The
Great Communist Robbery (2004) is a documentary by Alexandru
Solomon detailing the strange event on 29 July 1959 when five men and a woman
robbed a Škoda car carrying banknotes, valued at over 1.6 million lei, to the
National Bank of Romania in Bucharest.
This was despite the currency having no value outside Romania, and the
difficulties of spending it inside the country, where citizens were closely
monitored and abnormal spending patterns would be expected to draw the
attention of the police.
As Romania was a police state the
crime rate was very low, so the robbery took the authorities by surprise and
there was pressure on the security apparatus to solve the crime. The initial suspects were the bank staff, but
attention switched to disaffected members of the Communist Party. The pressure was on the investigators, who
were told that failure to arrest the perpetrators within a short period would
mean they were out of a job.
After rounding up a large number
of suspects and using robust interrogation methods, the group responsible –
brothers Alexandru and Paul Ioanid (who gave the group its name the Ioanid
Gang), Saşa Muşat, Haralambie Obedeanu, and husband and wife Igor and Monica
Sevianu – was uncovered and arrested in September 1959. Significantly, all of the members of the
group were Jewish. Confessions followed,
but then the case became even stranger.
The six were told to participate
in a film about the robbery. The result
was Reconstruction, a propaganda film
made on Communist Party orders by Virgil Calotescu in 1960, in which the
robbers played themselves. (Rather
confusingly there is a 2001 film also called Reconstruction. Directed by
Irene Lusztig, Monica Sevianu’s granddaughter, it is about the case but focuses
on Monica. A further Romanian film called
Reconstruction, directed by Lucian
Pintilie in 1970, is not about the 1959 robbery.)
The 1960 documentary, fragments
of which are included in Solomon’s film, comprise crude reconstructions, with
the accused unsurprisingly giving stilted performances. Naturally the method of obtaining confessions
is glossed over. Instead the suspects
sit at a small table looking uncomfortable while the interrogator narrows his
eyes and asks questions in a firm voice.
Showing a pile of weapons is enough to elicit a statement of guilt. The reality would have been far different:
the family of one of the bank staff initially suspected were told he had died
of a stroke while being questioned, a not uncommon occurrence they were
informed matter-of-factly.
Screenings of the film were
reserved for Party members, emphasising the efficiency of the state in dealing
with malefactors and acting as a warning to others who might be similarly
tempted. The six cooperated in the
project because they were led to believe they would receive lighter sentences,
but the state failed to uphold its side of the bargain and their trial followed
a standard Stalinist format, with pre-rehearsed public confessions. Death sentences were handed to all six, but
that of Monica Sevianu was commuted to life imprisonment as she was a mother,
and she was later allowed to leave for Israel where she died in the 1970s.
The
Great Communist Robbery dissects the robbery and the 1960 reconstruction
by visiting locations and interviewing people who were connected to the
robbers, the robbery and its aftermath.
Several were involved in the investigation and prosecution, including
the judge who handed out the death sentences.
These retired functionaries skirt any hint they behaved improperly, and
the lack of an interviewer’s voice means they are never asked hard questions;
even when a former prisoner mentions the name of a Securitate officer who had
ill-treated her and there is a brief shot of him, one of the interviewees.
Definitive answers on the robbery
are not forthcoming in Solomon’s documentary.
Naturally the state-ordered 1960 film had its own agenda and cannot be
trusted as impartial evidence.
Surprisingly, the men in the group had been significant Party members
and intellectuals, while Monica Sevianu was on a watch list after having
emigrated illegally to Israel where she married and had children before, for
reasons never stated, returning to Romania and remarrying. Some of the audience members in 1960 would
presumably have known members of the group, who had been long-term Party
activists. But to show that such people
had acted against in this way would have been embarrassing for the government.
Instead there were orders to the
filmmakers not to include any political motives, nor to refer to the
perpetrators’ political or Jewish backgrounds.
The reasons for their bizarre act were subsumed to the state’s
requirements for obedience. They were
depicted as lumpen elements acting solely from base impulses of greed. The Securitate were shown to be the heroes,
assisted by the public, in bringing the perpetrators to justice so efficiently.
While the 1960 film was unable to
arrive at a definitive reason for this quixotic act for ideological reasons, by
2004 many of those involved were dead.
The son of one of the robbers is shown examining the extensive files on
the case, but they reflect the official position and shed no new light on why
the robbery was carried out. Various
suggestions are propounded in Solomon’s film and found wanting, such as revenge
for discrimination against Romanian Jews, or to gather funds to assist illegal
emigration to Israel.
However, the extent of the
group’s Zionist sympathies is unclear, nor why they would feel it worth taking
such risks. Using the money to pay
bribes to corrupt officials within the country (not something which could have
been aired in 1960) seems a plausible reason, but it is discarded with little
discussion. The film argues that state
control would have made it difficult to spend the money in Romania, but amenable
officials might have been able to launder the funds and use the proceeds
discreetly, or the group themselves might have hoped to spend the money while
remaining under the Securitate’s radar.
Perhaps the answer is to be found in personal psychology, a search for
excitement in a grey society where individualism was frowned on, and the act
was the significant factor rather than considerations of its aftermath.
In a world of mirrors where nothing
is what it seems there is a possibility the robbery never occurred and the
group was set up, with alleged eyewitnesses coerced into their testimony, in
order to expedite an anti-Jewish purge.
If so, it seems an improbably elaborate strategy, but there is a
precedent of a sort in the theory that Sergei Kirov’s assassination in
Leningrad in 1934 was sanctioned by Stalin and the NKVD as a pretext for a
purge of the Bolsheviks. Agreement to
participate in the 1960 (fiction rather than documentary) film could have been
secured by threats to harm family coupled with the offer of emigration – but would
Monica then have been allowed to leave, with the risk of her exposing the
fraud? The rumour that the executions
were faked to allow the five men to operate secretly as intelligence agents
abroad is certainly unfounded.
This is a window on the way
Romania worked under the communist regime, where dissent was repressed and
anti-Semitism was forcing Jews, many of whom would have preferred emigration to
Israel to life in Romania, out of their jobs, even if they had previously been
staunch supporters of the Party. The
truth of the robbery will probably now never be known, but Solomon has gone
some way to airing the issues. Greater
rigour in interviews would have been welcome, but might not have elicited any
more information. More seriously, there
is a sense that delving further into the biographies of the six could have
thrown up insights about their behaviour, and this is the film’s greatest
weakness.
The
Great Communist Robbery is available on YouTube courtesy of
Cinepub:
