-
5. War Commemorations and State Propaganda under Dictatorship: From the Crusade against Bolshevism to Ceauşescu’s Cult of Personality, 1940–1989
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In response to your petition registered with the number 63.110/1 941, which requests the approval to raise a monument in memory of your son fallen for the Fatherland in the battles around Odessa, we have the honor of letting you know that for the moment, the building of Monuments for Heroes is suspended, until new orders. —Ministry of Education (1941)1 Mărăşeşti will remain for eternity the symbol of the Romanian people’s heroism, the great moral trait that today finds its brilliant illustration in the work full of enthusiasm undertaken by the proletariat in our fatherland, under the leadership of the Party, on the wide front of building socialism. —“The Semi-Centenary of Mărăşeşti and Oituz” (1968)2 5 War Commemorations and State Propaganda under Dictatorship From the Crusade against Bolshevism to Ceauşescu’s Cult of Personality, 1940–1989 In the fall of 1941,Nicolae Gheorghe Dumitrescu, a self-described devoted citizen from the village of Punghina, wrote to the Minister of Education to request permission for building a memorial to his son. Dumitrescu was the father of a lieutenant who had died while fighting in the bloody campaigns around Odessa at the beginning of Romania’s invasion of the Soviet Union on the side of the Nazis. The Ministry’s War Commemorations and State Propaganda under Dictatorship 145 response was polite but unequivocal. No such monuments were to be erected by families for the moment, until a new law for building commemorative markers was passed. Furthermore, the bodies of those who perished fighting in the war were under the authority of the Ministry of War, and their policy was crystal clear. All combatants would be buried with military honors at (or close to) the place where they had perished, in military cemeteries assembled by the army.3Families were instructed that they were not to put up any funerary markers that identified their departed ones as having perished in the war. If in World War I the Romanian state was unprepared to deal with the massive deaths and their damaging psychological impact for the multitudes of families and communities directly affected by these losses, the regime of Ion Antonescu (1882–1946) in World War II began combat fully prepared to control the process of burying, mourning, and commemorating the soldiers who died in the war. Legislation passed initially by Charles II in 19384 and then revised slightly by the Antonescu government in 19415was detailed and placed responsibility for war commemorations on the shoulders of the state, to the detriment of vernacular activities. Due to this legislation and the nature of the fighting, with the troops moving quickly through large swaths of territory and fighting predominantly on soil beyond the authority of the Romanian state,6most of those who perished fighting in the Romanian army, whether on the side of the Nazis (21 June 1941–23August 1944) or on the side of the Soviets (23 August 1944–8 May 1945),had their earthly remains buried on foreign ground: in the East on Soviet soil, from Ukraine and Transnistria to deep into the Russian steppe, as far as Stalingrad; or in the West, from Hungary to the Tatra Mountains in Czechoslovakia. These conditions throughout World War II forced families and local communities into a secondary role in terms of constructing war commemorative discourses. The new regulations also placed these actors in the position of having to construct clandestine counter-memories to the official ones. The presence of the Soviet armies as “liberators” starting in 1944 in Romania and other eastern European countries also insured that the memory of World War II would be shaped in keeping with the political goals of the Soviet Union. In the first postwar decade the role of the Soviets was overpowering, but by no means uniform. Statues to Soviet soldiers went up everywhere in the area, and 9 May became an official holiday in all of these countries, with parades and other rituals to demonstrate their loyalty to the Soviet Union. But behind this uniform façade there were important national and regional nuances. How various populations and armies had behaved during the war vis-à-vis the Soviets (and to some extent the Nazis) did make a difference in how commemorative discourses developed. This chapter traces the impact of the Soviets for how the Romanian state began to engage the memory of World War II, especially [3.238.233.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:19...