During the 1950s and ’60s, when Kant’s works were neither translated nor publicly accessible in socialist Romania, his philosophy reached students and readers through mediated instruction—public debates, university lectures, high school courses, and educational television programs. This paper explores how Kant was taught during the early decades of Romanian communism, particularly focusing on the renewed pedagogical and scholarly interest in the history of philosophy in the late 1950s. Sparked mainly by Ion Banu’s efforts, this shift laid the groundwork (...) for more systematic engagements with Kant in the 1970s, including new translations of his work. The first part of the paper examines how Kant’s philosophy was presented in expert lectures and university courses in Bucharest and Cluj. The second part adopts an inter-medial perspective, analyzing high school materials—textbooks and films—to trace diachronic shifts in Kant’s reception into the 1980s. Taking Kant as a revealing example, the present paper thus offers a close analysis of a specific historically situated praxis of philosophical historiography within State Socialism which closely reflects the broader ideological transformations taking place within Romania’s intellectual landscape. (shrink)

This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary specialization in the (...) advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the ‘thinning’ of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s. (shrink)

This article examines the emergence of video home systems (VHS) in socialist Romania within the broader context of state-controlled cinema industry and through the conceptual lens of “paracinema.” Rather than viewing video as a disruption in film consumption, the study explores films as both cultural products and commodities. The analysis addresses the social construc­tion of paracinema repertoires in a broader context and uses discourse analysis to explore ruptures and continuities in the polarised framing of films. The results show (...) an intersection of socialist cinema cultures and VHS repertoires, revealing a continuity in moral debates around popular film genres. The discus­sion also reveals how the circulation of videotapes in the black market and the emergence of alternative VHS film repertoires exposed the tensions between state policies and public demand, ultimately reshaping the social construction of cinema cultures under socialism. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss how existentialism was criticized, disseminated, and gradually autochthonized in the main philosophical journals of Socialist Romania. We show that the early critique of existentialism was both a statement against contemporary bourgeois philosophy in general and a condemnation of the local philosophical production of the interwar period. In the 1950s, this kind of critique was attuned to the growing fame of several Romanian authors who had emigrated to the West (e.g., Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade) (...) and targeted both past and contemporary irrationalism. Following a period of critique of existentialism without existentialists (i.e., without reference to individual authors), the 1960s discussions of existentialism were mainly driven by interest in a small number of existentialist authors. In particular, the evolution of Jean-Paul Sartre’s work and politics was analyzed as it straddled existentialism and Marxism. The 1970s saw the integration of selected existentialist concepts and themes, in an attempt to offer a Marxist alternative to existentialism in the form of philosophical anthropology. This led to a period of engagement with existentialists without existentialism across an increasing number of separate disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. In the 1980s, following the failure of Marxist philosophical anthropology and at the height of national communism, existentialism could also be autochthonized through the recovery of selected philosophers from the interwar period whose work had been previously criticized as irrationalist. (shrink)

This article locates the socialist cultural policy of protochronism within the broader narratives of national self-thematization that framed the emergence of semiperipheral Romania as a modern nation-state. I start from an overview of how traditional Romanian nationalism was resourcefully mobilized both during and before Nicolae Ceauşescu’s rule, mutating into cultural autarky due to the increased centralization of local political economy during the final communist decades. Correlating Verdery’s Bourdieusian approach and a constructivist understanding of nationalism, protochronism is depicted as (...) a rampant cultural expression of the nation-building process unfolding in socialist Romania from the late 1950s onwards. I exemplify the most striking ideas of its practitioners, as presented in the cultural press and theoretical texts, before questioning its main renditions within postsocialist historiography. Finally, I trace the link between protochronism and the contemporary Romanian radical right, highlighting their embeddedness in the ever-pressing project of ethnonational identity (the inception of which precedes the interwar period, its most widely invoked attendant). I argue that construing protochronism within these historical parameters is conducive to discerning which of its historiographical inertias are retained by contemporary Romanian culture, and how they are mobilised to various—and most often illiberal—political ends. (shrink)

This paper proposes a counterintuitive reading of cultural production in late socialist Romania by reframing the ideological struggles of the 1970s and 1980s as part of a broader global dynamic of anticolonial and self-colonizing strategies. Challenging conventional associations of postcolonial critique with postcommunist liberalism, I argue that protochronism and ultranationalism under Ceauşescu can be understood as forms of anticolonial discourse—efforts to resist both Soviet influence and Western cultural imperialism. In contrast, liberal postmodern cosmopolitanism is interpreted as a self-colonizing (...) trajectory, expressing a fascination with Western modernity that paradoxically reinforced dependency on global hegemonic cultures. Drawing on Aleksander Kiossev’s theory of self-colonization, the paper examines how Romanian intellectual movements navigated the tension between cultural exceptionalism and global integration. It further explores the unintended complicity of postmodernism with neoliberal logics, as Western cultural commodities and ideologies were embraced uncritically, undermining the subversive potential of postmodern critique. (shrink)

Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism, the paper suggests that Romania’s postmodern condition necessitates a distinctive theoretical framework, one that accounts for its special position within what the Marxist critic calls the Second World. This framework underscores the unique socio-cultural dynamics of the slow encroachment in Romania of “aspirational postmodernism,” situated within a broader, global capitalist system. The study identifies three genealogies—societal, cultural, and popular—that shaped Romanian postmodernism’s development, as it can be seen in the material provided (...) by the Arcanum archive between 1970 and 2000. Initially, the societal meaning of postmodernism, seen as a shift away from Western capitalism, gave way to a more aestheticized understanding. The cultural genealogy, driven by intellectuals and writers, was constrained by the dominance of older generations and the pervasive influence of nationalism in political discourse. By the 1990s, postmodernism emerged as an ideological tool in the public sphere, particularly in the context of liberalization and decommunization. However, in comparison with other semi-peripheral postmodernist phenomena, the postmodernist influence remained weak and underdeveloped. The paper calls for a reevaluation of both Marxist-Jamesonian and Romanian models of postmodernism to better understand the socialist bloc’s distinct experience of postmodernity. (shrink)

Some of the post-socialist countries of Europe experienced after the fall of communism what some called a religious revival. Anthropologists and sociologists alike were sure that they discovered serious evidence against the case of secularization theory. What unfortunately most of them failed to observe was the particular shape and form of this religious growth and the structural changes of the religious mentalities occurred in the process of transition from a closed, ideologically monopolized society, to a pluralistic one. After more (...) than half of a century of atheistic ideologization of the public sphere, Romania remains one of the most religious countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. The thesis of this article is that this fact is due to the lack of modernization of the Romanian social system both before and during the post-socialist period. (shrink)

In the past two decades academic and research literature on “corruption” has flourished. During the same period organizations and initiatives fighting against corruption have also significantly expanded, turning “anti-corruption” into a new research subject. However, despite a few exceptions there is a division of labor between scholars who study corruption itself and those who study the global anti-corruption industry. Juxtaposing corruption’s local discourses and anti-corruption international practices, this article is an attempt to bring together these two intertwined research dimensions and (...) explore how an ethnographic approach might contribute to framing them together. Firstly, it describes how corruption in Romania is often conceptualized and explained in terms of national heritage, something related to old and recent cultural history, including traditional folklore. Secondly, it explores how anti-corruption works in practice, focusing on international legal cooperation projects monitoring the progress and shortcomings both prior to and post Romania’s accession to the European Union. Finally, revealing the articulations of these two apparently unrelated research fields, the article argues that corruption’s local explanations and the circular logic of auditing observed within the anti-corruption industry share a common developmental ideology mirroring the crypto-colonialist structure of power relations and dependency among European nation-states emerging out of the Cold War. (shrink)

During the communist era, Radio Free Europe (RFE) was Romania's favorite radio station. This paper analyzes the role of RFE in everyday life in the strictly controlled Romanian communist state by looking at the broadcasts of RFE's Romanian Department, their audience, and their impact. Drawing largely on the RFE archives at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) and the former secret police files at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), it investigates (...) how radio waves mediated and channeled information while preparing people to embrace political and cultural change. The paper focuses on the circulation of knowledge, media confluences, and human agency. The rituals that developed around the secrecy which governed the listening process, the personal requests, attitudes, and opinions expressed in letters to RFE, and oral and written testimonies, coupled with the disproportionate and, at times, extreme reactions of the communist state, together reveal the carving out of individual spaces that allowed for the preservation of the “self” during Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship. At such critical historical moments, the connection became visible. Through an analysis of recent media representations in which RFE figures, such as Cold Waves, this study also looks at how RFE shaped personal memories of communist times. (shrink)

Although socialist Romanian cinematography focused on commer­cial and artistic feature films, hundreds of short films were produced every year on the fringes of the industry, in specialised animation and documentary studios, in amateur cine-clubs, by students at the National Institute of Film and Theatre in Bucharest, and by other amateurs (some of them visual artists) who owned a personal camera. Starting from an analysis of the context that allowed for such practices to flourish in a state whose official policies (...) did not support this typology, this essay explores the modes of production and the experimental tendencies in Romanian cinema during the socialist era, mapping the territo­ries where the avant-garde and experimental film manifested themselves. It is a gesture of digging at the margins of the film industry in the hope of shaking up the current canon and of offering a better understanding of the peripheries of the period’s cultural production, which will reverberate in the ways we are used to approaching its centre. (shrink)

Historienne, professeure associée à l’Université North Carolina Charlotte, Jill Massino est spécialiste de l’Europe de l’Est, de la Guerre froide, du genre, de l’histoire culturelle et de la mémoire, du socialisme et du postsocialisme. Sa monographie publiée en 2019 s’inscrit dans la continuité d’un volume collectif qu’elle a codirigé avec Shana Penn en 2009 (Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe, Palgrave Macmillan) et explore la problématique de la...

In a manner consistent with other Eastern European countries, Romania officially promoted the principles of egalitarianism and the right to education. In practice, however, those policies had unexpected consequences, particularly for women seeking to enter higher education in the 1980s. This study explores how state reforms, demographic pressures, gender norms and structural changes intersected to influence women’s educational path during this period. Following the 1978 Education Act, first-year study places limitations to traditionally female-dominated subjects and the push for polytechnisation (...) redirected many women towards technical subjects and male-dominated specialisations. Faced with intense competition and shrinking opportunities in ‘pink-collar’ fields such as teaching and healthcare, women adapted – often with remarkable determination – and, by the mid-1980s, they began to outnumber men in university enrolment. Using the concepts of the ‘triple burden’ and the emerging ‘quadruple burden’, this paper demonstrates how socialist reforms both reinforced gendered obstacles and opened new avenues for advancement. In late socialist Romania, women navigated a complex mix of progress and pressure, finding ways to thrive in a system that was never designed with them in mind. (shrink)

Drawing on stakeholder theory and the evolutionary approach to institutions, this paper investigates the channels through which corporate social responsibility (CSR) is developed in post-communist economies by focusing on the employee background factors that shape the employees' expectations with regard to corporate socially responsible behaviour. We identify three channels through which exogenous and endogenous CSR are developed: employees with work experience in multinational enterprises (MNEs) (leading to exogenous CSR), employees with CSR knowledge (leading to exogenous CSR) and employees with experience (...) of the socialist system (leading to endogenous CSR). Furthermore, we argue that the interactions between these channels lead to hybrid CSR in transition economies. We use a questionnaire-based survey with employees of domestic and MNEs in Romania and we conduct regression analysis. We find that employees with work experience in MNEs act as channels for exogenous CSR, while employees with experience of the socialist system act as channels for endogenous CSR. Furthermore, employees with experience of the socialist system and CSR knowledge or work experience in an MNE act as channels for hybrid CSR in transition economies. Based on our results, we put forward implications for theory, managers and policy makers. (shrink)

Chiar de la inceputul acestui memoriu, mentionez ca am depus primul memoriu[ Primul memoriu se poate accesa pe researchgate sau philpapers. Am primit raspuns pe data de 05.04.2022. [ Dupa ce am citit raspunsul la Memoriu I, am avut impresia ca a fost un raport scris de un sef de la un CAP comunist (comuna Scornicesti, judetul Olt) impotriva unui profesor care indraznise sa creeze ceva care nu era trecut in planul socialist de promovare a comunei. Sa ne aducem (...) aminte de evenimentul din anii 1950’: un tractorist (patru clase) numit “primar” (sau “sef” de genul asta), de catre comunisti/rusi, a legat cu un lant de tractor “Coloana fara sfarsit” a lui Brancusi si a incercat sa o doboare. Tractorul s-a rasturnat, nu “Coloana”! Numele tractoristului nu a ramas in istorie, nici macar precum cel al lui Salieri care i-a furat “Requiem” lui Mozart (ultima lui compozitie, atunci cand era deja pe patul de moarte)...]. (shrink)

During the late 60s and the beginning of the 1970s, the changes within the Communist Party which followed the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the former Secretary General, led to a certain openness for culture and arts, from an ideological point of view. The so-called ideological “thaw” would not last more than 6 years, but it was needed all along in order for the new nomenklatura system of Ceauşescu’s generation to take over the rule of the state and of the party. (...) This is the broader context in which the relationship between the theatre repertories, the audience and the politics would develop further in a very insidious way. Facing a massive “peasantization of the working class” due to the regime’s investments in the industrial sector, the configuration of the urban population in Romanian cities had changed significantly. The inflow of poorly educated persons had a strong negative impact on the efforts to educate the urban population in the working-class socialist ethics. In this study we are profiling the beneficiaries of the cultural policies of the regime: What were their cultural background and their expectations regarding theatre and why did the authorities intervene in regulating the theatre market? (shrink)

This essay presents an ethnographic account of two divorced Catholic women's memories of praying to the Virgin Mary while seeking illegal abortions under the Romanian socialist regime. These women's stories focused on troubling memories of being in love, reflections that were retrospectively shaped by divorce. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's notion of the uncanny, I call these recollections uncanny memories of the self in love. Uncannily remembering one's self in love combines experiential self-examination and ethical assessment of actions. The notion (...) of the uncanny self in love thus helps bridge the divide between experience- and action-oriented approaches to lived ethics. I argue that the ethical significance of the Virgin Mary's actions depended on my acquaintances’ approach to love. For one woman seeking to stay estranged from her ex-husband, the Virgin Mary's actions accentuated his ethical immaturity. My other acquaintance harbored more ambivalent feelings toward her ex-husband; for her, talking about the Virgin Mary helped her relativize feelings of ethical indignation. As a core implication of this argument, I urge greater awareness of the problematic tendency to include the need for greater awareness of tendencies in theories of lived ethics to reify socially situated perspectives on love. (shrink)

La chute des régimes communistes en Europe médiane en 1989 a eu des effets retentissants sur les conceptions et les usages du patrimoine. En effet, dans l’immédiat postsocialisme, l’attention s’est d’abord portée sur les symboles les plus visibles de l’ordre politique déchu voués à la destruction, tandis que les héritages antérieurs à 1945 ont été repatrimonialisés. Mais les héritages matériels de la période communiste visibles dans l’espace urbain sont loin de se résumer aux monuments et aux lieux de pouvoir : (...) ils sont présents également dans les odonymes, des bâtiments utilitaires (usines, magasins, édifices culturels, etc.) ou résidentiels, construits entre 1945 et 1990, qui constituent des éléments de l’environnement urbain quotidien. Indépendamment de leur portée symbolique, nous nous intéressons dans cet article à ces héritages ordinaires du passé socialiste. La question des temporalités de leur patrimonialisation se pose de manière singulière : immédiatement détruits pour cer... (shrink)

The Romanian communist cinematography has been analysed from the point of view of its value to the regime’s ideology or propaganda. The aim of this article is to examine Romanian cinema for its use of cultural heritage from the perspective of an art historian and museum curator. Using the current taxonomy of cultural heritage in Romania: movable cultural heritage—meaning paintings, drawings, decorative art—and immovable cultural heritage—build­ings, houses, inns, cultural monuments, the article follows these categories in the filmmaking industry. They (...) were both used in Romanian cinematography with the approval of the State and Party authorities. The main objective of this article is to „cut” the frames of selected films and see how and which cultural heritage objects were used in cinematography. (shrink)

The article examines the way in which, after a short period of liberal­isation and opening to the West, the Romanian Cinema during the Ceaușescu regime follows a path of increasing ideological themes and political control. The process began shortly after the consolidation of the power by the new Secretary General and unfolded gradually, culminating in 1971 with the “July Theses”. Like the rest of the cultural activities, the effects of this retraction into the ideological shell of national-communism, marked by strong (...) xenophobic and isolationist accents, can be seen in the film industry as well. The article relies on the files in the fonds of the Central Committee of Romanian Communist Party to cover the specificities of the cultural policies in Ceaușescu’s Romania. The way these policies were received by the cinema industry is reflected in the issues of Cinema magazine from the second half of the ‘60s to the mid-70s. Finally, the specific Romanian case is analysed in the broader context of the other communist regimes of Eastern Europe during the years of Cold War detente. (shrink)

The oil crisis at the end of the 1970s and, soon after, the sovereign debt crisis of socialist Romania had a huge impact on the domestic cultural system—mainly through austerity mechanisms of cutting production costs and increasing minimal mandatory revenues. One effect was the reshaping of cultural exports and exchanges on new, market-oriented bases, meant to also support the economic reorientation towards the Global South. In this article, I intend to follow the way the Romanian communist regime used (...) culture, in general, and particularly international film production and distribution as a tool for advancing not so much propaganda purposes, but prosaically more commercial ones. The article also shows how the contextual landscape led to a lack of consistency and efficiency in both the economic and propaganda efforts. (shrink)

This paper explores how allegory served as a subtle yet powerful form of criticism in Romanian cinema during the 1980s, under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s authoritarian regime. The research focuses on selected films by directors such as Dan Pița, Alexandru Tatos, and Copel Moscu, who used metaphorical and indirect approaches to criticise the oppressive social and political climate. Through detailed content analysis, the study reveals how these filmmakers circumvented strict censorship by embedding criticism of societal conditions and governmental control in their works. (...) The paper also discusses the production and distribution challenges faced by these films, emphasising the filmmakers’ resistance to the regime’s constraints and their efforts to depict the harsh realities of life in socialist Romania. Ultimately, the paper contributes to the understanding of how Romanian artists used cinema as a medium of resistance and cultural expression in a repressive political environment. (shrink)

Governance on the European periphery is frequently diagnosed through the lens of ‘incapacity’ or ‘failed modernization.’ Yet, such diagnostics overlook how dysfunction itself operates as a specific technology of power. This article advances a critical theory of the state by analysing what I term projectocracy. This regime governs not through the production of rational order, but through the strategic management of productive failure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in post-socialist Romania, I analyse how the subjects of this regime − (...) far from being passive victims − actively curate the state's fictions. My main argument is that these citizens perform the immaterial labour necessary to sustain the bureaucratic apparatus while pursuing their own survival in the shadows. Ultimately, I posit that the state survives not by eliminating its informal shadow, but by becoming structurally dependent upon the very parallel worlds it pretends not to see. (shrink)

Political participation and mobilisation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are shaped by historical legacies, socio-economic transformations, and the region’s distinctive political trajectories. Citizens engage through voting, protests, grassroots campaigns, civil society initiatives, and digital activism. However, in the post-communist context, participation is influenced by both authoritarian legacies and the opportunities and constraints created by European integration, economic transition, and the rise of populism. Recent scholarship, including work by Donatella della Porta, Jan Kubik, Mark Beissinger, Kralj (2022, 2023), Milan and (...) Dolenec (2023), and Mikuš (2018), shows how political participation and mobilisation influence democratic consolidation, policy reform, and social cohesion. However, political participation and mobilisation in CEE also present challenges. While these processes can strengthen democratic accountability and citizen empowerment, they may reinforce social divisions, amplify polarisation, or be co-opted by populist or authoritarian actors. Protest movements, grassroots campaigns, and civil society initiatives can drive institutional reforms, yet may also provoke political instability or distrust in institutions. Post-communist legacies, combined with economic inequality, migration, and geopolitical tensions, underscore the fragile and contested nature of political engagement in the region. This Collection aims to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue on political participation and mobilisation in CEE by examining historical trajectories, contemporary practices, and emerging trends. We particularly welcome case studies that explore empirical examples, including the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine and their role in decentralisation reforms, the evolution of student and youth movements in Serbia between 2006 and 2024, the rise of green-left political mobilisation in Croatia and Serbia, exemplified by Možemo and Zeleno-levi front, civil society activism and the transnational mobilisation of the Belarusian opposition since 2020, participatory budgeting initiatives in Romania and other post-socialist democracies, as well as environmental, feminist, and minority rights campaigns across cities and towns throughout Central and Eastern Europe. (shrink)

This paper discusses Eastern European Marxists’ consideration of science and technology concerning aesthetic dimensions. Different from most of Western Marxists who take negative or dystopian attitudes towards modern science and technology from the aesthetic utopian perspective, those Marxists who come from countries such as Hungary, Yugoslav, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria or Romania, which once belonged to the socialist camp, under the influence of Soviet and Western culture, pay attention to the complicated tension between science-technology and aesthetics. In (...) this paper, I probe into these notions by reading György Lukács, Budapest School, Romanian theorists and the Yugoslav Praxis Group, which are divided into four key points: basic nature of science in contrast with arts; modern tension of culture between science and arts; the possibility of scientific aesthetics; and development of arts in the world of technology. There is a dialectical understanding of science and technology here which contributes to contemporary recognition of science and technology from the point of view of neo-humanism, not only in aesthetics but also human existence. This is relevant to theoretical reflection on the present and future Chinese socialist aesthetics. (shrink)

This special issue on “Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in Late Socialist Cultures” revisits cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the cultural, political, and intellectual landscapes of late socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. The introduction builds on Alexei Yurchak’s paradox of the Soviet “eternal state” and Ronald Grigor Suny’s account of nationalism as a centrifugal force, while the contributions interrogate the contradictions that marked the socialist twilight: between Party and state, nationalism and internationalism, consumerism and austerity, openness and closure. The introductory (...) article situates Stephen Kotkin’s institutional analysis of state–Party decoupling alongside Ivan and Balazs Szelényi’s Weberian account of contingent system breakdown, as well as Vladimir Popov’s longue durée economic argument about the cyclical viability of socialism. The article also draws on Keeran and Kenny’s reinterpretation of the Soviet collapse, using their framework to illuminate the structural tensions and political contradictions that shaped late socialism in Eastern Europe. At the cultural level, the introduction explores the logics of late-socialist aesthetics through Lilya Kaganovsky’s reading of cinema as a site of absent desire, Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak’s theorization of stiob as an aesthetic of parody, and Svetlana Boym’s mythologies of everyday life. Case studies from Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia illustrate how cultural production mediated both cosmopolitan aspirations and nationalist revivals, often under conditions of scarcity, censorship, and technological change. (shrink)

This article pursues two interrelated aims: first, to trace Bulgaria’s trajectory as the leading manufacturer of computers in the Eastern Bloc; and second, to examine how cybernetics—drawing on examples from Bulgaria, Romania, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—retained its practical significance in socialist countries even after it fragmented into more abstract theoretical offshoots in the West. These dual concerns are situated within the broader context of Cold War geopolitics, technological modernization, and intra-socialist competition. Building extensively on Victor (...) Petrov’s Balkan Cyberia (2023), this analysis considers how Bulgaria, under economic and political pressures, strategically invested in electronics and computing to secure a prominent position within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, also known as Comecon). Far from being technologically insular, Bulgaria cultivated global relationships with countries such as the United States, Japan, and India, enabling technological transfer and market access. These dynamics complicate dominant Cold War narratives that emphasize East-West isolation, revealing instead a more porous and cosmopolitan socialist modernity. The article also explores the contrasting fates of cybernetics in the capitalist and socialist worlds. Following the 1970s, in the West, cybernetics either dispersed into specialized theoretical fields (such as systems theory), or was appropriated by novel cultural approaches (such as French Theory), losing its early promise as a unified framework. Socialist countries, by contrast, pursued an integrative approach, embedding cybernetic principles into governance, economic planning, education etc. In Bulgaria—but also in Romania or the GDR—cybernetics was not only a scientific discourse but also a technopolitical tool deployed to rationalize economic management and project ideological coherence. Through this dual focus, the article argues that Cold War technological development was not solely shaped by superpower antagonism. Rather, smaller socialist states played a decisive role in shaping global technological pathways, offering distinct models of innovation, adaptation, and international engagement within and beyond the socialist world. (shrink)

The vampire trope’s connection to socialism originates in Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848), where it symbolizes capitalism. This interpretation has dominated vampire studies, often narrowing the discourse on the semantic dimensions of the vampire in communist states. This article examines the evolution of the vampire myth in Eastern bloc cinema from Lenin’s 1917 October Revolution to Romania’s 1989 communist collapse. By comparing socialist vampire movies to Western counterparts, the study reveals that Eastern European vampires usually embody the (...) haunting legacy of communism’s earlier phases. The article’s final section contrasts vampire depictions in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and Romania during the cinema of late communism. While Romania—known as the vampire trope’s birthplace—avoided the myth in cinema, other countries embraced it during this period to critique consumerism and shifting gender roles in Soviet societies. Through this exploration, the article illuminates the cinematic interpretations of the vampire across different socialist contexts. (shrink)

The paper questions some of the premises in studying academic spin-offs in developed countries, claiming that when taken as characteristics of ‘academic spin-offs per se,’ they are of little help in understanding the phenomenon in the Eastern European countries during the transitional and post-transitional periods after 1989. It argues for the necessity of adopting a path-dependent approach, which takes into consideration the institutional and organisational specificities of local economies and research systems and their evolution, which strongly influence the patterns of (...) spin-off activity. The paper provides new findings and original arguments in support of Balazs’ seminal theses (Balazs 1995, 1996) about the emergence of academic spin-offs during the early transition. It reveals key economic and policy mechanisms bearing on academic entrepreneurship in Eastern Europe, such as the tensions between economic and political nomenclatures of former Communist Parties, where the dismantling or preservation of the power of political nomenclature resulted in different patterns of development—rapid reforms in the ‘first wave’ of EU accession countries or the establishment of rent-seeking and assets-stripping economies in countries like Bulgaria and Romania, making the transition period especially difficult. In the latter, a specific economic environment emerged, unknown in Western Europe and in the ‘champions’ of transition—such as suppression of the authentic entrepreneurship in a number of economic sectors, disintegration of corporate structures, etc. Thus, the paper reveals the common ground behind the two conflicting tendencies in post-socialist academic spin-offs, partially outlined in other research (Simeonova 1995; Pavlova 2000): as an authentic form of academic entrepreneurship grasping the opportunities opened up by the economic crisis and compensating failures in science and technology policy on the one hand, and as specific rent-seeking strategy draining valuable public assets on the other (the latter, in turn, boosting the negative attitudes in local scientific communities). The paper provides new findings about the evolution of the academic spin-offs in Bulgaria along the two polar trends and their positive and negative repercussions on parent research institutions. The results were achieved in the PROKNOW Project, EC 6th Framework Program. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore the relationship between the Romanian Socialist leadership and the Polish minority in Suceava after the outbreak of the “Solidarity” crisis, in August 1980. Although the Polish community in Suceava was small, it had close connections with the Polish tourists who visited Romania, whose number reached almost one million every year in the early ‘80s. These connections aroused many suspicions among the authorities in Bucharest. Particularly, this paper has three major objectives: it investigates (...) the extensive surveillance campaign targeting the Polish minority in Suceava after the emergence of the “Solidarity” Trade Union in Poland, it analyses the methods used by the Communist authorities to counteract the alleged effects of this crisis and it depicts the Romanian leadership’s perception of the Polish crisis of the ‘80s, beyond the official statements. Ultimately, as a general framework of this paper, I will study the bilateral relations between Romania and Poland. To these ends, I will use the archives of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives, corroborated with sources from the National Archives and the consular reports of the Romanian Embassy in Warsaw. For a more informed perspective I will also employ information from the Archives of Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The interviews featuring the persons with Polish contacts or monitored by the Securitate will complete the documentary sources. (shrink)

Studying the social memory of socialist regimes has generated extensive literature and numerous interpretations with regard to recollections of experiences of the socialist past. Amid such rich literature, this paper takes a novel approach, employing the concept of pop memory to explain the phenomenon of clickbait in the virtual press of Central and Eastern Europe. The media analysed focuses on the former dictators of Romania and was generally made available during 2019, 30 years after the bloody revolution (...) of 1989. My aim is to demonstrate how, by drawing on former socialist propaganda, socialist leaders Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu are transformed in such media, from brutal leaders to pop characters. The results indicate Romanians’ strong “affective positioning” towards the socialist decades, connected to a practice of remembering of the socialist past, that has been previously disregarded, but which is relevant to understand people’s curiosities and the sources they use to replenish their need of information. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to extend the Leszek Nowak's theory of socialist empire by introducing weaker forms of intersocial relation, e. gr. unsuccessful attempt at conquest and subordination. In the light of concretization of the model of socialist empire some facts from history of Soviet Union (intervention of the Entente and World War II) and socialist countries (autonomy of Albania and Romania in socialist bloc) are explained.

Lucian Blaga was an early- and mid-20th century European philosopher whose work was suppressed at the height of his career by the ascension to power of the Romanian Communist Party and the creation of the Romanian Socialist Republic. Because of historical circumstances, Blaga's philosophy has not become known outside of his own country, although within Romania it continues to be read and discussed. Were it to become known outside of Romania, Blaga's philosophy might well be able to (...) contribute to contemporary philosophical discussions. ;The thesis of this dissertation is that Blaga's philosophy has contemporary relevance to Anglo-American philosophy. Two steps are necessary to support this thesis. First, Blaga's philosophical system must be explained in sufficient detail to enable the reader to see how it can be applied to a variety of philosophical issues. This will be accomplished in six sub-chapters introducing Blaga's life and work, his philosophy of philosophy, his metaphysical system, his epistemology, his philosophy of culture, and his philosophy of religion. ;Secondly, Blaga's philosophy must be applied to issues discussed in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy in order to show how it can contribute to contemporary discussions. It seems likely that Blaga's philosophy has contemporary relevance to a number of philosophical fields. The field to which it will be applied in this dissertation is philosophy of religion, an arena of contemporary philosophy that is the scene of much lively debate. This section contains eight sub-chapters attempting to apply Blaga's philosophical insights to issues in this field. They are, in order, the nature of philosophy of religion, the problem of religious language, the question of religious knowledge, the justification of religious belief, the existence and nature of God, religion and science, the problem of inter-religious communication, and the "problem" of religious diversity. ;The dissertation concludes that Blaga's philosophy can make relevant contributions to issues in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion, and by extension, that it therefore has continuing relevance to Anglo-American philosophy. (shrink)

The author reviews some archival documents and materials of Pavlo P. Skoropadskyi, Hetman of the Ukrainian state, his personal memoirs and executive decisions on foreign policy issues over a period of April-December 1918. Pavlo Skoropadskyi's stand as to building the state and his commitment to the pro-Russian vector are demonstrated. Some examples of practical steps taken by Pavlo Skoropadskyi's government to gain understanding with the Entente countries after Germany and Austria-Hungary lost the war are given. Based on its organizational structure, (...) the type of the Hetman state is defined. An example of rapport with new temporary state formations on the Don and Kuban Rivers is given. The paper describes radical and prompt actions of the Hetman government, taken to draw the Crimea under the dominion of Ukraine. The fallacy of the pro-Russian line of policy of Hetman P. Skoropadskyi in the context of the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation is pointed out. The ambiguous course of Ukraine is exemplified by the formation of its Armed Forces, Cabinet of Ministers and delaying in the implementation of the agrarian reform. The attitude of Pavlo Skoropadskyi to the Ukrainians and the Galicians is demonstrated through specific references to his statements. The paper shows some practical steps in opening embassy missions and consular agencies in European countries, which point to the efforts of the Cabinet of Ministers to win international recognition and authority for the Ukrainian state. A situational geopolitical change of the diplomatic relations is demonstrated by the example of Romania. The main causes of the anti-Hetman uprising are defined as the lack of a negotiation process with representatives of socialist and democratic forces of Ukraine, incapability to enlist the support of rural masses and inferior moods in respect of Russia. (shrink)

The author describes briefly the activities of different ethical centres and gives a survey of the principle directions of ethical research in Romania. These include primarily normative problems, the theoretical problems and translations of classical ethical works. The recent publication of a project for a code of socialist morality gives evidence of the advance and significance of ethical research in Romania.

For a better understanding of the present situation in Romania it is necessary to go beyond the limited political approach, i.e., to seek the germs of contemporary conflicts in the history of that country — especially in the history of the Romanian Communist Party. We have to mink about the origins of Romanian communism in 1921, when the Socialist Left split into a strong and active radical minority and a “reformist” traditional Social-Democratic wing. The situation of the Left (...) in Romania was further complicated by an ethnic syncretism. Because of the incorporation of Transylvania, Bessarabia, and North Bukovinaand the subsequent national, social, economic, and cultural claims of the Hungarian, German, Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian minorities, the ethnic problem became an obsession during the inter-war period. (shrink)

This article examines the transference of the European Union's equal opportunity directives to the new post-socialist accessor states, most especially to Bulgaria and Romania. Drawing upon 13 interviews in Bulgaria and 12 in Romania with local institutional stakeholders — e.g. trade union deputies, ministry officials — the article shows how politico-ideological differences have bred very different gender sensibilities across Europe, East and West. It further reveals how these disparities have been downplayed, if not wholly ignored in the (...) EU's extension eastward. The study concludes that continued disregard of the historical and cultural specificities of power relations between men and women in the formerly socialist, new EU member states threatens the efficacy of the EU's `gender equality agenda' and more generally, the integrity of the EU as a self-purported democratic body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics and a Hidden GodDavid WetselThe Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics and a Hidden God, by Mitchell Cohen; xi & 351 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $35.00.Students of Pascal’s Pensées for the most part know Lucien Goldmann because of his 1959 landmark study, The Hidden God. Still controversial after thirty-five years, Goldmann’s theories concerning the Pensées have never been accepted (...) by mainstream Pascal scholarship. Jean Mesnard, France’s leading expert on Pascal, wrote in 1976 that “Goldmann’s Pascal is perhaps tragic, but he is most certainly a Molinist.” Mesnard, however, went on to acknowledge that no other critic before Goldmann had recognized the extent to which Pascal occupies a permanent place in the history of ideas. “To criticize Goldmann,” Mesnard went so far to say, “risks making Pascal less powerful.”Most pascalisants have erroneously assumed that Goldmann’s reading of Pascal represented nothing more than the imposition of Marxist theory upon the text of the Pensées. Among the revelations of Mitchell Cohen’s new study is that, to the contrary, Pascal represents one of the essential formative influences on Goldmann himself: “By the time he returned to Paris after the war, Goldmann was thoroughly conversant with Pascal’s oeuvre.... The appeal to him of Pascal was natural; Pascal was both a believer and a scientist.... [Goldmann] stated that were he to rewrite [Kant] he would assert that ‘Pascal was the first’ in the history of dialectical thought” (p. 48).Students of Pascal will be particularly fascinated by Cohen’s revealing analysis of Goldmann’s The Hidden God in the first section of chapter six of his study. Cohen’s account of Goldmann’s Towards a Sociology of the Novel (1964) and of his essays on Genet will likewise fascinate students of literature. However, The Wager of Lucien Goldmann goes far beyond those questions with which Goldmann’s name has been most closely associated in literary circles. The product of a painstaking excavation of Goldmann’s philosophical development, Cohen’s book recaptures a period of postwar Parisian intellectual life which drew to an end only with the events of 1968 and which has been obscured in recent years by postmodernism.A critic both of existentialism and of structuralism, Goldmann is portrayed by Cohen as the leading representative of Western Marxist humanism. Rejecting both the doctrine of Marxism’s “scientificity” and the traditional Marxist vision of the proletariat, Goldmann insisted upon Marxism’s need to reinvent itself. Specialists in Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, and particularly Lukács will appreciate Cohen’s careful explanations of Goldmann’s links to these key thinkers. Perhaps most fascinating is his account of the debate between Goldmann and the “anti-humanists”: “When the humanist Goldmann ‘transcended’ liberalism, he did so in the specifically Hegelian sense of negating and preserving at once, absorbing what was vital into socialism, while annulling [End Page 409] its abstractions. After all, he conceived socialist humanism as the culmination and not the annulment of Western culture...” (p. 290).This study, which I recommend to all students of modern France as well as to my fellow pascalisants, is, of course, not essentially meant to be a biography. Yet one sometimes finds oneself yearning for a more intimate portrait of Goldmann the man. Once he leaves his native Romania in the early 1930s, he seems to become the classical Parisian academic intellectual with no real personality of his own. Yet Cohen manages at least to neutralize Julia Kristeva’s parody of Goldmann in The Samurai, her roman à clef about French intellectuals in the 1960s, as quoted by Cohen: “Graying, pot-bellied, smiling, with his shirt open and of course no tie, he addressed everyone by the familiar tu and was always ripping up existentialism and lauding dialectical reason (as overhauled by Pascal), alienation, and the New Novel.”David WetselArizona State UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Lucian Blaga was an early twentieth-century European philosopher whose work was suppressed at the height of his career by the creation of the Romanian Socialist Republic. The thesis of this book is that Blaga's philosophy can make valuable contributions to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Blaga's philosophical system is explained in detail.

This article engages with socialist republicanism, which is preoccupied with extending freedom as non-domination, central to the neo-republican revival, from the political sphere of formal democracy to the economic sphere of capitalist production. Firstly, we discuss the transition from neo-republicanism to socialist republicanism. Secondly, we reconstruct the socialist republicanism of Antonio Gramsci, who was involved in the council movements in Turin in 1919–20. We argue that Gramsci applies the republican vocabulary of servitude to describe the capitalist workplace (...) and analyse the workers’ councils as republican forms, allowing for popular self-determination in the economic sphere. Consequently, we contribute to the ongoing exploration of the historical, political, and conceptual affinities between republicanism and socialism and inscribe Gramsci as a key thinker in this endeavour. (shrink)