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EUGEN STANCU
achievement of a communist utopia was considered possible with the help of
science and technology, starting from the 1970s (the 1971 July Theses and the
Program of the Romanian Communist Party from 1974 are the crucial official
political documents in this respect), the past became the main ideological
preoccupation of Ceausescu’s regime. The idealized Romanian historical past
was seen as that perfect illo tempore’ that had to be remembered, praised
and taken as a model for the present and future. History and national values
turned out to be the main discursive concern of the Romanian Communist
Party. The utopian communist future was replaced with the story of the
Romanian past that unfortunately was not fulfilled due to various enemies
that over time had threatened the organic development of the Romanian
nation. Yet, in the late 1970s and the 1980s, the Romanian communist regime
and especially its leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, aimed to recreate and especially
continue that development.
A revision of the state of affairs of historical studies was an intellectual
priority after 1989, yet it did not happen straight away. Many professional
historians that were active during communism still had important positions
in Romanian academia and were convinced that their writings, or in the best
case, the reshaped history they started to produce after 1989 was the ‘real one’.
It was, nevertheless, a change. However, this formula was a heterogeneous
one, a hybridization between the ‘old-style nationalist historiography’ with
legacies from the interwar and communist period and inspiration from the
new theoretical and methodological directions in historical writing developed
mainly in Western scholarship.
The possibility that historians had to debate the problems of their profession
was almost nonexistent in the 1990s and this situation was due, according to
Alexandru Zub, to the lack of institutions that could create the necessary
context.* Within this framework, there were, nevertheless, personal initiatives
that steered the Romanian post-communist historical debate, such as the
Centre for the History of the Imaginary set up at the University of Bucharest by
Professor Lucian Boia. The conferences that were organized and the volumes
published by the Centre in its first years opened a new research agenda on
critically scrutinizing Romanian historical mythologies, which was, however,
not embraced by many historians. Then, Boia’s seminal book, Istorie si mit
in constiinta romdneascad*, a controversial one at that time, initiated what
2 Mircea Eliade: The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History, Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1991.
Sorin Antohi - Alexandru Zub: Oglinzi retrovizoare. Istorie, memorie si morala in Romänia,
lasi, Polirom, 2002, 172.
* "The first edition of the book Istorie si mit in constiinta romäneascä [History and Myth in
Romanian Consciousness] was published in 1997. In this study Imake reference to the third
edition published in 2011. There are no differences from the first edition, except that the
forewords to the 2"! and 3"! editions respectively were added.
e 110"