The Search for Closure
The Dynamics of Communism’s Criminalisation in Europe
Full text of the proposal
Since 1989, attempts at criminalizing communism co-exist uneasily with the scholarly explorations of this, by now, historical phenomenon. In post-communist countries, the assessments of the communist experiences are burdened by the collision of the continuity of the present states with the desire to discard the substantive features of those same states’ recent pasts. Consequently, overcoming the communist pasts proves difficult for the new regimes. The issue is aggravated by visible discontent as societies experience radical social and political change. Our research group’s starting point is that in the years since the fall of communism, the process of working out the past has primarily taken the form of assigning blame for the abuses and failures of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. This is what we understand by the concept of criminalisation, which exists in parallel on multiple discursive levels.
We propose to examine criminalisation at the following levels:
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The legal reading of the past: A systematisation of post-1989 (extra) legal follow-ups
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Post-communist perspectives on communism, crimes and morality
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The recourse to history and ‘the trial of communism’
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Shifting visual representations of communism before and after 1989
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Legitimisation and expiation during post-communism in the discourses of the Orthodox Churches
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Contrasting national visions in a collapsing state: communist youth facing the fall of communism.
Initial assessments of communism were typically framed as a return to ‘normalcy’ from which the communist period could be excised easily. However, any measured judgment on communism, as a historical phenomenon, has to account for the wider history of Eastern Europe in the 20th century, and it also has to incorporate the pre-communist times and traumas and the problems and prospects of contemporary Europe. Recently, a measure of convergence could be observed in current historical studies on fascist and communist history as well as on their paradigmatic moments of rupture, i.e. the Gulag and the Holocaust. The call for trials of communism is based upon conceptualisations of historical trauma and upon what may be reconstructed to be the material track record of communist regimes. One of the key areas of potential renewal and condemnation of communism is that of political and societal morality, which necessitates the examination of various conceptions of morality under communism and in the post-communist years. This is to answer, first of all, the question how political and societal morality under communism has been seen since 1989. Church discourses are highly significant elements of this type of examination. The recording of the consequences and impact of this historical experience also generates problematic issues related to the nature of its visual remembrance and its possible forensic usage. Last but not least, one has to take into account the role of various youth movements that were among the first and most vocal actors to call for the criminalisation of communism. They often assumed the crucial role of handmaiden in project to criminalise communism.
Though 1989 tends to be presented as a fundamental breaking point, the years since 1989 in the former Soviet bloc can only be understood in their controversial relation to their communist pre-history. In what follows we present six working paper proposals to trace local and national variants of the aforementioned criminalisation process. Putting together our research findings ought to enable us to map regional efforts of working out the communist past in the former Soviet bloc and to deal with its significance for the present.
Working Group Coordinator
Bogdan Iacob, University of Maryland,
Government and Politics Department, Research Fellow;
Central European University, Budapest, History, PhD Researcher;
‘Writing contemporary history in Romania - institutional and thematic dynamics
of history production and its functions under communism (1963-1989)’;
MA Nationalism Studies, Central European University, Budapest.
Members
Maria Falina, Ferenc Laczó, Vladimir Petrovic, Simina Radu-Bucurenci, Marko Zubak
For professional CVs of the group members, please visit: http://www.ceu.hu/hist/phd_studentspage.htm
last modified: 2006-10-02
