Stalinism for All Seasons by Vladimir Tismăneanu

Nor did this notorious prison culture flat line when communism fell in fact, the opposite seemed true. Throughout the communist era, prisons and state asylums were where state officials devised “re-education” torture, which razed the subversive spirits of intellectuals and supplanted them with communist sympathies, and was notable for its “grotesque originality” as one of the most Soviet Era’s most inhumane torture regimens. Romanians charged with economic sabotage and absenteeism relocated to forced “labor units” or “work colonies” to serve their sentences. Not only did carceral institutions bookend the period, however. On Christmas Day in 1989, a tribunal convicted Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, of genocide and other crimes against the state in show-trail fashion and sent them before a firing squad, effectively ending communism violently alongside them. into a revolutionary high school for shaping communist fighters and revolutionaries devoted to the people and the cause of socialism, freedom, and peace.” And if Romanian communism was born in incarceration, it also died there. Nearly a decade before the Romanian People’s Republic officially was proclaimed in 1947, future communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej formed at Doftana Prison the “prison nucleus,” a think-tank of subversive intellectuals that included, among others, Nicolae Ceauşescu and Ana Pauker, and developed many of what would become the party’s central tenets. During a speech in September 1986, Ceauşescu reminisced, “The communists turned Doftana. Indeed, prisons were instrumental in the rise and fall of Romanian communism.

Their legitimacy hinged on an extensive and multifarious penal landscape from penitentiaries in the crisp Carpathian peaks of the north, to psychiatric torture facilities situated near Timişoara’s cityscapes near the western border, to deportation centers concentrated around the eastern Danube delta, the Romanian gulag was endemic to the communist regime.

Since it’s that time of year for juniors to prepare to propose a thesis topic, I figured I might post a little of what I’ve been thinking about over the past few months:įrom 1945 to 1989, Romanian communist leaders constructed a state that was as carceral as it was communist.

Stalinism for All Seasons by Vladimir Tismăneanu