Page 111 [111]
OCR
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"
