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Tismaneanu, Vladimir
3 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.
Vladimir Tismaneanu on concentration camps and the Gulag
During the Angelus prayers at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence, Pope Benedict XVI last Sunday described the Nazi concentration camps as "symbols of hell on earth". He should have mentioned the Soviet Gulag as well, writes political expert Vladimir Tismaneanu in the daily Evenimentul Zilei: "23 August is the seventieth anniversary of the fateful embrace of Bolshevism and Nazism, namely the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (in reality the Hitler-Stalin pact). This was not a temporary, opportunist alliance, but a more profound one ... . The Prague Declaration proposes declaring this fateful day 'A day of memorial for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism'. ...The signing of the Prague Declaration seems to me a necessary gesture of solidarity with those who suffered under the repressions. Equally we do not have the right two decades after the revolution of 1989 to forget what these two totalitarian dictatorships meant, the twin brothers of genocide, communism and fascism. European conscience has an obligation to confront ... the memories of the camps, the prisons, the mass deportations and to remember the millions of victims of these totalitarian experiments. ... In the Gulag the masses were not liquidated using technology as they were in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen, but by starvation, physical exhaustion and the systematic destruction of their power to resist. Both systems gave rise to hate and were based on contempt for individuals and their rights."
» full article (external link, Romanian)
More from the press review on the subject » History, » Remembrance culture, » Germany, » Russia, » Europe, » Eastern Europe, » Western Europe, » Romania
How to deal with ex-informers
In an open letter, the Romanian-German writer Herta Müller recently criticised the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) in Berlin for inviting as speakers Romanian intellectuals who worked for the communist secret service Securitate. The political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu calls for the integration of the accused: "In no other country of Eastern Europe has there been such an obvious regrouping of the nomenclatura and such a vehement offensive against supporters of an open society as in Romania. A lustration would have solved this problem. ... But since things look different in reality we must decide what to do with the ex-informers. ... Do they have a moral right to participate in social institutions? ... The ICR programme is based on the rules of academic competition, not on political biographies. Of course, an informer past is repulsive to anyone with any sense of morality. But the ICR is not a court of morals. And Herta Müller might have taken a welcome and therapeutic step if she had asked the two ex-informers what they thought about using their position as cultural authorities to return to the leading ranks of public life."
» full article (external link, Romanian)
More from the press review on the subject » Cultural Policy, » History, » Germany, » Romania
Opening files of the Romanian secret police
More than 16 years after the end of Communism, Romanians are getting a look at the work of the infamous 'Securitate'. Some 1.3 million files of the secret police will be opened gradually. Vladimir Tismaneanu, appointed by Romanian President Traian Basescu last April to head the commission for investigating the communist dictatorship in Romania, pleads for a clear disclosure of secret police collaborators. "We are waging a war against amnesia, and it's the right thing to do," says Tismaneanu, who is also professor of politics at the University of Maryland in the USA. "Anyone who calls this a witch hunt just does not get it. 'Witches' were innocent women who were denounced, tortured and often murdered using insane rituals. But secret service informers worked actively for an evil cause... It is high time to open the files of all today's powerful figures and politicians. We need total clarity and the whole truth. The net of lies that we are dealing with today is closing in... Such an atmosphere of ambiguity nourishes the growth of populism and other demagogical authoritarianisms."
» full article (external link, Polish)
More from the press review on the subject » Crime and Law, » History, » Romania
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