SETTING THE HISTORICAL RECORD STRAIGHT: JUDGING THE ROMANIAN COMMUNIST PAST AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF POPULAR NOSTALGIC RESISTANCE

Mihai Stelian RUSU

Autori

Mihai Stelian RUSU PhD, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, B-dul 21 Dec. 1989

Cuvinte cheie:

collective memory, communist nostalgia, politics of memory, Romanian “truth commission, ” Tismãneanu Report, transitional justice, trial of communism

Rezumat

This paper examines the relationship between the post-communist political regime and the communist past, analysing how the communist past, after a period of time when the state agents resorted to eschewing strategies, was eventually confronted frontally in 2006 when the Romanian President commissioned what came to be known as the “Tismãneanu Report” in order to officially condemn the communist regime. The Tismãneanu Report is seen here as a state-sponsored attempt to impose an official memory of communism as the sole “scientifically” based narrative of the communist past. The trial of communism, ended with the sentencing of the communist regime as illegitimate and murderous based on the conclusions of the Tismãneanu Report, is seen as expressing a political strategy of legitimating the new democratic order by breaking off with the past. The paper then examines the latent conflict subsisting between the official memory of communism codified in the narrative delivered by the Tismãneanu Report and the popular memory expressed by a strong collective nostalgia towards the same communist past. The paper concludes by suggesting that the anti-communist intellectual and political elites won the battle over public memory of communism, but lost the war over private remembrances of communism.

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