When writer Nicu Steinhardt was released from the vicious Communist gulag alongside thousands of other political prisoners during the general amnesty of 1964, four years into his initial thirteen-year conviction, he didn’t exactly walk out into freedom. As his father had warned him when urging him to choose prison over the communists’ demand that he should testify against his friend, philosopher Constantin Noica, Nicu was about to walk out from a small prison into a larger one—an apt description for totalitarian Romania between 1947 and 1989, and indeed for the entire Eastern bloc at the time.