CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Hasu, Ioana Elisabeta |
|---|---|
| Title | Fighting Communism in the Romanian Mountains: History and Memory of the Fagaras Armed Movement, 1950-1956 |
| Summary | In the post-1989 public sphere, two antagonistic discourses about the Romanian armed anti-communist resistance can be identified. Media accounts, movies, historiographical works, and public debates present the members of the so-called resistance in the mountains either as heroes or as criminals. Based on different professional ethics, their discourses fit by large into a black-and-white framework of interpretation: some support the positive portrayal of armed resistance, others the negative image. I argue that these opposite discourses have their roots in the ideological dichotomy of the Cold War, when primary accounts about the phenomenon of armed resistance were produced and disseminated. In order to expose the biases of the post-communist discourses, I will go back to the archival systems of the 1950s and study the gaps, inconsistencies, and pitfalls of the Romanian political police files and of the CIA financed Radio Free Europe archive. The information from these archival documents, which allegedly recorded the history of the movement from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, will be completed with other sources on the topic. Written memoirs and oral history interviews give voice to actors of the resistance overlooked by the archives and silenced in the public sphere both before and after the fall of the regime. The goal of this research is to propose a new historiographical approach, based on a critical reading of different kinds of sources, which offer a rounded view on the phenomenon. |
| Supervisor | Iordachi, Constantin |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/hasu_ioana.pdf |
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