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Nicolae (Nicu) Covaci is a famous Romanian composer, singer, guitarist, and painter and one of the founders of the rock band Phoenix, a well-known group in Romania. Born on 19 April 1947 in Timișoara, he was raised only by his mother, as his father was arrested by the communist authorities due to his political convictions. Despite economic difficulties, Covaci was tutored in French, English, and German and took private lessons of piano, violin, and guitar thanks to his mother’s efforts. His musical career started in 1961, when together with several others he founded the group called Sfinții (The Saints). In choosing the name of the band, they were inspired by the British TV series The Saint, which Romanian Television was broadcasting at that time (Stratone 2016, 62). The name was an implicit mockery of conformism, as the behaviour and outfits of the members of the group hardly respected the existing social norms. Because the Romanian authorities thought that the name had religious connotations, they pressured the band to change it. As a result, The Saints became Phoenix in 1962 (Covaci vol. 1 2014, 57, 75, 89).

The cultural opposition of Phoenix and implicitly of Nicu Covaci, was related to their musical activity. Due to isolation from the West, information about foreign music always reached Romania with some delay and mostly by way of informal and clandestine channels. Taking advantage of the limited liberalisation that characterised the beginning of Ceaușescu’s regime, Romanian youth tried to discover Western music and fashion, so they began to imitate the behaviour and outfits of their musical idols. In this respect, Timișoara, a multiethnic city located near the Western border, was more privileged than the rest of the country. Young people in Timișoara could tune their radios to the frequencies of foreign radio stations (especially Yugoslav ones) and British pirate radios broadcasting foreign music. At the same time, some of them had relatives in the Federal Republic of Germany from whom they received musical magazines such as Bravo, Musical Express, and Rolling Stone and the latest albums of the most popular artists of that time. Thus, Nicu Covaci and his friends began their musical career by singing covers of the latest hits and copying the dress styles of the artists presented in the pages of foreign magazines. Most important of all the Western influences that left traces on Phoenix during the 1960s was the hippy subculture. Its revolt against mainstream society and its social and political conventions, its quest for human closeness based on sincerity as opposed to the existing formalism, and finally the belief that world could be changed and that young people armed with love and the wish for peace could make that change possible also echoed in the minds of Romanian youth. They began to imitate the hippy fashion (flared trousers or tight pants, flowery shirts, a piece of textile tied over their foreheads to hold their long hair) and to question the existing order imposed on them by the regime and by the older generations. This was the context in which the members of Phoenix decided to write their own songs and to become the spokesmen of the younger generation’s rebellion against authority and lack of freedom. After winning a national musical contest for students, in 1968 Phoenix recorded their first EP, which contained two original songs, Vremuri (Times) and Canarul (Canary) composed by Nicu Covaci and another member of the band, Moni (Florin) Bordeianu. These tracks gave voice to the Romanian young people’s revolt against the communist regime that incriminated differences and failed to understand their need for freedom and personal experimentation. The first song Vremuri (Times) describes the rebellious stand and outfit of youth as just one among many nonconformist fashions that initially triggered the disapproval of the mainstream society but ended up by being accepted by it. In contrast, Canarul (Canary) tells the sad story of a bird that tries in vain to escape its silver cage and accepts its defeat by looking with sad eyes at an outside world that cannot hear its cry of despair. The allusion was to Romanian young people who were like the bird in the cage longing for their lost freedom, and whose failed escape attempts only left them the option of looking at the outside world beyond the Iron Curtain (Covaci vol. 1 2014, 83, 105, 127–131; Stratone 2016, 60–61). Another song heavily loaded with political meanings, which betrayed even more poignantly the revolt of younger generation against the communist regime, was Nebunul cu ochii închiși (The madman with his eyes closed) written by Bordeianu and Covaci in 1968 and included on the band’s second EP. The madman in the song could be interpreted as the Romanian communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who because of his privileged position (he is described as standing on a mountain and looking down at the world) became increasingly divorced from reality. Thus, his words spoken from the top of the mountain failed to inspire anything but indifference on the part of the population.

The so-called Theses of July 1971 officially put an end to the liberalisation process and stressed the need to improve the political and ideological education of all Romanian citizens. The arts, culture, and education were to play an essential role in this endeavour as they were to serve the political aims of the communist regime and to find their sources of inspiration in Romanian realities and traditions. In this context, Nicolae Covaci as the leader of the band Phoenix continued his cultural opposition towards the communist regime by using the means provided by it. He turned to authentic Romanian folklore and used it as a source of inspiration for the new compositions of the band. The result was a fusion between rock and folklore that observed the official cultural line but at the same time distinguished Phoenix’s music from other attempts to use folklore for political means. Consequently, the next three albums of the band were thematically inspired by traditional tales about outlaws, Gypsies, and mythical animals, and made Phoenix one of the best-selling bands in the country (Covaci vol. 1 2014, 237–267).

Despite their success, or maybe because of it, the members of Phoenix, and especially Nicu Covaci, were harassed by the secret police. After Covaci refused at a public meeting to become a member of the Romanian Communist Party, his harassment intensified. Moreover, the cultural authorities censored the public appearances of the band, as they were afraid of Phoenix’s growing popularity and that their nonconformist behaviour could become contagious among young people. As a result, Covaci applied for an exit visa as he had married a Dutch woman, and left the country in 1976. In the next year he returned to Timișoara and played with other members of Phoenix in a concert to raise funds for the victims of the earthquake of 4 March 1977, which had caused serious destruction in the southern part of Romania. Nicu Covaci then used his trip back home to help the rest of the band flee the country. Hidden in huge loudspeakers, they crossed one national border after another until they reached the Federal Republic of Germany, where Nicu Covaci hoped to resume the activity of the band. Unfortunately, disagreements among them led very quickly to the breakup of the group. After the fall of the communist regime, Nicu Covaci and Phoenix resumed activity in Romania, which continues to the present day (Covaci vol. 1 2014, 433-469; vol. 2, 15-165).

Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu (b.  10 October 1945, Bucharest) is a philologist, essayist, copy-editor and translator. She is the sister of the historian of religions, philosopher, and political essayist Ioan Petru Culianu and the wife of the writer and literary critic Dan Petrescu. Before 1989, she was an assistant lecturer in the Faculty of Philology of A.I. Cuza University of Iaşi, then researcher at the Institute of Philology A. Philippide of the Romanian Academy of Science, Iași Branch. She supported her husband’s dissident activity, not only morally but also logistically, with the help of her brother, who was in exile in the West, and materially when Dan Petrescu was unemployed between 1983 and 1989. After 1989, she edited the complete works of Ioan Petru Culianu for publication at the Nemira and Polirom publishing houses. She is a respected translator.

The Dan Petrescu and Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu collection contains various reports made within the Interior Ministry and the Iaşi County Inspectorate of the Securitate that contain information about the Petrescu couple collected with the help of “sources.” Such documents are very relevant for an understanding of the manner in which the communist authorities in general and the Securitate in particular perceived actions that were in contradiction to the ideology of the communist regime or the logic by which the party-state functioned. Among the findings resulting from the “informative surveillance” of the couple, the documents mention that  Thérèse Culianu-Petrescu is “continuing to have the same interest in maintaining relations with the French assistants placed in Iaşi, her husband Dan Petrescu also intermediating such connections,” that “she has a brother who left illegally the country to establish in France [in fact, in Italy and then in Holland], with whom she maintains contact and who writes literary works denigrating the accomplishments of our country and our regime,” that “she has listened to the radio station Free Europe,” that “she has actively supported the denigratory literary activity of her husband and supported him whatever the circumstances, sharing his point of view,” and that “she acknowledged the fact that the French assistants made numerous appreciations of a negative character regarding our country and that other Romanian intellectuals were also drawn in.” This short list of “sins” compiled by the Securitate officers in 1983 after their search of the Petrescus’ home constitutes a mini-dictionary of current and recurrent acts, more a matter of everyday life than of great one-off gestures, which define those whose life under communism involved thinking and acting differently from the conventional norm. In an undemocratic regime, such small actions, it should not be forgotten, had dramatic consequences for the people in question.

The historian Srđan Cvetković has comprehensively researched political repression during the start of socialist Yugoslavia, between 1944 and 1953. His particular areas of interest include state repression, human rights, and the Cold War. As a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History in Serbia he published monographs Između srpa i čekića, Represija u Srbiji 1944-1953 [Between the Sickle and the Hammer: Repression in Serbia 1944-1953] (2006), Portreti disidenata [Portraits of the Dissidents] (2007), Bela knjiga 1984 [White Book 1984] (2011), among others, and curated an exhibition U ime naroda! [In the Name of the People!] (2014) about the repression of the communist regime in Serbia. Cvetković was also a member of two state commissions which inquired into the killings and prosecutions of political opponents of the Tito regime.

Alexandru Călinescu (b. 5 octombrie 1945, Iași) is a professor, literary historian, literary critic, essayist, and former anticommunist dissident. He studied and then taught French literature in the Faculty of Letters of A.I. Cuza University in Iaşi, and was director of the Mihai Eminescu Central University Library there. He has been a regular contributor to the most prestigious cultural publications in Romania. He currently reads a weekly editorial on Radio Free Europe. In the early 1990s, he was Romanian language assistant at INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) in Paris. In the course of his career, he has published a number of volumes of literary criticism, literary history, and essays. Among these may be mentioned: : Anton Holban - Complexul lucidității (Anton Holban: the complex of lucidity, 1972), Caragiale sau vârsta modernă a literaturii (Caragiale or the modern age of literature, 1976), Perspective critice (Critical perspectives, 1978), Biblioteci deschise (Open libraries, 1986), Interstiții (Interstices, 1998), Adriana și Europa (Adriana and Europe, 2004), Incursiuni în proza românească (Incursions into Romanian prose, 2004); and Proximități incomode (Uncomfortable proximities, 2006).

Alexandru Călinescu’s professionalism has been rewarded with some of the most prestigious cultural awards in Romania: in addition to the Writers’ Union Prize (1972), awarded for his debut volume, since the fall of communism he has received the Romanian Academy Prize (1990) and the Prize of the Ateneu cultural magazine for his literary critical and historical work. He also holds the Jubilee Medal of the University of Angers, France (1991), the Order of Cultural Merit awarded by the president of Romania (2000), the Palmes Académiques Order conferred by the French government (2000), and the Ordre National du Merite awarded by the president of France (2004). As result of the special cultural links with France that he cultivated assiduously after the fall of communism, Alexandru Călinescu was the special guest of the most well-known maker of cultural programmes for French TV channels, Bernard Pivot, who between 2002 and 2005 made a series of programmes under the title Double je, which were broadcast by France 2 and were dedicated to those outside France who had adopted French culture as their second culture. In his capacity as director of the Central University Library in Iaşi, Alexandru Călinescu took part in the programme Double je spécial Iaşi, which was filmed in the city and broadcast on 21 October 2004.

On the subject of communism, he is very categorical: “I quite simply had a horror of it. I grew up in a family of hundred percent reactionaries, and growing up in that spirit I couldn’t possibly have turned into something of any use to communism.” From the Securitate documents, it emerges that Alexandru Călinescu was under surveillance as early as 1969. As he testifies, he knew how things were, but he didn’t suspect how much they had entered into his life through this daily routine of surveillance: “For me, it was obvious from 1983. But I didn’t realise the scale and intensity of the operation. In 1989, I knew that my life was like a sort of live broadcast for the Securitate. I had been four and eight people around me. And in the days of December 1989, it was at its peak. They were inseparable from me.” Having been followed for two decades by the dismal communist repressive institution, Alexandru Călinescu was one of those who achieved a remarkable professional career after the Ceaușescu regime fell in 1989. Today he is one of the most appreciated and most respected intellectuals working in the humanities in Romania.