Review: Remembering Romanian Communism

Reviewed Work(s): Comisia Prezidenţială pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România,
Raport Final by
Review by: Charles King
Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Winter, 2007), pp. 718-723
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20060381
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REVIEW ESSAY

Remembering Romanian Communism

Charles King

Comisia Prezidenfial? pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din Romania,

Raport Final. Bucharest: Office of the President, 2006. 665 pp. Appen
dixes. Notes. Published on-line atwww.presidency.ro.

Few professors have biographical entries on Wikipedia. Fewer still have

theirs blocked from further anonymous editing after becoming bulletin
boards for hate speech. That is the predicament of Vladimir Tismaneanu,
a political science professor at the University of Maryland and the fore
most authority in the United States on the politics and contemporary his
tory of Romania. In addition to his scholarly work, Tismaneanu spent
much of 2006 as chair of the Commission for the Analysis of the Commu
nist Dictatorship in Romania, a cumbrously titled committee under the
aegis of the Romanian president, Traian B?sescu. The commission con
sisted of a remarkable cast of eighteen leading academics and public in
tellectuals, including the historian Andrei Pippidi, the political essayist
Stelian Ta?ase, the philosopher Horia-Roman Patapievici, the literary
critic Nicolae Manolescu, and the American anthropologist Gail Kligman,
along with more than thirty specialists and other participants.
The commission's investigations and its final report, issued in Decem
ber 2006, created an avalanche of political maneuverings, scandals both
mini and major, and recriminations. It led to the first clear and public
condemnation of communism by a Romanian head of state, in a speech
B?sescu made before a raucous session of the Romanian parliament (with
catcalls from Corneliu Vadim Tudor, leader of the chauvinist Greater Ro
mania Party). Indirectly, the contents of the report, especially its willing
ness to list the names of those intimately associated with the old regime,
even if they happen to be involved in postcommunist politics and society,
lay behind the parliament's attempt to unseat B?sescu in spring 2007.l
Until the web editors intervened, all these issues were played out in mi
crocosm on Tismaneanu's Wikipedia site, which included the crudest of
personal attacks on the professor himself. The real story, however, is not
about the travails of the commission's president but about the fate of pop
ular memory in Romania and the way in which Romanians have (and have
not) begun to work through their own communist past.

1. For Tismaneanu's view on these connections, see Vladimir Tismaneanu and Paul
Dragos, Aligic?, "Romania's Parliamentary Putsch," Wall Street Journal, 20 April 2007. For
overviews of the report and reactions to it, see Lucian Gheorghiu et al., "Fantoma comu
nismului lupt? p?n? ?n ultimul ceas," Cotidianul, 19 December 2006; Vladimir Tismaneanu,
"Raportul nu e un rechizitoriu," Revista 22, 19-25 December 2006; Andrei Cornea, "Cele
dou? coalicii," Revista 22, 11-17 May 2007; and Adrian Ciofl?nca, "Regret formal," Ziarul
delasi, 10 April 2007.

Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007)

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Remembering Romanian Communism 719

At a little under 700 pages, the report is the most serious, in-depth,
and far-reaching attempt to understand Romania's communist experi
ence ever produced. Released only weeks before Romania's accession to
the European Union, it marks the culmination of months of feverish re
search and writing. The report is based on thousands of pages of archival
documents, recent scholarship in several languages, and the comparative
experience of other European countries, all refracted through the critical
lenses provided by some of Romania's most talented, and most abrasively
honest, thinkers. Virtually every aspect of communism as a lived system is
covered, from the installation of Communist Party officials during the
postwar occupation, through the scope and structure of the instruments
of coercion, to collectivization, the fate of religious institutions, the econ
omy, national minorities, education, and other spheres. A short section
deals with the 1989 revolution, a subject that has been treated volumi
nously, although never exhaustively, elsewhere. The report concludes that
somewhere between 500,000 and 2,000,000 Romanians were victimized by
the state between 1945 and 1989.
Some of the central theses of the report echo the (western) scholarly
consensus, while others challenge it, sometimes in new, even controver
sial, ways. First, the commission argues for a basic continuity between
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceau?escu. Western historians
have tended to see the Dej period, from 1948 to 1965, as mirroring the pe
riod of Stalinist terror that accompanied the installation of communist re
gimes across east central Europe.2 In Romania, by contrast, the trend has
been to focus on the personal dictatorship of Ceau?escu, Dej's successor.
In the popular imagination, and in the orthodox narratives of several
prominent historians and social commentators, the Dej period was char
acterized by a slavish obedience to the Soviet Union and mass repression,
while Ceau?escu, for all his later faults, sought to break with the "Com
internist" past and place Romania squarely on its own course. The com
mission argues for a fundamental connection between these two periods:
The use of terror and incarceration continued, albeit in more variegated
forms, across the Dej-Ceau?escu transition. The rhetoric of socialist inter
nationalism was mixed with a reinvigorated form of national exclusivism
after the mid-1960s, but overall there was no clear break between a "Stal
inist" brand of Romanian communism and its "national" variety later on.
Second, under Ceau?escu, Romanian communism represented a
brand of Stalinism after Stalin?a twentieth-century version of the old ar
gument about Romania as quintessentially Byzance apr?s Byzance. Unlike in
most other east European states, Romania did not witness a thorough
going process of de-Stalinization; the Dej leadership and, later, Ceau?escu
managed to recast the regime as the bearer of Romanian national iden
tity and the guardian of national sovereignty. In reality, however, Roma

2. See, for example, R. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century?and After
(New York, 1997); Dennis Dele tant, Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej
and the Police State, 1948-1965 (New York, 1999) ; Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall
of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley, 2001).

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720 Slavic Review

nia's role in the Warsaw Pact was always far more secure than Ceau?escu,
a master of dissimulation, led many western governments of the day to be
lieve.3 Rather than marking a period of change and development, the
Ceau?escu era was the continuation of Stalinism by other means, substi
tuting the insinuation of terror for its cruder variants and combining cal
culated cooptation with vicious attacks on any social actors who might rep
resent a potential threat to the state.
Third, the Romanian Communist Party lacked a reformist current, so
that the activities of individual dissident intellectuals had little purchase
among senior party cadres. The sole candidate for the position of re
former, Lucrejiu P?tr??canu, was executed as early as 1954. Other func
tionaries certainly fell out of favor in one period or other, and the party
witnessed the same repeated purges that were carried out in other east
European regimes. But a genuinely reform-oriented inner elite, with the
drive to build a more humane form of communism by finding links to
a local Marxist heritage or to European social democracy, was absent.
Oddly, the exit of Soviet troops from Romania in the late 1950s turned out
to be something of an unforeseeable burden. Whereas other communist
states developed reformist movements that could credibly claim to be the
true guardians of national interests, that option was simply not available
in Romania. Local political elites embraced nationalism not as a way of ex
pelling an occupying power but as a way of buttressing local privileges
against reformist impulses coming from the erstwhile occupier itself. (The
same logic, mutatis mutandis, would eventually come to apply in the "in
ner empire" of the post-Soviet republics as well.)
Fourth, the commission argues for interpreting December 1989 as
an anticommunist revolution, not as a coup staged by disgruntled com
munist elites. The victims of the initial violence in Timi?oara, followed by
street demonstrations and fighting between demonstrators, the secret po
lice, and army units in Bucharest and other cities, desired a genuine
change of regime, not an overthrow of the Ceau?escu clan and its re
placement by second-tier party officials. The report thus repeats the com
mon view (at least among western academics) of the revolution as having
been hijacked, early on, by a small coterie interested in preserving their
privileges in a new political era.
Finally, the report sees most of the 1990s as a continuation of the old
order, in large part due to former president Ion Iliescu and his immedi
ate associates, who seized power as the National Salvation Front after
Ceau?escu's fall. Otherwise, the commission asks, how can one really make
sense of a reality in which former members of the secret police became
major businessmen; Ceau?escu's hagiographers became popular authors,
publishers, and politicians; and senior political figures who survived the
revolution systematically blocked attempts at lustration or other tech
niques for bringing individuals to justice? In the commission's view, cur
rent politicians who were active in the communist era?including, for ex

3. For an early statement of this point, see Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economics,
and Society (Boulder, Colo., 1985).

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Remembering Romanian Communism 721

ample, the honorary president of the largest party in parliament (Iliescu)

and the vice president and secretary of the parliament's upper house (Tu
dor and Mihai Ungheanu)?should properly be seen as part of Ceau?escu's
legacy, not as closet dissidents who waited patiently for the chance to un
burden the country of a mad despot.
In the end, the report lists twenty-one specific crimes committed by
the communist regime, beginning with the "abandonment of national in
terests through limitless servility" (634) to the Soviet Union; continuing
through repression of peasants, anticommunist partisans, national and
religious minorities, student groups, and others; and concluding with the
"massacre of citizens on the order of N. Ceau?escu" (636) during the 1989
revolution. It is in its elaboration of concrete crimes that the commission's
goals become clear. The work of the Tismaneanu commission was not in
tended to produce an academic tome. Rather, the commission had an
avowedly political project, but in the best sense of that adjective: to pro
mote a version of Romania's recent history that represents the first col
lective attempt?however belated?by Romanians to conceptualize their
own national experience from 1945 to 1989 and to shame those in power
into leading the way. "I considered it necessary to establish the commis
sion precisely in order to provide an intellectual and moral foundation for
the act of condemning [communism]," B?sescu noted in his parliamen
tary speech.4 To that end, the report systematically names those most re
sponsible for the communist period and urges society to make a break
with the past rather than simply bury it. "We can affirm that the commu
nist regime in Romania . . . was illegitimate and criminal," the report con
cludes. "Simply put, the communist regime in Romania, a totalitarian sys
tem from its founding to its fall, was one based on the continual violation
of human rights, on the supremacy of an ideology hostile to an open so
ciety, on the monopoly of power exercised by a small group of individuals,
and on repression, intimidation, and corruption" (627).
The report is, above all, part of a national conversation in Romania,
too long in coming but now at last begun, with all the fireworks, denunci
ations, and intrigues that one might expect. Historians will occasionally
cringe at the sweeping conclusions contained in the report, the unsubtle
appropriation of patriotism, the unevenness in sophistication from chap
ter to chapter, and the sharp distinctions between villains and victims.
One wonders, for example, if the creation of a prominent monument to
the victims of communism in downtown Bucharest, the adoption of lus
tration legislation, and the banning of public displays of "communist
symbols"?all policies recommended in the report?would encourage
further debate about the past or simply replace a dark mythology with a
rather more luminous one. Indeed, those recommendations seem at odds
with the explicit call for greater openness and study of the communist past
that the commission encourages in the report's introduction.
But this judgment is easy to make outside a political system in which
elites who helped sustain the system of repression continue to sit in par

4. Traian B?sescu, "Un regim ilegitim ?i criminal," Revista 22,19-25 December 2006,1.

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 722 Slavic Review

liament, author history textbooks, and appear regularly as commentators

on national broadcast media. The Tismaneanu commission's chief tasks
had to do with both morality and power: to push Romanian politicians
and Romanian society into drawing a line between past and present,
putting an end to nostalgia for an alleged period of greatness and inde
pendence, and embracing the country's de facto cultural pluralism and
European future.
The communist experience, in the commission's view, involved four
and a half decades during which "the Romanian state was hijacked by a
political group alien to the interests and aspirations of the Romanian
people" (17). But this judgment is at the same time the source of the re
port's particular blindness when it comes to acknowledging the multifac
eted meanings of communism as a political system and a historical epoch.
The Romanian People's Republic, the report says in its conclusion, was
"neither a republic (in the authentic sense of this concept), nor 'of the
people,' nor, certainly, Romanian" (627). That republic (and the "social
ist" one that followed) may have lacked the first two qualities, but it cer
tainly had the third. The difficult fact is this: It was Romanians themselves
who built the totalitarian machine that claimed other Romanians as vic
tims, who learned to survive and even thrive within it, and who even now
look back with some ambiguity on the legacies that the presidential com
mission's report roundly denounces. Working through these historical
realities?which are more troubling and uncomfortable than the litany of
evils easiest to condemn?will be Romania's next national challenge. It is
one to which filmmakers, perhaps more eagerly than historians and po
litical scientists, have already begun to respond.5
Relative to the experience of its neighbors, Romania's modern history
has not been one of endless tragedy and defeat. The country was a huge
territorial winner in World War I. Between the wars, it had a monarchy
linked to the major houses of Europe and a foreign policy that skillfully
balanced relations with both the Allies and the Axis. It lost a significant
portion of its territory during World War II but eventually built a brand of
communism that, for all its subservience to Moscow, wrapped itself self
consciously in national colors. After the war, it was never invaded by the
Soviets, and for most of the postwar period, its government enjoyed a
measure of international legitimacy and goodwill in the west second only
to Tito's Yugoslavia.
But adversity, as Timothy Garton Ash once wrote, had its uses in east
central Europe.6 In many countries, it allowed the growth of an intellec
tual class that began to hold the communist state to the same hyper
legalistic standards that the state itself fetishized. It made being an
intellectual?and carving out a public space for intellectual conversa

5. See, for example, Corneliu Porumboiu's film Afost sau n-a fast? (Was there or was
n't there? 2006).
6. Timothy Garton Ash, "The Uses of Adversity," The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate
of Central Europe (New York, 1989), 105-19.

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Remembering Romanian Communism 723

tion?a necessity rather than a luxury. Most important, it allowed intel

lectuals interested in European values, the fate of the patria, and the most
obscure questions of philosophy or art to sign onto a common agenda:
ridding the state of an ideology and political class that were held in place
solely by the will of an alien superpower.
Romania's misfortune was that Ceau?escu's societatea socialista multilat
eral dezvoltat? (multilaterally developed socialist society) was, as time went
on, more and more a distinctly Romanian affair: a system built not just by
a band of miscreants but by an entire country that spent the second half of
the twentieth century at war with itself. Viewing the past as the province of
criminals is ultimately no more therapeutic than seeing it as the domain
of Cominternists and foreigners. The question now is whether the com
mission's report will be used as yet another opportunity to reject history or
as a way of helping Romanians learn, at last, how to own it.

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