From Tragedy to Farce: The Political Use of Memory in Post-Communist Romania

This paper deals with the relation between collective memory and national identity, explaining how the public understanding of the 1989 Romanian Revolution has shaped the post-communist Romanian society. The revolution as a schism between the communist regime and a newborn society acts like a prism through which Romanians understand their communist past, but also the developments the country has taken after it. Once discourses about the revolution are reinterpreted, the present and the past gain new attributes which are laid over older concerns, sometimes obliterating former remembrances. By analyzing the representations of the Romanian Revolution in several national newspapers during its anniversaries (1990 - 2009), this paper shows that the violent exit from communism in Romania shares the elements of both a tragedy and a farce (while the characteristics of the latter were only revealed several years later). The public reinterpretation of the past can explain citizens’ desire to have another revolution (visible through the display of the revolutionary symbols) which would take up the 1989 revolutionary moments and to complete the (unfinsihed) Revolution. The paper also shows that the kleptocratic communist dictatorship in Romania turned into a kleptocratic democracy after December 1989. The development of a corrupted political class along with the lack of clarity regarding the Romanian Revolution contributed to a crisis of legitimacy in post-communist Romania. I therefore claim that Romanians found themselves in a double-bind situation twenty years after the fall of communism: they neither can forget the past, nor resolve its problems.