On 22 October 2003, with the initiative of Romania's president Ion Iliescu, the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania (ICSHR) was set up. Nobel laureate for peace and American writer of Romanian origin Elie Wiesel was appointed as its president. In spring 2006, with the initiative of Romania's president Traian Băsescu, the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (CPADCR) was formed. Vladimir Tismăneanu, the American political scientist of Romanian origin, became its president. Both commissions were established with the purpose of producing a final report on the two forms of totalitarianism in Romania: the extreme right totalitarianism between 1940 and 1944, and the extreme left totalitarianism between 1944 and 1989. Both commissions rested on legal and ethical grounds and they addressed Romanians' expectations and dilemmas linked to their recent traumatic history.
Comisia Internaţionala pentru Studierea Holocaustului în România, editori Tuvia Friling, Radu Ioanid, Mihail E. Ionescu , Raport Final (Iaşi, Editura Polirom, 2005). [ International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, eds. Tuvia Friling, Radu Ioanid, Mihail E. Ionescu, Final Report (Iasi, Polirom Publishing House, 2005).]
2.
Comisia Prezidenţială pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România, Raport Final (Bucureşti, 2006). [Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, Final Report (Bucharest, 2006).] The report was published also, a little bit revised, in 2007, by Publishing House Humanitas from Bucharest, edited by Vladimir Tismaneanu , Dorin Dobrincu, and Cristian Vasile.
3.
Vladimir Tismăneanu published in magazine 22 (in its supplement, 22 plus, titled "Ora Romaniei" ("Romania's Time"), no. 220, May 15, a text-manifesto "Condamnarea regimului comunist in Romania" ("Condemnation of the Communist Regime in Romania") on the setting up of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania and on the elaboration of the final report. The text is a document of political science logistics, welcome for the Romanian public mentality.
4.
These are the ones who saved the Jews during the latter mass persecution period.
5.
For the entire inventory of the Romanian victims of the Gulag, see the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship, Raport Final, 159-60.
6.
The critical reactions against the Tismăneanu commission's final report were of two kinds: (1) the choleric and brutal ones (coming from the members or the devotees of an extremist party, Greater Romania, or from superficial and fiery journalists such as Victor Roncea, who writes for the daily newspaper Ziua, or others like him), and (2) those aimed at conceptual matters or that were historical-theoretical reproaches to the report. There were fewer defensive voices of the report (since the majority of the population empathized, however, with the issue of the final report), but they were emblematic. They focused on the appreciation of the collective effort for the moral and judicial condemnation of the communist ideology.
7.
The detractors of the report produced by the Tismăneanu commission tendentiously denounced the so-called lack of scientific rigor and objectivity of the final text. It was said that the final version was a compilation of blended sources, that it had an anti-Romanian bias, and that it offered a deformation of Romanian history, a falsification of the Romanian people. Former president Ion Iliescu himself obstinately attacked the report for "manipulation" of public opinion, especially with respect to the December 1989 events and to the first period of transition after the collapse of the communist regime.
8.
Another series of critical voices belonged to historians and political scientists or other specialists in the field who either felt marginalized for not having been involved in the report development and their reactions were full of frustration, or they found slips and goofs, some of them real, but which could have been relatively easily corrected by the commission's members and the experts. The report wanted to be a paper submitted to debate (it had been posted on the Internet shortly before the assumption of the conclusions by Traian Băsescu in front of the parliament, on 18 December 2006), because it was open to improvements and to error corrections. This second set of voices concluded that the Tismăneanu commission report was a "media product," or that it was not conceived as a unit, but only as pieces mechanically assembled. They also denounced the stylistic freedom of the authors when writing the chapters, the fact that the amount of information from the archives was pretty small, and that the estimation of the number of victims rather approximate.
9.
The third set of reproaches was of conceptual nature (they belonged to names such as Michael Shafir and Gabriel Andreescu): the two criticized, among other things, the inflated use of the term genocide and the anti-communist "wooden-language."
10.
For a comparison between the German precedent and the Tismăneanu commission see the article signed by Lavinia Stan "Cosminia Tismaneanu, intre adevar si reconciliere" ("Tismăneanu Commission, between truth and reconciliation"), 22, no. 9 (886), year XVII, February 27-March 5, 2007. Lavinia Stan's text is also interesting for the parallel drawn between the Tismăneanu commission and the Truth and Reconciliation commissions that functioned (especially) in South America, but on other continents as well, after the collapse of a dictatorship, especially a far right one.
11.
Another topical and suggestive comparison between the German model and CPADCR was drawn by Bogdan Cristian Iacob in the study "Comisia Prezidentiala, consensul anti-totalitar si perspectiva internationala. Cum a rezolvat Germania problema trecutului comunist" ("Presidential Commission, anti-totalitarian consensus and the international perspective. How Germany solved the problem of the communist past"), Observatorul Cultural, year VIII, no. 115 (372), May 17-23, 2007.
