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Rewriting the past: Trends in contemporary Romanian

historiography
a
Dennis Deletant
a
Senior Lecturer in Romanian Studies at SSEES , University of London , Senate House, Malet
Street, London, WC1E 7HU, UK
Published online: 13 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Dennis Deletant (1991) Rewriting the past: Trends in contemporary Romanian historiography, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 14:1, 64-86, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1991.9993699

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.1991.9993699

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 Rewriting the past: trends in
contemporary Romanian
historiography

Dennis Deletant

Abstract
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The later years of the Ceauşescu regime witnessed a reappraisal of the

Romanians' Roman past. This article analyses the reasons for this and in so
doing considers the part played by language and history in the Romanians'
perception of their national identity, the extent to which the regime's creation
of new truths distorted Romanian history, and the manner in which the
historical consciousness of Romanians was politicized and exploited by the
Ceaujescus. The demotion of the Romans in the ethnogenesis of the Roman-
ian people resulted from the primacy accorded to the Dacians, the indigenous
inhabitants of the region corresponding to present-day Transylvania. The
principal advocate of Dacian primacy has been Lieutenant-General Dr Ilie
Ceausescu, brother of the late President and a former Deputy Minister of
the Armed Forces. The article shows how Ilie, as the historian with the
highest political profile in Romania during the 1980s, used Dacian primacy
as a political tool in order to give legitimacy to the policies of Nicolae
Ceauşescu. Ilie's 'Dacomania' is still reflected in post-revolutionary pro-
nouncements of Romanian Orthodox clergy who have harnessed themselves
to the nationalist movement 'Vatra'.

In autumn 1987 a board game entitled 'Dacians and Romans' went on

sale in the toy shops of Bucharest. Cast in the role of the villains were
the Romans. Nothing illustrates more graphically how mutable the past
was in the hands of a regime well versed in the manipulation of Roman-
ia's history. We appeared to be faced with the paradox of a country
whose very name embodies its Latin past attempting to deny the posi-
tive aspects of its association with Rome. How are we to explain this
role-reversal of the Romans? What provoked this recent, for recent it
was, reappraisal of this period of Romanian history? Just as in the
case of most questions concerning contemporary Romanian affairs,
unqualified, simple answers are impossible to give. To provide an expla-

Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 14 Number 1 January 1991

© Routledge 1991 0141-9870/91/1401-0064 $3/1
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 65
nation requires consideration of a number of factors, the most impor-
tant of which are the parts played by language and history in Romani-
ans' perception of their national identity and the features of that
identity; the degree to which, to paraphrase Orwell, the mutability of
the past was a central tenet of the Romanian Communist Party [RCP];
the extent to which the party's creation of new truths distorted Roman-
ian history; and finally, the manner in which the historical consciousness
of Romanians was politicized and exploited by the Ceaujescu leader-
ship. Constraints of length will not allow me to conduct a detailed
investigation of all of the above points, but I shall touch upon each of
them.
Since the role of language and history is fundamental to an under-
standing of the Romanians' perception of their own past a historical
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presentation of the development of a national consciousness is impera-

tive. The impulse for creating a national consciousness among the
Romanians was provided by the activity during the last quarter of the
eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth of a small
number of Romanians in Transylvania who are known collectively as
the Transylvanian School (§coala ardeleantf). Most of these Romanians
were members of the Uniate clergy who had attended institutions of
higher education in Rome or Vienna. The Uniate, or Greek Catholic
Church, in Transylvania had been established in 1699 as a result of a
partly successful attempt on the part of the Roman Catholic hierarchy
of Hungary to convert the Romanian Orthodox clergy of Transylvania
to Catholicism. In promoting the union with Rome, the Catholic hier-
archy's main objective was to spread the faith. The Emperor Leopold
I saw the union as a means of increasing the power of the Catholic
minority in Transylvania and thus curbing the influence of the Calvinist
Hungarian nobility. The Roman Catholic Church was at pains to edu-
cate the Uniate priesthood above the level of the Orthodox priests in
Transylvania. Uniate schools were opened in Transylvania for the new
Romanian converts and bursaries founded at seminaries in Vienna and
Rome for Uniate priests. In Rome the priests, inspired by the monu-
ments of the Roman Empire, were awakened to their own Latin ances-
try and on their return to Transylvania they propagated amongst their
countrymen the idea of the Roman origin of the Romanians and the
Latin character of their language. The writings of such Uniate priests
as Samuel Clain, Gheorghe Sincai and Petru Maior on the origins
of the Romanians were major contributions to the awakening of the
Romanian national spirit. The Romanians could claim to be the direct
descendants of those Romans who had settled in Dacia following Tra-
jan's conquest of the province at the beginning of the second century
AD and as such to be the inheritors of a great imperial civilization. The
Romans colonized their new province with settlers from all parts of
the Empire, who intermarried with the local Dacian population and
 66 Dennis Deletant
Romanized it, thus producing a Daco-Roman people who were the
forebears of the Romanians. After the withdrawal of the Roman legions
in 271-75, the province became a gateway to the south for successive
invaders, with the Daco-Romans seeking refuge in the mountainous
regions, thus preserving their Latin language and culture. This expla-
nation of the Romanian presence in Transylvania is known as the theory
of Daco-Roman continuity. The Latin pedigree entitled the Romanians
to consider themselves of nobler stock than their Hungarian and Saxon
neighbours in Transylvania who enjoyed political and social rights
denied to the Romanians. The work of the Transylvanian School thus
provided the historical justification for the demand for equal rights
which the representatives of the Romanians first embodied in a petition
to the Habsburg Emperor Leopold II in 1791 entitled Supplex Libellus
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Valachorum and which was to be echoed by patriotic historians through-

out the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
It was only a short while before the influence of the Transylvanian
School was felt south and east of the Carpathians amongst the native
population of the Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia.
Although education in Romanian was at an embryonic stage, the ideas
of the School were echoed by teachers in schools in the seats of author-
ity, Bucharest and Iasi in the 1820s and 1830s. Coinciding as it did with
the spread of French cultural influences, the impact of the School's
work generated a Romanian national awakening in the Principalities.
The leaders of the Romanian nation used the continuity theory to
demonstrate the historical unity of the Romanians in Moldavia, Walla-
chia and Transylvania, a unity which was to be restored at the end of
the First World War. Romanian historians thereafter have used the
continuity theory to defend Romania's 'historical right' to Transylvania
against claims from Hungarian historians that a Romanian presence in
Transylvania can only be ascribed to immigration at the end of the
twelfth century from south of the Carpathians, and that therefore the
Hungarian entry into Transylvania at the end of the ninth century pre-
dates this.
Official post-1960s Romanian historiography regards the achieve-
ment of the 'national unitary state' in 1919 as historically inevitable and
every step in its realization is interpreted as pre-ordained (an example
is Pascu 1982). Emphasis is placed on national unity and since the
badge of Romanian identity and symbol of cohesion is the Romanian
language, so its role in denning Romanian nationhood is paramount.
The specific features of the Romanians' own perception of their national
identity have been their part-Roman, part-Dacian ancestry and the
Latin character of their language. Insistence upon the latter in contem-
porary Romanian publications may appear tiresome but can be under-
stood given developments during the Stalinist period.
In a campaign unique in the satellite states of the Soviet Union,
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 67
efforts were made to obscure the Latin origin of Romanian with empha-
sis placed on the phonological, morphological and lexical influence of
the Slavonic languages upon Romanian. The explanation for this overt
political manipulation of the language can be found in the drive by the
Soviet Union to isolate completely its newly acquired satellites from
the West and Western influences by underlining, and, if necessary,
inventing historical, cultural and political affinities with Russia. The
Romanians, because of the Romance character of their language, were
the principal target in this respect and during the late 1940s and 1950s
the Slavonic contribution to the expressive enrichment of Romanian
was underlined in a number of publications. Among the earliest mani-
festations of this drive was a slim volume entitled Studii si comentarii de
istorie si linguistics (Historical and linguistic studies and commentaries)
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which was issued by the Romanian-Soviet Institute in 1947 to mark the

thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. A glance at the table
of contents suffices to appraise the reader of the colouring of the
contributions: 'Soviet aid, a real basis for the independence and sover-
eignty of democratic Romania'; "The great language of the great Rus-
sian people'; 'Viewpoints on the Slavonic elements in Romanian'. The
latter paper, written by Alexandru Graur, concludes:

In a word, all the areas of Romanian linguistics must be studied

because, without doubt, the careful study of Romanian means to a
great extent the study of the relationships of Romanian with the
Slavonic languages (SCIL 1947, p. 34).

Cosmetically, the most striking feature of the campaign was the

replacement by a resolution of the Council of Ministers on 16 Septem-
ber 1953 of the letter S with t which represented the Romanized form
of a character used in the Cyrillic alphabet of the Romanians until 1860.
In December of that year there appeared an orthographic dictionary of
the Romanian language which incorporated the change and the new
orthographic norms officially came into effect on 1 April 1954 for all
state institutions except in primary and secondary education where they
would be applied at the beginning of the 1955-56 school year. For the
Romanians the change from S to i was particularly significant and
humiliating as their very name and that of their country was now to be
spelt respectively romini and Rominia instead of the etymologically-
based romSni and Romania which highlighted their Roman ancestry.
Not all Romanian linguists slavishly followed the Slavicizing fashion.
One of the most distinguished, Alexandru Rosetti, in a study actually
devoted to the influence of the South Slavonic languages upon Roman-
ian from 1954 was at pains to stress the Romance character of his native
language:
 68 Dennis Deletant
The Romance character of Romanian results, however, not only from
a consideration of its vocabulary. Indeed, if the principal stock of
the words of Romanian is made up of Latin words, there exists,
however, a large number of Slavonic words which also form part of
the core vocabulary. . . . On the other hand, the morphology of
Romanian is of Latin origin1 (Rosetti 1954).

Equally wounding to the Romanians' perception of their past was

the communist-inspired campaign to obfuscate their history, in particu-
lar their association with the West. Romanian government decrees of
1947 and 1948 outlawing the circulation of some 700 publications cover-
ing the former Romanian-ruled provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina
and the Romanian royal family illustrate one aspect of this drive, but
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a second, more damaging one was the systematic arrest and imprison-
ment of the flower of Romania's pre-war intellectual life. Association
with any of the now-outlawed political parties, which effectively meant
all parties other than the communist, or refusal to give public support
to the new regime was used as a ground for arrest and the ensuing
purge of the intelligentsia swept away most the country's established
writers and scholars, including of course historians and linguists. The
publications of the arrested were proscribed and in the process access
to the variety and fecundity of inter-war Romanian intellectual achieve-
ment was denied to the young. In its place they were offered a diet of
material inspired by the newly-imposed Marxist-Leninist ideology and
produced to Soviet specifications. As a result the presentation of Rom-
anian history was made to conform to a new blueprint whose features
were the predominance of a positive Russian influence, and the primacy
accorded to any popular movement which, it could be argued, was a
response to social oppression.
Scores of studies now appeared highlighting the felicitous contiguity
of the Russian people for the fortunes of the Romanians. A typical
example was Petre Constantinescu-Iasi's Relajiile culturale romino-ruse
din trecut (Russo-Romanian cultural relations in the past), published
in Bucharest in 1954. More syncophantic in tone was an article by
Victor Cherestesiu and others on the development of historiography in
the Romanian People's Republic. This claimed that the history of the
Romanians 'cannot be understood without an awareness of the support
of Russia' (Ghermani 1967, p. 141). For a decade such claims punctu-
ated with monotonous regularity historical papers and monographs,
recurring almost like a refrain. Thus, in George Bezviconi's Contribu(ii
la istoria relaiiilor romino-ruse (Contributions to the history of Russo-
Romanian relations) of 1962 we find that 'the presentation of the history
of our [Romanian] people has also to take into account the influence
of the great Russian people' (Bezviconi 1962, p. 3).
Other ingredients to be added to the recipe for the 'new' history
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 69
included a generous measure of attention to the experience of the
downtrodden masses which had been ignored in 'capitalist' historiogra-
phy, and to a number of personalities selected for their 'progressive'
contribution to Romania's struggle for liberty and independence. The
mixture was leavened with quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Stalin. Among the more original consequences of this treatment was
the appearance in Istoria Republicii Populare Romine (The History of
the Romanian People's Republic), a history textbook for schools, of a
previously unknown Russian figure in Romanian history, a certain Rus-
sian officer called Mihail Popensky, who allegedly played a key role in
the peasant rising of Horia, Closca and Crisan in 1784 (IRPR 1956a,
pp. 292-305).
It should come as no surprise that, in the welter of Russophilia,
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recognition of the contribution of the Romans to the ethnogenesis of

the Romanians was played down or even ignored. Although not a
history of the people, the only reference to this process in the History
of Romanian Literature edited by George Calinescu and others is the
following bald statement which is typical of publications from the
period: 'The Romanian people was formed in a close and prolonged
coinhabitation with the Slav peoples' (ILR 1954, p. 11).
While the formative influence of the Slavs is emphasized, the major
thrust of specialist historical works is dictated by Marxist ideology and
thus presents the early history of the Romanians in terms of the class
struggle. According to the Istoria RPR Dacian society moved from a
primitive stage to a slave state distinguished by two classes, rulers and
slaves. Roman influence in Dacia, therefore, is no longer seen as a
positive force, representative of a 'superior' ethnic origin and more
advanced culture, but is characteristic of class oppression: "The struggle
for freedom of the Dacians who fell under the yoke of the Roman
Empire becomes intertwined with the class struggle of the slaves and
the impoverished freemen against the exploiters' (IRPR 1956b, p. 43).
In the application of these ideological considerations it was not only
the fundamental pillar of Romanian national history, the Daco-Roman
symbiosis, that was discarded, but also the 'continuity theory', that is,
the claim of unbroken proto-Romanian and Romanian settlement of
the territory of contemporary Romania. Both were passed over in
silence in the Istoria RPR. Coupled with the Slavophil approach, this
Soviet-inspired reinterpretation of Romanian history constituted a
denial of the Romanians' ethnic origins and a distortion of their national
identity. It is therefore hardly surprising that a reaction against it soon
set in.
Two years before the publication of Bezviconi's syncophantically
Russophile 'Contributions', the first volume of the Romanian Acad-
emy's four-volume Istoria Rominiei (History of Romania) appeared
under the editorship of a committee headed by Constantin Daicoviciu.
 70 Dennis Deletant
Whilst faithfully reflecting the Marxist view of the dialectal progression
of the class struggle in a Romanian context, this 800-page tome included
a complete chapter on 'The formation of the Romanian language and
people' which set itself the task of

clarifying one of the fundamental problems of our history, namely

that of the area and period in which the Romanian language and
people was created. . . . Romanian and, to a great degree, foreign
historiography has maintained . . . the continuity of the Romanian
people on the territory of its present homeland, seeing in the Roman-
ian people of today the descendants of the Romanized Geto-Dacians
to whom were added other populations who were assimilated during
the early Middle Ages, in particular the Slavs, the latter constituting,
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alongside the Geto-Dacian and Roman element, the third ethnic and
cultural component of the Romanian people (IR 1960, p. 775).

The authors of the History of Romania declare themselves from the

outset supporters of the continuity theory and then proceed to show
'with scholarly and objective arguments, those ethnic elements,
Romance or Romanized, which stood at the basis of the formation and
development of the Romanian people north of the lower Danube' (IR,
1960, p. 77).
This re-establishment of the Roman contribution to the formation of
the Romanian people now opened the door to a series of publications
reiterating the continuity theory which included Constantin Daicoviciu's
Din istoria Transilvaniei (From the History of Transylvania). Daicoviciu
had been a prominent advocate of the Daco-Roman origins of the
Romanians in the pre-war period and his authorship during the 1960s
of a succession of studies on this theme signified not only a reassertion
of the traditional view of Romania's national history but also the
rehabilitation of historians previously tarred with the epithet 'bour-
geois'.
Behind the reappraisal of Romanian history and the reaction to the
Slavicizing drive lay a change in Romania's perception of its relationship
with the Soviet Union. Just as the denial of Western historical and
cultural influences had been a concomitant of political servitude to the
Soviet Union so the rebellion against it in the early 1960s was a signal
of the RCP's decision to assert its autonomy. It is to the party's rejection
in February 1963 of Khrushchev's plans to give COMECON a supra-
national economic planning role that the beginnings of an effective
independent Romanian line in economic and foreign policy have been
traced. Had the RCP accepted the Soviet scheme, Romania would have
been obliged to remain a supplier of raw materials to its industrialized
partners, and to abandon its plans for rapid and intensive industriali-
zation. The RCP interpreted the Soviet proposals as a threat to Roman-
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 71
ia's sovereignty and right to decide her own future; by rejecting them,
the First Secretary, Gheorghiu-Dej, could claim to be defending the
national interest. This identification of the RCP with the national
interest and its defiance of the Soviet Union served to increase its
popularity in Romania. By drawing upon the inherent nationalist anti-
Russian sentiment of the population, the RCP sought to move from
reliance upon the Soviet Union to support from within Romania for its
authority.
Gheorghiu-Dej distanced himself further from his overlord by revers-
ing the trend of Russianization in Romanian culture and education.
Romanian culture was restored to its position of honour. In the summer
of 1963 the Russian institute in Bucharest was closed and throughout
the country Russified street names reverted to their original Romanian
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ones. The poet Tudor Arghezi, who had remained silent during the
Stalinist period, called for the re-adoption of the letter t, and its use
in the name of the country and its people was officially reintroduced
in the spring of 1965. This rediscovered national pride in the people's
Roman ancestry and the Latinity of the Romanian language was
embodied in the successful public relations exercise directed at the
English-speaking world and the United Nations advocating the spellings
Romania and Romanian in preference to the traditional Rumania and
Rumanian which of course dictate the almost universal English pronun-
ciation with 'ou'. Lexical enrichment from French, the principal source
of neologisms since the cultural awakening of the 1820s and 1830s, has
continued to the present day to reinforce the Romance character of the
Romanian language and in its journalistic form to make it easy to
understand for a speaker of a sister Latin tongue. More recently, how-
ever, politically-inspired manipulation of Romanian culture and the
language has revived the memory of the Stalinist period, the important
difference being that the new brand was generated internally. Once
again it was ill-starred Romans who were the sacrificial victims.
In the mid-1970s the regime launched itself upon a cultural offensive
that trumpeted what one Romanian observer called 'Eastern and native'
values while rejecting European ones (Liiceanu 1983, p. 137). Put more
explicitly, a cultured band of opportunists collaborated for a decade to
promote a nationalist view of the Romanian past and its culture which,
by denying external influences, attempted to deform the Romanians'
perception of themselves and their place in history. A casualty of this
trend was, as in the 1950s, the Romans.
The demotion of the Romans in the ethnogenesis of the Romanian
people was a result of the primacy now accorded to the Dacians, the
indigenous inhabitants of the region corresponding roughly to present-
day Transylvania which was conquered by the Roman Emperor Trajan
in a campaign lasting from AD 105 to 107 and renamed Dacia. Such a
Dacian emphasis in Romanian historiography was not new; it was first
 72 Dennis Deletant
given in the 1840s in the Principalities as a corrective to the arguments
of those historians of the Transylvanian School who claimed a pure
Roman origin for the Romanians. During the Ceausescu era the Dacian
primacy was used as a political tool designed to give historical legitimacy
to the policies of the leadership; the so-called 'independent centralized
Dacian state', which, it was argued, was created under the Dacian King
Burebista circa 80 BC was the archetype of the so-called 'independent'
policies pursued by Burebista's 1980s' counterpart. By extension Ceau-
sescu was presented in official literature as the latest in a line of Roman-
ian heroes who were seen as defenders of Romanian national identity
and unity. These include Stephen the Great, Prince of Moldavia
(1457-1504), who for a while fought off Turkish and Polish attempts
to subjugate his people, and Michael the Brave, who succeeded briefly
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in bringing the Principalities of Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania

together under his rule at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
In discussing the role of the Dacians in the history of the Romanians
a course has to be charted between the slippery ground of Romanian
views and the thin ice of received knowledge which is often little more
than surmise based on the flimsiest of evidence. An examination of
Romanian's ancient past also raises problems of methodology. Where
the direction of antiquities and of publication is controlled centrally the
dispassionate observer may become sceptical of the academic indepen-
dence of studies produced under such an aegis. In respect of Dacian
studies it is sometimes hard to escape the conclusion that their authors
are writing history backwards. Some Romanian scholars insist that the
Dacians were quite distinct from the neighbouring peoples. When
foreign scholars are more cautious about the distinction, classing the
Dacians amongst the Thracian peoples, their Romanian counterparts
seem to feel that their ethnicity is under threat and overcompensate in
the opposite direction. In extreme cases extravagant claims are made
about the direct line of descent of Romanians not from the immixture
of Dacians and Romanians, that is, Daco-Romans, but from Dacians
alone. Thus, the argument runs, descent from the Dacians proves that
the Romanians are indigenous to Romania and thus pre-date the Hun-
garian conquest of Transylvania. Such surmise, by completely denying
the role of the Romans in the ethnogenesis of Romanians, dispenses
with the need to press the traditional theory of Daco-Roman continuity
in the territory of present-day Romania. Not surprisingly, serious schol-
ars of antiquity in Romania have no time for this groundless speculation
but its encouragement by a third member of the Ceausescu family
whom we have yet to mention conferred upon it a notoriety which it
was hazardous to challenge.
Lieutenant-General Dr Hie Ceausescu, a brother of the President
and Deputy-Minister of the Armed Forces, was the historian with the
highest political profile in Romania. Features of the works bearing his
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 73
name were the suggestion of the Dacian's primacy in the ethnogenesis
of the Romanians, and a negative view of the Roman conquest of
Dacia. Both were well illustrated in two of the General's recent publi-
cations, one on the history of Transylvania, the other on Romanian
military doctrine:

The Roman conquest, just like any foreign conquest, also had tragic
consequences for the Dacian people. First its state, the main instru-
ment of organization of its material, spiritual and military life, was
abolished. At the same time, the Roman conquest meant the depri-
vation of the Dacian people of its independence and sovereignty,
and the maiming of Dacia's territorial integrity, as part of her was
turned into a Roman province (I. Ceausescu 1983, p. 14).
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One of the gravest conseqences of the Romans' victory over the

Dacian people was the conquest of part of Dacia and the setting up
of a severe regime of military occupation. . . . Like other occupation
forces, the Roman troops deployed throughout Dacia inflicted
material and moral losses on the Dacian people. . . . The great
majority of these people nurtured a fierce hate for the foreign occu-
piers (I. Ceausescu 1988, p. 17).

Surprisingly, it was on this crucial matter of Romanian ethnogenesis

that Ilie was at odds with his brother, for the President admitted that
Daco-Roman cohabitation led to a symbiosis of Dacians and Romans:

Roman victory [in Dacia] was the starting point of a long period
when Dacians and Romans lived together, and the intertwining of
their respective civilizations became more accentuated. As attested
by contemporary written records, by archeological research and
scientific findings, it was at that time that the Daco-Roman symbiosis
was achieved, and a new people began to take shape, relying on the
highest virtues of both the Dacians and the Romans (N. Ceausescu
1985, p. 17).

The General, on the other hand, was adamant that this symbiosis was
a purely cultural one: 'Unquestionably, the Romanian people did not
come into being through a biological blending, but by taking over
the Latin language and other elements of material and spiritual life
throughout its coexistence with the Romans, that is in the lst-3rd
centuries AD' (I. Ceausescu 1983, p. 14).
For the major roles that assumption and exaggeration play in the
General's arguments we need look no further than the following lines:

For the sake of a better understanding of this historical truth, let us

 74 Dennis Deletant
suppose that the often trumpeted thesis about the biological blending
between the Dacians and the Romans were true. Then we should
necessarily admit the absurd idea that the Romanian people came
into being as many times as it got in touch with other peoples - and
there were plenty of them in the first millenium AD - with whom it
coexisted for a shorter or longer period of time (I. Ceausescu 1983,
p. 12).

In Ilie's mind the Romanian people seem to be a non-biological

creation, an entity whose existence is defined by a fusion of the Dacian
and Roman civilizations. Unfortunately, this idea is not developed and
the reader is left with a clearer affirmation of what the Romanian
people are not rather than with one of what they are. The reader's
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confusion regarding Ilie's thoughts on Romanian ethnogenesis is no

doubt compounded by the work on Romanian military thought:

The main feature of the period following the conquest of part of

Dacia was the Dacians' success in preserving their ethnic being, as
well as a set of linguistic and spiritual peculiarities and old traditions,
enriched by the long-term contact with the Roman civilization (I.
Ceausescu 1988, p. 18).

Once again the President's view on this subject was clearer and more
succinct and carried the implication that the Dacians did not preserve
their distinct ethnic being: 'In the hard battles and in the living together
for centuries of the Dacians and Romans, a new people was moulded
which preserved and developed the best features of its ancestors' (N.
Ceausescu 1982, p. 7).
For Hie Ceau§escu advocacy of Dacian primacy in the Romanian
ethnogenesis assumes a major role in his formulation of Romanian
military doctrine, since it is required to demonstrate support for his
contention that the Romanian people inherited the Dacians' 'unshake-
able will' to defend the independence of their homeland, and that the
Dacian experience provided the model for 'the assertion of the Roman-
ian military doctrine of the entire people's struggle for the defence of
the independence and ancestral land' of the Romanians (I. Ceausescu
1988, p. 28). The characteristics of the 'entire people's struggle' are
thus defined:

The first big confrontation between the Dacians and the Romans
conducted on Dacia's territory was a genuine synthesis of the tra-
ditional elements of the doctrine of the entire people's struggle:
manoeuvres on interior lines, scorched earth strategy and tactics,
permanent harassment, drawing them to a place of decisive confron-
tation, surprise attacks, encirclement and annihilation of the bulk of
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 75
the enemy troops, and tracking down the rest and chasing them from
national territory (I. Ceausescu 1988, p. 13).

The significance of the Dacian example for the regime becomes

greater if we bear in mind Nicolae Ceausescu's prediction that 'for the
entire people'

a possible war in the future can only be a war of defence, a people's

war, in which the entire people will participate in close unity, under
the leadership of the Communist Party, the leading political force of
the nation, and therefore of the struggle to defend independence and
revolutionary conquests (N. Ceausescu 1978a, p. 451).
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A historical precedent in the guise of the Dacians was claimed for

the mass participation in defence of the homeland advocated by the
party leader. To add to what we might call the mobilizatory value of
the Dacian example, with emphasis upon the 'liberty', 'independence'
and 'unity' of the Dacians, a committee of principally military historians
working under the chairmanship of the then Minister of Defence,
Colonel-General Constantin Olteanu, and the guidance of Hie Ceause-
scu, accorded it 'moral', 'psychological' and 'cultural' values:

The epic of the Dacian people's heroic defence of the liberty and
independence of their ancestral hearth has illustrated a series of
moral characteristics which are to be found steeled over the two
millenia of struggles to retain their own being, in the psychological
fabric of the Romanian people. The treasury of our culture and
civilization has ascribed a place of honour to the precious values
inherited from the Dacians - the unshakeable will to defend the
independence and sovereignty of the fatherland at any price, the
unity of the ancestral land, and the resolute refusal [to accept] any
foreign occupation or intervention in fashioning one's own destiny,
fearlessness in battle - which have marked the historical permanence
and vitality of the Romanian people.2

It is not our wish here to challenge the assumptions underlying these

claims, although the temptation to point out the vast difference between
'refusal to accept' and 'ability to prevent', illustrated by the chequered
history of the Romanians, is difficult to resist. For our argument this
passage is instructive since it also contains the premiss of 'the Dacian
idea' which in Ilie's words is that

of all the Romanian countries' union into a single independent state;

this union, although short-lived (1599-1600), was achieved under
 16 Dennis Deletant
the sceptre of Michael the Brave (1593-1601), the ruling prince of
Wallachia and then of all the Romanians (I. Ceaujescu 1988, p. 29).

It should be emphasized that the 'Dacian idea' is not a creation of

the General; it gained currency among Romanian nationalists during
the nineteenth century who used the existence of the Dacian kingdom
as an argument for uniting the Romanian Principalities and Transyl-
vania in a national state in what were perceived to be its ancient
frontiers. These frontiers included the provinces of Transylvania, Buko-
vina and Bessarabia, then under foreign rule, whose territory the
Dacians were claimed to have ruled. In the context of contemporary
Romanian historiography, with its vision of pre-ordained history, the
ascription by Ilie to the Dacian experience of an almost messianic ethnic
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and political role in the creation of the 'national unitary state' in 1918,
is hardly surprising. Yet the promotion of the 'Dacian idea' has a
significance for the creation of the ideal nation state which deserves
mention; maps designating the territory ruled by Decebal include the
area of Bessarabia, now the Moldavian Socialist Republic, and thus
constitute a reassertion of Romanian claims to this region (IMPR 1984,
p. 142). Ilie's identification with publications containing such maps
strengthened his nationalist credentials, thus compensating for his lack
of party ones, and thus also added to his authority as a 'historian'.
This brings us to consideration of another aspect of Ilie's activity
which we might call his 'militarization of Romanian history'. Pre-1990
historical publication was characterized by a number of studies edited
by the General emphasizing the army's role in defending the country's
independence and in furthering the accomplishment of national unity.
Ilie used his political position to magnify the role given to military
history in the study of the Romanian past and at the same time appropri-
ated to military history much of the country's history (an example is I.
Ceaugescu 1988). A keynote of the magazine Lupta Intregului Popor
(The Struggle of the Entire People), a quarterly published by the
National Commission for Military History whose editorial board was
chaired by Ilie, was the insistence on legitimate national goals pursued
by the army and on its positive role. But what purpose was served by
promoting these views?
They were, undoubtedly, linked to the policy of the propaganda
section of the Central Committee to stress the unity of the Romanian
people around Nicolae Ceausescu but, more specifically, they were
designed to underline the loyalty of the army. There was a particular
need to do this because of the rumoured attempt at an army coup in
1983 and the fear that the Soviet leadership might be seeking to court
Romanian army leaders. This fear, and the desire to indicate loyalty,
would explain why, firstly, Colonel-General Constantin Olteanu was
removed from his position as Minister of Defence in December 1985
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 77
after a visit to Moscow, and then later in June 1988 was appointed
Central Committee Secretary for Propaganda and the Media, and;
secondly, why Hie was given increased powers as Deputy Minister of
Defence.
It is not without significance that Hie Ceausescu was joined by Con-
stantin Olteanu in a concentration of fire on Hungarian 'revisionism'
in the hope of fostering latent Romanian suspicions that Budapest
might revive its claim to Transylvania, thereby seeking to mobilize
popular support behind the regime, and in attempting to link earlier
Romanian struggles to preserve the country's independence with the
regime's hostility to reforms, in particular to those branded as 'devi-
ations' in Hungary (Shafir 1989). The charge of revisionism also served
to deflect potential internal criticism of Nicolae Ceaugescu's policies.
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The prominent role played by both generals, especially by Hie, under-

lined the growing importance assumed by the military in defending the
regime's interests.
The primacy accorded to the Dacians by Hie also served these
interests by providing the basis for what academic historians in Romania
termed 'teoriile indigeniste' which we may translate as 'nativizing' or
'indigenizing' theories. As we have stated earlier, such theories emerged
in the nineteenth century and formed one of the pillars of the debate
about national identity. In recent years 'indigenism' was cultivated to
excuse the increased isolation which the regime imposed upon the
population since the late 1970s. Extolling what is indigenous reduces
the need to recognize the value of external influences. Difficulties in
obtaining a passport for travel to the West, and restricted access to
Western publications ostensibly through a lack of hard currency, limited
the cultural contact which Romanians from all strata of society had
with other peoples and, as a consequence, they were more exposed to
the cultural dictates of their regime with their emphasis upon the
national culture. By stimulating the national consciousness in this way
Ceausescu was able to appeal to it to mobilize support for himself.
Ironically, those amongst the German and Hungarian minorities in
Romania who insisted upon their own separate national identity were
accused of 'national isolationism' and of being disloyal to Romania.
The validation by Hie Ceausescu of distorted claims about the Dacian
contribution to the history of the Romanians was probably the spur for
the manipulation of the Dacians' role to absurd proportions by Nicolae
Copoiu, a research worker at the Party Institute of Historical and Socio-
political Studies. In an article published in the magazine Ctntarea Roma-
niei (Song to Romania) (no. 3, 1986) Copoiu claims that the Dacian
language was a Latin tongue and that it is 'a mistake to accept the
concept of the Romanization of Dacia' which 'would mean that the
Dacians disappeared from history' (Copoiu 1986). No Romanian his-
torian of this century has produced such an equation. According to
 78 Dennis Deletant
Copoiu, 'The Dacian language was preserved in our literature until
the 19th century, when it was invaded by Latin, French and Italian
neologisms'. No attempt was made to explain the nature of 'the Dacian
language'; in fact, Copoiu was merely playing with labels. From our
knowledge of the language spoken by the Dacians it is generally agreed
that it was a Thracian tongue which has left only a few words in
Romanian. Indeed, Ovid, writing about the Getae (Dacians) from his
place of exile at Tomis on the Black Sea coast, bemoans their ignorance
of Latin.3
Copoiu's presentation of his ideas was completely lacking in support-
ing argument or evidence and in these respects was in keeping with
the general nature of contributions to Cintarea Romdniei. In order to
appreciate, however, the reaction provoked by Copoiu's piece a few
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words need to be said about the significance of this magazine. It was

eponymous with a national festival conceived and planned by the propa-
ganda department of the Central Committee in 1975, and designed to
provide

the widest framework for the intensification of cultural and edu-

cational activities, for the participation of the mass of the people in
the development of the homeland's new spiritual assets - a new form
for the assertion of the talent, sensitivity and creative genius of our
people (N. Ceausescu 1978b, p. 316).

One facet of the 'new form' of the festival was its permanence. For
over a decade now a series of spectacles with mass participation was
staged under the umbrella of Cintarea Romdniei; in 1985 there were
3,593,316 active participants in the 153,000 artistic groups which perfor-
med (Giurchescu 1987, p. 165). As for the spiritual assets developed
by the spectacles, these were submerged by the emphasis given to
national liberty, independence and unity, the guardian of which was
Ceausescu as head of state and party leader.
A second aspect of the festival was its pervasiveness. All social groups
were involved; peasants, workers, intellectuals, young and old. Almost
all artistic genres were employed, including theatre and music. The
media continually echoed 'Song to Romania' in TV programmes, radio
broadcasts, and magazine features. In its idolatry and syncophancy it
became trite, predictable, and completely devoid of taste and judge-
ment. Given the festival's excesses and aberrations, it was not surprising
that it came to embrace 'historical research', but what is astonishing is
that an article of the nature of Copoiu's - one written, it should be
emphasized, by a member of the Party Institute of Historical and Socio-
Political Studies - should have appeared, since it not only challenged
a central pillar of the Romanians' own perception of their ethnicity,
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 79
that is, their Roman heritage, but it also undermined the credibility of
the country's community of historians.
The danger posed by Copoiu's fantasies was recognized by the aca-
demics. A joint denunciation of his article by Constantin Preda, Direc-
tor of the Bucharest Institute of Archaeology, and Ion Patroiu, Director
of the Centre for Social Sciences in Craiova, appeared in the Writers'
Union weekly Romdnia Literard on 15 May 1986 under the title 'A
Firm Position against the Falsifiers and Denigrators of our National
History'. Copoiu was taken to task for 'introducing wayward, unscien-
tific and dangerous theses and notions regarding the true process of the
formation of the Romanian language and people, denying, like fol-
lowers of Roesler, the people's Daco-Romanian origin' (Preda and
Patroiu 1986, p. 6).
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The identification of Copoiu with Roesler4 was tantamount to declar-

ing him an enemy of the Romanians, such is the vituperation directed
against the unfortunate German scholar whose arguments against the
Daco-Roman ethnogenesis of the Romanians represented a denial of
their historical continuity north of the Danube, specifically in Transyl-
vania, and have been espoused by most Hungarian historians. Preda
and Patroiu went on to state that Copoiu's assertions 'deny an entire
scientific tradition and completely ignore a vast historical and archeolog-
ical literature'. To support their criticism the two directors drew on
Ceausescu's speech, quoted above, of 1 June 1982, where it mentions
the symbiosis of Dacians and Romans. They conclude by asking three
questions: how could Copoiu's slanders and falsifications of our national
history appear in a magazine sponsored by the Council of Socialist
Culture and Education for the 'Song of Romania' festival? what purpose
and whose interests does such an article serve? and finally, how can
such a researcher work at an ideological institution of the party?
The final question was a direct challenge to the primacy which the
Party Institute of Historical and Socio-Political Sciences had previously
enjoyed among the historical institutions and was possibly a reflection of
the President's own dissatisfaction with the record of his Party Institute.
Underlying this criticism from the two institute directors was the feeling
of academic historians that the researchers at the Party Institute were
trespassing upon their territory with disastrous results for the nation.
Furthermore, the publicity given to the response from Preda and
Patroiu, and the fact that Nicolae Ceausescu was Honorary President
of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences under whose ideological
aegis the two research institutes represented by the directors operated,
indicated that Ceausescu did not consider his Party Institute beyond
criticism when the conventional national ideology was threatened.
Indeed, it was rumoured in 1984 that the very existence of the Party
Institute of History and Socio-Political Studies was under threat since
the President was planning to create a national institute of history in
 80 Dennis Deletant
Bucharest with branches in the provincial capitals of Iasi, Cluj and
Craiova which would subsume all existing historical institutions. The
Soviet ambassador is said to have expressed concern over the abolition
of the Party Institute and his intervention may well have helped it to
survive but the President was doubtless exasperated by the Institute's
inability to fulfil the principal task which it was created to achieve,
namely, to produce a history of the Romanian Communist Party. In
fact, such a history, if written with any grain of accuracy, would remove
the fig leaf of legitimacy with which the party sought to cover itself
since the imposition of communist rule in 1948, by highlighting its
failure to win widespread support among the Romanians since its cre-
ation in 1921. The solution to the problem was the integration of the
history of the party into the history of the people, with the consequent
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appearance of a weighty tome on modern Romanian history which

offered the most complete picture to date of the party's problems in
the inter-war period, namely Mircea Mujat and Ion Ardeleanu's Roma-
nia dupd Marea Unire (Romania after the Great Union) (Bucharest,
1986). In this context the supersession, in stage-managed demon-
strations of support for the party leader, of the slogan 'The Party,
Ceausescu and the People' by 'Ceaugescu and the People' and 'Ceau§es-
cu-Romania' was not without significance; it offered evidence of the
President's preferred persona. First the party, and then the people were
subsumed by the leader who became the embodiment of the nation
state.5
The tremors from the academic historians' blast would probably have
died away had not the extreme sensitivity of the regime to what were
seen as distortions of the Romanian past led to the presentation of a
united front by historians from several quarters, university, academy
and Party Institute, to combat 'falsifiers of history'. In an English-
language anthology entitled The Dangerous Game of Falsifying History
(Bucharest, 1987) we find the attack of Preda and Patroiu printed
alongside polemical rebuttals signed, in some cases, by serious his-
torians, of publications of largely Hungarian origin dedicated to aspects
of Romanian history. The inclusion of the Preda-PStroiu piece in such
a volume, in which a number of Copoiu's colleagues are present with
contributions, highlights the ambiguities and contradictions suffusing
Romanian political culture. Here we have evidence of how defence of
the national identity is paramount in historical debate and overrides
institution in-fighting. This is likely to remain the case in post-Ceausescu
Romania. Moreover, internal challenges to the national identity ran
the risk during Ceausescu's time of being interpreted as challenges to
the President's authority, since he was projected as being the embodi-
ment of the nation. Even close members of the Ceausescu family were
not immune from this risk. Although never explicitly stated as such,
the real target of the Preda-P3triou article were the Dacomaniacal
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 81
views sponsored by Hie Ceausescu. Nevertheless, the General's political
profile, and the politicization of his arguments, enabled him to continue
in the forefront of those who 'actualized' the significance, as they
perceived it, of the Dacian contribution to Romanian history. In a
slender English-language volume from 1987 it was seen as symbolic of
the Romanians' quest for independence:

The Romanians' history followed the uninterrupted path of struggle

for the defence of their own being and their forefathers' land, for
complete freedom of decision as to their future. The very first written
document about the forefathers of the Romanian people - an account
about the heroic resistance put up by the Geto-Dacians against the
invasion of the powerful Persian Empire 2,500 years ago - is a telling
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illustration of its capacity to make its history by itself. And the

emergence of the Romanian people 2,000 years ago through the
fusion of the two great civilizations of the ancient world - the Dacian
and the Roman - is an illustration of the same struggle fought in
defence of freedom, ethnical unity and territorial integrity. This
ardent wish to be independent and this undaunted struggle to pre-
serve national being became precious hallmarks of the glorious past
of the Romanian nation (I. Ceausescu 1987, p. 7).

Naturally, the contemporary successor to the Dacians in this endeavour

was the Romanian Communist Party:

A brilliant standard-bearer of the Romanians' struggle for indepen-

dence, perfectly identified with their historical ideals, the Romanian
Communist Party has naturally set itself, since its very foundation in
May 1921, as the fundamental target of its entire policy to defend
and strengthen national independence (ibid).

Here we have a potent illustration of the General using his political

authority to validate the criteria for the party's claim to historical
'legitimacy'. Advancing the position of the Dacians in the Romanian
national identity was not merely a matter of historical contention; it
became intertwined with a defence of the Romanian nation, of their
rights to their national territory. The phenomenon of Dacomania pro-
vides us with a clear example of not only the party's, but also the
President's, quest for legitimacy; for this reason, and for its effects on
the Romanian consciousness, it merits a few words of analysis.
The regime's obsession with the Dacians was highlighted in 1980
when the propaganda section of the Central Committee proposed the
celebration of the 2050th anniversary of the foundation by King Burebi-
sta of the 'centralized independent Dacfan state' on the territory of
Romania. President Ceausescu avidly endorsed the proposal. The
 82 Dennis Deletant
choice of 2050 years is itself indicative of the cavalier manner in which
national history is manipulated and its transparent artificiality under-
mined the propaganda value of the anniversary both at home and
abroad.6 Interwoven within the concept of the 'centralized independent
Dacian state' was the suggestion that the Dacian 'state' (in fact, if
anything it was akin to a kingdom) anticipated the creation in 1918 of
the modern Romanian state. The most authoritative presentation of
this view is given by Mircea Musat and Ion Ardeleanu in their book
De la statul geto-dac la statul romdn unitar (From the Geto-Dacian state
to the unitary Romanian state) (Bucharest, 1983). The symbolic role
of Dacia in the struggle for Romanian unity is evident not only from
the title but also from the chapter devoted to the uprising of Romanian
peasants in Transylvania in 1784 led by Horea which is subtitled 'Horea
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- symbol of Dacia's rebirth'. The insistence upon 'independent' and

'centralized' is on the one hand an affirmation of the country's auton-
omy from the USSR, and on the other an attempt to produce a historical
precedent and justification for Ceausescu's respective external and
internal policies. Furthermore, such an assertion seeks to devalue the
positive view of the Roman conquest of Dacia which brought with it
what have traditionally been regarded by Romanians as the matejial
and cultural benefits of a superior civilization. By translating this claim
and its corollary to the wider context of Romanian affairs it represents
a denial of any progressive or beneficial foreign influence. In this respect
it brings us to a further feature of the Ceausescu regime's political and
cultural postures: protochronism.
A major aspect of the increasingly-strident officially-inspired
nationalist tone which characterized historical and literary publications
from the late 1970s was the importance accorded to what the Romanian
essayist, Gabriel Liiceanu, has dubbed 'protochronism' which he defines
as 'a denial of Europe and the exaltation of Eastern and native values'.7
The advocates of protochronism argued that Romanian experience had
long anticipated that of the West in the political, cultural and historical
domains. Students of Soviet history will recognize a more extreme form
of protochronism in Stalinist claims that the major Western discoveries
in science were first made in Russia and that eminent cultural figures
such as Shakespeare had Russian blood. They may similarly identify
echoes of Stalin in Mrs Ceausescu's alleged description of Latin as a
'bourgeois language' to Academician Alexandra Graur when he unsuc-
cessfuly petitioned her in her capacity as cultural suprema to reinstate
Latin as a full degree subject in the summer of 1986. On a political
level Ceau§escu used protochronism to resist pressures for change and
innovation. Thus, the Romanian leader could pretend to be in step
with the economic reforms advocated in the Soviet Union by Mikhail
Gorbachev by arguing that he had already applied similar reforms in
Romania.8 In a similar protochronist vein the Romanian Party daily
 Contemporary Romanian historiography 83
Scinteia, in its report of the Nineteenth Soviet Party Conference, restric-
ted its coverage of Gorbachev's speech to those measures which had
already been adopted in Romania. In this way Gorbachev was pres-
ented as following Ceausescu's example in proposing that First Secretar-
ies should be elected as chairmen of local Soviets since, Scinteia pointed
out, this proposal would strengthen the party's leading role. Ceausescu
had taken similar measures some years earlier in Romania. Further-
more, Gorbachev was reported as admitting that the Soviet Union had
taken important decisions without 'proper consultation with friends'.
Here was a justification of Romania's refusal to follow blindly the Soviet
Union's lead in formulating Soviet bloc policies (Shafir 1988, p. 5).
An insular society such as Romania's favoured the development of
a cult providing a focus for people's attention. The President was
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projected as that focus. External interference threatened to diminish

the cult by blurring the focal point and dimming its brilliance, a brilli-
ance which blinded most Romanians to the brutalization of their daily
existence. While the regime's politicization of history and historiogra-
phy continually strengthened Romanian national consciousness, its
manipulation of the past was so blatant in much of what poses as
Romanian historiography that young Romanians have remained largely
ignorant of the historical basis of their national identity. Distortion of
the past was compounded by a distortion of contemporary realities in
the country and both were fundamental causes of the spiritual and
moral crisis of Ceausescu's Romania. Only a small number of intellec-
tuals managed to maintain their moral integrity and amongst their
number can be counted historians in the institutes at Bucharest, Cluj,
and Iasi. On 28 June 1988 a meeting was held at the N. Iorga historical
institute in the capital during which an unscheduled discussion of Presi-
dent Ceausescu's plans for the 'systematization' of two-thirds of Roman-
ia's villages took place. Eight historians expressed strong misgivings
about the proposals, including the present director Serban Papacostea
and §tefan Andreescu, describing them as an attack on the nation's
historical heritage; others spoke in favour. Of those who criticized the
plan, one of pensionable age, Nicolae Stoicescu, was instructed not to
return to the institute while the remainder received verbal reprimands.
Corruption of principles by the Ceausescu regime enabled it to assign
a role to Romanian national historiography which it was regularly called
upon to play, that of justifying the nation's claim to its homeland. The
fate of the nation was perceived as being inextricably bound up with
the promotion of this thesis; in its promotion, however, historical truth
was the victim. Whether the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu in
December 1989 will produce a revolution in Romanian historiography
remains to be seen. The legacy of 'Dacomania' is reflected at a populist
level in the pronouncements of Romanian Orthodox clergy who have
hitched themselves to the wagon of Vatra RomaneascS (Romanian
 84 Dennis Deletant
hearth), a nationalist cultural movement founded in Cluj in February
1990. Doubtless Romanian academic historians will seek to lead their
fellow-countrymen in rational and tolerant debate about their origins;
let us hope that they find a receptive audience.

Notes
1. Rosetti (1954, p. 13). Rosetti beat the deadline for the introduction of î by three
months since his study was typeset in January 1954. Rosetti is misleadingly quoted in an
article on the linguistic practice of this period by G. Schôpflin who implies that the
Romanian academician played down the Latin origins of Romanian. Schöpflin cites the
reference in the above-mentioned work of Rosetti to 'Cihac's Dictionary of 1879 which
showed that out of 5,765 words in Rumanian, two-thirds were Slavonic in origin and only
one-fifth neo-Latin' (Schöpflin 1974, p. 85, note 17). In fact, Rosetti wrote 'Latin' and
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not 'neo-Latin' and then continued: 'Hasdeu challenged the conclusions of Cihac by
invoking the criterion of the frequency of words and by showing that there exist Romanian
sentences made up entirely of words of Latin origin whereas it was impossible to compose
sentences solely from Slavonic elements' (Rosetti 1954, p. 12).
2. IMPR 1984, p. 179; see also p. 175: 'In the protracted wars between the Dacians
and the Romans . . . the Dacian people defended with a legendary tenacity its right to
a free and independent life in its eternal homeland'.
3. 'Nesciaque est vocis quod barbara lingua Latinae' (Ovid 1922, V,2, 1.67).
4. Robert Roesler (1840-81) published a volume Romänische Studien in Leipzig in
1871 in which he argued that the Romanian people was formed south of the Danube and
crossed into their present homeland between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries.
5. Perversely the 'Song of Romania' was, as Giurchescu has pointed out, 'a permanent
ceremonial, enacted by the entire country in front of a single spectator' (1987, p. 170).
6. The suspect chronology is evident from the President's speeches; in a message
addressed to the Fifteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences held in Bucharest
in 1980 Ceauşescu stated that 'this year we celebrate 2050 years since the foundation of
the first independent centralized Dacian state' (N. Ceauşescu 1983, p. 315); speaking to
the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party given on 28 November 1988 the
Secretary General referred to the 'formation 2060 (!) years ago, under the leadership of
Burebista, of the first centralized state of the Dacians' (N. Ceauşescu 1988, p. 2).
7. G. Liiceanu (1983, p. 137). Whether Liiceanu coined this term is not clear since
Matei Călinescu, writing in the same year, also uses the same word with an identical
meaning in his essay 'How can one be a Romanian? Modern Romanian culture and the
West' (1983, p. 28, note 6).
8. The suspicion that Ceauşescu was paying mere lip-service to Gorbachev is clear
from the former's keynote address to the Romanian Party Conference on 14 December
1987 when he reiterated his commitment to rigid central economic planning and insisted
that market forces were incompatible with communist society.

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 86 Dennis Deletant
— 1989 ' "Revisionism" under Romanian General's fire: Ceauşescu's brother attacks
Hungarian positions', Radio Free Europe Research, RAD Background Report 86, 17
May 1989

DENNIS DELETANT is Senior Lecturer in Romanian Studies at

SSEES, University of London.
ADDRESS: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Senate
House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK.
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