Sighet Memorial: Room 39 - The communisation of education

By means of terror, the communist regime repressed any act of opposition. The adult generation filled the prisons and was decimated in the labour camps. For the new generation, the most perverse methods of indoctrination were invented. From the very first years of Sovietisation, a large part of Romania’s educators – from country teachers to university professors – were sacked, assigned to manual jobs, sent to labour camps, or imprisoned. Those who remained and those joining the teaching profession had to adapt to the “new times”, becoming tools to propagate “Marxist- Leninist education”. Lessons were based on Soviet-style “standard textbooks”, and traditional disciplines were replaced with propagandistic, violently ideological subjects. The result was the creation of a “new man” (the dream of all dictators), a task set under way by Gheorghiu-Dej and completed by Nicolae Ceaușescu. The “new man” was an individual devoid of any past, forced to gaze smiling into a “luminous future” that never arrived. This room describes the nefarious process whereby the citizens of Romania were subjected to depersonalisation over the course of half a century, a process whose effects can still be felt today. At the same time, it is a homage to those who opposed this process, paying the price with the loss of their liberty and sometimes their lives. Hundreds died.