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The paper analyses aspects of literature works as presented in article published in the periocal "Flacăra" (July - December 1979)1, one of the propagandistic instrument of the Romanian Communist Party. The Flacăra newspaper includes a series of articles that highlight the folding of certain authors and their vision regarding the dogma of the communist regime, the periodical representing a strong factor of influence among the general public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freedom of expression, a fundamental pillar of democratic society, is today a fundamental right, protected at the Constitutional level, but which, over time, has been the subject of fierce struggles to enjoy legal protection and recognition. In this paper, we will analyze how this right has evolved, especially in the Romanian Constitutions after 1923, but also how it has experienced an alteration, being subjected to significant tests in recent years due to the emerging phenomenon of cancel culture. We will deepen the understanding of this phenomenon, evaluating its evolution, characteristics and impact on public discourse, respectively on freedom of expression. We will also explore the notable similarities between cancel culture and the policies of creating the „new man" from the communist era in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the methodological and discursive transition in Aurel Voina's theoretical conceptualisation of cosmetic science. The primary focus is the rewriting of personal and professional identity, assessing how Aurel Voina negotiated his conceptual and practical expertise from his role as eugenics ideologue and policy maker in the interwar era, to a much more marginal position as medical professional in Communist Romania. The aim is to identify common elements and identify how deep did the historical manipulation protrude. This paper thus offers a closer view of political changes determining calibrations in physical and conceptual self-representation, considering concepts of fluid identity and manipulation of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Flacăra Cenacle, the space where music, poetry and good humor were promoted, marked the existence of the "jeans generation" in a social-political context in which the communist society was not open to European culture. The purpose of this paper is to identify the role that the cenacle had during the totalitarian regime, which can be seen either as a political propaganda tool to serve the dictatorial couple, or as a cultural valve where young people could find themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of political life allows us to understand some important mechanisms which define the existence of a community, in a particular historical age. For an urban center such as the town of Galați, the issue of political life can be approached only considering it within the large political frame of the whole country. We have to discover the way the national political frame influenced, in various ways, the local situation. The relations between the central and the local institutions, between the government and the local authorities, between the parties and their local branches will be under scrutiny. Moreover, the paper will analyse the involvement of the local political elites in the process of mass mobilization during the electoral campaigns. As examples, we have chosen four of the most important parliamentary elections that took place between 1918 and 1948: those from 1922, 1928, 1937 and 1946. We investigated the functioning of the local political system and its dependency on the national political tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is an interdisciplinary approach to one side of a poet's career who has been of late de object of critical revaluation. The book published by Ruxandra Gavra last year, "Alexandru Andritoiu şi revista Familia," is trying to improve the public image of a poet who made his debut in the „obsessive decade" of the post-war period in Romania and whose literary career came into prominence especially during Nicolae Ceausescu's regime - 1965-1989 - when he became Managing Editor of the Familia Journal, the oldest periodical in the country. In his favour are pleading his connections with the Sibiu Circle and the space granted to the Echinox group who contributed substantially to the emancipation of the literary scene through studies in literary theory and in comparative literature. Nevertheless, we consider that a sociological perspective will reveal Andritoiu's role in the consolidation of Ceausescu's cult of personality, as well as his contribution to the shaping of a mode of discourse which was not personal (a phenotext) but a genotext - an institutionalized and patterned language of ideological cliches, if we are to use Julia Kristeva's binary in Semeiotike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the content of the cadre file of Henri H. Stahl preserved in the Archives of the University of Bucharest’s Rectorate. In the form in which it has been preserved after 1989, the personnel file of H.H. Stahl seems, from several points of view, atypical. If we compare it with the cadre files of the 1950s, it surprises by the apparent “goodwill” of the communist cadres towards H.H. Stahl. This ideological solicitude is manifested in the interpretation given to main cultural and political events in H.H. Stahl’s life. In other circumstances such political past could be labeled as unusable in a communist context. Equally curious and noteworthy is the issue of the ethnic origin attributed (and not necessarily real or assumed by the one described in the file), more precisely the issue of Stahl’s nationality ( Jewish) which was recorded in the file. Analyzing Stahl cadre file we can wonder if the integrity of this dossier has not been compromised by removing, extracting or modifying documents by the personel staff services or by someone else. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the research made in Transylvania referring the history of peregrinatio academica during the Communist regime, fhocusing on the most important work published about this topic: the book of Sándor Tonk, entitled “University attendance of Transylvanians in the Middle Ages”, published in 1979 in Hungarian language. I will discuss the sources, the primarly and secondarly literature, and the methodology used, and the critical reception of this book, as well the continuation of the Transylvanians’ investigations concerning the history peregrinatio academica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War and with the establishment of the communist regime, many Romanians, dissatisfied with the new regime, tried to leave the country. The fugitives most frequently chose the road or rail route, but there were also attempts to swim across the Danub or to cross the Black Sea with inflatable boats, and the bravest tried to hijack planes. Most of the fugitives paid with their lives or ended up in the dungeons of the Security and were imprisoned for decades. In the summer of 1971, seven young people from Târgu Mureș planned, in turn, to leave the country by hijacking a Tarom plane. The present paper aims to present their story from the communist Securitate archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the manifesting of Romania’s independence from Moscow in 1968, based on diplomatic documents from the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belgium. Romania’s dialogue with Moscow, Prague, Belgrade and Paris are presented in this article. The article proves that beyond the political regime, the national interest of Romania was permanent and it has manifested itself when it had this chance. It was an act of courage, openness and prestige. It was a risky move, but Romania managed to avoid a Soviet invasion. Internally, however, the Bucharest regime did not embark on the path of reforms, but of neo-Stalinism, the cult of personality and communist ideological correctness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper disscusses the literary-historiographical enterprise of Mihai Iovănel’s History of the Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2000 as a turning point in respect with the twofold aesthetic and ethnocentric dominant of this genre in Romania, whose tradition that is traceable back to the pos-Thaw period prolongs into postcommunism. Iovănel’s self-claimed ”postmarxist” approach puts under a deconstructive lens the ideological embededness of the Romanian literary space, whose postcommunist avatar still owes largely to its communist heritage by its indebtment to dominantly conservative and right ideologies. It also switches the analytical focus of the literary history towards the material (i.e. social, institutional, and so forth) conditions of the literary production per se. My essays develops two basic critical points derived from the above-mentioned premises. One concerns the topicality of the literary historian’s leftist vantage point in the view of deciphering long-engrained myths of the national literature and of its criticism, thus providing a clearer, more realist picture of its concrete phenomena. The other debates the utility and eventual drawbacks of the retrospective analysis the historian is forced to assume in order to achieve his deconstructive task, a retrospection that pushes his investigation way behind the confines of ”contemporaneity”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses aspects of literature works as presented in article published in "România liberă" (march-april 1971), on of the propagandistic instrument of the Romanian Communist Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses aspects of literature works as presented in article published in "Scânteia tineretului" (1972), the propagandistic instrument of the Romanian Communist Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses aspects of literature works as presented in article published in „România liberă” (January-February 1971), one of the propagandistic instrument of the Romanian Communist Party [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper discusses the evolution of national television in Communist states in the second half of the 20th century. After the Second World War, most of the eastern European states fell under the authority of the Soviet Union, so the beginnings of their national television programmes were marked by their Communist regimes. This study focuses on the evolution of each television, as well as on the similarities they all shared, such as the use of propaganda or censorship. Our main hypothesis is that media institutions from the states behind the Iron Curtain could not exist without proper cooperation between themselves. Programme exchange was an important aspect of their development, especially after the increase in broadcasting hours. The study offers a comparative outlook on the evolutions of each television network, by following the main sources on each individual case from the German Democratic Republic to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book „Forbidden truths“ is a objective synthesis of the research up to the present. This paper is meant to be the basis of studying and clarifying the situation of Jews from Romania, when in charge of Romania Marshal Ion Antonescu was. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe the process of Romanian collectivization between 1949-1962. The Communist Constitution from 1948 and the Land Reform from 1945 played also an important role to the Romanian collectivization. The process of collectivization has affected all the categories of peasants and his main goal was the abolition of agricultural private property and the consolidation of collective farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper is an attempt to reveal Henri H. Stahl's political views and the means by which he managed to work and publish during the Romanian communist regime. We thus uncover a social-democratic sociologist, concerned with the problems of Romania's peasant class, interested mostly in socialist theories of social change and viewing historical materialism as a powerful methodological tool. His political beliefs are anti-bolchevik and his works on the social history of the peasantry challenge Stalin's version of history, reviving the delicate and potentially subversive subject of oriental despotism. Apparently privileged, he in fact strives to overcome the numerous constraints and challenges that he faces during the communist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concentrating on the Parisian diary Timpul trăirii-Timpul mărturisirii (A Time for Living - A Time for Confession) of the prominant Romania literary critic Eugen Simion, the paper proposes that, as an intellectual coming to the French capital at the beginning of the 1970s with the experience of what used to be termed "the communist camp", the author retrospectively construes the moment of May '68 and weighs its consequences with the feeling that he deals simultaneously with a form of "typological" past, a counterfactual present and an alternative future of his own domestic society and culture. As a committed Proustian, Eugen Simion experiments with transferring the experience of reverting the temporal flux, which is perfectly possible within the bounds of our personal memory, at the scale of the collective experience and of the civilizational processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to provide a view on the Romanian's communist regime activity on the international stage, in the context of the geostrategic rivalry between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. The author emphasizes the way the rivals perceive each other military, political, economic power, the grounds of confrontation and especially the two superpowers' attitude towards their allies. Also, the research focuses on those events in which Romanian communist leaders took domestic and international policy decisions, in direct relation to the perception or error of perception of geopolitical developments arising from the geostrategic rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A very famous band during the communist period, Phoenix remained one of the central names of Romanian rock and Romanian music in general after the collapse of the Ceaușescu regime in 1989. This essay analyzes the contradictory and sometimes misleading ideology of the band, as it was laid down mostly by its leader, Nicolae Covaci, in his interviews and memoirs. It aims to support a rather uneasy premise, namely that between the official communist culture and youth culturesa process of convergence occured, a process that in no way did away with the dogmatism and authoritarianism of Romanian communism with reference to youth and it is not theorized in order to alleviate the major shortcomings of the communist period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article looks into the prolongations between the interwar and the communist period with regards to the discussion on defining the state church relationship. The survivals from the interwar period into the communist regime, be them in specialists, ideas, modernization projects, have impacted the way in which Romanian communism dealt with religion. The characteristics of the new regime have also put their mark on the design of the relationship - lack of trained specialists, lack of a clear understanding of communist ideology. The relationship was designed on a Soviet model, while the model was still in testing period and the consequences showed in the cases where the model was applied. Thus this paper suggests that instead of thinking this state church relationship came with the new regime one has to look at it as a surviving relationship that went back to mid-19th century for some particularities and mostly to the interwar period with regards to the specialists, points of contingencies between state and church, rules and regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests if the democratization process in Central and Eastern Europe coincides with a decrease in number of invalid votes. Using descriptive statistics, we seek for evidence from 67 elections in ten countries from the regions during the period 1990-2012. By the beginning of the 2000s, ten years after the breakdown of communist regime, the percentages of invalid votes in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe reached levels comparable to those of the Western European democracies. However, significant differences between regions and countries endure. This article adds to the literature by being the first to inquire into the subject of invalid votes in the Central and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]