*This article came into existence as a working paper delivered for the seminar on Comparative International Development at Johns Hopkins University, where it benefited from intense scrutiny; I am especially grateful for the comments of Stephen Bunker, Christopher Chase-Dunn, David Cohen, Ashraf Ghani, David Harvey, Germaine Hoston, Melvin Kohn, Emily Martin, Jessica Pittman, and Mack Walker. Thus fortified, it was delivered to audiences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley. I wish to acknowledge helpful comments from participants in those audiences, as well as from friends and colleagues, including Andrew Abbott, Daniel Chirot, Raymond Grew, David Kideckel, Gail Kligman, Jane Schneider, Eric Wolf, and Susan Woodward. The several Romanian scholars with whom I discussed the events recounted in this paper bear no responsibility for my interpretation, which I developed well after the fact. I also acknowledge the support of IREX, which funded not only the research that included this project but also two other research trips to Romania.

1. Quoted in Robert R. King, History of the Romanian Communist Party (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1980), p. 1.

2. Three recent examples are István Rév, “Local Autonomy or Centralism—When Was the Original Sin Committed?”International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 8 (1984), pp. 38-63; H. Gordon Skilling, “The Muse of History, 1984: History, Historians, and Politics in Communist Czechoslovakia,”Cross Currents (1984), pp. 29-47, and Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, “The Rise and Decline of Official Marxist Historiography in Poland, 1945-1980,”Slavic Review 44:4 (1985), pp. 663-680. An entire session was devoted to the subject of Czech historiography at the Third World Congress of Soviet and East European Studies, in 1985. See also Mack Walker, “Die Neuere Geschichtsschreibung in der DDR” (unpublished lecture, 1983). For some earlier examples, see Cyril E. Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History: Soviet Interpretations of Russia's Past (New York: Praeger, 1956); Vlad Georgescu, Politicăşi Istorie: Cazul Comuniştilor Români 1944-1977 (Munich: Jon Dumitru, 1983); Nancy Whittier Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: MIT, 1971); Robert R. King, Minorities under Communism: Nationalities as a Source of Tension among Balkan Communist States (Cambridge: Harvard, 1973), chapters 9-11; and Michael J. Rura, Reinterpretation of History as a Method for Furthering Communism in Rumania: a Study in Comparative Historiography (Washington, DC: Georgetown, 1961).

3. This is a main objective of Nancy Heer's book, Politics and History, for example.

4. A notable exception to the concern with legitimacy or `historical truth' is Walker, “Neuere Geschichtsschreibung.”

5. Valkenier, “Rise and Decline,” p. 663.

6. A burgeoning literature on the “invention of tradition” and the “production of history” makes these points for various non-socialist societies. See, for example, Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Atieno Adhiambo, “The Production of History in Kenya: the Mau Mau Debate,” David William Cohen, “The Production of History,” and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “So Spoke the Muffled: Notes on the Conditions of Possibility of the Socio-historical Narrative,” all three being unpublished papers written for the Fifth International Roundtable in Anthropology and History (Paris, 1986).

7. Paul Murray Kendall, Richard the Third (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955), appendix II; Marc Ferro, L'Histoire sous Surveillance: Science et Conscience de l'Histoire (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1985), pp. 24-25; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

8. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 412-453.

9. Because the terms used by participants are central to my argument, I have adhered strictly to the following conventions. I have narrowed the permissible translations of the Romanian word răscoală—which covers the meanings of the English words “rebellion,”“uprising,” and “revolt”—to “uprising” and will employ this word whenever I am paraphrasing someone who used Romanian răscoală. I employ “revolution” in paraphrasing those who used the Romanian word revoluţie. To keep the voice of narrator distinct from that of the actors, I use “revolt” or “rebellion” when I summarize on my own account.

10. King, Romanian Communist Party, p. 171.

11. The bibliography on Horea's revolt is very large. In the interests of maintaining a semblance of distance from the persons involved in the present dispute, however, I neither name nor refer to the works of the principal participants. The following abbreviated bibliography may prove useful to those interested in Horea: Gheorghe Bartoş, Răscoala lui Horea: Bibliografie Analitică (Bucharest: Ed. Ştiinţificăşi Enciclopedică, 1976); Florian Dudaş, Răscoala lui Horea in Tradiţia Poporului (Bucharest: Ed. Albatros, 1984); Nicolae Densuşianu, Revoluţiunea lui Horea in Transylvania şi Ungaria 1784-1785 (Bucharest: Göbl, 1884); Nicolae Edroiu, Horea's Uprising: the 1784 Romanian Peasants' Revolt of Transylvania (Bucharest: Ed. Ştiinţificăşi Enciclopedică, 1978); Nicolae Edroiu and Pompiliu Teodor, eds., Răscoala lui Horea: Studii şi Interpretări Istorice (Cluj: Dacia, 1984); Mircea Muşat and Ion Ardeleanu, “Increasing Assertion of National Awareness and State Unity, `Horea': a Symbol of Dacia's Revival,” in From Ancient Dacia to Modern Romania (Bucharest: Ed. Ştiinţificăşi Enciclopedică, 1985), pp. 200-238; Paul A. Shapiro, “The Horia Rebellion in Transylvania, 1784-1785,” in Columbia Essays in International Affairs (1971), pp. 65-93; Katherine Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp. 93-106.

12. To make it easier for readers to follow, I might point out that these names stand for Professor Uprising and Professor Revolution.

13. The manner of my participation made it almost impossible for me to interview members of the audience, hence I cannot be sure of its composition and can only report the guesses of those around me and of the conference organizer.

14. The welcoming speech addressed the audience as “men of science, art, and culture, researchers into the history of the people and the Party, museum personnel, educators from around the county.”

15. Throughout parts of the session, the buzz of conversation in the room was growing, but I learned that this did not necessarily signify inattention when I overheard the exchange of three people sitting behind me, who turned out to be subengineers in mining: “Who's he citing now?”“Marx. He's saying it's a revolution if there's an ultimatum.” This suggested that the outlines of the argument, if not, perhaps, all its obscure details, were obvious to at least some of the nonspecialist crowd. During the break, however, a random conversation confirmed that others in the crowd were completely unaware of the theoretical significance of the argument over uprising or revolution (my victim being a history teacher from the nurses' aides' school, who had found R's idea of revolution a convincing formula).

16. This final Academy symposium marked what many on the “uprising” side saw as the defeat of the “revolutionary” position. Organized by Professor R, the session included papers by several highly respected scholars, their papers all titled with “revolution” in the printed program (it emerged that Professor R had set the titles). Presiding over the session was the newly elected head of the Romanian Academy. To Professor R's chagrin, only his personal henchman and himself upheld the argument for revolution, the others adhering to the other view and speaking of “uprising” despite their titles.

17. Compare the use of “inside” and “outside” meanings by Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985).

18. Not only is there a long section summarizing Romanian history right in the heart of the 1974 Communist Party platform, but in the early 1980s President Ceauşescu called the first national-level meeting of historians, which he addressed as the “historians' [ideological] front.”

19. Though I know nothing about the means for it, a similar change was successfully made in the 1950s, when the 1821 movement led by Tudor Vladimirescu—long referred to as an uprising—was reprocessed into a revolution, a label that has stuck. Thus, there was a precedent for the current move, however differently motivated the two instances might have been.

20. In two cases, mentioned below, I counted as “revolutionaries” persons who also appeared in print with “uprising,” the latter in contexts where I believe other usage was specifically suppressed. I also counted as “uprising” one person whose public speech avoided all terms but who in conversation with me repeatedly used “uprising.”

21. There are a large number of institutions in Romania to which professional historians may be attached—e.g., the regular history institutes, the history institute of the Communist Party, the institute for military history, archives, university positions, and museums, including regional and Party museums. They pertain to a variety of higher administrative organs.

22. Arrayed in a 2×2 table—leaving off those whose usage oscillated—these data produce a chi-square of 22.21, p <.001.

23. Historians have especially visible evidence of this militarization. At five-year intervals a bibliography of historical publications appears, with topic headings that have been almost constant through four sets; in the volume for 1974-79, one of the few additions was a category for military history.

24. I am indebted to Ashraf Ghani for emphasizing this point.

25. The inconsistencies include not only Professor R's attempt to incorporate the peasantry while making Horea a kind of non-peasant but the peculiarity that Horea's event would not qualify as a revolution by any accepted Marxist definition (see below, p. 206.) These inconsistencies show how successful a symbol Horea is, because he allows room for many disparate points of view.

26. I owe this interpretation to a Bucharest scholar. I might add that evidence of the redefinition of history's object and of its transformation into “the entire people” is the founding of a new historical journal by that name in 1984.

27. This joke is reported in two emigré publications (Lupta and the Munich based Săptămîna müncheneză). The “agrarian revolution” it refers to is from a slogan in the campaign to develop agricultural production. In my view, the joke illustrates both the significance of the peasantry (and the question of its support for the regime) and the importance to the Party of eliminating the idea of spontaneous “uprising” from popular parlance.

28. New maps will do as well. During my stay, there was much excitement over a book that appeared with many maps showing Romanians distributed according to older territorial borders; see Ilie Ceauşescu, Transilvania: Străvechi Pămînt Românesc (Bucharest: Ed. Militară, 1984). In Romania, anything implying territory is readily understood as controversial.

29. The argument for revolution contains an anti-Hungarian statement of another sort as well: if Horea's movement is presented as a national movement, then it is no longer possible to argue that all members of the exploited groups joined to resist oppression in “brotherly” struggle, without regard for national differences, as had been argued in earlier texts; see, for example, Mihail Roller, ed., Istoria R.P.R.: Manual pentru Învăţămînt Mediu (Bucharest: Ed. de Stat Didacticăşi Pedagogică, 1952), p. 275. Thus, Hungarians are no longer revolutionary “brothers.”

30. Horea was not the only locus of anti-Hungarian scholarly activity in the 1980s; other examples can be found in the publication România Literară 49 and 51 (December 1984) and, earlier, in such writings as Ion Lăncrănjan's Cuvînt despre Transilvania (Bucharest: Ed. Sport-Turism, 1982).

31. I use the word “indigenist” to refer to arguments taking a protocronist line.

32. East German historiography contains an argument about the 1525 Peasant War, which, like the argument over Horea, contains a hidden claim that German society is more progressive than the Soviet Union; see Walker, “Neuere Geschichtsschreibung.”

33. Skeptics might wish to look at King's account of Bulgaria's pursuing very major international relations with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and the Warsaw Pact through the medium of historical argumentation, Minorities under Communism, pp. 187-219. King also offers (p. 239) precedent for historical arguments in which a single word was the basis for a Soviet denunciation.

34. For a good example of this, see Milan Kundera's “The Tragedy of Central Europe,”New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984, pp. 33-37.

35. Colleagues with whom I have discussed this case have asked whether, as is often true in other instances, this historical argument really is about alternative images of socialist society. I do not believe so. It is definitely about the present, but only in the ways suggested above. That is, the discussion has almost entirely to do with the nation and not with socialist change.

36. I can attest to Horea's existence in peasant minds in some village communities, as well as among urban populations.

37. Although the audience most affected by this display is not large, for the case at hand, I would argue that the repetition of events such as Horea's celebration involving other heroes in other places will draw in a fairly large proportion of Romanians, eventually, affecting them in a similar way.

38. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 34, and the rest of his discussion of the “spectacle of the scaffold” (pp. 32-69).

39. A concise argument linking state weakness with apparent “despotism” and state use of violence is found in Gerd Spittler, “Administration in a Peasant State,”Sociologia Ruralis 23 (1983), pp. 134-136. For another argument on the weakness of socialist states that differs from mine in its particulars, see Jan Gross, “East Central Europe, 1938-1948—Themes for Interpretation” (paper presented at the conference on The Effects of Communism on Economic and Social Development: Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective, Bologna, Johns Hopkins SAIS Center, June 1986), pp. 16-20.

40. Felipe Garcia Casals, The Syncretic Society (White Plains: Sharpe, 1980), pp. 34-35.

41. The state's relative weakness varies from one socialist regime to another, as is evident in the recent histories of the different East European countries.

42. These auxiliary disciplines gained from the rise of engineering either because the definition of “science” spills over into all fields that can lay claim to it, or more specifically because an increase in resort to “western” technique necessitates protecting the rest of society from contamination by it. This requires fortifying the ideological apparatus, but that too rests on a notion of “science” for its justification.

43. Zygmunt Bauman argues similarly for the mutual reinforcement of their knowledge-based claims to legitimacy on the part of intellectuals and Party elite; see “Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change,”Eastern European Politics and Societies 1:2 (1987), pp. 178-181.

44. See Charles F. Sabel and David Stark, “Planning, Politics, and Shop-floor Power: Hidden Forms of Bargaining in Soviet-imposed State-socialist Societies,”Politics and Society 11 (1982), pp. 439-475.

45. János Kornai, Economics of Shortage (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980). This shortage of labor is in part an outcome of the constant tendency for expansion, as managers bargain for investments under a regimen of “soft budget constraints.”

46. Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and State Socialism (London: Verso, 1985), p. 164.

47. See Richard M. Emerson, “Power-dependence Relations,”American Sociological Review 27 (1962), pp. 31-40.

48. See also C. A. P. Binns, “The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Development of the Soviet Ceremonial System,”Man 14 (1979), pp. 585-606; 15 (1980), pp. 170-187.

49. Indeed, many historians refer to the Calendar Strategy of publication: determine your topics by opening your calendar, not by pursuing the themes that interest you.

50. Making sense of this and of the example in the next paragraph requires that we note what is entailed in so-called “decentralization” and “enterprise incentives” in contemporary Romania. In the economic crisis, state subsidies to various sorts of enterprises, especially in the cultural field, have been reduced and the directors subjected to insistent financial pressure. Such organizations as museums, theatres, and libraries are now expected to pay their own way through their receipts. Personnel will be cut if they fail to do so.

51. The term “intellectuals” occurs throughout my discussion. I do not use it analytically, which would require me to give it a rigorous definition, nor do I take on the difficult job of trying to distinguish “intellectuals” from “cadres” (“experts” and “reds”), often entangled in the same person. My aim here not being theoretical advance on this question, I use the term more or less as East Europeans do themselves, to mean persons with some sort of university education.

52. Many persons made no use of the opportunities in Horea's celebration, and not all who figured in the events did so opportunistically. Professor U, it will be remembered, published his book on Horea several years before the bicentennial; he did not enter directly into the subsequent festivities, and he expressed his concern that Horea be captured for science only when it seemed that science was about to lose him. Given widespread opportunistic use of Horea, many were drawn into the fray who would otherwise have gone about their business.

53. Kenneth Jowitt suggests something of this in voicing his suspicion that there may be a few die-hard “hidden Marxists” around that very journal. See his contribution to Vlad Georgescu's “Romania 1985: Round Table,”Journal of the Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences 8-9 (1986), p. 45.

54. A historian to whom I suggested this view of the near-twin articles replied, “That presupposes, erroneously, that performances in our country are orderly.” (He thereby confirmed my argument about state weakness.) I nonetheless cannot believe that this pattern reflects only the chaos of Romanian daily life. Someone must have been aware that one word was being exchanged for another. That the second army general has at least two other publications calling the event a revolution suggests to me that this term was excised from his article in the Central Committee journal; but I might be wrong.

55. I argue this point more fully in my manuscript Historians Construct the Nation (in progress).

56. See also King, Minorities under Communism, pp. 212-214 for another example of historical discourse exceeding the bounds of the politicians' control.

57. Some version of this view is to be found in L. G. Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia: an Essay in the Social Structure and Roles of Soviet Intellectuals During the 1960s (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 108-109; Marc Rakovski, Towards an East European Marxism (London: Allison & Busby, 1978), p. 44; and Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economy, and Society (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1985), pp. 144-150.

58. This is more or less the position of Cyril Black, Rewriting Russian History; Nancy Whittier Heer, Politics and History; and Jean Woodall, The Socialist Corporation and Technocratic Power: the Polish United Workers' Party, Industrial Organization and Workforce Control 1958-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).

59. See pp. 212-213, above.

60. Thomas A. Baylis, The Technical Intelligentsia and the East German Elite: Legitimacy and Social Change in Mature Communism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 18. The obvious contrast is, of course, with Poland in the late 1970s.

61. This may not be what scholars have in mind when they speak of “legitimacy” in socialist systems. Germaine Hoston has suggested to me that precisely in this respect, the way analysts of socialism customarily invoke legitimacy is ethnocentric. In reference to western societies, she argues, the concept of legitimacy has a conservative bias, being used to imply that as long as government is not overthrown, it may be presumed to have the support of the citizenry and is therefore legitimate. When applied to socialism, however, this presumption is absent; efforts go to asking why the citizenry does not overthrow its obviously illegitimate regime. My phrasing in the text restores symmetry to how “legitimacy” is used.

62. Both of these arguments are made by Shafir, Romania, pp. 132 and 148-150, among others.

Was the Peasant Uprising a Revolution? the Meanings of a Struggle Over the Past

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