The Securitate: Romania's Communist Secret Police

By D. R. Ashworth · June 17, 2025 · Updated October 17, 2026 · 4 min read

• Eastern Europe
• Camps and Repression
• Censorship and Propaganda

The Securitate — formally the General Directorate of the Security of the People — was the secret police of communist Romania. It was founded in 1948 under the supervision of Soviet advisers, and for four decades it protected the Romanian Communist Party’s monopoly of power: arresting people without warrant or trial, overseeing the notorious “re-education” tortures at Pitești prison, monitoring even the typewriters on which citizens might write, and plotting against Romanian critics abroad. In 2006 Romania’s president, on the basis of a presidential commission’s report, condemned the communist regime as “illegitimate and criminal” (Tismăneanu, HotNews).

Built under Soviet supervision

The Securitate was officially established by Decree no. 221 of 30 August 1948, the culmination of a process that had begun in the autumn of 1944. Its first director, with the rank of lieutenant general, was Gheorghe Pintilie, and two Soviet agents, Alexandru Nicolschi and Vladimir Mazuru, were appointed as his deputies. According to the Memorial of the Victims of Communism at Sighet, “no cadre was appointed to the leadership of the Securitate without the prior approval of the Soviet advisers” (Sighet Memorial).

The new service grew fast. Its first budget, in 1948, provided for 4,641 positions; by 1951 it had 15,280. It introduced “administrative arrest” — arrest without warrant, investigation or trial — and hundreds of thousands of people were sent to labour camps under the pretext of “re-education through labour” (Sighet Memorial).

Pitești: “re-education” by torture

The darkest episode of the early years took place at Pitești prison. Its origins lay in Suceava prison in the autumn of 1948; on 19 April 1949 the first group of prisoners from Suceava arrived at Pitești, and from the autumn of 1949 a harsher regime began. The “re-education” was led by Eugen Țurcanu, himself a prisoner, under the supervision of Securitate officers who received the information extracted by torture. Prisoners — many of them students — were tortured under his direction, deprived of books and parcels, forbidden to talk or to look out of the windows, and given little food. Țurcanu was responsible for the torture of hundreds of students and the death of at least five. He was later condemned to death by the very regime he had served and executed at Jilava prison in December 1954 (Pitești Prison Memorial).

Watching what people wrote

Under Nicolae Ceaușescu the Securitate’s methods became subtler but no less pervasive. The Sighet Memorial describes a 1980s programme of rumours, frame-ups, denunciations, provocation and censorship (Sighet Memorial).

One measure captures the regime’s fear of the written word. Under Decree no. 98 of 28 March 1983, every typewriter in Romania needed police approval. Approved owners had to submit a sheet with samples of all the machine’s characters every year, so that any typed leaflet could be traced to the machine that produced it; a typewriter could not even be lent without approval. Owners who were refused had ten days to give away, sell or consign their machines (Grosu, Zeppelin).

Hunting critics abroad

The Securitate’s reach extended beyond Romania’s borders. In early 1982 General Nicolae Pleșiță, head of the foreign intelligence service, ordered Matei Pavel Haiducu, a Securitate officer living in France under cover as a political refugee, to assassinate two exiled writers, Paul Goma and Virgil Tănase. Haiducu went to French counter-intelligence instead. Together they staged a poisoning of Goma at a Paris hotel — a “journalist”, actually a French agent, knocked over the glass — and a fake kidnapping of Tănase. Haiducu then defected, and in August 1982 he appeared at a press conference alongside the two men he had been sent to kill. President François Mitterrand postponed a planned visit to Bucharest indefinitely (Iancu, Adevărul).

The reckoning

The Ceaușescu regime fell in December 1989. Romania’s formal reckoning came much later. In 2006 President Traian Băsescu appointed a Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship, chaired by the political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu and bringing together historians, political scientists and sociologists. It delivered its final report in early December 2006 (Vasile). One of the report’s aims was to show that the Securitate after 1964–65 was not, as nationalist accounts later claimed, a “patriotic” institution devoted to the Romanian people (Vasile).

On 18 December 2006, addressing Parliament, Băsescu condemned the communist regime as “illegitimate and criminal” and, as the U.S. Embassy reported, “tendered a formal apology on behalf of the Romanian state to the victims of the communist dictatorship” (Tismăneanu, HotNews).

Why it matters

The Securitate shows how a communist secret police could be built by one state and inherited by another — created under Soviet supervision in 1948, then turned under Ceaușescu into the instrument of a personal dictatorship that feared its own citizens’ typewriters. Its methods ranged from the crude to the bureaucratic, from torture at Pitești to annual character samples filed with the police. Romania’s own president, on the evidence of his own commission, called the regime it served criminal.

Further reading on this site

• The Stasi — East Germany’s secret police and its files.
• Romanian church persecution — the regime’s campaign against religion.
• Romanian food rationing crisis — hunger under Ceaușescu.
• All articles on Eastern Europe and on repression.