The year 2007 symbolizes a historical threshold which marks 60 years since the establishment of communist regimes in East-Central Europe (though it can be argued that this process took place earlier in some countries, such as Bulgaria, and in others later, such as Czechoslovakia). From 1989 onwards, the research of this specific period has been greatly facilitated by the opening of the archives in some of the region’s countries, and fresh findings enriched the body of knowledge in the field. At the same time, a certain sense of closure and atonement, at the local level, created new premises for coming to grips with the first decade of communism’s existence in the area, one fundamentally defined by trauma and repression.

The main goal of the present conference is to offer an opportunity for synthesis and comparison under circumstances of these favorable developments created by temporal distance and new archival availability. We can now better understand and interpret Cold War dynamics, the Stalinist revolutionary/expansionist project in East-Central Europe, the participation of local communist elites, the impact of Titoism on these elites, the rivalries between “Muscovites” and “home communists,” and the attempts to reconstruct, via the Cominform, a Moscow-centered world communist organization.

Our intention is to discuss and revisit the main hypotheses regarding the dynamics of the Soviet Bloc formulated in the classic work on the topic by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. The conference is imagined along the lines previously sketched by two other significant academic gatherings that were convened, at the time, for very similar research purposes as those of the conference to which you are invited. The most significant of the two was the 1975 conference on Stalinism organized at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center in Bellagio, Italy and which had as result the seminal volume edited by Robert C. Tucker, Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation. The second, more area studies focused, is the series of seminars devoted to the topic of communist power in Eastern Europe (1944-1949), held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies  at the University of London (1974-1976) and which resulted into the influential volume Communist Power in Europe 1944-1949 (among the contributors were Hugh-Seton Watson, George Schöpflin, and Norman Davies).

The period of communist takeover and of ‘high Stalinism’ in Eastern Europe was fundamentally one of institutional and ideological transfer based upon the premise of radical transformism and of cultural revolution. This is why it is important to clarify first the bedrock of this historical process and then put the preliminary conclusions into a comparative, regional, cross-country perspective. As recent scholarship on a variety of topics related to the 1944-1948 period has shown, there certainly was a blueprint for such transfers (i.e., Sovietization), but there were also a series of local developments in the process of the establishment of communist regimes, which gave some of the distinctive imprints of each of these cases in the long run. The early history of post-war East European communism can be divided in two distinct periods: 1944-1947, that of Leninist takeover and accelerated annihilation of democratic pluralism in the region’s countries; 1948-1953, that of socialist transformation and offensive characterized by institutional and ideological transfer (Sovietization), cultural regimentation, domestic terror, and international bi-polarism (Zhdanov’s “Two Camps” theory). At the same time, the fateful years 1944-1948 must be understood also in the context of the prior developments in the region during the Second World War and within the framework the domestic politics in each these countries, particularly in relation with issues such as the rise of the extreme right and of anti-Semitism, nationalities policies, and the activity of local communist parties, implicitly of the Comintern.

The primary directions targeted by the event are the relationship between domestic and external factors; factionalism and ideological orthodoxy; institution-building as part of the post-war European outlook; terror and transformism etc. Therefore, the main issues to be dealt with are: interpretations of Stalinism in the light of the similarities and dissimilarities among the new regimes and their individual path to power; the Cominform and the emerging bloc (dis)unity (the genesis of the Titoist challenge and the birth of ‘national communism’); the role of local communist leaders (e.g. Rakosi, Gheorghiu-Dej, Chervenkov, Ulbricht, Gottwald), and the incumbent legacies of early post-war communism for later developments within state socialism.      

The structure of the conference encourages both reinterpretation and input of fresh insights and research. The first panel is meant to offer a theoretical overview of the conceptual baggage that the term ‘Stalinism’ brings along with its usage. It is hoped that, by taking into account historical hindsight allowed by the passage of time and the recent evolution of scholarship in the field, new meanings would be identified for the general terminology. The second panel will explore the early framework of regime interaction under circumstances of Soviet hegemony. The relevance of the Cominform is two-folded: on the one hand, it represented the first post-Comintern supra-party international organization; and, on the other, its existence is linked to Titoism as the first major challenge to Stalinism dominance within world communism. The third and forth panels will provide both the empirical and comparative framework for an integration of the general evaluations and analyses of the first day. While several papers will emphasize the Romanian case, other contributions will deal with each East European country individually and offer the counterpart for circumscribing the big-picture of regime-change, societal transformation, and international positioning within the Soviet Bloc.

Moreover, the conference represents a pioneering effort to reinsert the Romanian case in the academic map in the US. Under circumstances of a rejuvenation of communism studies in Romania (signaled among other things by the publication of the Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, chaired by Prof. Tismaneanu) and considering the existent scholarship dealing with the period for the Romanian case (e.g. Henry Roberts, Ghiţă Ionescu, Ken Jowitt, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Robert Levy, etc.), the conveners of the “Stalinism Revisited” conference consider that it is high time to re-insert the Romanian case into the general debates about the communist takeovers and about the impact of Stalinism on Eastern Europe. This initiative of the Romanian Cultural Institute, in collaboration with University of Maryland (College Park), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Georgetown University is a first step towards the creation of a Washington-based academic network generally focused upon the history and politics of communism and post-communism in East-Central and Southeastern Europe, with a particular emphasis on Romania.               

Organizers of the Event:

Promoter and Host of the Project: Romanian Cultural Institute

The conference is organized under the patronage of prof. Vladimir Tismaneanu - Director of the Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies, Government and Politics Department, (University of Maryland - College Park) & Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania

The collaborating institutions are:

·        Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars – Cold War International History Program (Director – Christian Ostermann)

·        The Embassy of Romania to United States

·        The Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) at Georgetown University (coordinator Matthew Tyrrell) 

Project coordinator – Bogdan Cristian Iacob