Bibliografia naţionalismului comunist în România lui Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej
The Bibliography of the Romanian Communist Nationalism of the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej Period

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses an issue that can be considered both complex and delicate: “The Bibliography of the Romanian Communist Nationalism of the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej period”. In other words in this article we tried to describe the manner in which the authors who studied Romanian Communism referred to the nationalist acts of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime. The authors we studied have critical opinions about the period we discuss and there are no historiographical approaches that one can refer to in the ante-1989 historiography. The Romanian Communist nationalism of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime was not studied extensively but the issue was analyzed at least peripherally in all the serious studies referring to Romanian Communism. Not only did Romanian historians analyze this issue but some Western scholars also brought important contributions. In this article, even though we analyzed different studies and articles, we focused our attention on the larger and more complex papers. The studies we analyzed can be divided into two groups: those that approached sporadically the theme of the Romanian Communist nationalism and integrated it into a larger context; those that include entire chapters dedicated to this theme. Most of the authors analyzed the relationship between the Communist ideology and the nationalist acts of the dejist regime. The regime promoted some important nationalist ideas like: “a national Marxism”, “PMR as a patriotic party”, “anti-sovietism” etc. Step by step, the regime gave nationalism the central role in the country’s evolution and the Party identified itself with the entire nation. The nationalist acts of the dejist regime can be observed in a large range of domains: culture, economy, international affairs, the relationship with the minorities etc. The authors we studied considered that the dejist regime adopted a nationalist ideology because nationalism was an excellent instrument for the regime to legitimate itself in front of the population and also an instrument to obtain the population’s support. But one of the main conclusions of most of the authors is that the dejist regime didn’t create an authentic “nationalist discourse”, but it “rediscovered” – in the ‘60s – “the power of nationalism”, because this kind of discourse used to be powerful and persuasive before the Communist period.

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