Cristina Petrescu

Modern nation-building in Romania was a process accelerated by the 1918 unification of Transylvania with the Old Kingdom of Romania. This study argues that this process was continued under communist rule and entered a final stage in the early 1980s.

This study focuses on the key concepts of nation, nationalism and nation-building in order to demonstrate that the process of nation-building in Romania entered its final stage in the early 1980s. If one is to choose a year for the coming to an end of this process this would be 1981 rather than 1918. That the process of nation-building in Romania came to an end in the 1980s is also supported by the very fact that Romania did not follow the fate of the "unrealized" Czechoslovak or Yugoslav nations after 1989.

This study provides an in-depth analysis of politics of memory in post-communist Romania, focusing on the institutionalization of memory,  post-communist anti-communism, "battle" for opening the archives of communism, and active remembering and forgetting.

This chapter addresses the issue of dealing with the communist past in Romania during the first post-communist decade by focusing on three key aspects: retribution (how to punish the perpetrators); remembering (institutionalization of memory); and representation (historical reconstruction of the communist past).

Online Conference on Transitional Justice: "Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Transitional Justice," 6–7 July 2021, Loughborough University. An event supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Centre for Research in Communication and Culture (Loughborough University)

After the Second World War, the Central and East European region was integrated into the Soviet sphere of influence. The active construction of communism across the region during the Stalinist period (1945-1950s) had a number of far-reaching consequences, which arguably transformed the East European region. In the cultural sphere it meant the spreading of Stalin's cult of propaganda, the imposition of Marxist ideology and the persecution of any perceived opposition or alternative world-views. The economic sphere was marked by the liquidation of private property, collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization under the Soviet-style system of central planning. In the political sphere, the shift to a one-party state meant that all non-communist parties and organizations were liquidated and the power of the communist party was secured through mass repression and police surveillance. While the post-Stalinist period led to some liberalization within certain Eastern bloc countries, the limits to reform and relaxation were periodically reinforced, for example in 1956 (Poland and Hungary); 1968 (Czechoslovakia) and 1981 (Poland). The realities of life under communism provoked a multifaceted response among individuals and groups within East European societies between 1945-1989, ranging from support for, complicity with, dissent from and resistance to communism, as people struggled to navigate and negotiate the new parameters of their existence. This conference has two broad aims: (1) to analyse the various methods and experiences of communist control over Eastern Europe and (2) to examine different coping methods and strategies of resistance employed by those who lived under communist rule.

“Dissent in Romania Revisited: From Comparative to Transnational Approaches” - Online lecture by Professor Cristina PETRESCU (University of Bucharest); organized by the Faculty of Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University and Polish Philosophical Association, Poznań Branch, Monday, 30 November 2020, 5 p.m. (CET).