The Communist Regime in Romania: Interpretation or Condemnation?
The Communist Regime in Romania: Interpretation or Condemnation?

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the second life of the concept of genocide in public, scholarly and legal post- 2006 discourses about how to deal with the communist past in Romania. It counterpoises such problematic radical condemnations with recent developments in local historical studies. The contribution focuses on a new generation of historians (in their thirties and early forties), exemplifying these approaches by discussing novel studies about repression, institutions and biographies. It argues that the employment of the term genocide on the one hand reflects specific traditions of public, scholarly and legal narratives about the communist regime. On the other hand, it highlights the ambiguity and misrepresentation of historical phenomena concerning the period from 1945 to 1989 in Romania. Such overbearing denunciatory attitudes potentially obfuscate the complexities and varieties of the past. Benefiting from a genuine archival revolution after 2007, young historians counterbalance opaque, uncritical narratives of victimization with a renewed will for interpretation and revision.

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