Full Description
This book examines how the process of remembering Stalinist repression in Romania has shifted from individual, family, and group representations of lived and witnessed experiences characteristic of the 1990s to more recent and state-sponsored expressions of historical remembrance through their incorporation in official commemorations, propaganda sites, and restorative and compensatory measures. Based on fieldwork dealing with Stalinist repression and memorialization, together with archival research on the secret police (Securitate), it adopts an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the resurfacing of particular themes. As such it draws on concepts from sociology, political science, and legal studies, related to memory, justice, redress, identity, accountability, and reconciliation. A study of competing narratives concerning the meaning of the past as part of a struggle over the legitimacy of the post-communist state, Repression, Resistance, and Collaboration in Stalinist Romania 1944-1964 combines memory studies with a transitional justice approach that will appeal to scholars of sociology, heritage and memory studies, politics, and law.
Contents
Introduction 1. Repression and Victimization 2. The Piteşti Project: Testimonies of Remembering 3. Vernacular and Politicized Representations of the Armed Resistance 4. Perpetrators: Indifference, Denial and Delayed Justice 5. Different Voices: The Experiences of Women and Their Representations of Repression and Resistance 6. The Past in the Present Tense: The Case of the National Peasant Christian-Democratic Party and its Leader Corneliu Coposu Concluding Remarks
