ABSTRACT
The Introduction provides an overview of the context of Romania’s reckoning with the communist past after 1989 by emphasizing how the persistence of unreformed political elites in the early years of post-communism stalled swift transitional justice measures. But following the ongoing demands of anti-communist civil society groups, almost two decades later some legal and symbolic measures of historical redress have been pursued by state actors. These measures, however, are primarily embedded in the historical realities of early communism (1944–1964) characterized by forced Sovietization and communization and by generalized repression at the hands of an externally imposed regime. Thus, the history of the Stalinist era and the plight of its victims have become incorporated into and equated with a generalized national narrative that encompasses other episodes of national victimization and resistance, including the violent revolution of December 1989 itself. This analysis of the processes of remembrance and historical reconstruction is situated within the scholarship of memory studies focused on the ongoing interplay between memory, identity, and sociopolitical changes in post-socialist societies in Eastern Europe. The main goal of the monograph is to explore this change from lived or witnessed experience to transmitted and formalized memory.
