Aiud

""A close examination of an understudied European Union member state such as Romania reveals that, since 1989, post-communist state and non-state actors have adopted a wide range of methods, processes, and practices of working through the communist past. Both the timing and the sequencing of these transitional justice methods prove to be significant in determining the efficacy of addressing and redressing the crimes of 1945 to 1989. In addition, there is evidence that some of these methods have directly facilitated the democratization process, while the absence of other methods has undermined the rule of law. This is the first volume to overview the complex Romanian transitional justice effort, by accessing secret archives and investigating court trials of former communist perpetrators, lustration, compensation and rehabilitation, property restitution, the truth commission, the rewriting of history books, and unofficial truth projects. It details the political negotiations that have led to the adoption of relevant legislation and assesses these processes in terms of their timing, sequencing, and impact on democratization.

This nuanced and highly engaging book is the definitive account of transitional justice and collective memory projects in post-communist Romania. However, it is not only a book about Romania. Rather, Lavinia Stan sets her study within a comparative framework and, in so doing, tells a broader tale about how the political interests of the present can shape -- or even determine -- the ways in which we come to understand the political institutions of the past. John Gledhill, University of Oxford

This fascinating book by Lavinia Stan will be of interest to a very wide range of scholars from those specifically interested in how contemporary Romania has dealt with the communist past, to those with a wider interest post-communist democratisation and the politics of transitional justice. While the literature on transitional justice in post-communist states has grown in recent years, there is still a lack of in-depth theoretically-informed case studies so this book is a very welcome addition. Case studies are the building blocks of comparative political science and the Romanian case a particularly fascinating one written by someone who is both one of the most knowledgeable country specialists but who also knows the comparative literature well enough to locate the rich empirical detail within a broader context and use it to draw more general theoretical conclusions. Aleks Szczerbiak, University of Sussex""

The late re-education from the Aiud penitentiary (1959-1964) was a distinct phenomenon of the Romanian Gulag, a complex process through which the communist regime pursued the political restructuring of the prisoners (mostly convicted of belonging to the legionary organization), resulting in the abjuration of their political identity and the active acceptance of the new order; beyond this, the prison management also aimed to create an "anti-memory", respectively an alternative memory of the Gulag written from the perspective of the regime, describing how the detainees assumed criminal activity in prisons (Pitești, Gherla, Târgu Ocna, Canal, Ocnele Mari), as well as in the forced labour lead mines from Maramureș, all culminating with the re-education process from Aiud. The paper proposes to analyse this narrative approach made famous by the books of re-education, volumes with significant implications and memorial controversies among the detention literature of the Romanian Gulag. The study will appeal to various documentary sources-CNSAS archives from the Criminal, Informative and Network funds), memorialistic literature and oral history interviews.