, the earliest document relating to the Romanian movement for human rights is a personal letter addressed to the playwright Pavel Kohout, one of the signatories of Charter 77, whom Goma had had the chance to read and thus selected as addressee. In other words, what turned later into a collective protest was preceded by an isolated act of defying Ceaușescu’s regime and at the same time expressing solidarity with those who had founded Charter 77. According to Goma, he decided to take this step after several unsuccessful attempts to convince his fellow writers to send a common message. The majority of Goma’s colleagues, according to his recollections, regarded the signatories of Charter 77 as courageous intellectuals, but saw their endeavour as a useless protest which could have no practical result. Goma’s letter to Kohout assured the Czechs and Slovaks who signed Charter 77 of the sympathy they enjoyed among Romanians and made a telling comparison between Romanians and the other national communities included in the Soviet bloc after WWII. According to Goma’s description of the situation in 1977, “We [Romanians] are living in the same camp, in the same Biafra (capital: Moscow). You, Czechs and Slovaks, had a 1968, the Poles had a 1956, a 1971 and an ... always, the East-Germans had Berlin and Biermann. We, Romanians, do not have these landmarks. But suffering is not always proportional with the intensity of the outcry of revolt. You (like the Poles, the East-Germans, the Hungarians and the Bulgarians) are living under Russian occupation; we, Romanians, are under Romanian occupation – ultimately, more painful and more effective than a foreign one. But we live under the same yoke. ... The same lack of elementary rights, the same mockery of the individual, and the same shamelessness of lies everywhere. Everywhere: poverty, chaos in the economy, demagogy, uncertainty and terror.” Against this “programmatic degradation of the human being in our Stalinist ‘socialist’ societies,” Goma called for a fight using as weapon the “word, which is sharper than the blade.” This self-critical and witty letter contrasted Romania to other fraternal countries, but simultaneously pointed out that the communist regimes inflicted everywhere the same abuses upon individuals, for that represented the very essence of the system. It was a moving letter of solidarity with Charter 77, but not a programme of action for a Romanian Charter. However, due to Goma’s amateurish but quite perceptive political analysis in this letter, most historical reconstructions of the Goma Movement mention it as one of the most important documents of the Romanian movement for human rights.
Goma’s personal endeavours continued with a letter to the secretary general of the party himself. In his open letter to Ceauşescu, he invited the leader of the country to follow his initiative of expressing publicly solidarity with the Czechs and Slovaks who signed Charter 77. Through a much-quoted phrase, Goma drew the attention of his addressee to the simple fact that “in Romania, [only] two people are not afraid of the Securitate, your excellency and myself.” Thus, Ceaușescu, just like himself, was practically free to write to the Charter signatories, Goma’s argument continued. If he does this, all Romanians will be able to overcome their inherent fear of the Securitate and follow his and Goma’s example. As far as Ceaușescu is concerned, Goma underlined, the letter will illustrate “consistency with the declarations of 1968” and the secretary general’s genuine desire to “fight for socialism, democracy and humanity.” At the same time, “Romania will be able to participate in the [CSCE Helsinki Follow-Up] Conference in Belgrade with dignity.” The text of this letter is both amusing and mocking; it is illustrative of Goma’s literary talent and it is quoted by most analysists due to the unusual style for an official (though open) letter to Ceaușescu. Together with the letter to Kohout, it is often quoted in historical analyses, given its unique character in terms of content. Thus, this letter is also a featured item of this collection. However, this letter is not part of the collective protest against the violation of human rights in Romania either. Both letters marked Goma’s solitary action of defying the communist regime once they were disseminated among Romanians by Radio Free Europe beginning with 9 February 1977.
The most important document of the collective movement and implicitly of the collection, is the above-mentioned open letter of protest addressed to the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was scheduled to take place in Belgrade in 1977. By the time of his arrest, Goma had collected about 200 supporters for this common letter denouncing human rights abuses in Romania. The list of signatures collected by Goma is another featured item of this collection. This number of supporters was about as many as Charter 77 attracted from among the Czechs and Slovaks in the same year. In comparison to the signatories of the Charter, those who endorsed the Romanian letter of protest were rather a very loose community of isolated individuals who lacked a genuine common purpose. Turning to the letter which was finally signed by these 200 individuals, thus giving birth to a human rights movement in Romania, it is worth underlining its rather haphazard public emergence. It was initially disseminated as an open letter with eight supporters, of whom two were Goma and his wife. The real author of the letter was not Goma himself, as he recalls; although he drafted a version, the signatories preferred another variant, which one of the other initial signatories wrote. This explains why this collective letter contrasts sharply in style and content with the emotional and witty, but general and non-specific denouncement of abuses under the Ceauşescu regime which can be found in Goma’s two letters mentioned above. In contrast to these, the letter to the CSCE Follow-up Meeting in Belgrade uses a neutral tone to enumerate the rights which Romanian legislation theoretically guaranteed, but the authorities did not respect in practice. Besides indicating the precise articles of the Constitution which referred to rights that existed on paper but not in reality, this letter specifically emphasises the right to free circulation, which the Romanian communist regime (like all the others in the Soviet bloc) totally disregarded. According to the document, “the articles of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Romania which refer to civic rights (art. 17); the right to work (art. 18); the right to education (art. 21); the right to free association (art. 27); the freedom of speech, of press, of meetings and public demonstrations (art. 28); the freedom of thought (art. 30); the inviolability of human beings (art. 31); and of private residence (art. 32); the secrecy of correspondence and phone conversations (art. 33); are not respected. At the same time, the right to the free circulation of human beings, ideas, information is not respected, while the right to citizenship is transformed into an obligation.” By contrasting freedom of movement with the enforcement of citizenship, the letter hints at the right to change the citizenship given by birth by emigrating to a country of choice. A copy of this letter, which was dated 8 February 1977, was sent to Radio Free Europe using Goma’s channels of communication. Once information about the existence of the letter was systematically disseminated due to the active involvement of the Romanian desk of Radio Free Europe, it appeared as if the example of the Czechs and Slovaks was spreading fast among Romanians. Only a month after Charter 77, concern for the observance of human rights seemed to have gained momentum in Romania too. Although the two collective protests were apparently similar, in terms of the message expressed and the support received, their proponents proved to be driven by very different motivations.
Due to the way Radio Free Europe disseminated the information about this open letter, Goma turned into the epicentre of an earthquake which shook the Romanian communist authorities and took the secret police by surprise. The novelty of the challenge which Securitate had to confront with Goma’s attempt to establish a Romanian Charter 77 was twofold. It consisted not only in the ideas expressed, which were alien to political traditions in Romania, but also in the unprecedented and unexpected support for an open letter of protest. No other such rapid solidarisation of individuals around a common purpose occurred in communist Romania either before or after. Thus, this emerging movement which implied the defence of a political idea (and not a material benefit) must have been really puzzling for the Securitate officers, who did their best to grasp the situation and to understand the “real” motivations of the individuals involved in protesting over such an “abstract” issue as human rights. With the aim of containing the support for this collective protest, the secret police transformed what appeared to be an aggregate action against the communist regime into a multitude of individual motivations for expressing discontent with the regime. It was to this end that Goma was eventually arrested and brutally interrogated, among others by First Deputy Minister Nicolae Pleșită himself. He was, however, released on 6 May 1977, after a rather short detention, due to massive protests by the Romanian emigration in Paris, which managed to convince many outstanding personalities to sign a petition for his release. As is well known, Goma left Romania never to return just a few months later, in November 1977, thus ending his career as dissident in Romania and opening a new one as a defender of human rights in exile. The documents confiscated at the time of his arrest were preserved by the Securitate and subsequently transferred to CNSAS in 2002. They were included by the secret police in the Confiscated Manuscripts Fonds. All items confiscated during Goma’s house search were returned to him in 2005, so they are now to be found in Paris, where Goma settled after his forced emigration. Many of the documents confiscated from Goma, however, were also preserved in his file of informative surveillance, in particular the open letters and the lists of signatures, and thus they are still preserved in the Archives of CNSAS (ACNSAS, Informative Fonds, File I 2217). It is worth mentioning that copies of the documents that reached Radio Free Europe can also be found in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest (OSA/RFE Archives, Romanian Fond, 300/60/5/Box 6, File Dissidents: Paul Goma). The Paul Goma Private Collection is truly a special case not only because many of its items are preserved in copies in other repositories, but also because it is one of the few which travelled after 1989 from Romania into exile. The post-communist pattern was rather to bring back to Romania collections created in exile.
