The Totalitarian Origin of an Anti-Totalitarian Narrative: Past and Present Accounts on Communism in Romania (original) (raw)

The Spies Who Defended Us: Spy Stories and Legitimating Discourses in Ceausescu's Romania, 1965-77

Romanian Intelligence Studies Review, 2018

This article addresses the problem of legitimation under communist rule in Romania during the epoch of Nicolae Ceausescu (1965-89) by focusing on the communist spy novels published during a particular time span, that is, 1965-77. Communist spy novels set forth a fictional character, the counterintelligence (Securitate) officer who fought on the "invisible front" against Western spies sent to Romania to steal "state secrets'". Such novels obviously obscured the repressive character of the Securitate and attempted at legitimating the communist rule.

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).

Scientific exorcisms? The memory of the communist security apparatus and its past in Romania after 1989

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.

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.

“Anxieties of the Nomos : Fascism, Communism and Legal Discontinuity in Post-War Romania”

The Communist takeover in Romania continues to be one of the privileged topics in historical and political investigations of Romanian really existing socialism. Indeed, the question of the rise to power of the communist movement is not only a puzzling historical process raising a manifold series of political, legal and sociological issues, but also a fundamental nexus in the symbolic construction of the memory of the communist regime. Accordingly, creating a coherent historical narrative of this period is a pivotal task for approaching the structure of the system of communist power as much as it is an exercise in representing discursively the origins of Romanian socialism. This paper aims to further problematize the existing historical narratives of communist takeover in Romania by addressing the question of legal (dis)continuity between the communist regime and the authoritarian dictatorships of the 1940s. Drawing on the legal paradoxes entailed by the concept of ‘state of exception’ as present in the work of Giorgio Agamben, I seek to explore the ambiguities of the legal framework in force at the time of the communist takeover. In doing so, I shall focus on the legal strategies employed by the communist movement in legitimizing the new legal order as well as in obfuscating the continuities with its legal past. In a first part I shall offer a synoptical reading of the Romanian post-war historical context. Secondly, I shall put under scrutiny three legal dynamics, namely the process of constitutional reform, the post-war trials and the criminal law policies devised by the emerging regime. In a third and last part I shall critically question the communist strategies in breaking with the past. By this investigation I intend to bring under a new light the complicities at work - on one hand - between law and politics, as well as between authoritarian and communist dictatorships, on the other. I thus seek to engage with the contemporary consensus representing communism as moment of rupture in Romanian legal history.

Reckoning with the Communist Past in Romania: A Scorecard

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.

Communism in Post-communist Romania: An Ambivalent Legacy

Balkanistic Forum, vol. 2, ‘Ambivalent Legacies’, pp. 120-142, 2024

After Nicolae Ceaușescu's execution on December 25, 1989, Romania faced an important issue to deal with: What was to be done with the 44 years of a quasitotalitarian system, based on continuous political violence?! How should Romanians relate to it? What was to be remembered and what was to be forgotten? How it should be passed on to the next generations, those who were born before, around or after the fall of the regime? The answer to these questions has varied over the 35 years since the fall of the communist regime in Romania. Numerous factors contributed to the way in which Romanians related to their communist past, how it was represented in the public space, how it was and is passed on. The actors involved have also changed and the official public memory has known many avatars. In the subsequent pages, I propose an analysis of all these aspects, resulting from my research of the last 21 years on the memory of Communism.

Between History and Power. The Historiography of Romanian National-Communism (1964-1989)

Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea

Este artículo tiene como objetivo el análisis de la relación entre la historia y el poder político en la Rumania comunista durante el gobierno de Nicolae Ceauşescu. La sección de apertura del artículo tiene como objetivo explicar cómo la historiografía rumana fue sustituida por una versión pro-soviética y pro-estalinista, con el objetivo de proclamar la superioridad de la Unión Soviética y del comunismo. En segundo lugar, la primera sección muestra el delicado paso entre el estalinismo y el comunismo nacional. Como explica la primera sección, el liderazgo rumano entendió que eliminar la dependencia de Moscú era esencial para garantizar la estabilidad interna. Por esta razón, tuvo que crearse una legitimidad genuina al reeditar la ideología nacional rechazada en 1948. La historia nacional recuperó su importancia primordial dentro de la cultura rumana, esta vez al servicio de la élite estalinista y al lado de los símbolos marxista-leninistas. La segunda sección tiene como objetivo mos...

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 ...