Manea Mănescu (1916-2009)
Manea Mănescu (1916-2009)

Summary/Abstract: This article analyzes Manea Mănescu’s life trajectory. Manea Mănescu was a member of the nomenklatura during the Romanian socialist regime and also held important positions within the State administration (between March 1974 and March 1979, he was a prime minister). The main „turning points "of Mănescu's biography came under attention, with an accent on his political activity during the Second World War and on how and why the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) reassessed this period of Mănescu's life periodically after 1945. The well-known expression of the French historian Henry Rousso - „le passé qui ne passe pas "/„the past that not pass” - which refers to the impact of the Vichy syndrome on French society after the Second World War, seems to have functioned in Manea Mănescu’s case as well. From 1945 until 1960, even when he held key positions within the State and Party hierarchies, this official had to explain an alleged collaboration with the military dictatorship. This article also briefly discusses the main developments of the Romanian state-socialist regime in the second part of the 1970s, when Manea Mănescu was a prime minister and his role in the institutionalization of the Romanian cybernetic as a scientific field. Mănescu's biography relies on his Cadre file from the archive of the RCP, other unpublished documents, memoirs of the communist functionaries, and secondary literature.

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