Thousands of children used as spies by Ceausescu's police

ROMANIA: The dreaded secret police of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu recruited thousands of children to spy on schoolfriends, parents and teachers, historians have revealed.

Communist-era archives show that the Securitate blackmailed children across Romania into becoming informers in the late 1980s, as the whiff of liberalisation in the Soviet bloc prompted a fearful Ceausescu to tighten his grip on the country.

The files have shocked Romanians and prompted calls for an inquiry into why many agents who allegedly recruited the child spies enjoyed successful careers in the security services after Ceausescu was toppled and executed in 1989.

"In every county there were complex networks of these children, aged between 12 and 14 years old," said Cazimir Ionescu, a member of the state council created to study the Securitate archives.

Leading Romanian historian Marius Oprea unearthed a cache of children's files in the Transylvanian town of Sibiu, the 2007 European Capital of Culture, which was run like a fiefdom in the 1980s by Ceausescu's son, Nicu.

"In Sibiu in 1989, the Securitate recruited 830 informers and of these, 170 were under 18," said Mr Oprea. "On the basis of Sibiu, you could say that perhaps 15 per cent of the whole country's informers were children."

Historians believe the Securitate had hundreds of thousands of collaborators on its books by 1989. "What kind of information could these children give, except on family, teachers and so on?" said Mr Oprea.

The children were expected to tell their Securitate "handlers" about their friends' and families' opinions on the Communist Party, and whether they listened to western radio stations, had contact with foreigners, or even made jokes about Ceausescu.

"In the 1980s, the situation in Romania made it hard to recruit anyone with appeals to patriotism, so they blackmailed people, even children, with things they had done wrong at school, or with information they threatened to use against them," Mr Oprea said.

The secret police targeted intelligent and sporty children, whose participation in teams and clubs gave them access to many teachers, other children and their parents.

Several alleged recruiters were promoted through the ranks of the secret police after 1989, and some brought their young spies to work alongside them when they left school.

"This is a tragedy which must not only be brought to light but must also have clear consequences for the perpetrators," said historian Stejarel Olaru.

The files carry echoes of the tale of Pavlik Morozov, the child lionised by the Soviet authorities for denouncing his father to Stalin's NKVD secret police; Morozov's father was deported to a gulag, while his relatives set upon the young informer and murdered him.