At the end of the 90s, Dacia had released a sedan model and then almost all the models until 2004, with a new facelift that someone called “Iliescu’s smile” because of the radiator grille.
But did Ion Iliescu always have reasons to smile, since we are talking about the former first president of post-December Romania? From what follows, we see that the sadness of childhood faded like the cardboard that was frying the carp in the Oltenita of childhood and turned into a joy that will carry him “to the highest heights”. Of course, with some “turbulences” related to the “building of the multilaterally developed socialist society”.
Ion Iliescu was born on March 3, 1930, in Oltenita, in the current Călăraşi county. His father, Alexandru Vasile Iliescu was a communist illegal (1901-1945) and his mother Maria Dumitru Toma is said to have left her husband and child in 1931. Alexandru Iliescu was imprisoned several times, because he considered Romania an imperialist state, made up of several nations, according to Bukharin’s cominternist theses, Alexandru Iliescu had participated in one of the communist congresses of the PCdR, outlawed in 1924, more precisely near Moscow in 1931, at the V Congress, spending 4 years in the homeland of world communism.
Who were Ion Iliescu’s parents?
Alexandru Iliescu married Maria P Iliescu, she raised the future president, nicknamed “Ionel” as her son.
It is said that when Lenuța Petrescu, the future Elena Ceaușescu, went to visit her brother Gogu Petrescu in prison, she took “Ionel” an 11-12 year old child with her, to see his father.
Therefore, Ion Iliescu knew the Ceaușescus from the period of illegality, being perceived by them as a “child lover”.
At the age of 14, Ion Iliescu, having an illegal father, became a UTC member in 1944 and became a student of the Spiru Haret High School until 1949. In 1945, his father died at the age of 44 due to the illnesses he had suffered during his was closed after returning from the USSR in 1935.
In 1948, the high school was renamed IC Frimu, in memory of a former illegal who died in prison as a result of the 13 December 1918 strike of the printers.
He went to study in Moscow
In 1949, he was admitted to the Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest. A year later, also due to his “healthy” origin, “Ionel” becomes a student at the “V. Molotov” Hydropower Institute in Moscow, where he will stay until 1954, catching IVStalin’s death there.
Those who remember him since then (Nina Ilina, Aleksandr Velikanov, his colleagues, quoted by “Truth”) say that he always smiled, told jokes and had elegant clothes that he lent to colleagues. He had the money from the scholarship, which was larger than that of Soviet students, which allowed him to eat white buns prepared according to French recipes that many Soviets considered “delicacies”.
Ion Iliescu was blamed for his studies in Moscow, but he was understood by many. Of course, as he testified in his autobiography published in 2011, under the title “Fragments of life and lived history”, published by Litera Publishing House, the period in Moscow would have made him understand the limits of the Stalinist-inspired communist regime that was also being built here .
He adopted the “cannibals of Americans”
Obviously, in old age, the man still “sweetens” his memories, but in 1951, after completing the first year of studies in Moscow, he published an article in “Scinteia” with the title “The happiness of studying in the Soviet Union”. He did not forget the “cannibals of Americans” or the “superiority of Soviet man’s thinking”, the “just war of the North Korean comrades against the American imperialists” (the Korean conflict 1950-1953). Who imagined that 51 years after that article, Ion Iliescu would receive as president of Romania, in Prague in 2002, the invitation for Romania to join NATO? This is how history is written.
However, Ion Iliescu remembered the period, beautifully, like the years of his youth, especially since many sources claim (even a documentary from Russia 1 entitled “Ionel”) that in the second year of his stay in Moscow, in 1951, Ion Iliescu married a woman from Bucharest and a student in Moscow, Elena Şerbănescu (born somewhere in Giulesti or Crângași), later known as Nina Iliescu. Nina Iliescu was born on March 4, 1930.
Probably an occasion to smile was the former president’s recollection of how he mixed Russian vodka and rose liqueur at a fellow student’s birthday and “dressed up” with pickles from a Soviet “Alimentara”, noting that and pickles “were different” in the Motherland of the Soviets.
When he began his ascent
So, married and studying in Moscow, the essential city around which Romanian politics gravitated in those years, Ion Iliescu joined in 1953, the PMR, the party of Romanian communists as it was called since 1948.
Two years after coming to the country, in 1956, with a smile already installed on his face, “Ionel”, who became “comrade Iliescu”, received his first position at the UTM, that of secretary of the Central Committee of the UTM.
So, in 1956, at the age of 26, Ion Iliescu climbed the first rung of political power. He will remain in politics for almost half a century…
2023-08-19 14:36:56
#Ion #Iliescus #famous #smile
