Ceauşescu, poet politic. Cazul Imnului de stat al RSR din octombrie 1977
Ceauseşcu as political poet: The Case of the 1977 Romanian National Anthem

Summary/Abstract: Although April 1964 Declaration was a political document epitomizing Romanian communist leadership’s policy of „independence“ from Moscow, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Socialist Romania maintained formally as its National Anthem, without abolishing it, the Stalin-era political song entitled “We Praise you, Romania!” (Te Slăvim, Românie!). This Anthem was adopted in 1953 under the Soviet occupation and one of its main verses sounded like that: “Our People will be for ever in a fraternal relationship with Soviet People who Liberated Romania!”. After 1965 the new Secretary General, N. Ceausescu, pleaded for more autonomy from Kremlin in comparison with its predecessor, Gh. Gheorghiu-Dej, but for more than twelve years he and his Politburo colleagues were incapable of formally establishing a new State Anthem. Finally, in October–November 1977 this sort of political abnormity ended when Ceausescu proposed an adapted variant of the greatest Romanian composer (Ciprian Porumbescu) song’s (Three Colours) as the new Anthem.The aim of this article is to investigate one of N. Ceausescu’s hobbies, political poetry, focusing on the context in which the text of the 1977 Anthem was drafted. One of the hypotheses of this article is that probably Ceausescu himself (or with the aid of his closest collaborators, and apparatchiks) created the adapted version of the Anthem’s text. One indication is the dilettante way of drafting and editing which forced Ceausescu to hastily modify the Anthem’s text – by adding a new stanza – after only three weeks of the initial adoption.

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