1. Thomas W. Simons Jr. - “Eastern Europe between the USSR and the West: Reflections on the Origins and Dynamics of the Cold War" 

Abstract: Ambassador Simons brought an interest in Eastern Europe into the U.S. Foreign Service in 1963, grew at the knee of U.S. diplomats of the first Cold War generation, and was heavily engaged in U.S. East-West diplomacy from then until 1995. He will argue that ideology defined U.S. (and Soviet) geopolitical interests in Eastern Europe from the beginning; that this squeezed the U.S. policy approach into a characteristic cycle of hope-betrayal-bitterness; that each successive effort to expand the definition of U.S. interests in Eastern Europe beyond ideology succumbed to violent Soviet reaffirmation of the basic status quo which reconsolidated the basic U.S. approach. So that from the Cold War’s start to its finish, Eastern Europe remained a canary in the mineshaft for the U.S., a telltale indicator of Soviet intentions, rather a strategic factor in its own right.  

Biography: From 1963 until his retirement in 1998 with the rank of Career Minister, Thomas W. Simons, Jr. was a Foreign Service Officer of the United States, specializing for most of his career in East-West relations. Assignments included: Consular and Political Officer at Embassy Warsaw, 1968-1971 (including participation in the last talks with China held there); work on conventional arms reductions and European security talks in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs of the State Department, 1972-1974; Member of the Department’s Policy Planning Staff, 1974-1975; Embassy Moscow (including a spell as Acting Political Counselor), 1975-1977; Deputy Chief of Mission at Embassy Bucharest, 1977-1979; and Political Counselor at Embassy London, 1979-1981. In the 1980’s, Simons achieved the record for tenure as Director of the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the Department’s Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, 1981-1985, and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for relations with the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Yugoslavia, 1986-1989.  In the 1990’s, he was American Ambassador to Poland (1990-1993), Coordinator of U.S. Assistance to the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union, based in Washington (1993-1995), and American Ambassador to Pakistan (1996-1998). Currently, Simons is a Lecturer in Harvard University’s Department of Government and Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has also served as Chairperson of the Advisory Council of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, DC (2001-2005).  He has taught at Brown University (1989-90), Stanford University (1998-2002), and Cornell University (2004-6). He is the author of three books: The End of the Cold War?(1990), Eastern Europe in the Postwar World (2^nd revised edition, 1993), and Islam in a Globalizing World (2003). Between 2002 and 2005, he directed the Davis Center’s Program on Eurasia in Transition, a workshop for scholars probing the region’s structural developments since 1991.

2. Kenneth Jowitt - “Revolutionary Breakthroughs and the Fate of Leninism in East Central Europe”

Abstract:: I will address the complexities and ramifications of the Stalinist revolutionary breakthroughs. With the critical exception of Poland, in former Eastern Europe, these transformations were an integral part of a world historical, anti-Western phenomenon. Their character has not been fully grasped, neither its appeal nor its consequences.

Biography: Ken Jowitt is the Pres and Maurine Hotchkis Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Prof. Jowitt specializes in the study of comparative politics, American foreign policy, and post-communist countries. He is presently working on Frontiers, Barricades and Boundaries, a book dealing with the changes in international political geography and the challenges to American and Western institutions. Among his recent publications is The New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (University of California Press, 1992). He has also written "Really Imaginary Socialism" (East European Constitutional Review, spring/summer 1997), "In Praise of the Ordinary: An Essay on Democracy," published in Adam Michnik's Letters from Freedom (University of California Press, 1998), "Russia Disconnected" (Irish Slavonic Studies 19 [1998]), "Challenging the Correct Line" (East European Politics and Society, fall 1998), and "Ethnicity: Nice, Nasty, Nihilistic," in Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions, ed. Daniel Chirot and Martin E. P. Seligman (American Psychological Association, 2001).  In 1997 he delivered the presidential address at Whitman College. In 1998 Kenneth Jowitt delivered the Princeton Lectures, and was the Jean Monnet Visiting Scholar at the European University in Florence. He has spoken at the Commonwealth Club, the World Presidents Organization, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Prof. Jowitt has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1968. In 1983 he won the University Distinguished Teaching Award and was dean of undergraduate studies from 1983 to 1986. He also received the Distinguished Teaching Award for the Division of Social Sciences.

3. Vladimir Tismaneanu:  “Diabolical Pedagogy and the Logic of Stalinism in Eastern Europe” 

Abstract:In order to understand the dynamics of the Stalinist experiment in Eastern Europe, one needs to take into account the prevailing role of direct Soviet intervention and intimidation. Local communist formations were pursuing the Stalinist model of systematic destruction of noncommunist parties, the disintegration of the civil society, and the monopolistic occupation of the public space through state-controlled rituals and institutions. The overall goal was to build a passive consensus based on unlimited commitment to the political program of the ruling elite. The true content of the political regime is described by the “cult of personality” system. The personalization of political power, its concentration in the hands of a demigod, led to his forcible religious adoration and the masochistic humiliation of subordinates. The symbolic vehicle for this moral and political regimentation was the Stalinist definition of internationalism as unbounded love for the USSR. The Cominform emerged as the first attempt at institutionalizing the satellitization of Eastern Europe, and it represented an attempt to contain and annihilate the centrifugal trends within world communism. It laid the foundation for future frameworks of supra-governmental domination and ideological hegemony from the part of the CPSU. Paradoxically, the Cominform, brought about the first instance of dissent and revisionism from a ‘party-state’ (the Titoist “heresy”).

To keep strict control over all mechanisms that guaranteed social reproduction and preserved the matrix of domination in such a system, the party had to play the central role. Ideological purity and revolutionary vigilance were imposed as main political imperatives. Political police, cast in the Soviet mold and controlled by Soviet advisers, took care to fulfill the ideological desiderata. The political content of that ideological dictatorship in its radical incarnation (1948-53) was sheer terror and permanent propaganda warfare waged within a personalized dictatorship embodied by local “little Stalins.” The main weakness of this system was its deficit of legitimacy. Under mature Stalinism, both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, autocratic despotism managed to ruin the functioning of the party as an autonomous institution. In this monolithic structure dominated by the revolutionary phalanx, the plans to reshape man, nature, and society could be frantically pursued. Stalinism as a political religion overturned traditional morality: good and evil, vice and virtue, were drastically revalued. The goal was to create a system that managed to unify victim and torturer, to abolish the traditional moral taboos and set about a different code, with different prescriptions and prohibitions.  The dramaturgy of show trials with their diabolical pedagogy was a main component of this system based on universal fear, duplicity, and suspicion. 

Biography: Professor of politics and Director of the Center for the Study of Post-communist Societies at University of Maryland (College Park). President of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (April 2006 – March 2007). Since April 2007, Chairman of the Presidential Consultative Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania. He left communist Romania in 1981. In 1982 he settled in the US, where, in 1983, joined the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia as a research associate and a contributing editor to ORBIS. Between 1985 and 1990, he taught at University of Pennsylvania. Since 1990 he has been teaching at University of Maryland, Department of Government and Politics.  In 2003, he received University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award. In 2007, the university granted him the Distinguished International Service Award. Prof. Tismaneanu received from the American Association for Political Science a certificate of exceptional achievement for his teaching career. In 2004, his book, Stalinism for All Seasons was granted the “Barbara Jelavich Award” by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). He was Editor (1998-2004) and currently is chair of the Editorial Committee of East European Politics and Societies. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Human Rights Review, Studia Politica, and Journal of Democracy. For more than two decades he has been a permanent collaborator of Radio Free Europa, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and BBC. He was a Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington, DC), and received fellowships from the Remarque Institute (New York University), National Endowment for Democracy, Institute for the Sciences of Man (IWM-Viena). He was an editor of dissident magazines AGORA (1986-1990) and Meridian (1991-1992). Prof. Tismaneanu is Doctor Honoris Causa of Universitatea de Vest from Timisoara (2002) and of the National School for Political Science (2003). Among his publications in English are: The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: the Poverty of Utopia (Routledge, 1988); Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (Free Press, 1992, paperback with a new epilogue, 1993); Fantasies of Salvation: Nationalism, Democracy, and Myth in Post-communist Europe (Princeton UP, 1998); Stalinism for All Seasons: a Political History of Romanian Communism (University of California Press, 2003). He is also the author of numerous books in Romanian. Prof. Tismaneanu edited The Revolutions of 1989 (Routledge,1999) and co-edited the volume Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (1999). In collaboration with Marc Howard and Rudra Sil, he edited World Order After Leninism (2006). He is co-author to The Great Shock at the End of a Short Century (2005), a book of dialogues with the three-time president of Romania, Ion Iliescu. Prof. Tismaneanu is currently working on several books dealing with revolutionary political religions, the ideological passions of 20^th century, and the relationship between democracy and memory.

4. Agnes Heller -  "Legitimation problems and crises of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe"

Abstract: The most radical kind of totalitarianism, which lasted from the thirties until 1956- was characterized - with the exception of a few years of “the great patriotic war”- by the exercise of the party initiated terror. We call this stage of totalitarianism “Stalinism,” because both the system of domination and the government was legitimate mainly by the “charisma” of the Leader, which has been reinforced by the victory in WW2. Other kinds of legitimation, which were typical before the thirties and became typical after 1956, were reduced to an auxiliary place during the Stalinist period.

The communist parties of the Soviet controlled states were obliged to operate with the same scheme of legitimacy. This was an impossible task, especially in the case of Hungary. Hungary namely lost the war against the Allies. Thus Hungarians (with the exception of the remaining Jews and leftists) never spoke about “liberation,” but about “the front” or about “occupation”. This discussion remained on the agenda until now. The second problem of legitimacy consisted in the results of the relatively free elections –in Hungary 1945, 1947- which showed very little support for the communist party. The third problem was that the “charisma” of Rakosi was almost 100 % artificially created and subjected to the “charisma” of Stalin, not original but just “the shadow of the ideal”.

The paper will follow step by step the constant legitimacy deficit of the suddenly introduced system of domination and government (in one year!) before 1953 in Hungary and also in other “Peoples democracies”. After 1953, at least in Hungary, the two (legitimacy deficit for the system of domination and of the government) will become disentangled, since Imre Nagy’s government gets popular support against the system of domination. This   development will finally lead to the collapse of the regime in 1956.

Biography: Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the New School –A University in New York. Agnes Heller was a student and co-worker of Lukács's during the 1950s. She was one of a group of prominent members of the `Budapest School' who left Hungary for Australia in the early 1970s and taught sociology in Melbourne, at La Trobe University. In 1986, she moved to New York. Agnes Heller has written widely on the philosophy of history and morals, or the theory of modernity: The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (2002); A Theory of Modernity (1999); An Ethics of Personality (1996); General Ethics (1988); Beyond Justice (1987); The Power of Shame (1986); Radical Philosophy (1984); Everyday Life (1984); Lukács Revalued (editor, 1983); A Theory of History (1982); A Theory of Feelings (1979); Renaissance Man (1978); The Theory of Needs in Marx (1976). She is presently working on two books: Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life and The Concept of the Beautiful. Agnes Heller received The Sonning Prize, Denmark’s most important cultural award. She is also a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

5. Alfred J. Rieber: “Popular Democracy. An Illusion?”

Abstract:: My proposed paper topic is "Concepts of Popular Democracy in Late Stalinist Soviet Union." The paper focuses on the internal debate within the CPSU and what I call the social science intelligentsia over the nature of the social structures and political institutions of East European states that were located within the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II. The extension of Soviet power into the region had resulted from a conventional and not a revolutionary war fought in a coalition with Western democracies and legitimized by international agreements at Yalta and Potsdam. The Soviet leadership had no concrete plans for the future transformation of states and societies. Through the vehicle of armistice agreements and the Allied Control Commissions it pursued a policy of "limited intervention." Stalin had dropped some hints in the prewar period about the transitional nature of regimes in Poland and Romania. But these were merely sketches based on Lenin's discarded formula of democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. During the late phases of war and early postwar period Stalin also made remarks to Polish and Yugoslav Communist leaders that insisted on a different path to socialism for their societies avoiding the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, the Bulgarian leader G. Dimitrov had enunciated some of the principles of Popular Democracy in the mid-thirties (under the rubric of Popular Front)and this was now revived.  Lesser voices in the party apparatus and scholarly community began to explore the specific features of the newly conceived term "popular democracy." The paper seeks to explore the ways in which an ideological innovation evolved from these debates; how it shaped the Soviet policies in the immediate postwar period; and what role it played in the division of Europe into two camps.

Biography: Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania and University Research Professor at the Central European University. During his doctoral studies he spent one year (1958-1959) at Moscow State University, where he studied as a Columbia Traveling Fellow in the first U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchange Program. His administrative appointments at Penn include Chairmanship of the History Department from 1967 to 1972 and Associate Deanship of the School of Arts and Sciences from 1974 to 1976. As a noted scholar of Russian history, Rieber won numerous fellowships and awards, among them the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965, American Council of Learned Societies Exchange Fellowship with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1966, National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship in 1973, the Ford Foundation Grant for Faculty Enrichment in 1984, National Council for Soviet and East European Studies Fellowship in 1986, and Professor of the Year at the Central European University (1997, 1998). In addition, he received the Lindbach Teaching Award at Penn in 1967 and the E. Harris Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1969. His major publications are Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941-1947 (1962), The Politics of Autocracy (1966), Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (1982), Zhdanov in Finland (1995), and Imperial Rule, co-edited with prof. Alexei Miller. He is presently working on the book project "Struggle over the Borderlands".

6. Ivo Banac: „The Cominform, Yugoslav Defiance, and the Process of Sovietization“

Abstract:: The paper will examine the intent behind the establishment of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), a rump club of the mainly East European Communist Parties, and the role of this organization acquired in the split between Moscow and Belgrade, including its transmission services in the Sovietization of East European satellites.

Biography: Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University. From 1995 to 1999 he was the University Professor of History at the Central European University at Budapest, where he also directed the OSI/CEU Institute on Southeastern Europe. He is the author of The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (1984), which was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (1988), which was awarded the Josip Juraj Strossmayer Award by the Zagreb Book Fair, as well as numerous reviews, articles, and collections. He has edited eight additional books. He was the editor of East European Politics and Societies and served as the co-chair of the Open Society Institute (Croatia), as a member of presidency of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, and as the Director General of the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik. He is a corresponding member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU) and the president of the advisory council of the “Vlado Gotovac” Institute in Zagreb. He was the minister of environmental protection and urban planning in the government of Croatia (2003) and is a member of parliament (Sabor) of Croatia.

7. Charles Gati - Discussant for the „Stalinism Revisited” panel (29th November, 2007; Romanian Embassy in Washigton D.C.)

Biography: Adjunct Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, School of Advanced International Studies/Johns Hopkins University. Formerly a senior advisor with the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State and professor at Union College and Columbia University. He is the author of Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (1986), for which he received his first Marshall Shulman Book Award in 1987, The Bloc that Failed (1990), and several other books as well as numerous articles in publications including Foreign Affairs and The New York Times.  A study titled "If not Democracy, What?" was published in 1997. His latest book -- Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian revolt -- appeared in 2006 in English, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, and Russian and was awarded Dr. Gati's second Marshall Shulman Book Award in 2007.

8. Charles King - Discussant for the second session of the „Communist Takeovers in Eastern Europe” panel (30th November, 2007; Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars)

Biography: Charles King is Ion Ratiu Professor of Romanian Studies and Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University, where he also serves as chairman of the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. His books include Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the Former Soviet Union (1998), The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (2000), The Black Sea: A History (2004), and The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (2008).

9. Mark Kramer - “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1945-1953”

Abstract: My conference paper will reassess Soviet aims and concrete actions in East-Central Europe during the first several years after World War II. The paper highlights the interaction between Soviet policies in the region and domestic developments within the USSR, especially Stalin's decision to reimpose tight dictatorial control at home after the more relaxed period during the war. The paper will begin by describing the historical context of Soviet relations with the East-Central European countries, particularly the events of World War II. The wartime years and the decades preceding them largely shaped Stalin’s policies and goals after the war. The paper then will discuss the way Communism was established in East-Central Europe in the mid- to late 1940s.  Although the process varied from country to country, my paper will highlight many of the similarities as well as the differences. The final section of the chapter will offer conclusions about Stalin’s policy and the emergence and consolidation of the Communist regimes in East-Central Europe. The paper will draw extensively on newly available archival materials from the former Communist world. After the demise of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later, the former Soviet archives were partly opened and the East-Central European archives were more extensively opened. In the West, too, some important collections of materials pertaining to Soviet policy in East-Central Europe in the 1940s have only recently become available. Of particular note are declassified transcriptions of Soviet cables that were intercepted and decrypted by U.S. and British intelligence agencies and declassified U.S. intelligence reports. My paper will take advantage of the documents that are now accessible, without overlooking the valuable sources that were available well before 1989.

Biography: Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University . Professor Kramer is the author of Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion; Soldier and State in Poland: Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Change After Communism; The Collapse of the Soviet Union; and Crisis in the Communist World, 1956: The Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and Upheavals in Poland and Hungary (forthcoming, 2008). He was the translator and American editor for The black book of communism: crimes, terror, repression, published by Harvard University Press in 1999.  He is completing another book titled From Dominance to Hegemony to Collapse: Soviet Policy in East-Central Europe , 1945-1991. Professor Kramer also has written more than 150 articles on a variety of topics. His article "Ideology and the Cold War" in the October 1999 issue of the Review of International Studies was awarded a prize by the British International Studies Association for the best article published in the field of international relations in 1999. He has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and international organizations, including the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Defense Department, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Naval War College, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the UN World Institute for Development Economic Research.

10. Christian Ostermann -  “Discussing Sovietization: Stalin and his Stenograms with Communist Leaders”

Biography:  Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) and editor of the CWIHP Bulletin. Before joining CWIHP in January 1997 as associate director, he worked as a research fellow at the National Security Archive. He is a co-editor of Cold War History (London) and a Senior Research Fellow, National Security Archive (George Washington University). He also served as a Lecturer in History and International Affairs at George Washington University and Professorial Lecturer at Georgetown University. Mr. Ostermann designed and organized a series of critical oral history conferences on the Helsinki Conference, the 1979-1989 War in Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq War, the Congo Crisis of 1960-61 involving archival documents, veterans of diplomacy and policymaking and experts from all sides. His major publications include "Keeping the Pot Simmering: 'The United States and the East German Uprising of 1953'" (1996 DAAD Article Award of the German Studies Association) and Uprising in East Germany, 1953: The Cold War, the German Question, and the First Major Upheaval Behind the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2001), which won a Honorable Mention in the competition for the 2005 Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize for Documentary Editing.

11. Svetozar Stojanovic -  „Varieties of Stalinism in Light of the Yugoslav Case“

Abstract:: From the time of their formation, communist parties in Eastern Europe were for almost three decades in parliametary opposition, in inderground, under foreign occupation and not in power as was the Soviet Communist Party (SCP/b). The former were able to realize their full Stalinist potential only after assuming power in their countries. One should also not underestimate the difference between the Stalinism of the YCP during the antifascist and civil war and revolution (1941-45), on the one hand, and the ruling Stalinism in Yugoslavia (as well as in the USSR) once that Party assumed power, on the other hand. Furthermore,  Stalinism in power was one thing and the Stalinism of the communist parties in Western democracies was another. That „parlimentarism“ lied at one end of the Stalinist spectrum, and totalitarianism lied at the opposite end. As Stalinism was the result of a process, its phases and degrees have to be differentiated. In that process even the incomplete Stalinists were eliminated. For this reason, the key question is to what degree had the CPY become Stalinized prior to Stalin’s onslaugh in 1948. Three years in power had apparently not been sufficient for that party to complete the stalinization process.  It is also important to note that the CPY’s ideology in 1948 was completely Stalinized, whereas in practice some important differences with Moscow had already accumulated. The biggest irony in the CPY’s history, however, was that its most Stalinist potential was manifested only at the time it openly resisted Stalin. This is why I have described Tito’s initial „No“ to Stalin as a Stalinist anti-Stalinism. In Yugolavia as well, there was a pronounced difference between the Stalinists as initiators, orderers and executors of mass terror and the Stalinists who were naive believers. It would also be unjustified to equate the uninformed Stalinists with those who became Stalinists even though they were well informed. Up until the end of World War II, there was only a miniscul number of Yugoslav communists who knew what the real situation was like in the USSR. The rest, living at a great distance and possessing scant knowledge of Soviet affairs, were Stalinists in the sense that they blindly supported Stalin, the SCP(b) and the Soviet Union, in the belief that communist ideals were genuinely being materilized there.  Neither should we pass overgeneralized judgments on the Stalinists because of the generational differences. An important component of idealistic as against realistic Stalinists was the utopian nature of the communist youth. 

Biography: Founder and president of the Serbian-American Center, Belgrade, president of its Forum for National Strategy. Distinguished Research Fellow, Center for Inquiry International, Buffalo, NY. Member of the Board of governors of the Radio Broadcast Agency of Serbia. Elected member, Institut International de Philosophie, Paris. Elected member of the International Academy of Humanism, Buffalo, NY. Elected member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, UK. Elected member, Academy of Humanities Research, Moscow. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Praxis International (Oxford) along with Seyla Benhabib (1987-1990). He has been distinguished visiting professor at many universities in US, Germany, UK, Austria, India, etc. He was one of the leading dissidents in Yugoslavia; together with 7 other professors from the so called Praxis-group, was expelled, at Tito’s request, from the University of Belgrade in January 1975. After Tito’s death the whole group, including him, founded, in 1981, the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, where he was professor and director until retired (the end of 2001). He was a long-time critic of Slobodan Milosevic, and one of the protagonists of the Serbian democratic revolution against him and his regime (5/6 October 2000). His publications include 7 books, 4 brochures and about 130 journal articles translated into 14 languages.  Books in English: Between Ideals and Reality (1973); In Search of Democracy in Socialism (1981); From Marxism and Bolshevism to Gorbachev (1988); The Fall of Yugoslavia: Why Communism Failed (1997); and Serbia: The Democratic Revolution (2003). He is now working on a new book “Seven Years of the Democratic Revolution of Serbia (2000-2007)”.

12. Bartlomiej Kaminski & Antoni Kaminski -  “Road to “People’s Poland:” Stalin’s Conquest Revisited”

Abstract: The retrospection, which includes not only the end of Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union but also almost half a century of its control over Central Europe, offers an interesting vantage point on Stalin’s takeover of Poland. The main topics of this analysis can be summarized as follows: first, the Soviet takeover of Poland did not begin in the last stages of the World War. Its starting point was the partitioning of Poland in 1939 between two totalitarian giants—Germany and the Soviet Union. Its intermediate point came two years before the end of World War II at the Teheran Conference, which rejected Poland’s right to self-determination and assigned her to the Soviet sphere.

Second, while one may debate whether Stalin had a long term plan to subjugate Poland, his actions since September 17, 1939, i.e., when Soviet forces joined Germany in invasion of Poland, indicate consistency in creating conditions that would facilitate the takeover by eliminating the Polish political class. Examples discussed are, among others, mass deportations and executions in Eastern parts of Poland, the Katyn massacre and Warsaw Uprising.

Third, Stalin’s conquest of Poland did result in the imposition of all components of the Soviet model. Stalin’s system tailored to the Polish circumstances was less harsh than elsewhere; its political economy design was never completed leaving some space for civil society; and his political appointees sought legitimacy through cultivating symbols of Poland’s national identity. It is not clear why Stalin did not unleash a wholesale terror; why he did not order execution of the Gomulka group or massive deportations of Poland’s catholic priests. The answer may lie in Poles’ deep resistance.

Last but not least, whatever the answer might be, it seems the incomplete transition contributed to Poland’s series of upheavals. The historical irony is that states that the Hitler—Stalin pact wanted to erase from the political map of Europe, made their contribution to wipe out Stalin’s system, albeit in a different way. Poland’s upheavals contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, whereas Baltic States’ sovereign aspirations inspired other Soviet republics to leave the Soviet Union.

Biography: Professor Bartlomiej Kaminski teaches International Political Economy, Global Economic Governace and Political Economy of Transition at the Department of Goverment, University of Maryland at College Park. He has published extensively on European integration and economic development. His most recent publications include The Caucasian Tiger: Sustaining Economic Growth (co-authored with S. Mitra, D. Andrews, G. Gyulumyan, Paul Holden, Y. Kuznetsov and E. Vahskakmadze), The World Bank, Washington D.C., 2007, and Korupcja rzadow: kraje postkomunistyczn wobec globalizachi (Corruption of governance: post-communist countries and globalization), co-authored with Antoni Kaminski (2004). His current research interests focus on the political economy of transition and regional integration.

Professor Antoni Z. Kaminski is a lead researcher at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences and lecturer at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. In 2006, he was a visiting professor at Princeton. He has published extensively on international security and governance issues including corruption. He was a President of the Polish Chapter of Transparency International. His current research interests focus on threats to international stability as viewed from the perspective of the European Union's new member states and the political economy of transition. His most recent publication was Korupcja rzadow: kraje postkomunistyczn wobec globalizachi (Corruption of governance: post-communist countries and globalization), co-authored with Bartlomiej Kaminski (2004).

13. John Connelly -  "East German Stalinism in Comparative Perspective"

Abstract: In this paper I investigate the paradox of East German political development: that of a country which never had Stalinism wound up one of the most oppressive neo-Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Bloc. The view that East German Stalinism was weaker than variants elsewhere took hold in contemporary analyses, and has been assumed into the scholarly literature. It is based partly on the fact that the SED did not experience the show trials and self-mutilation of other parties. I take a comparative approach to this riddle, focusing on the unbroken development of party cadres in the GDR over the major break of 1956, led by a cohesive politburo with Walter Ulbricht at the head. This contrasts with the major ruptures in political development that one sees in Poland (1956) or Czechoslovakia (1968). In addition, the SED leadership used the open border to concentrate on its territory persons who had somehow arranged themselves with the regime. East Germans were the only population in the East Bloc that could vote with their feet. Finally, East German leaders invested more attention to the sociological challenges of creating their own elite through the use of worker-peasant faculties.

Biography: Associate Professor at University of California, Berkeley, Department of History. Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2002-03) and co-director, UC Berkeley History Social Science Project. He received the George L. Beer Prize of the American Historical Association (2002). He is the author of the seminal volume Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956 and of many important articles dealing with the politics of higher education under Stalinism in Central Europe. Prof. Connelly is currently working on the relation between anti-Semitism and racism in Catholic thought from the 1930s to 1960s, with focus on Central Europe and the US.

14. Bradley Abrams - “Hope Died Last: The Czechoslovak Road to Stalinism” 

Abstract: This paper examines developments in postwar Czechoslovakia from 1945 to Stalin’s death in 1953. It divides the era into two periods. The first one, which might be subsumed under the rubric “The Czechoslovak Road to Socialism,” focuses on events with important domestic roots or consequences. The first two of these purely domestic: the results of the free elections in 1946, and the evolution of Czech-Slovak relations, culminating with the role of the trial of Jozef Tiso, the leader of the wartime Slovak state. The remaining two are international episodes that had important domestic implications: the Czechoslovak reception of the Marshall Plan and the COMINFORM meeting of September, 1947. I will argue that Czechoslovak developments in the years 1945- 1948 showed both the domestic desires for radical social change and the willingness of domestic political actors to satisfy Soviet desires. The second period, after the Communist Party’s seizure of power in February 1948, might be called “The Czechoslovak Road from Socialism to Stalinism.” In it, I will examine the initially cautious steps the Communist Party took after gaining power, and argue that the COMINFORM meeting of June, 1948 signaled a turning point away from a Czechoslovak variant of communism to a more rigid Stalinism that looked like other regimes of the region. The examples here will be drawn from developments in party membership, in nationalization and collectivization, purges in the bureaucracy, army and elsewhere, and, finally, in the show trials of the early 1950s. In the conclusion I will address the larger affects of the failure of the “Czechoslovak Road to Socialism,” and the decline into Stalinism on Czechoslovak communism.

Biography: Bradley Abrams has taught as an Assistant Professor (1997-2004) and Associate Professor (2004-2007) in Columbia University’s Department of History. Since 2004, he has also served as the Associate Director of the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies, and was recently elected President of the Czechoslovak Studies Association. He is the author of The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (2004). Among his more recent articles are “The Politics of Retribution: The Trial of Jozef Tiso in the Czechoslovak Environment,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe, (2000), “The Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak Democracy: Elements of Interdependency,” in Martin Schain, ed., The Marshall Plan. Fifty Years After (2001), “World War Two and the East European Revolution” (East European Politics and Societies, Fall 2002) and “Allierte Planungen und Entscheidungen zur Nachkriegslösung des deutsch-tschechischen Konflikts” (“Allied Planning and Decisions for the Postwar Solution of the German-Czech Conflict,” in Barbara Coudenhove und Oliver Rathkolb, Hg., Die Beneš-Dekrete, 2002). Prof. Abrams is currently working on a project entitled “Normalizing the Socialist Good Life: Consumption, Consumerism and Political Legitimacy in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring.”

15. Janos Rainer - “Revisiting Hungarian Stalinism”

Abstract: In order to revisit Hungarian Stalinism it is worth to sum up the two phases of its historiography. My paper starts with them, and then it advances some proposals on new perspectives of Stalinism for „third wave” Hungarian researchers. Due to the efforts of some historians from the early ’80s on, there was scholarly research in Hungary concerning the Stalinist period rather than Stalinism itself. It didn’t mean too much use of conceptual frameworks (including e. g. totalitarianism) or clear critical attitudes concerning the conditions of those days. Characteristically enough, this first historiography treated the problem of continuity very carefully. Although it was equally clear that the Kádár regime had as much phenomena continuous to Rákosi regime as that of discontinuous, analysts always emphasized the latter. The main problem of any kind of historical account was 1956 which was put under strong taboo just after the Revolution.

The events of 1989 brought immediate fundamental change in several respects. The memory of ’56 and the Stalinism played a key part in Hungary’s change of system. The weakening legitimacy of the Kádár regime became apparent through open discourse on the past. Research and public discourse about Stalinism became freer and more varied. Contacts were made with international research into the contemporary period. A new, second wave of historiography on Hungarian Stalinism had emerged in early ‘90s. Most of the historical narratives about the Rákosi’-period (as well as 1956) were slotted in among the various chronicles. The dominant framework of interpretation derived from the theory of totalitarianism.

There is no real historical debate over Stalinism in Hungary these days. But the problem remains on the horizon of Hungarian historiography. The new generation of historians will have different sensitivities to problems and a more conscious methodological approach. The kind of ethical commitment that marked the historiography during the change of system will disappear or alter. The last point of the paper will propose some new approaches especially in the field of social and cultural history. It will also try to sum up the main possible points of a (future) debate including special problems of Hungarian version of Stalinism.

Biography: Director of the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He is also a lecturer at Budapest University of Theater and Film Arts. He published in Hungarian Imre Nagy. Political Biography 1896–1953 Vol. 1 and 2. Versions of his biography of Imre Nagy appeared in 2006 in Polish, German and Russian translations. He co-authored with György Litván and János M. Bak The Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Reform, Revolt and Repression 1953–1963 (also appeared in German). Along with Csaba Békés and Malcolm Byrne, prof. Rainer compiled, edited and introduced The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents. In 2002, he received the Academy Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His present research interest is focused on post-1956 period. Currently he is working on a book about state security organs during the Kádár-period.

16. Ekaterina Nikova - “Revisiting Bulgarian Stalinism”

Abstract: Bulgarian ‘pure’ Stalinism (the term is new for the Bulgarian scholarship) is usually dated from 1947 to 1953. In broader terms, it encompasses also the years 1944-1947 and 1953-1956. After the ‘sacred April’ (1956) Plenum and the ousting of Bulgaria’s ‘little Stalin’ Vulko Chervenkov, Stalinism was replaced by Zhivkov and his clique, who were interested in exposing and denouncing the ‘deformities and deviations’ of the ‘cult of personality’ era, but they did not go very far. Events in Hungary put an end to criticism; labor camps were re-opened and were to be closed as late as 1962.  In the 1980s new efforts were undertaken to investigate the Stalinist era. Carefully selected historians were given the possibility to work in the Party archives on carefully selected topics. They did shed some light on the period and its basic personalities, although strictly within the official doctrine.

Revisiting Stalinism could happen only after 1989.  Availability of archival material from Bulgarian and Soviet archives, the avalanche of important new books, memoirs, diaries (including those of Georgi Dimitrov), are now illuminating the period. East Europe’s most egalitarian country, less affected by wartime cataclysms than anyone of its neighbors, with social fabric and institutions almost intact, Bulgaria registered record numbers of murders, persecutions and incarcerations - crimes exercised not only against organized opposition but against society as a whole, including against the activists of the Communist Party itself. The true meaning of communist political violence is now becoming evident. This was not a class struggle against the bourgeois opposition, this was a crushing of the peasantry – the most organized force in Bulgarian society. It annihilated the small and valuable elite, urban culture and the thin layer of modernity, produced by a peasant nation in the course of three generations. The ensuing total atomization of society explains the later development and modus operandi of Bulgarian communism – the preservation of a strong grip upon society, its economic adventurism and grotesque megalomaniac distortions in all spheres of life.

New evidence and new scholarship are calling things with their proper names. We know now that people’s democracy was a stillborn child – a tactical and propaganda tool, not an alternative new road to democracy. We know that Soviet instructors were instrumental for the establishing of the new regime, and also that the role of the so called domestic factor of the revolution, despite Bulgaria’s leftist political culture, was minimal.

Biography: Senior Research Associate, Institute for Balkan Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Visiting professor/lecturer at U.S., European, and Japanese universities. Major publications: The Balkans and the European Community (1992), Bulgaria in the Balkans (1999), Balkan Regional Cooperation Revisited (2001),  Balkan Politics at the Cusp of Two Centuries (2003), The Balkans: Modernization Unfulfilled (forthcoming). Prof. Nikova is currently working on a project titled „Roads Connecting, Roads Dividing. History of Infrastructure in South-East Europe.”

17. Claudiu Secasiu: “The Destruction of the Anticommunist Democratic Opposition the Trials of 1947”

Abstract: Since the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) played a minor role in politics before and during the second world war, as well as in the first governments after the coup from August 23, 1944, the communists, backed by the Soviet military authorities acting under the terms of the Moscow Armistice Convention, took a series of measures to demolish the principal political, social and military structures.

Immediately after March 6, 1945, the RCP got full and exclusive control of all existing institutions dealing with intelligence matters - the security police, known as the Siguranţa (the equivalent of the French Sûreté Générale, operating in towns), the Jandarmeria (the equivalent of the French Gendarmerie Nationale, operating in the villages), the Second Section of the Army General Staff (the equivalent of the Deuxième Bureau), and the Special Intelligence Service (Serviciul Special de Informatii – SSI), the civilian intelligence service, subordinated to the Prime Minister’s Office. These institutions, whose initial task was “the gathering of general intelligence which met the higher interests of the state”, were quickly transformed into a pure political police, working exclusively for the RCP and feared by the rest of the society, or in the top-ranking Communist spymaster Emil Bodnaras words, “a superior weapon, at the Government’s disposal”. Their efforts were focused on groups and individuals who were openly opposed to the regime, including the traditional parties – the National Peasant Party (NPP), the National Liberal Party (NLP) as well as those social-democrats, opposing the forced fusion of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and RCP, the anti-Communist groups acting as underground resistance, the churches, and “sects”, the ethnic minorities, the journalists (both domestic and foreign) etc.

Thus, the RCP, through their controlled secret services, prepared the last phase in the destruction of the political opposition in Romania. Similar to the alleged Smallholders’ “anti-republican conspiracy” in Hungary, the leaders of the NPP, including Iuliu Maniu, were involved into a show trial, in November 1947, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The NPP was banned in June 1947, while the NLP ceased any political activity by the end of the same year. Some prominent liberals and independent social democrats were arrested and sentenced during the spring of 1948, marking the end of any effective political opposition to the Communists’ dictatorship for more than 40 years.

Biography: Mr. Secasiu has been a member of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives’ Collegium since 2000. In 1992-2000, he was a journalist and then a researcher with the BBC World Service Romanian Section. His present research has concentrated on the communist penetration of the Romanian secret services in the years 1944-1948, and its transformation into instruments of political terror. He published various articles on the subject, among them Serviciul de Informaţii al P.C.R. Penetrarea Serviciilor Oficiale de Informaţii (23 august 1944 - 6 martie 1945) [The Intelligence Service of the P.C.R. The Infiltration of the Official Security Services], in 6 martie 1945. Începuturile Comunizării României (1995); P.C.R. şi Serviciul Special de Informaţii. Drumul spre Poliţia Politică (1945-1951) [The Romanian Communists and the Special Intelligence Service, 1945-1951. The Road to the Political Police], in Dosarele istoriei, nr. 5, 1996; Serviciul de Informaţii al Palatului Regal (1946) - Adevăr şi Ficţiune [The Intelligence Service of the Royal Household, 1946-1947], in R. Rusan ed., Analele Sighet 3 (1996); Preliminarii ale Asaltului Final asupra P.N.Ţ. Contribuţia Organelor de Informaţii (1945-1947) [Some Preliminaries of the Final Assault against the National Peasant Party, 1945-1947. The Intelligence Services’ Contribution], in vol. Analele Sighet 5 (1997); Operaţiunea „Tămădău“ (14 iulie 1947). Un Document Inedit [Operation „Tamadau” – the Trap set up by the Communist Security Apparatus for Arresting the Leadership of the National Peasants], in R. Rusan, ed. Analele Sighet 5 (1997).

18. Dorin Dobrincu - “The Anticommunist Armed Resistance in Romania in Comparative Perspective”

Abstract:: The anticommunist armed resistance in Romania has been for decades one of the taboo objects of historical research, because of the ideological hindrances and of the impossibility to reach the sources. The Resistance emerged in Romania at the end of World War II as a reaction against the Soviets and it quickly acquired an explicit anticommunist nature. The phenomenon knew two periods – 1944-1947 and 1948-the beginning of the 1960s – differentiated from the standpoint of both the domestic and the international context.

Resistance groups were made up in almost all Romania’s regions, but particularly in the Carpathian Mountains, where the conditions were favorable to the guerrilla war. From a political point of view, the partisans in Romania were former members of the National Peasant Party, of the National Liberal Party and of the Legionary Movement, or even people who had joined the Romanian Communist Party or the satellite parties and mass organizations that the RCP controlled, and who at a certain point in time entered a conflict with the new regime; but most of the resistance groups members and of their supporters had no political affiliation. The partisans’ leaders were mostly people invested with an important symbolic capital in the action areas, but uncovered on the entire country territory.

Being a fight for freedom, but also for survival, the anticommunist armed Resistance was little known even in Romania until 1989. The theme was rediscovered after the communist regime collapsed, being one of the topics frequently attacked by the ‘memory retrievers’ and some of the historians, who however mostly limited themselves to publishing documents or treating just sequences, fragments of the phenomenon. That is why an overview on the phenomenon misses. At the same time, the idea of the uniqueness of the phenomenon in Romania appeared and got quite widespread. A look upon the Eastern-European region under the control of Kremlin after 1944/1945 (either directly or by interceders) shows us that the anticommunist (and anti-Soviet, according to the case) resistance was quite extended – in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, in Poland and Ukraine, but also in Moldova/Bessarabia –, even more than in was in Romania, in some places. Far from attacking the so often claimed “uniqueness” in certain circles in Romania, the anticommunist armed Resistance has a few common causes for the whole Eastern Europe: the Soviet occupation, the rapid and brutal transformation of the State and of the society, the political and religious persecutions but also the ethnic one in the territories directly occupied by the Soviets and so on. A phenomenon with many controversial aspects, the anticommunist resistance could be historicized and thus revealed in its real dimensions.

Biography: General Director of National Archives of Romania, Research Fellow at „A.D. Xenopol” Institute for History in Iaşi, Departament of Contemporary History, Associate Professor in the Faculty of History at Alexandru I. Cuza University, Iaşi. He is also a joint curator of a number of Romanian and international museum exhibitions. Publications: Proba Infernului. Personalul de Cult în Sistemul Carceral din România potrivit Documentelor Securităţii, 1959-1962 (editor, 2004). [The Inferno Test: Members of Religious Groups in the Romanian Prison System According to Securitate Records, 1959-1962]; Ţărănimea şi Puterea. Procesul de Colectivizare a Agriculturii în România (1949-1962) (co-editor with Constantin Iordachi, 2005) [Peasantry and Power. The Process of the Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania (1949-1962), with foreword by Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery]. Prof. Dobrincu was also co-author and co-editor of the Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Romanian Communist Dictatorship (2006, www.presidency.ro). The printed edition is forthcoming at Humanitas Publishing House in November 2007 (Co-edited with Vladimir Tismăneanu and Cristian Vasile). Under press: Listele Morţii în Arhivele Securităţii, 1945-1958 (editor) [List of Death in the Securitate files, 1945/1958]; Peasants into Lumpen. The Process of Land Collectivization in Romania, 1949-1962, Budapest, New York: CEU Press (Co-editor with Constantin Iordachi). In preparation: Raportul Final al Comisiei Prizidenţiale pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România. Documente, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2007 (Co-editor with Mihnea Berindei and Armand Goşu). 

19. Virgil Tarau - “The 1946 Elections and the Consolidation of Communist Power in Romania” 

Abstract:: The year 1946 is one of the turning points in the history of the Romanian contemporary society. At the time, the power structures instituted by means of force and blackmail by the Soviets (through their representative, Andrei Vîşinski), obtained their domestic political legitimation, when the falsified elections officialized the transformation of the political regime in accordance to the Stalinist blueprint. In the recent years, the research efforts of Romanian, Russian and Western historians began to offer the hard facts about the process of falsifying the 1946 elections. However, there are a few questions and problems related to this topic which are still in doubt and required further clarification.

The case of the Romanian electoral process presents a few particularities that require an analytical refinement of the model established in the analysis of the Soviet bloc as a whole. The new and extensive archival information I obtained from both Romanian and foreign sources (e.g. British and American) along with the documents declassified in the last 14 years in Romania impose certain nuances upon the evaluation of the 1946 electoral process. At the same time, documents produced by the diplomatic, military and intelligence corps in that period show how, both from a qualitative and a quantitative point of view, the elections in 1946 in Romania had a much larger role in the establishment of the communist regime than in the cases of other countries in the region.

Biography: Assistant Professor, "Babes-Bolyai" University, Faculty of History, Cluj-Napoca and member in the Board of the National Council for the Stufy of Securitate Archives. Between 1995 and1998, he was a Research Fellow at the History Institute of the Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca branch. He published 37 articles and he is author and editor of nine books and co-author of two high school textbooks. Among his publications are: Strategii şi Politici Electorale în Alegerile din 19 Noiembrie 1946  [Electoral Strategies and Policies in the Elections of 19 November 1946] (1999, with Marius Bucur); Colectivizarea agriculturii în România. Aspecte legislative. 1945-1962 [Colectivization of Romanian Agriculture. 1945-1962] (2000, with Gheorghe Iancu and Ottmar Traşcă); România şi relaţiile internaţionale în secolul XX [Romania and International Relations in 20th Century] (2000, co-editor with Liviu Ţîrău); Romanian and British Historians on the Contemporary History of Romania (2000, edited with George Cipăianu); Alegeri fără opţiune. Primele alegeri parlamentare din centrul şi estul Europei după încheierea celui de-al doilea război mondial [Elections without chance. First electoral processes in the Central and Eastern Europe after World War II] (2005). Prof. Tarau was also co-author of the Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Romanian Communist Dictatorship (2006, www.presidency.ro).

20. Dragos Petrescu - “Nationalism and Identity-Politics in Gheorghiu-Dej’s Romania, 1948-1965”

Abstract:: The large variety of sources that have become available after 1989 (especially documents, memoirs and witness accounts) indicate that Romanian communists did not come to power with a precise agenda with regard to the building of a ‘socialist’ nation. Arguably, their main political goal was to accede to power and preserve it at all costs. It was, therefore about the political survival of a frustrated, barely educated and tiny group, the “group from prisons” – as Vladimir Tismăneanu has aptly named it.

That group, also known as “Dej’s men,” was not only dependent on the Red Army that brought it to power, but also unprepared to govern and had no popular support. For such a leadership the only chance to stay in power was to be utterly subservient to Stalin. Until the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Romania in the summer of 1958, an issue of paramount importance for Dej and his men was to legitimize the Party’s leadership in the eyes of Moscow, and not in the eyes of the population. The situation totally changed after July 1958: the Party and its supreme leader had to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the people and had to devise a different strategy of political survival.

The present paper examines the birth of Romanian national-communism in the context of Gheorghiu-Dej’s struggle for political survival at the top of the Romanian Workers Party (RWP). Furthermore, this paper argues that the initial internationalist phase of Romanian communism was rather faked, than profoundly internalized, in spite of the internationalist rhetoric of the RWP propaganda machine. This argument is developed by examining the most representative moments of RWP’s history from 1948 to 1965 – and the related identity-discourses by its most prominent leaders – such as: 1956 and the reaction of the Romanian communists to the Hungarian Revolution or 1964 and the issuance of the so-called Declaration of April 1964.

Biography:  Prof. Petrescu teaches modern European history and comparative communism at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest. He is also a member of the Board of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) in Bucharest. His most recent publications include: “Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe:’ History, Ethnicity, and the Creation of a ‘Socialist’ Nation in Romania, 1945-1989,” in Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 37-54; “Mastering vs. Coming to Terms with the Past: A Critical Analysis of Post-Communist Romanian Historiography” (with Cristina Petrescu), in Sorin Antohi, Balázs Trencsényi and  Péter Apor, eds., Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), 311-408; “Workers and Peasant-Workers in a Working-Class’ ‘Paradise:’ Patterns of Working-Class Protest in Communist Romania,” in Peter Hübner, Christoph Kleßmann and Klaus Tenfelde, eds., Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus: Ideologischer Anspruch und Soziale Wirklichkeit (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2005), 119-140. He has also co-edited the volume Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest: Regio Books, 2001). Prof. Petrescu was co-author of Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Romanian Communist Dictatorship (2006, www.presidency.ro).

21. Cristian Vasile: “Propaganda and Culture in Romania at the beginning of the Communist regime”

Abstract:: In the aftermath of the Communist takeover, the Romanian Communist Party’s (RCP) list of things to be done included also the problem of the creation of a new culture, a Soviet-type one. Although the official discourse repeatedly stressed that this new culture it will be built by the working class, in fact its genesis was attentively and exclusively watched by the leadership of the Communist Party through the agency of a dreaded organ which belonged to the structure of the Central Committee – the Propaganda and Agitation Department, the Romanian Agitprop led by Leonte Rautu, a radical well-known for his anti-intellectual attitudes.

The organization and functioning of the Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD) produced both the perversion of the discourse regarding Culture, Arts, Education and the harassment of the more or less refractory intellectuals and artists. One of the main goals of the Department’s activity was the suppression of cultural diversity and therefore the cadres of the PAD were determined to fight against any spontaneous intellectual movement, showing accentuated contempt for the artistic freedom. The guidance of the Arts was in fact a synonym for political censorship.

In contrast with other Soviet-controlled countries in Central and Eastern Europe where the agitprop networks succeeded in gaining grounds and influenced working class and even intellectual urban milieus, in Romania the Communists had to defeat a much more reluctant attitude towards cooperation with the regime. However, the Propaganda and Agitation Department borne down any resistance.

The aim of this paper is to follow both the changes within the Arts Unions and other cultural institutions and the activity of the Propaganda and Agitation Department at the beginning of the Communist regime, using preeminently archival materials issued mainly by this Department, documents which were recently declassified. At the same time, I try to analyze in comparative perspective the first Communist attempts to bring culture under control in Soviet Union (after 1917) and Eastern Europe (after 1945).

Biography: Coordinator of the Advisory Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania and former Scientific Secretary of the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (April 2006-April 2007). Dr. Vasile is also researcher at the „Nicolae Iorga” History Institute of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest). He has written numerous articles on church and politics in twentieth-century Romania and on politics of culture under communism. He is author of three books: Biserica Ortodoxă Română în primul deceniu comunist [The Romanian Orthodox Church in the first communist decade] (2005); Între Vatican şi Kremlin. Biserica Greco-Catolică în timpul regimului comunist [Between Vatican and Kremlin. Greek Catholic Church under Communist regime] (2003); Istoria Bisericii Greco-Catolice sub regimul comunist. Documente şi mărturii [The History of the Greek Catholic Church under the communist regime – documents and oral interviews] (2003). His article, „The Suppression of the Romanian Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church”, was published in East European Quarterly (No. 3, September, 2002). Dr. Vasile was also co-author and co-editor of the Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Romanian Communist Dictatorship (2006, www.presidency.ro). The printed edition is forthcoming at Humanitas Publishing House in November 2007 (Co-edited with Vladimir Tismăneanu and Dorin Dobrincu). He is presently working on a book that focuses upon the dynamics within the arts and education in Romania between 1948 and 1953.

22. Bogdan Cristian Iacob - “Fighting for the Intellectual Sphere: Control, Manipulation and Cooption in the Restructuring of the Romanian Academy of Sciences”

Abstract:: The starting point of the institutionalization and centralization of history production in Romania is the year 1948, when the Academy became an enormous institution with several sectors/sections all covering the recognized sciences, history included. The Academy was to become the pinnacle of a pyramidal system, an omnipotent institution which aim was to “bring science closer to life” (nauka v zhizn’). However, a closer look at this institution’s development throughout the communist period will show a much more complicated picture, as periods of re-organization generated alternative functionalities and roles for the Academy and its institutes of history-production. The Academy will become one of the crucial arenas for the ups-and-downs of the continuity-change process under communism in Romania.

The Academy’s reform, along with that of the entire institutional corpus of Romanian higher education became part and parcel of the cultural counterpart of the political revolution shaking the foundations of the national community. The post-1955 developments at the level of both the Academy and the Institutes do however pose problems for an interpretation emphasizing mainly the destructiveness of the regime. I will use the historical field, and the overall developments within the academic community, in order to suggest a budding process of negotiation and bargaining between the academia and the political authorities, which will represent the preparatory phase for the “national turn” within historical production and the party-line. The party thorough reform destroyed the structures that characterized the former state organization, but they also brought about environments of ambiguity. These grey zones allowed for compromise and synthesis, which under circumstances of change in party line, brought about a nascent reorientation toward the past, toward tradition and its representatives - a counterpart or compensation for continuous repression.

Biography: PhD candidate at Central European University, History Department with a dissertation titled “Stalinism, Historians and the Nation in Romania (1955-1977)”. He is currently a research fellow with the Center of Advanced Studies in Sofia in SCOPES Curriculum Development Project, hosted by Fribourg University (Switzerland). He is currently project coordinator with the Romanian Cultural Institute (Bucharest). Between 2004 and 2006, he was associate coordinator with Pasts Incorporated Center for Historical Studies (Budapest). In 2006-2007 he was a research fellow at Center for Advanced Studies at Leipzig University and at the Center for the Study of Post-communist Societies at University of Maryland (College Park). Among his publications are: „Some Considerations upon the Characteristics of History Production in Romania under Communism  (1963-1974)” in Dusan Janjic si Florian Bieber eds., Globalization, Nationalism, and Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans (2007); "Finding the nation in socialism - Platforma Program and the “recourse to history" in Arhivele Securitatii (vol.4, 2007); “Paradigm Dynamics in Soviet Historiography 1931-1953”, Historical Yearbook (2007); and, „O Clarificare Necesară. Condamnarea Regimului Comunist din România între Text şi Context”, Idei în Dialog (I-IV, August-November 2007). Besides his doctoral research, mr. Iacob is currently working on a book project based upon his articles published in Romania on the meaning and significance of the process of working through the communist past in a comparative perspective.