România de la comunism la postcomunism. Criză, transformare, democratizare

Coordonatori: Dalia Báthory, Ștefan Bosomitu, Cosmin Budeancă

Volumele XIV-XV/2019-2020

Anuarul este disponibil pe site-ul Polirom.

Cuvânt înainte (pp. 15-19)

Partea I

Oana Ionel Demetriade, Mihai Demetriade, Practici ilegale ale Direcţiei Cercetări Penale din cadrul DSS (Compartimentul Arest, 1987‑1989) (pp. 23-72)

The Department of State Security severely sanctioned the various gestures of opposition to the Romanian communist regime that occurred in the late 1980s. One of the institution’s most important branches was the 6th Directorate of Criminal Investigations, which coordinated the inquiries and established the measures of prevention for the entire country (for those particular cases not sent to the courts). Despite the regime’s efforts to becloud the political crimes as common crimes, those persons considered more dangerous were placed under arrest and withheld in temporary arrest in the cells of the 6th Directorate, in the centre of Romania’s capital city. This study discusses the following themes: the nature and architecture of this Securitate branch of criminal inquires and its relation to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations of the Militia; the number of those placed under arrest and the legal framework within which their acts were interpreted; illegal apprehensions, including kidnappings; the treatment to which those apprehended were subjected to (program, conditions of detention, punishments, medical assistance); the unfolding of the criminal inquiries (methods, verbal and physical violence); typologies of case closings (punishments for political or common law crimes, amnesties and pardons); examples of actions framed as „propaganda against the socialist order” and the use of clandestine work in the process of the criminal inquiry. â

Keywords: the Securitate Directorate of Criminal Investigations, propaganda against the socialist order, clandestine, preventive

Nicoleta Şerban, Ultima revoltă ţărănească dinaintea căderii regimului Ceauşescu: satul Petrova (judeţul Maramureş), ianuarie 1989 (pp. 73-89)

In March 1988, Ceauşescu increasingly promoted the rural systematization project, through which, he believed, land for agriculture would have been recovered. The project involved the demolition of 7‑8 thousand villages and the relocation of the rural population to blocks of flats. The project would have been a catastrophe, because it meant the uprooting of a population, the destruction of a rural heritage, seriously violating a number of human rights. This is the reason why a protest movement arose in the West, called Opération Villages Roumains. During the operation, the village of Petrova from Maramureş was adopted, a village where there was a violent revolt of the inhabitants who opposed the systematization. The news made a splash in the West, which is why the Security Departement went on alert.

Keywords: Communism, rural, Petrova, Céroux, merging, revolt

Roland Olah, Fenomenul frontierist. Aspecte sociodemografice privind cetăţeni români reţinuţi în Ungaria pentru trecerea ilegală a graniţei de vest (1980‑1989) (pp. 91-116)

The communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe imposed severe control measures concerning the free movement of the population. They established severe border controls and legislated for restrictive measures on emigration and passport release, as well as for major punishments in the case of illegal border crossings. However, as the legal migration was prohibited, the Romanians resorted to fraudulently crossing the borders. The decline of the quality of life, together with the repressive system imposed by the authorities forced tens of thousands of Romanians to attempt to leave the country even with the cost of their lives. The main cause of the illegal emigrational wave of Romanians was economic. Arrested by the Romanian authorities or handed over by Western state authorities, long years of prison waited for them.

Keywords: refugees, illegal crossing, emigration, Hungary, communism

Mara Mărginean, Cooperare transnaţională şi dezvoltare socialistă în România anilor 1970: preambul al unei crize profunde (pp. 117-134)

This article examines the practices and patterns of knowledge transfer across the Iron Curtain in the 1970s through a case study of the work of the United Nations Development Programme. It conducts a case study on two seminars on the social implications of industrialization in rural areas, organized by ASSP in 1973 and 1975, respectively, at the request of the United Nations Social Division to bring to the fore the many ways in which scientific and technical cooperation contributed to the adjustment of Romania’s status as a developing country. It looks at the main mechanisms involved in organizing the two events. It also analyzes the transnational cooperation channels, questioning the possible forms of knowledge hybridization and the extent to which membership in various supranational bodies has been important in articulating national development policies.

Keywords: Romania, development, crisis, rural inequality

Cornel Ban, Un comunism impermeabil? Economie occidentală în România în timpul Războiului Rece (pp. 135-154)

What shapes the spread of an adversary’s economic ideas into the economics profession of an authoritarian regime? The main argument of the paper is that some elements of Western economics travelled into the narrow conduits of academic life in Cold War Romania as a result of the demand of the planning apparatus’ for technical knowledge about running complex economic systems. In turn, this demand opened up opportunities for direct and indirect communication with the American and British centers of professional prestige in economics during the détente of the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the active use of Western economic ideas and calculative devices. As a result of the rapprochement, communist Romania acquired a generation of economists conversant in the main advances of US and UK‑based economics, used methodologies of the Western neoclassical synthesis in their work and even integrated some of them into the planning techno‑structure of the socialist economy. Their impact in the economics profession covered the spectrum from intellectual dissidence to grafting onto the ideas and devices of the socialist planning apparatus. But unlike in the canonical cases, the second Cold War waged by the Reagan administration moderated the effects of this opening due to the Ceauşescu regime’s own ideological retrenchment. In short, the study highlights the role of variation in regime ideology, knowledge demand and shifting international relations between the authoritarian state and global liberal powers.

Keywords: Western economics, détente, socialist economy

Valentin Maier, Pregătirea unui nou tip de specialist în România comunistă: subinginerul (pp. 155-193)

Industrial development, achieved through forced industrialization, was placed at the centre of the economic development within the communist system. In fulfilling this decision, „cabinet ideas” prevailed over realities on the ground. All the newly set up industrial enterprises needed a workforce ready to carry out various activities. Some completely new, others old, but made possible with new means. After two decades of industrialization, the demand for labour force was quite weighty, and technicians, foremen or engineers proved to be insufficient to cover this need. The training of engineers generally took five years through daytime studies or even six years through evening and extramural studies. This is why the decision to train a new type of specialist was taken, an intermediary between foreman and engineer: the sub‑engineer. His training was considered a higher education program, just like the one for engineers, but it only lasted for three or four years, depending on the type of studies attended, and required fewer financial and educational investments. In other words, this type of specialist was much more adaptable to the great and urgent need for workforce in communist Romania. The training of sub‑engineers began in 1968 with the adoption of the Education Law, and was introduced in many higher education centres, but also in cities with important industrial enterprises. In this article, I analyse aspects related to the decision process involved in training these new specialists and the organization of the education of sub‑engineers, focusing on the evolution of institutions and specializations in which they could be trained, but also revealing some other aspect defining this type of specialist.

Keywords: institutions, specializations, higher education, Communism, sub‑engineers

Ştefan‑Marius Deaconu, Limitările mobilităţii sociale prin intermediul învăţământului superior la sfârşitul regimului comunist din România (pp. 195-217)

In this article I analyse how higher education contributed to students’ social mobility in the last decade of the communist regime in Romania. By assessing a series of defining features of the development of the education system in the 1980s, I underline the limits of higher education social mobility in the period of reference. Despite the theoretical expectations that an increase in the number of student quotas in higher education and the diversification of the degrees would facilitate students’ social mobility, the reality proved different. In the first part of the period of reference this drawback was caused by political interference that favoured the exclusion of certain social categories from universities and by the consequences of the bureaucratic apparatus reform pushed by the RCP, while later being generated by the socioeconomic volatility of the economic crisis. Another factor contributing to this situation was the decrease in the theoretical retention rate of high school graduates into higher education in the context of a strong demographic boom caused by the effects of Decree no. 770/1966 and other pro‑natality policies. Lastly, the economic factor was also important, since it generated precarious study conditions especially in the second part of the 1980s, when Romania was facing an acute economic crisis. The crisis determined significant changes in higher education policies, notably the decrease of student quotas and their allocation mostly for part‑time and no attendance programs. These structural changes were advantageous for the state apparatus, but restricted the social mobility of the students.

Keywords: higher education, social mobility, Romania, manpower planning approach, state apparatus, education policy, student theoretical retention rate, limited social mobility

Simona Deleanu, O disidenţă singuratică: Gheorghe Ursu (pp. 219-240)

Almost 35 years after his death, the activity of the Romanian dissenter Gheorghe Ursu remains quasi‑unknown. This study stands as an attempt to bring forward details of his life and, most importantly, his activity as a dissenter, aiming to complete and correct information that appeared in the post‑communist historiography. The Securitate managed to destroy most of his writings, including his letters to Radio Free Europe, the 40 volumes of his personal diary as well as other documents. Thus, paradoxically, although Ursu spent most of his life writing, research regarding his life and his activity can only rely on his statements given to the investigators, as well as on the few surviving letters and fragments of his personal diary that his family salvaged. The activity of this engineer born with the soul of a writer grew, during the last decade of his life, from his wish to honestly exercise his profession while criticising the absurd, even criminal measures the regime enforced. Gheorghe Ursu’s case remains unique both regarding the post‑Helsinki Romanian dissidence and the particular ending of his life during a brutal questioning by the Securitate while officially being in the custody of the Miliţie. During the last decades, his case became one of the most representative transitional criminal justice cases.

Keywords: dissidence, anti‑communist, journal, letters

Csongor Jánosi, Disidenţa maghiară ardeleană în anii 1980. Forme de exprimare: samizdat, atitudine individuală, cerc ştiinţific subteran (pp. 241-260)

The Transylvanian Hungarian civic opposition began to manifest itself more strongly from the early 1980s through the activities of small groups of intellectuals, who operated in several locations in Transylvania and in Bucharest. The present study deals with those who at first sight proved to be the most vocal in terms of human rights in the Ceauşescu dictatorship. What happened then – the case of the Oradea‑based samizdat publication known as Ellenpontok (Counterpoints), the cultural opposition activities carried out by the linguist Éva Cseke‑Gyimesi, as well as by the poet Géza Szőcs, both from Cluj‑Napoca, by the Limes Circle and by the Kiáltó Szó (Screaming Word) samizdat from Cluj‑Napoca – seems to be integrated into a natural process of evolution, which has encouraged civic resistance among the Hungarian minority in Romania.

Keywords: Transylvanian Hungarian dissent, human rights, persecution, secret police

Manuela Marin, Drepturile omului la Radio Europa Liberă (pp. 261-284)

The study analyses the manner in which the Romanian department of Radio Free Europe presented the violations of human rights by the Romanian communist regime during the 1980s through two of its programs, namely „Human Rights” and „Listeners’ Mail”. At the same time, the author shows how this radio station had its own contribution to the functioning of the boomerang effect specific to transnational networks. Thus, RFE did not limit itself to presenting the cases of human rights violations to the international public opinion, but organized actions meant to put pressure on the communist regime in order for it to comply with the observance of human rights. The paper is structured in three main parts. The first part considers how human rights became a subject of international relations during the Cold War. The second part examines the role of RFE as an institution of the Cold War and its contribution to supporting the opposition to the communist regimes. The analysis of the letters sent to RFE and broadcast during its programs „Human Rights” and „Listeners’ Mail” forms the third part of the paper. It is organized around several themes related to the violation of the right of free movement related specifically to emigration and considers the motives for emigration, persecutions to which people who wanted to leave the country were subjected to, the complicated bureaucratic process they were forced to navigate through, and lastly, the illegal trespassing of the national frontier.

Keywords: Radio Free Europe, human rights, the Helsinki Final Act, letters, Cold War

Cristian Vasile, Antidisidenţa. Scriitorii şi diversele forme de adeziune la politica oficială în România anilor 1980 (pp. 285-300)

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a large‑scale adjustment to the Ceauşescu regime within writers’ milieus. The intellectual dissent that was manifest in Romania was put in the shade by this political orientation, especially in the field of literature (Paul Goma, Dorin Tudoran, Bujor Nedelcovici, Mircea Dinescu, Dan Petrescu etc.). This adherence to the official Ceauşescu policy (which I call antidissent) took various forms in the 1980s. This article aims primarily to review and analyse the factors that favoured the adaptation and collaboration of several writers with political power in the last communist decade, such as the instrumentalization of national traditions and values, their direct interest in maintaining royalties, social rights, special pensions even in times of economic crisis and shortage etc. Secondly, the article will investigate the role played by influential political and cultural actors in the writers’ tendency to political conformity, such as: Iosif Constantin Drăgan, Eugen Barbu, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, Adrian Păunescu, Edgar Papu. The article is mostly based on archival sources (mainly from the Central National Historical Archives, the Archive of the National Council for the Study of Security Archives) and memoirs.

Keywords: antidissent, writers, Ceauşescu regime, literature

Cosmin Năsui, Nicu Ceauşescu, UTC, UASCR – mecena ai mişcării culturale şi artistice de tineret din anii 1980 (pp. 301-330)

The student and youth cultural‑artistic movement in communist Romania was planned, organized, coordinated and financed by the Communist Youth Union (UTC), the Union of Romanian Student Associations (UASCR) and institutions or publications subordinated to them, being directly related to both political and ideological priorities, with the infrastructure especially created or allocated to its development, and the entire hierarchical apparatus subordinated to the first secretary of UTC, Nicu Ceauşescu. We focused our analysis on a few examples of the generation of dynastic communism and how it was trained to come to power, as well as on the characteristics of the „new man” of the 1970s‑1980s. We took a brief look at the structure of the Central Committee (CC) of UTC, at Nicu Ceauşescu’s subordinates or protégés, and we tried to understand how UTC worked, struggling between its freedom of self‑management and the atmosphere set by perestroika. In the second part of the article, we exemplified the development of political and ideological programs through several art exhibition events developed under the auspices of UTC, together with UASCR, and we took a brief look at UTC’s art collection.

Keywords: Communist Youth Union, Union of Romanian Student Associations, Nicu Ceauşescu, the 1980s Generation

Alexandra Bardan,„Oaze de Occident”: turism şi agrement în România anilor 1980 (pp. 331-351)

A dualistic structure of tourism prevailed in socialist Romania, through the configuration of two main products: „commercial tourism” was intended mainly for foreigners, while „social tourism” was a service provided for the working people. This economic approach belonged to the broader context of tensions that shaped the complex relationships between power and society within the austerity measures and the economic crisis of the 1980s. Beyond the disparities among domestic and foreign tourists, the tourism product intended for export appears as the paradoxical representation of „Western Oases” in Romanian resorts, accessible to local tourists by proximity, but unaffordable and prohibited through specific tourism policies. A chronology of the moments marking the establishment of „Western Oases” in Romanian tourism, as well as the professional strategies of key actors in the process (IAPIT, an enterprise for leisure services and industrial production for tourism, plus the disc‑jockey community) reveal the emergence of ambivalent professional practices in the tourism and leisure domain during the 1980s. Generated from and within the industry, these specific professional practices reveal a space where norms of socialist consumption were negotiated, facilitating unaccounted imports of Western products. The latter have further infiltrated the social fabric, gradually blurring the boundaries between the official and the informal – a „grey”, intermediate area that calls into question the function of multiple „safety valves”, allowed, tolerated or even promoted.

Keywords: media products, commercial tourism, video‑disco club, cable television

Liviu Rotman, Naţionalismul în România comunistă. Lungul drum către radicalizare şi extindere pe orizontală (pp. 353-381)

The research explores the role played by nationalism within the dynamics of the communist regime in Romania, given its two layers: the gregarious one – bringing into the open various xenophobic clichés from the historical past, and the Stalinist one – that had a permanent significance. Throughout the study, the idea that the nationalist approach of the Romanian Communists is synonymous with the rejection of destalinization and the adoption of the national‑communist way for a self‑governing, unaltered Romania is emphasized. Another significant point is that nationalism is a complex political construct, which covers an approach of ethnical otherness, a certain political economy, policies for education and coordination of the cultural and artistic creation, as well as of the social sciences, such as historiography, nuanced political views towards religious groups, foreign policy etc.
On the approach towards national minorities, the research promotes the concept of minority discomfort by underlining that the main objective in national politics is to reach a homogenous socialist people. Basically, this would be synonymous with the levelling of ethnical differences up to a complete uniformization. Similarly, some nuances in the leadership’s reactions towards minorities are emphasized. These reactions occurred due to quantitative criteria, but also because of elements in the cultural politics that have their roots in history. The paper unveils the characteristics of the communist economic nationalism, materialized through the effort of industrialization, especially of the heavy industry. The tendency to build economic giants is emphasized, as well as the desire to stand out through approaching top industrial branches such as the automotive industry. Also, the broad changes of history research are targeted by imposing nationalist clichés, usually borrowed from the interwar extremist discourses. Similarly, the radicalization of nationalism during the last years of the „Golden Era” – that reached extreme, fascist forms – is scrutinized. Essentially, the research tracks down the tendency of cultivating the culture of the besieged city, threatened from outside by foreigners, and from inside by foreign agents („agenturile străine”), mentioned by Nicolae Ceauşescu during his last days in power.

Keywords: minority space, ethnic homogenization, autarchy, minority discomfort, protochronism, anti‑Semitism

Florin‑Răzvan Mihai, Un deceniu „lung” în relaţiile internaţionale. Politica externă a regimului Ceauşescu în contextul anilor 1980 (pp. 383-398)

The author set out to explain the complicated international context of the 1980s, emphasizing the important changes in world politics that led to the known outcome of the Cold War. The article deals not only with Romania’s foreign policy and the reaction of the Romanian Communist Party leadership to events outside the country, but also with new strategies and visions in the foreign policy of states that played a significant role in international relations: the Soviet Union, the United States of America and China. The author also analyzes Romania’s diplomatic involvement in Middle East issues, as well as the important themes advanced by the Romanian diplomacy in the ninth decade of the last century. During the 1980s, international relations were marked by the increasing competition between the two superpowers, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, by China’s economic rise and its political openness to dialogue with the above‑mentioned states, by the intensification of discussions on Human Rights, global disarmament and the threat of nuclear danger, as well as by the changes triggered by profound reforms, first in the Soviet space, then in other communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. In Bucharest, all these issues were dealt with little ideological flexibility, so that towards the end of this „long” decade Romania came to be isolated from the main political‑military camps, being criticized both in Washington and in Moscow.

Keywords: international relations, foreign policy, Ceauşescu Regime, 1980s

Daniel Filip, Reacţia conducerii Partidului Comunist Român în faţa prefacerilor poloneze din anul 1989 (pp. 399-415)

This article explores the reactions of the Romanian Communist Party leadership towards the rapid changes which took place in Poland in the second half of 1989, as well as its attempts to counteract their presumed influence at the level of the Soviet bloc. Although this subject has been analysed by historians, most have limited themselves to the letter sent by Nicolae Ceauşescu in August 1989 or to the debates of the Politburo, ignoring both the diplomatic correspondence of the Romanian embassy in Warsaw and the information from the National Council for the Study of the Security Archives (CNSAS). Thus, the present study covers these gaps and investigates the reasons behind the letter sent by Nicolae Ceauşescu in August 1989, that caused the deviation from the principles of the Romanian foreign policy, by corroborating the three types of sources. In light of these new documents, we set out to interpret the events of August in a new key: the letter sent by Nicolae Ceauşescu to the socialist leaders was his last attempt to form a coalition against reforms in the Soviet bloc, not a call for a joint military intervention in Poland.

Key words: Ceauşescu, Mazowiecki, invasion, controversy

Partea a II-a

Mihaela Toader, Implozia regimurilor în România şi Europa Centrală şi de Est (pp. 419-435)

The hypothesis of this paper is that the fall of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe was not the result of a singular cause. The context of the year 1989, that was preceded by 1956, 1968, 1980 and Gorbachev’s reformative doctrine, the catalyst messages of the dissenters or of those in exile, as well as the militancy for democratic values by international organizations (Helsinki Watch, Amnesty International), all these were not enough. This study focuses on the analysis of Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross from the work Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. Kotkin considers that the real gravediggers of the communist regimes were the decision makers in the nomenklatura, who became the main beneficiaries of the wild privatization process, the so-called „uncivil society”. In this case, the paradigm of the explosion of communist structures in 1989 is rediscussed, and the paradigm of civil society is rejected, as the author considers the fall of the regimes as a consequence of its inherent bankruptcy due to its lack of economic success.

Keywords: implosion, communist regimes, Central and Eastern Europe, civil society, uncivil society

Roland O. Thomasson în colaborare cu Andrei Ursu, Scurtul moment al adevărului şi începutul mistificării Revoluţiei: anul 1990 (pp. 437-448)

In early January 1990, while General Vlad and several other high‑ranking Securitate officers were arrested, the Securitate was officially disbanded. Under the threat of trials, these officers and their collaborators understood that the future of the former secret police was uncertain. They knew that it was pointless to declare that Soviet tourists had instigated the Timişoara revolt or that the „terrorists” did not exist or were anything else than part of the Securitate; they knew what too many citizens had seen and heard. They were thus forced to divulge some of the truth, namely that the „terrorists” existed and were part of the Securitate. But, in order to save and divert attention from themselves, and also to protect and rehabilitate a part of the former Securitate, they argued that the Securitate operatives who had participated in the repression and had committed „terrorist” acts should not be mistaken for the rest of the „good” Securitate, who had not participated in the two bloody actions. In this way, they admitted both the existence and the institutional
affiliation of those involved in the counter‑revolution. This study reviews and analyses an important part of this generally forgotten informational material. Shortly after the involuntary „opening”, the disinformation propaganda of the former Securitate took over a large part of the press and the public understanding of the events of the Revolution. Although the „legends” made up for this purpose have been ubiquitous to this day, the statements and articles published in January 1990 blatantly contradict them, undermining them forever.

Keywords: Revolution, Securitate, terrorists, contradictory narratives

Mihai Ghiţulescu, Construcţia democratică în România. Despre elaborarea Decretului‑lege pentru alegerea parlamentului şi a Preşedintelui României (ianuarie‑martie 1990) (pp. 449-467)

The electoral system that is still in use in Romania was „conceived” in the early 1990s mostly in turbulent conditions and with still vague motivations. In this paper, I propose an exploration of the process of drafting what has been officially called the Decree‑law no. 92 of March 14, 1990, for the election of the Parliament and the President of Romania, but, even before being adopted, was labelled as the „electoral law”, the „mini‑constitution” or the „small constitution” of 1990. Beyond the constitutional dimension, I seek to partially reconstruct how the first electoral norms and the electoral system, understood as a set of rules regarding the way in which the citizens vote and the way in which the votes are translated into seats, appeared. I emphasize aspects related to: (1) the type of system; (2) the number of seats and the electoral constituencies; (3) the electoral formula. The system was a compromise between the new parties’ desire to be represented as good as possible and the NSF’s desire to speed up the adoption of the decree, to create the image
of a consensus (including in front of the international community), but also to have the most favorable electoral mechanisms. In retrospect, the decree appears to be a work completed in a manner that permits the achievement of various objectives, sometimes contradictory and, in most cases, imprecisely outlined. As the discussions were somewhat confidential, it is difficult to tell the difference between intention and accident, between mastery and inexperience.

Keywords: constitution, electoral system, Romania, 1990

Adriana Cupcea, Metin Omer, Minorităţi în tranziţie. Democratizarea ca transformare, pragmatism şi inerţie la turcii şi tătarii din Dobrogea (pp. 469-491)

At the end of the communist regime, the Turks and Tatars in Romania, as all in the Romanian society, were looking for new identity landmarks. In their case, adapting to the conditions of a free democratic society, in addition to the political, economic or legal challenges faced by the entire population, also involved the discovery and assertion of one’s ethnic identity. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, the old intellectual and technical elites used the conditions created to assert themselves as political actors. This was the context in which the ethnic representative organizations of the Turks and Tatars in Romania emerged, which constituted the framework of the identity reconstruction process of the two minorities in the post‑1990 period. The present research examines the extent to which the ideological orientations, the internal and external connections and the political pragmatism of the „new” political elite influenced the identity reconstruction process of the community, the extent to which this process was a natural community movement and the extent to which it was a process controlled by the post‑communist elite. The present research is based on the semantic analysis of the post‑communist press of the Turkish and Tatar communities, on the interpretation of data collected through qualitative methods, on semi‑structured interviews with members of the political and religious elite, as well as with regular members of the Turkish and Tatar communities.

Keywords: ethnic minorities, reconstruction of identity, cultural orientations, political pragmatism

Cosmin Budeancă, Eşecul unei idei: Muzeul Comunismului în România (pp. 493-511)

Over 30 years have passed since the fall of the communist regime and there is still no Museum of Communism in Bucharest. Such a Museum would represent a normal step taken in the process of symbolic transitional justice assumed by the Romanian state. Starting in 1993, there have been at least 11 projects for the founding of this museum, put forward by politicians or various state institutions, but none reached completion. How is this situation possible? This study describes the projects (their initiators, the historical and political context in which they were put forward and their evolution) and offers an explanation: the anti‑communist theme was used by politicians for electoral purposes, without an actual interest in solving the problem. At the same time, the Romanian civil society was divided according to their leaders’ or other important figures’ interests, contributing to this unfortunate situation.

Keywords: communism, post‑communism, memory policies, Museum of Communism