Auntie Varvara's Clients: Clandestine Histories

Nonfiction. Romanian History. "Most of Tanase's AUNTIE VARVARA'S CLIENTS deals with the subversive and self organizational work of the Komintern agents in Romania, with the tribulations of the small, illegal and hardly popular Communist Party from Romania, and with the mafi-like pragmatics of these clandestinos. When the Red Army entered Romania in August 1944, there were fewer than 2,000 Communist Party members and sympathizers in the country and abroad. Not that opportunism is manifest only in that country but, by 1947, the party membership had risen to some 700,000. We were so few. So many of us are left, ran an adagio. This party that never came to be a grassroots movement, showed awkwardly disguised shudders of illegitimacy until its disbanding in 1989. As a proletarian dictatorship, the Romanian communist regime, which came to power through epic electoral fraud, proved that everything proletarian in it was absorbed by its dictatorial side"--Calin Andrei Mihailescu.