Vizitele de lucru, un ritual al "Epocii de aur" (original) (raw)
My paper analyzes how a part of the Romanian people contested on daily basis their leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, and also the overwhelming presence of his cult of personality in their life especially during the 1980s. To this end, I will employ James C. Scott’s concept of everyday resistance in order to map the array of means used by the people in order to express their protest towards the public homage paid to the Romanian communist leader.
Ceaușescu’s National-Communist Populist Turn of the 1970s: A Failed Charisma?
Connexe : les espaces postcommunistes en question(s)
Ceaușescu’s name is linked to his Promethean attempt to secure Romania’s independence from the Soviet tutelary power and to build a modern industrial state out of the agricultural and industrial Romania modernised during the 1950s following the Stalinist model. This international and social challenge was implemented through the mobilisation of nationalist ideology and the strengthening of the relation between the leader and his people. To attract the masses, Ceaușescu’s charisma did not refer to any objective and inner quality of the leader but to his capacity to embody and manipulate the aspirations of large part of society thanks to a vast housing and industrialization program and a call to nationalism. Even if this populist policy eventually failed in 1989, it consolidated the regime for almost 30 years.
The Proceedings of the International Conference Literature, Discourse and Multicultural Dialogue.Literature as Mediator. Intersecting Discourses and Dialogues in a Multicultural World, Tîrgu-Mureș, Mureș, 2018, eISBN: 978-606-8624-14-3, 2018
The present study aims to bring into attention the ways in which an important historical event, such as "the making of Great Romania" was celebrated during the "80 in Ceausescu"s Romania. It is known the fact that communist propaganda used each and every festive moment to support the communist ideology, and least but not last, to strengthen the leader"s personality cult. In this regard, we are going to take a look over some of the most important publications from those times: Scînteia, România Liberă, România Literară, Flacăra, Era Socialistă, Cutezătorii, Luminița, and Șoimii patriei.
Ceauşescu was my father! Letters about the Children of the Decree at the end of the '60s
International Journal on Humanistic Ideology, 2011
The present paper proposes a Lacanian discourse analysis of 38 private letters addressed to Nicolae Ceauşescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), in 1968. Most of the authors of these letters, found in the National Archives of Romania, were inviting the agnostic, openly anti-religious, general secretary of the RCP to participate to the baptism of their newborns, to be their godfather, and even to give his name, “Nicolae”, to their children. I argue that these requests indicate the transformation of Ceauşescu into the Symbolic Father of the newborn children, and by extension, of the future Romanian nation. Moreover, they show the citizens’ renunciation of their parental functions on behalf of the state: their children are not theirs anymore, but become “children of the decree” (decreţei in Romanian), as the children born in Romania between 1967 and 1971 were commonly called. Ceauşescu, the new “symbolic father”, society’s source of law and prohibition, is articulated at the most intimate structures of the citizens it governs, becoming “Nicolae”, a Symbolic Father, source and custodian of the higher symbolic order of culture.
7.Claudia-Florentina Dobre, Cristian-Emilian Ghiţă, (eds.), Quest for a Suitable Past: Myth and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe, CEU Press, New York-Budapest: 101-117. , 2017
After the fall of communism in December 1989, a feverish period of political and social changes ensued. A new political order took shape, instituted by and instituting a new social imaginary. In the process, old myths were brought back to life in order to give meaning and significance to the new reality, as well as to determine political and social cohesion and coherence. This chapter looks at the structures of the post-communist social imaginary in Romania through the lenses of the mythology constructed to make sense of the past and to provide significance to the present.
The present article aims to offer a synoptic picture of communist Romania's relations with Third World countries during the Ceaușescu regime. Within these relations, economic and geopolitical motivations coexisted along with ideological ones, thus making the topic one of the most interesting and relevant key for understanding RSR's complex and cunning international strategy. However, I intend to prove that mere pragmatism is not enough to comprehend the drive behind Ceaușescu's diplomatic efforts in post-colonial Africa; ideological factors need also to be taken into account.
Dealing with communist past: The case of Romania
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.