Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian communist politician and statesman. He was the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and the second and last communist leader of Romania. He was also the country's head of state from 1967 to 1989, and widely classified as a dictator, serving as President of the State Council and from 1974 concurrently as President of the Republic, until his overthrow and execution in the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, part of a series of anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe that year.
Enki Bilal is a French comic book creator and film director.
Roger Vailland was a French novelist, essayist, and screenwriter.
The Socialist Republic of Romania was a Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist state that existed officially in Romania from 1947 to 1989. From 1947 to 1965, the state was known as the Romanian People's Republic. The country was an Eastern Bloc state and a member of the Warsaw Pact with a dominant role for the Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its constitutions. Geographically, RSR was bordered by the Black Sea to the east, the Soviet Union to the north and east, Hungary and Yugoslavia to the west, and Bulgaria to the south.
The Securitate was the popular term for the Departamentul Securității Statului, the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania. Previously, before the communist regime, Romanian secret police was called Siguranța Statului. It was founded on 30 August 1948, with help and direction from the Soviet MGB. Following the Romanian Revolution in 1989, the new authorities assigned the various intelligence tasks of the DSS to new institutions.
The Danube–Black Sea Canal is a navigable canal in Romania, which runs from Cernavodă on the Danube river, via two branches, to Constanța and Năvodari on the Black Sea. Administered from Agigea, it is an important part of the waterway link between the North Sea and the Black Sea via the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal. The main branch of the canal, with a length of 64.4 km (40.0 mi), which connects the Port of Cernavodă with the Port of Constanța, was built in 1976–1984, while the northern branch, known as the Poarta Albă–Midia Năvodari Canal, with a length of 31.2 km (19.4 mi), connecting Poarta Albă and the Port of Midia, was built between 1983 and 1987.
Vasil Pavlovich Mzhavanadze was a Georgian Soviet politician who served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Georgian SSR from September 1953 to September 28, 1972 and a member of the CPSU's Politburo from June 29, 1957 to December 18, 1972. Dismissed after a corruption scandal, he was replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze.
Pierre Christin is a French comics creator and writer.
The Carnival of Immortals is a 1980 science fiction graphic novel written and illustrated by the Yugoslavian-born French cartoonist and storyteller Enki Bilal. It is the first part of the Nikopol Trilogy, followed up by La Femme piège in 1986 and ending with Froid Équateur in 1992. In 2004, Bilal directed the film adaptation Immortel , although many plot elements were changed from the comic book.
Les Humanoïdes Associés is a French-American publishing house specializing in comics and graphic novels, founded in December 1974 by comic artists Mœbius, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Philippe Druillet, and financial director Bernard Farkas.
Paul Goma was a Romanian writer, known for his activities as a dissident and leading opponent of the communist regime before 1989. Forced into exile by the communist authorities, he became a political refugee and resided in France as a stateless person. After 2000, Goma expressed opinions on World War II, the Holocaust in Romania and the Jews, claims which have led to widespread allegations of antisemitism.
Fabrice A Giger is a literary publisher and film & TV producer. The son of Swiss painter José Giger, he is well known for publishing thousands of comic books / graphic novels from such authors as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mœbius, Enki Bilal and John Cassaday.
The Polish October, also known as the Polish thaw or Gomułka's thaw, was a change in the politics of the Polish People's Republic that occurred in October 1956. Władysław Gomułka was appointed First Secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) marking the end of Stalinism in Poland.
The Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977 was the largest protest movement against the Communist regime in Romania before its final days. It took place 1–3 August 1977 and was centered in the coal mining town of Lupeni, in Transylvania's Jiu Valley.
The Nikopol Trilogy is a series of three science fiction graphic novels written in French by Yugoslavian-born Enki Bilal, published between 1980 and 1992. The original French titles of the series are La Foire aux immortels (1980), La Femme piège (1986), and Froid Équateur (1992), which in 1995 were collected together in a single volume entitled La Trilogie Nikopol. The individual stories were translated into English and published by Humanoids Publishing under the titles Gods in Chaos, The Woman Trap, and Cold Equator. In 1999, the trilogy was also published in English as a single volume, The Nikopol Trilogy. The series is regarded as one of the most original science fiction comics which have revolutionised the conventions of comic art.
Jules Roy was a French writer. "Prolific and polemical" Roy, born an Algerian pied noir and sent to a Roman Catholic seminary, used his experiences in the French colony and during his service in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War as inspiration for a number of his works. He began writing in 1946, while still serving in the military, and continued to publish fiction and historical works after his resignation in 1953 in protest of the First Indochina War. He was an outspoken critic of French colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence and later civil war, as well as a strongly religious man.
Eastern Bloc media and propaganda was controlled directly by each country's communist party, which controlled the state media, censorship and propaganda organs. State and party ownership of print, television and radio media served as an important manner in which to control information and society in light of Eastern Bloc leaderships viewing even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat to the bases underlying communist power therein.
Eastern Bloc politics followed the Red Army's occupation of much of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and the Soviet Union's installation of Soviet-controlled Marxist–Leninist governments in the region that would be later called the Eastern Bloc through a process of bloc politics and repression. These governments contained apparent elements of representative democracy to conceal the process initially.
Clerical collaboration with communist secret services occurred in some Eastern European countries during the Cold War. There were multiple reasons why certain clergy members chose to take this course of action. Some hoped to provide services to the government in exchange for a reversal of policies persecuting Christians. Others wished to buy favors from the authorities in order to advance their own careers, since the authorities could influence promotions within the Church hierarchies. Finally, there are claims that some clergy members were secret service agents from the beginning, working undercover.
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.
