Rock music played a role in subverting the political order of the Soviet Union and its satellites, which included Romania. The attraction of the unique form of music served to undermine the communist authority by humanizing the West, helped alienate a generation from the political system, and sparked a youth revolution.

This contribution was achieved not only through the use of words or images, but through the structure of the music itself. Furthermore, the music was spread as part of a broad public diplomacy effort, commercial ventures, and through the efforts of the populace in the Eastern Bloc.

A part of the rock culture included clothing. Just like today, where you can buy the shirt of your favourite band from their website, back then people wanted to accessorize their clothing, to represent the bands that they loved. And in the honest and pure communist tradition, the people got pulled out from concert halls, got abused, arrested, photographed, fingerprinted because they dared to have band names hand-written on their clothes, because printed shirts weren’t a thing in communist Romania anyway, even more the bands’ capitalist products.

Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității — CNSAS (National Council for Studying the Securitate Archives) is a government body established with the purpose of making available to Romanian citizens the files and documents compiled by “Securitate” during the communist regime, until December 22nd 1989.

A few days ago, CNSAS released a series of photos of the above-mentioned youngsters getting arrested for wearing “costumation”, wearing (ohnoes!) a hat with patches and “dead man’s head” drawings.

Recalling what a friend (Bogdan) wrote on facebook, the main problem appeared when a moron policeman got fooled when someone told him that “AC/DC” stands for “Accept Capitalism / Detest Communism”, and they would round up people with this written as they were part of a cult.

Also recalled by Bogdan, there is a story of a young rocker from Bucharest that was terrorized by a cop to become an informant and was pushed to the point where he took his life. Most likely, he wasn’t the only one.

We need to remember the cruelties and the lack of freedom of the communist regime so we can avoid its appearance in the future.

After this post, I received a tip from my friend (and only reader) Andrei, who recommended me the movie Metronom, on a similar situation during the Ceausescu communist regime. It’s a must watch.