Abstract
Using a case study of representations of communism in Romania, the paper offers a sketch of a critical-interpretive approach for exploring and engaging with the social memory of communism. When one considers the various contemporary appraisals, responses to and positions towards the communist period one identifies and one is obliged to deal with a series of personal and collective moral/political quandaries. In their attempt to bring about historical justice, political elites create a world that conforms more to their needs and desires than to the diversity of meanings of communism, experiences and dilemmas of lay people. This paper argues that one needs to study formal aspects of social memory as well as “lived”, often conflicting, attitudinal and mnemonic stances and interpretive frameworks. One needs to strive to find the meaning of the social memory of communism in the sometimes contradictory, paradoxical attitudes and meanings that members of society communicate, endorse and debate. Many of the ethical quandaries and dilemmas of collective memory and recent history can be better understood by describing the discursive and sociocultural processes of meaning-making and meaning-interpretation carried out by members of a polity.
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Notes
One of the problems for elite discourse (politicians, historians, political scientists) was how to get others to participate in a general vision of justice and “moral identity” (Gergen 2005: 116) within the national community. In order for society to come to a “common mind”, the ordinary citizen needs to be first “convinced by the proposed conception of justice before … consensus can come about” (Habermas 1995: 122).
To this one can add the shared social representations of social and political realities understood as ‘cultural spaces’ of negotiation of societal meanings (Tateo and Iannaccone 2012) that encapsulate tensions between ‘immediate’ experiences of communism and experiences triggered by cultural, social and political cues in the present. It could be argued that this distinction (although potentially problematic) works in resonance with another distinction (operated by both researchers and ordinary people) between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ spheres of experience and social practice - see, for instance, Fitzpatrick’s (2000) work on ‘everyday Stalinism’. I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.
I do not wish to suggest that “lived” experience is all there is. I do not wish to suggest that “everything goes”. “Lived” experience is a domain of social life, a unique, peculiar, foundational realm. It is also a social tool for accomplishing very specific personal and social goals. For instance, appeals to “lived” experience support both progressive and retrograde (revisionist) aspects of social memory. The “voice” of the victims is lived experience, as was the work of the Securitate operatives. Memory and experience work as recursive processes that manage the tension between stability of meanings and change, continuity and innovation.
It is not from historians and political scientists that most people get their knowledge of the past, but rather from “lived experience” and manifestations of popular culture: novels, newspapers, magazines, politicians, public personalities, and so on. One tends to underplay the importance of public sources of memory and the role of “memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform” memories and public artefacts “according to their own interests” (Kansteiner 2002: 180).
A major opinion poll was conducted by CSOP (in collaboration with The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of Romanian Exile (http://www.crimelecomunismului.ro/en/about_iiccr) under the title ‘Attitudes and opinions on the Romanian communist regime’. Data was collected between 22nd October–1st November 2010. The report is available at http://www.csop.ro/index.php?act=media&op=view&id=13 [accessed January 2011]. Two opinion polls were conducted by IRES (the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy), one under the title ‘Romania: Twenty one years since the Revolution’ in the period 19th–21st December 2010 and the other one, ‘Romanians and nostalgia for communism’ in the period 21st–23rd July 2010. Reports are available at www.ires.com.ro [accessed January 2011]
I will not go here into a critique of the way these opinions polls were constructed, how the questions were designed, their error margins, and so on. Epistemological and methodological issues relating to opinion polls on perceptions of communism and social change require separate analysis that is beyond the scope of this paper. I rely here on reports and interpretations of opinion poll results made freely available to the wider public.
There are, of course, a variety of other functions that nostalgia fulfills. The analysis can be taken in the direction of ‘symbolic capital’ and coping with rapid social change; nostalgia as a reaction to attempts by elites to ‘impose’ hegemonic representations of the recent past; nostalgia as a specific stage in a ‘developmental’ sequence of self and (social and historical) context appraisal. It is, perhaps, also very much the case that people can combine both condemnation and nostalgia in their appraisal of the recent past, and such paradoxical amalgamation can be transmitted to the generations that do not share ‘immediate’ experiences of socialism.
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Tileagă, C. Communism and the Meaning of Social Memory: Towards a Critical-Interpretive Approach. Integr. psych. behav. 46, 475–492 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-012-9207-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-012-9207-x