Communism in Post-communist Romania: An Ambivalent Legacy

This study focuses on institutionalization of memory in post-communist Romania with regard to the communist epoch, i.e., 1945-89, by addressing patterns of active remembering and forgetting.

Analele Știintifice ale Universității "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" Iași. Secțiunea Sociologie și Asistență Socială, 2013

This paper examines the relationship between the post-communist political regime and the communist past, analysing how the communist past, after a period of time when the state agents resorted to eschewing strategies, was eventually confronted frontally in 2006 when the Romanian President commissioned what came to be known as the “Tismăneanu Report” in order to officially condemn the communist regime. The Tismăneanu Report is seen here as a state-sponsored attempt to impose an official memory of communism as the sole “scientifically” based narrative of the communist past. The trial of communism, ended with the sentencing of the communist regime as illegitimate and murderous based on the conclusions of the Tismăneanu Report, is seen as expressing a political strategy of legitimating the new democratic order by breaking off with the past. The paper then examines the latent conflict subsisting between the official memory of communism codified in the narrative delivered by the Tismăneanu Report and the popular memory expressed by a strong collective nostalgia towards the same communist past. The paper concludes by suggesting that the anti-communist intellectual and political elites won the battle over public memory of communism, but lost the war over private remembrances of communism.

Hungarian Studies, 2011

This article analyzes the significance of the activity of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (PCACDR) and the impact of its report on the basis of which the communist regime was condemned as criminal and illegitimate. The author also situates the Romanian case within the larger discussions on the role of overcoming a traumatic past in post-authoritarian democracies. PCADCR rejected outright the practices of institutionalized forgetfulness and generated a national debate about long-denied and occulted moments of the past. The Commission's Final Report answered a fundamental necessity, characteristic of the post-authoritarian world, that of moral clarity. It set the ground for the revolutionizing of the normative foundations of the communal history, imposing the necessary moral criteria of a democracy that wishes to militantly defend its values.

In the early 1990s, Romania’s Communist past was a subject of heated public and private debate in which the historian’s voice was hardly ever heard. It was the time when metaphorical accounts of the country’s difficult past were more fashionable than serious academic analysis. It was in the 1990s that the 1945-1989 period came to be described as “a black hole” in Romania’s history, as a time when Romanians were “out of history.” My argument is that Romanian exhibitions on Communism have taken up this unfortunate metaphor and, although academic accounts of our recent past are currently more nuanced, the practice of exhibiting Communism has remained confined to these old-fashioned dichotomies and to what I describe as the black hole paradigm.

During the first two decades following the collapse of the communist regime, Romania has reckoned with the human rights infringements perpetrated from 1945 to 1989 with the help of a range of official and unofficial, judiciary and non-judiciary, backward and forward looking methods pursued by a variety of state and non-state actors. This article summarizes the progress registered to date in court trials, lustration, access to secret files, property restitution, truth commission, rehabilitation of former political prisoners, compensations to victims and their descendants, opinion tribunal, exhumations, rewriting history books, unofficial truth projects, and memorialization.

Memory Studies, 2019

called their monograph Romania Confronts Its Communist Past "a testimony and an analytical exercise" (p. 1). The monograph is indeed a testimony to how historical memory was finally restored in Romania, the last Warsaw Pact country led by a Marxist-Leninist government to overthrow communism. Memory, history, and trauma are the main concerns of the authors' analysis. The monograph is divided into six chapters. While the first, more general chapter, "Judging the Past in Post-Traumatic Societies: Romania in Comparative Perspective," illustrates what Avishai Margalit called "an ethics of memory," Chapters 2 to 5 follow a strict chronology. Chapter 2 ("Romania before 2006") describes the Romanian political scene between 1989 and 2006 and Chapter 3 ("Coming to Terms with the Past in Romania: The Presidential Commission") explains how the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (PCACDR), whose President was Tismăneanu himself, was set up and worked. Chapters 4 ("Reactions to the Condemnation and Political Rearrangements after 2007") and 5 ("The Report's Aftermath: Interpretations, Polemics, and Policies") survey the aftermath of the political life of a society that has made efforts to come to terms with its past. The last chapter, "Romania and the European Framework of Dealing with the Communist Past," poses questions on the former Soviet bloc's new ideosphere almost 30 years after the demise of communism, when "[c]ritical intellectuals seem to have lost much of their moral aura and are often attacked as champions of futility, architects of disaster, and incorrigible daydreamers" (p. 166). The "umbrella concept" of the book is "decommunization," "a means of dealing with the past both historiographically and publicly," offering legal, financial, and institutional measures and acknowledging responsibilities about dictatorship (pp. 8-9). The authors strongly believe in societies' need to keep historical memory alive, without attempting to sanitize those pages of history which were shameful. They oppose the idea that dealing with the past can be "an obstacle to the progress of democratization" (p. 10) and in their view, the 663-page Final Report of PCACDR was "moral therapy" through knowledge that exorcised "the spectres of the past by accessing nonmythicized truths" (p. 24). Issues pertaining to memory are the volume's main concern, hence its numerous reflections on the paradox of the "schizoid" communist regime that both "resented memory" and cultivated its traces: Securitate (the secret police) gathered thousands of transcripts, documents, and reports (p. 104). The Romanian Revolution started with people chanting "Down with Ceauşescu!" in Timişoara on December 18, 1989. On the same day, 17 years later in the Romanian Parliament, Traian Băsescu, then President of Romania, condemned "the illegitimate and criminal" communist regime (p. 6). He described the "path of overcoming the past," emphasizing that Romanians could leave behind "the state of social mistrust and pessimism in which the years of transition submerged" them only on condition that they genuinely examined their "national conscience" (p. 34, original emphasis). Băsescu characterized the communist regime as "forty-five years of national humiliation, persecution of minorities, ruin of the peasantry, exploitation of the proletariat, destruction of autonomous thinking, and the harassment of intellectuals" (p. 75), naming Romanian institutions of violent repression: Securitate, the party apparatus, party control commissions, and propagandistic committees (p. 75).

Annals of the University of Bucharest - Philosophy Series, 2019

This article proposes a phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia for communism, a collective feeling expressed typically in most Eastern European countries after the official fall of the communist regimes. While nostalgia for communism may seem like a paradoxical feeling, a sort of Stockholm syndrome at a collective level, this article proposes a different angle of interpretation: nostalgia for communism has nothing to do with communism as such, it is not essentially a political statement, nor the signal of a deep value tension between governance and the people. Rather, I propose to understand this collective feeling as the symptom of a deeper need at a national level for solidarity and ultimately about recapturing a common feeling of identity in solidarity. This hypothesis would be in line with a phenomenological approach to memory as a process of establishing shared codes by rewriting the past in such a way as to strengthen social bonds and make possible a re-imagining of a common future. Nostalgia for communism does not need to be ultimately an uncritical stance as it has been depicted, instead one could interpret it as a form of critical reflexion about our current forms of life. Instead of seeing communism nostalgia as a specific form of being stuck in the past, one could explore its potential for pointing at the things that are still not working in the current neo-liberal regime.

New Europe College Europe Next to Europe Program Yearbook , 2013-2014; 2014-2015, ed.by Irina Vainovski-Mihai Bucharest., 2018

The fall of the communist regimes in the East Central Europe can be seen as a momentous historical juncture for reclaiming the 'repressed' memories' during the past regime. The revolutionary changes of 1989, which mark a multifarious transition could trigger a different representation of the past. Long after regime change, the emergence of Institutes of Memory in most of the countries of East Central Europe, constitute a new empirical reality, which continues to be addressed within the framework of politics of memory, or transitional justice. In this paper, I propose a different theoretical perspective and focus on the case of Romania, given that issues of the past since December 1989 have been central to different actors at different levels. On the other hand, it is a case that can help understand the shift from the symbolic politics of the 90s, to memory production as a legitimating frame of the new democratic regime.

The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics

This paper examines the mnemonic battle fought over the Romanian communist past between the active forces of intellectual democratic elites and the passive resistance of the majority of the population. The former try to impose a narrative of cultural trauma regarding the communist past against the latter’s popular resistance expressed by strong nostalgic attachments towards the same communist past. The paper investigates the formation of the new official consensus on the communist legacy as cultural trauma, proposing a three stage sequence of its articulation: i) the breakthrough made by detention memorialistic literature in the aftermath of 1989 Revolution; ii) the officialization of communism-as-cultural-trauma’ narrative by the Tismăneanu Report condemning the communist regime; iii) the institutionalization of the cultural trauma narrative in the educational system. All these struggles over the memory of communism from the part of the anticommunist political elites are tacitly countered by strong popular nostalgia, as revealed by extensive survey data.

2012