 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2013) |
The Ioanid Gang (Romanian : Banda Ioanid) is the name given by Communist propaganda to a group in Communist Romania named after two of its members, Alexandru and Paul Ioanid. They were accused of carrying out on 28 July 1959 the most famous bank robbery in a Communist state.
An armed group of six Jewish Romanian intellectuals and Communist Party cadres (Alexandru Ioanid, Paul Ioanid, Igor Sevianu, Monica Sevianu, Sașa Mușat, and Haralambie Obedeanu) were alleged to have stolen 1,600,000 Romanian lei (about 250,000 US dollars in 1959) from an armoured car of the National Bank of Romania in 1959. The first five were alleged to have been in a getaway car, while Obedeanu was alleged to have been in a telephone cabin, keeping the bank's phone line busy.
The case was investigated by the Securitate, Communist Romania's secret police, and the supposed perpetrators were arrested within two months. They were rounded up in night-time raids, tried behind closed doors, and all but one sentenced to death. The executions, also kept under secrecy, including for family members, were carried out in 1960.
Monica Sevianu, the only woman involved, had her sentence commuted to forced labor for life because she was pregnant with her second child. In 1964, following an amnesty of political prisoners, she was allowed to emigrate to Israel.
In 1960, the government issued a propaganda film, Reconstituirea ("Reconstruction"), to be viewed only by Communist Party members, which reconstructed the way in which the heist had allegedly been planned and carried out. The jailed members of the Ioanid Gang acted out their own roles, either simply forced or possibly having been told that their death sentences would be commuted in return.
There were several unusual things about the story in its most common version. Beyond accusations based on various ideological guidelines, no reasons for the alleged robbery, or for the Ioanid group to have perpetrated it, were ever given. Although the persons on trial were accused of intending to donate the money to Zionist organisations that would send Romanian Jews to Israel, the stolen sum was in lei, which at the time could not be exchanged for hard currency anywhere in the world. Besides, none of the accused had been Zionists.
Given that Communist Romania was a police state, and unprecedented measures of strict control and surveillance were supposed to have been enforced in all areas of society (phone calls were routinely monitored, correspondence was intercepted, and secret police informants were common) a plan such as the one allegedly designed by the group would have been exceedingly difficult to carry out. It is also highly unlikely that the members of the "Ioanid Gang" could have been unaware of these facts. One of them, Alexandru Ioanid, was a colonel in the Securitate and, according to Victor Frunză, he had been related through marriage to the Securitate chief Alexandru Drăghici [7] (he had been married to, and recently divorced from, the sister of Drăghici's wife Martha Cziko; following the divorce, Drăghici had vowed to destroy him). During many months preceding July 1959 (the date of the alleged heist), at least one of the members, Obedeanu, was aware of being followed and of being constantly watched through binoculars by the Securitate from a building across the street from his apartment. Moreover, also for months preceding July 1959 the phones of the "Ioanid Gang" members had been tapped. In the aftermath, several of the friends with whom they had talked lost their jobs or positions.
After 28 July, the group was said to have engaged in reckless spending on luxuries, depicted in the original Reconstruction movie. It is, however, highly unlikely that a person living in Romania at the time, let alone such educated individuals, could have imagined being able to get away with such behaviour unnoticed by the surveillance apparatus. Moreover, in Obedeanu's case for example, the crew making the Reconstruction film resorted to bringing furnishing props, including carpets, furniture and curtains, to his apartment in order to show how he had spent the money. Obedeanu never really changed his spending habits, unlike apparently (according to Irene Lusztig) Sevianu, leading some to believe that, in trying to stage the event, authorities may have offered Sevianu money based on his more immediate needs (unlike the others, Sevianu was unemployed). Nora, Obedeanu's wife, was arrested at the same time as her husband but not accused; she was held for two months, which was the maximum allowed by law at the time. It has been indicated that Nora was interrogated only about the content of conversations among group members, and found out about bank robbery accusations only upon her release from prison.
All these aspects, together with the numerous cases of sentences based on false accusations, have led some, including relatives of the alleged robbers, to doubt that any robbery actually took place or that those charged with the crime really committed it, especially as there was no actual direct identification of the accused by the supposed witnesses. One conjecture is that the case was manufactured by the government in an attempt to justify a purge in the Securitate ranks – by accusing officers of incompetence in solving the case – as well as to remove most remaining Jews from leading positions inside the government and the Communist Party. Yet another contention with no evidence is that the executions were staged, so that the five men would have their records erased and become undercover agents abroad. Since most evidence has been filtered by the Securitate, the truth is extremely hard to discern, especially since Securitate files are unlikely to contain any self-incriminating notes of the staging of the heist, and restrict themselves to following the official story-line.
All those accused in the robbery were Jewish Communist intellectuals, all of whom had been party members during the years of underground activity [8] (between 1924–1944 the Communist Party had been outlawed in Romania). A large party purge was put in motion in 1958, a year characterised by a move away from Soviet Russia – the Soviet troops stationed in Romania since 1944 were leaving the country – and critics of party chief Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej are ousted. [8] The purge takes the shape of a "Romanian ethnicisation" of the party, ethnic Jews and Hungarians being the target. [8] The chief ideologue put in charge of the purge was Leonte Răutu who, in spite of his Jewish roots, had become a stauch Romanian national communist. [8] The "gang" members were even accused of planning to assassinate Răutu. [9] Vladimir Tismăneanu sees the whole affair in the light of a typical Bolshevist show trial, with the Romanian national communists set out to remove Jewish intellectuals from the party. [8] Some Jewish intellectuals, though being former underground fighters, are accused of lacking working class consciousness. [8] Paul Ioanid's Soviet connections have become a burden, and the personal vendetta of Alexandru Drăghici and his wife Martha (née Cziko) against Alexandru Ioanid for having divorced the sister of Martha Drăghici, is given the ideological spin of him having gravely strayed from "Socialist morals". [8]
Based on what is known about the group members (journalists, a physicist, a history professor, and a Securitate colonel, all of them were fully cognizant of the Romanian situation) and about the political climate at the time, as well as on recollections of some family members, another scenario also seems likely. Following prolonged Securitate surveillance of the group, which resulted in the accumulation of evidence about conversations with dissident tones, members may have been blackmailed including threatened with harm against their families and themselves, and promised some reprieve or even permission to leave the country with their families, if they went along with the staging of the robbery to serve several government and personal purposes.
In this event, the government failed to uphold its end of the bargain. As a parallel, in what was a highly unusual move for those times when nobody was allowed to leave Romania, another Jewish Securitate officer, Ion Crișan, incidentally described as "friend" of the Ioanid group, was permitted to leave the country with his family and go to Brazil around 1961, [8] shortly after the alleged incident; this has led some to believe that he may have been the agent through whom the government communicated its promises and made them credible.
Apart from the original Reconstruction movie produced by the Romanian state and widely screened before Communist Party members, there have been several other movies and documentaries, including Reconstruction (2001) by Irene Lusztig and The Great Communist Robbery (2004) by Alexandru Solomon. The film Closer to the Moon (2014) by Nae Caranfil, starring Harry Lloyd, Vera Farmiga, Mark Strong and Joe Armstrong, is fictional and very loosely connected to the real events. [10]
Ion Gheorghe Iosif Maurer was a Romanian communist politician and lawyer, and the 49th Prime Minister of Romania. He is the longest serving Prime Minister in the history of Romania.
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist party in Romania. The successor to the pro-Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave an ideological endorsement to a communist revolution that would replace the social system of the Kingdom of Romania. After being outlawed in 1924, the PCR remained a minor and illegal grouping for much of the interwar period and submitted to direct Comintern control. During the 1920s and the 1930s, most of its activists were imprisoned or took refuge in the Soviet Union, which led to the creation of competing factions that sometimes came into open conflict. That did not prevent the party from participating in the political life of the country through various front organizations, most notably the Peasant Workers' Bloc. During the mid-1930s, due to the purges against the Iron Guard, the party was on the road to achieving power, but the dictatorship of king Carol II crushed this. In 1934–1936, PCR reformed itself in the mainland of Romania properly, with foreign observers predicting a possible communist takeover in Romania. The party emerged as a powerful actor on the Romanian political scene in August 1944, when it became involved in the royal coup that toppled the pro-Nazi government of Ion Antonescu. With support from Soviet occupational forces, the PCR pressured King Michael I into abdicating, and it established the Romanian People's Republic in December 1947.
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu was a Romanian communist politician and leading member of the Communist Party of Romania (PCR), also noted for his activities as a lawyer, sociologist and economist. For a while, he was a professor at the University of Bucharest. Pătrășcanu rose to a government position before the end of World War II and, after having disagreed with Stalinist tenets on several occasions, eventually came into conflict with the Romanian Communist government of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He became a political prisoner and was ultimately executed. Fourteen years after Pătrășcanu's death, Romania's new communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, endorsed his rehabilitation as part of a change in policy.
The National Bank of Romania is the central bank of Romania and was established in April 1880. Its headquarters are located in the capital city of Bucharest.
Silviu Brucan was a Romanian communist politician. He became a critic of the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. After the Romanian Revolution, Brucan became a political analyst.
Vasile Luca was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian and Soviet communist politician, a leading member of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) from 1945 and until his imprisonment in the 1950s. Noted for his activities in the Ukrainian SSR in 1940–1941, he sided with Ana Pauker during World War II, and returned to Romania to serve as the minister of finance and one of the most recognizable leaders of the Communist regime. Luca's downfall, coming at the end of a conflict with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, signaled that of Pauker.
Gheorghe Cristescu was a Romanian socialist and, for a part of his life, communist militant. Nicknamed "Plăpumarul", he is also occasionally referred to as "Omul cu lavaliera roșie", after the most notable of his accessories.
Vladimir Tismăneanu is a Romanian American political scientist, political analyst, sociologist, and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. A specialist in political systems and comparative politics, he is director of the University of Maryland's Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies, having served as chairman of the editorial committee (2004–2008) and editor (1998–2004) of the East European Politics and Societies academic review. Over the years, Tismăneanu has been a contributor to several periodicals, including Studia Politica, Journal of Democracy, Sfera Politicii, Revista 22, Evenimentul Zilei, Idei în Dialog and Cotidianul. He has also worked with the international radio stations Radio Free Europe and Deutsche Welle, and authored programs for the Romanian Television Company. As of 2009, he is Academic Council Chairman of the Institute for People's Studies, a think tank of the Romanian Democratic Liberal Party. Between February 2010 and May 2012, he was also President of the Scientific Council of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania.
Grigore Preoteasa was a Romanian communist activist, journalist and politician, who served as Communist Romania's Minister of Foreign Affairs between October 4, 1955, and the time of his death.
Leonte Tismăneanu was a Romanian communist activist and propagandist.
The Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, also known as the Tismăneanu Commission, was a commission started in Romania by Romanian President Traian Băsescu to investigate the regime of Communist Romania and to provide a comprehensive report allowing for the condemnation of communism as experienced by Romania.
Miron Constantinescu was a Romanian communist politician, a leading member of the Romanian Communist Party, as well as a Marxist sociologist, historian, academic, and journalist. Initially close to Communist Romania's leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, he became increasingly critical of the latter's Stalinist policies during the 1950s, and was sidelined together with Iosif Chișinevschi. Reinstated under Nicolae Ceauşescu, he became a member of the Romanian Academy.
Alexandru Nicolschi was a Romanian communist activist, Soviet agent and officer, and Securitate chief under the Communist regime. Active until 1961, he was one of the most recognizable leaders of violent political repression.
Boris Stefanov Mateev was a Romanian communist politician, who served as general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1936 to 1940.
The Socialist Party of Romania was a Romanian socialist political party, created on December 11, 1918 by members of the Social Democratic Party of Romania (PSDR), after the latter emerged from clandestinity. Through its PSDR legacy, the PS maintained a close connection with the local labor movement and was symbolically linked to the first local socialist group, the Romanian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. Its creation coincided with the establishment of Greater Romania in the wake of World War I; after May 1919, it began a process of fusion with the social democratic groups of in the former territories of Austria-Hungary — the Social Democratic Parties of Transylvania, Banat and Bukovina. The parties adopted a common platform in October 1920. Progressively influenced by Leninism, the PS became divided between a maximalist majority supporting Bolshevik guidelines and a reformist-minded minority: the former affiliated with the Comintern as the Socialist-Communist Party in May 1921, while the minority eventually established a new Romanian Social Democratic Party.
Reconstruction is a 2001 documentary made by Irene Lusztig that investigates the Ioanid Gang bank heist committed in 1959 in Communist Romania. The film focuses on Monica Sevianu, Lusztig's grandmother, and the only female involved in the heist.
Mihail Roller was a Romanian communist activist, historian and propagandist, who held a rigid ideological control over Romanian historiography and culture in the early years of the communist regime. During his training in engineering, he rallied with the communist cells in Romania and abroad, joining the Romanian Communist Party while it was still an underground group. He collaborated with the Agitprop leaders Leonte Răutu and Iosif Chișinevschi, spent time in prison for his communist activity, and ultimately exiled himself to the Soviet Union, where he trained in Marxist historiography.
Alexandru Drăghici was a Romanian communist activist and politician. He was Interior Minister in 1952 and from 1957 to 1965, and State Security Minister from 1952 to 1957. In these capacities, he exercised control over the Securitate secret police during a period of active repression against other Communist Party members, anti-communist resistance members and ordinary citizens.
Leonte Răutu was a Bessarabian-born Romanian communist activist and propagandist, who served as deputy prime minister in 1969–1972. He was chief ideologist of the Romanian Communist Party during the rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and one of his country's few high-ranking communists to have studied Marxism from the source. Răutu was of Jewish origin, though he embraced atheism and anti-Zionism. His adventurous youth, with two prison terms served for illegal political activity, culminated in his self-exile to the Soviet Union, where he spent the larger part of World War II. Specializing in agitprop and becoming friends with communist militant Ana Pauker, he joined the Romanian section of Radio Moscow.
Jilava Prison is a prison located in Jilava, a village south of Bucharest, Romania.