The legacy of communism: difficult histories, emotions and contested narratives

Abstract

This paper considers contested and traumatic narratives, using a case study of the planned National Museum of Romanian Communism and the site of Jilava Penitentiary, a former communist prison, near Bucharest in Romania. It discusses what happened when representatives from different groups of former victims and perpetrators met together with facilitators and worked towards a shared understanding of the past to reach some consensus about how to deal with different and apparently conflicting narratives within a new museum of communism. It draws on notions of emotional communities in order to understand the role heritage plays in contested situations. It also considers the nature of transitional justice (‘Transitional justice is an approach to systematic or massive violations of human rights that both provides redress to victims and creates or enhances opportunities for the transformation of the political systems, conflicts, and other conditions that may have been at the root of the abuses’.) in this context.

Keywords:

• Emotional communities
• Romania
• museum
• communism
• difficult history
• transitional justice

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the invitation to Romania from the Institutul de Investigare a Crimelor Comunismuluişi Memoria Exilului Românesc/The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER). I would also like to thank the help in the checking of facts for this paper I received from Irina Hasnas Hubbard of IICCMER. Needless to say all opinions expressed here and any errors are the author’s own.

Notes

1. https://www.mnir.ro/index.php/expozitii/?paged=3 accessed 31 October 2016. Temporary exhibitions such as ‘our youth in communism’ also attempt to consider some aspects of the former regime. Meanwhile there is now a competition for a new museum (Information from Irina Hasnas Hubbard 24 October 2016 to whom I am indebted for this update).

2. Even now, there is no agreement as to whether Romania experienced a revolution or a coup. Many individuals question whether the country experienced a genuine revolution. Some Romanian and Western writers note that the Romanian post-revolutionary leadership consisted mostly of former communists and therefore that the country experienced a coup. Moreover, these writers argue that until 1996 there was no fundamental change in the country’s political or social policy (Roper 2004).

3. ‘TRCs entail the investigation of past human rights abuses whose findings are recorded in a report produced by a temporary official body (Bronkhorst 2003). Hayner (2001) identifies five common characteristics constituting a TRC: they focus on the past, they investigate abuse, they are temporary, they have official sanction or mandate, and they are usually created during a period of political transition’ (Androff 2010, 1965).