ÎNVĂȚĂMÂNTUL SUPERIOR DE ISTORIE LA BUCUREȘTI ÎN ANII DE ÎNCEPUT AI STALINIZĂRII ROMÂNIEI
HIGHER HISTORICAL EDUCATION IN BUCHAREST AT THE BEGINNING OF ROMANIA’S STALINIZATION

Summary/Abstract: Removing the old Romanian intellectual elites and creating new ones was the purpose of the communist authorities since the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. The objectives of this program were developed and covered separately in successive historical periods. First, in the years 1944-1947, academic elites were exposed to unbearable pressures, press attacks, direct threats and rude accusations that questioned their life and intellectual work. In the same time, a purging commission, which worked especially between 1944-1945 and 1947, removed all political opponents, who were connected to the “historical” parties, from teaching positions under the pretext of cleaning up fascists from society and solving budget problems generated by economic difficulties in a country ruined by war. Many of these victims were also the leaders of post-war Romanian historiography. The abolition of university autonomy and the enforcement of the Law of Education (1948) laid the foundation for the new construction. The strategies of selection and promotion on the vacant seats were simple and insidious. A number of teachers with undeniable merits were kept on the upper levels, but lower levels were filled with an army of new so-called teachers, lacking training and experience. They were coming from three distinct sources: party activists, high school teachers who supported the communist movement, and recent graduates, appointed without competition, and in most of the cases by ignoring professional skills and teaching experience criteria. While party activists held the real power, the representatives of meritocracy were continually harassed and intimidated. The first stage of reconstruction could be considered as completed in 1950, when Mihai Roller and his team had achieved positions in universities and Romanian Academy. Stalinist indoctrinators imposed Soviet textbooks in the study of history and extended this practice to all school levels. The consequences of this situation were felt for a long period of time. The loss of great teachers in this purging-years proved irreparable. Many generations of graduates paid the heavy price of mediocrity and frustration for the confusion of values and failures of those years.

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