According to the conventional knowledge developed in the West during the Cold War, Romania was more often than not an exception, at odds not only with the Soviet Union, but also with the other satellites. From a country envied by the" fraternal" states and applauded by the opposite camp because of its reorientation toward the West in the 1960s, Romania turned by the end of the 1980s into a discredited dictatorship with a rotten economy and the lowest living standards in Europe, with the possible exception of Albania. At the time when perestroika and glasnost stirred the winds of change throughout the Eastem bloc, Romania became an autarchic communist polity, resisting any structural transformation. Although the population endured in silence under the regime--critical attitudes and civic initiatives by opposition groups in Romania were the least significant when compared to such actions in the other countries

'of Eastern Europe+ ommunism collapsed during the same" miraculous year." With the unexpected revolution in December, Romanians witnessed the passing of a historical epoch without having much knowledge about it. Memory-based dissident versions of postwar historical events, overlooked or misinterpreted in official narratives, appeared long before 1989 in those countries in the Eastern bloc where structured opposition developed. In communist Romania, given the absence of noticeable civil society nuclei, only some family circles preserved the memory of the forbidden past. Thus, no alternative narratives to the official version of the postwar history emerged from inside the country, while those articulated outside remained largely inaccessible. If Romanians did not know until 1989 how to make sense of their past under communism,'looking retrospectively twenty years later, one can observe the

There are interesting differences among the former communist countries with regard to the use of concepts such as" socialism" or" communism" in reference to the pre-1989 past. In some countries, such as Bulgaria, the term" socialism" prevailed in public use, even after 1989. This term was the self-referential definition of the" old regimes," which considered that they had al-