Dan Deșliu de pe aer", 1974). Starting in 1962 and particularly from 1970, he began to criticize the policies of the Romanian Communist Party, and as a result was placed under thorough surveillance by the Securitate secret police. In the 1980s, he turned toward open dissidence, repudiating his "revolutionary" past, quitting the party in 1980 and directly criticizing dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, whom he accused of behaving as if he were "the owner of Romania". In March 1989, he sent an open letter to Radio Free Europe decrying the domestic situation in his country, prompting his placement under house arrest. An excellent swimmer,
Censorship in Communist Romania the loosest during the early period of Ceauşescu's rule, which ended with the July Theses. The purpose of the censorship apparatus was to subordinate all the aspects of the Romanian culture (including literature, history, art and philosophy) to the Communist Party's ideology. All features of the Romanian culture were reinterpreted according to the regime's ideology, and any other interpretations were banned as forms of "bourgeois decadence". Under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s second communist Romanian regime, propagandist material was the only available information to the public across the country and even this propagandist material (spread mostly via the national television and the party’s