Gheorghe Ursu

Gheorghe Emil Ursu (known to friends as Babu; July 1, 1926 – November 17, 1985) was a Romanian construction engineer, poet, diarist and dissident.

A left-wing activist and avant-garde intellectual who joined the Romanian Communist Party as a youth, he was soon after disillusioned with the Communist regime, and became one of its critics.

For most of his life, Gheorghe Ursu was active in cultural circles, and maintained contacts with literary and artistic figures.

Ursu anonymously denounced the policies of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and was kept under surveillance by the country's secret police—the Securitate.

A journal in which he recorded his thoughts and opinions was the subject of a denunciation, which eventually led to his arrest.

He was beaten to death by cell mates soon after, while in the custody of the Miliția.

Gheorghe attended primary school in Soroca from 1932 to 1936, and high school there until 1941, when his family moved to Galați.

Gheorghe Ursu joined the Union of Communist Youth in 1944, and became one of its secretaries.

He continued his studies at Vasile Alecsandri High School in Galați, where he graduated in 1945.

His maternal grandparents, along with ten other family members (who were Northern Transylvanian Jews) were killed at Auschwitz.

Ursu and his wife Sorana had a daughter, Olga (m. Ștefan) and a son, Horia Andrei.

Ursu was a person noted for his left-wing convictions.

During World War II, while Romania was allied to the Axis Powers (see Romania during World War II), he was involved in anti-fascist activism, as one in a group which also comprised future essayist Iordan Chimet and future science fiction writer Camil Baciu.

In parallel, the group cultivated avant-garde literature, and was interested in Surrealists such as Gherasim Luca, Tristan Tzara, and Gellu Naum.

According to Ursu's son, both his father and Baciu gravitated toward communism, while Chimet maintained a moderate leftist position, being more suspicious of Soviet policies and alarmed by the Soviet occupation of Romania.

Like his father Vasile Ursu and his friend Baciu, the young intellectual imagined communism along Utopian lines.

From 1945 to 1950, he was a civil engineering student at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, joining the Romanian Communist Party during this time and, together with future physician and historian of medicine Gheorghe Brătescu, editing the pro-communist student magazine Studentul Român.

Growing disillusioned with the communist doctrine after 1949, he was repeatedly sanctioned for disobedience and ultimately expelled from the party in 1950.

It was during his university years that Ursu began keeping a diary, in which he expressed strong criticism of the Communist regime.

When Ursu stopped writing, the manuscript comprised 61 notebooks, covering a period of 40 years.

From 1950 to 1985 he worked at the Bucharest-based Institute for the Study and Design of Communal Households.

Ursu was placed under surveillance during the 1960s, when he first traveled beyond the Iron Curtain, where he met with prominent anti-communist intellectuals such as Virgil Ierunca and Monica Lovinescu.

In 1970, Editura Litera published a volume of his poetry, Mereu Doi ("Always Two"), with a preface by the poet Nina Cassian.

In addition to this, he wrote but never published satirical poems targeting Nicolae Ceaușescu's leadership of the country.

Reportedly, he deliberately never took the precaution of keeping these hidden, which brought him to the attention of Securitate operatives.

Some of his writings ridiculed Communist and nationalist figures associated with Săptămâna magazine (among them Eugen Barbu, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and Dan Ciachir).

During this period, he was close to the filmmaker Mircea Săucan, the composer Anatol Vieru, and the important writers Zaharia Stancu and Geo Bogza (a former Communist who was by then a critic of the regime).

He personally designed a large number of lodgings; according to his own estimate, by 1977, 30,000 to 40,000 people were housed in buildings he had planned.

The Ursu family moved into the newly developed area of Drumul Taberei.

However, the most important stage of his conflict with the authorities came immediately after the major earthquake of 1977.

It was then that, as an engineer, he sent a letter to the West German-based Radio Free Europe, protesting against Romanian construction policies.

The anonymous piece was read by Ierunca over four successive broadcasts.

Earlier in 1977, Ursu had been one in a commission tasked with consolidating Bucharest's oldest tall structures.

At the time, he had witnessed and recorded a meeting of the commission, attended and supervised by Ceaușescu, during which the dictator allegedly ordered all consolidation works to cease, supposedly claiming that they caused panic and could not hope to repair structural faults.

Ursu's death was a matter of international scandal and, after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the subject of an inquiry initially headed by prosecutor Dan Voinea.

Much controversy arose over the new authorities' alleged procrastination, before two former officers were sentenced for instigating his murder.

A third one was jailed for confiscating his diary, most of which remains lost.

Ursu was born in the Bessarabian city of Soroca, now in Moldova.

His parents, both surgeons, were Vasile Ursu (of Galați) and Margareta (of Măgura Ilvei, Năsăud County).

He had a sister, Georgeta (married Berdan).