Ieșirea din anonimat a memoriei

Abstract

In the transition process from authoritarianism to democracy, Romania has, nevertheless, omitted something:the confrontation with the communist past. With a few exceptions, used to justify certain transition sideslips (restitutions, privatizations), the topic has been regarded, for decades, through an inverted spyglass. The lack of public politics to provide support for research and the preservation of the recent past, the authorities’ refusal to find and charge those responsible for the communist crimes have minimized, in the new post-December society, the enormous prejudice this profoundly inhuman ideology has generated for over forty years. Sociological studies demonstrate that the Romanians’ appreciation of the communist regime is, today, after three decades of post-communism, still unnaturally high. The fragmentary rendering of the past, the lack of an official narrator and of coherent strategies regarding the memorialization of the recent past, of educational programmes meant to expose it in a just and innovative manner, related to the specific requirements of the new generation, brings us today in a position to face the hypertrophy of the communist regime nostalgia, offering leeway to pro-communist revisionism and leftist negationism.

Keywords

• communist crimes
• post-communism
• transition justice
• memory institutions
• nostalgia
• negationism