This is the first extensive work in any language on Ceausescu's secret police, the Securitate. From the imposition of Communist rule in Romania in 1945, the organisation and activity of the Securitate remained shrouded in secrecy, and only since the overthrow of Ceausescu in December 1989 has some information become available. This has been published in the Romanian press, but there has been no systematic study of the Securitate's history. Dennis Deletant is the only non-Romanian scholar to have been granted wide access to the Securitate archives and this book is based partly on the fruits of his labours there. He has also drawn on the memoirs, some unpublished, of several victims of the Communist terror of the 1950s, and conducted interviews with many of the prominent dissidents of the Ceausescu regime, some of whom he got to know well during 1980s.

Chapter 1 Police Terror and the Imposition of Communist Rule; Chapter 2 The Securitate and the Removal of Opposition, 1948-1965; Chapter 3 From Terror to Fear: Nicolae Ceau?escu and the Securitate, 1965-1978; Chapter 4 Ceau?escu's Appeal to National Sentiment: The Case of Transylvania; Chapter 5 Cultivating Support: The Role of Bessarabia; Chapter 6 Compliance; Chapter 7 Dissent; Chapter 8 Central Planning as Coercion: Systematisation; Chapter 9 The Securitate and Repression, 1978-1989; Chapter 10 Epilogue;