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Small Comrades as Historians and Ethnographers: Performativity, Agency, and the Socialist Pedagogy of Citizenship in Ceaușescu's Romania, 1969–1989

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2019

Diana Georgescu
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Abstract

Beginning with the state's successful promotion of purposeful and patriotic tourism for children in Ceaușescu's Romania, this article argues that we should move beyond traditional representations of the relationship between citizens and the socialist state in oppositional terms that emphasize resistance, subversion, and indifference, leaving historical subjects strangely disconnected from their socio-political context. Children and teachers who engaged in summer expeditions, for example, found self-fulfillment not only by opposing the regime or escaping into alternative lifestyles, but also by pursuing the socialist and national values the regime promoted and by activating forms of youth agency that were built into the socialist pedagogy of citizenship, which encouraged activism, voluntarism, and leadership in youth. To investigate young people's engagement with the socialist state, this article proposes a performative approach that has the potential to not only contribute to studies of late socialism, but also invigorate studies of nationalism and histories of childhood and youth under authoritarian regimes.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 74 - 102
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as the participants in the Eastern European Reading Group at the University of Illinois and the annual conference of ASEEES, where I discussed preliminary versions of this article, for their useful suggestions. I also want to thank the former pioneers and teachers, especially the wonderful György Makara and Ilie Popescu, who generously shared their memories and diaries of summer expeditions with me. This research was supported by funding from the Social Science Research Council (NY), Council for European Studies (Columbia University), and New Europe College (Bucharest).

References

1. The term was proposed in Gorsuch, Anne and Koenker, Diane, Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (Ithaca, 2006), 8Google Scholar.

2. Marian, interview, Bucharest, December 2009. Marian was the team’s geologist. The interviews with former expedition participants referenced in this article were conducted by the author between 2009 and 2013. To ensure anonymity, I use initials or pseudonyms for interviewees who did not specifically require to be named in my work.

3. For studies of late socialism emphasizing the regime’s cynicism and resulting political apathy, see, for example, Tismaneanu, Vladimir, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York, 1993)Google Scholar or Kligman, Gail, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceaușescu’s Romania (Berkeley, 1998)Google Scholar.

4. Ion Vlǎduţiu, “Argument,” in Expediţiile Cutezǎtorii, şcoalǎ a iubirii de patrie (Bucharest, 1988), 12. See also Cutezǎtorii, November 13, 1975, as well as the issues of January 31, 1985 and January 30, 1986.

5. Statistics and reports on forms of school tourism (trips, excursions, expeditions) indicate they involved a growing number of school children from the 1960s through the 1980s. Archive of the Romanian Pioneer Organization [hereafter ARP], files 7/1967, 171–9 (Informare privind desfǎşurarea vacanţei de varǎ); 23/1971, 111–6 (Referat asupra evoluţiei cuprinderii pionierilor şi şcolarilor in tabere şi alte acţiuni de vacanţǎ); 13/1977, 174–6 (Notǎ cu privire la unele problem ale activitaţii Organizaţiei Pionierilor), and 19/1984, 64–7 (Raport privind activitatea educativǎ desfǎşuratǎ in cadrul acţiunilor turistice). The file and page numbers indicate the original archival references of the Romanian Pioneer Organization. The collection had not been processed and catalogued when I conducted my research in 2009/2010. Because it was temporarily held in the basement of the former Pioneer Palace (now, National Children’s Palace) in Bucharest, I obtained permission from the director of the Palace to consult the collection.

6. See, for example, classic texts such as Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar. For an analysis of totalitarianism in western Cold War literature, see Gleason, Abbott, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

7. Scholarship on dissidence centers on Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary and includes Barbara Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest, 2002); Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics; Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe, eds., Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule (Oxford, 2006). For a recent study on forms of evasion and escape, see Cathleen Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari, eds., Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (New York, 2013).

8. The exception to this approach is the burgeoning literature on everyday life, leisure, and consumption, which focuses on particular social categories (women, workers, peasants, etc.) and their forms of accommodation with the regime. See, Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (New York, 2012); David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, Ill., 2010); and Shana Penn and Jill Massino, eds., Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (New York, 2009). Even some of the contributions to these volumes, such as the studies on the second economy, assume that the overriding motivation of socialist citizens was (material) self-interest and that citizens could not resonate with socialist values.

9. In addition to running the risk of overestimating resistance, this approach rests on a normative liberal notion of subjectivity premised on the dichotomy between an authentic self, relegated to the private sphere, and a public persona compliant with the socialist regime. For a discussion of the pervasiveness of this liberal model in the scholarship on Cold War eastern Europe, see Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no 1 (Winter 2000): 132, 140–44.

10. If engagement is addressed in scholarship on state socialism, it is often framed in negative terms as “complicity” or “conformity,” an approach that rests on the view that socialist regimes were essentially immoral systems and any acceptance of their values was a form of material self-interest and/or moral capitulation. The most influential text is Vaclav Havel’s 1978 samizdat “The Power of the Powerless,” later published with John Keane as The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Eastern Europe (London, 1985).

11. On the ambivalent character of socialist ideology and youth policies, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 11, and Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation. Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford, 2010), 341.

12. For scholarship addressing the homogenizing and constraining aspects of youth education, see Katalin Jutteau, L’enfance Embrigadée Dans La Hongrie Communiste: Le Mouvement Des Pionniers (Paris, 2007); Anna Saunders, Honecker’s Children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979–2002 (Manchester, 2007); Karin Taylor, Let’s Twist Again : Youth and Leisure in Socialist Bulgaria (Münster, 2006).

13. For an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon, see Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania, (Berkeley, 1991).

14. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996), 13–22.

15. T. E. Woronov, “Performing the Nation: China’s Children as Little Red Pioneers,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no 3 (July 2007): 647–72.

16. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever.

17. The National Children’s Palace was the official headquarters of the competition, where expedition documents were sent to the national jury for evaluation. In his quality of secretary of the national jury, Victor Constantinescu preserved the diaries and photo albums of award-winning teams. He provided me with twelve diaries, indicating that he managed to “salvage” them from protesters who took the Palace by assault in December 1989. My research branched off to locate former participants, taking me to cities and villages (Baia-Mare, Chendrea, Nǎprad) in Transylvania, where I eventually collected an additional set of eleven diaries.

18. The interviews focused on teams whose expedition travelogues I could consult to allow for comparisons between contemporaneously recorded and recollected experiences. I also conducted interviews with former participants who posted recollections of pioneer expeditions on public blogs of amateur hikers or alpinists, but could not locate their organizing teachers or expedition diary.

19. This methodological approach is akin to Carlo Ginzburg’s valorization (via Auerbach’s work) of Ansatzpunkte, i.e. starting points, in the writing of microhistory. See Carolo Ginzburg, “Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory,” Critical Inquiry 31, no 3 (Spring 2005): 666.

20. In the post-Stalinist atmosphere of social reconciliation of the 1960s, the call on teachers marked a shift from post-war concerns with their political and ideological loyalty to an acknowledgement of their professional expertise. The shift was gradual: teachers had always been expected to support pioneer activities, but these were initially assigned to youth activists in the 1940s and 50s, as many teachers were politically suspect, having been educated in the “old” regime and betraying royalist, bourgeois, and extreme-right tendencies.

21. Catriona Kelly noted a similar phenomenon of voluntarist work among schoolteachers in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, see “‘The School Waltz:’ The Everyday Life of the Post-Stalinist Soviet Classroom,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 1 (2004): 108–58.

22. Alongside college students, young teachers responded readily to the opportunities opened by the development of the “tourism industry,” training and working as guides to supplement their income by organizing school trips and excursions. Articles in the national press often addressed this phenomenon, see Rodica Serban, “Studiul şi perspectivele turismului impun reconsiderarea profesiei de ghid,” Scânteia, January 4, 1968.

23. A.P., teacher of Romanian in Acâș, interview, Satu-Mare, March 2010.

24. See Verdery, National Ideology.

25. Elena Ene et al., Metodica predării istoriei României (Bucharest, 1981), 19–20.

26. Cutezǎtorii, April 10, 1975.

27. Ibid. “The Dacian Shield” refers to an enduring myth of ethnonational origins in Romanian culture, holding that present-day Romanians are the descendants of ancient Dacian tribes occupying this territory before the Roman conquest. Variants of this myth, popular with those wishing to emphasize the European character of Romanians, see Romanians as originating from the union of Dacians and Romans. “Mioriţa” is the title of a broadly-popularized folk ballad believed to capture the essence of the Romanian peasant, and by implication of the Romanian people.

28. In their turn, members of the national jury had diverse professional and ideological trajectories, being divided between those more closely associated with the regime (Dumitru Almaș, the regime historian, ethnologists such as the Moscow-educated Ion Vlǎduţiu, the Director of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest, and writers such as Aurel Lecca or Ion Grecea) and scholars with prewar training and allegiances (Gheorghe Focşa, the Director of the Village Museum in Bucharest, who was trained in the interwar tradition of militant sociology initiated by Romanian sociologist Dimitrie Gusti, geographers such as Marcian Bleahu and Ion Pişota, both of whom were well-known college professors at the University of Bucharest, and Constantin Preda, a researcher at the Institute of Archeology).

29. My interviews abound in portraits of “patriotic” teachers such as that painted in retrospect by a male respondent from Bucharest (b. 1968) in August 2009. His former teacher of geography, Andrei recalled, was a “real patriot” who organized regular school trips to historical sites during the 1970s, exhibited a beautifully-carved wooden bust of medieval ruler Michael the Brave in his living room, tried his hand at patriotic poetry, and had recently called to wish his former student a Happy Great Union Day on the anniversary of the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania in 1918.

30. Constantin Preda’s archeological projects and Ion Vlǎduţiu’s Ethnographic Atlas of Romania, for example, inspired many local schoolteachers in their choice of expedition routes and goals. Some of these topics, such as the history of wooden churches in Transylvania, remained ideologically risky and teachers often had to contend with the critique and obstruction of local youth activists before they could be vindicated by national awards and recognition from the Bucharest jury.

31. Until the mid to late 1970s, these included trips in the Soviet bloc in addition to electronic equipment.

32. The contribution was substantial given that the average net salary throughout the 1970s ranged from 1,300 to 2,100 lei and, in the 1980s, from 2,200 to 3,000 lei.

33. Cutezătorii, May 15, 1980. While industry was still protected by “soft budget constraints,” cultural enterprises—including some extracurricular programs such as expeditions—were encouraged to partially sustain themselves. See Verdery, National Ideology, 108.

34. Denoting a whole range of social rebels in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Balkans, “haiduks” were contentious figures in folk culture. They were reclaimed as heroes in the struggle for national and social liberation under various political regimes, including Ceaușescu’s Romania. On “turism haiducesc” (haiduk tourism), see “Pionieri pe cararile patriei,” Educatia pioniereasca, January 1969, 14.

35. Anne Gorsuch, All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford, 2011), 6.

36. The guidelines for the organization of the expedition were published annually in Cutezătorii. See, for example, the first set of rules in the journal’s issue of May 15, 1969 and slight additions and changes in later regulations in the issue of April 10, 1975.

37. Mihai, interview, Bucharest, November 2009.

38. Marian, interview, Bucharest, December 2009.

39. “Turismul se invata,” Educatia pioniereasca, March 1969, 24–26; Mircea Trifu, “Turismul cel de toate zilele,” Educatia pioniereasca, August 1968, 44–47. Se also Tatiana Gafan, Metodica predarii istoriei, (Bucharest, 1968), 235.

40. “Expediţiile Cutezǎtorii,” Cutezǎtorii, May 15, 1980.

41. On the constraining character of pioneer camps in particular, see Catherine J. Plum, “Summer Camp for Socialists: Conformity and Escapism at Camp Mitschurin in East Germany,” in Socialist Escapes, 98–126. For literature on socialist education more broadly, see Jutteau, L’enfance Embrigadée; Saunders, Honecker’s Children; Taylor, Let’s Twist Again.

42. For an account of the origins of the revolutionary view of children as precocious activists in the Soviet 1920s, see Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, 2007).

43. Group interview, Baia-Mare, July 2010. Cristi was thirteen years old when he participated in an ethnographic expedition in 1973. Partly because he came from a family of doctors, he was appointed the role of first aid assistant.

44. I draw here on Saba Mahmood’s critique of the analytical limits of liberal conceptions of agency, which equate agency with processes of subverting or opposing structures of domination and social norms in pursuit of autonomy and self-interest, ignoring the various ways in which dominant norms are “inhabited,” lived, or aspired to. See Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, 2005), 22–23, 29, 153–88.

45. Regulations for pioneer expeditions published in Cutezătorii, May 15, 1969.

46. In general, my analysis is based on diaries produced by teams whose members I could interview in order to enable a comparative perspective on the expedition and the diary.

47. See Cutezătorii, March 18, 1971. The organizers did not clarify how the distinction between child and adult productions would be made. In the early years of the competition, expedition members were also required to mail the diary to the national jury in Bucharest on the last day of their expedition from the first locality with a post office.

48. A.M., interview, Năpradea, Sălaj, July 2010. A.M. is a teacher of geography in the village of Năpradea, Sălaj.

49. S.V., interview, Baia-Mare, June 2010. S.V. was a teacher of Romanian in Baia-Mare.

50. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), 185.

51. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 36–76.

52. Movies included American series such as Mannix in the early 1970s.

53. Interviews often confirmed such memorable episodes, indicating that discursive representations were not mere fabrications even when they were cast in recognizable socialist frameworks of values and morality.

54. On the distinctively lyrical character of Ceaușescu’s ideological regime, see Paul Cernat’s contributions in Paul Cernat et al., Explorări in comunismul românesc. vol. 1, 2, 3 (Iasi, 2004, 2005, 2008).

55. As we will see later, instances of ideological clumsiness were flagged by jury members and edited on publication in the pioneer press, but were rarely penalized. On the contrary, many teams with flagged passages went on to receive national awards.

56. Archive of the “Sports and Tourism Club” of the former Pioneer Palace, Bucharest [hereafter, APPB]. Team “Flora,” Târgovişte, “Diary of Expedition along River Dâmboviţa,” (1989). The materials in this archive were consulted courtesy of Victor Constantinescu, administrator of the “Sports and Tourism” club.

57. APPB, Team “Piatra Piţigoiului” (The Magic Stone), Baia-Mare, “Diary of Ethnographic Expedition in Ţara Lăpuşului” (1973).

58. Ibid.

59. Most scholarship on ideological practices for youth focuses on their indoctrinating effect. See Paul Cernat et al., Explorări; Radina Vučetić, “ABC textbooks and Ideological Indoctrination of Children: ‘Socialism Tailor-made for Man’ or ‘Child Tailor-made for Socialism’?,” in Slobodan Naumović and Miroslav Jovanović, eds., Childhood in South East Europe: Historical Perspectives on Growing Up in the 19th and 20th Century (Münster, 2004).

60. C.M. (b. 1973), email interview, June 2013.

61. For an analysis of the process of learning to “speak Bolshevik” in Stalin’s Russia, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 198–237. This classic study revolutionized approaches to ideology by exploring both its hegemony and everyday uses.

62. See, for example, the travel guides authored by members of the national jury: Vlǎduţiu, Ion, Turism cu manualul de etnografie (Bucharest, 1976)Google Scholar; Almaş, Dumitru and Scurtu, Ioan, Turism cu manualul de istorie (Bucharest, 1973)Google Scholar.

63. Popescu, Ilie, “Dacia Felix:” 35 de ani de istorie si turism, 1972–2007 (Zalǎu, 2007), 12–13Google Scholar.

64. Ilie Popescu, a teacher of history who led team “Dacia-Felix” (Sǎlaj), collaborated closely with his colleague from a neighboring village, Aurel Medve, who led team “Samus 2000,” and with fellow historian Viorel Manolescu, leader of team “Sargedava” (Hunedoara). Popescu and Manolescu had been college friends and shared an interest in ethnography and Daco-Roman history, helping each other design routes throughout the 1970s and 80s.

65. Team “Dacia Felix,” Jurnal de Bord al echipajului “Dacia-Felix” (1973), 5, 9–10. Archive of the “History and Tourism School Club, 1972–2007,” [hereafter ACS], village Chendrea, Sǎlaj county. Materials in this archive were consulted curtsey of Ilie Popescu, who ran the club and collected the materials.

66. I visited the school exhibition in the village Chendrea in Salaj in the summer of 2010, when I was conducting interviews with former team members. The endurance of the exhibition is more important for the purposes of this study than the actual value of the exhibits (whether they are genuine Dacian and Roman artifacts), being testimony to the importance participants attached to pioneer expeditions and their accomplishments (awards, collections, diaries, etc.).

67. ACS, Team “Dacia Felix,” Jurnal de Bord al echipajului “Dacia-Felix” (1988 and 1989).

68. The edition mentioned in the pioneers’ diary is Romulus Vuia, Studii de etnografie si folclor, vol 1 (Bucharest, 1975).

69. Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

70. APPB, Team “Piatra Piţigoiului,” (1973).

71. Excerpts from the diary were published in Cutezătorii, January 9, 1975. The team won both “The Golden Pen,” the award for the best written diary, and “The Golden Compass,” the highest national award of the competition, being rewarded with a group trip to the Soviet Union.

72. Group interview with members of the team “Piatra Piţigoiului,” Baia-Mare, June 2010. The respondent is Cristi, quoted previously in this article. The fact that György Makara, a painter and teacher of drawing who led the team in the 1970s, could gather most of his former pupils for the interview thirty years after the events is testimony to the enduring closeness of the group.

73. Ibid.

74. APPB, Team “Piatra Piţigoiului,” (1973).

75. Victor Constantinescu, interview, Bucharest, March 2009. A number of former organizers petitioned the Ministry of Education for approval to launch a revamped national competition featuring new awards but remaining largely modeled on the goals of patriotic and scientific education popularized under socialism.

76. Many of these events, such as the thematic summer camp “The Dacians and the Romans,” where children dress up as ancient warriors and re-enact historic battles, are organized by younger generations of teachers, who were themselves pioneers in the 1970s and 80s.