ABSTRACT
The rule of Romanian Communist Party General Secretary Nicolae Ceausescu has elicited sporadic infusions of genuine popular support based primarily on its advocacy of national autonomy and, to a lesser extent, on the marginally accessible material returns of modernization. Few Romanians are willing to discuss the matter beyond such oblique references, at least in part because of the widely held belief that the obvious presence of so many representatives of the state's coercive power is but the tip of an iceberg of a truly omnipresent network of agents and informers. To the casual observer and the seasoned specialist alike the Socialist Republic of Romania seems a country in which the presence of uniformed representatives of the state's coercive power is all but inescapable. Aside from the functional rationale for the maintenance of a strong political police in socialist Romania, there are also compelling cultural, historical and idiosyncratic variables which help to explain its persistence.
