The Afterlife of the Securitate: On Moral Correctness in Postcommunist Romania (original) (raw)
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Institute of National Remembrance Review, 2020
This article discusses the institutional attempts to deal with the archival legacy of the Romanian communist security police, Securitate (1948–1989), during the democratic transition in post-communist Romania. The first part draws a short outline of Securitate’s history and activities as one of the main power instruments of the communist dictatorship. The second part of the article shows the development of political attitudes towards institutional attempts to deal with the communist past in the post-communist Romania. This paper describes the reluctant attitude of the ruling circles in the 1990s towards the opening of the Securitate archives and the lustration attempts. The formation of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității, CNSAS, legally established 1999) hardly changed the general situation: the archives of the Securitate were transferred to CNSAS with significant delays, and the 2008 ruling of the constitutional court limited its lustration competences. The establishment of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (Institutul de Investigare a Crimelor Comunismului şi Memoria Exilului Românesc, IICCMER, established 2005) and formation in 2006 of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship.
LEGITIMATING THE DEMOCRATIC STATE IN POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIA: MEMORY AS A CULTURAL GOOD
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.
Arhivele totalitarismului (Bucharest), nr. 104-105, 3-4 (2019), 2019
This article examines the "morally correct" narrative on the communist past which became dominant in early post-communist Romania, and which focused on the former secret police, the Securitate, as a key actor under the former regime. This narrative framed the epoch 1945-89 as a period of confrontation between innocent victims and the secret police, and trivialized as morally incorrect any attempt at redefining the much more complex relation between rulers and ruled under communist rule..
Memorie negate, verità di stato. Lustrazione e commissioni storiche nella Romania postcomunista
Quaderni storici, 2008
This article deals with the controversial legacy of Communism on historical research and the public debate in Romania, placing it as a case-study into the broader context of post-totalitarian experiences in Latin America, Africa and Europe. Most countries shared a will to rebuild their political community by symbolically condemning crimes and illegal practices of the recent past. State-owned and private memorial institutions," truth commissions" and archives were established, where professional historians and private ...
Book reviews: Romania Confronts Its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice
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).
The organization of Romanian social memory after the December 1989 events
Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 2013
The social memory phenomenon causes debates nowadays, puts in opposition methodological schools, generates a series of incompatible theoretical positions. Proof that the concept of "social memory" "lived" its first age are the numerous research which regards the phenomenon, studies which led either to new theories of social memory (the theory of the organization of memory according to culture and interests is one of the acknowledged theories from which it starts in the development of the subject), or they certified the ones established until then. The present paper proposes as its objective to evaluate the factors which led to the readjustment of the social memory of the Romanian people after the events from 1989. I consider that the social memory can be organized under the influence of factors which acts unitary. As a result, I will analyze the connection between the political factor (decision – maker agents that can influence some contents of the collective mem...
Balkanistic Forum
On December 7, 1999, the Law no. 187, on access to one’s own file and the disclosure of Securitate as a political police, was adopted by the Romanian Parliament. The law established the creation of an institution (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității-The National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives-CNSAS) whose mission is to collect all documents issued by the former Communist Secret Police (the notorious Securitate) and made them available to the researchers and the larger audience upon request as well as to reveal the agents of the repression. My article deals with the creation, its functionning, and the controversies which surrounded this institution from 2000 onwards. I argue that the archive of the Securitate was instrumentalized by various actors of the public space in their struggle for power, namely for controlling the cultural, economic, and political fields of power (les champs du pouvoir) and did not accomplish its mission to reveal the agent...