The present study aims to analyze the relationship between the so‑called ‘bourgeois’ intellectuals (socialized and educated in prestigious cultural groups in the interwar society) and the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, from three perspectives: repression, re‑education, and social reinsertion. The main argument is that all three phases corresponded to Politburo’s political approaches directly related to the evolution of internal or international political events of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sources used are the Securitate files of the persons convicted in the ‘Noica–Pillat trial’ from 1960. The research method is qualitative analysis combining an institutional approach of the Securitate files with a case study. Consequently, the article focuses on the case of Constantin Noica, a prominent Romanian intellectual. He was sentenced to prison in 1960, pardoned in 1964, and later used by the regime in power service. The Securitate used Constantin Noica’s friendship with Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade to attract prestigious intellectuals back to Romania and enhance the nationalist orientation of the regime through philosophy.

After the collapse of the communist regime in Eastern Europe, political parties were faced with the necessity of building political legitimacy. This research aims to find out how political myths were instrumentalized by political leaders during the presidential campaigns in order to gain popular support. In the first part, the article focuses on defining “myth” as a legitimizing political instrument. In the second part four political myths used in the early 1990s in Romania are being analyzed: the myth of the interwar period, the myth of original democracy, the myth of political reform and the providential man. The method used is political discourse and party platform analysis. The results suggest that, during the early 90s, different political groups tried to build their legitimacy using political myths instead of rational politics, which ended up in their failure to address the real issues of a changing society.

"After a brief period of liberalization in 1956, cultural politics in communist Romania went through an ideological radicalization between 1958 and the early 1960s, which led to intimidation campaigns, arrests, trials, and condemnations of several groups of interwar intellectuals. Director and actress Marietta Sadova was convicted in the 'Noica-Pillat' trial in March 1960. This paper aims to unravel the complex interaction between culture and politics through a qualitative analysis of Marietta Sadova's case study. The focus will be on the Securitate's surveillance, coercion methods, and narrative construction on one hand and the artist's surviving fascist identity, compromises made to survive, and the validity of cultural niches of existence on the other. The theoretical and methodological apparatus is built on new historiographical approaches to communist repression, including the ability of the secret police to construct and politically instrumentalize guilt narratives. The results suggest that the interaction between the interwar intellectuals and the communist authorities was neither unidirectional nor unitary but multi-layered and mutually depended on negotiations and concessions, as well as on the secret police agents' newly acquired methods of creating and repressing 'hostile' social networks. Keywords: communism, cultural politics, fascism, Marietta Sadova, repression, theatre "