This is the first volume to overview the complex Romanian transitional justice effort, detail the political negotiations that have led to the adoption and implementation of relevant legislation, and assess these processes in terms of their timing, sequencing, and impact on democratization.

Explores how the former communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe have grappled with the serious human rights violations of past regimes.

This book examines how the process of remembering Stalinist repression in Romania has shifted from individual, family, and group representations of lived and witnessed experiences characteristic of the 1990s to more recent and state-sponsored expressions of historical remembrance through their incorporation in official commemorations, propaganda sites, and restorative and compensatory measures. Based on fieldwork dealing with Stalinist repression and memorialization, together with archival research on the secret police (Securitate), it adopts an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the resurfacing of particular themes. As such it draws on concepts from sociology, political science, and legal studies, related to memory, justice, redress, identity, accountability, and reconciliation. A study of competing narratives concerning the meaning of the past as part of a struggle over the legitimacy of the post-communist state, Repression, Resistance, and Collaboration in Stalinist Romania 1944–1964 combines memory studies with a transitional justice approach that will appeal to scholars of sociology, heritage and memory studies, politics, and law.

This book examines transitional justice in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, exploring their attempts to come to terms with the gross human abuses which characterized their communist past. It considers transitional justice in all its aspects, explaining why different countries adopted different models and how successful they have been.

Are there any lessons Romania can teach transitional justice scholars and practitioners? This book argues that important insights emerge when analyzing a country with a moderate record of coming to terms with its communist past. Taking a broad definition of transitional justice as their starting point, contributors provide fresh assessments of the history commission, court trials, public identifications of former communist perpetrators, commemorations, and unofficial artistic projects that seek to address and redress the legacies of communist human rights violations. Theoretical and practical questions regarding the continuity of state agencies, the sequencing of initiatives, their advantages and limitations, the reasons why some reckoning programs are enacted and others are not, and these measures’ efficacy in promoting truth and justice are answered throughout the volume. Contributors include seasoned scholars from Romania, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and current and former leaders of key Romanian transitional justice institutions.

In the post-communist era it has become evident that the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe will be determined by many factors, only some of them political. Throughout the region, the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Greek Catholic churches have tried to impose their views on democracy through direct political engagement. Moreover, surveys show that the churches (and the army) enjoy more popular confidence than elected political bodies such as parliaments. These results reflect widespread disenchantment with a democratization process that has allowed politicians to advance their own agendas rather than work to solve the urgent socio-economic problems these countries face. In this penetrating study, Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu investigate the interaction of religion and politics in one such country, Romania. Facing internal challenges and external competitions from other religions old and new, the Orthodox Church in Romania has sought to consolidate its position and ensure Romania's version of democracy recognizes its privileged position of "national Church", enforcing the Church's stances on issues such as homosexuality and abortion. The post-communist state and political elite in turn rely on the Church for compliance with educational and cultural policies and to quell the insistent demands of the Hungarian minority for autonomy. Stan and Turcescu examine the complex relationship between church and state in this new Romania, providing analysis in key areas: church collaboration with communist authorities, post-communist electoral politics, nationalism and ethno-politics, restitution of Greek Catholic property, religious education, and sexual behavior and reproduction. As the first scholars to be given access to confidential materials from the archives of the communist political police, the notorious Securitate, Stan and Turcescu also examine church archives, legislation, news reports, and interviews with politicians and church leaders. This study will move the debate from common analyses of nationalism in isolation to more comprehensive investigations which consider the impact of religious actors on a multitude of other issues relevant to the political and social life of the country.

The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, creating collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that have emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts, such as Germany, Romania, Russia and others.

In the twenty-five years since the Soviet Union was dismantled, the countries of the former Soviet Union have faced different circumstances and responded differently to the need to redress and acknowledge the communist past and the suffering of their people. While some have adopted transitional justice and accountability measures, others have chosen to reject them; these choices have directly affected state building and societal reconciliation efforts. This is the most comprehensive account to date of post-Soviet efforts to address, distort, ignore, or recast the past through the use, manipulation, and obstruction of transitional justice measures and memory politics initiatives. Editors Cynthia M. Horne and Lavinia Stan have gathered contributions by top scholars in the field, allowing the disparate post-communist studies and transitional justice scholarly communities to come together and reflect on the past and its implications for the future of the region.

This book is the first to systematically examine the connection between religion and transitional justice in post-communism. There are four main goals motivating this book: 1) to explain how civil society (groups such as religious denominations) contribute to transitional justice efforts to address and redress past dictatorial repression; 2) to ascertain the impact of state-led reckoning programs on religious communities and their members; 3) to renew the focus on the factors that determine the adoption (or rejection) of efforts to reckon with past human rights abuses in post-communism; and 4) to examine the limitations of enacting specific transitional justice methods, programs and practices in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union countries, whose democratization has differed in terms of its nature and pace. Various churches and their relationship with the communist states are covered in the following countries: Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Belarus.

This volume examines the property transformations in post-communist Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and focuses on the role of restitution and privatisation in such transformations. It argues that the theorisation of ‘restitution’ in post-communist CEE is incomplete in the transitional justice scholarship and in the literature on correction of historical wrongs. The book also argues that, for a more complete theorisation of (post-communist) restitution, the transformations of property in post-communist societies ought to be studied in a more holistic way. The main legal vehicles used for such transformations, privatisation and restitution, should not be studied separately and in abstract, but in their reciprocal relationship, and in connection to the dimension of justice which each could achieve. Finally, the book integrates ‘privatisation’ in a theory of post-communist transformation of property.