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Journal of Romanian Studies, 3, no. 2 (2021)

Guest editors: Raluca Radu and Ioana A. Coman

Editors: Peter Gross, Svetlana Suveica, Iuliu Raţiu

Contents

Notes from the Editors (pp. 11-13)

Essay

Digital Revolution and De-Institutionalization in Central and Eastern Europe (pp. 15-20)

Paolo Mancini

Articles

Post-Communist Media Freedom and a New Monopoly on Truth (pp. 21-38)

Andrei Richter

The author suggests a set of legal instruments to enable freedom of the media in East, Central and South-East Europe. The failure to introduce and fully implement these instruments has led to the governments’ increased grip on the media and information flows. Additional possibilities to limit freedom of information have been provided by the current global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The article argues that the media capture in parts of the region leads to an establishment of a state monopoly on information and eventually to a monopoly on truth.

Public Opinion, Mass Media, and Foreign Policy of the Republic of Moldova: Between the Two Realms (pp. 39-62)

Alla Rosca

This paper examines public opinion among Moldovans regarding their country’s foreign policy and the role the mass media play in its formation. A logistic regression analysis indicates that trust in the Russian media that are present in Moldova strongly correlates with foreign policy opinion and trust in foreign leaders. Media consumption did not correlate significantly with any foreign policy decisions. In addition, the findings show a strong correlation between political preference and foreign policy opinion. The overall results support the Almond-Lippmann consensus that public opinion is volatile and does not have structure or coherence.#

Striving and Surviving: Romanian Journalism on the Quest for Funding Models (pp. 63-80)

Marius Dragomir, Manuela Preoteasa, Dumitrița Holdiș, Cristina Lupu

During the past decade, Romania’s media market has been experiencing massive shifts, particularly when it comes to its funding models. As elsewhere, these changes were triggered to a large degree by technological advances. The financial health of Romania’s media was also affected by local factors, including business practices, changes in government spending and media consumption patterns. This article describes the key trends in journalism funding in Romania in recent years and takes stock of the impact that the Covid-19 crisis is having on the industry’s financial health to understand the salient fi-nancial threats and opportunities that the country’s independent journalism is likely to face in the near future.

Romanian-language Conspiracy Narratives: Safeguarding the Nation and the People (pp. 81-109)

Onoriu Colăcel

The article investigates Romanian-language conspiracy narratives as tell-tale signs of foreign media influences and culture-bound knowledge claims. News and opinion samples are considered in order to analyze conspiracy theorizing in the commercial media of Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Conspiratorial discourses are traced to tropes and trends in the Romanian literary culture. They permeate conspiracy thinking across public discourses about the nation. The findings suggest that anxieties over the wellbeing of the country and its people are underlying local conspiracism. Ultimately, they tie in with concerns central to Romanian-language cultures.

Measuring Pseudoscience in Online Media: A Case Study on Romanian Websites (pp. 111-128)

Radu Silaghi-Dumitrescu

Abstract: To limit the negative effects of pseudoscience in public discourse, it may be useful to classify/quantify the occurrence of pseudoscientific topics – so that sources of such discourse may be effi-ciently identified and addressed. Here, the occurrence of 15 topics representative of pseudoscientific subjects is analyzed in a set of online mass-media pages in Romanian language. Correlations are found between some topics, yielding two main sets, centered on threats either to life/health or to identity/existence. The latter set appears innate to Romanian-language media, whereas the former do not. None of the 15 pseudoscience terms, nor their average or their total occurrence, correlate with the number of views of the respective websites – thus suggesting that pseudoscience alone is not a predictor of commercial success in Romanian-language online media.

Media Sources and Dissidents in the Romanian Revolution of 1989 (pp. 129-143)

Lucian-Vasile Szabo

This study highlights the way in which the media, particularly foreign outlets, contributed to Romania’s regime change in December 1989. Both news and the opinion articles and broadcasts appearing in the foreign Romanian language media are analysed, with a focus on broad- casts made from countries contiguous to Romania, as some of them could be received by its citizens. The study also examines the protest movement that began in Timisoara, correlated to the stances taken by a number of Romanian dissidents in and outside the country against Nicolae Ceauşes- cu’s dictatorial regime and in support of fundamental rights and liberties. Despite the terror, the hunger and widespread shortages, and in spite of the regime’s extremely harsh repressive measures, there were always indi- viduals who raised their voices against abuses. Their messages were picked up and amplified by the media outside the country. This was a difficult process, sometimes marked by errors and confusion. Nevertheless, the for- eign media, accessed clandestinely, by played an important role in chang- ing the course of history in December 1989.

Romanian Journalists’ Perception of Freedom of the Press and the Role Played by the Media in Countering Fake News (pp. 145-164)

Antonio Momoc

Abstract: This study is a preliminary investigation into the Romanian journalists’ perception of the role that newspeople play in identifying and fighting fake news. Prominent Romanian journalists were asked about the challenges of media digitalization, editorial independence during the economic crisis, how newsrooms relate to the fake news phenomenon, why they believe that some news websites are misinfor-mational, their own trust in the media, and journalists’ responsibility regarding media education, fact-checking, and countering fake news.

REVIEWS

Socialism under Scrutiny: Juggling Time, Planned Economy, and Heritage (review by Dana Domșodi) (pp. 165-168):

• Alina Cucu. Planning labour. Time and the foundations of industrial socialism in Romania. New York: Berghahn Books 2019. 246 pp.

• Emanuela Grama. Socialist Heritage: the Politics of Past and Place in Bucharest. Bloominton: Indiana University Press 2019. 247 pp.

James Kapaló and Tatiana Vagramenko eds. Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe. Zurich, LIT Verlag, 2020, 104 pp. (review by Roland Clark) (pp. 169-170)

Călin Cotoi. Inventing the Social in Romania, 1848–1914: Networks and Laboratories of Knowledge. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 278 pp. (review by R. Chris Davis) (pp. 171-173)

Ágoston Berecz. Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries. The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. 350 pp. (review by Anca Șincan) (pp. 175-176)

MAC LINSCOTT RICKETTS AT 90

Unexpected Encounters and Turnin Points (pp. 177-180)

Mihaela Gligor

Tribute for Mac Linscott Ricketts at 90 (pp. 181-183)

Doulas Allen

Encounters with Mac Linscott Ricketts and Mircea Eliade (pp. 183-191)

Liviu Bordaș

A Destiny on a Barricade (pp. 191-192)

Sebastian Doreanu

Mac Linscott Ricketts’ Translation of Eliade from Romanian into English (pp. 193-208)

Bryan Rennie

Call for Papers: Borders and Transfers

15-17 June 2022
Society for Romanian Studies
Hosted by Universitatea de Vest and Muzeul de Artă, Timişoara

The Banat is “a reality, and at the same time a myth,
situated at the place where borders meet.”
– Adriana Babeţi (2007)

The Society for Romanian Studies invites you to Timişoara in June 2022, where the soup is sweet and it is bad luck to serve chicken on New Year’s Day. Timişoara, and the Banat more generally, has been shaped by the borders of empires and nation-states, by ethnic, religious, cultural, and economic transfers, and by the cultures flowing along the Mureş, Danube, and Tisza rivers. A melting-pot whose local realities reflect transnational influences, Timişoara is an ideal place for us to reflect on how borders and transfers – both real and imagined – shape the culture and society of the diverse peoples connected to Romania and Moldova. Raising and crossing borders is becoming more contentious than ever, and new boundaries are being thrown up around and within communities, both in the region and in its diaspora, yet the transfer of goods and information continues at an unprecedented rate.

Keynote speakers:
Professor Maria Bucur (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Professor Adriana Babeţi (Universitatea de Vest, Timişoara)

The conference is concerned with the following topics:

• How borders and transfers facilitate group formation; what they exclude and whose interests they protect and reinforce.
• How borders are imagined, made real, and enforced.
• The impact of the pandemic on travel and crossing borders.
• The difference between spoken and unspoken borders and transfers.
• Liminal spaces in literature, art and film.
• Transfers, influences and connections between texts.
• Borders as limits on beliefs and imagination.
• Rites of passage, liminality and blockages in space or time. This might involve ageing, travel, career progression, or metaphysics.
• The contestation of boundaries and restrictions. When are transfers liberating and when are they perilous?
• Political and military borders in time and space.
• Corruption as the transgression of regulations and the function of discourses about legal, economic, and behavioral boundaries.
• Borders and transfers as they relate to the social and cultural performance of gender and sexuality.
• Interdisciplinarity as a goal and a challenge. The value and limits of disciplinary borders.
• Border-making as governmentality versus borders that are constructed and challenged from below.
• Processes of marginalisation, division, and solidarity.
• Linguistic borders, multilingualism and its social and political implications.
• Refugees, migration, population exchanges, and ethnic cleansing.

The official language of the conference is English, but papers, panels, roundtables, and discussions may also be delivered in Romanian. Each panel or roundtable will have only one language (English or Romanian), which will be printed on the official program.

At present we are planning to hold the conference face to face, with no hybrid option. If the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic makes this unfeasible we will communicate alternatives as soon as possible.

Proposals for individual papers, panels, roundtables, book or movie presentations, and art installations should be sent by October 25, 2021, to srs2022conference@gmail.com. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of their proposal at the latest by January 25, 2022. Proposals should be written in the language you wish to present in.
• Individual paper proposals should include a title, a brief abstract of up to 500 words, a one-page c.v. (one page), and contact information of the presenter.
• Proposals for panels including 3-4 papers, one chair, and 1-2 discussants should provide a title and description of the panel topic, abstracts of all papers, a one-page c.v., and contact information for all participants. Panel participants should be drawn from at least two different universities/ research institutes.
• Roundtable proposals of 3-5 participants should include a title and description of the topic, a one-page c.v., and contact information for all participants.
• In addition, the conference organizers will accept proposals for presentations of books, movies and art installations; proposals should include a title, a description, a one-page C.V., and contact information.

Conference registration fees:
• For individuals earning more than the equivalent of over $15,000 (USD) per year:
o $120 (USD): This includes an Individual Membership to the SRS for 2022 and an electronic subscription to the Journal of Romanian Studies for 2022.
o $100 (USD): This includes a Discount Membership* to the SRS for 2022.
• For individuals earning less than the equivalent of under $15,000 (USD) per year: $30 (USD). This includes a Discount Membership* to the SRS for 2022.
• For life members and individuals who have already taken out three-year memberships: $20 (USD).
• For students: $15 (USD).

*NB. Discount Members do not receive a subscription to the Journal of Romanian Studies.

There is a limited number of fee waivers for people with modest incomes sponsored by the PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies, Moldova. Please contact the conference organizers for details.

The Society for Romanian Studies is an international interdisciplinary academic organization based in the US and dedicated to promoting research and critical studies on all aspects of the culture and society of the diverse peoples connected to Romania and Moldova. For more information about the SRS see https://society4romanianstudies.org/

Journal of Romanian Studies, 3, no. 1 (2021)

Editors: Peter Gross, Svetlana Suveica, Iuliu Raţiu

Contents

Dennis Deletant

Keith Hitchins (1931-2020) (pp. 9-10)

Articles

Roland Clark

The Shape of Interwar Romanian History (pp. 11-42)

This article reviews some of the major frameworks that histori- ans use to tell the stories of interwar Romania, asking why they became pop- ular and how useful they are in the twenty-first century. It examines the problems of periodization and the placement of the nation-state at the cen- ter of Romanian history, then traces the evolution of four major framing narratives: (1) the problems of a small state; (2) the collapse of democracy; (3) the march of progress; and (4) the consequences of state-building and centralization. Such approaches give the impression that interwar Romania was an intolerant, chauvinistic society that marginalized anyone who was not male, Orthodox, and ethnically Romanian. The best new histories, how- ever, not only uncover alternative, suppressed narratives but also reveal how people were able to live and sometimes thrive in a society as diverse as interwar Romania undeniably was.

Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu

The Romanian Orthodox Church and its Financial Dealings in Post-Communism (pp. 43-64)

This article introduces the main sources of revenue and wealth of the dominant Romanian Orthodox Church as subventions from the state, the restitution of assets confiscated by the communist authorities, donations collected from various groups and individuals, money obtained for services and religious artifacts offered to believers, and other revenue-generating activities. It then discusses two instances in which the Orthodox Church has come under attack for the way it collects and uses money, the contributions it receives from the reserve fund of the government and the church’s efforts to finance the building in downtown Bucharest of a monumental national cathedral. Finally, the article tests the degree of secularization in Romania, based on the observations of José Casanova and Vyacheslav Karpov, to measure if and how much the country has secularized, especially in light of the economic and financial aspects of church activity presented here.

Valeska Bopp-Filimonov

Shaping, Questioning, Contradicting “Bad Communism:” Aspects of Generational Memory in Romania after 1989 (pp. 65-84)

Families in Romania, I was told when presenting my research topic in front of Romanian audiences in 2005, would not openly discuss the socialist past, neither within the family nor with a foreign researcher. My research—based on interviews with Romanian families—confirmed that different age groups remembered communism not only differently (which is to be expected due to variation in cohort and life experience), but also sep- arately, and rarely shared their memories. Instead, what all interview ac- counts had in common was the extensive examination of the overall nega- tive public discourse on “bad communism.” This paper presents the respond- ents’ particular strategies of examination, expanding our understanding of how the historical consciousness of a society in transition can be analyzed and understood. Of particular interest is how respondents reflected upon the socialist past, which came to an end in 1989.

Amelia Miholca

Re-envisioning Cubism in Romanian Avant-Garde Magazines (pp. 85-112)

Art historians and literary scholars have written little about the relationship between Cubism and the Romanian avant-garde. This paper seeks to remedy this oversight by analyzing images of cubist paintings and theoretical texts about Cubism, published by the Romanian avant-garde mag- azines Contimporanul and Integral, the platforms for the Romanian avant- garde and the magazines containing the most cubist art in the early to mid- 1920s. The considerable amount of cubist artworks, via photographic repro- ductions, in Contimporanul and Integral point to a serious engagement with Cubism on behalf of Romanian avant-garde artists. Specifically, artists and magazine editors Marcel Iancu of Contimporanul and M.H. Maxy of Integral exalted Cubism’s prominence in the formal development of avant-garde art while producing cubist still lifes and portraits, akin to the cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Their unusual turn to Cubism at the stage of the movement when critics and artists began to see Cubism as out-of-date signifies not only the stylistic hybridity of the Romanian avant-gardists but also their willingness to traverse the space between avant-garde and modern art as they sought to conceptualize their integralist art.

Radu Pârvulescu

The Romanian Judicial Professions Database: An Open-Source Tool for Researching the Romanian Legal System (pp. 113-120)

Justice is a perennial topic in scholarship on Romania, from so- cialist legality, through transitional justice, and to anti-corruption studies. Systematic study of law and justice has been stymied, however, by lack of basic information: who was doing what, where, when, and how? To begin to address this shortcoming, this brief article introduces the Romanian Judicial Professions Database, a new, open-source tool which provides yearly, indi- vidual data on 10,000 judges, 6000 lawyers, 5500 prosecutors, 3000 nota- ries public (notari publici), and 1000 bailiffs (executori judecătoreşti), in some cases going back to the 1970s. The database can be downloaded at https://osf.io/gfjke/ and supporting software is available at https:// github.com/r-parvulescu/ro_judicial_professions.

Book Reviews

Constantin Iordachi. Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities: The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–1918. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 682 pp. (review by Mara Mărginean) (pp. 121-124).

Sabrina P. Ramet. Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The Failure of Democracy-building, the Fate of Minorities. New York: Routledge, 2020. 331 pp. (review by Francesco Magno) (pp. 125-126).

Dorina Roșca. Le grand tournant de la société moldave. “Intellectuels” et capital social dans la transformation post-socialiste. Paris: Presses de l’Inalco, 2019, 359 pp. (review by Petru Negură) (pp. 127-130).

Journal of Romanian Studies, 2, no. 1 (2020)

Editors: Peter Gross, Diane Vancea, Iuliu Raţiu

Contents

Articles

Alexandra Chiriac

Ephemeral Modernisms, Transnational Lives: Reconstructing Avant-Garde Performance in Bucharest (pp. 9-34)

During the mid-1920s Bucharest became home to the Vilna Troupe, an ensemble formed in Vilnius in 1915 and famed for its ground-breaking Yiddish-language productions that toured all over the world. Its collaborations with the Romanian artist M. H. Maxy are the subject of this essay, which demonstrates the experimental nature of several productions that took place in Bucharest during this period. New research material from sources on both sides of the Atlantic makes it possible to reconstruct the outputs of this richly innovative partnership to a much greater extent than before, demonstrating that the vitality of avant-garde theatre in Bucharest has been heretofore underestimated by scholars, its existence obscured by the ephemerality of the performative and by its unwieldy transnational trajectory. An earlier version of this essay won the Graduate Student Essay Prize offered in 2018 by the Society for Romanian Studies.

Petru Negură

Compulsory Primary Education and State Building in Rural Bessarabia (1918-1940) (pp. 35-58)

This article examines the way in which public primary education was established in rural Bessarabia during 1918-1940. The imposition of mass compulsory education resulted from an unequal relationship of power between the state education authorities and the village population, which at times conflicted and at other times negotiated with each other. This process was crucial for the expansion of the state in rural areas and the development of citizenship among the civilian population of what was at the time a new Romanian province. Yet, primary schooling did not succeed entirely, due to the resistance of the rural population, the indetermination of state agents, and the lack of institutional infrastructure.

Vladimir Solonari

Record Weak: Romanian Judiciary in Occupied Transnistria (pp. 59-82)

This article explores the role of the Romanian judiciary in occupied Transnistria in 1940-1944. Based on a wide array of sources from American, Israeli, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan archives, the article focuses on the role of the judiciary in the fight against official corruption and administrative abuse, enforcement of legal norms in the fight against pro-Soviet guerrilla groups, and curtailment of violence against Jews. In these areas the Romanian judiciary had a weak record. Not only did they fail to fight official corruption and administrative abuse effectively, but Romanian prosecutors and courts were notoriously corrupt themselves. While military magistrates on duty in Transnistria refrained from imposing harsh sentences on suspected partisans, they looked another way when gendarmes murdered partisans under the pretense of attempted escape. Romanian prosecutors sometimes investigated the illegal appropriation of Jewish possessions by the guards, they never concerned themselves with their mass murder.

Delia Popescu

A Political Palimpsest: Nationalism and Faith in Petre Țuțea’s Thinking (pp. 83-108)

This article examines the political thinking of Petre Țuțea, a noteworthy public figure in post-1989 Romania. I develop Țuțea’s views as a significant instance of a reconstructive nationalist imaginary “for all seasons”: a radical religious ethno-nationalism that both transcends its pre-communist roots and conceals its continuity during communism in order to be recast as a suitable post-communist alternative. Țuțea samples radicalism on both sides of the political spectrum and ultimately embraces the mystical, elitist, nationalist ideology that distills the protochronic nuance of much of Romanian political life.

Cynthia M. Horne

What Is too Long and When Is too Late for Transitional Justice? Observations from the Case of Romania (pp. 109-138)

Nearly 30 years after the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime, what is too long and when is too late to use public disclosures about secret police complicity in the past to influence the composition of public office holders in the present? This article examines Romania’s public disclosure measures from 2010 to the present, drawing on the reports of the secret police file repository agency—the C.N.S.A.S.—in order to better understand the temporal parameters surrounding their continued use. First, the article shows that despite contentions that there are no more spies left to unmask, Romania’s vetting process continues to disclose the collaborator backgrounds of current political candidates, at both the national and local levels, and individuals being considered for appointments in high-ranking political and social institutions. Second, contrary to expectations that citizens might be too fatigued with the public disclosure process to consider them politically salient, citizen engagement with their personal files remains robust. Together, these findings suggest that preconceived temporal parameters for this type of transitional justice measure might have underestimated the duration of its utility and political relevance.

Brindusa Armanca and Peter Gross

Searching for a Future: Mass Media and the Uncertain Construction of Democracy in Romania (pp. 139-162)

To date, Romania’s democracy and the news media’s professionalization have not met indigenous and foreign expectations, as both have failed to assume their social responsibility. The persistent crisis in ethics, enveloped in the illiberal culture and political culture, is victimizing democratization and the media’s independence and professionalization and, thus, their ability to serve the still ongoing democratic transformation. This article chronicles the crisis, its causes and outcomes. Finally, it concludes that the country’s emerging civil society, coupled with the small groups of independent, professionalizing media and journalists are the key to the country’s liberal democratic future.

Book Reviews

Ionuț Butoi, Mircea Vulcănescu. O microistorie a interbelicului românesc.
(Review by Emanuel Copilaş)

Henry P. Rammelt, Activistes protestataires en Hongrie et en Roumanie.
(Review by Dana S. Trif)

Volume 3 (2021)

No. 1 Spring

No. 2 Special issue: Media and Communication

Volume 2 (2020)

No. 1 Spring

No. 2 Special issue: Law, History and Justice in Romania. New Directions in Law and Society Research

Volume 1 (2019)

No. 1 Spring

No. 2 Special issue: Romania and the Paris Peace Conference (1919). Actors, Scenarios, Circulation of Knowledge

Journal of Romanian Studies, 2, no. 2 (2019)

Special issue: Law, History and Justice in Romania. New Directions in Law and Society Research

Guest Editors: Mihaela Șerban and Monica Ciobanu

Editors: Peter Gross, Diane Vancea, Iuliu Raţiu

Contents

Articles

Mihaela Șerban and Monica Ciobanu

Law, History and Justice in Romania. New Directions in Law and Society Research (pp. 9-23)

This special issue of the Journal of Romanian Studies examines law as a social institution and the ways in which it intersects with the larger social, historical, political and economic world. While the articles included here mostly explore the intersections between law, history, and justice, they consciously reject positivist and doctrinal analyses of law and an understanding of law as primarily a (repressive) instrument of the state. Instead, we focus on “living law” and the complex interactions between law and social issues, including how law is created, interpreted and implemented, and how individuals and organizations live, shape and evade it in everyday interactions within and outside of the state. We also want to situate this flourishing area of research not only within broader fields, such as transitional justice and legal history, but also in the expansive law and society tradition that has been open to interdisciplinary legal research worldwide, but is perhaps less well known in Romania.

Cosmin Cercel

Reversing Liberal Legality: Romania’s Path to Dictatorship, 1930-1938 (pp. 23-52)

Romania’s anti-liberal turn at the end of the interwar period is a useful case study for analysing the dissolution of the liberal nomos fostered by the Versailles arrangements against the background of the authoritarian takeover in Europe. In this article, I explore the legal and constitutional mechanisms at the core of the instauration of King’s Carol II dictatorship. I propose to do so by mapping the reconstruction of the concepts of legality and authority within the political and legal processes seeking to contest, challenge and ultimately reverse the liberal features of the constitutional armature of the Romanian state. Drawing on jurisprudence, political theory, and constitutional history, I seek to unearth the ideological underpinnings of this regime of power and to reflect on the nexus between law and anti-liberal projects of state-building at the end of the interwar period.

Ştefan Cristian Ionescu

Perceptions of Legality during the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 (pp. 53-80)

This article examines how legality was perceived by the highest officials of Romania’s pro-Nazi Ion Antonescu regime and by a group of intellectuals (mostly jurists) closely connected with the judiciary. For Antonescu, legality meant a new type of authoritarian understanding of the role of the law in a state and its subordination to the will of the ruler; for him, legality mainly had an instrumental role. He understood his power to be discretionary and, usually, not bound by the extant law, even though he sometimes referred to the idea of constitutional order (a convenient source of legitimacy). Intellectuals, including jurists, harbored a diversity of opinions regarding legality. Some jurists supported the regime’s authoritarian legalism, or at least accepted it, while others, especially those with a more democratic mindset or belonging to minorities, perceived legality differently than Antonescu, and favored a liberal democratic version of legality involving the rule of law.

Mihaela Şerban

Litigating Identity in Fascist and Post-Fascist Romania (1940-1945) (pp. 81-108)

This paper examines legal mobilization and resistance to efforts through law to delineate ethnic identities during World War Two in Romania. Anti-Semitic legislation adopted under the fascist regime attempted to create and classify Jewish identity, while the end of war legislation formally reversed all discriminatory statutes and decrees and more broadly banned all inquiries into the ethnicity of Romanian citizens. Under both legal regimes, one’s identity, whether de jure or de facto, was decisive for repressive state policies that targeted Romanian citizens based on their ethnic identity. The concept and content of ethnic identity, however, were far from a clear matter. I explore in this paper how the local administrative court in the city of Timişoara (both first instance and appeal) constructed ethnic identity based on the wartime racial legislation, and how the court continued to apply this judge-made identity to the newly disfavored groups, primarily Germans, at the end of the war.

Monica Ciobanu

Writing History Through Trials: The Case of the National Peasant Party (pp. 109-134)

This article provides a comparative account of two criminal trials that addressed the role played by the National Peasant Party (PNŢ) in national history. The focus is on the ability of legal trials to construct historical narratives. The first was conducted in 1947 by the newly-established communist regime and resulted in the legal ban of the party. In 2015, the narrative was entirely reversed in court. The PNŢ was presented as a fully democratic actor. Alexandru Vişinescu – a former commandant of the Râmnicu-Sărat prison where prominent party leaders were subjected to repression – was sentenced for crimes against humanity. The sharp differences between these two legal proceedings – a Soviet-style show trial versus legal action that was oriented to providing some redress for the victims of communism – is emphasized.  But the conclusion is that criminal trials in general fall short in providing historical lessons and that retrospective justice does not necessarily produce reconciliation or accountability.          

Emanuela Grama

Restitution Reversal or “Re-nationalization”? An Analysis of Law, Property, and History Through the Case of the “Szekely Mikó” High School in Transylvania (pp. 135-164)

In 2002, the Reformed Church in Transylvania requested the retrocession of the Reformed Szekely Miko high school in Sf. Gheorghe/ Sepsiszentgyörgy, Covasna’s capital city. The state restitution commission at that time approved the return. In 2012, a court invalidated the initial restitution decision, accused the members of the former commission of fraud, and requested that the Church return the building to the city authorities. A close reading of the legal arguments that each party employed to justify or reject the restitution reveals competing temporalities of law and visions of history. This paper analyzes the long and tense debates around this case of property restitution – reversal, to further explore several interconnected phenomena: broader ideologies about the relationship of historical, ethnic, and property rights in contemporary Transylvania; the political mobilization of Romania’s ethnic Hungarians around property restitution; the ways in which negotiations around property propelled more conservative elites to the leadership of Transylvanian Hungarians and enabled them to strengthen their ties with their kin-state, Hungary.

Simona Livescu

Institutional Memories and Transgenerational Dynamics: The House of Terror and the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance (pp. 165-194)

This article provides an insight into the twenty-first century politics of institutionalized memory in two former communist countries, Romania and Hungary, as illustrated by their respective human rights memorial museums’ practices of documenting communist era abuse. After discussing the ways in which the two museums under consideration here inscribe themselves into the red and dark tourism phenomena, the article focuses on acts of over-remembering and misremembering that affect the politics of museal representation, highlighting the emotional communities created by these museums as well as the incomplete representation of the victim-victimizer rapport. In doing so, the article argues that institutionalized museal interventions into recent collective national and regional memories are representative of the still undecided legacy of communism in East and Central Europe.

Dragoş Petrescu

Law in Action in Romania, 2008–2018: Context, Agency, and Innovation in the Process of Transitional Justice (pp. 195-218)

This article tackles a hitherto-unnoticed innovative mechanism of transitional justice. Creatively interpreting the legislation, CNSAS, the institution dealing with the former secret police files, gradually transformed itself from a vetting agency into a fact-finding commission. While the law restricted the meaning of collaboration, CNSAS produced an open-access electronic database including digest versions of the screening process and providing quick access to excerpts from secret police documents. This repository demonstrates the multifaceted nature of collaboration, the wide variety of information gathered and the complicity of individuals originating from all social, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The e-database created by CNSAS offers not a simple list of wrongdoers, but evidence of wrongdoings according to rule-of-law principles. In brief, this registry of shaming represents a para-legal mechanism of transitional justice, which allows moral judgement, promotes transparency, and legitimizes the mission of CNSAS in fostering democracy by widely illustrating what democracy is not.          

Book Reviews

Marian Voicu, Matrioşka Mincinoşilor: Fake News, Manipulare, Populism.
(Review by Peter Gross)

Matei Călinescu and Ion Vianu, Scrisori din exil: corespondenţă inedită.
(Review by Iuliu Raţiu)

Journal of Romanian Studies, 1, no. 1 (2019)

Editors: Lavinia Stan, Margaret Beissiger, Radu Cinpoeş

Contents Page

Articles

Vintilă Mihăilescu

A Subjective Centenary: The Peasant Footprint in Recent Romanian History (pp. 9-34)

This article approaches Romanian history from the perspective of the peasantry. It treats the role of the peasantry throughout the modern period as well as some of the legacies it has transmitted up to the present day. The history of Romania’s peasantry is viewed in the Balkan context. Beyond various similarities and differences between the neighbouring countries, significant is the fact that the large agrarian properties lasted much longer in Romania than in the rest of the Balkans. This explains why the last great peasant revolt in the history of Europe took place in Roma‐ nia (1907) and why Romania is still the largest agrarian, rural country in Europe, with a land distribution identical to that in 1905. The article also identifies what present‐day Romanian society has inherited from this long‐ lasting peasant culture and its structural peculiarities, focusing on the broad, all‐encompassing consequences of its enduring “orality” (i.e., lack of “graphic reason”). This article was originally delivered as the first keynote address on 26 June 2018 at the triennial Society for Romanian Studies conference held in Bucharest.

Katherine Verdery

Notes on a Century of Surveillance (pp. 35-52)

The formation of Greater Romania in December 1918 entailed building up its intelligence apparatus, both foreign and internal—a development crucial to its survival in the twentieth‐century system of national states. Events during the war and provisions of the peace treaty lent special urgency to this development, for the rise of the communist movement in Russia posed grave problems for Romania’s eastern border (regularly breached by both refugees and communist agents), and revisions of the border with Hungary increased the threat of Hungarian irredentism. The intelligence services were once again challenged by World War II and the communist takeover; the events of 1989 repeated these challenges. To examine this series of transformations is to ask, among other things, what it means for the form of the state or its ruling regime to change. The paper, delivered as a keynote address at the 2018 international conference organized by the Society for Romanian Studies in Bucharest, explores continuities across these various transitions.

Dennis Deletant

Shattered Illusions: Britain and Iuliu Maniu, 1940–1945 (pp. 53-76)

During World War II the military situation was never conducive to a defection strategy for Romania. Fear of the Soviet Union had driven Romania into alliance with Nazi Germany and the threat posed by the former continued to cast a shadow over the British Government’s efforts to persuade Romania’s leaders to steer the country to abandon the Axis. For the British, Iuliu Maniu, the leader of the National Peasant Party, was the pivotal point for any action against the regime of Ion Antonescu. This article uses documents from the British Foreign Office and the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to trace the British perception of Maniu in 1940–1945, and the steps taken by the Foreign Office and the SOE to maintain contact with him and to encourage him to bring about  the overthrow of Antonescu.

Maria Bucur

The Queen Is No Sister: Three Faces of Marie of Romania (pp. 77-104)

This essay provides a gender analysis of Queen Marie of Romania’s autobiographical works to ask how we can best make sense of this complex and much discussed historical character during World War I as a woman of her time. My focus will be on her work as a politician/diplomat during the war; her efforts on behalf of the military campaign, particularly medical aid and other related services; and her relationship with the feminists who sought to gain the vote during the war. My conclusions offer some appreciative, though overall critical evaluations of the efforts Marie of Romania made in terms of using her dynastic position and popularity on behalf of other women.

Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismăneanu

Stalinism and Anti‐Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited (pp. 105-122)

Communist writer Alexandru Jar (or Solomon Iacob, “Paşchela” for friends, 1911–1988) is the most prominent Romanian case of disenchantment with Stalinism. The 1956 “Jar Affair,” as it came to be known in Romania and abroad, reveals the persistence of the Stalinist engagement of the Romanian communist leadership under Gheorghe Gheorghiu‐Dej (1901–1965). By singling out Jar, a veteran party member and a former French Resistance fighter, the hegemonic nucleus within the Romanian Workers’ Party succeeded in neutralizing political and intellectual challenges similar to those in Poland and Hungary. Based on newly discovered materials in the archives of the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee, including Jar’s party file and his numerous letters asking for political rehabilitation, this study offers a novel interpretation of the relationship between party leadership and intellectual unrest in Romania during the hectic year 1956. The authors explore the “Jar Affair” in a comparative, transnational historical perspective meant to highlight the complexities of political awakening in the aftermath of Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. The article adds significantly to the understanding of the dialectics of de‐Stalinization in East‐Central Europe.

Book Reviews

Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File.
(Review by Radu Cinpoeş)

Cristian Vasile ed., “Ne trebuie oameni!’’: Elite intelectuale şi transformări istorice în România modern şi contemporană.
(Review by Roland Clark)

Ioana Em. Petrescu & Liviu Petrescu, Scrisori Americane (1981‐1983), ed. Ioana Bot.

(Review by Iuliu Raţiu)

Bruce O’Neill, The Space of Boredom. Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order.
(Review by Petru Negură)

The Society for Romanian Studies announces the winner of the Third Biennial SRS Book Prize for 2015: Sean Cotter’s Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania (Rochester, 2014). The book prize committee, consisting of Holly Case (Cornell, History, Chair), James Augerot (University of Washington, Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Vladimir Solonari (University of Central Florida, History) solicited nominations for the best book published in English in any field of Romanian studies (including Moldova) in the humanities or social sciences.

The books this year were of very high quality. In the end, Sean Cotter’s book stood out as an exceptional example of rigorous scholarship and original argument. The book wonders “Under what conditions could literary translation move to the center of the national imagination?” To do so, he makes the “minor” status of Romanian culture into an interpretive mechanism, largely through following the careers of Lucian Blaga, Constantin Noica, and Emil Cioran in the aftermath of the Second World War. Being minor is not merely a matter of size or scale, but a matter of nature and type, a “translated nation,” as he calls it. The Soviet occupation prompted Cotter’s protagonists to “rethink the country in minor terms.” Tracing literary debates, personal dilemmas, and translations of their work and ideas both within and beyond Romania, Cotter shows that the essence of “minor” cultures can be read through careful analysis of translation practices.

The committee also recognizes Moshe Idel’s Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (Peter Lang, 2013) with an honorable mention. Idel presents Eliade in an admiring light, yet does not hesitate to include the various blemishes in the wide-ranging career of one of the best-known Romanian writers of the twentieth Century.

The Society for Romanian Studies is pleased to award the 2013 Society for Romanian Studies Biennial Book Prize to Peasants under Siege: the Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), by Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery.  Peasants under Siege was selected from among a very strong field of English language books which appeared between January 2011 and December 2012.  Entries for the prize included a large number of excellent works from multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. 

The prize selection committee appreciated the scope and rigor of the research undertaking upon which Peasants under Siege is based. The book builds upon the authors’ decades of experience doing field research in rural Romania. Kligman and Verdery make use of multiple types of sources, including archives, the communist press and extensive interviews, to analyze the relationship between the collectivization of agriculture in Romania and the process of party and state building that transformed the countryside and Romanian society as a whole. The authors stress that in the process of collectivization, the Party apparatus and the Securitate were not only changing property relations according to the Soviet model but also creating the new institutions of the Party-state through local practices and policies they devised in and for Romania. An important part of the documentary research that underpins the study was carried out in the Securitate archives (CNSAS). The authors’ field work, along with that of the other nineteen researchers from various disciplines who collaborated on the project, provides a wealth of intimate detail from the point of view of the participants in the collectivization process that refines and modifies the picture that emerges from Party reports and similar documentary sources. 

In sum, Peasants under Siege represents a central contribution to the literature on Romania during the communist period, and indeed on the history of collectivization in other contexts, as well. Because the communist past is an ongoing battlefield in the present-day politics of memory in Romania, an accurate history establishing the extent of participation in and the full range of responses to collectivization is all the more important.  Kligman and Verdery demonstrate with great subtlety the particular ways in which the Soviet model was carried out in the particular Romanian context. As the authors write: “Blueprints may provide a plan, but social practices are not so easily hammered or welded into place.” In Romania collectivization was as much negotiated as it was violent. The authors skillfully reconstruct what it created (a new kind of state, society and “person”) while simultaneously offering a full account of what it destroyed (communities and lives).

This beautifully conceived and clearly written work of history, anthropology and sociology shows how fruitful it can be to ignore the boundaries between disciplines in the interest of gaining insight into the fraught nexus between society and state. Peasants under Siege will provide a valuable guide to scholars seeking to understand rural transformation in the region for years to come, and serve as a primary reference point for those wishing to understand what really happened in the long decade of the 1950s in Romania, and what it meant for those who lived it.

The 2013 SRS Biennial Book Prize Selection Committee:  William Crowther, (chair), Holly Case and Valentina Glajar.

Committee: Delia Popescu (Chair), Inessa Medzhibovskaya, and Benjamin Thorne.

The committee evaluated ten entries, most of which were high quality historical or sociological work. Ion Matei Costinescu won the prize with his “Interwar Romania and the Greening of the Iron Cage: The Biopolitics of Dimitrie Gusti, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, and Ştefan Zeletin.” This is a chapter from his dissertation on The Village as Quest for Modernity: The Bucharest Sociological School and the Romanian Alternative Way, which he has been completing at the University of Bucharest. The dissertation explores the work of the Bucharest Sociological School in interwar Romania to propose an “alternative modernity project configured along biopolitical lines.” Costinescu offers a constructivist twist to a Weberian argument by recasting the notion of the iron cage in the terms of the Bucharest Sociological School. The chapter offers an impressive critical assessment of alternate visions of modernity, which propose the biopolitical transformation of the people, and the creation of a new national ethos infused with a mythos of superior moral and ethnic value. Costinescu suggests that the Weberian model was adapted to accommodate such a new vision of the state imbued with a new and mobilizing “secular magic” of Romanian nationalism. The essay leads with a robust critical argument that is well developed, interesting, and contributes to developments in the field. The strong theoretical focus of the piece offers a much needed and nuanced addition to the small but extremely important literature on Romanian biopolitics by focusing on the latter half of the compound term, politics. It is an important intervention that both deepens and expands our knowledge of the period, is well-researched and engagingly written. Many congratulations to Ion Matei Costinescu for a fascinating essay!

Honorable mentions

Madalina Valeria Veres’ “Constructing Imperial Spaces: Habsburg Cartography in the Age of Enlightenment” is an important contribution to the study of historiography and the geopolitics of space in Central and Eastern Europe. Her imaginative and objective interpretation is based on the examination of rare archival material, which is organized with impeccable fairness and scholarly tact. This beautifully written piece is a comprehensive and compelling presentation of patterns by means of which constructs enter politics, a sobering invitation to take nothing for granted– and to reinvigorate the analysis of what appears to be a closed topic. The submission is part of her doctoral dissertation, titled Mastering Space: The Great Military Map of Transylvania, which she is completing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Zsuzsanna Magdo’s “Ceausescu’s Thaw and Religiosity: The Central Committee Considers Atheism, 1965-1974” examines the sort of political dialectic occasioned by the encounter of communist state policy and Romanian cultural religiosity. The essay makes use of archival documents from the Department of Religious Cults, the Committee of Historical Monuments, and the Ministry of Culture, to propose a compelling and sophisticated analysis of the “religion question” in the autochthonous modernity project delineated by the Romanian communist state. Magdo offers an interesting and well-researched historiography with a strong argument that leads to a rich picture that traces historical developments and transformations in the context of communist ideological development. Magdo recasts the politico-ideological interchange between Marxism, modernity, and national spiritual life. The clear and prominent integration of archival material on Agitprop is a particular highlight of the essay, and Magdo succeeds in being both informative, analytical, and infusing the occasional sense of humor, which smooth the way to an enjoyable and thought-provoking piece of reading.  Magdo’s entry is part of her dissertation, The Socialist Sacred: Atheism, Religion, and Culture in Communist Romania, 1948-1989, which she is completing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.