Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Francesco Zavatti, Writing History in a Propaganda Institute

2017; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0265691417711663av

1461-7110

Maria Bucur,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

narrative to date about the ways in which the historiography about the communist past was crafted between 1948 and 1989.The author's aim is to reconstruct the dynamic power relations that animated the scholarship produced at this Institute, highlighting the ideological, experiential and personal differences that shaped the production of historical knowledge through books, museum curatorship, and other cultural/intellectual products.Zavatti wants us to view this history not as simply an empty fac¸ade dominated by monolithic forces at the top of the RCP hierarchy, but rather as the expression of earnest disputes in which all participants had historical agency.The pay-off rests, therefore, in answering not so much the 'why' or 'what' of what happened, but rather the 'how'.The book is organized in ten chapters.The first chapter provides an overview of the research aims, the methods and sources, as well as a broad overview of historical writing in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.It is followed by an excellent overview of previous research, which I found to be extremely up to date, nuanced and earnest in highlighting both strengths and weaknesses.A more detailed discussion of the nature and issues raised by the sources in terms of veracity and utility follows in Chapter 3, probably the one I would have dropped, had I been the editor of the book.The next five chapters correspond to distinct sub-periods of the communist regime : 1948-1958; 1959-1964; 1965-1968; 1969-1974; and 1975-1989.The author provides closure with a discussion of the afterlife of the Institute and its historians and a conclusion.The chapters are all very clearly organized and build on each other to show important continuities and shifts across these periods in terms of the specific role to be played by: the Institute in relation to the priorities of the RCP; historians from the Institute in relation to the Soviet Union; ideological and experiential differences among historians and apparatchiks in shaping the research agenda; the personal patronage of various leaders, especially Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceaus¸escu.For this reviewer the most innovative interpretations come in Chapter 5, where the author links the development of the national-communist canon to the late Dej period, prior to Ceaus¸escu's ascent to the role of Secretary General in 1965.The author shows how the attempt of the RCP to distance Romania from the tight embrace of the Soviet Union provided important resources and especially breathing room for historians at both the Romanian Academy and the Party Institute.Both institutions began to develop a more independent historiographical agenda, to the point of advancing arguments about Romania's past that provided critical assessments of Russian imperialism, along with a decidedly ethno-nationalist turn in discussing everything from the 1848 Revolutions to World War I.A particularly important moment for this historiographic turn was the discovery of a text by Karl Marx, Notes about Romanians, which provided a very friendly assessment of Romanian nationalism.Though not broadly circulated, the Notes were used in the Institute, with the explicit approval of the Dej administration, to make a decisively nationalist turn in research and writing.Through this discovery, the author strongly suggests that the narrative about the ultra-nationalist turn of