According to a false narrative that ignores Gyr’s involvement in legionary crimes, Radu Gyr, an anti‑communist and devout Christian, is portrayed as the only person ever sentenced to death for writing a poem. This narrative follows a decades‑long pattern of attempts to rehabilitate legionary figures or even the Legionary Movement as a whole.
NEWS: The poet suffered 20 years in prison for his Word. His was first imprisoned during King Carol II’s totalitarian dictatorship, supposedly patterned on Hitler’s, between 1938–1940, when he was jailed in the Miercurea Ciuc camp alongside the Great Romanians Mircea Eliade, Nae Ionescu and other intellectuals from Romania’s Pantheon. Upon his release, he was sent to the front for “rehabilitation”. During this period, he prepared the poems for the volume “Poeme de războiu” (War Poems), a volume censored by the communist regime, but eventually published in 1942.
Radu Gyr, the apostolic poet of Romanian prisons, was again incarcerated during Ion Antonescu’s dictatorship. In 1945, the Bolshevik‑communist dictatorship grouped him with Nichifor Crainic and Pamfil Șeicaru in the “group of Christian journalists”. and NKVD‑backed judges sentenced him to 12 years of political imprisonment.
The poet returned home in 1956, but the communist authorities arrested him again in 1958 and sentenced him to death for the manifesto‑poem “Ridică-te, Gheorghe, ridică-te, Ioane!” (“Rise, Gheorghe, rise, Ion!”)
NARRATIVES: 1. Radu Gyr was sentenced to death for a poem and for being an anti‑communist dissident. 2. The communists sentenced him only because of the poem “Ridică‑te, Gheorghe, ridică‑te, Ioane!” 3. He is the only poet in the world sentenced to death for a poem.
PURPOSE: Who benefits the most from maintaining the cult of “heroes of the nation”? First of all, the neo‑Legionary movement in Romania, which operates underground and consolidates its influence especially in the underbelly of social networks (since neo‑Legionarism is officially banned in Romania). Secondly, Russia benefits (via Romanian extremists) by constantly trying to destabilize and deepen social divides, amplifying fragmentation and fractures within society, which can all facilitate street violence or violent outbreaks during crises. In the most serious historical cases, such fractures fueled by hatred or deeply antagonistic worldviews have led to coups (abrupt, forceful regime changes involving the Army) or, in the most dramatic instances, civil wars.
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: In fact, Radu Gyr (born Radu Demetrescu) was imprisoned four times by three different regimes. He was a commander and theorist of the criminal Legionary Movement in the interwar period, with a strong anti-Semitic rhetoric, and he persecuted Jewish communities through his writing and direct actions in the early 1940s.
Radu Gyr was convicted of war crimes in 1945. After 1989, during the democratic period, Romanian courts ruled (the Bucharest Tribunal’s decision 809/2011 of May 4, 2011) that Gyr should not be rehabilitated for war crimes because the 1945 People’s Tribunal sentence was not political in nature. Gyr was rehabilitated only for the poem “Ridică-te, Gheorghe, ridică-te, Ioane!”, a fact exploited by neo‑legionaries and far‑right extremists, who conveniently ignore the fact that he remains guilty of war crimes, and that the 1945 sentence cannot be overturned.
Thus, Radu Gyr is included among war criminals alongside former military dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu (the mastermind of the Holocaust in Romania, together with Transnistria’s governor Gheorghe Alexianu) or Mircea Vulcănescu, a former Finance Ministry state secretary (who dispossessed Jews of property and money). Their glorification is criminalized under Government Ordinance 31/2002 regarding the cult of war criminals and the promotion of extremism, xenophobia and antisemitism, an offense currently investigated in the cases of pro‑Russians Călin Georgescu and Diana Șoșoacă, and punishable by up to 3 years in prison.
Radu Gyr was convicted for legionary activism and war crimes, not for a poem
Radu Gyr was not sentenced for a poem or for being anti‑communist. He was convicted four times under three different regimes, as follows:
1938 – Under the royal dictatorship of King Carol II, detested by the Legionaries and labeled a “traitor” and “Judaized”. Gyr was a Legionary commander during the short period of shared governance with dictator Ion Antonescu and was put in charge of the region of Oltenia, a “nest” leader in a criminal movement that had assassinated even the sitting Prime Minister I.G. Duca (1933) and deputy Mihai Stelescu (1936).
It is important to note that Carol II’s dictatorship (1938–1940) was neither totalitarian (i.e. Nazism or Communism), nor related to Hitler or Nazism, contrary to what activenews.ro claims in its attempt to boost Gyr’s image as a martyr/hero by separating him from Romanian interwar Legionarism, which was aligned with Hitler’s regime. During Carol II’s dictatorship, Romania was aligned with France and the United Kingdom until the summer of 1940.
1941 – Gyr was also sentenced by Ion Antonescu, who had brought the Legionaries to power for a short period. While serving as Director of the National Theaters, Gyr took part in the Legionary Rebellion that Antonescu eventually crushed. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison but, after the start of World War II, was sent to the Eastern front.
1945 – After the communist regime was installed with the rise of the Petru Groza government, Gyr was sentenced to 12 years along with the “fascist journalists’ cluster,” accused of fascist‑Legionary propaganda, war crimes and blamed, together with the other journalists, for the “country’s ruin”.
1959 – Gyr returned to prison, accused of fighting against the communist regime, and was sentenced to death, though the punishment was commuted to 25 years of hard labor. He never served this sentence in full because on June 16, 1964, Decree no. 310 granted amnesty to 3,467 political detainees, including Radu Gyr. Upon his release, Gyr and other Legionaries started writing for the Securitate‑controlled publication Glasul Patriei (“The Voice of the Motherland”, later Tribuna României – “The Romanian Tribune”), under the pseudonyms Ioachim Pușcașul and Radu Miroslav.
Even if Gyr had been sentenced to death “only for a poem”, he still wouldn’t have been “the only poet in the world” to receive the death penalty for his writings
History preserves several examples of poets from around the world who were executed or sentenced to death because of their writings, even if authorities didn’t always admit it publicly.
Their works were deemed “heretical” or served as direct evidence in their trials. Farzad Kamangar, Federico García Lorca and, earlier, Giordano Bruno are just a few among many.
Farzad Kamangar, a Kurdish poet, journalist and human rights activist from Iran, was executed in May 2010 without his family or lawyer being notified, labeled an “enemy of Allah”. Kamangar, an icon of Kurdish resistance, was in prison when his poems, essays and letters about hope, freedom, and human rights went viral, becoming symbols of the struggle against the criminal Islamist dictatorship in Tehran. He was hanged in secret.
Federico García Lorca, a progressive Spanish poet, was murdered during the Civil War by Franco’s fascists because his writings symbolized diversity, progressivism and cultural freedom, values unacceptable to Spanish nationalists in the late 1930s.
One of the most well‑known examples is Giordano Bruno, the philosopher and poet condemned to death and burned at the stake by the Inquisition at the end of the 16th century for verses that expressed ideas contrary to Church doctrine.
BACKGROUND: The glorification of figures openly anti-Semitic and convicted of war crimes takes place within a complicated social environment, amid rising anti-Semitism both in Romania and across Europe and the United States. A study by the Anti‑Defamation League earlier this year reported record‑high global levels of anti-Semitism.
This surge in anti-Semitism parallels increasing support for populist and far‑right parties that share, among other views, anti‑immigration sentiment, Euroscepticism and sympathy for Russia despite its aggressive policies.
In Romania, praise for Legionary‑affiliated figures occurs amid growing social unrest fueled by austerity measures an approaching major economic crisis, as well as political instability.
The far‑right bloc, the second‑largest political force in Parliament today, fully capitalizes on the heroization of antisemitic historical figures, following the same interwar pattern used by the very figures they now praise: “Jews/foreigners are to blame for the country’s hardship, poverty and corruption”.
Thus, far‑right extremists and neo‑Legionaries prey on the vulnerabilities of a society burdened by frustration and in search of native‑born heroes rather than the “tribe of Judah,” while calling for a return to the “moral purity” advocated by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Legionaries. Here is an example of Radu Gyr’s anti-Semitic poetry, repurposed today in neo‑Legionary rhetoric and among supporters of the pro‑Russian groups AUR, SOS, POT, and Călin Georgescu:
“Packs of cruel, starving beasts
Have overrun our land.
Vipers’ offspring, driven from everywhere,
They suck the Country’s body dry, they drink its holy blood!
The soil is drained, the treasures plundered,
The tribe of Judah has grown rich;
We have no rest, we have no justice,
The tribe of Judah has bled us dry”.
(Radu Gyr, “Geme Jilava,” in “Cântece legionare”, Sibiu, Propaganda Service, 1940, p. 75, via Romanian‑British journalist Petru Clej, expert on Holocaust and anti-Semitism)
Such “moral rehabilitations”, like the one promoted for Radu Gyr, occur amid a wave of public frustration felt by nearly half the population after the exclusion of the pro‑Russian presidential candidate, still referred to by his supporters as “My President”, “The President chosen by Romanians”. In fact, Călin Georgescu was voted by less than 23% of Romanians. The other 77% voted for different candidates.
