According to information popular on the Internet, in the late 80s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned the popular board game, citing its complexity and subversive nature. We checked whether this legend is true.

Most often, the verifiable statement can be found in various collections of strange bans around the world. That's what reported in one of them on the MyDutyFree website: “Back in the 1980s, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu officially banned the board game Scrabble, calling it “overly intellectual” and equating it with a destructive evil. It’s surprising that this ban is still in effect today.”

Similar information can be found on many Russian and Ukrainian sites: “Peekaboo", "Rambler", Vokrugsveta.ua, Traveltime.km.ua. Tourist section of the site Delfi.ee, in turn, reports that the ban did not last long. This information is also popular in the West, where it is provided by such publications as Daily Mail, National Geographic Traveler, as well as book authors "A Brief History of Politics", "Free Time Killer", "Absolutely stupid facts about modern history", "Colossal Reader" (2008). And in one edition of 1994 reportedthat Ceausescu, in addition to Scrabble, also banned baseball, bridge, martial arts and field hockey.

Scrabble board game, the essence of which is to compose words from an existing set of letters on a special board, conquered The United States dates back to the middle of the last century, after which it began its victorious march around the world. At the end of 1962, in the Soviet magazine "Week" it was described under the name "Word Thrower". In 1968, after adaptation to the peculiarities of the Russian language, the rules of the game “Krestoslovitsa” (that’s the name it received this time) were published in the magazine "Science and Life", and in the 1980s the set for the game was already under the trademark "Erudite" found its way into hundreds of thousands of Soviet apartments, becoming a favorite entertainment for many people, which remains popular today.

The history of the Romanian version of Scrabble dates back to February 1, 1982, when engineers Şerban Teodorou and Ioan Comănescu, who adapted the game for their native language, launched a two-year series of feature articles with problems in the journal Știință şi Tehnică (“Science and Technology”). However, the center of the movement of game lovers in Romania was not this publication, but the magazine Flacăra-Rebus. In the mid-1980s, the first Scrabble competitions and camps began to be held in the country, appeared player ratings (numbering up to 500 people), radio shows, specialized books and dictionaries began to be published.

Participants in the first Scrabble competition in Romania (1984–1985)

In 1987, Scrabble was officially recognized as a sport, and the corresponding governing structure became part of the Romanian Chess Federation. On January 26, 1990, a separate Romanian Scrabble Federation appeared under the Ministry of Sports. By data Romanian researchers, in 1989, a total of about a million (!) Scrabble sets were sold in the country, and the number of officially registered clubs for fans of the game was about 60. In other words, Romania per year execution of Nicolae Ceausescu definitely had a Scrabble bug.

Where did the information about the ban come from then? Could Ceausescu have vetoed the game during the last months or days of his life? It has been written about the complex relationship between the family of the Romanian leader and the intelligentsia and intellectuals much, therefore, such an act of his at a moment when differences with society reached a critical point cannot be completely excluded. After another worldwide wave of news about a strange ban in May 2011 was raised by a publication in Daily Mail, Romanian journalists tried figure out in the legend, contacting Stefan Pall, the first president of the Romanian Scrabble Federation (1990–1992), who returned to this post in the 21st century. Pall said the banning of Scrabble in Romania under communism is nothing more than an urban legend. He confirmed that Ceausescu had a negative attitude towards the development of intelligence through games, but at the same time he never banned Scrabble, although he did not give the go-ahead for its financing.

However, according to Pall, this was an era when any meeting of at least three intellectuals could attract attention Securitate - the Romanian equivalent of the KGB. Service employees regularly infiltrated the circles of Scrabble lovers, after which they reported their observations to their superiors. Realizing this and trying to prevent possible problems with the law, Romanian Scrabble fans often engaged in self-censorship.

Many carried lists of words with them that were highly discouraged from being used. For example, if you could form the word nazist (“Nazi”) from the letters you have, then you could immediately forget about this thought. There were also funny moments. In particular, in a game dedicated to a major socialist holiday (either the National Day of Romania, or May Day), at some point it was possible to play the word ciomaguri, which was quite winning in terms of points. However, the judges deliberated and decided that the word Omagiu (“homage”) must be posted - the name of a series of regular events dedicated to the president and his wife. However, such examples, typical of a totalitarian socialist society, clearly do not fall under the category of “ban.”

Thus, the story about the ban of the Romanian version of the game Scrabble by Nicolae Ceausescu turns out to be a fiction.