This paper proposes a multi-level analysis in terms of semantic roles of the ideologically based manipulation that underlies the rhetoric of totalitarian discourse represented by Ceausescu's speeches and of post-totalitarian discourse represented by Iliescu's speeches. The analysis focuses on the linguistic violations and pragmatic failures that consist in backgrounding or demoting the Agent role to the status of Patient or Experiencer, in foregrounding or promoting the Eventive or Theme to the status of Agent, in objectifying or institutionalising the Agent role, as well as in de-agentivising active verbal constructions. It is argued that this semantic role reshuffling is correlated not only with semantic feature transfer and the changing hierarchy of syntactic relations, but also with cognitive conceptualisations, information structure, speaker-audience relationship, speaker confidence, credibility and vulnerability.