Provocări metodologice ale cercetării comunismului din România
Methodological Challenges of the Research on Communism from Romania

Summary/Abstract: Research on Communism from Romania went through a period of radicalism and Manichaeism. Those who were pushed aside by the regime became judges of the phenomenon, and its beneficiaries have adopted a variety of discursive strategies, from the public exposure of the past to rewriting their own past. Thus, furthermore, Communism was assessed in either the nostalgic manner, designed to rehabilitate it, either through the lens of militant anti-Communism, both perspectives leading to the failure of any dialogue. Unfortunately, the anti-Communist militants with visibility have Bolshevized their speech; they have reinterpreted the facts in the light of the new class struggle with everything that happened in Communism. For this reason, I consider it necessary to revaluate how we report in relation to Communism, and, as a result, the use of qualitative methods (in particular the interview and the biographical method). Such an approach is primarily useful because it’s a form of rehabilitation of the individual. Because the old regime ignored him, operating only with templates as well as „multilaterally developed socialist society „, the „new man”, and more, the individual existed into a kind of undercover. The life story takes us to what happened with the individual beyond the iron curtain of the official speech. Secondly, the qualitative research brings with it information which does not appear in the documents because the regime recorded only the purposeful stride towards the utopian Communist society and passed under silence the essential elements of real life. Therefore, a symbolic reconstruction of the Communist society only from documents would result in a projection of a society as the Communists wanted to be seen and not as it was in reality.

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