IDEOLOGIE ȘI ISTORIOGRAFIE LA BAZA DE CERCETĂRI ŞTIINȚIFICE A ACADEMIEI ROMÂNE DIN TÂRGU MUREȘ (1957–1971)

Abstract

In 1957, The Scientific Research Base of the Romanian Academy in Târgu Mureș was created, an institution that in 1967 was named the Center for History, Philology and Art History. In 1970, it came under the control of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences, receiving the name of the Center for Social Sciences, the research was included in the propaganda themes of the communist regime. Between 1957 and 1971, the Research Base was headed by Fuchs Simion, a left-wing man who was active during the interwar period in the Communist Youth Union, illegally a man with a dramatic biography, deported to Auschwitz, where he lost his mother, wife, and two children. During the time he held the position of director, Romania experienced two distinct periods in the evolution of Romanian communism. The first period was between 1948 and the early 1960s, when historiography was enslaved to the communist regime, recalling Stalin’s recommendation of 1930, “that history is not science but politics projected into the past”. After the establishment of the communist regime, in historiographical terms, Romania was disconnected both from its cultural tradition and from its ties with the West, triumphing in the historiography of the so-called “Marxist-Leninist” discourse. The second period began in the 1960s and lasted until 1974, when a party program was broadcast at the PCR Congress, in which Nicolae Ceaușescu summarized national history on 18 pages. The 1960s politically coincided with Romania’s distancing from Moscow and the encouragement of the national discourse, giving historians the chance to recover a part of the interwar historiography. The history of the Institute reflects an era and a destiny of a left intellectual in the “century of extremes”, as Eric Hobsbawm called it.