Stalinism for All Seasons by Vladimir Tismăneanu

Tismăneanu sees this ‘political disability’ of the RCP as the main explanation for the permanent and omnipresent obsession of the party leadership with writing its own history. The last point leads to another aspect of the book that needs to be discussed, namely that of the lack of historical legitimacy by the RCP and its consequences. There is, however, a problem of unevenness in his book: the inter-war period, the Second World War aftermath, and the Dej era are greatly favoured over the days of the Ceauşescu “administration.” Because of the briefness of analysis of these twenty-four years of communist rule, the historical, personnel, and ideological lineages become unclear, leaving space for a harmful overemphasis on the personality cult (which began only in 1974/5) and on the theme of dynastic communism (which could at earliest be identified around 1977). Tismăneanu constructs an encompassing genealogy of Romanian communism. This way, the reader can trace back all the way and thereby comprehend the power struggles (reasons, factions, influences, typologies) within the party during its reign, while also being able to connect them with the ideological shifts that characterized the RCP’s activity, both before and during state socialism. The volume contains a broad survey of the origins, early days and pre-coming-into-power dynamics within the RCP’s leadership and its ideology. Thus, a deeper understanding of terms such as “Stalinism”, “revisionism”, “de-Stalinization”, “national-communism”, etc., is offered to the Romanian students interested on expanding their research interests beyond the scope of the history of their domestic communist experience. Moreover, the extensive historiographical insertions also open the way to a comparative analysis of the phenomenon in the context of the development of communist regimes in former Eastern Europe. The latter is very important particularly in the Romanian context, for too often domestically produced materials appear with hardly any mention of the main foreign books published on the problems of communism in Romania. Second, it contains an extensive historiographical sections on the main themes and topics related to the history of communism in Romania. First, it brings forth novel research based upon access to archives that were inaccessible previously.

Both for the international and Romanian public (the volume was translated in Romanian with some modifications in 2005), the study is important for two reasons. Tismăneanu’s book is an excellent survey of the transformations undergone by the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) during its history, before and after coming into power. Bibliography, Index, Appendix.īerkeley/London/Los Angeles: University of California Press

XVI, Series: Societies and Cultures in East-Central Europe, 11. Stalinism for all seasons: a political history of Romanian communism

Stalinism for All Seasons by Vladimir Tismăneanu