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Alexandru Câmpeanu

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

acampeanu2003@yahoo.com

Soviet Style Modernization of the Romanian Villages (1948–1962)

Abstract: This paper is intended as a comprehensive insight into the communist process of “collectivization” in Romania. Given that history is a field of study with a most disputed scientific character, as governments have employed it for propaganda purposes almost since time immemorial, I deem it necessary not to lay great emphasis on key events and personalities. Rather, this is an enquiry, based on personal ideas and opinions of generally known facts and oral history interviews. The article proposes therefore an overview of the communist modernizing strategies of the rural world, the violent ways the apparatus imposed them and the outcomes, both behavioral and mental, those policies had on their human subjects.

Keywords: Romania; Communist Regime; Rural Life; Agrarian Reform; ”Collectivization”.

If we really wish to understand the various answers of the villagers towards the communist system, imposed after World War II in Romania, we have to highlight the principles that stood at the core of real socialism and the behavior that this ideology implies. In fact, the Marxist egalitarian utopia has nothing in common with what scientists and the media call “real socialism”. Even if the communist systems varied widely, especially in the area of social experiments, analysts tend to focus on the all-inclusive state that accumulates all production, resources and power as the essential trait of east European communism. One can notice that the degree of centralization in every one of these states depended on their particular historic past. Placing the needs of the state above those of the individual is still a common habit in today’s Romanian politics and preceded socialism. Even economic self-sufficiency, an obsession of the Ceausescu years, is as old as the national independence and the birth of the first political parties. The nineteenth-century liberal ideology based on the principle “by ourselves” is not too far away.

As a Leninist party in a rural society, dominated by vast social inequalities, the Romanian communist party[1], encouraged the appearance of social conflict. In a Justice Ministry document from 1956, the feature appears clearly emphasized: “Poor peasants are the main support of the working class […] we will back the poor peasantry, will strengthen the alliance with the middle peasants and organize the unceasing fight against the kulaks”[2]. The long road from theory to practice began. Since very few rich peasants existed, the wealthier they were, the better integrated they would be in the communities that considered them as godfathers. With that in sight, the party focused on weakening the links between different rural groups. The first step was to separate rich people from the rest. Their land was confiscated, the party accused them of being exploiters of the poor, sabotaged their production, and they were beaten, deported or incarcerated. The authorities aimed at destroying their symbolic position inside the communities through stigmatization. Therefore, the kulaks suffered much worse taxing than the rest of the society as the quotas replaced former land taxes during 1948 until 1956[3]. Those quotas were based on the amount of land owned and developed into a primitive taxing system that oppressed the rich to make accumulation useless and poverty acceptable. The kulaks owned roughly 8% of the arable land in 1952 but gave 13% of their grain through quotas[4]. While the anti-kulak campaign mounted in intensity, many poor peasants became party members attracted by the promised economic assistance and low interest credits.

The agrarian reform of 1945 was another party tactic in the general strategy to gain the support of the poor before the general elections of 1946. Almost 10% of the Romanian farming land belonged to what remained of the big landowners and some Nazi supporters and given to peasants without property. The amount of land left to allot was small because of the big land reform of the twenties, so it was not possible to improve life conditions in the rural areas only by it. Still the market-oriented small property was opposed to party ideology, so as soon as they gained total control of the state they began collectivizing farmland[5]. The party also tried to restrict the power resources of the rural communities. Thus appeared the centre-controlled regions, replacing the counties governed by the local elites. The state imposed its control on religion, aiming to destroy independent elites. The Greek-Catholic church, believed to be a Vatican instrument, was absorbed by the more obedient and national Orthodox Church. In addition, the protestant groups from radical reformation churches lost their legal status. The new Orthodox patriarch, Justinian Marina, former country priest having connections with the party leader: Gheorghiu-Dej, was also an expression of the movement towards total social control, as the party left nothing outside its authority.

As it happened with the big brother, USSR, the guiding light in all matters, every imagined or perceived enemy of the new system became a kulak or an exploiter. Problems began when the administration observed the peasants’ tendency to envy and emulate the rich and noticed that the proletarian peasants became party members in order to take the dominant position from the kulaks rather than because they were inspired by ideological ideals. The rich were powerful through their social network of relatives and friends and not because of real wealth in money or land. Properties over 10 hectares were rare and most peasants had around 3-5 hectares depending on the geographic position in the plains or highlands. In addition, we have no proof of any class conscience or class conflict in such uniform societies. All had virtually the same lifestyle and the only difference was that the richer you were, the more probable it would be to send your children to school to escape this world of poverty and build a career in a town. It is certain that the structure of the kulak fortunes was highly influenced by the ability of many consequent generations to work towards the same goal. Wealth changed during time due to the diligence or economic ability some had. Too many children, a few poor harvests and the so-called rich returned to poverty caused by lack of capital and modern farming technology. It is also sure that nobody knew what ‘exploiter’ had meant before communism and that all able men worked hard to gain small benefits, with the peril of famine always above their heads.

The initial tactic aimed to destroy the kulak went bankrupt when quotas eroded virtually all the differences between villagers. In the end, the state gave a battle not against some weak communities that were not used to opposing central decisions but against the basic human need for property. Since time immemorial, peasants had wanted land and we can understand their desperate resistance when the communists tried to take it away from them. Hence, the party was faced with rebellious communities – as it was the case in the USSR – that did not work according to the Marxist ideology of class antagonism but tended to be sympathetic to their formal or informal leaders. Finally, the strategy to divide the peasantry based on false presumptions and ignoring human natural interest in having possession, failed. When there was still land left to be shared, the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy worked. “Trying to start a social conflict is possible only as long the insufficient resources are offered as a reward to some to the detriment of others […] Communism was a prosaic tyranny based on an excessively ambitious ideology. Following the class struggle, all classes disappeared and a new unscrupulous, selfish new man appeared.”[6]

Collectivizing farmland was the main tactic in the communist efforts to destroy old rural social life. After the Central Committee approved the legal framework in March 1949, the party sent commissars to the local level to explain its benefits and to enroll peasants in the new organizations. Close to 1000 farms with 70000 families existed in 1950 but the next year resistance stiffened and propaganda could celebrate only 62 new collectives[7]. At first, the party blamed the slackening of the initial excessive enthusiasm on its members, who had forced the peasants to enroll, and then stigmatized the bourgeois feelings of the conservative villagers, who were unused with the “modern” forms of collective property.

To cope with these problems, the party accepted an intermediate organism to appear in September 1951: the peasant associations[8]. Opposed to the collective farms, they combined traditional with modern, socialist systems. The association members could bring in as much land as they wanted but it remained privately owed even if it was cultivated into big lots to facilitate its toil. Members’ payment was according to the amount of land brought into the association, and not, as with the collectives, in compliance with the amount of work. The administration gave them use of the machines it had in state farms and planned the work as it would do with the collectives latter[9]. Those institutions multiplied rapidly in the fifties, encouraged by state loans, tax and quota reductions. Between 1952 and 1958, their number grew from 1800 to 12748, reaching more than a million members[10].

In this case, as with the 1945 reform, those measures contradicted the communist ideology and were mere transient compromises. Therefore, when party leaders considered the time had come, they restarted collectivizing and used it to change peasant mentality and the old ways of the interwar economy. A party manual used this reasoning: “Pressure will not be used to force peasants into collectives but the only method will be by explanation and persuasion […] Peasants will be persuaded through discussions with soviet peasants, regional exhibitions and extended media campaigns. […] Party commissars will be sent for persuasion and farm organization in areas with fertile lands”[11]. The tactics seemed to bear fruits. In 1962, at the National Conference of the Collective farmers, the process seemed to be complete, as collective farms comprised 80% of the arable land. In that same period, the amount of work in agriculture had dropped by 10%, because of industrialization and the deportations of reluctant rural inhabitants, who refused to join collectives.[12] The massive industrialization that followed collectivizing in most country regions had dramatic effects on the rural economy but mostly on the peasants’ psyche, who became convinced they were the victims of a godless regime.

The huge suffering caused by the quotas, more than any other state policy involving enforced modernization, is recorded by any oral historian in the field. The reversal of traditional values caused desperation, since before, work was the way to prosperity, while now party connections and good social origin did the trick. Those who had worked hard to build their fortunes lived now worse than those who had done nothing. Marginal paupers became influential communist apparatchiks, while the former elites became outlaws and got prison convictions and deportation if they were dissenters. The abject quotas ruined men of means because they had to buy at a loss those goods they had to deliver. This diluted what little capital they still had left because of the monetary reforms from 1947 and 1953[13], which had forbidden people to convert more than a previously settled amount of money into the new currency. Some bribed local party members to avoid classification as kulaks but did not escape regular persecution reserved to the former elites. The surviving strategies deconstructed once solid and somewhat harmonious communities. It was a fight of everyone against everyone else and those whom the regime persecuted remained victims of the hateful communities, their grandparents had once been leaders of.

The anti-kulak campaign was as abusive as the quotas. Some families were too “rich” to avoid insertion in the exploiters’ class – the so-called boyars/ nobles who still had some farmland and forests under the former 1923 land reform – but most people got into that situation because of political reasons and personal enmities. Some were small shopkeepers, others had farming machinery, others were intellectuals, some had employees, some had money, the motives could be many and they were absurd, but the reality is that almost anyone, except for the extremely poor 10%, could be considered an enemy of the state. Obvious abuses were committed as some rich merchants/industrialists avoided classification, while local party chiefs unjustly persecuted their personal enemies. Many party leaders claimed that the central administration imposed on them quotas of kulaks they had to denounce, but the local situation depended too much on the relations of the individuals with the local “bosses”.

The big problem of this campaign was its success. Even if it destroyed the entire rural elite, eliminating local political resistance, this de-kulakization broke once cooperative communities into isolated, suspicious families that could not do anything together, and it also deprived the communist local chiefs of any credibility, since everyone knew they were former paupers turned racketeers. The campaign disintegrated old society but did not succeed in closing the gap between socialist ideals and peasant mentality. Even if initially the numerous pressures were associated with the promise of progress, the latter failed to appear up until the twenty first century, making the town-country gap more like an abyss. This meant rather slow and poor quality mechanization, no infrastructure, no paved roads, no current water but some electric current. However, even if those reforms had improved rural life, the peasantry would still have opposed them, as it had happened with the 1848 abolishment of the corvee. If asked to join the collective by the state agent, men would often flee and leave only women at home, who would pretend not to have any right of signature. In addition, most claimed they would join if other, more influential members of the community did too. Nevertheless, as the state exerted more and more pressure, the villagers’ resistance was broken down. In 1962, it took only 2 months for 50 collective farms to appear, as many as during the entire 1950s. Peasants joined the farms not only with their land but also with all the tools and animals they had. However, even in those late reports that spoke of unanimity, there were still a few dissidents left. In those cases, the state simply seized their land, forbade their access to paid jobs and gave them poor quality land in return.

Historians consider collective farming as the destructive chapter in the building of communist, while industrialization is seen to have been a more positive aspect[14]. The impact those processes had on rural social relations, on work ethos and life ideology, transformed the communities in a way only climate change would be able to do. The peasant workforce moved to large building sites and while heavy industry appeared, the country’s face changed forever. Young peasants got away from the poor and oppressive countryside to earn a new life in the developing industrial towns of the new socialist Romania. They gradually moved into wretched blocks of flats and brought with them an entire set of rural habits that still define the contemporary class of urban working proletariat, as it is the case with all developing nations. The still backward agriculture and the continuous lack of mechanization required a lot of workforce, and this is the reason Romania has almost 49% rural population, the highest proportion in all continental Europe. Some of the former privileged praise the collective positive aspect of raising the number of people having access to education. The statistics confirm the decrease in the number of workers between the ages of 16 to 24, the period for conducting higher education. The lack of capital and technology made the rural farm of the thirties excessively dependent on labor, so young people could not be sent away to study. Some progress was noticeable with respect to electrification – though consumption was symbolic and rationalized – and infrastructure, as paved roads had appeared and buses connected once isolated countryside with the urban areas.

It is almost a commonplace that party personnel was recruited from the poor peasantry[15] as in Romania the intelligentsia had little sympathy for communism, represented by the perpetual enemy, Russia. Nationalism and extremist rightist movements had much more appeal, and the Legion of Archangel Michael was the most successful of them all. While priests and teachers had been legionnaires or members of other parties, communist propagandists came from the poor families on the outskirts of villages and lacked education or prestige. Those young stubborn and rapacious apparatchiks entered in conflict even with their own families because they refused to obey the sacred rules of the community. If the regime had acted only through those few adherents and some other people it brought to villages to replace the deported German population from Transylvania, it would not have succeeded. Instead it used army and Securitate units, investigated by torture, deported or imprisoned traditional leaders to bring down the resistance where needed. Therefore, fear became a second nature in these tormented communities. People tended to feel nostalgic about the good old days of the king and dreamed for the Americans to come and end the nightmarish reality of the communist regime.

Agent recruiting for the new elite passed through a few stages. In Romania, the legion was the main anti-system movement, with some success in the rural areas because of its anti-Semitic propaganda and Orthodox ethos. Communist agitators had little to say that appealed to the villagers’ mentality, even if they came from peasant-soldiers captured on the Russian front and gathered in two soviet divisions: “Tudor Vladimirescu” and “Horea, Closca, Crisan”. Those soldiers and the later militants had little knowledge of Marxist dogma but afterwards the regime selected workers and sent them to popular universities in order to get the personnel able to replace the old time clerks it distrusted. New elite members recruited on “healthy social origin” basis and their offspring and successors form almost entirely the rural elite today[16]. We can say they are predator elites, legitimized by the fear of Securitate or Militia and consolidated through the deportation and imprisonment of former elites. “Theft is illegitimate by definition and there is no authority without legitimacy. There is only domination. A predator elite is one that does services only to itself, oppresses the subordinate population, creating poverty on a large scale and whose existence is imposed by force”.[17] This is how the communist system forged new Romania. Collective farming emerged as the founding crime against society.

Communist policies – ideologically speaking – should have facilitated the disappearance of classes, families and promoted a new socialist identity based on working class ethos. In fact, it brought forth new forms of inequality, strengthening old barriers of wealth and prestige. Instead of raising collective individual activity, people became increasingly isolated into smaller families as everyone feared imprisonment. Romania became a mass prison whose leaders pledged world peace and social progress just like in Orwell’s 1984[18]. The natural consequence of isolation was lack of communication and rising conflicts. In a society with no moral legitimacy, nobody respected anything except for the basic surviving rules. Before World War II, peasants were community members regardless of the dimensions of their property. Once communism had triumphed, wealth differences implied a politically privileged status. The descendants of those who opposed communism had no access to positions of economic status. The education system banned those with exploiter origin and refused them access to universities up until the eighties.

After the old order disappeared, the new one lacked moral authority. In general, new collective farm presidents and engineers were more famous for alcoholism, womanizing, incompetence, rapaciousness than for their managing skills. The fact, reflected in a diluted, counterfeit manner, even in communist propaganda films, confirms that it really was a problem. The widely spread incompetence and poor management brought communist systems to virtual economic collapse in 1989.

Nationalization, collectivization and industrialization changed social relations in rural and urban communities violently and changed an entire country’s morality. Collective farming became obviously inefficient because of its inability to produce more than traditional Romania had achieved. It had to falsify registers in order to pretend it was a modern institution, on a par with the western world private companies’ production.

Rural patterns changed in the new society. The number of nuclear families decreased in accordance with the rise of poverty between 1951 and 1964 from 29 to 24%[19], surprisingly, since interwar Romania had not been a wealthy nation. These enlarged families could help each other better against a terrorist state. The marriage age had also dropped since traditional times. In 1931-1940, the average marriage age was 20.5 for women and 24.7 for men. In 1960-1964, it got to 17.5 for women and 23.5 for men[20]. Commuting from town job to rural home increased because of exogamic marriages. If from 1919 to 1945, only 35% of the families had had husbands from outside the village, this number rose to 43% in 1962[21].

People recall the tormenting times of the quotas when poverty got to middle-age levels in rural communities because the state took everything to give it to the soviets as war compensations. One peasant remembers: “[…] in the quotas time, people had to steal because they were left without money, vegetables or bread […] it was a great famine. Everything we produced went to Fagaras. There were our tomatoes loaded in kilometer-long goods trains”[22]. Socio-political changes affected the individuals’ self-respect but that did not raise the party’s prestige. People perceived all communists as traitors, outsiders and godless people whom one should avoid and fear. Isolation became a life ideal, as the saying goes, ‘mind your own business and have nothing to do with the others’. While in interwar Romania there had been more people eager to be local councilors and mayors than then available positions, in the sixties people feared public responsibility. This is how a few families managed to dominate the communities, monopolizing all available positions in the school, collective farm or popular council.

The imposing of communist power meant massive social change with enduring consequences. The wealthy interwar class had either disappeared in prisons or become outsiders after returning from deportation, while their children had difficulty getting into schools and lived in constant fear of the authorities. Communism leveled the new society into poverty and separated men by fear, envy and hate. Villages became more conflictive and increasingly passive, and in their refusal to accept communism, they remained as anti-modern and deeply antithetical to cities as before. This is perhaps the reason why real socialism responded by launching urbanization procedures. They aimed to destroy villages by forcefully transforming them into small towns and by redistributing population from rural to urban settlements. The only thing that stopped communists from achieving that was their 1989 fall from power, in a violent revolution.

Bibliography:

Cătănuş, Dan; Roske, Octavian, Romanian Collectivization: The Repression, 1948-1953, Bucuresti: Institutul Naţional pentru studierea Totalitarismului, 2004.

Conquest, Robert, Harvests of Sorrow, Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2004.

Deletant, Dennis, Communist Terror in Romania. Dej and the Police State. 1948-1965, Iaşi: Polirom, 2001.

Dobrincu, Dorin, Peasants and Power. The process of collectivizing agriculture in Romania. 1949-1962, Iaşi: Polirom, 2005.

Enuta, Nicolae, ”The Kulaks: Death Enemies of the Collective Farm”, Ştiinţă şi Cultură, no. 8, 1952.

Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe. Cuvântarea rostită la încheierea consfătuirii pe ţară a ţăranilor colectivişti, Bucureşti: Editura Politică, 1962.

Iancu, George; Ţârău, Virgiliu; Trasca, Otmar, Collectivizing Agriculture in Romania. Legal Aspects, Cluj: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2000.

Ionescu, Constantin, Men, Society, Socialism, Bucureşti: Editura Academiei, 1973.

Jowitt, Kenneth, Social Change in Romania. 1860-1940, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Kideckel, David, The Solitude of Collectivism. Romanian villagers to the revolution and beyond, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Liiceanu, Aurora, Neither Black, nor White. The biography of a Romanian village 1948-1998, Bucureşti: Nemira, 2000.

Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina; Althabe, Gerard, The Sickle and the Bulldozer. Scorniceşti and Nucsoara. Ways to subdue the Romanian peasantry, Iaşi: Polirom, 2002.

Ogoranu, Ion Gavrilă, Trees Bend but don’t Break, vol 1-2, Timisoara: Marineasa, 1995.

Onişoru, Gheorghe, Romania in 1944-1948. Economic transformations and social realities, Bucuresşti: Fundaţia Academia Civică, 1998.

Şandru, Dumitru, The Agrarian Reform of 1945 Romania, Bucureşti: Institutul National pentru Studiul Totalitarismului, 2000.

Tănase, Stelian, Elites and Society. The Gheorghiu Dej years: 1948-1965, Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1998.

Verdery, Katherine, Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic and Ethnic Change, Berkeley: California University Press. 1983.

This research work was financed by CNCSIS, ID 2274/2008.

Notes

Mara Mărginean

“G. Bariţiu” Institute of History, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

maramarginean@yahoo.com

Importing Words to Build a City:

The Socialist Modernization of Hunedoara

between the Architects’ Designs and the Politicians’ Projects, 1949-1952

Abstract: This paper examines the shifting borders of institutional functioning in the trans-nationalization of public space, which had to redefine the collective identities of the newly formed socialist communities, by looking at how the built environment in Hunedoara was the outcome of negotiated agreements between architects and politicians. Given the Romanian authorities’ isomorphic institutional behavior, according to which implementing a Soviet bureaucratic order in a different socio-economic context had to legitimate the system politically, while not to fluidizing the decision-making mechanisms, carrying out the program became the illustration of versatile practices and conflicting creation choices. As such, the built environment’s ideological reading was added various new facets, while the meaning was revisited every time the political context changed.

Keywords: Romania; Socialist realism; Urban architecture; Ideology; Bureaucracy.

It is well known that socialist regimes based their modernizing strategies on command economy and centralized bureaucratic decision-making mechanisms. In so doing, they constructed a political system of state-management that consisted of strict control over financial and material resources and finely-structured institutional networks. This had two effects. On one hand, the authorities in charge were caught between political priorities, economic facets, and bureaucratic interactions, which did not happen always as planned, making the system fluid and, sometimes, even hard to predict. On the other hand, the population negotiated its identity by eluding the ideological cannons through particular interpretations and adaptations. Inside this hybrid system, therefore, various actors nuanced a theoretically compelling project by performing multiple, but parallel understandings of the communist modernization initiative. For instance, the Romanian city Hunedoara, which rapidly expanded soon after the end of WWII due to the communist project of industrial development, illustrates how the centralized institutional involvement and the clear-cut building program were blurred by local interactions, legislative interpretations, and creative adaptations in design. Despite the fact that the ‘modern’ aspect was an outcome of the steady concern for rationalization and standardization, scientific planning and economic preeminence fueling the politicians’ projects and the architects’ views, the ambivalence in decisional process opened up a different perspective on the city. As such, the final form of Hunedoara was a mélange of architectural styles and functions kept together by propagandistic constructs, which illustrated a difference between what was stated and what was really done. This dissociation opens up several questions. To what extent were the official cannons of state-leadership and ideological frameworks efficient in bringing to life the so-called modernization program? How im/penetrable were concepts like rationalization, standardization, and bureaucratization under the radicalized conditions of the early Cold War years, and what, if anything, made them alter their initial significance? Which were the rapports between the planning structures and the political decision-making factors?

This essay will examine the shifting borders of institutional functioning in the trans-nationalization of public space, which had to redefine the collective identities of the newly formed socialist communities, by looking at how in Hunedoara the built environment was the outcome of negotiated agreements between architects and politicians. Given the Romanian authorities’ isomorphic institutional behavior, as defined by Powdell and DiMaggio, according to which implementing a Soviet bureaucratic order in a different socio-economic context had to legitimate politically the system, but not to fluidize the decision-making mechanisms, carrying out the program became the illustration of versatile practices and conflicting creation choices.[1] As such, the built environment’s ideological reading was inflicted with various facets, while its meaning was revisited every time the political context changed.

The City, Borders and Economic Space: Setting Up the Questions

By the end of the Second World War, Andrei Zhdanov, Central Committee Secretary, Politburo member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Stalin’s spokesperson in the cultural field, launched the ‘two champs theory’ that divided the world into two: “imperialist and anti-democratic” and “anti-imperialist and democratic.”[2] Moreover, phrases and dogmatic constructs like anti-cosmopolitism, bourgeois imperialism, nationalism, proud patriotism, etc., with all their intended meaning were used on a regular basis both in the Soviet Union and in the eastern bloc. The campaign started soon afterwards, known as the Zhdanovshchina after its initiator, was tantamount to a crackdown on the arts, which effected into an “ideological and aesthetic polarization between the West and the USSR [that] produced an artistic antagonism that was certainly more visible than in other disciplines.”[3] For the Soviets, however, the rhetoric unbounded then comprised a more complicated state of affairs. Given that the tensed political arrangement between the former Allies had evolved into an open confrontation, they started a peace campaign that officially aimed to bring science and technology in the service of the people, and furthermore, claimed that the previous understanding of modernity was redundant in the post-war conditions of socialism.

Under the general reading, modernization was the outcome of combined actions of socio-economic transformations and ideological paths. While the former – industrialization, urbanization, and mass-education – consisted of state-led measures of structural reconversions with direct consequences upon the population’s living standards, the latter – the technologization of the state and the individual – delineated the symbolic mechanisms of social mobilization, as well as their foreseen outcomes. In so doing, the decision-makers sought to develop a better future. At the core of the process there was placed a new concept of social life, according to which society was to be urban, predictable and rationalized by economic projections. In general, the success of the program would be guaranteed by a well-planned functionalist organization of space, steady political investment, and rational resource management. As the state was dependent on cost-effective strategies, the modernization process, consisting of acquired control over “territory, communication and speed,”[4] escaped the domain of architectural influence in favor of engineering. Technicality, therefore, and not the apparent side of the material world, would maintain a strong cohesion at the institutional level and would also support the process by both “right-sizing the state” and “right-peopling” the masses.[5]

The Soviets had argued that, as modernization constantly depreciated the national identity based on the trans-national circulation of concepts, knowledge, and resources, this vision of state-functionalism was no longer sufficient to support the masses’ needs. Such disagreements occurred because, unlike the capitalist economic system based on competition/trans-national and efficiency principles, the Soviet one was fueled by the Leninist concept of international socialism, which stated that socialist states had to attain their economic independence by developing a heavy industry. Technology continued to play a significant part in raising the peace discourse. By then, science had acquired its revolutionary-democratic content, and soon after 1945, it was cast, alongside with economy and culture, as the major ideological benchmark of the Soviet-type modernity.[6] At the level of official rhetoric, ‘culture’ replaced ‘communication’ as the domain of modernization, while the notions of ‘territory’ and ‘speed’ were re-defined, given the principles of international proletariat. Accordingly, based on the Marxist understanding of progress as the succession of economic stages of development, the vision of segregated nationalism would be replaced with that of trans-national class unity, which effected, at least ideologically, into the dissolution of borders, both symbolic and geographic. Within the multiethnic Soviet state, the translation from “attributed” group/ethnic identity to “obtained” class identity would be achieved by each nation on a case-to-case basis, by having the masses reading critically the so-called progressive historical periods. This conversion was expressed through the dictum “national in form and socialist in content.”[7] As such, the centrality of rationality and technology was based on artistic representations in the Soviets’ attempts of renegotiating borders of knowledge and social change.

The use of socialist realism, as opposed to abstractness, was symptomatic for the state’s attempt to assemble a mass culture through centralized-led strategies of enlightening mobilization. The best way of grounding the socialist consciousness into accurate representations of the surrounding material world was to select, from the wide range of artistic representations, those elements that were the closest to the people’s values, namely, those emblematic for the progressive historical periods, and also, for the genuine folk tradition.

Spelling the Program: Anti-Cosmopolitism and the Political Project in Building Hunedoara.

In Romania by the late 1940s and the early 1950s, given the increasing Soviet pressure and the institutional reconfiguration by founding the Popular Councils and setting up a new administrative organization, the decision-makers were forced to reevaluate the development strategies so that a different pattern of architectural representation could be found, and a new line of bureaucratic interaction could be created.[8] Echoing the theoretical statements on anti-cosmopolitism, bourgeois nationalism and imperialism expressed first by Leonte Rautu, and then in architectural critique by Nicolae Badescu, reading the design in Hunedoara immediately after 1949 was realized in terms of economic efficiency and ideological truthfulness.[9] On one hand, due to the heavy industry priority constantly reaffirmed by the regime, the increasing efficiency in steel production took over any social initiative. On the other hand, the subsequent attempts to establish development frameworks so as to delineate the best socialist living model comprised within the command economy both the bureaucratic and the architectural mechanisms of city planning. This came as a result of the fact that, during the initial building campaign led between 1947 and 1948, less than a hundred buildings were erected out of more than a thousand planned, while in 1949, the accommodation capacity of Hunedoara did not exceed 8,000 inhabitants.

Already by the end of 1947, the Romanian officials contacted the local authorities in Hunedoara to start the research for drawing up the systematization plan. Using the monographic research methodology, the program, focusing on the region as a whole and not strictly on the urban area of Hunedoara, engaged an interdisciplinary team consisting of architects, physicians, economists, sociologists and ethnographers. Their aim was to sketch the socio-demographic character of the region in order to delineate “the concerted action of factors like territory, population and production that would lead towards an economic system.”[10] Announced as a pioneering drive in post-war Romania, the research focused on social and demographic details and had to identify solutions to facilitate a shift in the regional structure from an agrarian-based to an industrialized economy. Much of the preliminary data, gathered during the 1948-1949 campaign, illustrated the sociological feature of the region by analyzing, in comparison, the expected values of the recently assumed planned economy and the existing work force. The conclusions were worrisome. Despite the fact that the central leadership of the state continued to increase the steel production rates, the number of workers inhabiting Hunedoara was outnumbered by the migratory work force. In fact, most of the steelworks’ employees were rural population, commuting to the city on a daily basis and continuing to lead a traditional way of life within their village communities of origin. As a result, answers were searched for drawing up a systematization program and advancing design solutions that were to provide the workers with dwellings where living standards would be similar to those they had in their home communities, yet with modern, standardized amenities designed on a scientific basis. In terms of ideological investment, the focus was, of course, to implement locally the Soviet urban typologies.[11]

Formulating a systematization project was part of the reconstruction strategies elaborated all over war-devastated Europe; the national space would be re-conceptualized based on a liberal reading of progress and the political use of meaningful concepts: institutions, state interventionism, legislation, functionality, economic efficiency, local administrative autonomy, etc. Accordingly, reevaluating the regional significance within the national system was achieved by using bureaucratic strategies to delegate the decision-making responsibility to the local structures. This practice echoed the state’s priority of handling complex territorial structures via establishing a balanced system amid heterogeneous economic regions and maintaining the social cohesion between the urban and rural areas through goods and cultural exchanges. Theoretically, the project started from the assumption that villages and cities represented the basic organizational structures of society, and their continuous growth was determined by social trends – urbanization, individualization and socialization –, while the state’s involvement through planning, institutional coercion and legislative initiative would maintain the project’s long term feasibility.[12] For the communists, however, the interest in regional structures had first and foremost an ideological reasoning. They were interested in eliminating the differences between the rural and urban areas, so that, in Marxist terms, the capital accumulation, and control over the production means would generate the homogenous economic socialist system and, therefore, the socialist consciousness of the masses. This effected into an alteration of the notion of regionalism, in its aforementioned reading, by transferring the decisional competence to the centralized structures away from the local authorities. In the long run, the dialectical-materialist vision would be creating a new class order through centralized economic planning.[13]

Officially assumed by the political leadership as part of the party’s effort to replace the existing ‘class project’ with a new democratic vision, the spatial reconfiguration of the local economic and social relations had a surprising turn.[14] As the ideological canon of socialist realism delineated well formulated standards of architectural representation, research campaigns to evaluate the local dwelling customs came to complete the decision-making’s dynamic and their findings aimed to integrate quickly and efficiently the new urban solutions into a supposedly authentic Romanian socialist-realist tradition. However, since the institutional configuration framed the texture of society during the Cold War, the construction of Hunedoara at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s should be approached in terms of individual responsibility versus institutional engagement, and of architectural knowledge and professional debate versus political-mindedness.[15]

As such, the data gathered locally during 1948 were sent to Bucharest where the Architects’ Association was appointed to undertake the groundwork planning. Therefore, in 1949 at the Institute for Planning and Construction in the Romanian Ministry of Construction (IPC) headquarters in Bucharest, Stefan Popovici and Adrian Gheorghiu began research for drawing the systematization plan for Hunedoara. Architects claimed they were inspired by “the Soviet ethnographic methodology of regional analysis and research,” and N. Bădescu’s 1950 article, “Against cosmopolitism and bourgeois architecture,” which opposed cosmopolitism and formalism to socialist realism. In this respect, the Urbanism Department recommended the establishment of two new structures under the Department of Research of the Ministry of Construction that had to gather relevant documentary material on architectural heritage and translate integrally into Romanian the Soviet ideological texts. Furthermore, in 1950, the Urbanism Department organized two successive research campaigns in Hunedoara, which had to center around regional architecture typology and construction materials. Architects explained their choice to focus on Hunedoara because “there was about to be created an important industrial centre and a socialist city, and because it was located in Transylvania, where issues related to the national arts were more complicated.”[16] As such, the campaign in Hunedoara, started in 1949, was the beginning of extensive professional debates on the architect’s social role and the use of vernacular heritage as a national art, and announced changes that were about to shake from the ground up both the profession and the planning practice. The arguments placed behind the program in Hunedoara conveyed a socialist-realist agenda in line with previously expressed principles of architecture’s social function. The program should be read on two levels.

On one hand, by the beginning of 1951, Petre Antonescu, a long-standing figure of Romanian architecture had observed: “the local heritage of the Hunedoara region uncovered an architecture capable of reflecting reality and endowing each building with natural beauty.”[17] The appeal to regional architecture in creating patterns for social dwellings targeted Bădescu’s idea that socialist-realist architecture had to be “national in form and socialist in content.” Accordingly, the local vernacular architecture would be studied from the perspective of space distribution, building proportions, and connections between form and function, and would provide the designers with the bases for future socialist-realist architecture and standardized construction patterns.[18]

On the other hand, the systematization project, drawn for the region, opened up discussion on the issue of standardization in construction, development of large urban estates, and later use of pre-fabricated materials in building manufacture. ARLUS and the Ministry of Construction hosted a lecture series, featuring Gustav Gusti, H. Delavrancea, and Daniel Farb, which was soon followed by several planning contests at the IPC.[19] The jury, led by Gustav Gusti, now transformed into a local theoretician of Soviet architectural ideology, selected several dwelling types and argued that they could provide the architects with an easy start in planning, which would help them eliminate “the cosmopolite influence though the use of regional forms.”[20] The projects proposed over-sized variations on the vernacular architecture, in terms of both roof geometry and ground imprint, with two-room apartments puzzled together in order to fit the rectangular building’s perimeter. The furnishing solutions were adapted to serve a minimal space of no more than 45 square meters per dwelling, while the finishes and amenities were distributed according to the designers’ individual preferences. In evaluating the projects, resemblance with the traditional building played the main cart.[21]

In spite of these research campaigns, by the time the second building phase began in Hunedoara, neither had the systematization plan been approved, nor had the dwelling pattern been typified. Nevertheless, the demand for dwellings made officials complete a new urban project in Hunedoara, which was the outcome of the aforementioned professional interactions. Designed by D. Hardt, Cezar Lăzărescu, R. Moisescu, and V. Perceac, it was constructed between 1949 and 1951. The project, initiated in 1949 parallel with the First Annual Economic plan, which had foreseen an industrial boom, and finalized in 1951, proposed a more compact urban structure, with two-storey buildings. The blocks had two-room apartments, and the interior space’s dimensions had been substantially narrowed down to forty square meters per dwelling.[22] These flats had spatial planning featuring rooms that opened one into another without a corridor or hallway, which affected the functionality of the dwelling and allowed inhabitants little privacy. Out of twenty considered, only seven buildings were constructed. In 1950, the authorities hoped to gain “maximal satisfaction by permanently meeting the material and cultural needs of the entire local community by successfully engaging technical findings in the construction industry of the almost perfect socialist society.”[23]

Bureaucratic Construct and Institutional Consolidation

In 1952, the Romanian political leadership, which, until then, had ignored almost entirely the dwelling industry, made a sudden turn towards aesthetics and reevaluated the socialist urban spaces. Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, for instance, stated that although “we began constructing new cities because funny buildings were being erected,” the national plan of urban development needed to be sanctioned by the Soviet comrades. Only after such consent was formally granted, would standardized dwelling patterns, comprising the best living amenities, be designed so that they could address efficiently the issue of socialist city:

Comrade Chivu [Stoica] knows that when the building campaign had started in Hunedoara many were enthusiastic about the sight: beautiful houses nothing more than some beautiful boxes, with yards, chicken coops, pigsties, spaces to raise cows, and so much more. It is so beautiful to take visitors there. Look what a beautiful little town we built in Hunedoara, on a surface we could have achieved so much more. Like a gypsy tribe![24]

At the same time, officials from the Romanian central leadership demanded the buildings erected in Hunedoara since 1947 be demolished. They argued that, as long as the existing urban space did not conform to the ideological canons of socialist-realist architectural representations, there was no solid reason why the buildings should continue to be kept in place. Furthermore, the irreconcilable recent mistakes, in terms of both planning and design, needed to be rapidly eliminated, before they made effects on the supposedly correct line in architectural professional practice. Explanations strictly related to the ideological correctness of the project made direct references to concepts like ‘peace campaign’, ‘patriotism’, ‘anti-cosmopolitism’, and, in spite of the generally admitted fact that inside the city there was a severe dwelling shortage, ideology was much more influential in the first instance. Such proposals came as a surprise as over the previous years, authorities had saved no effort in claiming that Hunedoara was the very illustration of modern socialism. Indeed, skimming through the Romanian press between 1948 and 1950 unveils a growing interest in the city; according to the official propaganda, it conveyed the ideological and economic aspiration of the communist power, and it illustrated the creation of the “new man” based on Marxist experiences of the space. It was the same city, however, that by the time it was finished, resembled more the modernist designs than socialist-realist projects.

The hasty understanding of the correctness of the socialist space was, in fact, an echo of the Romanian politicians’ reactions to the pressures of I. A. Zvezdin, the Soviet councilor on architecture in the country, whose activity on the Romanian building sites produced some very critical notes forwarded to the Council of Ministers. About Hunedoara, for instance, Zvezdin argued that the architects’ involvement in the program was problematic, which affected negatively bureaucratic coherence, keeping up with the systematization plans, and accessing financial resources or building materials. The Soviet official analyzed the functioning of the state’s institutions and architectural planning structures, as well as their interactions, and argued that unless drastic measures be taken up immediately, the efficiency of the national development program, and the prospects of the command economy would become problematic. Zvezdin supported his theoretical argumentation on the socialist-realist principle of “national in form and socialist in content,” stating that Romanian architecture, dominated until that moment by bourgeois influences, promoted formalism and cosmopolitanism and put to bed the traditional values of the people. Furthermore, such an option contravened the socio-economic reality of the moment according to which planning had to be based on “scientific arguments” which would facilitate the country’s “future balanced development.”[25]

This generated a twofold perspective on the city. On one hand, using the socialist-realist rhetoric as a theoretical principle for creating a new life style, according to which the state had to transpose politics into visual representations, exacerbated the urban space’s formative function to shape the new man. On the other hand, the economic program’s priority of developing the heavy industry absorbed the entire financial resources available, and therefore, jeopardized the finalization of the city. As such, the political reading of the socialist-realist aesthetic and its impact upon the built environment became the fruit of negotiated agreements between actors – politicians and architects – and institutional structures over how the workers’ needs should be addressed.[26] The Romanian authorities, pressured to copy the Soviet bureaucratic model that was simultaneously being shaped in the Soviet Union, sought to reconsider the hierarchies within the state under the incoming institutional and ideological requirements. Inexperienced and missing any political legitimacy before 1944, the communist party looked up to the Moscow-led development strategy as the best way to achieve progress goals, and made scarce efforts to adapt it to the local realities. This inflexible attitude was transposed into the radical measures that emerged on the public scene, such as bringing Hunedoara down, among other things. The heterogeneous cultural and social environment and the fragile bureaucratic system newly set up, however, became disturbing factors in this process. For instance, the building program required the involvement of a large number of institutional structures both in the central administration and in the local bureaucracy. Sketched by several ministries given the requirements of the command economy, the program would be implemented by local structures that were first responsible to the central government, and only after, to the local administrative organizations. Accordingly, the local authorities’ frequent complains over access to resources and inefficiency in handling the programs depicted an atmosphere of chaos, decision-making blockages, and fierce competition over resources.[27]

To address these shortcomings, the politicians were forced to find alternative solutions that had to accommodate in a unitary development strategy the ideological and pragmatic requirements. Bringing the city down was postponed until the housing capacity would suffice, but the radicalism of the politicians’ visions echoed debates about architecture’s function within the socialist construct and its capability of subscribing to the socialist-realist dictum “national in form and socialist in content.”[28] Revisiting the urban project in Hunedoara did not mean that the decision-making factors were shifting aesthetic priorities or were reconsidering the maneuver space they were willing to afford architects. On the contrary, starting with the 1952 institutionalization of architectural practice strict control over professional structures sought to bring design under political control. However, the moment coincided with the launching of what historians have called the “new economic course” in Romania’s development, according to which the shift from heavy industrial investments to housing and consumption goods industry produced a re-conceptualization of modernization priorities within the communist state. The solution was found in the words of Stalin who arguably stated: “one of the fundamental requirements of reaching communism demands us to improve the living standards.”[29] Pressured by the obvious ideological truth, Gheorghiu-Dej had no alternative but to admit that measures had to be taken to redress a “difficult” situation emerging from the dangerous discrepancies between the fast marching of the heavy industry and the questionable coverage of the social needs. In fact, this was not a surprise as the political actions of the previous years, both in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, had not succeeded in addressing the social needs of the masses.[30] Accordingly, the approach of urban space was about to be reconsidered under the growing influence of prefabricated building technology, and also of the new structural reconfiguration of state-led politics, which stressed the need to raise the dwellings’ number and improve the building technology. Within this context, the integration of the working class in the supposedly correct socialist-realist tradition would be achieved based on structural changes in politics and consumerist economic investments.

Conclusion

The political act of shifting borders within the Soviet sphere of influence was counter-balanced by the changing boundaries of institutions, understood here as a complex concept cumulating bureaucratic structures, professional practices, cultural options and patterns of public behavior, which were repositioned under the varying socio-economic local conditions. The success of the building program in Hunedoara depended on the degree of penetrability of professional circles and state-led institutions, and their availability to comply, absorb and adjust their actions, and eventually, their personal reading of the program. As such, a first level of negotiation occurred between architects and the incoming socialist-realist aesthetics. Under personal experiences, previous professional practices, training and design options, architects came up with a development plan that, to some extent, met the Soviets’ requirements to form, but did not fulfill the socialist-like modernization ideology. This was best evinced by the first attempts to sketch a systematization plan in the late 1940s. On the next level, politicians performed a different reading of modernization by taking into account the ideology according to which the heavy industry development would generate progress in domains like urbanization, the consumption goods industry, or the dwelling sector. The subsequent re-evaluation of the building strategies as a result of the new economic course opened up the way for an alternative understanding, by re-formulating the meaning of the existing urban space in Hunedoara every time the political context required it.

Bibliography:

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Baudin, Antoine. “’Why is Soviet Painting Hidden From Us?’ Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947-1953.” In Socialist Realism without Shores, eds. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeni Dobrenko. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

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Crowter, William. The Political Economy of Romanian Socialism. New York: Praeger, 1988.

DiMaggio, Paul, Walter Powell. „The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” In The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, eds. W. Powell and P. DiMaggio. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Duskin, Eric. Stalinist Reconstruction and the Confirmation of a New Elite, 1945-1953. Pargrave Mcmillan, 2001.

Enescu, Ion Mircea. Arhitect sub comunism. Bucureşti: Paideia, 2007.

Filtzer, Donald. Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labor and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Foucault, Michael. “Space, Knowledge and Power.” In Michel Foucault. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Power, vol. III., ed. James D. Faubion. Penguin Books, 2002.

Gorlizki, Yoram and Oleg Khlevniuk. Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Greceanu, Eugenia. “Sovietizarea învăţamântului în arhitectură.” In Arhitecţi în timpul dictaturii. Amintiri, ed. Viorica Curea. Bucureşti: Simetria, 2005.

Montias. Economic Development in Communist Romania. Cambridge, MA,: MIT Press, 1967.

Martin, Terry. “Modernization or Neo-traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism.” In Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Mevius, Martin. Agents of Moscow: the Hungarian Communist Party and the Origins of Socialist Patriotism, 1941-1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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O’Leary, Brendan. “The Elements of Right-Sizing and Right-Peopling the State.” In Right-Sizing the State: the Politics of Moving Borders, eds. Brendan O’Leary, Ian Lustick, and Thomas M. Callaghy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Parrish, Scott. “The Marshall Plan and the Division of Europe.” In The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949, eds. Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.

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Notes

Manuela Marin

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România

marinmanuela2004@gmail.com

The Limits of the Romanian Communist Propaganda:

The Case of People’s Letters

Abstract: The article analyzes the limits of the Romanian propaganda as they were reflected in letters sent to Nicolae Ceausescu during the first years of his leadership (1965-1967) from two different perspectives. Firstly, the limits of the propaganda are assessed in view of Ceausescu’s popular identification with the Romanian leadership and especially with an all-powerful national paternal or godparent figure. Secondly, the boundary of propaganda is illustrated by the people’s use of the official arguments in order to demonstrate the hypocritical instrumentation of the question of Bessarabia and Bukovina by the new party and state leadership.

Keywords: Romania; Communist regime; Nicolae Ceausescu; Communist propaganda; Open letters; Bessarabia; Bukovina.

The article proposes an analysis of the limits of Communist propaganda by considering letters that people sent to Nicolae Ceausescu during his early years in power (1965-1967). In supporting their cases or expressing personal thoughts, citizens used an official language; they wanted to portray themselves as worthy citizens and/or grateful recipients of state-sponsored assistance. However, as I will demonstrate later, in most cases, using the official terminology proved a bigger challenge than one could imagine, as the intended meaning(s) were altered. In the first part of the article, I will consider those letters in which citizens dealt with their personal issues. The analytical reading of these epistles will stress that the senders actually meant what they said, despite their misuse of officially sanctioned concepts and the distortion of formal language through traditional elements. In addition, the senders’ relatively low level of education, which was evident in their substantial misuse of grammar and frequent spelling errors, raises questions regarding their competence in textual elaboration or their conscious dissimulation of hidden personal intentions. The second part of the article concentrates on letters sent to the Romanian leader in a very special context, given the decision of the Romanian leadership to reevaluate the historical issue of Bessarabia and the Northern part of Bukovina. Although a significant number of letters expressed satisfaction with the nationalist line embraced by the RCP, there were also several others denouncing the party and the state leadership as paying lip service to the issue of the former Romanian historical provinces.

The letters dealing with personal matters expressed mainly, but not exclusively, the senders’ gratitude to Nicolae Ceausescu. His intervention, they argued, could trigger a favorable solution to their problems. Although the practice of people addressing the state authorities on different issues was institutionalized,[1] turning towards the leader himself, frequently identified as a fatherly figure and the supreme repository of social justice, questioned the very valences of politically assumed propaganda. After Gheorghiu-Dej’s demise in March 1965 and until December 1967, a collective ethos characterized the Romanian leadership’s public performance, and not the activity of individual leaders. Even though Ceausescu’s status of primus inter pares was officially assumed by the Romanian propaganda in March 1965, the letters distinguished him among his colleagues and furthermore, ascribed to him almost exclusively fatherly attributes.

Despite this increasing personification of the Romanian leadership’s popular image, most of the letters writers had serious difficulty in finding the correct formula to address the RCP leader. A good number of senders failed to identify the correct designation of Ceausescu’s official position within the Romanian leadership: instead of “Comrade General Secretary”, they tended to employ the former title of the party leader, that of the “Comrade Prime Secretary”,[2] no longer in use since the 9^th RCP Congress (August 1965) or even addressed Ceausescu as “Comrade Minister”[3] or “Comrade Prime Minister”.[4] Another letter contained an even more puzzling label: while expressing her gratitude towards the RCP leader for visiting her native town, an elder woman seemed to be rather confused about the political nature of the regime and referred to Ceausescu as “the king of all Romanian women”.[5] Other citizens seemed to ignore the entire propagandistic effort concerning the subject of the collective leadership as they called Ceausescu “the president of the Council of State”[6] or “the president of the Socialist Republic of Romania”.[7] Even the correct spelling of the RCP leader’s name proved challenging for some citizens: as they were elderly persons or had below-average educational background, they used archaic variations of Nicolae Ceausescu’s first name, such as “Neculaie” “Neculai” or “Nicolai”[8]. If the popular familiarity of the Romanian leader’s forename may account, to some extent, for its incorrect spelling, the different versions of his surname exemplify the Romanian propaganda’s incapacity to reach a great part of the population. Therefore, the Romanian leader’s surname was mangled as “Ciausescu”,[9] “Ciuşiscu”[10] or Ceauşăscu.[11] Besides the assimilation of the RCP leadership’s identity with Ceausescu, another major flaw in the Romanian propaganda agenda was the latter’s popular perception as a father or godfather figure. Some letters expressed this imagined familiarity with the Romanian leader by addressing him as “dear/beloved” or “our dear and beloved”[12] comrade or general secretary. Hence, this closeness was matched with Ceausescu’s enjoying some kind of reverence from those writing to him. This open reverence reflected both his popular fatherly image and his leading position within the Romanian leadership. Therefore, while apologizing for disturbing him with their small, insignificant problems, people justified their gesture by describing Ceausescu as the ultimate depositary of social justice. For instance, one of the letters said: “I apologize for wasting your so precious time, but I have heard you listen to the problems of the whole people and where needed, you right wrongs”.[13] Consequently, a significant number of letters expressed their authors’ gratitude to Ceausescu for his intervention in solving their problems. The range of problems addressed in letters included accommodation, job requests, financial or educational issues. Although the local party and state organs had dealt with the issues described in the letters and sometimes their writers even openly admitted so, the individuals attributed the favorable solution to their problems to Ceausescu’s providential intervention. For example, while mentioning that she got a job following her appeal to the Romanian leader, the woman added: “this request was solved by the local organs as you had instructed them”.[14]

A further limit of the Romanian propaganda was the public reading of official decisions as eloquent illustrations of Ceausescu’s paternalism. During its early years in power, the new regime increased the revenues of the collectivized peasants and retired people. Such letters were acknowledgements of gratitude on the part of individuals and collective groups alike; most of these pensioners showed their appreciation towards the RCP leader, while ascribing the raising of the elderly people’s average income to Ceausescu’s “paternal concern” towards this marginal category of Romanian people.[15] Another distinct group of letters concentrated on the problem of accommodation. For instance, a young female worker expressed her gratitude to the Romanian leader for her new “sunny and bright” home, where she could recover after her long suffering from tuberculosis.[16] In one letter, a woman mentioned that during Ceausescu’s visit in Cluj-Napoca, she submitted her request for a place to live. Now, she was writing to let him know that the local authorities had given her a home where she “could rest after work”.[17] Educational issues were under attention, as well. While for some individuals the new educational opportunities were a means for professional integration, for others they also meant social rehabilitation. Two examples are worth mentioning. The first was the case of an orphan and handicapped girl whose application for a special school received no answer until she wrote to Ceausescu about her situation. Therefore, she showed appreciation towards her benefactor as she had been able to learn a trade and lead a “dignified life with all family members”. The other case was that of a former Iron Guard activist, whose political past had prevented him from graduating the faculty of medicine. After writing to the RCP leader, he received approval for the state exam and, therefore, he thanked Ceausescu for his social and political rehabilitation, for “bringing him back among honest people” and for the life-saving opportunity of practising his chosen profession.[18]

A distinct category of letters contains a particular request: that Ceausescu should perform “a Christian act” of baptizing children or witnessing the marriage of young couples.[19] Consequently, the popular image of the RCP leader enriched itself with a new attribute: that of a godfather, an attribute that bore little connection with his propaganda-sponsored image. According to the Romanian popular tradition, the sponsorship institution (or of being a “naş” – ”godfather”) creates a symbolic relationship of kinship between the two families involved. Usually, the godparents assume the role of spiritual parents and also undertake certain social and economic commitments in relation with their spiritual children.[20]

Those writing to Ceausescu and asking him to be the godfather of their newly born children came mainly from very poor and large families, where one parent was usually physically incapable of supporting his/her family. One sender described his family situation as follows: “(…) we are a poor family and we have no prospect to earn so as to fulfill our basic needs (…) all the children are at home [they were 10 children] and have no job”. A father of 9, suffering from TBC and being unable to work, asked Ceausescu not only to christen his daughter, but also to financially support his family to buy clothes for his 4 school-going offspring.[21] Besides this humanitarian argument, the petitioners proved themselves to be very inventive when it came to presenting their cases and hopefully getting Ceausescu to baptize their children. One argument was the parents’ decision to name their child after the Romanian leader. For example, a father wrote to Ceausescu inviting him to baptize his twins since one of them was to be given his forename.[22] Other parents chose to put forward “communist” arguments: that one of the parents, usually the father, was a party member and a veteran worker (“I have been a worker since the year of 1939” or, as one party prime secretary wrote down, “I have always been a worker and a class fighter”)[23], that the child’s birthday/baptism coincided with different official events (the National Day or the RCP leader’s visit in their town or region)[24] or that the parents wished to organize “a communist christening as never seen before” in their native region.[25] In several letters, Ceausescu’s image as a godfather combined with his parental attributes, as those writing to him argued that his participation in a baptism ceremony would in fact replicate, on a minor scale, his major quality of being the father of his people. One peasant woman from Aiud and a party member asked the Romanian leader to be “the godfather of our child (…) as you are our father and the father of all the workers in the entire Socialist Republic of Romania”. A railroad worker wrote to Ceausescu the following lines: “Beloved father, I consider you the godfather of my child and I thank you for creating a beautiful life for all of us, a life that our children can enjoy”.[26]

Young couples or their parents might invite Ceausescu to witness their marriage or the wedding of their children. Their requests made mention not only of material difficulties, but also brought arguments that could fall into the category of what I call emotional blackmail. A future groom mentioned that the RCP leader’s attendance to his marriage ceremony would demonstrate “the preoccupation you have as a beloved leader of our people for all mankind and primarily for the contemporary youth (…) educated under the socialist sun”. Another young man mentioned that Ceausescu’s witnessing his marriage “would constitute evidence of (your) concern for the working people regardless of the social position they hold in society”.[27]

Although Ceausescu never attended any of these events, his physical absence was usually compensated by other things. The local party secretary was instructed to present congratulations, to thank for the invitation on behalf of the Romanian leader, to justify his nonattendance by invoking his busy official agenda and to offer presents or material support when needed.[28]

I have identified three main ways of expressing gratitude for Ceausescu’s intervention in solving people’s personal problems, at least two of which contradicted the spirit and the letter of the official propaganda. One way of thanking the Romanian leader was to invoke God’s protection for him. For example, an elderly woman wrote him the following lines: “Comrade Secretary Ceausescu I pray the good Lord to give you many happy years, health (…) to live and do only good”.[29] The second example of misappropriating the propaganda message refers to the inadequate use of certain contemporary slogans. In order to demonstrate that they were reliable citizens and politically worthy recipients of socialist welfare, several people employed the official language completely unrelated to the topic of their letters. For instance, after thanking Ceausescu and other party and state leaders for his increased income, one retired man ended his letters in the following way: “we fight for peace”, this probably echoing the on-going official campaign for peace in Vietnam.[30] Finally, people showed their gratitude by vowing to be model exponents of the contemporary code of socialist values. For instance, a mother thanked Ceausescu for helping her “children to get their legal right [the board allowance] (…) for not leaving them without a home”; she also mentioned her decision to raise her children so as to become worthy citizens of the socialist state.[31] The former Iron Guard militant for whom Ceausescu’s intervention meant social and political rehabilitation asked to work as a doctor in “a difficult rural health centre to show the Party that my gratefulness for the confidence I have been granted is boundless”. There, he could make up “through work, through diligence” for the political mistakes of the past while promising to contribute wholeheartedly to “the progress of socialism” in Romania.[32]

In assessing the limits of the Romanian propaganda as reflected in the letters people sent Nicolae Ceausescu at the beginning of his leadership, I will consider another issue, that of the historical problem of Bessarabia and the Northern part of Bukovina. The Romanian regime’s assumption of the conflict waged over these two former national provinces against the Soviet Union must be seen in the wider context of the way the political relations between these two states had evolved since the beginning of the 1960s. This period coincided with the public outburst of disagreement between the Romanian and the Soviet leaders concerning their divergent perspectives on their future national and regional economic development. The Soviet-endorsed plan of coordination and integration of the national economies of the socialist states proposed by Khrushchev in June 1962 would have resulted in the reinforcement of the existing pattern of development, and therefore, in the denial of the future possibility of the less developed countries to catch up with other, more advanced brotherly states. For Romania, complying with this COMECOM plan would have meant withdrawing from its long-term rapid and all-round industrialization program sanctioned by the Third Congress of the Romanian Working Party, held in June 1960. The arguments invoked by the Romanian leadership were related to both the technological solution of its problems of rapid economic growth and industrial underdevelopment, and the political and ideological significance attached to the industrial type of national modernization. Accordingly, the goal of industrialization represented the singular ideological expression of building socialism in Romania and transforming the country into an independent and developed country both economically and politically. Over-optimistically labeled as a proclamation of independence, the Romanian Working Party’s Statement of Independence of April 1964 asserted, in fact, the right of the Romanian party to decide its own domestic and foreign policy based on its immediate interests. This implied a radical reassessment of the political relations within the socialist camp; no party or other superstate authority could impose its unique and uniform patterns and recipes as mandatory requirements for the general development of the entire socialist system. Following this public assertion of political autonomy from the Soviet ally, the RWP faced a legitimacy dilemma.[33] Lacking now the Soviet sponsored legitimating force of proletarian internationalism, the Romanian leadership was forced to enter the national realm. Consequently, the RWP’s assumption of a national political line described it as a historical defender of the national values of independence, unity and sovereignty, especially against the background of the traditional Romanian anti-Russian feeling. This turnover in the official policy was epitomized by the de-Sovietization campaign of the Romanian public and cultural life, and especially by the assumption of the historical problem of Bessarabia (see, for example, the publication of Karl Marx’s “Notes about Romanians” in 1964 or of Engels’ letter sent to the Romanian socialist Ion Nadejde, also published in 1964, which mentioned and condemned the annexation of Bessarabia by the Tsarist Empire[34]). After Gheorghiu-Dej’s demise in March 1965, the new party leader, Nicolae Ceausescu continued the national political line with its previously established anti-Russian bias. In his discourse held on 7 May 1966, Ceausescu not only established the major guidelines for reinterpreting the Romanian history in order to portray the RCP as the successor, in the national pantheon, of the historical forces involved in the struggle for building the national state and the Romanian nation, but he also dropped hints to the Romanian claims on Bessarabia.[35]

In this political context, several Romanian citizens stated opinions on the newly elected leadership in respect to Bessarabia. The nature of the documents (letters sent to Ceausescu and kept in the archive of the former CC) and their small number rule out the pretence of assessing fully the popular opinion on this issue. While a significant number of letters speak highly of the national political line embraced by the RCP, and put forward the requests of Soviet ceding Bessarabia and North of Bukovina back again to Romania, there are also some letters expressing open criticism towards the authorities’ attitude in this matter. This type of epistles reveals that some citizens were fully aware of the hypocritical manipulation of these sensitive issues by the Romanian officials in general and by Nicolae Ceausescu in particular, to legitimize their newly acquired political positions. The pervading theme of all these letters was the senders’ xenophobic anti-Soviet feelings, demonstrating the failure of the Romanian pro-Soviet propaganda after 1945.

The letters exposed anti-Soviet popular feelings by mentioning the behavior of the Soviet state towards Romania in 1940, its refusal to cede back to Romania the occupied territories and its intention to use the cultural sovietization and economic integration to gain control over the entire state. A First World War veteran mentioned to Ceausescu that “our neighbors from the East curtailed again (our) country, seizing Bessarabia and the North of Bukovina, and even half of Dorohoi county and at their height of their cynicism, they still pretend to nourish everlasting friendship towards us, Romanians. I think this (situation) suits them but the people and the entire Romanian nation consider this friendship as that of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If we are really engaged in a true, honest, friendly relation with them, they should prove it (…) by ceding Bessarabia and the North of Bukovina back to us. You, Comrade Ceausescu, have direct relations with the Soviet leaders, I say, why wouldn’t you make them this proposal, from friend to friend, showing them that the whole Romanian people are asking for it?”. One sender was convinced that the Soviet expansionist plans towards Romania would continue. He argued that Moscow’s refusal to cede Bessarabia and the North of Bukovina back to Romania echoed the Soviet intention of using these lands as an advanced post in case of a final strike against the country. Thus, “A question arises: why is the treaty between Hitler and Stalin and the (Soviet) seizure of Bessarabia and the North of Bukovina still valid, if the Soviets are not aiming for territorial expansion? Why did they extend their rule over the northern part? Is it because they wanted to isolate the Romanian element and make a deal with Hungarians and use them accordingly? Bessarabia and Bukovina are Romanian territories. Certainly, the Munich (agreement) favors them and everything favoring them is right and Marxist-Leninist. The Hitlerists exterminated people in camps, but Russians are no better than them”.[36]

Besides letters expressing their senders’ belief in the new party leadership’s determination to regain the Romanian territories taken by the Soviet Union, in August 1940, there were also messages expressing personal dissatisfaction about the Romanian diplomacy’s failure to achieve this goal. Referring to different episodes in the contemporary Romanian foreign policy, the letters emphasized the inconsistency and superficiality of the official actions concerning this territorial dispute with the Soviet Union. Instead of denouncing publicly the Soviet aggression against Romania from August 1940, and initiating clear actions to rectify the existing situation, the senders mentioned that the Romanian diplomacy had chosen to sign official documents sanctioning the existing territorial status-quo or to get involved in peripheral actions from the point of view of the national interest in Bessarabia and Bukovina. Consequently, the argument was that the sanctioning of the inviolability of European frontiers created at the end of World War II was, in fact, an indirect endorsement of the Soviet territorial gains at the expense of the Romanian state. One individual, named Romanescu, wrote Ceausescu the following lines: “While reading the official statement issued on the occasion of Todor Zhivkov’s visit in our country, I was unpleasantly surprised by the excerpt referring to the German Democratic Republic, which mentions, among other things, the inviolability of the borders established in Europe at the end of the Second World War. I consider this phrase to be utterly wrong because it harms the aspirations, demands and interests of the Romanian state, because you (Nicolae Ceausescu) also recognize implicitly the frontiers (borders) with USSR and consequently, the relinquishment of Bessarabia and Bukovina”.[37] An unsigned letter criticizes the current official position regarding the restoration of the inter-war territorial integrity of the Romanian state: “As one can see, we, Romanians, are more interested in Vietnam and American imperialism than in Bessarabia and the North of Bukovina, taken by force by Soviet imperialists. When do you intend to organize marches at United Nations Organization so that Soviet imperialism will give us back the land torn off from our motherland’s body? Is Vietnam to us, Romanians, of more value than Bessarabia and the North of Bukovina? Why so much cowardice on the part of our state leadership in this regard? Why are we interested in Vietnam in Asia when we should take care of our Vietnam (Bessarabia and the North of Bukovina)? We should know that the entire Romanian people and history condemn you for your position towards this desideratum. (…) It is true that Americans are imperialists but aren’t the Soviets imperialists too? (…) Do you think we give a damn about Vietnam? No, we care (…) about Bessarabia and Bukovina. We wish to read in our newspapers that the party and government have demanded the Russians to give Bessarabia and Bukovina back to us”.[38]

The main purpose of this article has been to highlight the limits of the Romanian propaganda as they were reflected in the letters people sent to Nicolae Ceausescu during the first years of his leadership (1965-1967). The limits of the propaganda were assessed in the view of Ceausescu’s popular identification with the Romanian leadership and especially with an all-powerful national paternal or godparent figure. The citizens addressing the RCP leader on the question of Bessarabia and Bukovina used the official propaganda arguments in order to demonstrate the hypocritical official instrumentation of this sensitive issue in order to bolster the regime’s popular legitimacy.

 Bibliography

Archival materials

Direcţia Arhivelor Nationale Istorice Centrale (DANIC), Fond CC al PCR -Secţia Cancelarie.

Books

Floyd, David, Rumania. Russia’s Dissident Ally, Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1965.

Ionescu, Ghita The Reluctant Ally. A Study of Communist Neo-Colonialism, An Ampersand Book, 1965.

Lévesque, Jacques, Le conflict sino-soviétique et l’ Europe de l’ Est. Les incidences sur le conflicts soviéto-polonais et soviéto-roumain, Les Presses de L’ Université de Montréal, 1970.

Marin, Manuela, Originea şi evoluţia cultului personalităţii lui Nicolae Ceauşescu 1965-1989, Editura ALTIP, Alba Iulia, 2008.

Memoires

Constantiniu, Florin, De la Răutu şi Roller la Muşat şi Ardeleanu, Editura Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 2007.

Niculescu-Mizil, Paul, O istorie trăită, Editura Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1997.

Collection of documents

Ceauşescu, Nicolae, PCR–continuator al luptei revoluţionare şi democratice a poporului român, al tradiţiilor mişcării muncitoreşti şi socialiste din România. Expunere la adunarea festivă organizată cu prilejul aniversării a 45 de ani de la crearea PCR. 7 mai 1966, Editura Politică, Bucureşti, 1966.

This work was supported by CNCSIS-UEFISCSU, project number PN II-RU code 410/2010

Notes

Negotiating Communist Boundaries

The demise of Communism remains an important research topic for Human and Social Sciences. Twenty years on, with the benefit of hindsight, research on the phenomenon has been enriched, its instruments refined to respond to the complexity of the concepts involved as well as to the critical and theoretical approaches in circulation. These are now applied to a field of investigation enriched by the publication of new documents and testimonies, as well as by the opening of document archives inaccessible until recently. Building on the topic of boundary negotiation within communism, this issue of Echinox Journal reunites several generations of researchers from various European countries, applying different perspectives on a phenomenon characterised by the complexity of a whole ”continent”. It is a continent possessing a typical geography and therefore making necessary a good mapping at all levels: historical, political, social, psychological, cultural and literary. We do not claim having achieved such a map, but do believe that this issue of Echinox Journal can provide a series of suggestions and keys perhaps landmarks, useful for a reader interested in (re)visiting the complex topic of Communism.

In designing this volume, we started from the idea of “boundary”, imposition or limit, as one of the main realities of a totalitarian regime, at work at all social and cultural levels of the Eastern European societies. The symbolical boundary (a sort of imaginary “wire fencing”) was present in all walks of life, from the closed geographical borders to the ideological restrictions enforced upon culture and literature (as a new, ideologically imposed “canon”). Professional and even private life was subject to various boundaries (from the freedom of speech to the controlled distribution of workplaces, houses, food, everyday items and so on). The system was the only one to decide which the accepted limits were, be they in everyday life, legislation, culture, press, education or art. This issue of Echinox Journal investigates therefore the manner in which the idea of boundary, totalitarian imposition or limitation is perceived by post-communist research today, especially by a new generation, as the volume features contributions signed mainly by researchers specialised after 1989 and who thus recover and try to make sense of – in many papers through direct access to recently open official archives –an important part of their countries’ history (but also history of literature or social history), benefiting from the current framework of research, the new means and perspectives. Our aim has been that of offering the reader a truly interdisciplinary collection of papers, signed by specialists in different areas of social and human sciences (history, literature, cultural studies, psychology and others), as well as representing different cultures and nationalities – mainly belonging to Eastern European countries, as the topic refers to realities that affected this part of the world. We welcome contributions from specialists in some Western countries (France, Switzerland) the volume opening up – we hope – a prolific dialogue between the two geographical areas and their different historical experiences and ways of envisioning communism.

The studies are grouped around four main sections, according to the principle of shared conceptions and similarity of perspectives as well as that of shared scientific background and tools. Thus, the first section, Life and Culture under Siege, figures mainly studies focusing on the historical and social aspects of the restrictive policies of the communist regime. The papers in this section (most of them based on direct study of official communist documents and archives in Bucharest) profiles the totalitarian state and the manner in which it tried to shape indeed to level down (by means of its specific control apparatus) education, culture, law, architecture, among other. The analyses illustrate how, for instance, the state tried to impose a typical Soviet style model to public space, in both urban and rural environments (see historians Mara Mărginean’s and Alexandru Câmpeanu’s papers on the socialist modernization of Hunedoara in 1950-1951, and respectively, on the Soviet style modernization of the Romanian villages 1948 – 1962). In an archival research, Manuela Marin approaches one of the most important totalitarian phenomena (propaganda) and its limits during Ceauseşcu’s first years in power (1965-1967). Along with propaganda, another significant aspect of a totalitarian regime is by definition, repression. Corneliu Pintilescu approaches the latter in a legitimising context, the Socialist legislation and the communist mechanism of legalising political abuse. Another historian’s paper, that of Cătălina Mihalache, focuses on Communist education and its system of control and limitation through punishment and reward. Moving towards the field of clinical psychology, Alina Bîrsan’s paper is interesting in its illustration of the traumatic aspects of the forced adaptation and/or resistance to the totalitarian restrictive frame. Discussing culture and society within the ideological boundaries imposed by Communism, Cristina Spinei approaches the concept of “political culture”, while Alexandru Matei explores the relation between communist ideology and aestheticism. Francois Ruegg initiates a complex discussion on the prolongation and current effects of the political intrusions in cultural matters in post-communist Europe (with reference to the situation of a contemporary cultural “siege”).

When discussing a framework of limits and limitation, one of the most immediate implications (illustrated by the second section, Escaping Communist Boundaries) that comes to the fore is the subject of freedom (see Rodica Ilie’s study), the need of escaping / trying to transgress the boundaries (whether physical or psychological). Focussing on recollections from the communist period, Andi Mihalache’s paper approaches the need to escape the pressure of the public life of the time, while Alain Vuillemin ventures further, looking at the attempts of some authors in the communist block to denounce the political restrictions to the West. Corina Boldeanu focuses on irony as a subtle form of evasion, and as a form of poetic language used to circumvent and fight censorship.

A third section approaches closer culture and literature by addressing issues regarding the negotiating boundaries in cultural policies and literature. This extensive section gathers case studies on literature written during communism, especially by literary studies specialists working in different Eastern European literatures (Croatian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Romanian and German literature as practiced in/on Communist Romania). Caius Dobrescu focuses on the delicate problem of writers’ subjective consciousness of the limit in the post-Stalinist period, an “intra-subjective dimension of the mental and rhetorical construction of the limit”. Sanda Cordoş also writes on the post-war Romanian literature, examining the complex manner in which literature was submitted to the political authorities and the measures and directives, external to its field and specificity. This political intrusion is also illustrated in the mourning poetry examples offered by Anna Spólna from Polish literature (on Stalin’s death) as well as by the interesting 1980s Romanian poetry selections in Andrei Bodiu’s study on the mechanisms and limits of censorship. A specific form of (this time direct) negotiation is analysed by Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu, who discusses a phenomenon manifest especially in the late 1940s-1950s Romanian literary environment (a compromise, a “deal with the Devil” authors accepted/were forced to do between ideology and aesthetic value). Restriction patterns and stereotypes within communist countries become apparent in discussions of the studies on Slovenian and Croatian literatures (the latter in an interesting Gender Studies approach on the negotiation of boundaries, margins, liminalities). Representations of the theme in Russian and German literature are approached by a group of papers, each group establishing a complex dialogue on two cultural contexts important within the totalitarian regime. Ileana Alexandra Orlich speaks of Solzhenitsyn’s works and their importance for revealing the restrictions and atrocities of the Stalinist gulag, while Olga Grădinaru and Mihaela Lovin deal with the distortion of literature by communist ideology (either on writing Soviet literature or reading of the classics). An interesting take on German culture in communist Romania is offered by Carmen Elisabeth Puchianu, Mihaela Bereschi Rogozan and Delia Cotârlea who write about the German language cultural communities in Romania and how totalitarian control is reflected in their literature (see Rogozan’s study on Nobel prize winner Herta Müller) as well as cultural journalism. Moreover, a poet herself, Puchianu shares her writing experience (as a German language author) in the 1980s Romania.

Discussing Communist boundaries after twenty years since its collapse makes the year 1989 a pivotal topic for the kind of analyses conducted here, especially as the moment represents itself a limit. Ruxandra Cesereanu deals precisely with the 1989 moment and the unsolved issues around the violent historic event, i.e. the “terrorists” (the unseen protagonists of the Romanian Revolution). Following the end of Communism, the four papers closing the volume discuss several of the very interesting directions and questions of interest for international research of Communism. Ion Manolescu thus tackles the urban “systematization” inheritance, while Vlad Navitski, questioning the tradition of the left through the communist “lesson,” and Alin Rus, who refers to the situation of a former Soviet country, Moldova and its identity problems, focus on other aspects of post-communist societies and their traumas. Finally, Patricia Goletz deals with a very significant aspect of today’s research on the communist past (not only in Slovakia, the case studied by Goletz, but in all former communist countries) – the institutional recovery of the memory. All these papers, forming a sort of epilogue to a discussion on the communist restrictive influence on the society, a larger debate on the consequences or effects of the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe.

At the end of this foreword, we would like to take the opportunity to thank all the authors for their interesting and stimulating contributions and to the editorial board of Echinox Journal, especially to Professor Corin Braga, for all their support and for providing the topic of boundaries within Communism with this excellent framework of analysis, thus continuing new directions and questions to add to the collection of academic issues already published by the Echinox Journal on different aspects of totalitarianism.

Sanda Cordoş

Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu

2010  volume 19                    Communism – Negotiation of Boundaries

Coordinatori: Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu & Sanda Cordoş
Editor: Phantasma. Centrul de Cercetare a Imaginarului
Editura: Fundaţia Culturală Echinox, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ISSN 1582-960X (România)
ISBN 2-905725-06-0 (France)

Summary

Viaţa şi cultura sub asediu

Manuela Marin, Limitele propagandei comuniste româneşti: Exemplul scrisorilor poporului [13-21]
Mara Mărginean, Importând cuvinte pentru a construi un oraş: modernizarea socialistă a Hunedoarei între planurile arhitecţilor şi cele ale politicienilor, 1950-1951 [22-34]
Alina Bîrsan, “Rezistenţă” şi “rezilienţă” a subiectului cotidian în context comunist român. Configuraţii ale politicii în lumina psihologiei clinice [35-44]
Cătălina Mihalache, Între pedeapsă şi recompensă: Familiile şcolarilor în serviciul educaţiei comuniste [45-62]
Alexandru Câmpeanu, Modernizarea în stil sovietic a satelor româneşti (1948 – 1962) [63-71]
Corneliu Pintilescu, Legalitatea socialistă şi dilemele represiunii politice. De la modelul sovietic la democraţiile populare [72-86]
François Ruegg, Cultura sub asediu în Europa. Odată cu sfârşitul comunismului, instalarea anunţată a unei gândirin europene unice şi rentabile [87-100]
Cristina Spinei, Dimensiuni ale politicii culturale româneşti: conştiinţă civică sau punct de convergenţă? [101-111]
Alexandru Matei, Se poate vorbi de o estetică a comunismului? [112-119]

Evadând din graniţele comuniste

Andi Mihalache, Evadarea din spaţiul public comunist: obiecte, decoruri, amintiri [123-134]
Corina Boldeanu, Transgresând cenzura comunistă prin ironie poetică [135-145]
Rodica Ilie, Viaţa şi opiniile lui Zacharias Lichter de Matei Călinescu sau calea tăcută spre libertate [146-154]
Alain Vuillemin, Denunţarea comunismului sovietic în Franţa interbelică de către intelectuali de expresie franceză din Europa de Est şi Centrală [155-161]

Politici culturale şi literatură: negociind limitările

Caius Dobrescu, Legende ale frontierei interioare. Conştiinţa în literatura română a epocii post-staliniste: 1960-1989 [165-182]
Sanda Cordoş, Literatura română postbelică. Limite, privilegii, funcţii [183-190]
Réka M. Cristian, Tronuri periferice: Negociind limitele în proza feminină croată de azi [191-200]
Anna Spólna, Limitele ale creativităţii în poezia funerară a realismului socialist: Elegii dedicate morţii lui Stalin în presa poloneză [201-211]
Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu, Negociind “canonul” ideologic comunist – Un studiu de caz: Petru Dumitriu (1948-1953) [212-228]
David Bandelj, Caracterul închis sau deschis al graniţei slovene vestice la trei scriitori: Pahor – Rebula – Kocbek [229-242]
Ileana Alexandra Orlich, Totalitarism comunist în literatura lui Soljeniţân [243-249]
Mihaela Rogozan, Frontierele în Diskurs des Alleinseins de Herta Müller [250-258]
Delia Cotârlea, Politici culturale şi literatură între 1965 şi 1975 în periodicul român în limba germană Volk und Kultur [259-268]
Andrei Bodiu, Cenzură comunistă şi poezie românească în anii ’80 [269-272]
Carmen Elisabeth Puchianu, Scriind în cursa de şoareci. Despre scrierea poeziei şi a prozei la finele anilor ’80, sub dictatură. O retrospectivă (auto)critică [273-281]
Olga Grădinaru, Copilul ca personaj şi eroul în proza sovietică a celui de-al Doilea Război Mondial [282-290]
Mihaela Lovin, Livada de vişini în relectură sovietică [291-300]
Elena Butuşină, Micul lup cenuşiu va veni să vindece rănile perioadei comuniste [301-311]

Evadarea finală: Europa de Est după 1989

Ruxandra Cesereanu, Revoluţia anticomunistă în România şi “teroriştii” din decembrie ’89 [315-328]
Patricia Goletz, Procesul de transformare şi problemele curente ale Institutului Memoriei Naţionale din Bratislava [329-337]
Ion Manolescu, Ştergerea identităţii anterioare. Efecte ale procesului de “sistematizare” în România lui Nicolae Ceauşescu [338-342]
Vlad Navitski, Pentru a sfârşi cu istoria: Ce anume ne pot spune experienţele stângiste despre lumea contemporană [343-361]
Alin Rus, Româneşte sau moldoveneşte? Limba co o legătură artificială între locuitorii unui nou stat [362-373]

Book reviews [377-418]