DANIEL BARBU AND ANTI-COMMUNISM
DANIEL BARBU AND ANTI-COMMUNISM

Summary/Abstract: Daniel Barbu was one of the most important post-communist political scientists in Romania. He wrote extensively about the post-communist Romanian political society, and the understanding of the communist regime. Barbu’s critique of post-communist anti-communism was accompanied by his critical evaluation of the Romanian state’s official condemnation of communism in 2006. Before becoming a historian, political scientist, and theologian, Daniel Barbu was an art historian. He graduated from the Nicolae Grigorescu National Institute of Art in Bucharest in 1980 and then worked as a museum custodian at the Village Museum, and the Museum of Art in Bucharest. This article focuses on Daniel Barbu's experience as an art historian during the communist regime in Romania and highlights his anti-communist stance in two reports he wrote with Octavian Roske, and Radu Ciuceanu in 1981 and 1984. The reports documented the destruction of historical monuments under the Ceaușescu regime and were clandestinely sent to Radio Free Europe. This prompted a Securitate investigation that failed to identify the authors.

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