Preservation of Christian dignity and identity in the oppressive context of the communist confinement regime. Young Nicolae Rădulescu’s carceral periplus

The present paper examines the modifications that occur to human beings amidst the deplorable conditions of Romania’s communist confinement system, using Nicolae Rădulescu’s story as a case study. After being imprisoned, the individual endured a horrifying system that elevated horror and treason to new heights. His stigma as a political and counter-revolutionary prisoner naturally drew dramatic consequences, both inside and outside of prison. From the Security people’s point of view, he was a pariah, a peripsema mundi who only needed to be forced in order to satisfy the demands of the new Soviet man. The uniqueness and, respectively, the originality of our research approach are supported by the consultation of primary resources, the main source of information being the Archive document, the tabs in the file from the Informative Fund drawn up in the name of our subject, ensuring the originality of this approach. At the same time, in order to eliminate the danger of slipping into the logic of the former Security, we used the data obtained from the memorial literature and specialized works that dealt with the issue of the concentration space under communist totalitarianism, in general, and of our subject, in particular. Simultaneously, we employed the information gleaned from the memorial literature and specialised works that addressed the problem of the concentration space under communist totalitarianism, in general, and of our subject, in particular, in order to eliminate the risk of falling back on the logic of the previous State Security. Furthermore, of the 16 individuals that the Security’s goals and mindset brought together in the famous Burning Altar group in 1958, Nicolae Rădulescu is the only one who remains alive today to respond to inquiries concerning the oppression of the communist concentration system against them. The main argument of the paper is that we need to examine the structural mechanisms that shaped the Romanian Gulag in accordance with the demands of the political police’s ideology in order to comprehend the scope of the struggle waged by those who fought to preserve their religious identity and dignity in the communist prisons.