Bucharest student movement of 1956
On 22 October 1956, students from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics compiled a list of sixteen points containing key national policy demands.
Their interpretation of the events in Hungary was that, under communism, students were the group that had to initiate such protests, and that, once begun, the revolt would be joined by the masses at large.
Romanian students closely followed the unfolding events in Hungary, not only in Bucharest, but also Timișoara, Cluj, Târgu Mureș, and Iași.
[1] At first, different students would exchange information they had heard on the radio or from other sources and discussed their prospects for undertaking similar actions.
The students did not form committees, which the authorities might have considered to be clandestine organisations and attract a repression by the state security apparatus.
The most active groups were formed in the Faculties of Law, Letters, Theatre, Medicine, Architecture, Journalism, and Philosophy, as well as at the Medical-Military Institute and at the Politehnica.
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej continued to lead the country using the same authoritarian methods and he was not influenced by Nikita Khrushchev's 23 February Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, in which Stalin's abuses were denounced and the negative impact of the personality cult was exposed, nor by the reactions of the other communist countries, which purged their Stalinist leadership at least partially.
But the invitation demonstrated to those who hesitated to join the movement that more energetic actions were needed as a consequence of the authorities' negative attitude.
For some more perceptive students, this was a clear signal that the West did not intend to intervene and that the Hungarian revolutionaries, as well as those in Romania, should not count on external assistance.
Others expressed contrary views, pointing out that Soviet troops had not intervened and that the Hungarian Revolution was a success, since the communist regime there had practically been overthrown.
[citation needed] (One of those arrested was Peter Freund, who claimed to have narrowly escaped execution by firing squad; he would later become professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chicago.
Aware that if a protest were to take place, it could no longer be delayed, on 2 November 1956 the action committee, led by Alexandru Ivasiuc and Mihai Victor Serdaru, decided to organise a public student gathering.
Students from the Faculties of Letters and Law wrote a series of manifestoes in which they presented their demands and urged the rest of the population to side with them.
The manifestoes also contained slogans such as "No more Russian and Marxism courses", "We demand science, not politics, in universities" or "Follow the example of the Hungarian, Czech and Polish students".
Traffic was completely stopped, and the entire area normally used by vehicles in front of the university was filled with lorries in which soldiers, armed with automatic weapons, were sitting on benches, ready to intervene.
The command had extensive powers, including the right to order troops to open fire and to declare a state of emergency in any part of the country.
[5] Furthermore, the principal protest organisers were unmasked in public sessions during which their expulsion was requested in view of their status as people enemy to the regime.
Students convinced professors and artists to sign petitions asking that those arrested be freed; as a result, repressive actions intensified and more were condemned and expelled.
On 13 November, in a session of the Political Bureau, it was decided that the Ministry of Education should draw up "a concrete programme of measures to lead to an improvement in the social composition of students".
Although the great majority of them had not been involved in the protest movement, Nicolae Ceauşescu explicitly asked for this step to be taken in a speech held in Bucharest on 15 November 1956.
Around the same time, Virgil Trofin, secretary of the Central Committee of UTM, declared, "We have to know how many enemies there are in our country and are trying to fight against our party".
The movement was generally forgotten, at least until the December 2006 publication of the Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, which devotes a chapter to the events of 1956.
In 2006, Stela Covaci published a book documenting the communist repression of 1956–58 and the methods used to crush a protest movement run by students and anti-communist writers.
