Nationalism Communism

The Political Discourse of National-Communism
1971-1979
BOGDAN CRISTIAN GAVRILA
The Department of Nationalism Studies

Central European University
2004
Budapest, Hungary
Coordinator: professor Sorin Antohi.

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts
Table of contents:
Introduction - general theoretical assessments of national-communism..1
The structural context of national-communism in Romania up to the advent of the16

multilaterally developed socialist society
The project and societal environment of national-communism..40
Conclusion overall assessment of the national-communist experience, in the 1970 and91

some observations related to its impact upon society
Bibliography99
I.
Introduction general theoretical assessments of national-communism.
Communism was the dominant and traumatic experience of Eastern Europe after
1945. It is the defining historical experience for this part of Europe until 1989. If in the
beginning the communist environment could claim a certain level of uniformity because
of the accelerated imposition of Stalinism - the "Augustinian period" (when the sacral
reality of the Soviet line of communism was politically asserted)1, after 1955, the
panorama of communist Eastern Europe gained diversity. As communism entered into its
"Aquinian Inclusion" (when "Khrushchev replaced the norm of regime indivisibility with
regime individuality")2, each and every country started to shape a more or less
independent path of accomplishing socialism. If to this, one adds the successive breaks,
with varying degrees of systemic differentiation, from the Moscow Center (Jowitt) in
Eastern Europe, the big-picture of communism seems to be characterized more by local
particularities, and less by ideological synchronization in implementing the communist
goals. It can be said that a Great Retreat (Timasheff) was experienced by each and
every communist regime in Eastern Europe. This brought into the domestic dynamics
relevant sets of traditional, pre-revolutionary, national values or practices, thus generating
interesting mixtures between languages and practices of power springing from general
ideological ethics of rule (i.e. Marxism-Leninism) and organically developed national
forms of internal sovereignty (national creative interpretations of the path to
communism).
Kenneth Jowitt, the New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction, pp.78, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1992.
2
Kenneth Jowitt, the New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction, pp.79, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1992.
Nevertheless, regime specificity was not only a consequence of positive responses

to an environment of reform in Eastern European communism. The basic tenet of the
Aquinian period was the initiative of regime de-Stalinization. Depending on their own
domestic power-situation within their own parties and on the developmental tasks3 set
up by various Five-Year Plans, national, communist leaderships reacted positively or
negatively to this new trend coming form Moscow. National communism in Romania
gradually grew into becoming one of the most, maybe the most, articulated types of
negative responses to the Aquinian age. It aimed at and developed such an ubiquitous
presence in Romania's reality of the period 1957-1989, that it, in fact, became the only
empowered reality of the society during that span of time, affecting all layers of the
Romanian societal space. It was the shape that communism took in Romania for most of
its developmental cycle. Consequently, understanding its creation, functioning, and
impact is crucial for becoming conscious of the heritage that national-communism has
left to present Romanian society. The national-communist endeavor in Romania meant
embarking on a Marxist-Leninist project of modernization localized to Romanian realties
(or, what they perceived as realities or national necessities/priorities), while rejuvenating
the symbolic discourse of the nation to support such project. In the general context of
regime individuality, the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) changed its nature of rule,
from breaking-through practices4 relying on primitive accumulation of legitimacy, to
"The Leninist elites adoption of a specific task causes particular types of political uncertainties and,
consequently, particular types of regime structures to manage those uncertainties", in Kenneth Jowitt, the
New World Disorder the Leninist Extinction, pp.12, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992.
4
According to Martin Shafir, Jowitt employs the concept of breaking through, to analyze RCP
motivations and strategies in the period following take-over. The aim of the process of breaking-through
is complete transformation of societal structures and values. The concept refers to the decisive alteration
or destruction of structures and behaviors which are perceived by a revolutionary political elite as
comprising or contributing to the actual or potential existence of alternative centers of political power.
More specifically, according to Jowitt the process is perceived by the party as conditioned by the
inclusionary policies focused either on attaining legitimization in relation to society or, in

latter stages of communism in Romania, upon containing the societal space and
extracting from it if not consensus at least compliance.
In this paper I will analyze the political discourse of the Romanian Communist
Party, trying to genealogically identify, by means of discourse analysis, the development
and the composition of the conceptual construct labeled by the regime as the socialist
nation, in the some of the most important programs or projects of the RCP during the
1970s. The interplay between nationalism and communism was discursively dominated
by a basic polarity of the ideological narrative. Self-determination (Leninist
understanding and its Stalinist redefinition), emphasizing socialist patriotism as the
defense of the homeland and of the victories of socialism, paralleled the socialist
nation, an ethno-genealogical turn caused by the exacerbation of regime individuality
within the communist regime. In Romania, between 1964 and 1974 the two discourses
coexisted, but gradually that of the socialist nation gained the upper hand, especially
after the initialization of the multilaterally developed socialist society project.5 The
shift was made through processes of standardization focused on the main elements of the
nation (in its Stalinist understanding): history, language, territory, population, and
economy. Moreover, the paper adds to this classical definition of the nation, by
considering it an "imagined community6. But, considering that national-Communism
achievement of an absolute monopoly of political power; by industrialization; and by collectivization of

agriculture., in Martin Shafir, Romania, Politics, Economics and Society - Political Stagnation and
Simulated Change, pp.40-41 Frances Pinter Publishers, London, 1985.
5
This term had been used in the circles of power since 1965, but it was for the first time included as a
modernization target at the Tenth Congress in 1969.
6
imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, and even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each life the image of their communion () It is limited because no nation imagines itself as
conterminous with humankind () It is imagined sovereign because the gage of freedom is the sovereign
installed itself in a previously defined national terrain and that it also contains a formula
of the imagined community (the Stalinist definition of the nation), it can be said that the
way it constructed its stand on the nation was an act of re-imagining the community, of
transposing two modules of the nation-form. The basic idea of this paper is that
communism in Romania made a series of successive shifts from take-over/breakthrough
practices, first, to patriotic socialism, second, and lastly, to a discourse of the socialist
nation, thus performing a change of emphasis from the primacy of coercion, force, and
exclusionary Stalinist policies, to that of law, self-determination, and socialist
individuality, to finally end nationalizing itself, deploying more effective and complex
technologies of power, contained into a general political discourse. This last shift was
given a positive and productive substance aimed at re-imagining the Romanian
community in order to attain systemic sustainability. On the one hand, the paper will
concentrate on the differences, both structural but mainly discursive, between the last two
phases of the overall transformation of communism in Romania. But, on the other hand,
it will mainly attempt to see how forms of pastoral power co-existed with the emergence
of forms of power exercised over life, notably the development of an automo-politcs of
the human body (discipline) and a bio-politics of the population (bio-power).7 That is
why, the paper will inquire upon the way concepts like work, education, family, social
participation, etc, where defined within the more general political and historical
assessments made by the RCP in order to circumscribe its new understanding of
Romanians as members of a socialist nation. I will try to see how the RCP attempted to
state () It is imagined as a community, because the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible." In Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities, pp. 6-7, Verso, New York, 1991.
politically discipline the social and personal space and how it tried to legitimize this
endeavor. At the same time, by using secondary sources information I will also follow,
but to a lesser extent, the adaptive reaction of society. In the next part of the introduction
I will try to clarify the terms I am using in the above general statements to describe the
purpose of the present paper.
Craig Calhoun identifies three dimensions to nationalism: "as discourse: the
production of cultural understanding and rhetoric which leads people throughout the
world to think and frame their aspirations in terms of the idea of nation and national
identity, and the production of particular versions of nationalist thought and language in
particular settings and traditions. Second, there is nationalism as project: social
movements and state policies by which people attempt to advance the interests of
collectivities they understand as nations, usually pursuing in some combination increased
participation in an existing state, national autonomy, independence and self
determination, or the amalgamation of territories. Third, there is nationalism as
evaluation: political and cultural ideologies that claim superiority for a particular nation
() in this third sense, nationalism is often given the status of an ethical imperative ()
members of a nation ought to conform to its moral values."8 Following this triadic
description of nationalism, the paper considers national-communism to be a discourse of
power legitimization within the modernization project of Romanian communism that
permanently forced upon society evaluative stances. That is, the socialist ethics and
equity combined with claims of national heritage and continuity have been the filters of
action and movement within the unfolding of the construction of communist Romania.
7
Barry Smart, The Politics of Truth and the Problem of Hegemony, in Ed by Barry Smart, Michael
Foucault Critical Assessments, pp. 211, Routledge, London/New York, 1994.
National-communism is possible as an analytical conceptual construction

applicable to understanding the structural dynamics of a communist regime, exactly
because of the polarity of discourse in the ideological narrative. There are two main
factors that make the national-communist construction valid: the modularity of
nationalism and the Leninist self-determination right. Nationalisms become modular,
once created, that is, "capable of being transplanted, with different degrees of selfconsciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a
correspondingly wide number of political and ideological constellations."9 Furthermore,
this issue of modularity can be expanded. If one follows the modifications brought to it
by Manu Goswami, a terminological upgrading can be obtained. Thus, the modularity of
nationalism becomes "the transposable, dynamic, durable, and doubled character of the
modern nation form."10 In this way, modularity is not a universal process of mimesis (of
self-identical repetition through time and across space)"11, because "inherent to the
transposition of social forms is the agentic and dynamic reconfiguration of cultural
categories, institutional repertoires, and meanings."12 The doubled character springs from
the fact that nationalism is both a highly universalistic and particularistic articulation of
collective identity. The durability is explained by the fact that "the nation form is a
paradigmatic instance of a deep structure that affects practices and institutions that
Craig Calhoun, Nationalism, pp. 6, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1997.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp.4, Verso, New York, 1991.
10
Manu Goswami, Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of
Nationalism, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 4, no. 3, October 2002, pp. 770-790.
11
12
9
structure the spatio-temporal matrices of social and political life."13 Consequently, this
modularity allows nationalism the possibility to find discursive and infrastructural
applications even to a communist polity, especially if that polity is attempting to gain for
itself an individual profile.
The second factor, the Leninist explanation of the right to self-determination,
covers the antinomy domestic-international, the pretext of the RCP of undergoing an
independent path to socialism. The right has two facets: the first is that of a nation's selfassertion against pretenses of annexation, and the second is that the nation is right to
undergo such a struggle only if her stand has worth in the general struggle against
imperialism and capitalism. "In this way the question of the oppressed nations became a
question of supporting, or rendering real and continuous assistance to the oppressed
nations in their struggle against imperialism for real equality of nations, for their
independent existence as states."14 Furthermore, Stalin identifies two tendencies of the
national problem: "the tendency toward political emancipation from the shackles of
imperialism and towards the formation of an independent national state - a tendency
which arose as a consequence of imperialist oppression and colonial exploitation; and the
tendency towards an economic rapprochement among nations, which arose as a result of
the formation of a world market and a world economic system."15 The end goal of this
evolution of the nation form is toward amalgamation of all nations (Lenin), that is, a
mixture of various units that continue to maintain their specificity, but are united by their
fight against oppression and for reaching the Communist state. Of course, Stalins
13
14
J. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, pp. 61, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1947.
15
J. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, pp. 64-65, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1947.
interpretation of the Leninist right of self-determination was not targeting a nationalcommunist possibility, but the formulation that he gave to this right allows leverage for a
communist party which intends to achieve autonomy, but continues its commitment to
the anti-imperialistic struggle within the world communist movement.
The conceptual possibility of national-communism, as an analytical tool, because
of nationalisms modularity and because of interpretative mobility within Leninist selfdetermination, can be confirmed by the political discourse of Romanian communism. For
example, Ceausescu justified the nationalizing of the RCPs regime at the Ninth Congress
of the RCP the following way: for a long time to come the nation and the State will
continue to be the basis of the deployment of socialist society. The development of the
nation, the consolidation of the socialist State [notice the synonimity of the two] comply
with the objective requirements of social life; not only does this not run counter to the
interests of socialist internationalism, but, on the contrary, it fully corresponds to these
interests, to the solidarity of the working people, to the cause of socialism and peace. The
development and flourishing of each socialist nation, of each socialist state, equal rights,
sovereign and independent, is an essential requirement upon which depend the
strengthening of the unity and cohesion of the socialist countries, the growth of their
influence upon mankinds advance toward socialism and communism.16 The
individuality of communism in Romania was to be the result of the adaptation of national
historical development to the modernization project of communism; consequently, it can
be said that the regime was national-communist.
16
Nicolae Ceausescu, Exposition at the Ninth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party, pp. 60, Editura
Politica, Bucuresti, 1965.
The methodology used for analysis in this paper is attempting to combine both
structuralist methods and instrumentalist ones. National-communism is considered to
have originated both in institutional transformations within the system and in attempts by
leadership to expand its capacity of control and support within Romanian society. Of
course, the institutional evolution overlaps with endeavors to achieve societal
purposiveness, especially as the regime made the shift from the developmental stage of
transformation to that of inclusion. National-communism was born out of the RCPs
"positive ideological evaluation of the nation-state" (Jowitt). The way the RCP defined its
domestic and international role and the type of identification with Romanian history and
world-level politics within the broad Marxist-Leninist ideology, formed a justificatory
policy and task construction that attempted to solve the main problem of inclusionary
stage of Communist development: "the regime's intention to enhance its legitimacy
without sacrificing charismatic exclusiveness of its official (apparatchik) component."17
The logic of the modernization and emancipation process of communist Romania, as
sketched by the RCP and its leader, is defined by a "combined substitution". That is, "the
dual process of insulation-transformation at the national/international level: to break
through dependency in a peasant country, a political organization with a paradigm
antithetical to that of a social order based on status must simultaneously insulate itself
from and recast the institutions of a peasant society and insulate the country itself from
international ties that constrain, shape, and reinforce domestic institutional patterns."18
On the domestic realm the RCP was centered upon the modernization and transformation
17
Kenneth Jowitt, the New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction, pp. 93, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1992.
18
Kenneth Jowitt, the New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction, pp. 44, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1992.
through societal homogenization, while on the international one, the RCP attempted to
make away with Romania's dependency (e.g., the discourse of struggle against inherited
backwardness), to achieve national emancipation in a new type of communist order. For
the RCP, its mission was to create a socialist national identity and to affirm it
independently within a world order containing different social systems. What was
previously labeled as mechanical inclusionary process was supposed to create a party of a
new type, that is, a "class nation": " only when a nation becomes a class, a visible
category unequally distributed in an otherwise mobile system, the former earned a
political conscience and acted upon it. Only when class becomes nation, the class evolved
from the class per se situation, to the class for itself or the nation for itself. Neither
nations nor classes dont seem to be political catalysts; only nation-classes or classnations perform this function."19 The type of transformation that the RCP attempted
during the inclusionary phase was that of reconstructing the society according to its own
project of Enlightenment; its main thrust should be defined as the withering of society,
which, for all practical purposes, is to be taken over from within by the conscious factor.
(Niculescu-Mizil)20 And the general result of this process was a re-imagination of the
nation. From 1965 to 1977 Marxism-Leninism was secularized into the form of creative
Marxism (ideology applied to national realities, contexts, and necessities). The latter was
vernacularized by the inclusionary process, which created the a large range of
"contamination" of all social categories through their involvement in the accomplishment
of the RCP's project of modernization (self-identification through the administrative
pilgrimage created by certain Party policies, e.g. rotation of cadres). The provinciality of
19
Ernest Gellner, Natiuni si Nationalisme, pp. 181, Editura Antet, Oradea, 1997.
10
Romanian communism was re-enforced through a mini-Cultural Revolution,21 "a

philological revolution", that modulated Romanian nation-ness, by asserting its
centrality, self-sufficiency, and its importance in anticipating Romanian communism.
Stalin's definition points out six main features of the nation: it is community with unitary
economy, history, language, territory, culture, and psyche. The RCP modulated all these
features on Romania's past and present socio-historical development saturating them with
communist significance. By 1977, the RCP had managed to re-imagine the Romanian
nation into a national-communist regime; it accomplished a symbolic re-interpretation of
its developmental tasks. The years that followed just furthered this re-imagining process,
which was upgraded by Ceausescu's personality cult that bifurcated the charismatic
power: the Party and the Leader.
The discourse of the socialist nation became, during the gradual encroachment of
society by the RCP, a modality of preventing dysfunctional developments, which could
challenge the communist authority over the country, and, at the same time, a means of
disciplining the population into a behavior the could re-produce the system and satisfy
the need of accomplishing the tasks set up by the RCPs modernization project. The
continuation of its domination over the society was achieved both through legitimization
and compliance. The concept of legitimization is centered upon both the structure and the
system. As a structural legitimization act, national-Communism attempted to "avoid the
nonorganization of an effective counterimage."22 In other words, the attachment of a
national discourse to the Communist regime was designed to prevent pluri-structuring,
20
In Martin Shafir Romania, Politics, Economics and Society - Political Stagnation and Simulated Change,
pp.53-57, Frances Pinter Publishers, London, 1985.
21
Its landmark moments are the 1971 program of re-ideologization of national culture and the 1976
Congress of Socialist Culture.
11
that is, alternative loci of power that could coalesce populational segments toward either
reformation or even regime change. As a systemic legitimization act, nationalCommunism tried "to explain to individuals not only why they ought to perform a certain
action and no another, but also, to tell them why things were the way they were ()
Legitimization justifies the institutional order imprinting a normative dignity to its
practical imperatives."23 The introduction within the general ideology of the regime of the
national discourse was meant to create, within the population, first, a sense of familiarity,
and second, the imagery of continuity on a new progressive structural basis.
At the same time, this paper is attempting to also promote two types of
understanding power: first, as primarily political power as linked to leadership dynamics,
and second, a type of power that is immanent to the general regime of truth (Foucault)
that national-communism became through its project of modernization and re-imagining
the nation. The first type can be identified as pastoral power that has four main
features: its "ultimate aim is to individual salvation in the next world; it must also be
prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock; it looks after not just the
whole community but each individual in particular, during his entire life; and, finally, it
cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of the people's minds, hence it implies a
knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it."24 Extending these four traits of
pastoral power to a political regime such as the national-Communist one in Romania, one
can obtain the big picture of the kind of power exercised this political, economic, social,
and cultural construct. It prophesized the salvation of the Communist society, a
22
Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism - Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's
Romania, pp. 10, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995.
23
Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Construirea Sociala a Realitatii, pp. 111-112, traducere de Alex.
Butucelea Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 1999.
12
desideratum which degree of proximity to factual events grew weaker as the count of
failures grew larger. It claimed a revolutionary spirit of self-denial from the members of
the RCP, and generally from the whole population, which it designated as the true
sovereign. It was preoccupied not only with the collectivity of the nation, but also with
each an every individual, designated with the privileged status of being Romanian. And
finally, it attempted "organic integration" of the Party-State in society and of society in
the Party-State, targeting the conscience of both the society and of its members.
However, this first understanding of power fails to point out, if instrumentalized
in analysis, the will of knowledge from the part of the RCP, exercised over the Romanian
society in order to politicize social space. The political discourse of the nation, as it will
be stressed out in this paper, contains the composites for the re-construction of society
according to the goal culture25. As by mid-1965 political terror was not anymore a
widespread tool for societal control, the regime, or to put it in other words, the
incumbents of pastoral power, turned to compensatory normative appeals (Dallin and
Breslauer). In the context of both leadership change (death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej)
and of the turn from terror to manipulation, as means of attaining control, two variables
emerged as crucial for the stability of communist polity. Everything else (including
political culture, personalities, economic constraints, external pressures and threats) being
equal, there must be organization (consistency of command) and compensatory
24
Michael Foucault, Power, pp. 333, edited by James D. Faubion, The New Press, New York, 2000.
Chalmers Johnston defines the goals culture as an ideologys image of the ultimate utopia, its idealized
contrast to the present, which elicits purposive revolutionary behavior and sacrifice from a significant part of
the revolutionary party and which may be used to justify the partys resort to coercion and violence against
the noncompliant. In Chalmers Johnson, Comparing Communist Nations, in Ed. Chalmers Johnson,
Change in Communist Systems, pp.7, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1970.
25
13
incentives (functional equivalents of terror).26 One of such equivalents was the discourse
of the socialist nation, while the first variable was to be mirrored in the highly
centralized project of modernization through industrialization. Thus, in Romania, after
1965, the transfer culture27 of communism is one of national industrialization through
strong socialist work ethics, which prescribe and rationalize social and individual
behavior. The means of implementation are attempted to be legitimized, but at the same
time, society is contained through the very content of the values promoted in the
discourse that circumscribes this new form of regime development. Society is not only
ruled, but it is also inevitably disciplined. At this point, the second type of power
comes into play, that is, disciplinary power. T. Carlos Jacques, in describing Foucaults
presentation of disciplinary power, states that its main feature is expansionist character,
as it places ever more activities of human life under its domain. These developments,
though, are not the consequence of a conscious project, or overall plan. On the contrary,
they are due to a diversity of incremental changes in various institutions confronting
specific problems. The changes subsequently imitated and supported each other, thus
giving rise to a new kind of social power.28 According to Foucault himself, this kind of
power produces: it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.
The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this
26
Alexander Dallin and George Breslauer, Political Terror, in Ed. Chalmers Johnson, Change in
Communist Systems, pp. 207, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1970.
27
Again, Johnston defines the transfer culture as the one that provides the norms that guide policy
formation: it specifies what steps the revolutionary leadership must take to move toward the goal culture.
In Chalmers Johnson, Comparing Communist Nations, in Ed. Chalmers Johnson, Change in Communist
Systems, pp.7, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1970.
28
T. Carlos Jacques, Whence Does the Critic Speak? A study of Foucault's Genealogy, in Ed by Barry Smart,
Michael Foucault Critical Assessments, pp. 102, Routledge, London/New York, 1994.
14
production.29 In the paper the concept is used to stress the transformative value of
national-communist discourse: it was meant to give a new physiognomy to Romanian
society (even more to the nation) However, the impact of the discourse and its reality (I
mean the policies, laws, or norms resulting from it) was ambivalent: both the party and
the society were affected, but not particularly in correspondence to the modernization
project, but in a hybrid manner, one in which traditional and communist values and
practices coexisted into a reproduction of the national-communist regime. This situation
reflected the reality of the socialist nation, as Stalin has defined it - a bourgeois nation
that continued its existence, in a new way, in socialism.
The main disciplinary tenets of the discourse of the socialist nation were those of
motivated work, education and educational recycling, and the demographic policies,
within the larger context of the creation of the national-Communist "narrative" (with its
historical time and values) justifying the Romanian Communist modernization project.
The aim was to form "cognizant public"30 (Verdery) that would willingly participate into
taking the nation to higher stages of socialism. But, this was not a consultative process,
but one controlled by a party that had absolute monopoly over decision-making and a
party that, with the advent of the multilaterally developed socialist society, was
attempting a taking-over from within. Society complied, but it also dissimulated. Thus an
awkward reality was born, containing an in-built systemic gap between pay legal and
29
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 194, translated from French by Alan Sheridan, Vintage
Books, New York, 1979.
30
"A 'cognizant public' is one that recognizes and acknowledges the bases upon which an elite makes a
claim to superior status. Their recognition depends upon accepting the values that underlie that claim. ()
Forming a cognizant public includes not only "civilizing" the public into one's preferred values and
sustaining its attachment to them but also, sometimes, recivilizing it: forming new cognizances for a public
already cognizant within a given distribution of values." In Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under
Socialism - Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania, pp. 197-198, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1995.
15
the pay reel31 that became the main foe against which the whole system was to struggle.
The social space was officially socialized according to the directives contained in the
regimes discourse, but also the socializers had to adjust to the challenges raised by the
process. The nation contained only non-antagonistic classes, but their homogenization
was still to be achieved. It was a state of hegemony32, where compliance, legitimacy, and
dissimulation were simultaneously existing levels of re-production of the regimes power.
By employing socializing, disciplinary means the RCP was truly nationalized, and its
communism indeginized, but at the same time it succeeded into perpetuating and
accentuating its domination over society.
II.
The structural context of national-communism in Romania up to the advent

of the multilaterally developed socialist society.
National-Communism appeared in Romania because of a set of specific

sociohistoric contexts on both the domestic and international domains. They can be
grouped as follows: the evolution of Communism, as an overall, international
phenomenon; the profile dynamics of the RCP; domestic heritage of national, historic
discourse; and finally, the societal reality of Romania before and after 1968. All these
31
Martin Shafir Romania, Politics, Economics and Society - Political Stagnation and Simulated Change,
pp.53-57, Frances Pinter Publishers, London, 1985.
32
I follow Barry Smarts explanation of the concept: hegemony contributes to or constitutes a form of
social cohesion not through force or coercion, nor necessarily through consent, but most effectively by way
of practices, techniques, and methods which infiltrate minds and bodies, cultural practices which cultivate
behaviors and beliefs, tastes, desires, and needs as seemingly naturally occurring qualities and properties
embodied in the psychic and physical reality (or truth) of the human subject. In Barry Smart, The Politics
of Truth and the Problem of Hegemony, in Ed by Barry Smart, Michael Foucault Critical Assessments,
pp. 210, Routledge, London/New York, 1994.
16
factors combined into creating the ripe environment for a national-Communist choice and
path in Romania.
Communism in Eastern Europe had two general systemic profiles: Stalinism and
de-Stalinization. The two originate in the in two basic interpretations of Communist
developmental tasks in the Soviet Union: War Communism and the New Economic
program (the NEP). The latter are the basic modules of Communism understood as
praxis. The first, war Communism appeared in June 28, 1918, when the decree of
nationalization was issued in the Soviet Union, and developed at its peak during the civil
war. "The political and economic institutions of war Communism represented a mixture
of apparently utopian and practical policies. In industry the system of state-organized
barter without the use of money tended to take the place of free market exchanges.
Factory discipline was put on a semi-military basis. Within Party also discipline was
strengthened. Appointments to office replaced election to a wider extent than ever before
and became the rule in many sectors of political life outside the Party, such as trade
unions. The peasants were subjected to numerous and purely arbitrary requisitions."33
War Communism was the structural matrix of Stalinism, its locus of inspiration and
heritage for its project of state, Party, and society construction. The second, the NEP was
made up of sets of responses to the detrimental effects of war Communism on the
stability and harmony of the newly born Bolshevik State. "The central measure of the
NEP was the granting to the peasantry of the right to trade in the open market in whatever
produce they had left, after a certain specified amount had been turned over to the
government. This decision meant the return to an important sector of economy. In the
33
Barrington Moore, Jr., Soviet Politics: the Dilemma of Power, pp. 89-90, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1950.
17
field of industry the government retreated to the "commanding heights" of control over
banking, transportation, and certain large industries, permitting private enterprise to take
over the rest. In one of his speeches Lenin candidly described the NEP as a partial return
to capitalism."34 The NEP was the model for all reformation, softening of Communist
rule in the Soviet Union and respectively in Eastern Europe, it was the historic
legitimization source for the de-Stalinization undergone by Khrushchev in 1956.
As for all Eastern European countries, Stalinism was the formative experience for
Romania, the ideological foundation of the construction of Communism pursued after
1947. This endeavor had been one of complete transformation of the old Romanian
society, "the bourgeois-landowner order", and then of consolidation of the results
obtained during the transformative phase. The essence of this dynamic lies in Stalin's
definition of Leninism, which is "Marxism of the era of imperialism and of the
proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the
proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the
proletariat in particular."35 Furthermore, "the fundamental problem of Leninism, its point
of departure, is not the peasant problem, but the problem of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, of the conditions under which it can be consolidated."36 In other words, the
RCP was founding its claim to power as the representative of the proletariat and the
enforcer and consolidator of its dictatorship. Adding to this the RCP's dependence, in its
incipient existence as the only locus of politic power in the state, on Soviet assistance, it
can be said that "the party chose not to cultivate legitimacy but gave priority to achieving
34
Barrington Moore, Jr., Soviet Politics: the Dilemma of Power, pp. 93, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1950.
35
36
18
rapid and comprehensive industrialization; though the party sought to secure a degree of
popular support, it was unwilling to win support at the price of compromising its basic
ideas for the transformation of the political and economic system. This determination,
coupled with Soviet support, permitted the party to utilize coercion and violence in
achieving its goals."37 The dominant features of these first two stages of Romanian
Communist evolution, transformation and consolidation, were: rapid industrialization,
minimizing consumption, comprehensive collectivization, high level of coercion and
overt terror; porletarization of society; and, a strong anti-imperialist, anti-deviationist
stand within the Warsaw Pact (for example the Cominform congress that condemned
Titoism was held in Bucharest). It is plain to see that the RCP took over all the defying
traits the war-like Communism prophesized by Stalin. Even the distrust, not only in the
revolutionary commitment of the peasantry, but also, in the good faith of the Romanian
proletariat, whose integration in the power structured was only limited. For the RCP, at
the time, the Soviet Union was "the head of the family", both in terms of domestic policy
inspiration and in terms of Communist internationalism.
That is why, when Kchrushchev delivered the secret speech at the XXth Congress
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, the RCP was caught on
the wrong foot. Its problems deepened as Kchrushchev's developmental shift to inclusion
"signaled a reduction in the political and ideological tension between the quasi-sacral
party regime and the society it ruled () Soviet inclusion rested on the recognition that
Soviet society is no longer a contaminating force."38 By declaring the complete victory of
37
Robert King, The History of the Romanian Communist Party, pp. 100, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford,
1980.
38
Kenneth Jowitt, the New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction, pp., University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1992.
19
Socialism, Khrushchev was able to give up to the Stalinist antinomy Party-society. It was
a similar evolution as the one ending War Communism because the civil war had been
won, and starting NEP out of the need of rapprochement of the society with the new
regime. Within the bloc, Khrushchev insisted on "an organization of Leninist regimes
that imperatively asserts the substantive - not simply procedural - unity of a group and
recognizes the existence of distinct and potentially conflicting interests within it."39
In conclusion, it can be said that the Soviet developmental shift was for the RCP
both a heavy blow and a great opportunity. On the one hand, the RCP policies suddenly
fell short of justification, as the Soviet center grew more interested in consumption and
welfare imperatives and it gave up to overt terror as means of achieving mobilization. On
the other hand, the RCP had the chance of performing its own inclusion process; to start
gaining legitimacy points. The dilemma got further clarification because of two important
events in the reality of Communist Eastern Europe: the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and
the retreat of the Soviet troops from Romania. In fact, the two are related: the RCP
adopted a strong stand against the Hungarian revolution, faithfully staying by the side of
the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev, in the context of the complete Communist border
encroachment of Romania, granted to the RCP as prize the retreat of the Soviet troops in
July 25, 1958. Of additional interest is the fact that the 1956 crisis triggered a rebellious
state of facts in Romania, especially in Transylvania and Bucharest, and especially
among the Hungarian minority. So, as far as the foreign situation was concerned, by the
end of the 1950s the odds were pointing to a national solution of the dilemma of the
RCP, that is, how to continue with Stalinist policies in an inclusionary environment.
39
Kenneth Jowitt, the New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction, pp., University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1992.
20
The general behavior of the RCP, after consolidating its power, was determined
by two main, interrelated factors: the first is the nature/profile of the RCP before and
immediately after the take-over phase; and the second is its initial relationship with
Romanian society. From the beginning, it should be stressed the very limited impact the
RCP had upon the pre-communist Romanian environment. As David Chirot states,
nowhere else had the Party been so weak and alien in the 1930s, and in no other country
in Eastern Europe did it have so little genuine popular support after 1945 (Ionescu). Very
rarely has such a pathetic movement become an overwhelmingly dominant elite so
quickly. Without the period of Stalinist terror enforced by Soviet occupation, and the
continued fear that such thing might happen again, there is no question that communist
rule in Romania would have collapsed long ago. Without understanding this it is
impossible to comprehend social change since 1947.40 The main reason41, and this
would even be later stressed by Ceausescu himself, was the national question. The RCP
in the interwar period had labeled the newly formed Romania (as a result of the
Versailles treatise) as an imperialist state, thus requesting the self-determination of the
national groups within its borders. According to R.V. Burks, it was not the absence of
the characteristic social or economic problems which produced communism elsewhere in
the Balkans that accounts for the weakness of the Romanian party. It was rather the fact
that it was impossible to identify the national interests of ethnic Romanians with Soviet
40
Daniel Chirot, Social Change in Communist Romania, pp.460, in Social Forces, Vol. 57, No. 2,
Special Issue (Dec. 1978), pp.457-499, University of North Carolina Press.
41
A second, partial reason would also be the attempts of agricultural reform that for some time discharged
the dissatisfaction of the Romanian peasantry with the interwar establishment; for this point of view see
Franz Borkenau, World Communism: a History of the Communist International, New introd. By Raymond
Aron, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) Press, 1962. Of course there were other reasons, like the
weakness of the proletariat and of the trade unions, the predominately peasant society, the entrenchment of
various elites, etc.
21
communism.42 In a broad overview, it can be said that the general profile of the RCP
during the inter-war years was composed of four basic elements: in April 1924 it was
banned, so it went into illegality; between 1924 and 1944 its general secretaries were not
ethnic Romanians (even the membership was based on minorities' elements, rather than
Romanians43); its political program was profoundly anti-national, "a typical multinational
state created on the basis of occupation of foreign territories"44; and finally, the prison
experience, as the most important RCP leaders after 1944 spent considerable time in
confinement at the Doftana, Caransebes, Targu-Jiu prisons. The four features can be
meshed into two main statements about the specificity of the RCP: first, not touching
upon the national question, the party, by starting to exploit this legitimization resource,
could appear before the people like a new, reformed political force, more attentive to
their needs and cultural background; and second, the RCP, using the accumulations of the
prison and illegality years, had a certain preparedness for an independent stance within
the Communist bloc. Furthermore, as the core of the RCP was in prison, the
communication and pilgrimages to Moscow were limited, a rarity, and this allowed the
formation, within the RCP ranks, of a second-hand type of Communism, developed
mostly out of a basic understanding of Leninism as Stalinism and inter-group debates that
were strongly conditioned by the lack of profound ideological knowledge of the leaders
42
in Mary Ellen Fischer, Nicolae Ceausescu a Study in Political Leadership, pp. 17, Lynne Rienner
Publishers, Boulder & London, 1989.
43
Mary Ellen Fischer describes the ethnic composition of the party: the Hungarians, less than 8% of the
population of Greater Romania, made up over a quarter of the RCP members in the 1930s; the comparable
figures for the Jews were 4% of the population and 18% of the Party. Russians, Ukrainians, and Bulgarians
had a share in RCP membership over three times greater than the share in their share in the total population.
The Romanians were the reverse: they made up 72% of the population and only 23% of the party. In Mary
Ellen Fischer, Nicolae Ceausescu a Study in Political Leadership, pp. 16, Lynne Rienner Publishers,
Boulder & London, 1989.
44
This is the description made by Ceausescu to the position of the RCP on the national question (adopted at
the third, fourth, and fifth congress of the party during the inter-war years), at the 45th anniversary of the
RCP's founding.
22
of the RCP - this is one of the origins of the highly dogmatic version of Communism that
developed in Romania. At the same time, most of the traits of the organization of the
party formations in prisons were transferred after taking power to the organizational
policies of the RCP. In the confinement circumstances, "the organizational authority
could be manifested only in terms of personal authority. The certification of gaining entry
in the in the organization came under the guise of miscellaneous but vital acts of
obedience; being endlessly reiterated, they were sedimented in a peculiar and dominant
trait of one's psychology, best explained by the postulate: the supreme duty of a true
revolutionary is total docility toward its superiors () The homogeneity of an
organization, which the asymmetry of power relations endangered to a great extent, was
founded upon the equality of condition: the state of captivity, the risks, the common
cause, and additionally, the paradox of an equality of atmosphere ruling interpersonal
relationships."45 The traditions of isolation from society and of leadership through the
personal power of one man were the fundamental imprints left on the profile of the RCP
by the inter-war years. The rationale was that the RCP had a revolutionary mission of
insuring its survival and its purity from the corrupted and inimical outside. In conclusion,
it can be stated that the RCP lacked a social base and it didnt identify itself with
Romanian nation (not yet at least) on the major issues mobilizing Romanian to political
action between the wars: national unity and sovereignty.46
These internal patterns of development of the RCP corroborated with the takeover reality (1947-1953) of Romanian society created an environment dominated by high
45
Pavel Campeanu, Ceausescu, Anii Numaratorii Inverse, pp. 58, Polirom, Iasi, 2002.
Mary Ellen Fischer, Nicolae Ceausescu a Study in Political Leadership, pp. 34, Lynne Rienner
46
23
degrees of distrust in party-population relations and of terror47, as a mechanism of

implementing collectivization, industrialization, and the purging of class enemies and
unhealthy elements of the nation. Daniel Chirots strong assessment of the transformative
phase of Romanian communism best describes the relevance of the systemic
developments on these years: the importance of the 1947-53 period cannot be
underestimated. Whether one follows Jowitts breakthrough interpretation of chooses to
view the period as one of randomly applied terror in order to insure total submission,
there is no question that for the party elite as well as for Romania this was a formative
experience. In later years, the party cadres continuing distrust of their own masses and the
great bitterness they expressed toward the Soviet Union combined to create a unique and
distinctly Romanian pattern of communist development.48 At the same time, more
general developments, characterizing communism all over Eastern Europe, left their mark
on these years. From 1948 to 1953 a deep and sharp factional struggle dominated the
RCPs internal dynamics. The main political conflict in the transformative and
construction phases was between Gheorgiu-Dej (the leader of the prison group) and Ana
Pauker (the representative of Dimitrov, former head of the Comintern). This conflict
won't be described, for it's not the purpose of the paper, but what should be concluded out
of this experience is an already blurry independent attitude of some of the RCP
leadership. Gheorghiu-Dej and his group, trying to obtain undisputed leadership, had to
emphasize (besides obtaining Stalin's approval) its indigenousness, its character of
natural, national Communist product. The involvement of this wing of the RCP in the
47
According to Chirot by early 1950s some 180,000 (out of a total population of 16 millions) were in jails
and concentration camps, about 40,000 them at work on a Danube-Black Sea canal, which was to be given
up at the beginning of the 1960s, and then re-initiated as a project in late 1970s.
24
August 23 1944 coup d'etat (through its representative Emil Bodnaras), its role in the
return of the North of Transylvania to Romania, and achievement of the retreat of the
Soviet troops, all these were essential landmarks that could be exploited for strengthening
the national line. The resolution of the factional crisis within the party, by late 1950s,
produced coherence within party affairs: a whole new elite had arisen, with its own
interests, its own internal divisions, and a greater sense of security than it had possessed a
few years before.49. The stabilization of the elite was the signal of the beginning of an
inclusionary process, of which firs instance was the relaxation of 1953-1955. In the
Program of the Party of 1974, Nicolae Ceausescu was describing the stage of
Communism that preceded him, stated that "the 1951-1955, 1956-1960, and 1961-1965
five-year plans secured the technical and material groundwork of socialist society [my
Italics] in industry and agriculture; this objective was attained with the completion of the
cooperativization and of the organization of the activity of the agricultural production
cooperatives. Under the 1961-1965 Five-Year Plan the unitary socialist economy was
achieved in Romania, which marked the complete victory of Socialism in all fields of
activity, the eradication for good of all the exploiting classes, the abolition of exploitation
of man by man, the assertion of the socialist principles in social life.50 Moreover, the year
1948 was the one when a single revolutionary Party of the working-class was set up, as
the RCP merged together with the Social-Democratic Party, thus being put an end to "the
split in our working class movement, an important victory of the revolutionary forces in
48
49
Daniel Chirot, Social Change in Communist Romania, pp.469, in Social Forces, Vol. 57, No. 2, Special
Issue (Dec. 1978), pp.457-499, University of North Carolina Press.
50
Nicolae Ceausescu, The Romanian Communist Party Program of 1975, pp. 61, Editura Minerva,
Bucuresti, 1976.
25
Romania."51 In 1955 the RCP had about 600,000 members (5% of the total population
over 20 years of age), of whom about 55% were under 40. Between December 1955 to
January 1960 the total increase in RCP membership was of 40%, with an average annual
increase of 8.8%, while between April 1962 and December 1964 the increase was of
50%, with an average of 20%.. While in 1955 the class composition of the party was of
42% workers, 41% peasants, and 12% intellectuals, in December 1965 was of 40%
workers, 32% peasants, 22% intellectuals, while the total membership increased to
1,518,000. In 1965 a national Five-Year Plan had already been accomplished, and being
based on heavy industrialization, urbanization52, porletarization of society, territorial
reorganization of the country, and collectivization. The Romanian population with its
various occupational strata, by 1965, had already been granted extensive possibilities of
communist membership, had been given a habitat (see the note on Chirot) through
urbanization and redefinition of rural life within the institutions of collectivization (statefarms, cooperatives, etc), and it was gradually beginning to b offered the possibility of
national identification within the communist regime.
The indigenization of the RCP first appeared as a development caused by external
incentives, by the general relationship with the Moscow center. The event that
51
Bucuresti, 1976.
52
Daniel Chirot points out the deep transformation on the typical agricultural society of Romania, which
impacted upon populational structure and consequently its peoples behavior toward the hegemony of the
RCP. Massive migration to the cities in the 1950s and the 1960s created severe strains for an economy that
emphasized investment in heavy industry rather than consumer goods and housing. Form 1951 to 1955
about 14,000 apartments were built per year to accommodate over 150,000 new urbanites per year. From
1956 to 1960, an average of 26,000 new urban apartments were built per year, and in the early 1960s, about
45,000. During those years, close to 200,000 new urbanites had to be housed each year. The number of the
new apartments built annually rose to 80,000 in late 1960s, and in 1970s over 100,00 new urban apartments
have been built each year. New apartments have also grown in size. In 1950s, over 20% had only one room,
and under 15% three or more rooms; by 1974, 7% had one room, and over 40% had three or more. So it
was not until the late 1960s that enough new apartments were built each year to keep up with urban
26
triggered the decision of trying autonomy form Moscow was the Khrushchev plan,
presented on August 1961 to members of the Camecom, "to give the body a supranational
planning role which, if accepted by Romania, would have obliged her to remain a
supplier of raw materials, and to abandon her program of rapid industrialization, thus
risking economic chaos at home. Such a move would have made the country susceptible
to further economic exploitation by the Soviet Union, which was precisely what
Gheorghiu-Dej sought to avoid by embarking on the policy of industrialization."53 His
autonomy moves were inspired by those of the Chinese Communism, which at the time
was in a harsh conflict with the CPSU; moreover, when he rejected Khrushchev plan he
was granted support by the Chinese Communists, this being the beginning of a
collaboration of great importance in the evolution of the RCP (the first visit in Peking
was in 1964). To this tense atmosphere another two ingredients were added: the Valev
plan of creating an economic region encompassing all SSR Moldova, half of Romania,
and parts of Bulgaria; and, the usage of Transylvania as blackmail topic by Khrushchev
in his relations with the RCP. The initiatives of the Soviet Union were inflicting upon the
RCP leadership in a crisis of geographically shrinking authority. The result of all these
turmoils was the declaration of 1964 that legitimized the Romanian policy as independent
path and non-interference in domestic affairs. In the same year Khrushchev was deposed
of power, Gheorghiu-Dej having an extra opportunity of consolidating the positions
gained. He did so by obtaining from Brezhnev the withdrawal of the KGB counselors
from Romania (December 1964) and by deepening the measures of de-Russification of
Romania, initiated in 1963. Under the circumstances, communist Romanian leadership
growth. In Daniel Chirot, Social Change in Communist Romania, pp.474, in Social Forces, Vol. 57, No.
2, Special Issue (Dec. 1978), pp.457-499, University of North Carolina Press.
27
focused on international relations priorities: singling itself out of the Warsaw Treaty
Organization (WTO) mass and finding alternative spaces to identify itself with, and
consequently, place itself within.54 Thus, at a national level, 1964 marks a turn-point in
the way the RCP leadership envisages the national space. During this year the RCP issues
its declaration of independence that designates its ultimate and absolute sovereignty
within the national territory. This is officialized by the publication of Marxs Notes on
Romanians: the founder of scientific socialism legitimizes Romanias right to stand
against the forced subordination toward the USSR. The text grants, through a historical
transfer, to the RCP the claim to self-determine its own space of authority. At the same
time, the taboo regions of what later Ceausescu called historic Romania, Transylvania
and Basserabia, become objects of strong, expansive initiatives of national identification.
Moreover, the national space is not only de-Russified but also increasingly Romanized.
Gheorghiu-Dej adopted a more Romanian stance in his dealings with the national
minorities inhabiting Romania, especially when it came to Hungarians. The turmoil
produced by the Hungarian uprising in Romania during 1956, made the RCP leadership
to pursue preemptive policies with a view to Hungarians, trying to integrate this minority
into Romania and to weaken its links with Hungary. The institutions of education in their
mother language were gradually assimilated into Romanian institutions, and all their
students were compelled to learn Romanian (i.e., to become bilingual). The best example
of such education policy was the merger of the Hungarian-language Bolyai University in
53
Dennis Deletant, Romania Under Communist Rule, pp. 142, the Civic Academy Foundation, 1998.
I am thinking here at the permanent strivings of the RCP and of Nicolae Ceausescu to heavily deal with
other institutions or organizations that would allow them a claim for progressive political forces. For
example: the involvement into the Russian Chinese negotiations, the role played in the Israeli-Arab peace
negotiations, the role in the movement of non-aligned countries, the future collaborations with IMF or
acceptance of GATT. All these initiatives cover a very large geographical space of international selfidentification.
54
28
Cluj with the Romanian-language Babes University, the administration of the new
education center being dominated by ethnic Romanians. "Another symbolic gesture was
made in 1960 with the alteration of the boundaries of the Hungarian Autonomous Region
[created in 1952]. The two most heavily Hungarian districts were added to a nearby
region having a predominantly Romanian ethnic population, and new territory with
proportionally smaller Hungarian population was added to the Autonomous Region. The
percentage of Hungarians in the region declined from 77% to 62%, while the proportion
of Romanians increased from 20 to 35%. A further symbolic gesture was the addition of
the Romanian place name "Mures" to the region's official name, making it the Mures
Autonomous Hungarian Region. At the same time Romanians began to assume a greater
role in the administration of the area."55
The year 1965 also marked a change of leadership within the RCP. Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej died of cancer, and from 1965 to 1967 there was a period of collective
leadership, with Nicolae Ceausescu was the most visible figure. I am not going to enter
into details about the struggle for power at the top of the RCPs ranks, but I am going to
only point out the special nature of leadership succession in Romania at the time.
Ceausescu's coming into power has three very interesting features: first, "he was the only
leader in the area who gained the supreme position in a situation of relative relaxation of
social, economic, and political tensions"; second, "he obtained his nomination after the
natural death of his predecessor, and the decision was taken by a body entitled by law to
reach such decision"; and third, "his nomination was obtained at the recommendation or
55
Robert King, The History of the Romanian Communist Party, pp. 131, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford,
1980.
29
"blessing" of the Kremlin."56 Ceausescu's access to power was the result of an

independent, national, elective, and organic decision, which gave him a status of national,
independent leader, a crucial legitimization point scored by him and the RCP. His
succession came in an environment of terror relaxation in which Romanian society was
beginning to settle itself within the societal framework established till 1965 by the RCP.
In fact in June 1965, four months after the death of Gheorghiu-Dej, a new constitution
was proposed that declared Romania to be a Socialist Republic in place of a people's
Republic. The most important aspect of this constitution is that it emphasized the idea of
socialist legality, because first of all, it contained a measure of judicial supervision over
the activities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Department of Security
(Securitate). "More power was invested in the courts, and a twenty-four hour limit was
placed on the time that a citizen could be held without being charged." In order to prove
his consistency in pursuing socialist legality, Ceausescu began denunciating the abuses of
the previous leadership, what got later to be called the "haunting decade"; the first
important step taken in this direction was the rehabilitation of Laurentiu Patrascanu,
original figure of Romanian Communism, who had a certain status on the Romanian
political stage and in the Communist international movement before the coming into
power of the RCP. The basic idea of the prosecution of the Gheorghiu-Dej era was that
its main mistake was the usage of terror in its accomplishment of stabilizing Communist
power in Romania. The RCP "had to cope with a lot of internal difficulties which
diminished its fighting capacity, and many a time turned it away from its chief
preoccupations. A number of mistakes were also made in the way some problems were
solved in a certain period, in the attitude toward some social sections and nationalities,
56
CAMPEANU, Ceausescu, Anii Numaratorii Inverse, pp. 7-8, Polirom, Iasi, 2002.
30
especially in the work with the peasantry. Serious offenses and abuses were committed
against a number of outstanding functionaries of the Party [another name he had in mind
was Stefan Foris, former secretary general of the Party, killed by the order of GheorghiuDej]. Every time, however, the Party found in itself the necessary force to overcome the
difficulties, shortcomings and errors, to ensure the advance of socialist construction. In
spite of various shortcomings, the general feature of the Party's activity was devotion to
the fundamental interests of the people, the creative application of the general principles
of scientific Socialism to the concrete conditions of our country, the rallying and
successful organization of the working masses in building the new social system in
Romania."57 The general conclusion of the indictment of the "haunting decade" was that
the party line was correct, but the means used sometimes were unfortunate. Particularly,
that terror was used instead of a greater focus on "creative Marxism". The consequence of
such attitude was the mere change in form and socio-political framework (which was
continuously enlarged), instead of a profound, substantive change of the content of the
policies; as it will be shown further on, the Stalinism of the political line of the Party was
accentuated by upgrading it with the national question. "Ceausescu criticized GheorghiuDej's power not during the latter's exercise of it, but only after he got to exercise it
himself."58
At the same time, after the consolidation of his power over the party, Ceausescu
began to show the first signs of national re-imagination. In the constitution the
grateful references to the Soviet Union and its army where removed, and the role of the
57
Bucuresti, 1976.
58
Pavel Campeanu, Ceausescu, Anii Numaratorii Inverse, pp. 8, Polirom, Iasi, 2002.
31
RCP in the birth of the Romanian Peoples Republic was portrayed as decisive59. The
country itself was given a new name, the Romanian Socialist Republic (RSR), in order to
show the passing into a higher stage of socialism and thus pointing out the necessity of a
new approach to the challenges of modernization. Moreover, Ceausescus speech at the
Ninth Congress (1965) legitimized the partys push for industrialization with the help of
Romanian intellectual thought. According to his speech, A.D. Xenopol had written that
to remain agricultural is to condemn ourselves to the production of raw materialsto
make ourselves for all time the slaves of foreigners. Dobrogeanu Gherea had insisted
that we must develop all the resources of our country and become an industrialized
state. Finally, Ceausescu cited Gheorghiu-Dej at the October 1945 party conference: the
development of heavy industry opens the widest possibilities for utilizing the entire labor
force of our people and for creating the wealth necessary to rebuilt the country.60 This is
amongst the first instances when, in the discourse of a high-rank official, at a national
party conference, the two main goals of the regime, industrialization and national
autonomy, are attempted to be justified form the point of view of a continuity of national
goals. The developmental tasks were legitimized in this way through concordance to the
tradition of the endeavors of nourishing the nation. At the ninth congress, Ceausescu
continued to sketch his new ideas of national priorities in a historical context for the
nation. One of the main functions of such discursive practice was that it set up the
relevant historical moments using the symbol of the socialist nation as a sorting device
(Hobsbawm). After identifying them, Ceausescu or other decision-makers were using
59
32
these historical beacons as justificatory landmarks for the set of policies or norms that
they intended to promote. For instance, at the same congress, while trying to promote a
reorganization of agriculture, Ceausescu spoke of the Dacian agriculture, of the tradition
of peasant uprisings, of the important role played by peasants in the armies of Romanian
heroes such as Decebal, Michael the Brave, and Tudor Vladimirescu. Simultaneously, he
emphasized the patriotism of both Romanian and non-ethnic Romanian peasants, who
fought together to defend the national homeland.
Another very important moment of re-imagination of the nation was the
administrative-territorial reorganization of the country in 1968. This project returned to
the pre-communist administrative-territorial structure, substituting about 40 counties
(judete) for the 16 regions and 150 districts, which were following the Soviet
administrative design. Mihai Gere, president of the new Committee for Problems of
Local Administration, stated that the aim was to have the counties correspond to the
political, economic, and social realities of our country and to reflect at the same time the
historic traditions of the Romanian people.61 The purpose behind this change was the
optimization of both productive capacities of the national territory and of decisionmaking, and thus of political control over the society. An additional novelty brought
about by this reform was the division of the Hungarian population into two counties
(Harghita and Covasna) where this nationality would be majoritarian; this way, this
national minority found temporal reassurance of fairness of the new administration.
Overall, however, the 1965-1968 years can be said to represent the beginning of the
60
61
In Mary Ellen Fischer, Nicolae Ceausescu a Study in Political Leadership, pp. 113, Lynne Rienner
33
definition of a new national subject, as the country was offered a new name and a new
territorial-administrative structure, while a still shaky, insecure leadership was gradually
crystallizing its new language of power in the shape of a socialist narrative of the
nation.
Moreover, during the first years of his tenure, Ceausescu inaugurated a practice
that will characterize his future activity concerned with the nature of the relationship
between central and local authorities. Along with the general initiation of structural
reforms that were to re-imagine the national territory of the socialist nation, RCP
leadership accentuated the practice of work visits (vizite de lucru), which showed an
increased willingness to re-discover the people and re-define the space in order to obtain
the determination of the new self, the Socialist Republic of Romania (the new name
attained in 1965). The old geographical space had a new content/meaning: it was
economically, socially and culturally homogeneous, the language spoken within it was
unitary, and its inhabitants had a strong conscience of their common origin, ancestry.
After fixing the geography (all its forms) within the sphere of socialist sovereignty, the
RCP gave it a population knit together by socialist patriotism. This was to become in
1969 the homeland of the multilaterally developed society and of the multilaterally
developed man. This new developmental stage of the landscape (i.e., cultural) can be
explained through Semples statement: in every problem of history there are two main
factors, variously stated as heredity and environment, man and his geographical
conditions, internal forces [of race] and external forces of habitat.62 According to the
62
Ellen C. Semple, Influences of Geographical Environment, pp. 254, in: John Agnew, David N.
Livingstone, Alisdair Rogers, eds., Human Geography. An Essential Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996.
34
RCPs take on this new morphological alteration of the landscape, the natural, historical
and inescapable dynamism and progressiveness of the Romanian forces of production
required an extension of their breathing space. All had to begin corresponding to the
new national desiderata, including the environment, the external forces of habitat.
However, as space was modified, so heritage got to be re-discovered or re-imagined,
hence creating an upward spiral of symbolic geographic re-interpretation, which climaxed
during the Golden Age of Communism and in Ceausescus grotesque cult of personality.
A limited series of examples clarifies the profile of this new attitude of historicalterritorial re-imagination of the nation: at the 90th anniversary of Romanian declaration of
independence, Ion Gheorghe Mauer, the Prime Minister, praised the Romanian army for
its sacrifice, at that time, for the sake of the attainment of independence, but he didnt
mention anything about the collaboration with the Tsarist army. Another more striking
instance was the commemoration of the Calugareni battle, in July 7 1967, attended by
Ceausescu. During the ceremonies, him and some other leaders of the RCP were formally
invited into Mihai Viteazuls tent, thus being associated with this voievods historical
glory. However, in the report of the event there was no mention of the fact that Mihai was
played by an actor; the voievod was referred to by his title throughout. Another two
visits, during this period of time, are significant: the one in Bucovina, where he toasted
for the region, making a subtle reference to historical Bucovina; and, the one at Putna
Monastery, celebrating Stephen the Great (Stefan cel Mare), who was also sovereign over
Basserabia. The leader of the RCP, between 1965 and 1968 (the very years of instability
caused by the problem of succession), through his travels across the country, was
attempting to, a great extent, to re-enact the historical itinerary of the Romanian people;
35
but, with himself and with the system of authority and domination that was behind him as
central actors of the present being blessed by those of the past. History and historic
experience were to gradually become elements of incentive, justification, and
mobilization for the modernization plans of the RCP for Romania.
The time period circumscribed by 1967 and 1971 was one in which the external
tensions with various communist countries, and especially the Soviet Union, amassed to
the benefit of the regime. The intervention in Czechoslovakia was the climax, which
prompted a large number of non-party members in the country to enter the party. It was
the peak legitimacy moment of the party and of its leader and at the same time it was the
moment of the beginning of the outward institutionalization of the discourse of the
socialist nation. The speech that Ceausescu gave as reaction to the Soviet intervention,
this genuine national postulate, was based on the following basic elements: independent
choice of the socialist construction, non-interference in domestic affairs, the respect of
independence and national sovereignty, equality of rights. Simultaneously, Ceausescu
postulated the complete unity between the RCP and the Romanian people: "we decided
that from this day onwards to begin the creation of patriotic, armed guards, made up of
workers, peasants, and intellectuals, defenders of our socialist homeland [patria]
(heartfelt applauds and ovations). We wish our people to have its own armed units for the
defense of his revolutionary breakthroughs, for insuring his peaceful work, the
independence and security of our socialist homeland () the whole Romanian people
will never tolerate any transgression of the territory of our homeland () I ask the
citizens of our homeland that, while fully confiding in the leadership of the party and the
state, they show full unity, firmness, and calm. Each of you, at his or her workplace,
36
ought to dozen his or her efforts of accomplishing the development program of our
Socialist society. We ought to be ready at any time, comrades, to preserve our socialist
homeland (applauds, acclamations, ovations)."63 This speech sketches the general profile
of the regime that was about to come into being in the following year. Besides the list of
elements already pinpointed, the reader is stricken by the "revolutionarization" of the
whole Romanian people for the sake of defending the socialist homeland, the socialist
program of constructing a new social system, more precisely. The national sovereignty of
the socialist homeland becomes an axiom of Ceausescu and the RCP; the very axiom on
which national-Communism was built upon. The secularization, at least at the level of
discourse, was complete Marxism-Leninism became "Romanian-Socialism". The main
tenets of this discourse were to be re-emphasized in November the same year, when a
commemorative plenum of the Great National Assembly was held to celebrate 50 years
from the unification of Transylvania with Romania. Here he stated that "the history of the
Romanian people is crossed by the struggle for national and social liberation against
foreign invaders"64, and socialism accomplished these ideals of national and social
liberation of the forerunners. Furthermore, he gives a full-fledge Stalinist definition of the
Romanian nation: the territory inhabited by Romanians was economically, socially and
culturally homogenous, the language was unitary, and these inhabitants had a strong
conscience of their common origin, ancestry. In order to justify the declaration of
independence, Ceausescu proves to his audience that, while Romania was in the first
stage of capitalist development (beginning of the XXth century), the country was a
63
The text of the discourse was published in Scanteia (the Spark), the Party's newspaper, in the issue of
August 22nd 1968.
37
"battlefield" for the political and economic interests of the imperialist countries, that is, it
was exploited. The unification was an act by the people, and not a gift from the great
powers, and a development project the masses supported for their emancipation both as
nation and classes (the peasantry and the working class). The unification had "a large
mass character", but its purposes were betrayed by the exploitative indigenous classes
and imperialists, this causing a deepening of the backwardness of Romania. "It was
granted to our socialist order the historic task of liquidating the backwardness inherited
from the bourgeois-landowner's regime, the task of creating a strong and modern national
industry, multilaterally developed."65 So, the RCP managed to accomplish the historic
desiderata of the peasantry, the working class, and of the progressive elements of the
intelligentsia66 and reduced the developmental delay. Therefore, its activity was towards
the political and economic emancipation from the shackles of imperialism, hence part and
parcel of the proletarian revolution. The present strong indigenist, revolutionist stance is
explained as rooted in the highly unstable world scene, as a preemptive measure because
of the danger of New World War (a typical Stalinist view of world politics). It is clear
that Ceausescu reconstructed through his argumentation the Stalinist explanation of the
Leninist self-determination right, in order to avoid any ideological rebuttal from Moscow.
By admitting the belligerency of world politics, Ceausescu stresses the importance of
64
Nicolae Ceausescu, Expunere la sedinta jubiliara a Marii Adunasri Nationale consacrata sarbatoririi
semicentenarului unirii Transilvaniei cu Romania, 29 noiembrie 1968, pp. 6-7, Editura Politica, Bucuresti,
1968.
65
semicentenarului unirii Transilvaniei cu Romania, 29 noiembrie 1968, pp. 26-27, Editura Politica,
Bucuresti, 1968.
66
Most of the official documents of the RCP, except one, that had an English translation use this term in
order to translate the Romanian word "intelectuali" (the exception text used the translation "intellectuals").
In the paper I will stick to the form "intelligentsia," in order to stress the idea of the new class developed
during the national inclusion stage, a category that had an interest in perpetuating the national-Communist
regime.
38
continuing the "traditional" collaboration with the first workers' state, the USSR, but only
along the initial lines decided when the CMEA and the Warsaw pact were created. "We
cannot approve in any way with the denunciation of the fundamental principles of the
statute, with the promotion of certain these and proposals which maintain the
"integration" of the members of the CMEA, the endowment of this organization with
supranational attributes. This would harm the member-states' sovereignty and
independence, it would only hinder the collaboration between them, also subverting the
attraction force of socialism in the world."67
The two discourses, the August and the November ones, will become the new
ideological bedrock of the new line that the RCP is going to pursue in the following
years. They are the beginning of the construction of a new physiognomy of Communism
in Romania. They also represent a new vernacularization, the creation of a new language
of power that it will spread to all layers of the regime, to all spheres of activity, becoming
the language through which all citizens are to justify their action. Its main elements are:
socialism is legitimized by Romanian history; Romanians had a common ancestry,
language, economy and conscience; Romanian history has a large mass character; the
national ideal is a national, multilaterally developed industry; because of the need of
constructing Communism and of preserving it in an inimical world, the RCP and the
people must adopt a highly revolutionary social, political, cultural, and economic
behavior.
67
semicentenarului unirii Transilvaniei cu Romania, 29 noiembrie 1968, pp. 26-27, Editura
39
III.
The project and societal environment of national-communism.
The year of 1969 was the beginning of the huge transformational project of the
RCP, that is, the multilaterally developed socialist society (MDSS). The general reason
for entering into this new stage of development of Communism in Romania, was,
according to the political discourse of the party, the fast pace of the development of
productive forces, which needed a new societal environment meant to be progress-prone.
For Stalin, the productive forces of society were "the instruments of production
wherewith material values are produced, the people who operate the instruments of
production and carry on the production of material values thanks to a certain productive
experience and labor skill". The forces of production have a distinct type of relations of
production, that is, "the relation of men to each other in the process of production."68
Stalin was concluding that "the productive forces are not only the most mobile and
revolutionary elements in production, but are also the determining element in the
development of production"69. Consequently their profile forces upon the society they
exist in the type of the new social system, the new type of economic development, the
essence of history. In the same way, Ceausescu states in a discourse in 1971 (what later
got to be called the July theses) that "our main priority is the multilateral development of
the forces of production, of industry, agriculture, and other branches of material goods
production, and this is based on the Marxist-Leninist theses that the development of the
forces of production is the essential factor of any society's progress, especially of the
socialist society, and consequently of the creation of the conditions for forging
Politica,Bucuresti, 1968.
68
40
Communism."70 The incumbents of the rapid developing forces that are already
constructing the multilaterally developed society are the most progressive and the best
elements of the people, its working class and its intelligentsia. Hence, the RCP has to
focus his attention to the domestic reality because only the Romanian people are the
source of socialist progress.
In 1975, in the Political Program of the RCP for building the MDSS, the latter
was described as requiring, first, the continuous perfecting of the leadership and
organization of the economic and social activity with a view to better making use of all
material and human resources and to eliminate all losses. The MDSS presupposed the
concentration of the peoples effort upon the crucial directions of material and spiritual
progress, of uniting and rationally coordinating, with maximum output, the social forces
for the fulfilling of the Party Program. Secondly, the MDSS also involved the rapid
development of the forces of production on the entire territory of the country, the
territorial and administrative systematization and organization so that a harmonious
development between the town and the village should be obtained. Thirdly, the MDSS
meant insuring equal life conditions for all of countrys citizens according to the
principles of socialist equality and the gradual disappearance of the differences between
rural and urban centers, by elevating the comune to a level of urban environment.
And, the MDSS also needed the unitary leadership of all social and economic activity to
be continued and perfected.71 Consequently, it can be stated that the MDSS was a
69
Nicolae Ceausescu, Propuneri de masuri pentru imbunatatirea activitatii politico-ideologice, de educare
marxist-leninista a membrilor de partid, a tuturor oamenilor muncii, 6-9 iulie 1971, pp. 34, Editura
71
Nicolae Ceausescu, Programul Partidului Comunism Roman de Faurire a Societatii Socialiste
Multilateral Dezvoltate si Inaintara a Roamniei spre Comunism, in Congresul al XI-lea al Partidului
Comunist Roman, pp. 645-67, Editura Politica, Buuiresti, 1975.
70
41
modernization project, targeted both at the members of the nation, regardless of

differentiation and sat their environments of existence, that is, social and personal spaces.
In 1971, two main behavioral problems were identified in both the party and society: selfcontent and servility (ploconire) with a view to external influences, especially the
western technical and material accomplishments. But there was a solution for both: for
the first, the diffusion of motivated labor, and for the second, emphasis on the national
breakthroughs and potential. These solutions can be put into practice only if the decisionmakers maintain their double status of specialists and politicians and if through their
initiative, coupled with the RCP activity, an increased ideologization is pursued, that is to
match the rapid progress of the forces of production. And the object of this new
ideological upsurge was to be the development fund, that is, a new mobilization in
industry and in the industrialization of agriculture. In Romania, Ceausescu gradually
constructed a deontology of the party-member and the state administrators, or for even
simple workers, relying on reideologization, mobilization, indigenism, and lastly,
personal expertise; after 1969 the RCP gradually imposed a new dogmatism, based on the
language of power that was just being built. Also in 1971, on February 10th, Ceausescu
summed up his new mobilizational vision into the label of "socialist patriotism - the
developmental force of the Socialist Romanian Republic (SRR); "the unifying substance
between the party and the people, the cement of our socialist nation's cohesion."72
However, this socialist patriotism contains a conceptual upgrading tha6t differentiates it
from the same type of coinage that was used in late 1960s. At the Ninth Congress,
Ceausescu was locating the strength of the socialist order lies in the consciousness of the
72
Nicolae Ceausescu, Cuvantare la intalnirea cu oamenii de arta si cultura, pp. 14-16, 10 februarie 1971,
Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1971.
42
high responsibility that every citizen has toward the homeland, for the defense of socialist
conquests of the people; it lies in the revolutionary vigilance of working men and
women.73 In contrast to the 1969 definition, the RCP was promoting, in 1971, an
organic unity between the party and the society, which had an active purpose of edifying
a new Romania. At the same time, this new type of cohesion had to re-construct both the
society and the party in order to express a new physiognomy of Romanian communism.
The MDSS was a nation-building project, based upon the socialization of both the
socializers and of those who were to be socialized.
The years from 1971 to 1975 were characterized by a synchronization of the
enlargement of the party, the institutionalization of the new elites, and the national
integration of the RCP. Between 1971 to 1975 the RCP membership increased form
roughly 2 millions to 2,577,434, a continuance of the trend began in 1965 (when the
membership was of 1,518,000). More important was the accomplishment of a fairly good
representation in the Party of the various social categories of the Romanian population,
and especially of the intelligentsia, "the bearers of technical knowledge, those involved in
the administration of the new values and ideas." On the topic of the intelligentsia, it can
be said that the pattern of its integration in the decade 1965-1975 was quite similar to that
pursued in the pre-Communist times. In both periods, the rationale of such process was to
enlarge the basis of the power of former elites, to co-interest the significant
representatives of the managerial, productive social categories, to tie them to the regime
that promoted them. According to Daniel Chirot, a new class was making its way to the
top-ranks of political power in Romania, during 1920s and 1930s: of all members of the
73
This quotation is the motto of the collected volume of party documents: Documente ale Partidului
Comunist roman, Culegere Sintetica, Promovarea si Respectarea Legalitatii Socialiste, Editura Politica,
43
parliament (both chambers) from 1922 to 1937, 20.6% were doctors, pharmacists, or
engineers, and 35.5% were lawyers. Business men made up under 3% of the membership,
and peasants only 6%.74 What Chirot calls the technical intelligentsia was becoming a
very important element in the pre-communist power structure as the country was
modernizing. And, again in the 1970s, it was to be the medium of the Partys power
dispersion within society, the polytechnic generation, the very result and actor of
communist modernization of Romania. In 1972, Ceausescu was stressing upon the
necessity of enlarging and granting new role to this new productive and socializing core
of the MDSS: we need a relevant increase of the number of engineers and technicians in
production. This way we will achieve a tight bond between physical and intellectual
work, between workers and specialists, who together will make up a huge dynamic force
for the material and scientific progress of the country, thus generating the process of
profound homogenization of our socialist nation.75 The polytechnic generation was to
reflect and perpetuate through its productive and/or party activity the new social structure
and practice generated by the RCPs modernization project, by the MDSS.
In 1975 the composition of the party was the following: the peasants represented
5% (20% of the total peasant population was enrolled in the RCP); the physicians 11%
(41% of the all the people having this job were enrolled in the party); 21% people active
in culture and the arts were party members (75% of the whole category were party
members); 20% industrial workers (72% of this social category were members of the
1972.
74
75
Nicolae Ceausescu, Cuvantare la Conferinta pe Tara a Inginerilor si Tehnicilenilor, May 19th 1972, in
Documente ale Partidului Comunist Roman, Culegere Sintetica, Sporirea Eficientei Intregii Activitati
economico-Sociale, pp. 156, Editura Politca, Bucuresti, 1978
44
RCP); 14% were engineers (52% of all engineers were party members); 16% were
academicians, doctors, and university teaching staff (60% of the whole category were
enrolled in the RCP); and finally, 13% were primary and secondary school teachers (47%
of the total of this occupation category were members). To this party structure another
two variables should be added: the gender and the age proportions. "During 1972 almost
30% of new members admitted to the party were women, and at the year's end they made
up almost 24% of the total membership () In 1974, for example, it was reported that
over the previous five years 60% of new party members were admitted directly from the
Union of Communist Youth"76; the age structure of the party was of 44% under age 40
and 56% under age 40 (in 1973). It is clear that by 1975, the RCP was a good mirror of
the occupational, age, and gender structure of the country, offering to the population an
image of a representative body, summing up harmoniously all the interests of the
"socialist nation". In fact, the RCP created the populational pool for a domestic
"administrative pilgrimage" (Anderson): the new members were acquiring the values of
the party by activating within it, by enforcing its interests in various fields of activity or
in specific counties, territories of the country. The mechanisms through which the RCP
ensured the completion of this process were the rotation of cadres, the multiple-candidacy
elections, the polarity of offices, and the recycling of cadres. The rotation of cadres was
proposed in February 1971 and it was included in July 1972 in the program of the
National Party Conference: "in assigning cadres the principle of rotating them between
party and state work will be borne in mind, so that they may acquire many-sided
experience, so that they will be able to understand and resolve with increasing efficiency
76
Robert King, The History of the Romanian Communist Party, pp. 80-83, Hoover Institution Press,
Stanford, 1980. (all the data mentioned in the paragraph is taken from this book)
45
the complex problems of social life and the scientific management of society."77 The
concept of plurality of offices first appeared when the party secretary became chief of
state in 1967, and then evolved into "the "plurality of attribution" of organizations, or
"organizations with a dual [party-state] nature"; that is, certain bodies are subordinate to
both higher party and higher state organizations."78 This latter principle was combined
with the recycling of cadres, which meant that individuals holding these dual positions
were following every year or so courses of Marxism-Leninism and technical and
scientific updating. By 1979, at the Twelfth Congress, the recycling technique was so
wide spread that Ceausescu predicted that the inclusion in process will amount to over 2
million people annually, so that within the time span of a FYP each and every working
person to have been involved at least once in an organized action of perfecting its
professional and technical proficiency.79 Recycling was both a method of re-education
and control of individuals involved in the productive or decision-making process. It
ensured a permanent mobility preventing the certainty of ones position. At the same
time, it was a means of recharging the individual with the new or newly changed values
or norms created by the party, his/her mobility securing their spreading on all levels of
society, the individual fulfilling the carrier mission.
The fourth mechanism, multiple candidates, was designed at the 1972 National
Conference too, and it was meant to meet the need of the people to participate more
broadly in the country's management, to strengthen socialist democracy. When analyzing
the 1975 election R.King makes some crucial observations:" an examination of the
77
[In] Robert King, The History of the Romanian Communist Party, pp. 95, Hoover Institution Press,
Stanford, 1980.
78
Robert King, The History of the Romanian Communist Party, pp. 107-108, Hoover Institution Press,
Stanford, 1980.
46
candidates nominated for the Grand National Assembly suggests a high degree of
centralized control; () there were no opponents running against nominees who were
members of the party's Political Executive Committee or of the Council of Ministers,
county first secretaries, or CC members who held posts in the central party bureaucracy;
() in almost all cases the two candidates held positions that were equivalent and they
were usually employed in the same field, even balanced by sex and apparently by
nationality." These elections had two main consequences: the party maintained the proper
balance of various groups in the national assembly and, at the same time, offered a great
deal of new names/faces, leaving the impression of power alternation, instead of power
multiplication and reproduction. By 1974-1975 Ceausescu managed to achieve a unified
Party-state apparatus. B. Anderson states that the unification of an apparatus of power
means "internal interchangeability of men and documents. Human interchangeability was
fostered by the recruitment naturally to varying extents of homines novi, who, just for
that reason, had no independent power of their own, and so could serve as emanations of
their masters wills."80 The new members of the Party-State apparatus had to carry
("ceaselessly", because of the rotation of cadres concept and recycling) the new principles
of the socialist democracy, legality. Through their activity they were to defend and
nourish the socialist homeland within the territory (county or institution) their were
assigned to, thus fulfilling "an administrative pilgrimage", which developed among their
ranks "a consciousness of connectedness" (Anderson) that was essentialized by the
directives of the RCP and of its leaders.
79
Nicolae Ceausescu, Congresul al XII lea al Patidului Comunist Roman, November 19-23th 1979, pp. 46,
Editura Politica, 1981.
80
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 55-56, Verso, New York, 1991.
47
The profound restructuring of both the party and society from 1970 to 1975
generated a wider basis of the pastoral power of the RCP and of its leadership (from early
1970s the Ceausescu personality cult began). But, it also required a new type of control, a
substitution of terror with more subliminal disciplinary practices. Under the
circumstances, from 1971 onwards the RCP documents are emphasizing discipline, order,
education, deontological behavior, health, family values, and profitability within a new
socio-human, the socialist nation. Socialist patriotism, as based on responsibility toward
the laws of the socialist homeland, gave away to a discourse of a homogeneous, organic,
non-antagonistic community with historic, economic, political, cultural, and social
imperatives of continuous development into communism. This shift was achieved
through a discursive and practical deepening of the responsibility of the individual in
relation to production81 in society, and then, through a gradual process of
circumscribings of the internal environments of both social and personal spaces:
school, industrial units, trade unions, family, party organizations, festivals, etc. It was an
accentuation of significance in social layers that became relevant components or
manifestations of national life. If in 1968 the homelands interests were to be the
primary focus of the citizen and involvement into socialist democracy was the key to
productive social activity82, in 1976 individual activity, both personal and social, was to
take place in an organic unity aspiring to communism. The new environment of human
81
Production here has a very wide meaning encompassing the economy, the political system, culture,
education, family, etc. In my opinion this understanding of production corresponds to its usage in RCP
documents, as it is referred to in general terms, and then particularized to all facets of human activity from
industry, to education, to demographic and territorial systematization.
82
For example, at a speech in Constanta on April 11th 1968, Ceausescu stated that nobody should discard
the homelands interests. Those who do not perform their duty are to be excluded. They pull the societys
development backwards. Socialist democracy must combine wide consultation, free exposition of opinions,
critical discussions with the sense of responsibility of all before the people, to whom all of us has to pay its
48
existence was the Romanian socialist-nation led by a vanguard communist party: our
party si the party of youth, of the future! In order to be able to fulfill with pride the higher
historical mission that falls upon it, the party has to permanently remain in the country of
youth without elderliness, to always look to the future! The real youth of a revolutionary
party lies in its profound understanding of reality, in its organic interweaving, through all
fibers, with the masses, with those who work; it lies in the coincidence between itself and
the interests and aims of the people it is part of. Only by working and living alongside
with the people, only by finding inspiration in the wisdom and experience of the people,
incessantly feeding itself [the party] with the peoples never-ending strength, the
communist party will always maintain its youth, thus being able to lead successfully in
the process of the revolutionary transformation of society.83 Socialist nationalism,
though nobody in RCP branded it like this (it was just the socialist nation), became
necessary in order to insure maximum nourishment of the material and human potential
that was crucial in efficient (de)(em)ployment of the forces of production for the
achievement of the nation-building process the MDSS. That si why, the developmental
tasks, the process of modernization, was accompanied by a project of Enlightenment,
by a discourse of the new man and of the new type of human existence, of the communist
conscience. At the Congress of Political Education and Socialist Education in1976, the
Enlightening of the nation was considered as both prerequisite of development and
present fact of Romanian society. It was stated that only by bettering the conscience of
each member of the society, only by perfecting participation and by strengthening
dues. In Documente ale Partidului Comunist roman, Culegere Sintetica, Promovarea si Respectarea
Legalitatii Socialiste, pp. 96, Editura Politica, 1972.
83
In the collected volume Formarea si dezvoltarea Constiintei Socialiste (Culegere Sintetica), pp.73, Editura
49
personal responsibility toward the general interests of the collectivity, then and only then
a superior, communist manner of society rule by the masses will be attained; only then
the forging of history by the people, in accordance to its will, is going to be obtained.
The RCP project of Enlightenment was contained in its doctrine of socialist humanism
that placed the individual as a social being in close connection and interdependence with
his/her kind, with the large, popular masses. It is founded on relationships of
collaboration and respect amongst all members of society, on the ban on exploitation, on
equality, on the human beings freedom to consciously act for the assessment of its
personality, on building its own future. Socialist humanism presupposes the achievement
of personal happiness in the context of the fulfillment of the entire peoples happiness.
Within the popular masses ones personality strongly thrives alongside with that of the
entire nation. Thus, the individual, the citizen had only one framework of its freedom of
action and thought, and that was the nation, of which development and elevation into
communism had to become the primary and ultimate aim of the individuals activity.
The manner in which the RCP circumscribes the individual-collectivity
relationship corresponds to some extent to Makarenkos practices of socialization and
discipling the members of his kollectivs. His goal was to produce a healthy, literate and
if possible educated man who is well developed and has initiative, who is orderly in
hygiene an everyday life and, most important, who consciously takes part in the joint
work of the kollectiv and of the class, as an active agent of our construction.84 [My
emphasis] Furthermore, Makarenko considered that at the basis of any communist
organization or institution lies the relationship between the kollectiv and the lichnost (the
84
In Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia, pp. 201, University of California
Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1999.
50
true identity based on communist conscience). The lichnost was o be advanced in the
sense that it was allocated as an advance, a prepayment for work yet to be done.85 One
individual fulfilling its duties within the kollectiv develops both his role and takes part
into the achievement of the general goals set up to the kollectiv, and thus gets involved in
the general progress of the society toward communism. This was a process of cultivating
the individual through conscious discipline and parallel action into a goal-oriented
socialist environment.86 The activities of education and socialization were to be
conducted through a parallel action that presupposed a simultaneous effect on both the
individual and the collective that results into a conscious discipline. Thus, the
communitys members become collectivist individuals, who espouse collectivist values
and repeat statements of collectivist discourse in which they had been socialized, while in
practice they act individually in order to support this collectivism in discourse.87 This
new, collectivist individual closely resembles, in its essence, the multilaterally developed
Romanian citizen: one must be active for the general elevation of the knowledge level of
the people. One must be active in arming it with the most advanced science and culture
that will built-up the man with multilateral knowledge, capable of interpreting the
phenomena taking place into social life, thus orienting him/herself in a just way in his/her
s activity, firmly taking action for the revolutionary transformation of society.88 The
individual collectivist practice combined with the conceptualization of history,
democracy, work, education, family, etc, formed within the political discourse of
85
Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia, pp. 204, University of California Press,
Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1999.
86
I constructed this general statement using Makarenkos jargon in order to discursively exemplify his idea
of the rationale of a kollectiv.
87
Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia, pp. 206, University of California Press,
Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1999.
51
Romanian national-communism a distinct type of socialization that was one triggered to

provide truth (the correct line of interpreting time and existence) for the citizen, and thus
aiming at regulating individual conduct. This supposedly was em-powering the
individual, but was actually creating the societal premises for the reproduction of the
system. The national-communist discursive experience is one that aims at achieving
maximum of knowledge of and from society by imposing an extensive disciplinary
conceptual and practical structure focused upon organizing social intersubjectivity.
However, society responded by adjusting itself and by dissimulating within the
environment of values, norms, and institutions created by political discourse of nationalcommunism and hence creating a hybrid situation that, as the regime radicalized its
stance (especially in the 1980s), started to gradually drift from the reality espoused by the
RCPs documents.89 In the following pages, the paper will try to describe the nature of
the communist project of Enlightenment, the construct of values promoted from 1974
onwards along with its previous accumulations (1970-1974), and, but to a lesser degree,
the split results of this interaction with Romanian society.
One of the most important steps taken to integrate the discourse of the socialist
nation in the Romanian societal environment was to create for it a historical framework.
88
Quote taken from the collected volume Formarea si dezvoltarea Constiintei Socialiste (Culegere Sintetica),
pp.13, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1978.
89
This tension between the project of creating a new man, in Romanian case a socialist nation and
consequently a re-imagined national reality, and the adaptive reaction of society is also stressed by Chalmers
Johnson. He states that the determination to build a new man produces two interacting processes: a
modification of reality by ideology, and a modification of ideology by reality. The state apparatus of the
mobilization regime penetrates deeply into the nonpoliticized society, altering the performance of some roles
in accordance with its ideology and suppressing other, competing roles; at the same time, given the inability
of the state to replace the society totally, innovations are made in the ideology in order to prevent the gap
between ideology and reality from growing to unmanageable proportions. As already mentioned, the gap
between discursive reality and the deep-structure one became the main problem of RCP and the sources of
systemic megalomania after the Mangalia theses in early 19080s. Chalmers Johnson, Comparing Communist
Nations, in Ed. Chalmers Johnson, Change in Communist Systems, pp.18, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, California, 1970.
52
As I have shown already this was a process began since mid-1960s, but the year 1974 has
the outmost importance, because that was the time when the RCP offered a complete bigpicture of national history as it understood it. The introduction to the Political Program of
the Romanian Communist Party, which was later to become the political and ideological
Charta of the party, is an extensive description of the evolution of the Romanian nation
through the filters of scientific socialism. One of the main functions of a historical
nationalist discourse employed was to set up the relevant historical moments using the
symbol of the nation as a sorting device (Hobsbawm). It is an act of symbolic political
utilization of history in order to attain legitimacy and authority for the agency of power
employing or supporting it. The Romanian Communist Partys political program of
November 1974 is a symbolic-ideological endeavor to produce legitimizing meaning by resorting national history. It is a document that officially signals the merger of the planned
revolution with an official nationalism, thus becoming the manifesto of the Romanian
national-communist regime. It constructs the historically justificatory foundations of the
physiognomy of the communist system in Romania. It expresses the rationale of the
national-communist ideology: the Program will secure the raising of the political and
ideological level of the Party, of all the working people around the Romanian Communist
Party in the struggle for the implementation of the grand ideals of socialism and
communism.90 The Political Program rendered the nationhood-ness of the RCP visible91,
by projecting its main desiderata into national history and by tailoring the latter according
to these very desiderata. The RCP to envisaged the Political Program as the first time that
90
Bucuresti, 1976.
53
the party has worked out a single, long-range program meant to ensure the rallying of the
efforts of communists, of the entire people for the realization of the multilaterally
developed socialist society and Romanias advance toward communism. This program maps
out the fundamental directions of the Partys activities for a period of 20 to 25 years.92 At the
same time, by sketching Romanian history in the Marxist deterministic, teleological way,
the Political Program is a historical calendar93 of the socialist nation, thus integrating the
latter into the a more general framework of the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of
universal history. The main units of measurement between new stages of national
development toward communism, the most righteous social system (the Political
Program), are the fights for national and social liberation and the class struggle. Hence, the
Romanian history becomes a history of continuous class struggles, of battles fought by the
peoples masses for liberty and social justice, for safeguarding its [the Romanian people]
national being and independence, for progress and civilization. From the very emergence of
the first Romanian State formations, the struggles of peoples masses against feudal
exploitation were closely interlinked with the struggles against foreign domination.94 The
two general ideas behind the Political Programs conception of nationhood were that the
91
I am here following up on Katherine Verderys idea that national symbolization includes the processes
whereby groups within a society are rendered visible or invisible, in Katherine Verdery, Whither Nation
and Nationalism?, pp. 230, in Gopal Balakrishnan ed. , Mapping the Nation, Verso, London, 1996
92
Nicolae Ceausescu, The Romanian Communist Party Program of 1974, pp. 27-28, Editura Minerva,
Bucuresti, 1976.
93
I am using here Ricoeurs notion of calendar: there are three features common to every calendar. 1. A
founding event, which is taken as beginning of a new era, determines the axial moment in reference to
which every other event is dated. This axis moment is the zero point for computing chronical time () 2.
By referring to the axis defined by the founding event, it is possible to traverse time in two directions: from
the past toward the present and from the present toward the past () 3. Finally, we determine a set of units
of measurement that serve to designate the constant intervals between the recurrence of cosmic
phenomena [in my context national breakthroughs], in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, pp. 106,
translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,
1988.
94
Bucuresti, 1976.
54
nation was a leaving reality and continue being in the future, and that the creative efforts
of the Romanian people forming the nation finally found accomplishment under socialism
and the leadership of the Communist Party95.
As I mentioned earlier, the Program re-mapped Romanian history along the line of
a calendar of which founding moment is a united state of the Romanian peoples ancestors
of a compact population (the Thraco-Dacian kingdom of Burebista and Decebal), and of
which units are various struggles for national or social liberation, of which impact or
success, internationally or domestically (or both), generate new stages in Romanias
inexorable development toward a communist system. The historical time embedded in this
kind of calendar construction of the history of the socialist nation allows physically
simultaneous events [to] become contemporary with one another, [to] anchor points for all
the meetings, the mutual efforts, the conflicts that we can say happened at the same time,
that is on the same date.96 Thus, history and its time became responsive to the Party's will,
a never-ending resource of legitimizing rituals97, which were re-enforcing and reproducing
the RCPs domination over Romanian society.
95
The accomplishment of the historical national efforts of the masses by the RCP is branded as a historic
mission of leadership of the Romanian people on the path of building the multilaterally developed socialist
society and of Communism in Romania, in Nicolae Ceausescu, The Romanian Communist Party Program
of 1974, pp. 26, Editura Minerva, Bucuresti, 1976.
96
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, pp. 108, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1988.
97
The importance of rituals in stressed by Ricoeur on basis of the rituals periodicity that expresses a time
whose rhythms are broader than those of ordinary action. By punctuating action in this way, it sets ordinary
time and each brief human life within a broader time. (in my case, the proximity of higher stages of
communism was validated by the fact that every endeavor of the national-communist present was backed
by already righteous past heroic moments), in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, pp. 105, translated
by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1988.
55
In the Political Program, Romanian history98 was effectively separated (in my

opinion) into three periods: the premodern Romanian history (the Thracian-Dacian state,
the Roman conquest, the migratory invasions, the voievodships within a broader analysis
of feudal times); the modern period (with two subsequent sections, 1821-1921 and 19211947, but the distinction is not so clear-cut, because of the emphasis of the role of socialist
Marxist movements); and, the socialist period, with its ongoing progress toward higher
stages of communism. In the analysis of premodern history two main sources of
backwardness of the Romanian territory are identified: the invasions of the migratory
peoples and the foreign domination that led to a longer continuance of the feudal system
as compared to central and western Europe. However, al this could not destroy the
identity of our [Romanian] people, could not divert it from its objective historical
road.99This is going to be one of the essential stances of the national-communist discourse
on the history of the socialist nation: its continuity through time, regardless of the degree of
historic negative conditions or incentives. During the feudal period, the peasantry was
considered to be the main social force in economic and social development and the
decisive military factor in the battles the people had to wage in defense of national entity, of
the homeland integrity, of its sacred right to live freely.100 The role of the voievods was to
98
In this paper I am just going to attempt to summarize the general historical map created by the Program,
and not criticize the historical data provided. I am interested in the structure and discourse of the new
history and not in its accuracy, as this is not the purpose of the present paper.
99
Bucuresti, 1976.
100
Bucuresti, 1976.
56
canalize this energy of the peasantry into a resolute fighting to be master in its own
country (Ceausescu)101
In the modern period, the transition from feudalism to capitalism is followed and
the implicit ascendance of the bourgeoisie into leading positions to accomplish historical
desiderata. But at the same time, the young class of industrial proletariat is brought to
life by the historical progress of the Romanian nation. The revolution of 1848 is considered
to have given a great impetus to the growth of Romanians people self-awareness and it
showed a greater degree of radicalization of the masses, of their capacity of imposing their
will and determining the course of historical events.102 1859 is the year of the formation of
the national state under the luminous reign of A.I.Cuza, followed by the independence
war in 1877.103 At this point the discourse is breached by the inclusion of a sub-history of
the socialist groups and movements in Romania, from the Socialist Utopians (1853) to the
Social-Democratic Workers Party (1893)104. Also, the formation of trade unionism is
signaled, while 1907 becomes the first moments when the peasantry and the workers join
forces against the oppressive strata of the country and against the imperialistic capital and
landowners, who were holding hostage the assets of the nation. World War one is defined
as a defensive war against the aggression of German militarist occupants, and as a moment
of unfading heroism and devotion to the homeland. The 1918 unification and formation
of greater Romania (the blueprint of historical Romania in the RCPs national
101
See the discussion of the connection of Michael the Brave or Mircea the Old, etc to the peasantry in
Nicolae Ceausescu, The Romanian Communist Party Program of 1974, pp. 33, Editura Minerva, Bucuresti,
1976.
102
Bucuresti, 1976.
103
the role of the Tsarist Russia in the context of years 1877-1878 is surprisingly not specified, a similar
position being taken in 1967.
104
Special attention is given to the strong relationship between this party and Engels, and later, between
the SDWPR and the Social-Democratic Workers Party of Russia, and particularly V.I.Lenin.
57
discourse) is legitimized internationally as part and parcel of the European peoples

movement for self-determination and for shaking off foreign domination, while
domestically as the outcome of the struggle of the peoples masses in Romania and in
other Romanian territories under foreign occupation, for the formation of a unitary
Romanian national state. Furthermore, the peace treaty only sanctioned an actual
situation which had been created by the fight of the peoples masses.105 An interesting
additional point represents the treatment of the significance of the victory of the Bolshevik
revolution and of the creation of the Soviet State as the beginning of the era of transition
from capitalism to socialism. Hence, the USSR became, instead of the first
Socialist/communist State, a transitional state; in this way, the RCP was denying the USSR
claims of hegemony and knowledgability within the communist movement.
The creation of the RCP is placed in he background of the 1920 general strike,
thus the new partys birth in 1921 appearing as a historical need of the masses. The
interwar period is structured according to the various shifts in the policy of the RCP: 19211924, the legality period, 1924-1931, the Comintern period106 (when, according to the
Program) the RCP was gravely mistaking by adopting an anti-national stand; 1931-1933,
the United front attitude of the RCP (the formation of the United Workers Front)107; and,
1934-1938 the anti-fascist period.108 In the analysis of the RCPs history from 1939-1945 is
105
Bucuresti, 1976. This particular way of argumentation was directed against what the RCP saw as
Hungarys claims over Transylvania or against any discourse involving the right of the Hungarian minority
in that region.
106
In fact, the periodization of the interwar RCP history is an expression of the various orders sent by
Moscow and the Comintern to the communist parties in Europe. The RCP accepted the 21 conditions of the
Comintern, thus being very obedient to the directives from Moscow.
107
Here there is no mention of the Grivita strikes, the moment of Gheorghe-Gheorghiu Dejs becoming a
public figure and accession to power within the RCP (according to accounts of the RCP history during the
pre-Ceausescus times).
108
The Program admits one mistake (which again is rooted in Moscows directives): the RCP maintaining
that it was not Hitlerism but British-French imperialism that accounted for the chief threat.
58
over-exhausted with an anti-fascist discourse, a typical historical approach for a

communist party, as anti-fascism was a strong tool of legitimacy for all communist
movements, even long after the end of the war. World war two is seen as a national tragedy
because of the Vienna Dicktat, and more subtly, because of the Non-Aggression Treaty.
The RCPs opposition to fascism and to the anti-Soviet war materialized into the AntiFascist Patriotic Front, and it peaked in May 1944, with the United Workers Front (the
RCP, the SDP and, afterwards the National Democratic Bloc).109 In the end, August 23
1944 is labeled as the grand moment of patriotic and national awareness of the RCP, the
cornerstone of its historic mission of fulfilling the national desiderata (while it minimized
the involvement of other parties to the phrase other democratic, patriotic forces).
The beginning of the communist history is December 30 1947, the date of the
abolition of monarchy and proclamation of the Workers Republic. The year 1947 was the
peak of a three-year period (August 1944 - December 1947) of big revolutionary struggles
that led to deep-going social transformations, to the implementation of a nationalities
policy of complete equality of rights for the nationalities, and to a series of economic and
social reforms in favor of the peoples masses.110 In 1948 the single revolutionary Party of
the working class is created through the merger of the RCP with the SDP. The first stage of
building communism in Romania has started, that is, the building the technical-material
groundwork for Socialism111 through nationalization, heavy industrialization and
cooperativization of agriculture. This first stage comprised the first three Five-Year Plans
109
Additionally, the RCP boasts a higher organizational knowledge for launching guerilla attach against the
aggressors.
110
Bucuresti, 1976. This seems to be the period of the Romanian protracted communist revolution that
included the victories against both the fascist Antonescu regime and the imperialist monarchical rule.
111
Bucuresti, 1976.
59
and generated accelerated progress of the country. However, a number of mistakes were
also made in the way some problems were solved in a certain period, in the attitude toward
some social sections and nationalities, especially in the work with the peasantry. Serious
offences and abuses were committed against a number of outstanding functionaries of the
Party.112 But, the general line was correct causing the advance of socialist construction.
The present stage of the building of Socialism in Romania was that of establishing
the multilaterally developed society, decision taken for the first time at the tenth Congress
of the RCP, in 1970. The 1971-1975 Five-Year Plan first put into practice this project, thus
officializing the passage into a higher stage of building communism. The great success in
building communism in Romania, within the span of almost 5 Five-Year Plans a higher
stage was reached, proved that the Partys policy is the faithful expression of the vital
interests of the entire people and that the Romanian people has achieved a grand historic
work 113.
The type of national history created by the RCP was a revolutionized one, in
which the condition of permanent revolution was the main engine of progress. The
nation was an organism building up upon itself, continuously expanding to fully grasp its
historical mission. The socialist nation was an entity of action, of permanent struggle, and
existence in it was automatically committing the individual to developmental tasks, as he
was meant to rise to the expectations of his forerunners and unborn. Consequently, being
a Romanian became an identity pattern conditioned by the readiness of consuming one's
112
Bucuresti, 1976. This statement summarizes what Pavel Campeanu calls the illusionary antithesis: the
indictment of the Dej years for some abuses, but no real re-assessment of the RCPs activity on the whole.
In other words, the non-de-Stalinization of the Romanian communist regime, a phenomenon that allowed
the RCP the continuation of similar policies under the guise of a nationalist discourse.
113
Bucuresti, 1976.
60
energy for the sake of a historic mission of which embodiment was the RCP. This was a
new type of amassing legitimacy by a communist system, through the historical
reponsabilization of each member of the socialist nation: "not only will the actor, who
performs an action of a certain type, will be recognized, but also that very action will be
admittedly seen as being performable by any actor to whom the specific structure of
relevance can be plausibly assigned to."114 The RCP imposed the Nation as a "master
symbol" and made it the essence of its relevance structure, thus forcing all individuals
into a national scope of activity: failures of performance or deviations from the party line
became evasions of one's patriotic duty. The unitary historic Romania could justify a
monolithic Romania under the RCP. By imagining the past as a total, common effort of
the nation into progress, the RCP could claim legitimacy in its endeavor to create a new
social system, the multilaterally developed socialist society; could extract acquiescence
for its effort of lifting the nation into advanced stages of socialist development. The main
projection of the national-Communist regime's power was by "organically integrating" its
socio-historical vision in a homogenized society. In other words, national-Communism
could succeed only by unifying the fields of exchange and communication (Anderson).
That is why the society and state were to "unflinchingly applying" the directives and
programs of the RCP, to establish an ultimate fixity of the language of power. NationalCommunism already had a mundane discursive status, considering that the Party had the
monopoly of all mass media. All it had to achieve was a "philological revolution: "the
coincidence of language-of-state and language-of-the population."115 This was done
through the deepening of the politics of culture; and, the best example was the strong
114
Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Construirea Sociala a Realitatii, pp. 87, traducere de Alex.
Butucelea, Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 1999.
61
support for protochronism, which was to become the main cultural expression of
national-Communism.
The philological revolution had began, at the level of the politics of culture116,
as early as mid-1960s, but its officialized completion was attained with the advent of
protochronism. Protochronism consisted of the pretense that in Romanian culture could
be found developments that have anticipated the events in the better-publicized cultures
of Western Europe. In other words, that Romanian culture "forerunned" what were
considered as the landmark moments of the modern European civilization. Protochronism
was a cultural reaction that was rooted in the inter-war debates between westernizers and
indigenists; it took the latter position and transformed it into the unilateral glorification of
Romanian history. It attempted to counter standpoints about Romania's cultural
provincialism, mimetism, and delay, by reversing the subordination relation: Romanian
culture was a central locus of modern cultural and civilizational development. It was
another form of "combined substitution": it was an initiative to insulate and recast the
Romanian culture. It was part of the construction of Romanian national-Communist
regime, the institutionalization of "provinciality", of the particularism of the new social
system, seen both through past historical and cultural evolutions and through present
socio-historical imperative, all contained in the modernization project designed by the
RCP.
115
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 78, Verso, New York, 1991.
I borrow here the meaning of the phrase politics of culture from Katherine Verdery: the processes of
conflict and maneuvering that go on both internal to communities of this kind [of "high culture"] of cultural
producer and between them and the political sphere "proper", dominated by the Communist party, as it
sought to manage and shape the culture being produced." In Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under
Socialism - Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania, pp. 12, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1995.
116
62
However, up to 1974 there were previous signals on the Romanian cultural space
that a new understanding of national culture and history was shaping. The first great step
to nationally sort out the history of the socialist nation was to integrate it, and thus
legitimize its self-determination claims, into the general Marxist historical accounts. That
was done in 1964 through the publication of Marxs Notes on the Romanians117. Another
significant moment in the re-mapping of national history was the publication of Dan
Berindeis book, Inceputurile diplomatiei romanesti, in which the chosen-ness of
Romania was reiterated (a theme pretty popular in pre-communist times). The book
treated Romanian history from the standpoint of the contemporary Romanian State and
projected that standpoint backwards. Thus Transylvania was, in effect, discussed as if it
had always been Romanian; and the Romanian national idea [the socialist nation] was
regarded as something that had already existed.118 Also, in 1965 the journal Lumea issued
a series of articles on Romanian history of which main characters selection was made on
the basis of achievements on the path to national independence. But the most important
moment of this approach was the publication in The Times119, December 29 1972, of Adrian
Marinos Great figures in the history of Romanian genius. In this article, historical
stature gains meaning only within collectivity, within the nation. The argumentation of the
author was that the personalities who contributed to shaping and developing the
Romanian spiritual civilization have proved to be striking and individualized persons.
However, more than in the West, such figures acquire general collective features and, one
117
This manuscript, besides being a sharp attack against Tsarist policies on Bassarabia in the late 20th
century, also included statistical accounts. For example, the number of Romanians specified by Marx,
following Regnault, was of 7,7 million, including Romanians in Bukovina and Bessarabia.
118
George Schopflin, Rumanian Nationalism, pp. 90, in Eastern European Quarterly, spring-summer 1974.
119
Marinos historical piece was the prelude to an article by Ion Mitran, the New Social Experience of
Romania, which was boasting the deep-going transformation in the living conditions of the people
because of the Romanian transition from an eminently agrarian mode of production to an industrial one.
63
after another, enter history, tradition and folkloreThe Romanians lack the
egocentric vision of the great personalities. They become great first by redeemed,
recuperated collectivity.120 Accordingly, Neagoe Basarab becomes superior to Machiavelli
for the formers rejection of cynicism and amorality; Stefan cel Mare is the embodiment of
the struggle against invasion; Mihai Viteazul was conscious of the necessity of a unified
Romanian state; Horia, Closca and Crisan synthesized social with national awareness;
Tudor Vladimirescu regenerated the claims for national and social liberation; A.I. Cuza
achieved the union of the Principalities; Mihail Kogalniceanu was Cavour-type of
reformer; Mihai Eminescu enriched and purified the language, while N. Iorga showed a
sacrificed patriot; the last on this long enumeration of exceptional leaders was Nicolae
Ceausescu, who was made of the same mold as his predecessors. Additionally, toward the
end of the 1960s, three syntheses of national history appeared: the History of Romania,
edited by Miron Constantinescu, Constantin Daicoviciu, and Stefan Pascu, 1969; The
History of the Romanian People, edited by Andrei Otetea, 1970; and The History of the
Romanians from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, by Constantin C. Giurescu and
Dinu C. Giurescu, 1971.121 To all these academic endeavors massive historical movies
were added, which commemorated to megalomaniac dimensions the nations glorious
history: Columna lui Traian, Mihai, Tudor, Stefan cel Mare, Vaslui, etc.
Nevertheless, the impact of the officialization of protochronist discourse
transformed the territory of culture into network of zero-sum evaluations. Adherence to
the main tenants of protochronism gradually became synonymous with patriotism,
120
In George Schopflin, Rumanian Nationalism, pp. 91, in Eastern European Quarterly, spring-summer
1974.
64
progressiveness, and true revolutionary consciousness. The support provided by the RCP
to this cultural trend transformed this cultural trend into the expression of the party line in
Romanian culture. And as the RCP was the only locus of allocative power in an
"economy of shortage", the cultural producers were forced into adherence to
protochronist form of expression out of reasons of survival. Scarcity affected "not just
individual literary careers but the possibilities for acquiring public resources. This is
because in a system of scare and centrally allocated resources, any group seeking to
acquire the wherewithal for an activity must persuasively argue that its version of that
activity is more representative of certain values than is the activity of others, claiming the
same resources on comparable grounds. Protochronism reveals, then, a struggle to control
the definition values - for stakes that were enormous; the very foundations of literary
life."122 As the party defined work in terms of utility, then a cultural product is valuable
only if it helps in the process of building the multilaterally developed socialist society,
hence cultural value appears only where a cultural product is constructed along the line
offered by the RCP. Protochronism was the cultural expression of the RCP's modulation
of the Marxist-Leninist right of self-determination. Protochronism first appeared in 1974,
when Edgar Papu, an intellectual who was formed and who gained prestige during the
inter-war years, published in Twentieth Century literary magazine the article "Romanian
Protochronism". This author insisted on the originality of national literary tradition as
compared to western forms. "Moreover, he said, Romanian literary creations had often
anticipated creative developments in the West (such as surrealism, Dadaism, and so
121
Two interesting observations: Andrei Otetea is the historian who unearthed Marxs note on the
Romanians, while C.C. Giurescu, after being fired from his university professorship in the Sovietization
years, was brought back in 1963and became a figure of nationalist historical discourse.
65
forth), even though these anticipations had often not been acknowledged as such because
they were little known abroad."123 From this, he was concluded that one of the dominant
defining traits of Romanian literature was protochronism. In 1977, Papu published a book
in which he "proves" that Romanian writers anticipated Baroque, Romanticism, Realism,
etc. However, Papu did not maintain that these Romanian cultural products influenced
western culture, but that stressing out the protochronist feature was an important claim
against past and present pretenses of cultural backwardness. Such thesis was a great
chance for party ideologues from two points of view: it could back up the idea of selfrelying development (the Romanian culture contained all the blueprints of modern
civilization), and it could offer the resources of countering the claim of political and
cultural dominance of the Soviet Union. As the protochronism thesis gained more
attention form the Party and from certain categories of the high culture production realm,
it radicalized into superiority pretension over both the east and the west, into a
prophesizing of autarchy, into a trend focused on pursuing any kind of understanding of
past Romanian evolutions/products that could affirm and reaffirm the centrality of the
country in past, present, and future history. Protochronism coupled with the Song of
Romania festival (which first edition was in 1977 and it was a competition among
amateur cultural producers, either collectives of creation or individuals) signaled the
completion of the cultural revolution projected by the Program of November 1974.
122
Romania, pp. 189-190, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995.
123
66
The growing emphasis on the study of history and the protochronist cultural
discourse were an act of re-composing "the society's relevant stock of knowledge"124.
Each nationalism is based upon, among other things, a "characteristic amnesis", that is,
"an awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of
continuity, yet of forgetting the experience of continuity, thus engendering the need for
a narrative 'identity'."125 This narrative identity is an act of reminiscing, that is, "the
revitalization of the past through an evoking act performed by more individuals at the
same time, each helping the other to remember the shared events and knowledge, and
one's remembering being a reminder for the other."126 National-communism rests upon
the imposition of a "narrative identity" constituted through a path-dependent reminiscing
act ordered along a series of "characteristic amnesis" set up by the developmental tasks of
the regime. As it has already been stated in the introduction of the essay, nationalcommunism came into being out of three related basic need of the RCP: of legitimacy, of
support, and of justification. During the first two stages of the its history (of socialist
revolution and of building the groundwork of socialism), the RCP acted oblivious to
these three needs, ignoring the possibility of establishing a charismatic relationship with
the society. Its decisions and action were inflicted upon society, rather than enacted as
emulations of a power center. Thus, when the inclusionary stage begun, the RCP had to
dissociate itself from the past. It did it in two ways: by criticism of the former leaders (a
topic already discussed) and by acting upon the collective memory of the people, those
whom it re-conceived as a socialist nation. Consequently, "a narrative identity" was
124
125
67
created that could only be sustained by abusing collective memory. All party documents
from 1968 onwards contain, if not a whole chapter, multiple references to Romanian
history. For example, at the Congress of political education and socialist culture in 1976,
an impressive showdown of the national-communist Enlightenment project, it was
considered that culture, by mirroring the peoples level of general material and spiritual
civilization, will help each individual to understand the percepts and commandments of
history, will help him/her consciously participate in the forging of its own destiny, at the
elevation of society to higher stages.127 The initiation of a national congress on the issue
of culture and education or the drafting of periodical party documents dealing with the
issue of re-ideologization (e.g., 1968, 1971, 1978, etc), amassed to a constant, perseverant
endeavor of imposing the path of reminiscing of history and of profiling culture, both
being affected by the "characteristic amnesis" immanent to the socialist nation discourse.
The socialist order that was fostering the Romanian nation was the natural result of a
historical and cultural choice that was made in order to fulfill the heritage of the ancestors
and the needs of the people. Thus, when our people, under the leadership of the party,
took the first steps toward socialist revolution, it didnt go against historic legitimacy. On
the contrary, socialism proved to be in practice the only way the backwardness left legacy
by the previous social order could be nationally wiped-out, within the framework of
historic time. It proved the only means of radically solving the highly complex economic,
social, cultural problems our nation was facing. This is the ultimate criterion for the
126
Paul Ricoeur, Memoria, Istoria, Uitarea, pp. 56, traducere de Ilie Gyurcsik si Margareta Gyurcsik,
editure Amarcord, Timisoara, 2001.
127
Congresul Educatiei Politice si al Culturii Socialiste, June 2nd-4th 1976, pp. 38-39, Editura Politica,
Bucuresti, 1976.
68
historic legitimacy of our revolution. [my emphasis]128According to this statement, the

correctness of adopting the socialist path and the particular nature of the RCPs approach
are justified by the very existence of the socialist nation in communist environment of
Romania. At the same time, the quotation contains a very important component of the
new national narrative within the socialist nation discourse - that of specific conception
of time.
The time of the socialist nation on the one hand is not determined when it comes
to its quality of conditioning the achievements/progress of the national-communist
modernization project, but at the same time becomes highly coercive and predetermining
for the citizen, as the incumbent of past national desiderata and of regime-identified
imperatives for future generations. Time, as the RCP deduced it from Romanian historic
development in the context of the national project, was made up of a complete synchrony,
simultaneity between the past, present and future; it is a "Messianic time, a simultaneity
of past and future in an instantaneous present."129 The present, the national-communist
regime, was an incarnation of past national desiderata and the confirmation of the bright
future that it envisaged through its developmental tasks, in its Five-Year Plans. The RCP
and its leader were just perfecting and following the initiatives of its forerunners and, at
the same time, they were trying to bring communism closer to reality, that is into the
present. But, there was another type of time existing in the regime's environment: "the
homogeneous empty time, in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time,
marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by
128
Part of the speech held by Leonte Rautu at the Congress of Education, in Congresul Educatiei Politice
si al Culturii Socialiste, June 2nd-4th 1976, pp. 378, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1976.
129
69
clock and calendar."130 This second type was that of the processes of putting into action
the party programs, while the first was that of the modernization project. This lexical
order of time is the main source of the disparities between what was goal setting and what
was action taking. The more disproportionate the subordination of the latter to the former
was, the more unsustainable was the reality of the regime. "The time being created, then,
was a time responsive to the Party's will, a time of which the Party was master."131 This
definition of time had an impact on the RCP's conception of the nation. The nation was
seen as an organic unity of the working people that bore the perpetual presence of their
forefathers and of the generations to come. The nation comprised all Romanians,
regardless of their "clinical" status, dead, unborn, or alive. For example, at the same
Congress of socialist culture, it was stated that the educational activity will plant into
individuals conscience the requirement of responsibility toward the heritage of the
ancestors and the decisiveness to advance the new historical conditions, to carry further
the flame of progress and of civilization on Romanias soil, only by cultivating
gratefulness and respect for our nations ancestors, who through huge sacrifices had
defended the national being of the people, who bore the flag of the national liberation
struggle, of the fight for national and social justice.132 So, within the national historic
time, the dead already performed their duty by fighting and struggling for the national
and social liberation of the people. It is the present generations, imprinted with this past
experience, who are to perfect what had already been done, while the unborn are
anticipated by the fact that all that is being done was done for them, so that when they
130
131
70
materialize they would already restart this cycle. Implicitly, the nation becomes an
organism building up upon itself, continuously expanding to fully grasp its historical
mission. The nation turns into an entity of action, of permanent struggle, and existence in
it is automatically committing the individual to developmental tasks, as he/she was meant
to rise to the expectations of his forerunners and unborn.
Another issue to be deal with here is that of the type of memory promoted by the
discourse of the socialist nation. The search of legitimization of the RCP lead to a
motivational-type of memory that was extracted from history and projected upon the
present thus creating the type of conditioning specified above. The RCP story of the
Romanian history dominated by constant struggle against domination, exploitation, and
social injustice, brings forth a traumatized memory of the historic past that conditions all
present and future developments. By constantly commemorating the fatality of the past,
the RCP imposed "a repeated memory resistant to critical analysis"133, which prevented
continuity of historic time; the trauma of the past is always present with us, so any
forward movement is in fact a reparation of this trauma. The past continues to take place
in the present by the present's urge of future development. Memory further abused by
manipulation manifested as an attempt of the regime to create an identity criteria, a
"categorical identity", that is, to designate who the relevant people are in the new reality,
in the context of a new project of nation building. This is the level where the
characteristic amnesis comes into play in order to create the new narrative identity of the
new language of power of the regime. The manipulated memory is a stasis in which over132
Taken from Nicolae Ceausescus speech at the Congress. In Congresul Educatiei Politice si al Culturii
Socialiste, June 2nd-4th 1976, pp. 14-15, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1976.
71
abuse of memory and of forgetfulness coexist as variables of the momentous needs of the
newly created narrative identity. The causes of the manipulated memory are: "the
fragility of identity, the confrontation with the other, and the violence of the founding
heritage."134 The tradition of intersubjectivity, as it was constructed in the discourse of the
socialist nation, is dominated by a revolutionary imperative135 that mobilizes any type of
social, productive action and it also creates a trauma of conflict as starting point for
judging any human activity within the social environment. For example, it was
considered that the political-educational activity must start from the knowledge of our
past of revolutionary struggles, it has to rely upon our peoples cultural, progressive
traditions, and on the world progressive, revolutionary heritage. We must never forget
that the ways of thought and life of our people have been and will continue to be the
foundation of our cultural advancement. Thus, we must add to the creation of the past
that of the future, as a testimony of the great achievements of our ancestors, of our
forward-minded revolutionary movement.136 The revolutionary history of the nation
prerequisited social, productive activity and relationships into a permanent activity, for
purposes of revolutionizing both the present and the future. Ultimately, collective
memory becomes compelled because first, "the duty of memory is to make justice, by
imposing an anamnesis upon the other; second, to be able to pay this due to memory, one
has to be conscious of its heritage; and third, moral priority have only those who suffered,
133
134
Paul Ricoeur, Memoria, Istoria, Uitarea, pp. 103-104, traducere de Ilie Gyurcsik si Margareta Gyurcsik,
135
nowadays and in the future, one cannot be truly patriotic if he/she does not struggle for national and
social liberation; if he/she does not built a socialist society. in Congresul Educatiei Politice si al Culturii
Socialiste, June 2nd-4th 1976, pp. 81, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1976.
72
the victims"137 who constitute the traumas of our memory. In this context, the history that
the RCP brought forth is one dominated by martyrs, national sacrifices, unsatisfied
desires of the Romanian people. This conditions the present in the sense that each
member of the Romanian nation has to do its socialist, national duty of being always
conscious of the sacrifices made and thus through his work to make his/her contribution
to the fulfillment of the historic desiderata of the past. The process of individual
anamnesis was limited to becoming conscious of what were the imprints of the past and
to acting along the lines of these imprints, which in their turn were dug out of history by
the RCP.
The main result of such conceptualization of the society's relevant stock of
knowledge (Berger and Luckmann) through a specific vision of history was the new
conception of the citizen, of the member of the nation. He/she was a permanent worker
and its activity (both personal and in community) could only be focused on furthering the
goals and purposes of the MSSD, which success was conditioned by the accentuation of
this citizens productivity in all his life endeavors. This was de developmentalist upwardspiral that later became more obvious when the regime refused to acknowledge its
failures and it chose to accentuate its push for progress. This situation is similar to what
Jadwiga Staniszkis refers to as a trap that legitimacy claims sets up for political
authorities in communist systems. According to this author, legitimization arguments
determine the philosophy of rule; they represent the basis of the language in which the
authorities formulate problems and propose solutions, and, to significant extent, they
136
Congresul Educatiei Politice si al Culturii Socialiste, June 2nd-4th 1976, pp. 163, Editura Politica,
Bucuresti, 1976.
137
73
determine the nature of institutional structures in the political sphere. Thus, although
these arguments do not actually fulfil legitimizing function, since they have not been
accepted by society, they nevertheless have important consequences for the political
process and they may also lay a trap in which the authorities occasionally become
ensnared.138 In Romania, the discourse of legitimacy, because of its nature as it has been
described in this paper, devoided the individual of political responsibility, but exhausted
him/her with the patriotic duty of participation and of work. Active, productive, and
efficient work becomes the only type of activity acceptable in the MDSS, any
individuals purpose in life and the goal to be achieved by education, propaganda, and the
division of labor. The formation of the new man can only be the result of participation
into active work of societys development. In the socialist and communist system each
citizen must perform a useful activity for itself and for all the other members of society,
to actively participate, along the lines of the countrys unitary development, into
productive work, according to ones own specialization and requirements of social
progress. No valid citizen can live in socialist society without usefully working for its
advance!139 Work discipline and deontological behavior in ones performance of his/her
job become the fundamental values for evaluating a persons communal and personal
existence. One of the discursive axioms in late 1970s was that work, useful social
activity is the fundamental factor in the formation of socialist conscience, in the political
and moral education of the masses. The society that we are forging is that of those who
138
Jadwiga Staniszkis, The ontology of socialism, pp.84, edited and translated by Peggy Watson, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1992.
139
In the collected volume of party documents Formarea si Dezvoltarea Constiintei Socialiste (Culegere
Sintetica), pp.103, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1978.
74
work, it is directly established on the creative work of all of its members.140 The
complete picture of the part played by work in the dynamics of the national-Communist
regime becomes clear only in its association with the permanent urge to mobilization of
the RCP; only in a mobilizational context the work of the Romanian people is granted
usefulness. "The people has to consciously act for solving the problems that appear in the
process of building the multilaterally developed society, it has to consciously forge its
future () All citizens must perform an useful work!"141 In this view, the RCP developed
two standard expressions of the mobilizational concept of work: first, work was the
decisive factor in the molding of the new socialist conscience, and second, the success of
Communism in Romania depended upon the "concerted work of the whole people". The
national-communist regime essentially connected its existence to the incessant work of
the members of the nation; its basis of power was a population urged and forced to
continuously consume its "creative energy" into the performing of the regime's
developmental tasks. The inclusionary phase was a scavenging act that made individuals
totally accountable to the nation-building project. It was a process of "preserving a crisis
reality"142. This reality was circumscribed as "a permanent historic struggle" that could be
gained only through continuous work. This was a process of secondary socialization
during which the "socializing personnel", the RCP, was inflicting upon individuals "an
internalization of a set of sub-worlds, which were either institutional or based upon
140
Recurrent party statement, appearing in the Political Program in 1974, at the Twelveth Congress, and in
all collected volumes of party documents that I have consulted regardless weather their main topic is
economy, culture, or laws. Another discursive axiom is that any member of the socialist nation should
expect to get from society and state only according to his/her work, and that nobody can consume more
than they produce.
141
Nicolae Ceausescu, Propuneri de masuri pentru imbunatatirea activitatii politico-ideologice, de
educare marxist-leninista a membrilor de partid, a tuturor oamenilor muncii, 6-9 iulie 1971, pp. 36,
75
institutions. Its length and character are determined by the complexity of the division of
labor and by the social distribution of knowledge."143 The never-ending secondary
socialization performed by the RCP was caused by the fact that the party was controlling
both the division of labor, it was "judiciously distributing the forces of production", and
the allocation of knowledge in society through its "lexicographic revolution"144, the
program of education at all levels, including the project of compulsory twelve-year
education.
Besides understanding work as a productive activity, the discourse of the socialist
nation provides for it a second advanced meaning, that of ideological-educational work.
The permanence of it is slightly different form that of work as a productive activity
within the social, economic system. It is less related to performance and more integrated
in the general process of developing the socialist conscience, which is a life-long duty of
the citizen. Work becomes a laboratory145 for the full emancipation and nourishment of
human personality, while the social-economic unit is the citadel146 for the practical (read
productive) life of the new man. Since early 1970s the RCP set up two important goals
142
143
144
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 71-78, Verso, New York, 1991.
145
This formulation can be found in 1979 at the Twelfth Congress: work si the huge laboratory in which
relevantly significant personalities are forged, where geniuses are nourished, where masterpieces are
created, both at the level of material and cultural creations. By being inspired by the peoples chef doeuvre
of socialism and by participating themselves in the heroic struggle for building the new social order, the
writers and artists will be able to come up with immortal creations, emotional testimonies of the most
glorious epoch of Romanian history. In Congresul al XII lea al Patidului Comunist Roman, pp. 70,
November 1979, Editura Politica, 1981.
146
This kind of coinage appears in the collected volume of party documents about socialist conscience and the
creation of the new man: we have to do everything in our powers to make the socio-economic unit a great
family, a citadel if one can put it like this in which to live all the members of the collectivity according to
the socialist norms and principles; in which everybody to bear complete responsibility both for production
and for the life and work conditions crested in it, bear responsibility for the political-educational activity, for
the exemplary behavior of all working people. In Formarea si Dezvoltarea Constiintei Socialiste (Culegere
Sintetica), pp.120, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1978.
76
related to political, educational, and ideological work: to educate the whole nation and to
create a "truly intellectual working class". Under these circumstances, "school is meant to
mold advanced political-moral traits upon our youth in order to create the physiognomy
of the new man, builder of communism and socialism with a wide horizon of thought,
knowledge and comprehension, with a rich spiritual life, also owning superior ethics. The
duty of school is to prepare the youth for active participation into the heroic work
underwent by our people for edifying SSMD."147 The two goals meshed together into the
equivalence ideologization - education: "it is necessary to encompass in all culturaleducational activities all social categories and to eliminate any manifestations of
formalism or festivism, in order to take advantage at bets of the material basis for our
activities. All political-ideological work must have as final goal the more intense
mobilization of all social and human forces into production, in order to establish a
rigorous organization and discipline in both industry and agriculture.148 All activities of
the individuals were to become both a performing act (work) and a learning process
(education), facets of a general national effort of mass cultural-educational work. This
was a process of constructing "the structure of veridicality, the social basis for a very
precise suspension of doubt, without which the respective definition of reality cannot be
maintained in the individuals' consciousness."149 Human action had two criteria of utility,
that of work and that of education, which as the regime radicalized, began to be used
together in order to accelerate the mobilization and homogenization of the nation. The
citizen had to simultaneously work and educate (or be educated), any other type of
147
Congresul Educatiei Politice si al Culturii Socialiste, pp. 62, June 2nd 4th, Editura Politica, 1976.
Of Ilie Verdet speech at the Congress of political education, in Congresul Educatiei Politice si al
Culturii Socialiste, pp. 257, June 2nd 4th, Editura Politica, 1976.
148
77
activity being excluded. The Romanian, because of his/her historic mission, could not
rest. Even the leisure time had to become useful, while the locative space an expression
of the general struggle for national and social liberation, of building Communism in
Romania. "Even the relaxation time is a way of educating, if it is done accordingly. We
must understand that what we are doing, regardless of the field of activity, has a goal and
a meaning."150 Movies, music, book, art, they all have an educational role, even when
they are used as entertainment. At the same time, "in housing constructing and other
socio-cultural developments, attention will be paid to achieving improved comfort and a
higher degree of utility."151 In order to achieve its change of conscience within the
individual, the discourse of the socialist nation contains a fundamental tenet aiming at the
systematization of152 space so that utility of both territory and its inhabitants can be
maximized. The systematization of the countrys territory must insure a better
concentration of productive units, of dwelling space, a more complete utilization of
constructive sites, the complete elimination of any waste of economically viable land and
of the still existing serious misgivings in the location of industrial, agricultural and
inhabited areas. The drive of taking a strong hold of the individual's private habitat and
to reorganize territory for a better productive efficiency had as turning point the year
1977, when a serious earthquake hit the country. Ceausescu used it as a pretext to justify
the turning into reality of his vision of the right home for each and every inhabitant of
149
150
Nicolae Ceausescu, Propuneri de masuri pentru imbunatatirea activitatii politico-ideologice, de
educare marxist-leninista a membrilor de partid, a tuturor oamenilor muncii, 6-9 iulie 1971, pp. 63,
151
Bucuresti, 1976.
78
Romania. At the same time, 1977 was also a crucial year for the RCP's general campaign
of transforming leisure time activity into useful educative work. The RCP was concerned,
before and after 1977, with the more educational usage of leisure time, with culturally
and scientifically informing the youth for stimulating their will to read, their interest for
perfecting professional proficiency. The RCP was pursuing the continuous
development of youth creativity and their involvement in to cultural organizations of both
the state and the party.153 1977 also marked the beginning of the Song of Romania, a
huge festival comprising a large range of activities, all at the amateur level and all having
a cultural-educative importance within the festival. In the 1970's another nation-wide
event, Daciada, focused on comprising all sports in a national showdown of the athletic
skills of the people. Adding to this all ceremonies of commemorating history, one has a
complete picture of a full-fledged centralization of all non-occupation-related activities of
the people.
A topic that the regime linked to the importance of work and education was that
of the youth and, more generally the "permanent youth of the people." First of all, the
general line of the regime's policy was that "each school will have to become a
productive unit" and that "the school is the main factor for the education and formation of
the young generation, of man generally."154 The RCP realized that the youth were a
crucial guarantee for its future perpetuation of its power. Thus, it attempted to insure that
the professors and teachers shaped "the youth as conscious and devoted citizens, of the
152
Nicolae Ceausescu, Expunere cu Privire la Imbunatatirea Organizarii Administrative a Teritoriului

Republicii Socialiste Romania, February 15th 1968, in Romania on the Path of Accomplishing Socialist
Construction, pp.22-25, vol.3, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1969.
153
Taken from Ion Traian Stefanescus speech at the Congress of socialist culture. In Congresul Educatiei
Politice si al Culturii Socialiste, pp. 189, June 2nd 4th, Editura Politica, 1976.
154
Bucuresti, 1976.
79
socialist homeland, as enthusiastic builders of communism in Romania."155 Its overall

educational project was to gradually extend from 1980 to 1990 the twelve-year education
system, while up to 1980 the first stage of lyceum to be perfected and generalized. The
goal of the RCP was to obtain a two-folded result by implementing its education policies:
the creation of a skilled, professional, devoted corpus of specialist or workers, while at
the same time, by imposing compulsory production quotas to school or faculties, to
activate as early as possible these pools of population into the productive processes. The
idea of the school as a productive unit was a characteristic and essential element of the
national-Communist regime. The school was to become the area of recruitment and
ideologization of the future subjects, so worth for the production of individual power
resources for the regime. And, the school was to be introduced in the general division of
labor, through remuneration-less "patriotic work". Again, the national historic desiderata
were through at the core of the whole project of maximizing the symbolic and "proper"
productive nature of the components of the educational system. On the one hand, in the
school curricula the historic and progressive deeds of the Romanian people were brought
forward as examples of revolutionary, patriotic consciousness that was supposed to be a
role-modeling experience. On the other hand, the productive work of pupils and students
was an experience of initiation into the "right" attitude and social posture of citizen of
socialist Romania, of a member of the multilaterally developed socialist society. The
educational policies of the RCP were processes of bringing to the lowest age levels of
society of the new "narrative identity", of national-Communism. These processes were an
early triggering of the internalization of the basic values of the regime: creative (i.e.,
155
Nicolae Ceausescu, Expose on the political, ideological, cultural and educational activity of the molding
of the new man, conscious and devoted builder of the multilaterally developed socialist society and of
80
national) Marxism and work within the developmental tasks set by the vital center of
society, the RCP. In this new context of understanding the value of education, the RCP's
dictum "the permanent youth of the people" gains a deeper meaning. If one extends to the
level of the whole people the status of the youth in the regime, with a view to work and
education policies, one can understand the above statement as the permanent work and
education/re-education of the people. The "permanent youth of the people" is maybe the
most characteristic expression of national-Communism as a new narrative and this is so
from multiple reasons. The Messianic, simultaneous time adopted by the discourse and
by the modernization project of the RCP transformed the "bi-millenial" history of
socialist Romania into a never-ending, always happening time sequence, and
consequently the people living in this historical time were in an "evergreen" existential
stage. Its permanent youth was a reason of permanent, motivated productive activity. The
Romanian historical time was one of permanent revolutionary activity or attitudes, thus
its evergreen actors were compelled into revolutionary, socialist consciousness. In this
way, constant indoctrination was to be justified: compelling the memory of the people
through the imposition of this kind of historical time, the individuals were subjects of
permanent "developmental contributions" (i.e., productive work) and education. "The
Party will further pay the necessary attention for enlarging the scope of all working
people's knowledge, organizing periodical recycling for arming them with the latest
knowledge. The continuos widening of the political, professional, technical and general
culture knowledge of all working people is a condition of paramount importance for the
successful fulfillment of the tasks facing them, as essential aspect of schooling, of the
Communism in Romania, June 2, 1976, pp. 68, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1977.
81
activity of training cadres."156 This trend of accelerating the maximization of

power/productive extraction inflicted upon the people can be exemplified by comparing
the weekly work-time projected in 1975 and that specified in 1984. In the five-year plan
that contained the year 1975, the introduction of the 44-hour workweek was scheduled,
while the workweek was to be reduced to 40-42 by 1990, during the next two five-year
plans. But, in 1984, the RCP was still hanging on the 44-hour workweek, with no
bettering prospects for the next five-year plan.
Another interpretation, and maybe the most important considering its
transformative effects, given by the RCP to the expression "the permanent youth of the
people", was that of permanent youth of the working force. In 1979 this was one of the
main point underscored at the Twelfth Congress: "our party will continue to aim at
improving and strengthening of the peoples health, at stimulating birth rates, at fostering
both mother and child, at reinforcing the family, at achieving a right proportion in the
age-structure of our population, at the healthy upbringing, both physically and
intellectually, of the new generations."157 The goal of the RCP was to show "a young
Romania in an aging Europe"158, but also to supplement for the scarce labor force needed
for the expanding Communist modernization project. The demographic policies of the
RCP were ways of "educating" and "putting to work" the reproductive resources of the
population. They constituted a "construct of sexuality" (Romanian translation dispozitiv
de sexualitate), which rationale is not reproduction per se, but "the activity of
proliferation, innovation, annexation, invention, the more and more thorough penetration
156
ucuresti, 1976.
157
Part of the Report given by Nicolae Ceausescu at the Twelveth, in Congresul al-XII-lea al Patidului
Comunist Roman, 19-23 noiembrie 1979, pp.45, Editura Politica, 1981.
82
into bodies and the increasingly complex control of populations."159 This "construct of
sexuality" stressed out the public utility and importance of reproductive behavior of the
population, and at its basis laid a whole public, official discourse that was composed of
both highly coercive laws and official expositions on the topic given by party officials
and by the RCP leader, Nicolae Ceausescu. The national-Communist regime proceeded
in 1966 "a socialization of reproductive behavior: economic socialization by means of
encouragement or inhibition, through social or fiscal measures regulating the couples
reproduction; political socialization, through the reponsabilization of the couples in
relation to the whole social body; and, medical socialization, by stressing the pathogenic
value of birth-control for both the individual and the specie"160 [in our case for the
nation]. At the same time, by "managing/policing" the demographic evolution of
Romania, the regime had also a transformative impact upon the family, which in its
modernization project was to become the socialist family, a family of a new type.
Moreover, this impact determined a complication of the "alliance construct"161: the
relationships among father, mother, children and their social statuses. In the context of
the RCP's growing emancipation and adoption of an independent political and
developmental line, the demographic politics and policies became an attribute of
Romania's national sovereignty. Hence, "the population becomes a strategic element that
had to be disciplined and manipulated for the maximization of the country's development
158
Lucian Boia, Destinul Mare al unei Tari Mici, In: Lucian BOIA (coordonator), Miturile Comunismului
Romanesc, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, Bucuresti, 1997, pp.25.
159
Michel Foucault, Istoria Sexualitatii, pp. 81, traducere de Beatrice Stanciu si Alexandru Onete, Editura
de Vest, Timisoara, 1995.
160
161
83
potential."162 A new hierarchy of subordination will be created, at the top being the PartyState, in the middle the society, and then, the family. The state obviously was focused
upon the promotion of the healthy family, that is, on the right reproductive attitude. The
society in "collaboration" with the state had the task of insuring that this family is a
socialist one, that is, "the medium in which the new man's socialist character could be
shaped. As an abstraction, the family was a necessary unit for the socialist reproduction.
As type of social organization, the family, especially the peasant one, was considered a
residue of the bourgeois order, which had to be destroyed to facilitate the socialist
transformation."163 The new status of the family in the national-Communist regime can
be considered a result of the "ingenious error syndrome". "The Leninist analysis of
village organization is in error - not in pointing to social distinctions, but in conceiving
them as class (rather than status) distinctions. But the error is "ingenious". The
ideological conceptual map with which Leninists work leads them to see economic
differences as evidence of social polarization and of the existence of "class allies" in the
villages, and it enables them to distinguish and oppose competing social bases and
conceptions of the nation-state (e.g., working-class versus middle-class nation). Working
with such a paradigm, Leninists attack the institutional bases, not simply the elite
organization, of peasant society."164 The replacements for family were the youth
organizations and the schools. The specific profile of communist youth organizations,
and especially the Pioneers, was based upon the conception of childhood as a social
162
Gail Kligman, Politica Duplicitatii - Controlul Reproducerii in Romania lui Ceausescu, pp. 19,
traducere de Marilena Dumitrescu, editura Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2000.
163
Gail Kligman, Politica Duplicitatii - Controlul Reproducerii in Romania lui Ceausescu, pp. 135-136,
164
Kenneth Jowitt, The New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction, pp. 27, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1992.
84
construct, related to a particular cultural setting.165 (Chris Jenks) Consequently, schools

and pioneers organizations were to become frameworks of socialization that had to
overcome the family-based setting of primary socialization.166 They were supposed to
become the first area of initiation in the socialist society. Moreover, according to the
Soviet model, schools and youth organizations were small-scale copies or hybrids of
socialist community. The great focus on the ideological value of children also is rooted in
the fact that a child, as compared to an adult, is an individual with no past, a blank sheet
that can be in-scripted with the commandments of the discourse of the socialist nation.
This is why, the communist regime attempted to take the child out of his family and bring
him forth, at the earliest age, in environments dominated by the socialist value-system.
Through the political rituals characterizing the youth organizations, children are
converted from the status of ideologically undecided to ideologically decided
members of the community167. The syndrome of the "ingenious error" was the breaking
165
Ildiko Erdei, The Happy Child as an Icon of Socialist Transformation, pp. 157, in Eds. John R.
Lampe and Mark Mazower, Ideologies and National Identities the Case of 20th Century Southeastern
Europe, Central European University Press, Budapest/New York, 2004.
166
The RCP attempted through its demographic policies to usurp the role of primary socializing that
usually a family has. The task of educating children could be granted upon parents only if they were
teaching their offspring the basic values promoted by the socialist nation discourse, otherwise the RCP was
labeling family life as individualism or social anomism, blaming the family of lack of national
responsibility. For example, at the Congress of socialist culture it was stated that: do you think that there is
a incompatibility between being a young communist and of organizing a marriage? It is necessary that the
UTC to be preoccupied with the organization of the youngsters personal life. As you all well know, the
National Conference predicted that by 1990 our population will amount to 25.000.000. Everybody must
understand that they have responsibilities toward our society, including that of having children. We must
not close our eyes before this issue. The youth must be brought up in a healthy way, one of responsibility
toward society, toward the family. Only then we would have created the developed socialist society! We
cannot be indifferent to what is happening in a family, to the way youngsters get married, only because it is
considered that this is their private life. Of course, their life is private, but society has always been and
should be preoccupied with the private life of human beings. The interest for their lives is not something
abstract, but both the care for material welfare and for the moral, spiritual health of our citizens existence,
and especially that of the youth. Actually, there are no big and small problems, and the manner of ones
private life, of family life is a fundamental condition of the good functioning of social life. In Congresul
Educatiei Politice si al Culturii Socialiste, pp. 200, June 2nd 4th, Editura Politica, 1976.
167
Ildiko Erdei, The Happy Child as an Icon of Socialist Transformation, pp. 155, in Eds. John R.
Lampe and Mark Mazower, Ideologies and National Identities the Case of 20th Century Southeastern
Europe, Central European University Press, Budapest/New York, 2004..
85
up of households, or other forms of families' coagulation, into the nuclear families, which
are given only the part of productive units. When each family is a productive unit, its
members are productive individuals accountable to the Party-State, consequently the
family losing its previous institutional integrity, becoming a social space of policing and
the basic productive (with a view to both work and education) unit of the nationalCommunist regime. A good example for the understanding of the "ingenious error
syndrome" is the regime's attitude toward divorce. In 1966, the year when the
demographic politics were initiated, a divorce was possible only in exceptional cases; in
1967 the number of divorces dropped to 48.168 Even if afterwards the divorce levels
normalized (in 1965 there were 36,914, in 1976, 35,945), the discourse of the regime
constructed an inimical environment for those pursuing divorce, increasing the costs (in
the broad meaning of the word) of such an initiative. "Granting the divorce entailed the
formal stigmata of social illegitimacy. These "moral" and civic failures were registered at
the workplace in the individuals' personal files. This way, the evolution of one's
professional or/and political carrier was the price paid for a divorce. For those who could
or did not want to pay this price, the consequences were costly from other points of view.
Under the circumstances, living 'together' was just another way through which the
dissimulation and internalization of double-standards were transformed into norms of
everyday existence."169 Divorce was a high-risk social attitude because it symbolically
and practically meant for the regime the break-up of harmony, unity, continuity (the main
features of Romanians and of Romania's history according to the RCP documents) and of
168
The data is taken from Gail Kligman, Politica Duplicitatii - Controlul Reproducerii in Romania lui
Ceausescu, pp. 62-63, traducere de Marilena Dumitrescu, editura Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2000.
169
86
the production that each family was generating in "comradeship" for the sake of the
development of the socialist homeland. Divorce was not a deontological option of life in
the general code of socialist ethics, it was a breach of both work and education: "we
cannot be indifferent to what is happening in a family, the way in which some get
married or un-married, on the basis of the claim that it is their personal life. Of course, it
is their personal life, but society has always dealt with the people's personal life, too."170
Also, on the topic of the conditions of marriage, more particularly marriages with
the citizens of other countries, the permit of leave was granted only conditionally.
Starting from the premise that all those born on Romanian territory had to perform their
duties (i.e., productive activity) in the birth country, and from the organic concept of the
nation, which was bounding each national to social and political body of the nation, the
RCP justified its reticence by pointing out the importance of the relative's point of view.
"It is precisely by acting in the spirit of humanness of revolutionary humanism that we
are in duty bound to take into account the agreement of the family, of the relatives, who
according to ancient customs of the Romanians have a word to say when the young ones
get married. The parents have a right to call on the State authorities and the authorities
have the duty to take into account their objections which are justified."171 This is another
clear case of disturbing the productive unit called family, because first of all, an
individual is escaping the territory that gave birth to him (see the "sons and daughters"
type-definition of the homeland), and second, he/she's evading his/her right and duty to
work for the progress of its country. Additionally, it is not the household, which judges
170
Part of one of Nicolae Ceausescus speeches at a meeting with students in 1972, In: Gail Kligman,
Politica Duplicitatii - Controlul Reproducerii in Romania lui Ceausescu, pp. 62, traducere de Marilena
Dumitrescu, editura Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2000.
87
the case, but the state authorities, which have a distinct and crucial role in the business of
each Romanian family.
But the demographic politics had the harshest impact on women, whose social,
family, and individual situation worsened as the regime was strengthening its nationalCommunist "narrative". The main instrument of reproduction control was the October 1st
1966 770 Decree of the State Council that declared abortion illegal. The conditions of the
decree were revisited in 1970, 1975, and 1985, becoming increasingly coercive. The
result was a social disaster: between 1965 and 1989 approximately 9,452 women died
because of complications provoked by illegal abortions; between 1983 and 1989 for each
live birth there was 1,3 illegal/legal abortion; in 1990, after the fall of the regime,
Romania became the country with the highest number of children infected with AIDS;
the orphanages and institutions of abandoned children were veritable gulags. From one
point of view, it can be said that the tool of the demographic policies was so high that any
analysis of them, regardless of its length/thoroughness, has to point out their unacceptable
and abnormal character. From another, the national-Communist narrative was from the
beginning to the end a cumulus of state engineered gender subjugation. In 1975, in the
program/manifesto of the RCP, it was considered that "women make an essential
contribution to material and spiritual production in our society, to strengthening the
family, to the development of the nation, to maintaining the youthfulness of the people, to
rearing and educating the young generation. In the ensuing period, too, women accounting for more than half of the country's population - will keep asserting themselves
as an outstanding force of socialist and communist construction, making an ever bigger
171
Nicolae Ceausescu, Expose on the political, ideological, cultural and educational activity of the molding
of the new man, conscious and devoted builder of the multilaterally developed socialist society and of
88
contribution to the development of material and spiritual output, to molding and

educating the young generations, to the country's social multilateral progress."172 Under
the circumstances, women, within the national-Communist narrative, had a triple role
(i.e., function): workers, mothers, and wives. "Despite the ideologically proclaimed
equality of the sexes, the progressive legislation concerning women's rights as socialist
workers often times contradicted their duties as reproducers of the labor force [in the
RCP's slang, "fertile stock"] - in other words, as mothers."173 The growing contradictions
between the women's roles within the state, family, and the productive units accentuated
the gravity of the trespassing performed by the power loci upon their private lives. Gail
Kligman identifies three stages of the discourse and policies on the populational fertility
control. According to Kligman, between 1966 and 1973,the general demographic
discourse of the regime was that "our children are the children of our homeland"174.
During this first timeframe, the family was the small-scale expression of the Party-State;
the State becomes the family of the people. The national-communist narrative, at its
beginnings, started to phrase national belonging on paternalistic terms: the Party is a
parent, the country is the mother, the workplace is a family, etc. The second period, from
1973 to 1983, "the woman-creator"175 times, is characterized by a strong motivational
campaigned meant to socially, politically, economically, and culturally integrate women.
The symbolic act of this period was a whole body of decisions taken on June 18-19th
Communism in Romania, June 2, 1976, pp. 109-110, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1977.
172
Bucuresti, 1976.
173
174
175
89
1973, at the plenary meeting of the CC, and it was to officialized the strong involvement
of women in the "solving of the social, political, economic problems of the country." In
1973, Ceausescu was making away with gender differences, in the sense that, for him
being either a man or a woman was of no importance, what was important was the
individual's main quality of socialist citizen "paying its dues", in the general interest of a
multilaterally development of the socialist society. This campaign was synchronized by
Ceausescu with the promotion of his wife in leadership positions.176 The result of this
propaganda was the emphasis on the women's role of "producers of social goods,
including children" (Kligman). "The contemporary family is increasingly decided to
claim its role of an informative environment."177 In this decade the family becomes a
space of knowledge, which has to be strengthened through educative public campaigns in
order to produce the results expected by the regime.
All the mechanisms of motivated work, education and educational recycling, and
the demographic policies, within the larger context of the creation of the nationalCommunist "narrative" (with its historical time and values) justifying the Romanian
Communist modernization project, they form general initiative trend pursued by the RCP
with a view to the formation of the necessary "cognizant public" (see the footnote on this
term of Katherine Verdery in the introduction). The cognizant public of the nationalcommunist regime was formed of individuals whose foremost right was to work, who had
to be permanently educated and reeducated, whose leisure time was judged according to
utility standards, and whose intimate relationships were transformed into productive
176
In 1972 she becomes full member of the Central Committee, in 1973 she is member of the Executive
Committee.
177
Ecaterina Deliman, In Gail Kligman, Politica Duplicitatii - Controlul Reproducerii in Romania lui
Ceausescu, pp. 144, traducere de Marilena Dumitrescu, editura Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2000
90
attitudes. This public had to understand that all the sacrifices asked from them were
necessary in order to continue the bi-millennial history, in order to face to the challenges
and heritage of the past, in order to assert the independence and sovereignty of the
country world-wide, and finally, in order to claim for Romanian and the RCP a crucial,
progressive part in the international Communist movement. The Romanian population,
from 1968 to 1979, was discursively circumscribed as a socialist nation that was pursuing
a process of modernization blended with self-determination in order to advance upon the
path to communism. Furthermore, the very fact that the RCP postulated the reality of
such phenomena was granting the party a historic legitimacy and a systemic one in its
relationship with society. And, in its turn, this situation of congruence party-society
generated the responsibilities and obligations that were regulating individual and social
life in national-communist Romania.
IV.
Conclusion overall assessment of the national-communist experience, in the

1970s, and some observations related to its impact upon society.
The main goal of the analysis pursued in the above pages was to present the
historical context, the general environment, and especially the composition of the
discourse of the socialist nation that accompanied the general modernization project
promoted by the RCP under the label of the multilaterally developed socialist society.
The main idea of the paper was that the MDSS was a nation-building endeavor that
justified its developmental tasks through a discourse which attempted to re-imagine
national history, territory, economic imperatives, the populational structure, and last but
91
not least the conscience of the individuals who were designated as members of the nation.
However, all these processes were not complete discontinuities with pre-communist
times. On the contrary, the RCP in mid-1960s, when it turn to inclusionary policies aimed
at enlarging its basis of power and at increasing systemic legitimacy, had a large resource
of nationalist discourses and policies form the past from which it could draw inspiration.
There was a strong and deep-rooted heritage of defensive, self-victimizing nationalism
from the pre-communist Romania. In Katherine Verdery's words, "if national ideology
struck outside observers as the most salient feature of Romanian politics, this was not
because the Party emphasized nothing else but because the Nation was so well
entrenched discursively in Romanian life. It was the one subject that was guaranteed to
get Romanian's attention, because so many them were using it themselves."178 In preCommunist Romania the formation of the state, as a more or less unified institutionalized
territory, was simultaneous with national emancipation. It can be said that the
modernization project of pre-Communist Romania was a nationalist one, and Romania's
differentiation from its neighbors was made primarily along the lines of a historical
discourse of the nation; the utilization of the Nation as master symbol was not the
invention of the RCP. What later became the ruling bureaucracy of modern Romania
attained legitimization by identifying itself with the interests of the nation. "From the
outset, Romanian elites couched their appeals for assistance in terms of an image of
themselves that was rooted in the past. This established at the very beginning that
Romanian identity was to be linked with history as a field of knowledge and with
historical truth as a site of representations for pursuing the truth about the Nation,
178
92
understood as a question of origins."179 Daniel Chirot makes a similar point, but he goes
even further when he traces the emphasis on industrialization, corporatism, polytechnic
education, primordialistic self-portrayal, etc, that characterized the Romanian nationalcommunism into the interwar years.180 This type of argument combined with the papers
detailed description of the project of individuals socialization could explain the still high
levels of legitimacy and the lack of serious contestation of the regime till late into the
1970s. Unfortunately, lack of space forced this paper to limit itself to one decade of
national-communism. In the1980s, the regime would radicalize, dynamic signaled as
early as the Twelfth Congress, in 1979, when it was scheduled that the MDSS phase of
development would be upgraded by the fact that Romania would become a a socialist
medium developed country. Because of heavy borrowing and economic exchange with
the Western markets, the regime went through successive crises at the end of the 1970's
and beginning of the 1980's, as loans became more difficult both to obtain and to be
reimbursed. At the same time, a series of natural disasters hit the country: the 1977
earthquake, the 1980 and 1981 floods, and the severe winter of 1984-1985. Moreover, in
the West a new informational revolution was taking place generating a rapid technical
and scientific development, which increased the lagging behind of the communist
countries. In 1981 Romania's foreign debt was of $10.2 billion and it increased to more
than $11 billion in 1982. In 1982 Romania was entering into a deep economic crisis,
while the regime was entering in profound stagnation caused by overinflation of the Party
and of the state bureaucracy and by the vicious circle of the RCP's self-imposed
179
93
inescapable spiral of development. The new five-year plan covering the period 19811985 set up new "peaks" of development for Romanian economy and society, targets
unsustainable considering the world economic situation, in general, and Romania's, in
particular. But already a developmental infrastructure had been constructed, thus making
a slowing down of economic expansion inevitable, which acceptance in the RCPs
program would have equaled to an admittance of failure that consequently would become
a national failure, considering the new type of language of power and of regime that had
been established by 1977. Neither the RCP nor its leader could assume such failure. It
would have meant the negation of the regime's very essence. What was done was the
resurgence of "the planned revolution". The unsustainable reality of the nationalCommunist regime forced the RCP and its leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, to tighten the grip
for the sake of their own survival and for the survival of their "modernization dream".
This new mobilizational/revolutionary stage of Romanian Communism adopted a strong
pretense of grandeur extracted from the "successes" of the RCP's foreign policy,
successes that were accounted on the side of the party leader, Nicolae Ceausescu.181 The
image that resulted was that of a great leader of a great country, a great boost for the
preservation of the regime. The foreign policy grandeur claim was transposed upon
domestic politics and societal situation, hence the leader's cult. However, it should be
said that by 1985 the regime was facing increasing isolation on the world stage, while
domestic distress showed signs of accentuation.
180
In Daniel Chirot, Social Change in Communist Romania, in Social Forces, Vol. 57, No. 2, Special
Issue (Dec. 1978), pp.457-499, University of North Carolina Press. John Lampe, Martin Shafir, and Pavel
Campeanu make similar points.
181
I refer here to the visits in Bucharest of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and Ceausescu's returned visits
in Washington; Ceausescu's visits in London and Paris, Romania's involvement in the Middle East peace
process, its growing part of the non-aligned movement. (these are developments from both late 1970s and
early 1980s).
94
But what were the actual results of the usage of the discourse of the socialist
nation in Romania. The first, and maybe the most important one, was the fat that the
social structure of the society was deeply affected. As I mentioned previously in the
paper, a new elite (political, professional, social, cultural) appeared, which by late 1970s
was still the backbone, the apparatus of power behind Nicolae Ceausescu. At the same
time, as both Jowitt, Chirot, and Shafir point out, the systematization of the countryside,
the new housing projects in the cities, the educational reform (compulsory 10-year
education) determined the coming into being of a hybrid population: half urban, half
rural. By the end of 1970s, the primary aim of the communist party, the creation of a
modern working class distributed throughout the country, and the gradual elimination of
the peasantry as a distinct class, was very far on the road to completion.182 This will be
the main reason for the further accentuation of the systematization of villages in the mid1980s and of further housing projects in urban areas. The result was that the country was
increasingly being transformed into a territory full of small industrial towns (Chirot)
where because of the semi-urban society in the village a highly rural one in the town
was produced.183 Shafir, Cole, and Sampson go even further, by tracing the lack of
opposition against the regime to the similarities between the values promoted by the RCP
and those that would be predominant amongst such a halfway modernized society.
What is sure is that is that the discourse of the socialist nation along with the project of
the MDSS come to meet two basic needs of a population under a political regime: one of
infrastructural development and the other of continuity of value-systems, despite
182
183
Authors emphasis, Martin Shafir, Romania Politics, Economics and Society (political stagnation and
simulated change, pp.142, Frances Pinter Publishers, London, 1985.
95
reinterpretation. Besides the external context, which at time made Romanians rally
behind the RCP, a possible explanation for the continuity of the RCP, and particularly of
Nicolae Ceausescu, was the ambivalent effect of the adoption of nationalism to
communism: because of techniques of creative Marxism, the latter had been
indigenized, while the Nation, as the master symbol, had been fit into a communist cast.
The nation-building project of Romanian communism accompanied by its project
of enlightening the nation (i.e., re-imagining it, both discursively and practically) had one
indisputable consequence: it disciplined the members of it into, if not legitimization
attitudes, but into a regime reproducing conformity. In her overall analysis of
communism, Jadwiga Staniszkis describes this conformist behavior as the result of a
schizophrenic split, the essence of an oscillating self-identification that allows adaptation
to necessity when change is impossible, and, at the same time, leaves space for rebellion
when its chances of success are greater.184 This type of explanation is consonant to the
fact that by trying to attain a positive evaluation of the regime, the RCP, through the
discourse of the socialist nation, presupposed a normative consensus upon the Nation that
was merged with both the Party and the State. This also brought about a normative
framework for power justification hidden under the guise of both coercive, but mainly,
utilitarian, inclusionary interactions with society.185 This is why, power in nationalcommunism was bifurcated: the political, pastoral-type of it managed to continue its
tenure of leadership by defusing itself within the social structures by means of
disciplinary practices. The RCP, despite serious degrees of distortions of its projects and
184
Jadwiga Staniszkis, The ontology of socialism, pp.112-114, edited and translated by Peggy Watson,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992.
96
despite many failures, penetrated Romanian reality by putting it and itself in a national
context. The RCP, through its multifaceted political discourse, created a large set of
values/norms that regulated basic activities and practices within society (work, political
participation, family life, education, cultural activity, etc.) according to nationalrevolutionary imperatives.186 Thus, the RCP was omnipresent through influence and by
law, its power (and order too) being "created and sustained independent of the person
who exercises it"187. Power, in this case, is exhaustive, it "efficiently consumes through a
maximum density conferred a limited space"188, and it relies on inclusion and observation
of the "diseased" subjects. So, the RCP was simultaneously omnipresent in the political
system as locus of power through the "self-management" of subordinate bodies, and in
society through corrective/correctional means of insuring the socialist inculcation. By
adopting a nation-building project in which the main imperative was that of permanent
revolution and considering the pre-MDSS history of Romanian communism, it can be
said that the RCP's domination over society started from the premise of an unfaithful
population, still corrupted by bourgeois remnants of consciousness. The society was
diseased and the RCP was to cure it by means of work and education. This explains the
185
In this explanation I have been using Zvi Gitelmans terminology from its essay Power and Authority in
Eastern Europe (pp.239-249), in Ed. Chalmers Johnson, Change in communist systems, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, California, 1970.
186
An example, another amongst the many that this paper offers, is the way in which the duties of the
citizen were defined: a) minutely obey the countrys law; b) fight individualism and petit-bourgeois
egoism; c) high responsibility for the establishment of the family the nucleus of society on the basis of
socialist morality, of equality, respect and mutual affection, and for the accomplishment of the familys role
in the healthy education and bringing up of children and in the strengthening of our socialist nation; d)
cultivate the critical and self-critical spirit, the intransigence toward weakness, the decisiveness to fight
routine and conservatism; e) cultivate the spirit of international proletariat. In Formarea si dezvoltarea
Constiintei Socialiste (Culegere Sintetica), pp.102-103, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1978. Or the fact that at
the 1979 Twelfth Congress, the RCP was boasting 6,200,000 million people involved in educational and
professional recycling.
187
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 201, translated from French by Alan Sheridan, Vintage
Books, New York, 1979.
188
Lucian Boia, Istorie si mit in constiinta romaneasca, pp. 275, Editura Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2000.
97
project of Enlightenment aimed at developing the right socialist conscience of individuals

by means of scientific socialism. It can be said that in its relationship with the society,
especially after the initiation of the inclusion period, the RCP applied the "plagued city"
model of domination, extracting power. The main goal was the normalization of society,
the production of a "healthy people" (see the three phases of demographic policies)189 as
members of a multilaterally developed socialist nation.
This paper has tried to show the extensiveness of the socialist nation discourse,
encompassing all three facets identified by Calhoun in a nationalism190, and the way it
had been related to developmental tasks by the RCP. The overall result of the consequent
power dynamics within both society and the system of political authority was a heritage
(for the next decade or for the post-communist times) of "a teleology of national
continuity and an ideology of national values, premised on internal uniformity."191
Consequently, despite lack or usage of sufficient, reliable data on communist Romania,
this paper states that national-communist political discourse had an important
transformative effect upon its target public. This hybrid between nationalist and
communist conceptualizations of Romanian community affected
the national
identification of the people, the intersubjective relationships within society, the status of
individuals, and implicitly the processes of individuation/socialization of a large agecategory of the contemporary population of country.
189
Idea taken from Michel Foucault, Anormalii, pp. 59, Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 2001.
discourse, project, and evaluation, see the discussion in the introduction on this issue.
191
190
98
V.
Bibliography:
A.
Primary Sources:
1.
Documente ale Partidului Comunist roman, Culegere
Promovarea si Respectarea Legalitatii Socialiste, Editura Politica, 1972.
Sintetica,
2.
Congresul Educatiei Politice si al Culturii Socialiste, June 2nd-4th 1976,
3.
Documente ale Partidului Comunist roman, Culegere Sintetica, Sporirea
Eficientei Intregii Activitati Economico-Sociale, Editura Politca, Bucuresti, 1978.
4.
Formarea si dezvoltarea Constiintei Socialiste (Culegere Sintetica),
5.
Nicolae Ceausescu, Exposition at the Ninth Congress of the Romanian
Communist Party, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1965.
6.
Nicolae Ceausescu, Expunere la sedinta jubiliara a Marii Adunasri
Nationale consacrata sarbatoririi semicentenarului unirii Transilvaniei cu Romania, 29
noiembrie 1968, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1968.
7.
Nicolae Ceausescu, Expunere cu Privire la Imbunatatirea Organizarii
Administrative a Teritoriului Republicii Socialiste Romania, February 15th 1968, in
Romania on the Path of Accomplishing Socialist Construction, vol.3, Editura Politica,
Bucuresti, 1969.
8.
Nicolae Ceausescu, Propuneri de masuri pentru imbunatatirea activitatii
politico-ideologice, de educare marxist-leninista a membrilor de partid, a tuturor
oamenilor muncii, iulie 1971, pp. 34, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1971.
9.
Nicolae Ceausescu, Cuvantare la intalnirea cu oamenii de arta si cultura,
10 februarie 1971, Editura Politica, Bucuresti, 1971.
10.
Nicolae Ceausescu, Cuvantare la Conferinta pe Tara a Inginerilor si
Tehnicilenilor, May 19th 1972, in Documente ale Partidului Comunist Roman, Culegere
Sintetica, Sporirea Eficientei Intregii Activitati economico-Sociale, Editura Politca,
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Nationalism Communism

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The Political Discourse of National-Communism

BOGDAN CRISTIAN GAVRILA

The Department of Nationalism Studies

Coordinator: professor Sorin Antohi.

Introduction - general theoretical assessments of national-communism..1

The structural context of national-communism in Romania up to the advent of the16

The project and societal environment of national-communism..40

Conclusion overall assessment of the national-communist experience, in the 1970 and91

Introduction general theoretical assessments of national-communism.

Nevertheless, regime specificity was not only a consequence of positive responses

inclusionary policies focused either on attaining legitimization in relation to society or, in

achievement of an absolute monopoly of political power; by industrialization; and by collectivization of

National-communism is possible as an analytical conceptual construction

Craig Calhoun, Nationalism, pp. 6, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1997.

Romanian communism was re-enforced through a mini-Cultural Revolution,21 "a

The structural context of national-communism in Romania up to the advent

National-Communism appeared in Romania because of a set of specific

degrees of distrust in party-population relations and of terror47, as a mechanism of

"blessing" of the Kremlin."56 Ceausescu's access to power was the result of an

The project and societal environment of national-communism.

modernization project, targeted both at the members of the nation, regardless of

Romanian national-communism a distinct type of socialization that was one triggered to

In the Political Program, Romanian history98 was effectively separated (in my

discourse) is legitimized internationally as part and parcel of the European peoples

over-exhausted with an anti-fascist discourse, a typical historical approach for a

historic legitimacy of our revolution. [my emphasis]128According to this statement, the

Nicolae Ceausescu, Expunere cu Privire la Imbunatatirea Organizarii Administrative a Teritoriului

socialist homeland, as enthusiastic builders of communism in Romania."155 Its overall

activity of training cadres."156 This trend of accelerating the maximization of

construct, related to a particular cultural setting.165 (Chris Jenks) Consequently, schools

contribution to the development of material and spiritual output, to molding and

Conclusion overall assessment of the national-communist experience, in the

project of Enlightenment aimed at developing the right socialist conscience of individuals

Ed. Gopal Balakrishnan, Mapping the Nation, Verso, London, 1996.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, New York, 1991.

Craig Calhoun, Nationalism, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1997.

Michel Foucault, Anormalii, Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 2001.

Ernest Gellner, Natiuni si Nationalisme, Editura Antet, Oradea, 1997.

Umut Ozkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, Palgrave, New York, 2000.

George Schopflin, Politics in Eastern Europe, Blackwell, 1993.

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