Provocări epistemologice ale totalitarismului O metodologie a

 Florin Leontin ABRAHAM PROVOCĂRI EPISTEMOLOGICE ALE TOTALITARISMULUI O METODOLOGIE A STUDIULUI REGIMURILOR COMUNISTE PROVOCĂRI EPISTEMOLOGICE ALE TOTALITARISMULUI O METODOLOGIE A STUDIULUI REGIMURILOR COMUNISTE Autor: Florin Leontin ABRAHAM Conducător ştiințific: Prof. dr. Vasile PUŞCAŞ Lucrare realizată în cadrul proiectului „Valorificarea identităților culturale în procesele globale”, cofinanțat din Fondul Social European prin Programul Operațional Sectorial Dezvoltarea Resurselor Umane 2007 – 2013, contractul de finanțare nr. POSDRU/89/1.5/S/59758. Titlurile şi drepturile de proprietate intelectuală şi industrială asupra rezultatelor obținute în cadrul stagiului de cercetare postdoctorală aparțin Academiei Române. Punctele de vedere exprimate în lucrare aparțin autorului şi nu angajează Comisia Europeană şi Academia Română, beneficiara proiectului. Exemplar gratuit. Comercializarea în țară şi străinătate este interzisă. Reproducerea, fie şi parțială şi pe orice suport, este posibilă numai cu acordul prealabil al Academiei Române. ISBN 978‐973‐167‐113‐0 Depozit legal: Trim. II 2013 Florin Leontin ABRAHAM Provocări epistemologice ale totalitarismului O metodologie a studiului regimurilor comuniste Editura Muzeului Național al Literaturii Române Colecția AULA MAGNA
4
Cuprins INTRODUCERE ..................................................................................................... 9 PARTEA ÎNTÂI. TOTALITARISMUL.............................................................. 21 I. TOTALITARISMUL: CONCURENȚA VIZIUNILOR POLITICO‐EPISTEMICE ............................................................................... 23 A. Istoricitatea conceptelor ........................................................................... 27 i) Apariția noțiunii. Perioada interbelică şi Al Doilea Război Mondial .............................................................. 27 ii) Războiul Rece şi totalitarismul. Autorii clasici ............................... 34 iii) Reconsiderări ale teoriei totalitare în timpul Războiului Rece .... 45 iv) Revigorarea teoriei totalitare după 1989 ......................................... 59 B. Capacitatea explicativă a teoriei clasice a totalitarismului .................. 67 C. Responsabilitate şi vinovăție în regimurile comuniste...................... 101 II. COLAPSUL COMUNISMULUI EUROPEAN: DILEME ISTORIOGRAFICE ....................................................................... 110 A. Căderea comunismului: între ideal politic şi problemă de studiu .................................................................................................. 112 B. De ce au reuşit revoluțiile anului 1989?................................................ 120 i) Factori endogeni ................................................................................. 122 ii) Factori exogeni................................................................................... 125 iii) Centru ................................................................................................ 128 iv) Periferie.............................................................................................. 134 C. Controversele continuă .......................................................................... 137 III. STUDIUL COMUNISMULUI ÎN EUROPA CENTRALĂ ŞI DE EST. CAZUL ROMÂNESC ............................................................... 142 A. Trăsături dominante ale istoriografiei postcomuniste...................... 144 i) Dimensiunea instituțională ............................................................... 145 ii) Trenduri tematice, preferințe metodologice.................................. 153 5
iii) Istoriografie şi decomunizare ......................................................... 157 B. Cazul românesc........................................................................................ 164 i) Arhitectura instituțională după 1989............................................... 167 ii) Temele predilecte ale istoriografiei................................................. 186 iii) Istoriografia română, între „revoluție” şi „restaurație de catifea”?.......................................................................................... 191 PARTEA A DOUA. RENOVAREA STUDIULUI COMUNISMULUI........ 201 IV. ATELIERUL ISTORICULUI COMUNISMULUI.................................... 203 A. Istorie recentă şi studiul comunismului .............................................. 204 B. Sursele cercetării comunismului: implicații metodologice................ 207 i) Izvoarele istorice produse de dictaturile totalitare........................ 208 ii) Istoricul şi sursele comunismului ................................................... 229 C. Metode ale istoricului ............................................................................. 236 i) Metoda istorică ................................................................................... 238 ii) Metoda comparativă ......................................................................... 241 iii) Ancheta orală .................................................................................... 256 iv) Metode statistice............................................................................... 263 v) Studiul de caz în istoriografie.......................................................... 266 D. Istoriografie şi memorie socială ............................................................ 268 V. CERCETĂTORUL ISTORIEI RECENTE: „SPECTATORUL ANGAJAT”.................................................................................................... 275 A. Istoricul şi „spectatorii” săi.................................................................... 275 i) Contactul istoricului cu publicul...................................................... 275 ii) Ce cred cetățenii despre comunism? .............................................. 277 iii) În căutarea unor explicații .............................................................. 283 B. Condiția meseriei de istoric.................................................................... 286 i) Condiții profesionale.......................................................................... 286 ii) Condiții materiale.............................................................................. 289 C. Rolul istoricului, între „taumaturgie” şi „obiectivism” ..................... 290 D. Elemente ale unei etici a cercetătorului istoriei recente .................... 295 6
i) Justițiarismul ....................................................................................... 298 ii) Morala faptelor şi morala istoricului .............................................. 300 iii) Excesul de istorie.............................................................................. 300 iv) Drepturile actorilor istoriei ............................................................. 301 E. Noi direcții în cercetarea comunismului din România ...................... 302 i) Mai are viitor istoria politică? ........................................................... 302 ii) Istoria economică, un tabu pentru istorici? ................................... 305 iii) Istoria socială îşi aşteaptă ucenicii ................................................. 307 iv) Istoria culturală: o veritabilă terra incognita.................................. 309 CONCLUZII ....................................................................................................... 312 BIBLIOGRAFIE .................................................................................................. 319 ADDENDA ......................................................................................................... 357 ABSTRACT ........................................................................................... 357 SUMMARY........................................................................................... 363 Lista tabelelor Tabel 3.1 ‐ Instituții de studiere a regimului comunist în Europa Centrală şi de Est ............................................................................ 150 Tabel 3.2 ‐ Instituții create în România după 1989 pentru studiul comunismului/istoriei secolului XX............................................. 175 Tabel 3.3 ‐ Ariile tematice ale istoriografiei române din perioada 1989‐2010.......................................................................................... 188 Tabel 4.1 ‐ Tipologie a surselor istoriei regimurilor comuniste................... 231 Tabel 4.2 ‐ Diferențe între „ancheta orală” şi „istoria orală” ....................... 258 Tabel 5.1 ‐ Rolul social al istoricului................................................................ 294 Tabel 5.2 ‐ Noi direcții de cercetare a comunismului.................................... 311 7
ADDENDA Abstract Epistemological challenges of totalitarianism. A methodology for studying communist regimes The need for this research is provided by the abundance of studies, memories or critical references about communism in Central and Eastern Europe. During last decades, a huge quantity of historical information communism was accumulated, but the quality of its interpretation is very different, from studies which resist the test of time, methodologically well‐
founded, to real historiography “ballast”, including those researches gradually becoming unusable for academic international standards and rigours. Therefore, critical reflection concerning results of over two decades of researching communist regimes has become imperative. Researching a vast international literature dedicated to totalitarianism allows us to emphasize the historical contextualization of the main concepts and interpretative theories concerning communist regimes. It is quite easy to distinguish a dialectics of concepts and theories regarding totalitarianism, the initial stage in which totalitarianism had been considered a positive project, within the broader current of interwar fas‐
cism, being quickly counterbalanced by critical approaches of various doc‐
trinal shades regarding the same phenomenon. During the Cold War time, “totalitarianism” was one of fundamental ideological concepts used by the West in order to categorize the communist regime, at the same time indicating the moral and functional convergence of Stalinism and Nazism. Even if the classical totalitarian theory was subject to substantial criticism and reinterpretation within Western social and political research during the 70s and 80s, it managed to resist precisely because it has an important ethical function. After the fall of communism in Europe, totalitarian theory was revived, but its explanatory capacity concerning historical research proved to be limited, in light of new research sources. The “great 357
epistemological innovation” in studying communism consisted in turning classical totalitarianism into a new tenet, not so much for methodological reasons but for political and moral considerations. “Anti‐totalitarianism” has become one of those “good” concepts, endowed with massive emotional load, as it subsumes condemning all atrocities achieved during the times of communism and fascism. Studying of communist regimes is a fully expansive quantitative, thematic and methodological task. The mark of Sovietology on the historiography of communist regimes from Central and Eastern European countries, two decades after the unravelling of the Soviet empire is still easily identifiable. The “historiography revolution” in studying communism, which was so emphatically mentioned after 1989, is an unfinished project. Archives become, most of them, accessible to historians’ communities, research institutions have multiplied until redundancy, as well as research programmes, but a Cold War spirit of revenge and ideological impregnation of the historical discourse seems to have subsisted to the passing of time, also being passed on to new generations of researchers. The ethoses of moral history, the exaltation of therapeutic virtues of historical knowledge upon the change of the post‐communist public space, are easily identifiable within the predominant historical discourse regarding recent past. The philosophical bases upon which militant history is grounded can be found in the classical theory of totalitarianism, especially in Hannah Arendt’s works, which has become an ineluctable landmark for 20th century researchers. In Central and Eastern Europe, the totalitarian theory has become an epitome of politically correctness applied to historiography. The Nazism‐
Communism comparison has been trivialized, becoming during last decades a canonical approach, in historiography as well as in politics. The simultaneous condemnation of fascism and communism, by identifying their unhealthy role in the history of humanity, is the main result of totalitarian theory. Comparative and genealogical study of fascism and communism has become a stereotype, as we have shown during our analysis, being one of the ideological remnants of the Cold War. The repressive nature and actions of fascist and communist regimes against the 358
dignity and freedom of human beings are indisputable in factual terms, and essential facts or at least their perception are common goods among European democratic societies. To this end, totalitarian theory has fulfilled its ideological role and can be withdrawn from the historiography circuit. Nonetheless, the totalitarian perspective upon the history of communist regimes is still so strongly impregnated in the thoughts of historians, but also in the political discourse, that any claim to quarantine the term “totalitarianism” is lacking realism. Our suggestion, addressed mainly to the 20th century history researchers’ community, is to become conscious of the cognitive weaknesses of totalitarian theories and concepts, using the term only for its ethical virtues and less for the methodological ones. The gradual exit of communist regimes’ historiography from the logic of pragmatic‐therapeutic history specific to the Cold War is perceptible due to the emergence of an alternative discourse concerning recent past, coming from socio‐cultural history, which attempts to stabilize its epistemic foundations in post‐structuralism. Socio‐cultural history is still perceived as a “subversive” product of the intellectual left, which questions the predominance of political history having as central subject the totalitarian state, ignoring society with its successive transformations. The differences between East of West concerning approaching the history of communism, to which alternative methodological devices are dedicated, must not be interpreted exclusively using the traditional grid of the gap between West and East, of the latter’s delay, but also as a form of geopolitical differentiation between the two parts of Europe. The historical discourse about the East’s sufferance does not always find its best audience in the West because it is inevitably accompanied by evoking the West’s “moral duty” towards former Soviet bloc states. Recently, in the East it is increasingly stated that repairing the injustices of the past must be accomplished not only by mere accession to NATO and the European Uni‐
on, but also by implementing European policies of cohesion financed by the West, which became richer during the Cold War. Or, in the context of the current economic crisis, during which the West creates its own discourse about the “lazy”, “corrupt” and “inefficient” East, the traditional historical discourse, centred on sufferance, also becomes a subtle instrument of reacting towards the policies of differentiation within the European Union. 359
Following the contact with the study of communism, historiography, as scientific topic, did not regain its cognitive autonomy. At one extreme of historiography approaches there is a primitive and counterproductive positivism and at the other extreme there are eclectic narrative constructions (sometimes exaggeratedly defined as “interdisciplinary”), in which the relations between collective memory and historical memory are imprecise and confuse, lacking a coherent and unified methodological stand. Between the two extreme types of writing history we identify a broad spectrum of study themes and research methods, but without being able to identify an integrating direction. Political history is quantitatively predominant, but its innovating potential is reduced. The usage of sociological concepts created during the Cold War in order to describe communist regimes is a frequent situation, but starting from a recently discovered factual basis. The result of conceptual‐methodological inertia is a repetitive, stereotype historiography, in which the main accumulations are quantitative and less in the direction of new interpretative perspectives. The study of the communist regime in recent Romanian historiography has some common features with historiography from other states from Central and Eastern Europe. Predominance of the therapeutic historical discourse thematically anchored in the political and methodological history of (neo‐) positivism can easily be identified in the study of communism within the ten states, which belonged to the Soviet space, acceding to the European Union in 2004 and 2007. The emergence of several public institutions specialized in the history of communism, often in an unfriendly competition with one another, is common to the whole area from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Adriatic. With the notable exceptions of the KARTA Foundation in Poland and the Open Society Archives within the Central European University on Budapest, financing of historical research is achieved from public budgets, being legitimated not only by the humanist imperative of knowing the past, but especially by turning historiography into a sui generis form of transitional justice. The strong relation between history and memory, coming to open confusion, is another predominant feature of studying communism in the East European region. Cultural conflicts within the historians’ guild and the competition for supremacy can be easily encountered not only in Romania but also in 360
the other countries of the region. The specific feature of Romanian historiography is given by the quasi‐absence of assumed neo‐Marxist historical literature, unlike Poland or Hungary, states in which Marxist critical thinking has a prestigious tradition. The weakness of Romanian neo‐Marxist historiography must be corroborated with the relatively small number of historiography projects alternative to those inspired by the theory of totalitarianism. The need for a critical discourse towards predo‐
minant historiography narration is not cause by ideological reasons, but by methodological ones, being convinced that scientific disputes and debates can help to revive a research field which seems to function following the automatic pilot principle, in a mechanical and stereotype manner. Meditating upon the perspectives of studying communist regimes reveals to us two main challenges lying ahead of the researcher of recent past. The first of them refers to the relation of the historian not to his research object but with the public to which it addresses and, consequently, with the sponsors of his work. The history of communism increasingly loses its thaumaturgical function, because the threat of totalitarianism for new generations does not have a direct reference object and the Evil in society is increasingly associated not with the period of the communist regime, but with the years of transition to democracy and market economy. The second challenge for the historian of communist regimes is common to the whole recent history and consists in the perverse effects of “memory democratization”, a process following which researchers lose their royal right of intermediating knowledge. Abundance of memoirs and other memory places, proliferation of the past’s popularization history type exercise pressure upon the nature of historical knowledge. As long as any presentation of the past risks being associated with historiography, what is the role of the historian? The danger of dissolving historical knowledge is increased by the fact that within the historians’ guild the preoccupation for a methodological consolidation of the discipline and demarcation of the research fields in relation to other socio‐humanistic disciplines (sociology, anthropology) is marginal. The book was especially conceived in order to become a useful tool for researchers of communism. General theoretical references were reduced 361
as much as possible, in order to avoid overcrowding with elements that can be easily grasped within the international specialized literature. The fun‐
damental objective of this project is to generate critical reflections among researchers of recent past. It is not an ossified research ending a road but it sets to generate curiosity and interest for broadening the debate, whose expected result is a richer and more diverse historiography, which offers to the public new factual landmarks and interpretative perspectives. The faces of totalitarianism are multiple and multifaceted, bit in order to fight against them, they must be precisely localized, systematically described and analyzed in depth in relation to the human nature, in order to avoid history excess, which is as harmful as lacking a conscience of the past. 362
Summary INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 9 FIRST PART: TOTALITARIANISM .................................................................. 21 I. TOTALITARIANISM: THE COMPETING POLITICO‐EPISTEMOLOGICAL VISIONS ............................................... 23 A. History of concepts ................................................................................... 27 i) Emergence of the notion. The interwar period and the Second World War ................................................................ 27 ii) The Cold War and totalitarianism. Classical authors .................... 34 iii) Reconsiderations of totalitarian theory during the Cold War ..... 45 iv) Revival of totalitarian theory after 1989.......................................... 59 B. Explanatory capacity of the classical totalitarian theory ..................... 67 C. Responsibility and guilt within communist regimes ......................... 101 II. THE COLLAPSE OF EUROPEAN COMMUNISM: HISTORIOGRAPHY DILEMMAS.............................................................. 110 A. The fall of communism: between political ideal and study topic .... 112 B. Why did the 1989 revolutions succeed? ............................................... 120 i) Endogenous factors ............................................................................ 122 ii) Exogenous factors ............................................................................. 125 iii) Centre................................................................................................. 128 iv) Periphery ........................................................................................... 134 C. Controversies continue........................................................................... 137 III. THE STUDY OF COMMUNISM IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE. THE ROMANIAN CASE............................. 142 A. Prevailing features of post‐communist historiography..................... 144 i) Institutional dimension...................................................................... 145 ii) Thematic trends, methodological preferences .............................. 153 363
iii) Historiography and de‐communization ....................................... 157 B. The Romanian case.................................................................................. 164 i) Institutional architecture after 1989 ................................................. 167 ii) Favourite topics of historiography ................................................. 186 iii) Romanian historiography, between “revolution” and “velvet restoration”?.................................................................. 191 SECOND PART: RENOVATION OF THE STUDY OF COMMUNISM.... 201 IV. WORKSHOP OF THE HISTORIAN OF COMMUNISM....................... 203 A. Recent history and study of communism............................................ 204 B. Sources of research concerning communism ...................................... 207 i) Historical sources generated by totalitarian dictatorships ........... 208 ii) History and sources of communism............................................... 229 C. Methods of the historian ........................................................................ 236 i) The historical method ........................................................................ 238 ii) The comparative method ................................................................. 241 iii) Oral investigations ........................................................................... 256 iv) Statistic methods .............................................................................. 263 v) Historiography case study ............................................................... 266 D. Historiography and social memory ..................................................... 268 V. THE RESEARCHER OF RECENT HISTORY: THE “PARTICIPATING SPECTATOR”.................................................... 275 A. The historian and his “spectators” ....................................................... 275 i) Historian’s contact with the public .................................................. 275 ii) What do people believe about communism? ................................ 277 iii) Searching for explanations.............................................................. 283 B. Conditions of the historian’s craft ......................................................... 286 i) Professional conditions...................................................................... 286 ii) Material conditions ........................................................................... 289 C. The role of the historian, between “thaumaturgy” and “objectivism” ................................................................................... 290 364
D. Elements of an ethic of the recent history researcher ........................ 295 i) Justitiarism........................................................................................... 298 ii) Morality of facts and morality of the historian ............................. 300 iii) History excess ................................................................................... 300 iv) Rights of history actors.................................................................... 301 E. New Romanian communism research directions ............................... 302 i) Does political history have any future?........................................... 302 ii) Economic history, a taboo for historians?...................................... 305 iii) Social history awaits its apprentices.............................................. 307 iv) Cultural history: a real terra incognita............................................ 309 CONCLUSIONS................................................................................................. 312 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................ 319 365