Romanian Communist Childhoods: Educational Strategies, Remembered Tactics of the 1970s-1980s
Romanian Communist Childhoods: Educational Strategies, Remembered Tactics of the 1970s-1980s

Summary/Abstract: With the proliferation of generational life writing focused on exploring experiences of childhood in communist Romania (particularly the decades 1970s-1980s), a new discourse on the recent past has penetrated the public sphere as an alternative to the dominant anti-communist discourse that has so far focused on intellectual and political elites or members of the resistance. This article puts forward the claim that instead of relegating this discourse to the all-too-often dismissed category of pop-culturalization of history or commodification of nostalgia, researchers would be better advised to take their cue from this return to the child’s perspective on the everyday as a potential means to disentangle the binary perspective that plagues post-communist memory studies. Following de Certeau (1984), this article explores educational “strategies” targeted at school-age children in communist Romania, while giving equal importance to the “tactics” that children employed in response, as they appear in oral history projects or autobiographies. It focuses particularly on children’s organizations and media, highlighting the need to account for a multiplicity of childhood experiences and to factor in the child’s agency. As communist “structures of feeling” find their articulation from the perspective of the traditionally marginal child-figure, we might find we need to start talking about communist childhoods in the plural.

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