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30 results

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Romania Confronts its Communist Past
  • Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice
  • Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marius Stan
  • Published online:
    10 May 2018
    Print publication:
    17 May 2018
  • Reckoning with mass crimes perpetrated by an ideologically driven regime entails engaging in a thorough-going exploration of its utopian foundations. In the case of Romania, such an analysis requires an interpretation of the role of personality in the construction of a uniquely grotesque and unrepentant form of neo-Stalinist despotism. Of all the revolutions of 1989, the only violent one took place in Romania. Confronting its communist past therefore involves addressing the abuses committed by the communist regime up to its very last day, its failure to engage in Round Table-type agreements with democratic representatives, and the repression during the first post-communist years, a direct legacy of the old regime. This book shows how moral justice can contribute to a restoration of truth and a climate of trust in politics, in the absence of which any democratic polity remains exposed to authoritarian attack.

  • A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

  • Vladimir Tismăneanu
  • Journal:
    Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15 / Issue 2 / June 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    08 June 2017, pp. 538-539
    Print publication:
    June 2017

  • The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

  • Personal Power and Political Crisis in Romania

  • Vladimir Tismaneanu
  • Journal:
    Government and Opposition / Volume 24 / Issue 2 / 01 April 1989
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 March 2014, pp. 177-198

  • COMPARED TO OTHER COMMUNIST STATES IN EAST-CENTRAL Europe, Romania offers a fascinating case of neo-Stalinist radicalism cloaked in nationalistic language. A hyper-centralized model of leadership, based on clan instead of party dictatorship, an obedient, corrupt and strikingly incompetent political class, a marked preference for coercive rather than persuasive methods of domination, and stubborn opposition to reforms have contributed to the development of a deep and potentially explosive social, political, and economic crisis. But the price for this unabated commitment to the Stalinist model has been a gradual institutional erosion, the growing deterioration of the social fabric, the heightening of economic tensions, and intellectual asphyxiation. The conflict between state and society has been exacerbated by president Nicolae CeauSescu's wilful and increasingly idiosyncratic behaviour.

  • 3 - Ideological Erosion and the Breakdown of Communist Regimes

  • Edited by Martin K. Dimitrov, Tulane University, Louisiana
  • Book:
    Why Communism Did Not Collapse
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    31 July 2013, pp 67-98

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    Communist regimes are partocratic ideocracies (as discussed by authors such as Leonard Schapiro, Alain Besançon, A. Avtorkhanov, and Martin Malia). Their only claim to legitimacy was purely ideological, that is, derived from the organized belief system shared by the elites and inculcated into the masses that the party benefited by special access to historical truth and therefore it enjoys infallibility. If this interpretation is correct, then de-radicalization (Robert C. Tucker), primarily in the field of ideological monopoly, leads to increased vulnerability. The demise of the supreme leader (Stalin, Mao, Hoxha) has always ushered in ideological anarchy and loss of self-confidence among the rulers. Attempts to restore the “betrayed values” of the original project (Khrushchev, Gorbachev) resulted in ideological disarray, change of mind among former supporters, desertion of critical intellectuals from the “fortress,” criticism of the old dogmas, awakening, a break with the past, and eventually, as in the case of Kołakowski or the Budapest school, apostasy.

    This chapter looks into the adventures of critical Marxism in Soviet-style regimes and its corrosive impact on the “Moscow Center” during the 1970s and particularly the 1980s. I conceptualize the “Gorbachev phenomenon” as a culmination of the revisionist ethos in the socialist bloc, which implicitly turns the focus of my contribution to the inherent paradoxes and fallacies of his perestroika. The latter are perceived to be inherent in the incompleteness of revisionism’s promise for change. Nevertheless, I by no means deny the role of this fascinating chapter of intellectual and political history in providing a fundamental lesson about the role of ideas in the disintegration of authoritarian regimes of Leninist persuasion. What I do state is that only the reinvention of politics operated by the dissident movements could offer the possibility to achieve genuine democracy and full liberty in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I will also introduce the cases of China and North Korea in order to situate the demise of communism and Gorbachev’s reform within a comparative framework. I argue that communism in China has survived because, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen repression, the party created avenues of reintegration for the intellectual elite, thus lowering the impact of dissent and opposition. I therefore counterpose the sequence, so typical of communism’s evolution in Europe, revisionism to apostasy, to what I have called the technocratic revisionism of post-1989 Chinese intellectuals.

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