Gheorghe Emil Ursu (known to friends as Babu; July 1, 1926 – November 17, 1985) was a Romanian construction engineer, poet, diarist and dissident. A left-wing activist and avant-garde intellectual who joined the Romanian Communist Party as a youth, he was soon after disillusioned with the Communist regime, and became one of its critics. For most of his life, Gheorghe Ursu was active in cultural circles, and maintained contacts with literary and artistic figures.
Ursu anonymously denounced the policies of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and was kept under surveillance by the country's secret police—the Securitate. A journal in which he recorded his thoughts and opinions was the subject of a denunciation, which eventually led to his arrest. He was beaten to death by cell mates soon after, while in the custody of the Miliția.
Ursu's death was a matter of international scandal and, after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the subject of an inquiry initially headed by prosecutor . Much controversy arose over the new authorities' alleged procrastination, before two former officers were sentenced for instigating his murder. A third one was jailed for confiscating his diary, most of which remains lost.
Biography
Early life and left-wing activism Ursu was born in the Bessarabian city of Soroca, now in Moldova. His parents, both surgeons, were Vasile Ursu (of Galați) and Margareta (of Măgura Ilvei, Năsăud County). He had a sister, Georgeta (married Berdan). Gheorghe attended primary school in Soroca from 1932 to 1936, and high school there until 1941, when his family moved to Galați. He continued his studies at Vasile Alecsandri High School in Galați, where he graduated in 1945. His maternal grandparents, along with ten other family members (who were Northern Transylvanian Jews) were killed at Auschwitz. Ursu and his wife Sorana had a daughter, Olga (m. Ștefan) and a son, Horia Andrei.
Ursu was a person noted for his left-wing convictions. Gabriela Blebea Nicolae, "Les défis de l'identité: Étude sur la problématique de l'identité dans la période post-communiste en Roumanie", in Ethnologies, Vol. 25, Nr. 1/2003 (hosted by Érudit.org); retrieved November 19, 2007 Cristian Teodorescu, "A doua asasinare a lui Babu Ursu", in Cotidianul, July 12, 2007 Andrei Ursu, "Despărțire de Iordan Chimet" , in Revista 22, Nr. 849, June 2006 During World War II, while Romania was allied to the Axis powers (see Romania during World War II), he was involved in anti-fascist activism, as one in a group which also comprised future essayist Iordan Chimet and future science fiction writer Camil Baciu. In parallel, the group cultivated avant-garde literature, and was interested in Surrealists such as Gherasim Luca, Tristan Tzara, and Gellu Naum. According to Ursu's son, both his father and Baciu gravitated toward communism, while Chimet maintained a moderate leftist position, being more suspicious of Soviet policies and alarmed by the Soviet occupation of Romania. Like his father Vasile Ursu and his friend Baciu, the young intellectual imagined communism along Utopian lines.
Gheorghe Ursu joined the Union of Communist Youth in 1944, and became one of its secretaries. From 1945 to 1950, he was a civil engineering student at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, joining the Romanian Communist Party during this time and, together with future physician and historian of medicine Gheorghe Brătescu, editing the pro-communist student magazine Studentul Român.Brătescu, p.381 Growing disillusioned with the communist doctrine after 1949, he was repeatedly sanctioned for disobedience and ultimately expelled from the party in 1950. Armand Goșu, "Andrei Ursu: Cazul Gheorghe Ursu. SRI a ascuns crimele Securității" , in Revista 22, Nr. 852, July 2006
Dissidence It was during his university years that Ursu began keeping a diary, in which he expressed strong criticism of the Communist regime.Dennis Deletant, Ceaușescu and the Securitate, M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1995, p.331. Christian Levant, "Disidentul Gheorghe Ursu, anchetat și pentru cutremurul din '77" , in Adevărul, February 3, 2007 When Ursu stopped writing, the manuscript comprised 61 notebooks, covering a period of 40 years. Mirela Corlățan, "Istorii. 'Notele' către Securitate ale disidentului Gheorghe Ursu", in Cotidianul, July 10, 2007 From 1950 to 1985 he worked at the Bucharest-based Institute for the Study and Design of Communal Households. He personally designed a large number of lodgings; according to his own estimate, by 1977, 30,000 to 40,000 people were housed in buildings he had planned. The Ursu family moved into the newly developed area of Drumul Taberei.
In 1970, published a volume of his poetry, Mereu Doi ("Always Two"), with a preface by the poet Nina Cassian. In addition to this, he wrote but never published satirical poems targeting Nicolae Ceaușescu's leadership of the country.Vladimir Tismăneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998, p.138. Reportedly, he deliberately never took the precaution of keeping these hidden, which brought him to the attention of Securitate operatives. Some of his writings ridiculed Communist and nationalist figures associated with Săptămâna magazine (among them Eugen Barbu, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and ). During this period, he was close to the filmmaker , the composer Anatol Vieru, and the important writers Zaharia Stancu and Geo Bogza (a former Communist who was by then a critic of the regime).Blaga, p.79-80, 81-82, 105-106, 118, 254
Ursu was placed under surveillance during the 1960s, when he first traveled beyond the Iron Curtain, where he met with prominent anti-communist intellectuals such as Virgil Ierunca and Monica Lovinescu. However, the most important stage of his conflict with the authorities came immediately after the major earthquake of 1977. It was then that, as an engineer, he sent a letter to the West German-based Radio Free Europe, protesting against Romanian construction policies. The anonymous piece was read by Ierunca over four successive broadcasts. Earlier in 1977, Ursu had been one in a commission tasked with consolidating Bucharest's oldest tall structures. At the time, he had witnessed and recorded a meeting of the commission, attended and supervised by Ceaușescu, during which the dictator allegedly ordered all consolidation works to cease, supposedly claiming that they caused panic and could not hope to repair structural faults. In his rendition of the meeting, Ceaușescu is quoted proposing instead solutions involving "concrete and chemical substances" to be tried out. Ursu refused to sign the motion endorsing the new guidelines, which caused a minor scandal. In 1984, he wrote that the meeting had convinced him that Romania's leader was "paranoid".
According to Andrei Ursu, at a later stage his father also considered drafting a protest document which he intended to read inside the Great National Assembly, Communist Romania's formal legislative branch. He continued to travel abroad, visiting various European countries until 1980, when he was no longer given the needed Securitate permission. Ursu was also prevented from publishing his account of the travels. His various writings of the time show that he was conducting his trips while on a very tight budget, and that he occasionally had to rely on the good will of Romanian exiles and distant relatives. His daughter Olga settled in the United States, and her subsequent correspondence with her father was itself a venue for criticism of the regime.
He caused the Communist authorities further irritation after sending numerous protest letters to the Communist Party organ Scînteia and to the magazine Săptămâna, denouncing the leadership for using or condoning opportunism, demagogy, and antisemitism. In one other case, he sent a letter to the Ministry of the Interior, demanding to know why citizens were required to wear a suit and tie when photographed for their identity documents, and stating that it was their right not to.
Denunciation, interrogation, and death In 1984, two female subordinates denounced Ursu to the Securitate for his diary. On orders from General Eugen Grigorescu, his home and office were searched and the notebooks seized, along with other manuscripts. Interrogations and an investigation followed, with the Securitate intending to depict him as the head of an anti-government conspiracy.Brătescu, p.381-382 Ursu was allowed some freedom of movement: he took a vacation to 2 Mai, on the Black Sea coast, where he met with Cassian and G. Brătescu. Brătescu recounted that, during the trip, Ursu was avoiding discussions, but discreetly confessed his fears that the Securitate was using his notes to organize a round-up of his friends.Brătescu, p.382
Ursu was arrested on September 21, 1985. The accusation was one of concealing foreign currency: the equivalent of $16 (US dollars) (17 lei at the contemporary official exchange rate) in various denominations was found in his house. George Tărâță, "Torționarul Stanică rămâne liber" , in Ziua, November 9, 2006 His son was also subject to interrogations.Olaru, p.41 After Ursu's diary was confiscated, Cassian, who was visiting the United States, chose not to return to Romania. "Simțeam nevoia unei evadări într-o zonă în care se mai putea strecura feeria" (interview with Nina Cassian) at the Memoria Digital Library; retrieved November 16, 2007
Held at the Miliția quarters on Calea Rahovei in Bucharest, Ursu was subjected to repeated violent assaults. On November 17 he was transferred to the Jilava Prison hospital, where he died of peritonitis later that day.Olaru, p.41-42 His body was released to the family and, after a funeral service, cremated. Several intellectual figures, including Chimet and philosopher Sorin Vieru, attended the ceremony in defiance of continued Securitate surveillance. Also present were G. Brătescu and theater critic Radu Albala, the latter of whom, doubting the official account, raised the possibility that Ursu had been killed by an inmate.
Several relatives expressed suspicions that Gheorghe Ursu was killed because of his refusal to incriminate other literary figures,—in support of this notion, Andrei Ursu quotes his father's Securitate file, which investigated in part "close links with certain writers who, due to their hostile beliefs, are kept under watch by Securitate organs". Ursu's sister claimed such authors included Bogza, Chimet, Cassian, and Albala.
Legacy and controversies
Legal case and lost diary Gheorghe Ursu's death, alongside the persecution of Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa, contributed to an international scandal, and, as a direct result of these cases, the United States withdrew Romania's "most favoured nation" status. His killing also outraged members of the intellectual elite. Bogza would thus write: "One could not say of Gheorghe Ursu that which poets generally like to be said about them: that they are great poets. Killing such a person is equivalent to killing the King of Butterflies. It would be appropriate for the whole Romanian culture to stand up and salute Gheorghe Ursu's memory." Brătescu recalled: "Gheorghe Ursu's drama helped me to better understand what world we live in." In her assessment of Ursu's conflict with the regime, University of Ottawa professor Gabriela Blebea Nicolae concluded: "Gheorghe Ursu counts as one of the «martyrs» who make moral values triumph. The lives of all these persons form a bridge supporting the moral values that risk being engulfed by the murky waters of an aberrant political regime of the kind Romanian communism was throughout its history."