State Induced Theft

Abstract

In this article I argue that one of the main tools that allowed the Romanian communist state to control oppositional activities, far better than many of its Eastern European neighbors, was the transformation of political opponents into petty criminals and felons. I contend that in the two decades that preceded 1989, communist Romania witnessed a pragmatic shift from hard rule (based on simply imprisoning political opponents under the category of “political detainees”) to subversive criminalization. The main operative tool for the subversive criminalization of so-called political offenses was Law 18/1968 (subtitledLaw regarding the control of the provenance of goods that have not been acquired through legal means). I argue that Law 18 was the result of two interconnected political drives. The first drive was the desire of the Ceauşescu regime to gain favor with the West by perpetuating the rhetoric launched as a result of the general amnesty for political detainees in 1964, under the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej administration. The second drive was the political imperative of the Ceauşescu regime to suppress political opposition. My argument is that this transformative shift was accomplished through the development of what I call amechanism of state induced theftbacked by the deployment of a subversive legal instrument of criminalization, which was Law 18/1969. This paper analyzes the role, essence, and implications of Law 18 while supporting a theory of a strategic shift in communist policy.