Ceausescu Regime Research Articles

The Instrumentalization of Cultural Heritage in Ceausescu’s Romania

This article analyzes the heritagisation policies and the instrumentalization of cultural heritage by Ceausescu's regime for political purposes. I argue that Ceausescu’s political regime was neopatrimonial, a system where rules took place within the framework of legal bureaucracy of a modern state in which formal structures and rules did exist, although in practice, the separation of the private and public sphere was not always observed. This system was characterized by insecurity about the behavior and role of state institutions, but primarily the actions of the supreme leader that were erratic and unpredictable. In this regime, the rural cultural heritage was used for political-ideological purposes, in close connection with the cult of the personality of the supreme leader. In this context, the heritigisation of folk creations such as folk plays did not mean the preservation of these rural cultural forms under threat in a society undergoing major economic and social transformations that imperiled traditional community life. Instead, it was a form of symbolic political manipulation used to acquire political legitimacy. Received: 17 January 2024 / Accepted: 29 May 2024 / Published: 02 July 2024

Why Romania is a NATO “Model Ally"?

NATO’s eastward expansion was a fundamental geopolitical process that allowed countries to be prepared for the worst, the Russian revanche, by pursuing the best, the most successful path for democracy. Romania, which emerged from the tremendous communist Ceausescu regime, strongly wanted NATO membership and, after the first encouraging meetings in 1990, officially entered in 2004. However, Romania has been already back then contributed to many Western missions. Due to its geographical position, Romania is central to all NATO objectives. Now, Romania and Poland are the pivots of NATO’s defensive complex in the “post-soviet space”: Poland protects the Baltic Sea, Romania the Black Sea, where the Russian old-imperial appetites remain; Romania still defends the precious grain corridor. Furthermore, Romania is a “model ally”. There is a solid pro-Atlantic and pro-American sentiment in the country.

REGIMUL CEAUȘESCU ÎN RAPOARTELE DIPLOMAȚIEI BRUXELLES-ULUI

This article analyses proposes new considerations on the Romania’s neo-Stalinist regime as reflected in the diplomatic documents from the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belgium. In 1982-1983 the regime started to pay the country’s external debt, exporting agricultural products at dumping prices, imposing huge sacrifices and burden on country’s economic profit and on citizens standard of life. The Romanian stores ran out of food for years. The Ceausescu regime has forbidden the citizens to leave the country. Belgium, France, USA, and other Western countries started to criticize the regime, harsher and harsher. Romania’s foreign policies of independence towards Moscow were still important for the Western interests, but their value decreased. USA even retired the highly symbolic Most-Favored-Nation Status. The Ceausescu regime became more and more isolated between 1982-1989.

Aspecte privind evolutia artei oficiale in Romania comunista in perioada 1965–1974

A definite relationship of determination between the geopolitical map and the cultural map of the world always existed. The centers of political power, voluntary or involuntary, have contributed to the development of models to be followed for the artistic milieu. For the European culture a major role was played by the division after WW II, when the states of Central and Eastern Europe came under the influence of the USSR. Following the establishment of the communist regime in Romania, the evolution of the Romanian fine arts began to differ significantly from that of the fine arts in the countries left outside the totalitarian bloc. Starting from the premise that this evolution was determined by specific sociocultural rules, the article analyzes the relationship between the sphere of power and the artistic sphere throughout the Ceauşescu period of the communist regime. It proposes a synthetic vision combining art history with political science and sociology. The cultural revolution was also continued by the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, within the project of training the new man. The rise to power of Nicolae Ceausescu was established on the background of a trend of de‑Stalinization initiated since the time of Gheorghe Gheorghiu‑Dej. From the evolution of culture standpoint, but not only of it, this meant an openness to the West, simultaneously with the exacerbation of nationalism. Until the mid–1970s, there was a relaxation of the artistic milieu, inasmuch as the regime gave the illusion that political interference in art would be increasingly limited. The management of the artistic discourse was no longer done by force, by constraining from the center, but was directed from within. Even so, the opening period did not turn out to be very long. The moment of glory of the Ceausescu regime came with the condemnation of the 1968 armed intervention of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia, except Romania. This demarcation toward Moscow established a positive image of Nicolae Ceausescu among the Western countries, but, at the same time, it coincided with the opening of the path from hero to idol. Hence, at the beginning of the 70’s of the 20th century, the raher short but fertile contact of the Romanian artistic milieu with the European cultural context quickly gave birth to some promising signals within the art of the moment. An international level production emerges, confirmed also by exhibitions organized abroad and several international awards obtained by Romanian artists in Paris, Edinburgh, Berlin, etc. But this inflorescence will not have time to be fully fulfilled in those few years of “socialist liberalism” authorized by the regime for political reasons which the intellectuals of the time can neither understand nor influence in their true motivation.

The impact of education reform in Romania between 1989-2020 on the regulation and decentralization of early childhood education

Romania inherited a tightly controlled and strictly regulated mass education system from socialism, which inevitably has gone through a systematic reform. However, transformation or change of any education system does not take place for its own sake, but it is intended to meet certain social and political challenges and requirements. Therefore, the present study investigates the significant changes that have taken place in early childhood education (ECE) in Romania since the collapse of the Ceausescu regime in 1989. Specifically, the impact of the reform measures on ECE provision is examined in relation to curriculum content and structure. Explanation of how to investigate education have been central to the present research. The analysis of documentary data corpus identified three main themes reflecting the changes that took place: (i) the introduction of education reforms, (ii) the emergence of educational pluralism, (iii) the various iterations of the early childhood curriculum. Findings suggest that decentralisation processes led to the spread of alternative pedagogies in ECE add the findings about curriculum content change our investigation offers a detailed picture of the educational processes of decentralization and the changes it has brought in the early childhood curriculum.

Vladavina Nikolaja Čaušeskua i njena tragična epizoda tokom rumunske decembarske revolucije

In December 1989, thousands of Romanian citizens took to the streets, protesting against Nicolae Ceausescu's policies. This was no surprise-some time ago, the Warsaw Pact countries, which for decades languished in the ideology of communism and the one-party system, struggled to put this era behind them. These uprisings initiated the fall of the current regimes through initial protests, which was why the then political elite often responded hysterically with repression and political violence. As the last country from the Central-Eastern bloc, Romania started the changes in the most repressive way and ended the era of communism. The most impressive aspect of this transition is the behaviour of Nicolae Ceausescu, the president of Romania at that time, who ignored the mentioned events in the neighbourhood. The initial revolt of the Romanian people, which Ceausescu visibly defied without suspecting that it would affect him, finally happened and closed his rule in blood. Relying on a wide range of different sources of material, in this paper we will try to present the historiography of the Romanian revolution authentically, from the perspective of the present moment. The starting point for the work is a conceptual analysis of the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu-from the very beginning, through the characteristic periods, all the way to the year of its completion. His rule, characterized by other Warsaw Pact states as the most severe form of communism, led to violence and revolutionary riots that left a bloody mark on Romania's history. Some of the theses presented, such as the coup d'etat, conspiracy, or foreign intervention, which were presented as the cause of the collapse of Ceausescu's regime, opened space for many reflections. But the real picture seems much simpler: the people of Romania, after the most difficult period of austerity, poverty, and torture, rose against a dictatorial regime that has denied the most basic social and humanistic values.

Uncovering Wounds, Countering Obliviousness: Tragedy of Humanity in Herztier, a Novel by Herta Müller

The research is financed by Directorate General of Higher Education Ministry of Research an Technology as the organizer of BPPDN. Abstract Fictional works from Herta Müller are regarded as documentations and information sources of socio-political life in Romania during the dictator Ceausescu regime from 1967 to 1989. Müller’s novel Herztier is considered as the most concrete in representing the tragedy of humanity under the practice of totalitarian system power. This study aims to investigate the tragedy of humanity represented in the novel Herztier, and the intentions the author, Herta Müller, wants to achieve through those representations. To understand and achieve profound result, study were performed on Herztier and the social and political contexts relevant to the novel. Therefore, as the theoretical basis, the Stanzel theory of narrative and van Dijk theory of critical discourse analysis are used. By the combination of these theories, the narrative reconstruction, directed at the narrator elements, narrative perspective, narrative intonation, and linguistic choices, also the contexts related to the socio-political facts in Romania during the reign of Ceausescu. The analysis shows two findings. First, the tragedy of humanity shown in Herztier are represented by a first person narrator. Second, through the novel-imaginative fictional stories-, the author tries to provide a means to fight the oblivion about bad events in life and to raise the awareness of the readers about the true reality. The public awareness of reality, in the future, can move them to actively participate in the struggle for a just society. Keywords: tragedy of humanity, totalitarian system power, narrative situations, critical discourse analysis DOI : 10.7176/JLLL/60-07 Publication date :September 30 th 2019

Memory and identity-focused narratives in Tănase's 'lived book'

In her article "Memory and identity-focused narratives in Tănase's 'lived book'" Nicoleta Ifrim analyses România mea (My Romania), Virgil Tănase's first book published after the fall of Ceausescu's regime, a collection of interviews in which personal history is fictionalized according to the narrative rules of a "spoken book." The text is representative for the Eastern intellectual travelling to the West, carrying out his own personal post-totalitarian traumas now mirrored in a self-oriented narrative.

Incoherence of urban planning policy in Bucharest: Its potential for land use conflict

Bucharest is a city in transition from its communist past to a market economy, but poor urban planning in is impacting adversely on contested spaces. Lack of effective and strictly enforced regulation and public sector indecision, mixed with problems inherited from the Ceausescu regime, generate many examples of poor urban planning and management. One such example concerns the uncertain future of Văcăreşti “Lake”, our in-depth case study, which is an encapsulated 184ha wetland whose management has been particularly poor. Employing a mixed methodology of mapping the evolution of the area in question and conducting interviews with surrounding residents and experts in the urban planning or public administration, we demonstrate how lack of an effective planning system and appropriate policies serves to exacerbate conflict between interested parties. Initially there was a conflict between former land owners and authorities, after which developers, surrounding populations, urban planners and ecologists were added. Worse still, the juridical owners of the site are unresolved! Many government agencies and the Bucharest municipality have also compounded the problem by failing to take a lead in future planning and conflict resolution by adopting a passive management approach, which is a recipe for inaction in a poorly regulated land market. Thus, incoherent land use policy has greatly amplified individual and professional conflict both at the local level and city-wide.

Fostering early brain development.

Fostering early brain development.

Beyond the iron curtain of historiography, between party canon and scholarly standard

This paper aims at elaborating a new theoretical framework and a new methodology in order to identify the location of history discipline endorsed by the East European communist regimes between scholarly production and propaganda. The case study considered is the historiography produced by the History Institute of the Romanian Communist Party (Isisp) during the Ceausescu regime (1965-1989). This highly ideological, but still polymorphic historiography is placed into the context of the 19th and 20th centuries’ professionalization of history in Europe. Since historiography has been the main mean to develop nationalist messages, this paper is also a contribution to the study of nationalism. Since history-writing is a myth-breaker but also a (national) myths-maker, the theory considers that the Isisp historians were elaborating an academic, scholarly standard while performing the mandatory metanarrative canon imposed by the communist Party, creating a double-set of coherence, for the party and for their own profession. The theory implies also a methodology of analysis which integrates the study of the history-writings, considered in diachronical perspective, together with the collective biographies of Isisp and of its historians.

The politics of writing history

After exhibiting one of the "hottest" instances of ethno-national related violence in all post-socialist transitions, early 90s Romanian society seemed to have "cooled" down in terms identitarian conflicts, hence making it even more surprising why an apparently small-scale debate concerning history textbooks quickly spiraled to the point of becoming a fully-fledged public scandal against a Government dubbed as "Anti-Romanian". The aim of this paper is thus to contribute to the overarching research question: Why did nationalism remain such a powerful force despite the fall of the Ceausescu regime? To provide a comprehensive answer the article looks at two, tightly interwoven, sides of cultural reproduction: the politics of history-teaching in Romanian high-schools and its more general background -historians' debates on nationalism. The conclusion reached through this analysis is that a conservation of ethno-centered nationalistic thinking about history was generated by a distorted understanding of professionalization of history qua science.

External Debt Management in Romania

This paper approaches the evolution of Romania’s foreign debt in three periods of time: during Nicolae Ceausescu regime, in the transition period and the one which followed the adhesion to European Union. For all three periods the external debt management had to deal with different circumstances: the sharp increase of real interest rates from the 1980s, the lack of credibility on international financial markets from the 1990s or the recent global crisis. We conclude that political regime, the efficiency of the allocation of the borrowed funds or the international context played major roles in the external debt management.

On feminism, philosophy and politics in Post-communist Romania: An interview with Mihaela Miroiu (Bucharest, 17 May 2010)

Synopsis Mihaela Miroiu is a Romanian political theorist and East Europe's most prominent feminist philosopher. She is the author of twelve books published in Romanian, including Road to Autonomy: Feminist Political Theories (Polirom, 2004), Priceless Women (Polirom 2006) and Convenio: On Women, Nature and Morals (Alternative Publishing House, 1996). She has also edited or co-edited nine volumes, most of them on feminism and feminist theory. Born in Romania in 1955, she was raised during the communist era under the Ceausescu regime, and emerged after 1989 as one of the country's leading feminist voices. She founded the country's first gender studies Master's program in 1998, and helped to organize two of its earliest independent women's nongovernmental organizations: AnA. –The Romanian Society for Feminist Analyses and The Center for Gender Studies FILIA. Professor Miroiu is an expert advisor to both UNESCO and the European Union, and has won prestigious international fellowships at Cornell University, Indiana University, Oxford and Manchester Universities, and at the Central European University in Budapest. In 2010, the U.S.-based Association of Women in Slavic Studies awarded Professor Miroiu its Outstanding Achievement Award for her accomplishments as a philosopher and her mentorship of a new generation of young Romanian feminists. The European Institute for Gender Equality also featured her in its “Women Inspiring Europe” 2011 calendar. On May 16, 2010, Kristen Ghodsee, an American scholar of East European women's movements and the John. S. Osterweis Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College, accompanied her to a public protest in front of the Romanian presidency against a government plan to cut state subsidies to mothers of young children. The following day, Ghodsee interviewed Professor Miroiu in her home in Bucharest.

Die Kritik der ungarischen Medien an der Politik des „Bruderstaates“ Rumänien in den letzten zwei Jahren des Ceauşescu-Regimes (1987-1989)

The noticeable deterioration in Hungarian-Romanian relations at the end of the 1980s gave rise to an unprecedented situation in the history of the Eastern Bloc resp. the Warsaw Pact countries. From 1987 onwards, the ideological differences and political attitudes of the regimes in Budapest and Bucharest opened a wide gulf between both countries, which developed into hostility between the Socialist Republic of Romania and the People’s Republic of Hungary, formerly regarded as “brother nations”. While Budapest went down the path of reform in line with perestrojka and glasnost, the leadership in Bucharest was be-coming increasing entrenched as an anti-minority, neo-Stalinist dictatorship, the Conducator Nicolae Ceausescu at its head. Hungary’s dismal economic perspectives and the changes in the Soviet Union weakened the party’s strict control over the media and, following the 1986 Press Act, allowed more room for the free expression of opinion. The Hungarian media’s criticism of the Ceausescu regime may be regarded as part of this general liberalisation over control over the media. The employment of experts in many editorial departments, especially within radio and television, the increasing influence of Samizdat publications, together with media appearances by reformers, brought many previously taboo subjects before the public. All the most important state-media, the radio, television, the official press agency MIT, and even the press office of the Communist Party, were affected by this turn of events. At the same time a dispute with deep historical roots flared up between Hungary and Romania. This was used by the Romanian leadership to build up the notion of an external enemy in order to strengthen the internal stability of the regime. There followed even harsher criticism by the Hungarian media, involving not only critical reports, but of all forms of media (music, film, satire). All attempts on the part of the Romanian dictator to silence his Hungarian critics proved unsuccessful. As some of the Hungarian electronic media could also be received across its international border in Western Romania, their criticism of the Ceausescu-Regime helped to create a feeling of solidarity between the Hungarian and Romanian populations. The outbreak of the popular uprising in Timisoara, followed by those in Arad and other cities of mixed population on the 16th and 21st of December 1989, can be traced back to the effects of these media.

Inattentive/overactive children with histories of profound institutional deprivation compared with standard ADHD cases: a brief report

The Inattention/Overactivity/Impulsiveness (I/OA) behavioural cluster diagnostic of ADHD is recognized as a characteristic outcome of early institutional care. We compared the symptom and neuropsychological profiles of children with a history of I/OA and early severe deprivation (D-I/OA: n=13) with standard clinical ADHD cases (S-ADHD; N=20) and children who had experienced deprivation but were not pervasively I/OA (ERA-controls; n=22). The mean age of testing was around 13 years. D-I/OA and ERA-controls were selected from the English and Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study and had spent their early lives in the extremely depriving Romanian institutions of the Ceausescu regime and were later adopted into UK families. ADHD symptoms for male D-I/OA and S-ADHD cases showed marked similarities across symptom domains. In contrast, girls with D-I/OA were more similar to ERA controls than to ADHD cases. Longitudinal data suggested that this was due to a remission of symptoms in D-I/OA girls. Neuropsychological profiles of males and females with D-I/OA, however, were similar: both were more impaired than S-ADHD and ERA controls. Children with D-I/OA were more neuropsychologically impaired than S-ADHD despite the fact that only boys showed a persistent pattern of ADHD symptoms. These results need replication in a larger sample with groups matched for gender.

Form-Trans-Inform: the ‘poetic’ resistance in architecture

In Nicolae Ceausescu's ‘Systematisation’ programme, implemented across Romania throughout the 1980s, power was played out in acts of building. The city of Bucharest provided a visible symbol of the centralisation of authority, manifest in the construction of the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism and the House of the People. Beginning from this historical context, this paper revisits the work of one group of student architects in Romania, Form-Trans-Inform, who used spatial practices to question orthodoxies in architecture around them as protests against repressions under the monolithic Ceausescu regime.

Toronto 2007

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2007 With a festival as big as Toronto's, pinning down a general theme about its line-up each year would seem to defy its promise of something-for-everyone, as this year's slate of 349 films from 55 countries showed. Although larger media outlets named discernible themes among the festival's subsections anyway - "frustrated youth" for one; "war in Iraq and global terrorism" for another, the most engaging films this year were apt to be foremost of all, engaging and well-told stories. Here are ten examples: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania 2007)The waning period of the Ceausescu regime sets the stage for a young woman's labours to arrange a back-alley abortion for her college roommate. Although the illegality of the undertaking furnishes much of the plot's intrigue, the film's gravitas owes much to Mungiu's calibrated direction, which eschews reactionary...

Making sense of North Korea: “National Stalinism” in comparative-historical perspective

This paper examines the striking institutional parallels between the seemingly inexplicable DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and Ceausescu's Romania. It argues that in both cases, the role of strong anti-liberal ideology that combined both far left and far right nationalist elements was highly significant in sustaining the regime and therefore should not be underestimated. While developments elsewhere in the Soviet bloc deprived the Ceausescu regime of potential nationalist cards it could play and thus precipitated regime change, the DPRK regime was able to hold on to power by using imagined and real external threats to justify its ongoing domestic repression and reinforce its nationalist claims.

Romania's tortured road toward modernity

This book addresses the form and nature of the transition Romania has undergone since the fall of the Ceausescu regime in 1989. The reconstruction of Romania has taken place not only within the context of the legacy of state socialism, but within an even greater context of general historical, political social and economic legacies. Some of the problems Romania has encountered during this progression are its system of social stratification, economic development and the struggle to create a solid national identity.