Istorici disidenţi, exilaţi şi occidentali despre regimul comunist din România. Între motivaţiile biografice şi preocupările profesionale
Dissident, exiled and western historians about the Communist Regime in Romania. Between biographic motivations and professional concerns

Summary/Abstract: The writing of a history of the communist regime in Romania, before 1989, was a real challenge because the official historiography was ideologically distorted and written in the so-called ”wooden language”. However, even during the regime, Romanian historians, exiled or living in the country, and Western historians, for whom communist Romania was a partially mapped study space, did write histories which differed from the officially sanctioned versions.The historian of the communist regime in Romania appears as an intellectual with a complex personality which, depending on the circumstances, could be classified into several categories. He could be the dissident resident, who wrote about the regime while living under it; the exiled dissident who started writing under the protection of foreign citizenship or without giving up the Romanian citizenship; the Western historian who experienced the regime's repression or the one who has developed a special professional interest for Romania.This taxonomy also reflects two great coordinates of the discourse practiced by historians, which was determined by biographical motivations and professional concerns.The borders of the classification proposed by this article (which represents a segment of a PhD thesis) are extremely permeable. Affiliation to a category is not exclusive. For example, a dissident resident might at some point become a dissident in exile, as happened to Victor Frunză. Or a foreign historian could evolve from professional concerns to personal ones, as is the case of Dennis Deletant.The work of the nominated historians, even if in some cases it was written and published abroad before 1989, falls within the period 1990-2015 because it was edited and re-edited in the Romania during that time. Other selection criteria were also the special conditions for elaborating and publishing volumes about the regime, the novelty of the discourse, the pioneering aspect in the topic approach, the impact on publication, the author's notoriety as well as his contacts with post-communist Romania.

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