Much of the text focuses on Romania's dissidents after the start of De-Stalinization, and the peculiarities of this process in Romania. Tismăneanu notes how communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, whose dictatorial rule of the 1950s and early 1960s preceded and survived the start of De-Stalinization, was able to exert control over the local intelligentsia even as civil society and nonviolent resistance movements were being created in other parts of the Bloc. It is also noted for its treatment of Gheorghiu-Dej's successor, Nicolae Ceauşescu, who associated himself with a message of liberalization and nationalist revival, and who made a point of opposing the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. This gesture, "Arheologia terorii" argues, was in actuality Ceauşescu's attempt to ideologically legitimize his grip on Romanian society. In his review of the book, literary critic Ion Bogdan Lefter concludes: "One finds here, in the subtext, the premises for an extended debate on themes related to the philosophy of history: what are, in reality, the effective relations between the collective destiny of a community and the destinies of individuals who compose it? ... The [book's] answers are ... shattering. Looking back into the communist regime's back stages ... one finds not the faithful prophets of a utopia, but the morass of disgusting spiritual filth—and one cannot but be horrified by seeing who has been entrusted with the destiny of an entire people".