Communism and Anti-Communist Dissent in Romania as Reflected in Contemporary Textbooks

Radu Săgeată,Bianca Mitrică,Nicoleta Damian

doi:10.3390/soc11040140

Abstract

The structural changes brought about by the collapse of the communist system also included the reconfiguration of social memory, so that future generations have a more objective imagining of the impact of the communist period on the societies from Central and Eastern Europe. In this view, the depoliticization of recent history is a top priority. The present study aims to highlight the way in which the schoolbooks in Romania bring into the memory of the young generation a strictly secret episode in recent (pre-1990) history: anti-communist dissent. Two categories of methods were used: researching the data and information contained in history textbooks and other bibliographic sources on anti-communist dissent in Romania in the overall socio-political context of that era; and assessing—with the help of a set of surveys—the degree of assimilation by young people in Romania of the knowledge about communism conveyed through textbooks. Research points to the conclusion that the Romanian curriculum and textbooks provide an objective picture of the communist period in this country, but young people’s perception of communism in general and of Romanian communism in particular tends to be distorted by poor education, poverty and surrounding mentalities rooted in that period.

Highlights

Quantifying the degree of assimilation by young people in Romania of the knowledge transmitted through textbooks and the relationship between objective and subjective information that underlie the imagination of the young generation about communism
Positive associations are related primarily to job security (10% of respondents) and implicitly to “ensuring tomorrow” (8%), making a decent living (8%), equality between individuals (5%), with 5% believing that it was a good system in general, all of these being arguments that we find among the young generation, which shows that they were influenced in their perceptions by their parents and grandparents’
The curriculum and the textbooks in Romania provide young people with a picture of the main political and socio-economic characteristics of the communist era in this country which correlated to that offered by the studies used as the basis for the documentation for this paper. They tend to be distorted against the background of poor education, functional illiteracy and, last but not least, due to ignorance and lack of interest in educational pursuits, which is characteristic of a large part of the young and current generation [50,54,55,56,58]

Summary

Introduction

The collapse of the communist system in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of political developments in the former Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s created the premises for a rewriting of recent history in the formerly communist countries. In this context, archival documents could be declassified, and some until-recently hidden aspects were discussed, related to the repressions on the side of the authorities from the states politically and ideologically subservient to the former USSR. All textbooks are written in a context by somebody who has some sort of political opinion that will, in some way, influence what they write [1]

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