5 Comments

Great picture as the lead.

I remember the news when it was going on, and it sucks that the library burned but the Ceausescu's deserved that by all accounts.

elm

war sucks

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I haven't been able to find if the library was targeted because of secret police near it but maybe.

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I was living in Bayern/Bavaria at the time and don't recall reading contemporaneous reports. I wonder now what else I missed. I seem to recall attempted mass destruction of secret police files across Eastern Europe at the time.

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I was aware of the library burning but didn't really get the timeline of executing Nicolae Ceaușescu & his wife. I'm looking at the censorship during the Ceaușescu era. You are right--it means I have to do some work on the secret police, too. I think in the West we were focused on Berlin and didn't really absorb what happened in Romania.

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Almost everything in Eastern Europe during the Cold War has to be seen through the lens of the secret police. It was the single, eternal constant.

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