The Soviet Afterlife in Romania: Reservists’ Political Culture and the Pull Towards Moscow

By Cerasel Cuteanu

Nearly four decades after the fall of Communism, Romania is still asking whether it ever truly escaped Moscow’s grip.

A new political system is in place. Yet recent events have exposed something beneath it: a hidden layer, indistinct and easy to dismiss as inconsequential, that the new system never seems to have disturbed. It is also, to put it delicately, not out of step with Russian propaganda: a set of ideas that resonate comfortably in the Kremlin.

Is there a political culture that refuses to recede into the past, one that persists alongside the political system and in spite of it? Is the past still very much alive in Romania’s fragile present?

A recent interview with Cătălin Ranco Pițu, a general in the reserve and former head of the military prosecutors’ section attached to Romania’s High Court of Cassation and Justice, opens a more provocative line of inquiry. It was broadcast on Dialoguri la puterea a cincea, the podcast of Romanian journalist Melania Cincea, and published as a transcript on her platform.

His contention is not simply that Russian influence has endured despite the rupture the 1989 Revolution, which toppled the communist regime in Romania, is assumed to have produced. It is that the institutions built after 1989 never fully detached themselves from the political and security structures of the old order (above all the Securitate, the regime’s brutal secret police) that the anti-communist Revolution was supposed to have swept away.

Pițu was the prosecutor who drew up the indictment in Romania’s long-running Revolution case, the investigation that sought to establish legal responsibility for the violence accompanying the collapse of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime. That work led him to a further nuance: contrary to common belief, revolutions do not always disrupt the system they replace.

Sometimes they merely alter the surface, leaving the rotten core untouched.

That distinction may lie at the heart of Romania’s unresolved relationship with its own past, a relationship that still shapes the country’s present in more ways than one.

The Story Romania Told Itself

Once history enshrined the 1989 Revolution, Romania settled into the belief that it had become a different country, one free to celebrate its existence outside the shadow of Moscow. It was a constructed reality, resting on a simple premise: that the Soviet grip could not possibly hold, because the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist.

But things are not always what they seem.

Romania joined NATO in 2004, entered the European Union three years later, and gradually recast itself as a Western democracy, taking inspiration from Brussels rather than from Moscow.

It was almost a textbook success story. A dictatorship had crumbled into dust, giving way to a dawn of optimism. Whatever imperfections remained (corruption, instability, economic inequality) were put down to the inexperience of an emerging democracy. Communism appeared to have parted ways with the new order thanks to the disruption a revolution is expected to deliver.

History, however, has a habit of avoiding definitive endings.

War by Other Means

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe to reconsider assumptions it had spent three decades treating as settled. Military aggression had returned to the continent but so had something less visible: influence.

Hybrid warfare, authored above all by Russia, became a growing presence in democratic societies. Intelligence agencies, security scholars and policymakers described an updated form of conflict that relied less on weapons and tanks than on narratives, less on occupation than on a more penetrating, invisible instrument: persuasion.

Persuasion theory holds that to resist unwanted persuasion a target must first be able to recognize persuasive intent.

What came along soon after was an assault on the symbolic pillars of democracy: an attempt to void them of their Western content and, more intriguingly, to spread uncertainty, to make the citizens of free societies doubt the very institutions built to protect them.

More and more citizens proved unable to do so, and began to doubt the quality of the life a democratic society offers them. What they missed was that the alternative on offer was the old and expired one, of the Soviet authoritarian type. The influence was covert, and it was aimed at the foundations of an advanced democratic society.

Elections became targets. Voter fatigue began to undermine the very mechanism that gives democracy its legitimacy.

Public trust became a vulnerability, one that could be cynically manipulated to serve malicious ends.

Social media turned easily into an instrument of coercion its users could not see, allowing manipulation more subtle than anything that had come before.

Together these formed a mechanism that made the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare more effective, more pervasive and more aggressive than ever, while hiding in plain sight.

The devil, as always, is in the details. Citizens of democratic societies have reached such a level of candour that they will entertain almost any persuasive approach without questioning who set it in motion, or in whose interest, and without weighing the peril of a return to pre-democratic, uncivilized authoritarianism.

Revolutions That Change Only the Surface

Every revolution carries a promise of discontinuity. The old order falls; a new one takes its place. Institutions are rebuilt, political cultures renewed. The common view is that a separation ought to occur: the old order is replaced and, presumably, ceases to exist.

It rarely happens that way.

Systems may be rigid, but they are made to work by people, and the people who make them work develop relationships that outlast a change of government or the collapse of an ideology. Even when formal authority disappears, informal influence carries on. It has a strange way of refusing to die.

Political culture, consequently, resists change, more often than not.

The worldview it passes on still connects the members of the so-called old guard inside these institutions. This is not specific to Romania. Every state inherits scraps of its past, some more toxic than one would hope.

Democratic transitions are rarely acts of complete reinvention. Spain emerged from Francoism through negotiated compromise. South Africa’s democratic transition preserved much of the administrative machinery of apartheid. Even Germany’s postwar denazification proved far less complete than popular memory often suggests.

Romania’s case is distinctive for another reason. To this day, historians continue to debate the precise sequence of events in 1989, the role of the armed forces, and the extent to which competing factions sought to shape the emerging political order.

Pițu’s analysis moves into these unsettled and still active debates.

He argues that the 1989 Revolution was more than the overthrow of a dictator. Given how disputed the rupture with that buried past remains, the overthrow itself may have served only as a pretext.

What followed it still shapes the young Romanian democracy. Politicians such as Ion Iliescu and military figures such as General Nicolae Militaru, accompanied and supported by a network of people whose ties stretched back into the old establishment, took power in the new political system in 1989.

Hence the original democracy they proclaimed: a post-communist arrangement that would not simply copy Western liberal democracy but would supposedly reflect Romania’s particular circumstances.

These are serious historical claims.

They remain disputed, and many historians would argue that the documentary record does not support such sweeping conclusions. Pițu himself distinguishes between the facts established during judicial investigations and the broader historical interpretation he has developed over decades of studying the Revolution.

The value of his interview lies not only in the allegations it contains, but in the broader question it raises: what does it mean for a democratic society that has presumably broken with its communist past if the political culture of the former establishment persists, discreetly, behind the proverbial curtain, and still shapes reality?

The question has acquired new urgency across Europe.

Today, concerns about external influence rarely revolve around tanks crossing borders or governments being openly overthrown. More often they appear as disinformation, propaganda, strategic polarization, or the deliberate erosion of public confidence in democratic institutions. The objective is seldom to convince citizens to embrace a foreign power. It is to persuade them that no institution deserves their trust.

In that sense, the most effective weapon is not propaganda, but uncertainty. Influence of that kind works through persuasion that never announces itself: narratives set in motion by a hostile foreign actor, then promoted and validated inside the target country by networks bound together by a shared old-guard political culture. This is what the new so-called anti-establishment movement amounts to: sowing uncertainty and distrust of democracy and of Western values, carried by the political culture of the ancien régime, living out its unnatural and grotesquely unpatriotic afterlife.

The Reservists

Such influence travels through long-term networks of trust and access. Pițu’s concern is not with serving intelligence officers but with those who have already left public service: retired generals, former intelligence officials, veterans of the Interior Ministry, and the broader community known in Romania simply as rezerviști (reservists).

A reservist is not necessarily someone waiting to be recalled into military service. He is someone who has left it, usually with a state military pension calculated on a more generous basis than his contributions alone would justify: the country’s way of saying thank you for your service. In Pițu’s account, the word describes an entire social ecosystem of former officers who spent decades inside institutions built upon hierarchy, discretion and enduring personal trust, and who share a worldview that may itself have governed who was recruited and promoted in the first place.

Retirement signals the end of a career, but it does not necessarily dissolve a role in the network. In Pițu’s view, retired officers go on promoting the same worldview, with the fervour typical of influence agents.

During the interview, he points to recent journalistic investigations reporting significant support among retired military and intelligence personnel for Călin Georgescu, a nationalist, sovereigntist politician whose anti-establishment, traditionalist platform aligns closely with Russian geopolitical interests. Georgescu has expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin while criticising NATO and EU policy and opposing Western support for Ukraine, positions widely described in Romanian public debate as compatible with Kremlin messaging.

His rise was abrupt. Georgescu polled in low single digits through the autumn of 2024, then finished first in the presidential first round on 24 November with nearly 23 per cent of the vote. On 6 December, two days before the run-off, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the result, citing campaign-financing irregularities and evidence of foreign interference. According to declassified documents from the country’s Supreme Council of National Defence, reported by the national news agency Agerpres, his campaign had been amplified by a coordinated Russian hybrid influence operation. The election was rerun in May 2025, and Georgescu was barred from standing in it.

To Pițu, given this context, Georgescu’s candidacy is not a random electoral fact. It suggests that parts of an older institutional culture may have found a new political expression.

Importantly, and like Pițu, one must stay away from the concept of conspiracy.

What he describes is closer to a continued-influence effect, perpetuating itself through time. Those newly recruited into the institutions inherited the values of the networks that took them in; recruits were selected precisely because they fitted the network’s ideology, and to be selected at all, one had to adhere to its worldview. The direction of these professional networks therefore stayed on course, insulated from the alternative the new ideology was meant to introduce. The ideas defining the old political culture kept on, defying time.

A network does not need to receive instructions from Moscow to shape political outcomes in ways that coincide with Russian interests. It may simply preserve assumptions formed during another era: scepticism towards the West, admiration for strongmen and authoritarianism, distrust of liberal institutions, or an instinctive understanding of geopolitics inherited from the final decades of the Cold War.

This is why Pițu repeatedly returns to the language of continuity rather than infiltration. His concern is less that Russia successfully inserted agents into Romanian society than that parts of Romanian society may never have fully detached themselves from the older political culture.

Pițu is himself a reservist, which arguably made him the prosecutor best qualified to handle an indictment arising from the events of 1989 and the change of regime they produced.

Whether this reading is correct remains open to debate.

Social scientists would point to many alternative explanations for the political preferences of retired officers. Nationalist politics often attracts former military personnel across democratic societies, including countries with no Soviet legacy. Yet Pițu insists that Romania’s case cannot be understood in isolation from its own history. His argument rests on a deceptively simple premise: institutions do not merely preserve procedures. They preserve worldviews.

That insight helps explain why he places such emphasis on reservists. They are not important because they command troops or control intelligence operations. Most do neither. They matter, in his view, because they occupy a unique position between the formal state and civil society.

They carry institutional legitimacy into public debate, and in Romania that legitimacy is considerable. In opinion polls, the Church and the Army consistently rank as the country’s most trusted institutions, far ahead of the presidency, the government and Parliament.

Their worldview propagates itself across generations. They influence and, quite possibly, shape newly recruited officers; they advise political figures, participate in veterans’ associations, appear in the media, and remain trusted voices, both within communities that outsiders rarely see and, still more, within the narrower network of people who share a political culture they have learned to trust. Inside such networks, truth travels with the amplified force of an echo chamber. Its subscribers were raised and shaped in this particular worldview, one crafted independently of the political and ideological system that defined the state after 1989. Follow Pițu’s argument, and that worldview descends directly from the grey days of the 1989 Revolution, when a system of politicians and military officers aligned with the KGB took power on the catafalque of the fallen communist dictatorship.

A Story About Inherited Trust

Present-day warfare is no longer waged with obvious weapons and methods. The classic spy story is outdated, replaced by something less conspicuous, harder to identify and harder to trace back to its source. Hybrid warfare, in this reading, is not primarily a story about espionage but rather a story about inherited trust.

The most effective influence operation is rarely the one that persuades strangers. Instead, it moves through existing relationships, through voices that are already trusted, and within communities that share a common language.

That is why Pițu’s interpretation deserves attention even from those who reject his historical conclusions. The question he raises extends well beyond Romania: can democratic institutions renew themselves while coexisting with informal networks that operate out of sight, survive every change of regime, and are sustained by members who go on sharing the anti-values of an older worldview?

Governments are beginning to recognize that resilience depends not only on military capabilities but also on something far more difficult to measure: the invisible architecture of trust.

From Iliescu to Georgescu

In Romania, that architecture has a history. When Iliescu came to power in 1989 alongside Militaru, he did so with the backing of a military establishment that, in Pițu’s account, supplied more than institutional support: it offered the rudiments of a system. His argument is straightforward: no political figure rises to power, particularly in a moment of rupture, without some system already in place to sustain that ascent.

Years later, Georgescu would return to a remarkably similar formula. His own bid for power was reportedly supported by military reservists.

Were they, then, the nucleus of the system Pițu believes indispensable, a structure capable, over time, of closing the country’s democratic interlude and guiding it back towards authoritarianism?

And if so, would Georgescu’s presidency have delivered a dictatorship of a different kind: one that, rather than merely inheriting the old order, was expected to preserve and perhaps deepen its ties to the Kremlin?

After all, Georgescu is the most successful exponent of an undying political culture, still defiantly promoted by reservists who may hope to find a place inside the new, pro-Kremlin system it would build.

Cerasel Cuteanu is a philosopher, academic researcher and investigative journalist whose work spans political philosophy, democracy, media and contemporary Romanian society. A Research Fellow at the Media and Journalism Research Center, Cuteanu holds a PhD in Philosophy from Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania.