Lucrarea abordează, într-o manieră simultan comprehensiv-holistică și detaliat-analitică, fenomenul memoriei istorice românești, așezat de autor în centrul nervos al identității naționale. Interogând fenomenul pe care și-l fixează ca obiect de cercetare de pe poziții social-construcționiste, abordarea analitică propusă de Mihai Stelian Rusu reușeste să surprindă, desfășurate în durata lungă a ultimelor doua secole de existență istorică românească sub zodia ideii naționale, diferitele ipostaze sub care s-a alcătuit memoria istorică elaborată pentru a ține treaz trecutul românesc în conștiința colectivă. Alături de ideea natională, luată drept axa centrală a identității românești și vectorul memoriei istorice, educația școlară este acreditată nu doar ca principala agentțe de naționalizare identitară, ci și ca o crucială instituție culturala a memoriei naționale. Fără excepție relativ la regimul politic în care a fost organizată exercitarea puterii de stat, școala a fost însărcinată ideologic cu misiunea de a socializa populația în narativa dominantă despre trecut favorizată de status quo-ul politic. Ca atare, cartea scrutează tripticul relațional configurat între identitate-memorie-educație, arătând, pe de o parte, cum identitatea este dependentă de memoria istorică și cum, pe de altă parte, atât identitatea, cât și memoria utilizează educația ca instituție socială pusă în slujba socializării populației în acest „complex identitar-mnemonic” în care rezidă conștiința istorică de sine a unei colectivități.

The article develops a typology of political strategies of coming to terms with the past as a theoretical frame of reference against which it assesses the transitional politics of memory pursued in Romanian post-communist society. It argues that after an initial ‘elusive’ strategy based on a politics of amnesia gave way to a confrontationist stance promoting a politics of anamnesis, the communist past was both politically criminalised and symbolically demonised. The article concludes by arguing that the failure of the ‘mastering the past’ paradigm epitomised by the 2006 Tismăneanu Report needs to give way to a ‘normalising’ paradigm of remembering Romanian communism.

Drawing on a sample of children’s reading primers published between 1938 and 1953 in Romania, this article explores ways in which both the monarchic and the communist regimes used primary education to fashion political subjects before, during, and after the Second World War. Theoretically grounded in a sociological approach and empirically grounded in textual and visual thematic content analysis, the findings reveal significant semantic shifts in understandings of the “nation” in relation to internal and external anchors, including religion, monarchy, and work, but they also indicate important continuities relating to an ethos of political submission (toward God and king, or the party and the Soviet Union) and patriotic solidarity (with the Romanian Orthodox nation or the workers’ proletarian nation).

This paper examines the mnemonic battle fought over the Romanian communist past between the active forces of intellectual democratic elites and the passive resistance of the majority of the population. The former try to impose a narrative of cultural trauma regarding the communist past against the latter’s popular resistance expressed by strong nostalgic attachments towards the same communist past. The paper investigates the formation of the new official consensus on the communist legacy as cultural trauma, proposing a three stage sequence of its articulation: i) the breakthrough made by detention memorialistic literature in the aftermath of 1989 Revolution; ii) the officialization of ‘communism-as-cultural-trauma’ narrative by the Tismăneanu Report condemning the communist regime; iii) the institutionalization of the cultural trauma narrative in the educational system. All these struggles over the memory of communism from the part of the anticommunist political elites are tacitly countered by strong popular nostalgia, as revealed by extensive survey data.

The paper analyzes the calendrical struggles over mastering symbolic time in Romanian modern history by scrutinizing the logic of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing a temporal order made up of political holidays celebrated within a festive calendar. It looks, first, at how the constitutional monarchic political order established in 1866 with the enthronement of Carol I as Ruling Prince of Romania developed a royal festive calendar pillared on the National Day of the 10th of May. By analyzing the making of the royal temporal order organized within a national festive calendar, three techniques of calendrical construction are identified and detailed: a) calendrical shifting, b) calendrical concentration, and c) celebrative sequencing employed for framing temporal coincidence and staging festive density. After presenting how the festive calendar was articulated using these techniques for the purpose of legitimating the monarchic order, the paper goes on to address how the Socialist republican regime established in the aftermath of the Second World War tried and succeeded not only in abolishing the dynastic monarchy through a political revolution but also in overthrowing the entire royal calendar of political celebrations through a symbolic revolution in the politics of festive time. The paper identifies four techniques of calendrical deconstruction used by the Socialist regime to destructure the royal festive calendar and supplant it with a republican one: a) calendrical decentering, b) calendrical concentration, c) symbolic downgrading, and d) shifting the celebrative weight. In exploring these techniques of calendrical construction and deconstruction, the study underscores the power struggles intrinsic to organizing festive time. The paper ends with highlighting the crucial importance played out by commemorations, ceremonials, and festivities by which social time is politically structured and ritually punctuated in legitimizing political power.