Victoria Isabela Corduneanu

Remembering State Socialism in the 1970s-1980s Romania: from Official Memory to the Memories of the "Dominated" Victoria Isabela Corduneanu

The context of research is Romanian state-socialism in 1970-1980, reconstructed in this book through its nationalism, centralisation, state control, censorship, economic shortage, surveillance and emigration phenomenon. Nevertheless, the focus of this book is not on reproducing a descriptive narrative of these variables, but on the ways in which the subjects received these characteristics and policies, and what they made out of them. To a lesser degree it discusses the policies per-se. The focus of this work is on the politics of memory, and moreover, on the tensions between an official-institutional memory, sustained heavily by a historical heritage that denied ethnic diversity and in an attempt to impose a unique, idealised and ideologically desirable Romanian identity, and alternative memories that spread up from both ethnic diversity and everyday life experience.