Communist Romania Research Articles

Din istoria „Revistei Arhivelor” (1924-1989)/ From the „Journal of Archives” history (1924-1989)

The Journal of the Archives was founded in 1924 by Constantin Moisil, a university professor, academician, and director of the State Archives. The historian and archivist Aurelian Sacerdoțeanu continued its coordination and published five volumes in 1938–1947, but later the Communist regime abolished the journal for a decade. The Journal of the Archives was the State Archives’ official publication. It had many of the organization and operation issues of this institution both in the Capital and in its regional branches. It also had a variety of studies in archiving, chronology, diplomacy, genealogy, heraldry, numismatics, paleography, and sphragistics, studies regarding the peculiarities of the scientific preservation and capitalization of historical documents, homage volumes, bibliographies, and reports. Hundreds of documents, catagraphs, terms, inscriptions, manuscripts, etc. have been published in this journal. During Communist Romania, The Journal of the Archives resumed its publication in 1958, with a new series, including various socialist propaganda materials, but also valuable archival works. Along with great historians, philologists, university professors, members of the Romanian Academy, such as Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Dimitrie Onciul, Nicolae Iorga, many archivists published valuable studies in The Journal of the Archives. They are: Emil Vârtosu, Ștefan Meteș, Teodor Bălan, Mihai Regleanu, Mihail Fănescu, Ștefan Hurmuzache, Tudor Mateescu, Marcel Ciucă. Articles written by archivist ladies Maria Holban, Elena Limona, Maria Dogaru, Mioara Tudorică, Ioana Burlacu, etc. also appeared in this journal, and some were inspired by women’s history.

De-Constructing Communist Romania’s Pro-Feminist Discourse. Women’s Status as Reflected in the Femeia Communist Magazine

In communist Romania, the official discourse of the state would stretch over all fields of activity irrespective of their contiguity to or remoteness from the leading committees. Women magazines enrol in this general orientation and become insidious voices of communist propaganda spreading with little concern for women, their supposedly main interest, but with much solicitude

Faith on the Margins: Religion and Civic Emancipation among Roma People during Communist Rule in Romania

Abstract This paper analyzes the way in which religion bolstered Roma people’s demands for civic emancipation and strengthened their ethnic and cultural identity in 1970s and 1980s Romania. Based on documents mainly from the former secret police, the Securitate, the paper is divided into two main parts. The “rst is a general overview of the state of the Roma people in communist Romania and the main initiatives for their civic emancipation. Next, the paper uses the perspective of “lived religion” to study three elements that informed the religious life of Roma during the 1970s and 1980s. These are the persistence of religious beliefs, the creation of Gypsy Neo-Protestant churches, and religious pilgrimage. Moreover, the paper will show that religious practice strengthened ethnic identity, favoured individual agency, and raised questions about equal rights and religious freedom.

Documents as weapons: secret police files in Communist and post-Communist Romania

PurposeThis study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret police files, before and after the fall of Communism in Romania. These DIPs were often weaponized against citizens perceived to be anti-government.Design/methodology/approachBased on Buckland's (2017) concept of a document as an object with physical, mental and social parts, the study used thematic analysis to examine volumes of DIPs from 1945 to 1989 Communist Romania as well as several recorded reactions to the DIPs by the victims who were targeted by the Communist secret police.FindingsFour themes were revealed by the study's findings and discussed within the manuscript: DIPs as unreliable epistemic tools, DIPs as tools to construct the identity of the “People's Enemy,” DIPs as weapons to fight the “People's Enemy” and DIPs as tools that could be used in counterattacks during post-Communism, including in political-economic blackmailing.Research limitations/implicationsThere are two major limitations to research of DIPs. First, since many DIPs have been stolen, copied illicitly or even destroyed, it is difficult to articulate precisely their actual or potential social and political effects. Researchers may often detect these effects only indirectly, based on information leaks in the news. Second, many victims of surveillance practices during the Communist period have chosen not to leave records of their reactions to reading the DIPs that targeted them.Social implicationsCurrent and future comprehensive studies of DIPs can reveal possible parallels between surveillance by the Communist regime and the massive data-collection that occurs in democratic societies, particularly given the increased technical capabilities for processing data in these democratic societies.Originality/valueWithin documentation studies, secret police files and document weaponization have been particularly under-researched, therefore this study contributes to a small body of literature.

European construction and the Franco-Soviet Summit in Kiev (December 6, 1989). Part I

Since 1990, and especially after the Franco-Soviet meeting of December 6, a large number of opinions, studies, and articles in the Romanian historiography have spoken of a „plot” of the West (NATO & EEC), in agreement with the Soviet Union, against socialist Romania. In spite of this fact, the official documents of the EEC and NATO, the stenographic records from the meetings of the European Council, as well as other documentary testimonies and memorialistic works, show that the year 1989 was dominated by the collapse of the strategic glacis of the USSR and the amplification of the European construction process. The franco-soviet Summit that took place in Kiev on December 6, 1989 represents an essential milestone on the way to the Maastricht Treaty (February 7, 1992) rather than an episode of the Soviet-Western „plot” against socialist Romania. The President of France was involved in a complicated political-diplomatic game whose stake was European unity in which Chancellor Helmut Kohl had to make major political concessions in favor of President François Mitterrand’s geopolitical plans: 1) launching the negotiations on the creation of the Economic and Monetary Union, as a prelude of the future European Union; 2) recognizing of Germany’s borders with Poland on the Oder-Neisse line; 3) maintaining Germany unified in NATO and 4) confirming Germany’s denuclearization. These were the necessary conditions without which President François Mitterrand did not want to discuss with Mihail S. Gorbachev about „German reunification”.

Hungarian Beyond the Border1 On the Contexts of Education, Bilingualism, and Labour Market in the Early 21st Century. The Transylvanian Perspective

Abstract Borders are particular (in-between) spaces: they have this side and the other side, which involve several real and imaginary spaces at the same time. For minorities, “beyond the borders” is also a specific space of language use. This paper discusses the correlations between minority bilingualism and social structure characteristics based on sociological surveys, taking as approach the sociology of space and John Ogbu’s ecological cultural model of schooling. It aims to offer an overview of my research carried out on this topic and tries to provide some references for rethinking the sociological implications of minority education considering the experiences of three decades since the fall of communism in Romania. The main results of this research – in concordance with other findings of similar inquiries – show that a mother-tongue education for ethnic Hungarian children in Romania is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reducing the structural gap that Hungarians in Transylvania have inherited from the 20th century. This study is centred on the aspects of interrelation between the language of education and labour market, more specifically on those linked to the attitudes and patterns of behaviour towards the official language, with particular focus on the role that languages play in the society and, in a narrower sense, in self-positioning on the labour market.

Existentialism, existentialists, and Marxism: From critique to integration within the philosophical establishment in Socialist Romania

In this paper, we discuss how existentialism was criticized, disseminated, and gradually autochthonized in the main philosophical journals of Socialist Romania. We show that the early critique of existentialism was both a statement against contemporary bourgeois philosophy in general and a condemnation of the local philosophical production of the interwar period. In the 1950s, this kind of critique was attuned to the growing fame of several Romanian authors who had emigrated to the West (e.g., Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade) and targeted both past and contemporary irrationalism. Following a period of critique of existentialism without existentialists (i.e., without reference to individual authors), the 1960s discussions of existentialism were mainly driven by interest in a small number of existentialist authors. In particular, the evolution of Jean-Paul Sartre’s work and politics was analyzed as it straddled existentialism and Marxism. The 1970s saw the integration of selected existentialist concepts and themes, in an attempt to offer a Marxist alternative to existentialism in the form of philosophical anthropology. This led to a period of engagement with existentialists without existentialism across an increasing number of separate disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. In the 1980s, following the failure of Marxist philosophical anthropology and at the height of national communism, existentialism could also be autochthonized through the recovery of selected philosophers from the interwar period whose work had been previously criticized as irrationalist.

Longing for the West: The literary utopia of consumption in communist Romania

The main focus of this study develops around the symbolic potential of consumption as a social phenomenon and its multiple spheres of social manifestation. Given that the literature insists upon the implications of consumption upon individual and social identity construction, this analysis lays emphasis on the influences of a certain type of consumption, strictly determined by the political regime, in a given socio-political space and well-defined time-frame—communist Romania—on the citizens’ political, cultural, and even on literary identity. I have come to identify a type of “subversive consumption” which is shaped as a declaration of adhesion to the free Western world and, implicitly, as a rejection of state ideology. This strategy of revendicating another political, social and cultural descendance through consumption also manifests itself in the literary works of the poets of the so-called ‘80ist Literary Movement. Given communist poverty and all sorts of interdictions, certain imported goods, as well as certain cultural products, gained a deeply subversive value that was later taken up and transformed into “intentional communication” (Hebdige) and manifesto by the young poets.

Marietta Sadova: Fascist Identities and Political Compromise in Communist Romania

"After a brief period of liberalization in 1956, cultural politics in communist Romania went through an ideological radicalization between 1958 and the early 1960s, which led to intimidation campaigns, arrests, trials, and condemnations of several groups of interwar intellectuals. Director and actress Marietta Sadova was convicted in the 'Noica-Pillat' trial in March 1960. This paper aims to unravel the complex interaction between culture and politics through a qualitative analysis of Marietta Sadova's case study. The focus will be on the Securitate's surveillance, coercion methods, and narrative construction on one hand and the artist's surviving fascist identity, compromises made to survive, and the validity of cultural niches of existence on the other. The theoretical and methodological apparatus is built on new historiographical approaches to communist repression, including the ability of the secret police to construct and politically instrumentalize guilt narratives. The results suggest that the interaction between the interwar intellectuals and the communist authorities was neither unidirectional nor unitary but multi-layered and mutually depended on negotiations and concessions, as well as on the secret police agents' newly acquired methods of creating and repressing 'hostile' social networks. Keywords: communism, cultural politics, fascism, Marietta Sadova, repression, theatre "

Party Education and Cadre Schools in Communist Romania. Some Preliminary Considerations

"The present lines raise the question of the necessity of a thorough study of a largely ignored chapter in the history of Romanian communism, namely the system of party education and cadre schools. If in a first phase, in Romanian post-socialist historiography, the orientation towards the research of the extremes of the system, of terror and repression has prevailed, nowadays it is at least as necessary to understand the mechanisms by which the communist system was perpetuated and regenerated. Party schools were more than mere instruments of indoctrination, manipulation and propaganda, they represented key institutions that fully contributed to the construction of the system itself. Keywords: political education, party schools, cadres, Romanian Communist Party"

"Women’s Roles, Place Attachment and the Socialist Nation in Cutezătorii Magazine. Representations in Comics Featuring Romanian Communist Pioneers "

Socialism created materially and discursively an ideological context (and then tradition) to control social space and implicitly people’s experiences in society and space. The aim of my research is to identify representations of the women’s roles in communist Romania, as these were constructed by propaganda in comics for communist pioneers and published in Cutezătorii [The Daring Ones] magazine (1967-1989). My research material is made of comics where Romanian communist pioneers appear as characters. I discuss gender representations using discourse analysis and critical visual analysis. I interpret these gender representations in relation with the socialist nation and place meanings, as constructed by the official discourse. My research explores the meanings of place and the attachments created, which rest on the respective meanings. I consider the role of this official discourse about place meanings in constructing students’ place attachments (i.e., readers of the respective magazine). I concluded that the egalitarian ideology of the communist regime did not affect the patriarchal and the engendered inequalities in the Romanian society because the paternalist communist state supported the patriarchal regime. Comics show a patriarchal society despite the communist propaganda about an egalitarian society. In addition, I showed how, in the analysed comics, which were part of the popular culture, nature- and culture-induced place attachment was influenced by a gendered socialisation with space.

Going West: Socialist flexibility in the long 1970s

AbstractThis article analyses some of the transformations in economic vocabularies, practices, and institutions that accompanied the turn towards high value-added and technology-driven industrialization in late socialist Romania. It investigates the challenges posed by increasing integration of the country’s commodity production into the world market in the 1960–70s and assesses the measures adopted by its economic executives as a response to these challenges: the reorganization of production; the reconfiguration of planning mechanisms; and the strategies of keeping labour cheap. This article shows that planners behind the Iron Curtain wrestled with similar problems to their Western counterparts. It demonstrates that the solutions of the socialist economic executives not only mirrored, imitated, and translated Western managerial ideologies and practices but also represented creative local responses to the challenges of the world market. I argue this constellation of solutions constituted a fully fledged form of ‘socialist flexibility’. Analysing how these flexible solutions paralleled the neoliberal deregulation in the capitalist core helps us question the analytical separation between centrally planned and market economies and the still powerful narrative of 1989 as a historical fracture.

Dream in a Suitcase: The Story of an Immigrant Life by Domnica Radulescu

Reviewed by: Dream in a Suitcase: The Story of an Immigrant Life by Domnica Radulescu Roxana Cazan Domnica Radulescu Dream in a Suitcase: The Story of an Immigrant Life New York. Austin Macauley. 2021. 331 pages. I REREAD Domnica Radulescu’s memoir, Dream in a Suitcase, after I returned from a weekend trip to Slovakia. There, in a train station in Bratislava where I was waiting for my ride home, children were playing on old mattresses that served as an improvised indoor playground. A spirited little girl whose face was blossoming with a wide smile reminded me of my own energetic three-year-old, waiting for me to meet him in Romania, where he was spending the summer at his grandparents’ house. But unlike my own child, who is a second-generation Romanian Iranian American born and living in Oklahoma, this little human was a Ukrainian refugee, living in a makeshift shelter in a train station in Bratislava. Overwhelmed by grief, I returned to Radulescu’s memoir because this book explores the trauma of exile as experienced by a young person. And what can be more satisfying a read than this memoir, when I have been feeling so dreadfully helpless in the face of the cruel and tyrannical war waged by Russia in Ukraine, only a short distance away from my parents’ house in Romania, which received scores of terrified refugees, most of whom were women and children? Radulescu’s memoir unfolds a stunning life story, masking the keen of grief behind a veneer of sarcasm and dry humor. Her own exile from Romania in the 1980s had been inspired by a terror not unlike the one we see devastating Ukraine today: a Soviet-inspired authoritarian communist regime that targeted women specifically in ways that removed their autonomy over their bodies and their lives. In fact, in an article written for the Boston Review, Ileana Nachescu writes that in the context of Russia’s cruel war in Ukraine, “regional solidarities of the postsocialist space are emerging again.” She offers some examples: “Pussy Riot recently tweeted a video of Kharkiv’s bombed center, recalling that the Center for Gender Studies was the place where they first read feminist books. Ukrainian refugees are finding shelter in Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, the first two—the ones with the longest borders with Ukraine—considered the poorest countries in Europe.” And although it was written a year before the tragedy in eastern Europe, I understand Radulescu’s memoir as another act of solidarity with women and migrants across the postsocialist region. Radulescu’s book belongs to a lineage of grief-inspired memoirs that meld personal stories with a sharp social critique of racism, xenophobia, and inequity in the United States, such as From Borsch to Burgers, by Ruslana Westerlund; Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, by Maria Hinojosa; The Ungrateful Refugee, by Dina Nayeri; or Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang. In it, the reader accompanies the memoirist on a long and harrowing trip from Bucharest to Rome, then to Chicago, and finally to a small town in Virginia. This voyage parallels the writer’s psychological journey of becoming a woman in charge of her life and dreams. Radulescu left Romania as a teenager to reunite with her parents in hopes of seeking political asylum in the US. The horrors that inspired Radulescu’s family to escape communist Romania have been amply described by scholars such as Katherine Verdery, Gail Kligman, Dennis Deletant, Jill Massino, Irina Livezeanu, Maria Bucur, and many others. They include decades of terror and tyranny, isolation, acute poverty, inhumane conditions for children, for the poor, for the Roma minority, a strict surveillance of women’s reproduction, the mistrust of intellectuals, corruption, and state patriarchy, to mention a few. Away from everything she knows, Radulescu is accompanied only by one small suitcase containing a handful of clothes and the manuscript of a story collection she manages to smuggle out of communist Romania, risking her life. The suitcase represents a vehicle of escape into a world where Radulescu can reclaim agency over her body and her mind. In the United States, she graduates...

Advertising and Fashion in Socialist Romania. The Case of the Representation of Voroneț in the Advertisements of the Moda Magazine (1970)

The consumer culture in socialism, the socialist advertising and fashion in Romania in the 1970s are historical research subjects that outline the fundamental context for the analysis of the visual documents represented by the advertising published in the Moda [Fashion] magazine.

Humanist Redemption and Afterlife: The Frankfurt School in Communist Romania

Abstract This paper discusses the reception of Frankfurt School critical theory in Communist Romania. After some opening remarks concerning the relevance of this topic, Section 2 sketches the evolving political and historical contexts that circumscribed this philosophical reception. The content and configuration of the Romanian reception of critical theory is then discussed in a double sequence: first (Section 3), by surveying and analysing the main clusters of arguments developed in these texts, which are filtered and classified into four categories: a) general considerations and strategic approach to critical theory; b) positive assessments; c) philosophical critiques; d) politico-practical critiques. Then, Section 4 attempts to delineate the divergent paths adumbrated in this field of critical reception, which it illustrates through the specific authorial trajectories of the main Romanian interpreters (Tertulian, Marga and Tismăneanu). Finally, the concluding remarks are devoted to some brief comparative and historical considerations on the meaning, value and amplitude of this critical reception.

Fighting the Cold War on the beach: East–West encounters on the Romanian Black Sea Riviera between the 1960s and the 1980s

ABSTRACT This article examines how starting in the 1960s and with the peak in the 1970s and into the early 1980s, the Romanian Black Sea Coast became a hotbed of European tourism with visitors not just from Romania and the neighbouring socialist countries, but also from western capitalist countries. Following the model of more developed tourist countries and lured by the possibility of gaining hard currencies, socialist Romania sought to develop beach tourism so as to attract Western tourists seeking seaside vacations. But, as this article shows, the socialist state was not the only one to benefit from the arrival of Western tourists. The presence of foreign tourists, especially of those from capitalist countries who were in stark majority on the seaside, offered the Romanian citizens the opportunity to mingle and to establish economic and personal relationships that helped them to acquire goods unavailable in ordinary shops, while enabling them to adopt a more cosmopolitan way of life. This article shows that from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, on the Romanian Black Sea Coast, with the tacit acceptance of local officials, became a space that mingled socialist landscape and values with capitalist material culture.

CONTRIBUȚII LA O ISTORIE A COMUNISMULUI: OFIȚERUL DE SECURITATE ÎN EPOCA CEAUȘESCU – MIT, MODEL, FORMARE, ACTIVITATE (I)

This study aims to detail some aspects of the fieldwork of the security officer in the 1980s – especially that of the intelligence department – based on testimonies, which also involve interviews and archival documents. In addition, this information is linked to current studies on the training of security officers along with training manuals for officers, used in the form of courses. Some of the documents used are “Instructions for Surveillance and Investigations” from 1978 and “Current Issues and Changes in the Foreign Intelligence Service v. R.S.R.” Both documents were published electronically by Remus Mircea Birtz on his personal blog; therefore, the task of researching and extracting these documents from the archives – often demanding and cumbersome – does not belong to us. It should be noted that the Security, as a body of utmost importance for the functioning of the R.S.R. In the foreseeable parameters for the regime of that time, it has known important fluctuations and transformations, even radical ones, on the current ones of what historiography is almost in the form of definition, “the history of communism in Romania”. So, we can capture several stages in the evolution of the Security – almost a history segmented at intervals of ten years each.

The Mission of the Church and the Phenomenon of Instrumental Social Relations in Post- Communist Romania

The Mission of the Church and the Phenomenon of Instrumental Social Relations in Post- Communist Romania

Unpacking Tourism in the Cold War: International Tourism and Commercialism in Socialist Romania, 1960s–1980s

The role of market-oriented tourist policies in the planned economies of socialist Eastern Europe has been long overlooked. This article examines how the socialist regime in Romania moved from sheer ideological rhetoric to commercialism and market-driven strategies when promoting Romania as a tourist destination in the ‘West’ between the 1960s and the 1980s. It argues that there was a continual shifting between using tourism as an ideological tool and a certain pragmatism that was needed to turn socialist Romania into a desirable tourist destination.

Social science and Marxist humanism beyond collectivism in Socialist Romania

This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary specialization in the advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the ‘thinning’ of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s.