Reckoning with the Communist Past in Romania: A Scorecard

During the first two decades following the collapse of the communist regime, Romania has reckoned with the human rights infringements perpetrated from 1945 to 1989 with the help of a range of official and unofficial, judiciary and non-judiciary, backward- and forward-looking methods pursued by a variety of state and non-state actors. This article summarises the progress registered to date in court trials, lustration, access to secret files, property restitution, the truth commission, rehabilitation of former political prisoners, compensation to victims and their descendants, the opinion tribunal, forensic investigations, rewriting history books, unofficial truth projects and memorialisation.     

Rewriting and remembering Romanian communism: some controversial issues

This article examines the dynamic relationship between the two major dimensions of memory and justice in the context of post-communist countries: truth-telling and retroactive justice. This interdependent and uneasy relationship is illustrated by recent attempts at constructing a new historical narrative of the communist past in Romania in the wake of the de-secretization of the files of both the Communist Party and the communist secret police (Securitate). A systematic analysis of the activity of institutions that have been directly involved in research and public education about the recent past – the National Archives, the National Council for the Study of Securitate's Archives, and the Institute for the Investigation of Crimes of Communism – is undertaken. The work of these three institutional actors shows a direct relationship between truth-telling in its various forms (access to archives, opening the files and exhumations) and any subsequent retroactive justice and restitution. The main argument of the paper is that while deep-seated dichotomies between former communist and anti-communists in addressing the past still persist, a more nuanced way of seeing the regime that explores the ambiguous line that divides outright repression from cooptation is emerging.     

Shaking off an historical burden: China's relations with the ASEAN-based communist insurgency in Deng's era

Deng's China tried hard to prevent its relations with ASEAN-based communist insurgents from obstructing its relations with local governments. China's efforts were seen mainly in three areas: the People's Daily coverage of the communist insurgencies: Chinese leaders' rhetorical reassurances to their ASEAN counterparts; and China's actions in readjusting its relations with the local communists. In all these areas, China's efforts had become increasingly substantive. Meanwhile, various theoretical elaborations were put forward in China regarding the concepts of revolution, war, and era in order to justify some major foreign policy actions including China's changing approach to foreign communist parties and its efforts to promote friendly relations with ruling regimes in the developing world. In the process Mao's theory of National Democratic Revolution, the ideological justification for China's support for communist revolution in the developing world, was revised and finally discarded. China's approach to regional communist insurgencies since 1978 was a significant reflection of Deng's de-Maoification efforts.     

Managers of Transition—Leadership in Post-Communist Romanian Companies

The article presents the perspectives of managers as part of the Romanian organisational elite on the communist regime and on the transition period, and the values and principles that informed their behaviour as managers in each period. For the first decade after the end of communist rule, managers were drawn mainly from the second level of management of the state-owned enterprises of communist times. As a group they had been selected and formed in late communism. Among the main advantages of this social group were that they demonstrated considerable survival capacity, ideological neutrality and an ability to manoeuvre in a turbulent environment. On the other hand they had to adapt to their new environment drawing on the skills and mentality they had developed under the old regime. The research employed a qualitative method based on the interpretation of conversations between managers and students.     

Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Politics of memory and majoritarian conservatism

There is unprecedented domestic and international interest in Turkey's political past, accompanied by a societal demand for truth and justice in addressing past human rights violations. This article poses the question: Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Drawing upon the literature on nationalism, identity, and collective memory, I argue that the Turkish state has recently taken steps to acknowledge and redress some of the past human rights violations. However, these limited and strategic acts of acknowledgment fall short of initiating a more comprehensive process of addressing past wrongs. The emergence of the Justice and Development Party as a dominant political force brings along the possibility that the discarded Kemalist memory framework will be replaced by what I call majoritarian conservatism, a new government-sanctioned shared memory that promotes uncritical and conservative-nationalist interpretations of the past that have popular appeal, while enforcing silence on critical historiographies that challenge this hegemonic memory and identity project. Nonetheless, majoritarian conservatism will probably fail to assert state control over memory and history, even under a dominant government, as unofficial memory initiatives unsettle the hegemonic appropriation of the past.     

Revolution,longevity and legitimacy in communist states

This article examines key linkages in the dramatic turn of events in totalitarian states by reviewing the literature on regime legitimacy and longevity in communist regimes. But that longevity is a poor substitute for legitimacy. Eastern Europe states, where communist rule was externally imposed, were relatively “easy” to overcome. However, changes occurring in countries where quasi-legitimacy was achieved by mass movements, as in China or the Soviet Union; and those under family dictatorships, such as North Korea and Cuba, are not as subject to collapse. These pseudo forms of legitimacy resist liberalization in political terms, although economic changes are increasingly feasible as a half-way house. Still it is now clear that longevity in and of itself is not a substitute for legitimacy. The former is a function of time, the latter of social structure. This paper was written and accepted for publication in the wake of events following the collapse of communist power in most states of Eastern Europe during 1989. It does not cover the events which led to the collapse of communist power in the Soviet Union during 1991. Rather than simply adjust the paper to reflect current events, I take this opportunity to simply note the time frame during which the paper was produced. Indeed, I would also note that the Russian Revolution of 1991 served to delegitimize communist power by the exposure and then collapse of the coup attempt orchestrated by the KGB, a sector of the military elite and the upper stratum of the Communist Politburo. Such delegitimation accelerated a process of communist disintegration that could have taken a much longer period of time, and with possibly a different set of outcomes. [ILH] Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt distinguished professor of sociology and political science at Rutgers University. He has written widely on developmental subjects, includingThree Worlds of Development (1965);Equity, Income, and Policy: Comparative Studies in Three Worlds of Development (1977); andBeyond Empire and Revolution (1982); all published by Oxford University Press.     

GPU Repressions of Zionists: Ukraine in the 1920s

This essay explores repressions against Zionist political parties in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, and considers the formation of an efficient synergetic structure of Soviet secret organs in Moscow and Ukraine. The narrative identifies participants from central and regional secret departments who engaged in systematic mass operations against Zionists, and reveals that despite Moscow's initial vacillation between tolerance and persecution of Zionist parties, the Soviet secret police exhibited a continual escalation of repressions against Zionists. The policies of the secret police in Ukraine illuminate their personal adaptation to the coercive Soviet system of centralisation and ideological exclusion.     

Constructing communism in the Romanian People's Republic. Orthodoxy and state, 1948 – 49

This article analyses the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between the Orthodox Church and the communist regime during the first two years of the Romanian People's Republic. The installation of communism and the process of Stalinisation led to an unprecedented control of the church. The church was actively employed in propaganda and the regime imposed its own people in the hierarchy. On the one hand, Romanian communists followed the Soviet model regarding the place of the church in the communist state while, on the other hand, the church hierarchy adapted to the new political system by creating a theory of ‘social apostolate’. Lacking popular support, the communists used the church as an instrument through which they could acquire the political support of the masses. The church thus enjoyed a favoured position in society mainly because the communists employed it in their ideological expansionism and confrontation with the West.     

Dealing with the communist past: Its role in the disintegration of the Czech Civic Forum and in the emergence of the Civic Democratic Party

The end of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1989 has opened the thorny question of how to deal with the communist legacy. This paper focuses on important aspects of decommunization at the beginning of the 1990s and analyzes the role they played in the disintegration of the Civic Forum and in the emergence of the Civic Democratic Party. The paper shows that the decommunization agenda gradually became a significant divisive factor within the Civic Forum and served as one of the key issues through which the Civic Democratic Party defined itself. It also provided an opportunity for politicians skilled enough to grasp this issue to do so and to incorporate it into their wider political agendas.     

The Chinese and Japanese communist parties: three decades of discord and reconciliation, 1966–1998

This article depicts a painful period in the relations between the Chinese and Japanese communist parties. Using a case study of relations between a ruling Chinese communist party and a non-ruling Japanese communist party, the article covers negotiations and communiqué between the JCP leader Miyamoto and CCP leadership in 1966 that was overruled by Mao Zedong on the issue of Soviet “revisionism” and revolutionary line for the JCP. It discusses the resulting breakdown of negotiations and CCP’s efforts to splinter the Japanese party by setting up a pro-Beijing Japanese communist group. The article analyzes the obstacles to normalization, and the reasons why the leadership of the two parties decided to compromise and reach normalization in 1998 after 30 years of acrimony.     

Communist regimes,legitimacy and the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe

The purpose of this article is to clarify the relationship between forms of political legitimacy employed by communist regimes in East and Central Europe and subsequent models of revolutionary change in 1989. The conceptual basis of the analysis lies in Max Weber's theoretical framework of legitimacy. The four cases selected for comparison are Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania. The attempts of de-Stalinization and reformation of these party-state regimes through the introduction of paternalistic and also more goal-oriented measures could not prevent their disintegration in the 1980s and their subsequent collapse in 1989. But, I argue, it was the withdrawal of ideological support by elites that ultimately brought communism to an end. The differences in revolutionary scenarios and transitions to democracy in the four cases indicate the importance of a shift in both rulers and masses towards interest in dialogue and compromise. Hungary and Poland represent the clearest scenarios in which communist parties acted as agents of regime change in a rational-legal direction. The Bulgarian case stands as an intermediary case between these two and Romania. Finally, Romania represents an extreme case of violent revolution and the overthrow of a traditionalist and sultanistic regime and illustrates the difficulties following a complete collapse of political authority.     

Case Study of Management Internships: Eastern Europeans in America

Abstract

A great Eastern European shortfall is in trained managers for free market operations. While many management training programs have been offered for former communist countries, some of the most effective have been internships that immerse managers in the business environments of free market countries. This article examines the effects of an internship program on fifty-three managers from Romania who were interns in the United States and compares their experience with undergraduate student interns from Bulgaria who had a somewhat similar internship.     

Remembering the repression of the Stalin era in Russia: on the non-transmission of family memory

Research into some 30 families has revealed blank spaces in the history of many of these families, most of which date from the Stalin period. My thesis is that the internal policy of the Soviet state, with its repression and stigmatization of victims and their families, contributed to making certain pages of Soviet history disappear from family memories, or be reinterpreted within these memories. The policies of physical and symbolic stratification of the new “communist” society and stigmatization of broad social groups tended to create a gap between the social outcasts and their families. Families were impelled to “purge” their past and to eliminate the elements that could make them discreditable: to change names, surnames, and fathers’ names, to destroy the documents and photographs containing information about repressed people and to forget relatives lost from sight in the political turmoil. With the disappearance of eyewitnesses, firsthand memories that had not been transmitted to subsequent generations fell out of family history. These memory omissions result in these pages of family history being entirely wiped out, or lead to fragmented and impersonal memories.     

Introduction: Benefit of U.S. Educational Assistance in the Eastern European Transformation

Abstract

Following the demise of communism, numerous programs were begun to improve the educational systems of Eastern European nations. It was evident that the newly independent states had little knowledge of democracy and free market practices and western nations looked for ways to improve the former communist citizens’ knowledge of these concepts. American governmental agencies and private foundations rushed into redress these problems in Eastern European educational systems to preclude the return of communism or other dictatorial regimes and to help the nations find a position among the democracies of the world. A sample of the programs and their outcomes are presented in this symposium.     

Judicious choices: designing courts in post-communist politics

One area which has been generally overlooked in the literature on institutional choice in post communist politics has been the design of judicial institutions. This paper seeks to evaluate a number of different explanations for judicial systems choice in post communist politics, especially those which emphasize the influence of socio-cultural factors, economic factors, the judicial legacies of the past, and political bargaining. As an empirical test of these explanations, we examine variations in the amount of judicial power that constitution makers granted to the constitutional courts in the countries of the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Eastern Europe.     

Provocation at the center: A study in the history of counter‐terror

Abstract

This paper deals with the early beginnings and subsequent history of the secret, or political, police in nineteenth‐century Europe, whose task was to tame and terrify the masses, appeal to fear, and to root out revolutionary groups and secret societies, including even revolutionary attitudes. As pointed out here, the origins of such police forces, specializing in counter‐terror, go back to the French Revolution and the Ministry of Police headed by Fouche. Autocratic governments not being unusual, the history of counter‐terrorism displays many practitioners and techniques during the nineteenth century. A true heir of Fouche was Louis Andrieux, a Chief of Police of the Third Republic in France, who gave advice to Tsar Alexander III that has since been followed by many agents provocateurs and counter‐revolutionaries. The Russian Okhrana and the role played by Plehve in containing the revolutionary movement are discussed as are also the alliance between Degayev and Sudeykin, in addition to the Zubatov system and the Azef affair. Throughout, the struggle between revolution and counter‐revolution illustrates the fact that the physical blows that were the results of provocation were not always decisive; the exposure of provocation was often more harmful than anything that provocation itself could achieve. Moreover, the author concludes, the role played by the Russian secret police served to perpetuate terrorism and made all other state authorities a domain for the machinations and intrigues of the leaders of the secret police.     

Secrecy,Fear and Transaction Costs: The Business of Soviet Forced Labour in the Early Cold War

What does it cost to do business under a dictator? In 1949 the Soviet state had entered its most secretive phase. One of the Gulag's most important secrets was the location of its labour camps. As this secret was guarded more closely, camps found it increasingly difficult to do business without disclosing a state secret: their own location. For months and then years Gulag officials worked around this dilemma, expending considerable efforts. Rather than resolve it, they eventually normalised it. This study of the transaction costs of an autocratic regime raises basic questions about how Soviet secrecy was calibrated.     

The Oslo Talks: Revealing the Turkish Government's Secret Negotiations with the PKK

This article explores the extent to which the secret talks influenced the path of official negotiations toward ending Turkey's Kurdish conflict, which the scholarly literature has yet to assess. Utilizing interviews with key political actors, this article aims to close this gap by assessing the Oslo talks (2006–2011) as the most comprehensive secret contact between the Turkish government and Kurdistan Workers' Party. It demonstrates that the secret track is not merely a “pre-negotiation” stage aimed at de-escalating the violent conflict ahead of official talks, but also a crucial part of the negotiation stage aimed at establishing a final political agreement.     

The Trouble with History

The essay discusses the phenomenon of a recent upsurge of so-called “politics of history” in Poland, and in other postcommunist democracies. The upsurge, as the author argues, is caused by a growing anxiety following the collapse of the communist order.