Epurările politice din universităţile româneşti în timpul regimului comunist: cazul Gheorghe Ivănescu
Political purges from Romanian universities during the communist regime: the case of Gheorghe Ivănescu

Summary/Abstract: The installation of communism in Romania after the Second World War was accompanied by the removal from public life of many figures in the fields of administration, politics, education, journalism, etc., who had become undesirable for the new political regime. Gheorghe Ivănescu (1912-1987), professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Iasi and an authoritative linguist, also fell victim to the repressive policies of that era. He was removed from the University together with his wife, Rodica Ciocan-Ivănescu, professor at the Faculty of History. The reason was scientific, but it acquired a political connotation: Professor Ivănescu fought against the theories of Soviet linguists, primarily Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr. Marrism formed the basis of the policy of Russification of the peoples of the Soviet Union by replacing the Arabic and Latin alphabets with Cyrillic, as was done with the Romanians east of the Prut. Gheorghe Ivănescu argued that by historical rights, ethnographic and linguistic boundaries must be respected when it comes to borders between states, and therefore “where Romanian is spoken, there must be Romanian rule”. In 1952, he was fired from the university, a few years later he moved to Bucharest, remained unemployed for some time, and only in 1961 was he allowed to return to teaching, but in Timisoara. He was able to return to Iasi only in 1971.

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