Name: Auntie Varvara's Clients | Stelian Tanase
Brand: University of Plymouth Press
Price: 32.00 RON
Availability: InStock

Descriere & specificații

Stelian Tanase's book explores the politics of the totalitarian state. He is an historical authority on the communist period in Romania. Auntie Varvara's Clients brings to life documents discovered in the archives of the pre-communist secret police, the Siguranta (nicknamed Auntie Varvara). This extensive work reveals a regime reliant on secrecy. The narrative changes tense unannounced, giving a surreal, filmic quality to the writing. Tanase takes us from the early days of illegal membership of the communist underground, at the end of the First World War, to the eventual rise to power and the struggle for supremacy. Auntie Varvara's Clients is illustrated with the art of contemporary Romanian artist Cristian Tarba, as well as original Siguran mugshots and photographic portraits of members of the underground including Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Ana Pauker and Nicolae Ceausescu. One of the main theses of Auntie Varvara s Clients is that the organisational structure of the underground a closed, rigidly hierarchical secret society, comprising cells, of whose members was demanded blind obedience and unthinking submission to the arbitrary will of the absolute leader, and in which dissent or apostasy was punishable by death was extended to the whole of Romanian society once the communists seized power. Romania becomes a vast prison camp, what Tanase calls a carceral society. The inmates of this prison are housed in barrack-like conditions (communal flats and shoddily built prefabricate