Abstract
Romania has witnessed a delayed and partial reckoning with the past, including in regard to public memory policies of the communist regime. This overdue dealing with the past is due to the multiple continuities of political leadership in post-communist Romania. Repression, Resistance and Collaboration in Stalinist Romania 1944-1964: Post-communist Remembering, by Monica Ciobanu, represents an important contribution to the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, and specifically to our understanding of the memory of the first two decades of the communist regime in Romania.
From a theoretical perspective, the book combines a memory studies and a transitional justice approach and uses several methods, such as the sociology of memory and discourse analysis. The volume is based on a large corpus of primary sources, which include memoirs, exhibitions, and documentary films, as well as on secondary literature on the history and memory of communism in Romania and transitional justice in post-communist Romania. The book is best suited for scholars interested in the memory of communism in Romania and the former communist regimes in Eastern Europe, as well as for those that analyse memory and gender, and the history of (anti)communism. Differently than several books on the Romanian communist regime (Gilberg, 1990; Verdery, 1995), it doesn’t focus on the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965-1989), but on that of Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej (1948-1965), which has been analysed to a lesser extent, and even less so from the point of view of memory studies.
The book’s scope is to show ‘how the act of remembering and its emphasis on various individual, social and political processes shape the remaking of historical experience within the confines of a variable collective memory’ (p. 10). The main thesis of Ciobanu’s book is that the master memory of communism in Romania is that of anti-communism that has ‘equated communism with a generalized Stalinist and gulag-wide repression’ (p. 8). She argues that this narrative that was imposed after 1990 by several agents of memory is one that ‘seems to sustain and define national identity in terms of exceptionalism, victimhood, and heroism that is similar’ to the nationalist communist ideology (p. 4).
The book is divided into six chapters, with an introduction and concluding remarks. The introduction starts with ‘Recent measures of historical redress in Romania’, such as the trial against Alexandru Vișinescu, the director of the Râmnicul Sărat political prison. It further explains how the fact that the absence of transitional justice measures led to the privilege given to the civil society’s ‘truth telling and memorialization initiatives as the next best thing’ (p. 8).
In chapter 1, ‘Repression and victimisation’, Ciobanu reconstructs ‘the mechanisms and contexts that shaped the construction of a political and cultural narrative of the Stalinist repression between 1989 and 2018’ (p. 20). To do so, she focuses on the representations of repression and victimization produced by three different types of ‘agents of memory’ (p. 20): victims, including political prisoners; civil society representatives (NGOs, intellectuals, artists) that have contributed to the anti-communist discourse by framing it as a ‘national trauma’; and state actors that have supported an official policy that centres on Stalinist communism and which is in sync with the traditional, patriotic, nationalist, and Christian Orthodox political culture. To these memory agents should be added the new civil society actors that include religious groups such as the ‘prison saints’ movement’ that amplify this political message. These groups have put forward ‘a narrative of collective victimization’ in which ‘Stalinist repression is equated with the entire communist period’ (p. 36) and the representation of communism is marked by the theme of sacrifice. This memory discourse, which was consecrated first by civil society and the opposition formed by the ‘historical parties’, became translated into a state policy after the mid-2000s. Although most of Romania’s population under communism was formed of bystanders, the dominant memory framework is that of the victims of the Stalinist period. While there is no official number of the victims of the communist regime, Ciobanu mentions 600,000 victims (p. 3); an evaluation that includes the number of ‘political detainees, administrative detainees, deportees, and more than a half million young people in forced labor’ of which 80,000 were peasants who ‘were arrested for opposing collectivization’ (p. 3). This is a smaller number than the one advanced by other sources, such as the Report of the Tismăneanu Presidential Commission, which acknowledged two million victims (Tismaneanu, 2006: 215–216), but bigger than the one put forward by the Sighet Memorial of 70,000 prisoners between 1945 and 1989.
In the second chapter, ‘The Pitesti project: testimonies of remembering’, Ciobanu confronts ‘the ambiguities of the politics of memory’ (p. 15) through the analysis of the fascinating, yet under-researched phenomenon of the ‘prisons saints’ movement’ that has ‘pursued the canonization of the victims of the experiment’ (p. 47) in Pitesti regardless of their previous sympathies for the legionary movement. The chapter dissects ‘how the lived experience of this “painful past” has been appropriated by conservative, right-wing, nationalist and strongly religious civic associations sometimes supported by the Romanian Orthodox Church (BOR)’ (p. 48). The analysis focuses on three channels of transmission of the reeducation: autobiographical memoirs; the Memoria Foundation, which has organised annual symposiums in Pitesti; and different documentary films or interviews that have ‘given legionaries an opportunity to publicly speak out freely’ (p. 59). Reeducation in Pitesti has been presented as unique, although similar practices were seen in other cases such as that of the prison of Goli Otok in Croatia. This singularization of Pitești has helped establish the ‘canon of remembering’ that excludes other types of memory of communism (p. 63).
The third chapter, ‘Vernacular and politicized representations of the armed resistance’, analyzes another very important topic in what concerns the post-communist representations of the opposition to the communist regime in Romania. According to Ciobanu, there are two opposite views of resistance, which is glorified either as a ‘national anti-Soviet movement by the anti-communist opposition’ or rejected by former communists ‘by trivializing and often vilifying it as a series of criminal or anti-national bands of isolated episodes’ (p. 77). For Ciobanu these two essentialised and biased discourses are useful for the myth-making that accompanies the representations of the armed resistance that was active between the mid-1940s and 1960s. The author considers these were neither heroes nor criminals, but ‘ordinary individuals reactive to hostile forces’ (p. 77). An interesting aspect is that the artistic discourses, such as the 2010 film The Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man by Constantin Popescu, chose to memorialise Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu who was a legionary, although the legionary were marginal inside the anti-communist resistance as Ciobanu observed.
Starting from the discussion of the trial of A. Vișinescu, Chapter 4, ‘Perpetrators: indifference, denial, and delayed justice’, analyzes the representations of perpetrators in the discourses of the victims and based on their own evocations. Although victims tend to present them as beasts, villains, inhumane characters, Ciobanu mentions that qualitative studies have acknowledged that they were in fact ‘sadistic, violent, ignorant’ but also ‘careerists, voyeurs, zealots, the reconverted’ (p. 112) and vulnerable individuals. The lack of justice in what concerns them is attributed by Ciobanu to a lack of political will and to a series of procedural constraints. This chapter further humanises the aggressors and relativises their portraits.
Chapter 5, ‘Different voices: the experiences of women and their representations of repression and resistance’, convincingly demonstrates there is a gendered representation of the communist experience. Based on the memoirs of several women prisoners and other secondary sources, Ciobanu shows that there is a distinctive experience of women political prisoners in terms of their higher degree of solidarity. Moreover, Ciobanu discusses a typology of women prisoners that includes: the ‘ladies/intellectuals’, the legionary women, the peasant women and the women who were part of the different religious confessions. Although having a different social background, they shared the trauma of the body. Furthermore, the ‘gendered representation of the gulag’ included the image of ‘sacrificial women’ identified as ‘mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters’ while their political agency has been marginalised in favour of a ‘masculinization of the anti-communist resistance’ (p. 154).
In the final, sixth chapter, ‘The past in the present tense: the case of the National Peasant Christian Democratic Party [PNT]and its leader Corneliu Coposu’, the role played by Corneliu Coposu in the democratic transition after 1990 is analysed, including how he became ‘a revered and legendary figure’ through ‘acts of historical remembrance that have broadened his image as a politician and statesman’ (p. 183). This last chapter of the book about Coposu, the leader of the PNT who has become associated to the image of the victim of the communist regime is detached from the other case-studies in the book.
One of the limits of Ciobanu’s analysis is that, while briefly recalling the fact that most Romanians were neither victims nor perpetrators, she doesn’t discuss the different types of memory in competition. As Mihai S. Rusu acknowledged, there are (at least) three types of memory discourses: the ‘politics of amnesia’, reckoning with the past by pursuing a ‘confrontational strategy’ founded upon a ‘politics of anamnesis’, and a ‘multilayered, comprehensive memory’ (Rusu, 2017: 1274). The latter includes the
multiple layers of the communist experience, by drawing on the political memory of the repression and terror unleashed in the 1950s as well as the popular memory of both the better times of the 1960s and 1970s, which some Romanians today regard with nostalgia, and the collective misery of the 1980s. (Rusu, 2017: 1275, 1274)
This third type of memory narrative is not discussed by Ciobanu’s book which only reconstructs the discourse on resistance and victimisation, although the title of the book also refers to ‘collaboration’.
Ciobanu acknowledges the two competing narratives of the communist past (p. 8) – the cleavage between communist and anti-communist – but chooses to focus exclusively on anti-communism, without fully contextualising the other attitude, which is dominant inside Romanian society. For example, according to Alexandru Gussi, in Romania there is no ‘coherent official discourse about the communist period’ and ‘two opposing and separate types of discourses: that of indictment, which condemns the crimes of communism, and that of nostalgia coexist’ (2013: p. 723). These ‘two distinct pairs of competing narratives of the communist past’ are ‘produced by some state institutions and the political elite, the other one is the product of civil society’ (Gussi, 2013: 732). Moreover, for Vladimir Tismăneanu, ‘various political factions promoted institutional parallelisms by continuous fueling the opposite, nostalgic and even negationist interpretations’ (2008: p. 171).
The strengths of this book are that, first, the volume explains and deconstructs the establishment of the Pitești prison myth as exceptional and shows how the phenomenon of the ‘prison saints’ came about. Second, the book clarifies how the anti-communist discourse became hegemonic and how it equates communism with the Stalinist repression and the Gulag. The volume also investigates the portrayals of the armed resistance in the mountains of the 1950s and 1960s which have been evoked as unique in the region, although they were not. Ciobanu also demonstrates there is a specific memory of women political prisoners based on their different memoirs. Erstwhile, her analysis of the perpetrators of the communist prisons is less convincing and seems to relativise their responsibility.
The volume by Monica Ciobanu makes an important contribution to our understanding of the processes of memory making in post-communist Romania by focusing on several agents of memory and demonstrating how a master narrative is imposed. Moreover, the book represents a valuable resource for the scholars of the memory of communism in Eastern Europe as well as for those interested in the role-played by civil society actors in the making of memory discourses.