Authors

Mihai Stelian Rusu¹;  ¹ Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania

Discussion

Public monuments constitute powerful means of inscribing space with ideological meanings. These material artefacts are fundamental for constructing memorial landscapes that legitimate a political regime. During the four decades of state-socialism in Romania (1948–1989), the country’s territory was marked with Soviet war memorials and monuments dedicated to the Red Army, Soviet and domestic communist leaders, and figures from the Romanian workers’ movement pantheon of heroes. After the regime change of 1989, these ideological statements written in stone or cast in bronze became unwanted residua of the defunct regime. In this paper, I investigate the monumental politics of these rubbles of memory by charting their memorial afterlives during the protracted period of postsocialist transformations in Romania. Drawing on scholarship from memory studies and political geography, I construct a typology of multiple memorial fates suffered by the communist monuments in postcommunist Romania, ranging from complete annihilation, through abandonment and relocation, to adaptation and in situ preservation. The typology, which includes several subtypes, is illustrated with case studies of specific monuments, statues, and busts from numerous places from Romania. The paper concludes by discussing how the memory of the past embedded in material artefacts is negotiated following a regime change and highlights the varieties of communist statues’ memorial afterlives.