Narrating Communist Repression in and Outside the Courtroom: The Case of Former Prison Commander Alexandru Vișinescu and its Resonance with (Societally) Available ‘Narrative Worlds’

Abstract

In 2016, Alexandru Vișinescu was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his actions as a prison commander five decades earlier. This article explores the epistemic function of this “landmark case” by contrasting the judicial narrative with the narratives of the participants in the trial, i.e., the civil parties, and spectators, i.e., the university students representing the younger generation. The accounts of the survivors’ families, while showing great similarities with the judicial account, considerably broaden the setting and locus of responsibility and place Vișinescu's story in the larger context of communist repression. University students, by contrast, have very limited knowledge of the adjudicated events, reflecting their de-contextualised understanding of the past. This understanding is an expression of what I call the available narrative world, including publicly accessible narratives and discourses, but also subjective stories from the private sphere. In the Romanian context, characterised by perpetuated silences about the communist past, the narrative world available to university students is restricted and offers little resonance for the judicial narrative, making its integration into existing knowledge structures difficult. Consequently, I argue that the reception and acceptance of judicial narratives varies according to their resonance with societally available narrative worlds.

Introduction

Amongst the large variety of mechanisms to confront a violent past, criminal trials take a prominent role. In contrast to Hannah Arendt's statement that “[t]he purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else” (1963: 254), writings in the field of critical legal studies, law and literature or transitional justice draw attention to courtrooms as sites where a particular account of past injustices is produced. From this perspective, courts engage in history writing (Wilson, 2011), with trials serving as “an epistemic engine” (Laudan, 2006: 2) and judgments advancing an official account of events that lay claim to truth. This legal “truth”, in turn, may serve as an account and “affirms respect for the law, reinforces a moral consensus, narrates history, and educates the public” (Drumbl, 2007: 12). These, at least, are the normative assumptions attached to criminal trials in their capacity as epistemic engines. Yet, “there has been a notable dearth of empirical grounding” (Sander, 2019: 8) to these assumptions, especially in the context of national proceedings ¹ .

Addressing this gap, the present article interrogates the epistemic function of the court case against Alexandru Vișinescu, who was the commander of the Râmnicu Sărat Penitentiary (hereafter, ‘R.S.’) between 1956 and 1963. Five decades later, Vișinescu was sentenced to 20 years in prison for inhumane treatment of political prisoners in 2015 by the Bucharest Appellate Court. Because he was the first individual condemned for crimes committed during the first two decades of the communist regime, the case attracted widespread media attention in and outside country with some dubbing it even as “Romanian Nuremberg” (BBC, 2015). Taking this “landmark case” (ibid.) as a starting point, I examine if and how the judicial narrative about the events at ‘R.S.’ was received in and outside the courtroom in order to interrogate a court's ability to provide a narrative that appeals to and educates the public.

More specifically, I excavate the judicial narrative as it appears in the final judgment given on 10 February 2016 and scrutinize if the judicial narrative coincides, on one hand, with the narratives by the survivor's families, who actively participated in the trial as civil parties. In total, the Court granted civil party status to three women, who are the granddaughter and daughter (Carmen), widow (Valentina) and sister of former political prisoners. The present article refers to interviews I conducted with Valentina, Carmen and her sister Laura who was a witness in the trial ² . On the other hand, I contrast the judicial narrative with the accounts of today's university students who serve as a proxy for the young generation in Romania. They neither have a direct experience with the communist regime nor the events at ‘R.S.’, but are facing various narratives of that period in their everyday encounters (Petre, 2012). Here, I draw on interviews with 13 students from different faculties conducted between 2017 and 2018, i.e., relatively close to Vișinescu's conviction.

Examining and juxtaposing these three different sets of narratives, I supplement the many contributions that focus on the judicial narrative and its limitations, or on active participants such as judges, prosecutors or victims. Thus, as Eltringham (2012: 433) has observed, courtroom ethnography usually focuses on “active, speaking participants and ignores silent, passive spectators”. However, as I show, considering university students as passive spectators provides important insights into how judicial narratives are received, listened and reacted to outside the courtroom. My analysis reveals that the epistemic potential of trials is not only dependent on the form and content of the judicial narrative and its transmission. Rather, it depends on the correspondence and resonance of the judicial narrative with the narrative world available to the audience, including family stories, fictional stories, documentary plots, the repertoire of (historical) characters or the available catalogue of meta-narratives.

To unfold and empirically substantiate this argument, the article proceeds in eight sections that can be roughly grouped into three parts. The first three sections contextualize my analysis by outlining Romania's “obsessive decade” (1), the official approach towards the communist past and the perpetuation of silences about this era (2) and the methodological approach and data set (3). The following three sections delve into the analysis of the narratives put forward by the court (4), the civil parties (5) and university students (6). I show that the civil parties’ accounts are mostly consistent with the judicial narrative due to their active participation in the courtroom. Yet, they greatly expand the context and tell a story about institutionalised torture rather than an individual torturer. In contrast, the university students’ narratives focus solely on Vișinescu's brutal character and reveal an overall de-contextualised and de-politicised understanding of the communist past, which reflects the knowledge conveyed to them from different sources. Beyond these insights based on the narrative plot structure, the last two sections interrogate the epistemic function of the trial by presenting my interviewees’ views on the courts’ ability to educate the public (7) and by synthesising the findings (8). In sum, I demonstrate that in the Romanian context, the narrative world available to the public is restricted and offers little resonance to the judicial narrative, making its reception and integration into existing knowledge structures difficult or even impossible.

Communist Repression in and through Political Prisons

To contextualize Vișinescu's actions, I outline the early decades that that was “the harshest period of repression under communist rule” (Grosescu, 2017: 1). This period is also known as Romania's “obsessive decade”. The term was first coined by Marin Preda (1970) in the literary sphere and later gained “wide usage in the Romanian public discourse in designating the traumas of the 1950s inflicted by communist authorities in their bid to transform Romanian society into a socialist regime” (Rusu, 2017: 1267). Thus, after the Second World War, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej became the first General Secretary of the Communist Party and ruled the country through “neo-Stalinism” and the repression of so-called “class enemies”, including a variety of groups and individuals such as former ministers and officers, leaders and members of political parties, ethnic and religious minorities, the clergy, doctors, or teachers and students (Deletant, 2019).

Between 1948 and 1964, up to 600,000 political prisoners were detained in more than 120 prisons and detention centre's all over the country (Rusu, 2015). The object of those prisons was the “annihilation of individual will and of the prisoners’ capacity to (re)act” (Dobre, 2012: 45) through a generalised system of life-threatening deprivations of basic needs and repression. Repression also aimed at transforming society into a socialist regime. The persecution of the elite and middle classes and the peasantry altered the social structure and extinguished resistance. Peasants resisting forced collectivisation represented about one-third of the prisoners (Ciobanu, 2021).

Against the backdrop of this nationwide detention system, ‘R.S.’ was known as the “prison of silence”. Initially used as a transit station for political prisoners, later the most famous members of the historical political parties or clergymen were imprisoned in ‘R.S.’ for a longer period of time (Ciobanu, 2021). From the mid-1950s, i.e., during Vișinescu's active time as prison commander, this included members of various religious sects, former democratic leaders, or previously disgraced members of the regime such as the husband of Valentina, one of the civil parties to the trial. In 1956, the Army General and Deputy Minister at the Ministry of National Defence was released from all ranks and service because he publicly advocated for reforms after Stalin's death. Later, he was incarcerated for his novel Gulliver that eventually became evidence in Vișinescu's trial. Both the grandfather and father of Carmen and Laura, by contrast, were famous members of the Peasant Party that opposed Sovietization in the mid-1940s. When the communists took power, the party was dissolved and its members were sent to prison.

When Gheorghiu-Dej issued a general amnesty in 1964, the surviving prisoners were released and many of the political prisons such as ‘R.S.’ abolished. This marked “the transition from the phase of violent repression through physical incarceration and corporal annihilation, towards the phase of social control through mass surveillance” (Rusu, 2015: 3). Yet, the destruction of the (old) elite and middle class or the dislocation of peasants from the land, as well as the widespread of fear and trauma, set the course for the remaining decades of the regime (Deletant, 2019). When Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965, Nicolae Ceauşescu succeeded as head of the state and first consolidated and later extended the dictatorship with a pronounced personality cult. His rule ended with the December events of 1989, in which more than 1100 people were killed and 3300 wounded. The violent revolution did not lead to a decisive break with the past, but to a consolidation of the elite, who then pursued a strategy of political amnesia towards the communist past, as I show in the next section.

Perpetuated Silences in Public Space

With political power largely in the hands of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the heirs of the Communist Party, the newly formed government employed a “‘forget-and-forgive’ policy, preferring to silence the communist past” (Rusu, 2017: 1264). Only the ‘end of communism’ in December 1989 received attention as it was the “founding moment of the new political order” (Grosescu and Ursachi, 2015: 72). Because violence “rendered the judicial silence impossible” (ibid.), prosecuting individual state agents connected to the past regime seemed necessary during the first phase of transition. The accounts put forward by the courts adjudicating Romania's violent revolution, or by the former nomenclature and Securitate officers that dominated politics, located responsibility predominantly in Ceauşescu. The widespread abuses under Gheorghiu-Dej during Romania's “obsessive decade” were distorted or silenced (Ciobanu, 2021).

Amidst this politics of amnesia, documenting “traumatic experiences of communist repression, resistance, and exile in oral history projects dominated public discourse” (Pohrib, 2016: 11) in the 1990s. The accounts by former political prisoners or dissidents shared the “generalized sentiment of having experienced a human catastrophe that needed to be publicly addressed” (Ciobanu, 2021:33). Communist repression in and through political prisons was framed in terms of individual trauma, resistance and survival. However, the wide range of memoirs that entered the public sphere and related civic initiatives such as the Sighet Memorial project “failed to convince the larger population to engage in a thorough working-through of the past” (Rusu, 2017:1267) ³ .

Only after the electoral defeat of the PSD in 2004, which had ruled the country almost continuously from 1990 onwards, a shift in Romania's memory politics occurred. Particularly with the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, the country went from silencing to “mastering the past”, by which is meant “the attempt to bring a troubled past under the control of the present so that it can be held accountable by means of ‘demonisation’ or ‘criminalisation’” (Rusu, 2017: 1263). In this sense, President Băsescu, on the basis of the Commission's Final Report, officially condemned the communist regime as “illegitimate and criminal” in December 2006. While this threw light on the first two decades of the regime, it did not contribute to a thorough reappraisal of the country's past. Depicting communism as the ‘other’, i.e., alien to Romanian values and imposed by external forces, and equating communist rule with Stalinist repression, the Report provides a general narrative of trauma and resistance that disregards the institutional texture and social dynamics of the regime (Tileagă, 2018). By explaining the history of communism in exculpatory terms and distancing it from the (national) self, it further relieves the political elite and society of the burden of remembering and impedes “a travail de mémoire by ordinary citizens” (Rusu, 2017).

While the official condemnation did little to stimulate personal, institutional or societal reflections, it marked a turning point. State actors now appropriated the narrative of suffering and resistance, inserting it “into a much broader historical and cultural narrative that emphasises collective trauma and victimhood” (Ciobanu, 2021: 9). The renewed official discourse was followed by the opening of the archives containing the secret files in 2007 and the establishment of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of Romanian Exile (IICCMER) in 2009. It was further institutionalised through a “pedagogy of trauma” (Pohrib, 2016: 111), including the development of a high school textbook on Romania's communist past published in 2009 − 20 years after the fall of communism. Yet, it is an optional course that pupils can elect in their last two years of high school.

Beyond these state-sponsored initiatives, however, little has happened. This is reflected in Romania's poor judicial record in investigating communist crimes, according to which the conviction of Vișinescu and another prison commander remain isolated cases ⁴ . In this light, Tileagă (2018: 66) sees the “most important consequence” of the report in the way “the past is used to shift responsibility onto others instead of promoting a truly democratic dialogue”. The strategy of mastering the past, ultimately, has contributed not to a deeper understanding and dialogue, but to perpetuation of silences that might transform communism into a “foreign country shrouded in the veils of ignorance and forgetfulness” (Rusu, 2017: 1273). While this danger is described mainly for the younger generation, surveys show that for large parts of the Romanian population, given “their frustration with contemporary society” (Murgescu, 2012: 12), the communist past has no relevance to their lives (ibid.) nor to contemporary politics (IRI, 2018). In this context of perpetuated silences, the trial of Vișinescu and the judicial narrative about his actions provided a rare opportunity to bring knowledge about the obsessive decade into the public sphere.

About Narratives and the Available Narrative World

Narrative theory, in general, helps to examine the reproduction of an event – here, past violent crimes – in spoken, written or visual form so that it is not simply confined to the study of literature where it originated but serves as a social science methodology to assess making sense of experiences more broadly (Czarniawska, 2004). In this vein, the article is based on two premises.

First, law can be seen not only as a set of rules and policies, but also as a source of “stories, explanations, performances, linguistic exchanges – as narrative and rhetoric” (Brooks and Gerwitz, 1996: 2). Criminal trials, accordingly, can be analysed as courtroom dramas in which multiple actors, including judges, witnesses or prosecutors, contribute to the construction of a particular version of the adjudicated events that is set out in the verdict. Yet, knowledge about the events enters the courtroom only through various formal or structural filters (Douglas, 2006), according to which criminal judgments construct fragmented and distorted histories (Sander, 2019). Studies on the epistemic function of trials further emphasise that criminal law's narrow focus on individual guilt compromises the historical value of proceedings by promoting a reduced, simplified and depoliticised understanding of the events (Osiel 1995; Simpson, 2007). The form and content of judicial narratives thus affects the epistemic potential of a trial.

In addition, the social relay of judicial narratives is similarly crucial (Houge, 2019). The transmission of narratives constructed by (international) courts, and their acceptance or rejection by local communities, depends on different factors such as e.g., the context of proceedings and the legitimacy of the court or socio-psychological dynamics such as attributional biases and self-perceived victimhood (Sander, 2018). Research on the representation of trials in public discourse further highlights the influence of national politicians and local media on the adoption and interpretation of court narratives. These narratives are distorted from the perspective of other institutions and filtered through existing narratives when relayed to the public, where they compete with other versions of the past (e.g., Gordy 2013; Savelsberg et al., 2014). The present article supplements these findings by foregrounding the available narrative world as crucial for the societal and individual reception of judicial narratives.

Secondly, people use narratives to make sense of and experience events and experiences in their lives (Somers, 1994). Narratives thereby follow a creative process of (re)constructing events and experiences, adapting to the changing positions of, and available meanings to, the narrator. As Somers (1994: 614) notes, people tell stories “in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives”. How we make sense of the world and narrate events thus depends on who we are, what social position we occupy, and on the discourses and narratives available to us in the moment of telling.

The available narrative world, as I call it here and elsewhere, is decisive for individual sense-making processes and the reception and interpretation of (judicial) narratives. To this end, we draw on meanings and interpretations in our social environment and thus on the private and publicly available narratives, including family stories, fictional stories, documentary plots, the repertoire of (historical) characters or the available catalogue of meta-narratives. In the Romanian context, marked by perpetuated silences towards the communist past, the narrative world available to the public of Vișinescu's trial is limited and offers only little resonance to the judicial narrative, which makes reception and integration into existing knowledge structures difficult or even impossible.

Importantly, narratives – constructed both within and beyond courtrooms – are not explicitly laid out in a text or document; they require interpretation and are the product of inquiry. Here, the objects of inquiry are the 186-pages long final judgment against Vișinescu, i.e., Decision No. 51/A (10 February 2016) by the Romanian Supreme Court of Justice (hereafter Decision 51/A) as well as the transcripts of the interviews I conducted, on one hand, with the civil parties to the trial. Between November 2017 and June 2018 I met Valentina, the widow of a former Army General as well as Carmen, whose father and (maternal) grandfather were members of the Peasant Party, and her sister Laura who appeared as a witness in the trial and participated in several hearings, each at their private homes in Bucharest ⁵ . The interviews focused on their own or their relatives’ life and experiences under communism, and their participation in the trial against Vișinescu. As active participants, the three women shaped the construction of the judicial narrative significantly.

On the other hand, during the same period, I conducted interviews with 13 university students (seven women/six men) whom I met in public places such as cafés or parks. Although the focus on students limits generalisability, these interviews show how the young generation engages with the recent past (Light et al., 2019). To cover a possible variety of voices and perspectives among the young generation, I chose to interview students from different faculties, including the departments of political science, architecture, geography, cybernetic and computer science in in Bucharest and Suceava ⁶ . In doing so, I understand university students not only as proxies for the young generation in Romania, but also as “passive spectators” (Eltringham, 2012) of Vișinescu's trial. Although they are often the addressees of memory work and, moreover, probably represent the future elite and memory activists, this part of the public is often overlooked. However, investigating how university students portray and re-tell communist repression, and whether Vișinescu's case is of relevance to their understanding, not only “allows us to better understand the contents that are passed on as well as the discursive processes through which inter­generational transmission occurs” (Achugar et al., 2013: 266), but also reveals the narrative dynamics involved in the reception and interpretation of judicial narratives.

The presentation of the judicial and private narratives is oriented along the five elements of dramatism by Kenneth Burke (1969 [1945]) while each of the elements is linked to a question. In particular, these elements are ACT (what happened), SCENE (where, when), AGENT (who), AGENCY (how, by what means) and PURPOSE (why) (Burke, 1969 [1945], xv). These elements have proven particularly useful for the analysis of the judgment as the stories produced at criminal trials centre around the defendant as the agent and the crime as act. The analysis reveals which elements are included or excluded, and which explanations of the past adhere to or deviate from the narrative produced in the courtroom. In addition, I took inspiration from Skjelsbæk's (2015) analysis of sentencing judgments at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. She identifies in total three narratives about perpetrators of sexual violence crimes, each linked to a distinct plot. A “plot”, which is the logic or syntax of a narrative (Somers, 1994), allows us to take the same set of events and “weave them into very different ‘moral’ stories’” (Baker, 2006: 9). In this vain, I condense the narratives put forward in the judgment and interviews into a one-sentence-plot that is oriented along the elements mentioned above. This way of summarising the narratives allows for a simple, yet well-founded comparison that sheds light on the epistemic function of Vișinescu's trial.

Judicial Narrative About a Brutal State Agent Setting up a Novel Extermination Regime

Prior to the trial against Vișinescu, only a handful of court cases related to crimes committed during the communist regime ⁷ . The prosecution of crimes committed during Romania's “obsessive decade” was long restricted inter alia due to legal constraints. Thus, inhuman treatment of prisoners and torture were considered as ordinary crimes (e.g., murder, abuse in office) submitted to statutory limitation. Only in 2012 did Romania adopt amendments to the criminal code, introducing crimes against humanity and letting international crimes become punishable regardless of when they were committed. In February 2014, the new penal code entered into force and “opened previously blocked avenues of justice” (Grosescu, 2017: 20), allowing the conviction of two former prison commanders, the first being Alexandru Vișinescu ⁸ .

Born in 1925, Vișinescu completed his mandatory military service by working in the Securitate and Militia forces and was later trained to become a political officer in prisons and labour camps. After graduating, he was appointed political officer at the Jilava (1950 − 1953), Mislea (1954 − 1956) and finally ‘R.S.’ Penitentiary, where he was the commander until its abolition in 1963. Following ‘R.S.’, Vișinescu was prison officer at the Ploiești and Jilava Penitentiary until his retirement. When proceedings started in 2013, Vișinescu was lieutenant colonel put on reserve status, living in an apartment in central Bucharest on a monthly pension four times higher than the average state pension.

Shortly after the filling of a criminal complaint by the ICCMER, which started proceedings, Vișinescu was approached by journalists near his home and showed an aggressive demeanour. “The image of an angry old man berating reporters and trying to smash their cameras made a considerable impression” (Ciobanu, 2021:125) and the case became widely publicised. The accompanying media campaign “made the case an issue of national concern and put pressure on prosecutors to investigate the matter” (Grosescu, 2017:16). In 2014, the Supreme Court of Justice seised the case from the Military Court of Bucharest, and indicted Vișinescu for crimes against humanity.

After a 10-month trial, the Bucharest Appellate Court found Vișinescu guilty of having run a “regime of extermination” at ‘R.S.’ that had resulted in the death of at least 14 political prisoners, of whom six had died as a direct consequence of Vișinescu's actions. ⁹ As the Romanian constitution grants defendants the right to be judged under the accusation carrying the lighter penalty, the judge changed the accusation from ‘crimes against humanity’ to ‘inhuman treatment’ (Grosescu, 2017) and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Vișinescu was also stripped of his military decorations and ordered to pay the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the National Prison Administration together 300,000 euros compensation to the civil parties. In February 2016, the Supreme Court of Justice upheld the sentence I hereafter refer to as Decision 51/A, ¹⁰ which Vişinescu then served out at Jilava Penitentiary Hospital until his death in November 2018.

Looking at how the storytelling unfolds, the judgment starts by sketching the background to the act (scene), i.e., first by delineating the historical function of ‘R.S.’ (I. Râmnicu-Sărat Penitentiary, Decision 51/A: 19–21), and secondly by presenting the categories and profiles of the detained (political) prisoners (II. Detainees and their convictions, ibid.: 21–30). Accordingly, ‘R.S.’ was a “special” penitentiary populated with “the most dangerous enemies of the regime” (ibid.: 37). Besides this classification of the prison and the later statement of an adverse relationship between the defendant and inmates, the judgment gives little context to the communist regime of the time nor its practices and institutionalised repression through a countrywide detention system.

Next, the defendant appears on the scene (III. Defendant, Decision 51/A: 30–35) and the focus shifts to the agent. Vișinescu's background and career within the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) are presented. The judgment accentuates that his prompt appointment to, and long exercise of, the role of the prison commander took place despite his “low level of education”, “poor cultural and political preparation” (ibid.: 37) and serious “disciplinary misconduct” (ibid.: 34). Hence, his “special qualities”, i.e., his “brutality” and “discretionary behaviour”, masked in his assessment reports under the expression of “firm and demanding attitude towards counter-revolutionary detainees” (ibid.: 33) against whom he had already developed “class hatred” (ibid.: 37), recommended this “mediocre individual” for the position.

The two main characters in the scene, the defendant and the collective of political prisoners, have an adverse relationship, essentially based on state policy (IV. Adversity report, Decision 51/A: 35–39). Thus, selecting and transferring the “class enemy” on one hand, and appointing an adequate commander to “suppress” (ibid.: 132) or “destroy” (ibid.: 142) them on the other hand, is the result of a process at the leadership level of the MAI led by “complementary criteria” (ibid.: 35). The judgment presents the existence of this adversarial relationship between the defendant as an agent of the state and the collective of political prisoners as the premise to Vișinescu's actions and inactions, while emphasising their purpose, i.e., the direct intent of eliminating the “class enemy”.

In designating Vișinescu's agency, the judgment frequently stresses his “abusive” and “discretionary” application of the “rules and regulations of that time” imposed by his role as commander (ibid.: 3; 6; 80; 10), yet without questioning those and, in consequence, implicitly designating those as legal and normal. As the language of agency is role and law-bound, the political and bureaucratic apparatus are consigned further into the background.

Following the “adversary report”, the largest section within the judgment extensively recounts the detention conditions established and maintained by Vișinescu (V. Detention conditions, Decision 51/A: 39–127). The focus is on the act, i.e., the direct and indirect methods characteristic of the detention regime applied to political prisoners during Vișinescu's command. The elements included isolation, inhumane and degrading treatment, starvation, deficient medical care, disciplinary punishment, and physical violence (beating). Importantly, each of the elements is presented and illustrated through extensive sections quoted from testimonies and memorialist literature of former (political) prisoners, which the civil parties in part provided. These elements, in turn, are the condition for installing a regime of extermination aiming at, and resulting in, the physical liquidation of the “class enemy” (ibid.: 126 − 127). Ultimately, the court found that the direct and indirect methods characteristic of Vișinescu's detention regime resulted in the slow but efficient death of at least 14 political prisoners – six of which were the direct consequence of Vișinescu's actions.

Notably, the “brutality of that program and of the defendant himself, as its promoter, but also as an individual” (Decision 51/A: 142), is frequently stressed and one of the main themes running through the judgment. It further conceals Vișinescu's ambivalent representation: on the one hand, he appears as a brainwashed promoter of a state-sponsored program, an “instrument”, “used by state authorities of that time to fulfil the political objective of destroying ‘class enemies’ specifically placed in his custody” (ibid.: 142). On the other hand, he is presented as an autonomous commander and torturer, i.e., “an artisan and zealous performer of an original program of the persecution of “counter-revolutionary” detainees” (ibid.: 142). Yet, the judgment – such as all criminal judgments – portrays the events at ‘R.S.’ Penitentiary as being caused by individual human agency and thus privileges Vișinescu's character and behaviour as an explanation thereof.

Summarising the judgment into a one-sentence-plot, the narrative is about an abnormal (i.e., brutal) individual (AGENT) who established an extermination regime for political prisoners (i.e., objects of repression) (ACT) through the abusive and discretionary application of the rules and regulations of that time (AGENCY) in the former political regime (SCENE) because of the class hatred he developed earlier (PURPOSE). Emphasising the act and the agent, the judgment links Vișinescu's purpose with the premise to his actions, but without taking into account the (ideological) pretext for the development of such “class hatred” and thus the scene. The judgment, in short, draws attention to the brutality of an individual agent of the state and not to the state itself. The narrative constructed in the courtroom is thus truncated, i.e., it provides a partial and incomplete account. This de-contextualisation, which results from the narrow focus on ‘R.S.’ and Vișinescu's actions, is deplored by the civil parties, who offer a much broader narrative overall.

Survivors’ Families Narratives About a Brutal and Indoctrinated Individual Executing State Policy

Moving to the survivors’ families’ perspective, the narrative accounts by widow Valentina and the sisters Carmen and Laura reveal two interlinked arguments regarding the events at ‘R.S.’ that reassemble the judicial narrative. The similarity is not due to the narrative efficacy of the court, but to the fact that the three women contributed significantly to the narrative construction in the courtroom (Avram, 2020). Besides, and important to note, their narrations about communist repression move beyond Vișinescu's actions in ‘R.S.’.

First, my interviewees note that ‘R.S.’ Penitentiary was (one of) the worst political prisons of that era, detaining the “moral elite” (Laura) or “the most dangerous, the most important” individuals (Carmen) with the objective to repress and/or kill them. Valentina, in this regard, notes that her husband left the penitentiary as a “living corpse”, taking this as clear evidence for the existence of an extermination program at ‘R.S.’ Similarly, Carmen stresses the existence of a state-sponsored extermination program: “‘R.S.’ was a prison of the elite and of extermination. The purpose was to kill them. […] And after [Vișinescu] killed M. [important political figure of that time], it served its purpose”. Accordingly, the three women describe the scene (‘R.S.’ as a political prison) and purpose (extermination of the class enemy) similar to the judgment.

However, they do expand the scene in significant ways. While the judgment treats the political system of that time rather as the setting than as the immediate cause of Vișinescu's actions, the larger historical and ideological context of his actions is a salient feature in the survivors’ families’ accounts. The transformation of society into a socialist regime, and the societal composition at that time, take a prominent role in their narrations because “only when we understand how society was composed before the installation of the communist regime, we understand who was imprisoned and killed [and why]” (Laura). Here, Laura draws attention to the pre-war elite, in particular to members of political parties such as the Peasant Party to which her relatives belonged. She emphasizes their democratic aspirations and resistance to communism, which ultimately resulted in incarceration. The scene is accordingly expanded to delineate communist repression beyond R.S both temporally (including the interwar period and Second World War) and spatially (including other prisons and labour camps, thereby pertaining to the countrywide repressive system). Here, repressive practices of the communist regime and its various state agents as opposed to one particular state agent, i.e., Vișinescu, are at the fore.

Secondly, the civil parties emphasize that communist state organs selected both the prisoners at ‘R.S.’ but also its commander carefully (agent). Highlighting that Vișinescu received the position particularly because of his “brutal”, “cruel” or “sadistic” character and/or behaviour, the three women resemble the judgments characterisation of Vișinescu as a zealous and brutal state agent to some extent. For Valentina, these personal features not only explain his appointment but also his promotion to a management position after the dissolution of ‘R.S.’, concluding that “he has tortured very much and was appreciated for that”.

In contrast to the judgment, however, the role of the state and of ideological leaders is central when explaining Vișinescu's actions. Both sisters note that “these were not murders made privately by him in the bathroom” but that “he was given the role” by communist state authorities who indoctrinated him ideologically (agency/ purpose). More specifically, Carmen elaborates: “They have bestialized those with a rudimentary intellect. Vișinescu is a very primitive guy. When you wash the brain of such people […] and put in their head that they [detainees] are the enemies […] and you [guards] have to be ruthless, actually, it's a bigger crime than the physical one that Vișinescu committed”. The narrative accounts of the survivors’ families thus regard the political context and system rather as an immediate cause than the mere background of his actions and equate it with his purpose.

Because communist state authorities and organs set the context for his actions, both sisters do not locate (criminal) responsibility only in the defendant: “Vișinescu was not alone, because if there was no system to allow him that way, there would be nothing to talk about” (Carmen). They thus expand the locus of responsibility, including authorities who appointed Vișinescu as commander “knowing that he is sadistic” (Laura), or the ideological leaders that indoctrinated him. Similarly, Valentina extends the question of responsibility for repression in ‘R.S.’ and beyond to a wider group of people: “Many should give an account […] for the horrors that happened there and not only there. Not only in Râmnicu-Sarat, but in Aiud, Jilava, Poarta Alba, in all [places] All who participated in the hell, in which they were tortured, should give an account”.

Importantly, while the civil parties elaborate extensively on Vișinescu's character, he is not the central character (agent). Their narratives focus on their personal heroes, i.e., their husband, parents or friends. They portray strong, active, funny, sincere and loyal persons who neither gave up their (democratic) convictions and (religious) faith nor cooperate with the authorities, comparing them to martyrs for the good cause. In line with this centrality of their relatives’ experiences, they often steer our conversation away from Vișinescu to specific prisoners or witnesses of the trial. It reflects how their relatives recollected prison time at ‘R.S.’ who “didn't talk much about Vișinescu” (Laura), but rather told stories of courage and faith, friendship and loyalty. Far from being passive victims who lacked agency, they practised their faith and were role models in prison and beyond. In this context, Carmen regrets that her heroes became victims during the trial.

In sum, the survivors’ families’ accounts espouse the plot of an abnormal (i.e., brutal, sadistic) individual (agent) who promoted a state-sponsored extermination regime for political prisoners (i.e., heroes, martyrs) (ACT) through his sadistic and brutal character (AGENCY) in the repressive communist regime based on a countrywide prison system (SCENE) because he was indoctrinated (PURPOSE). While the judicial and individual narratives share great similarities regarding the act and the agent, the three women introduce more agents, centre on a different character, i.e., their personal heroes, and expand the scene. The latter affects the responsibility ascription and overall narrative – instead of telling a story about ‘R.S.’, they tell a story about the principled struggle against communist repression during Romania's “obsessive decade”. In doing so, they draw on their own experiences and the memories handed down to them, which they weave together with knowledge from their own research. Their available narrative world is decisively rich and allowed them to actively co-construct the narrative in the courtroom. Yet, how do university students as spectators of the trial receive the judicial narrative? Are the events at ‘R.S.’ and repression part of their narrative account on the communist past?

University Students’ Accounts About an Individual Torturer

Given their relatively high educational background, presumed interest in public life and societal issues (such as the prosecution of past crimes), and great exposure to (social) media, one could assume that the university students I interviewed have been exposed to the trial against Vișinescu. Despite the highly mediatised beginning of proceedings in 2013 and his final conviction only 2 years prior to the interviews, the majority exhibits only limited knowledge. Although most knew Vișinescu was the commander of a prison during communism, some of them confused his offenses (e.g., misappropriation of money) or the body of evidence (e.g., mass graves) with the one of Ficior and other prominent media cases (e.g., proceedings for crimes against humanity against the former president of Romania, Ion Iliescu). This statement by political science student Catinca exemplifies the vague and patchy knowledge: “I know very little about Vișinescu. I only know that/ I do not know if it is correct/ he committed many crimes, but I am not sure. And that he is ruthless. But that's about it.”

Catinca's statement reveals two recurring aspects in the interviews: First, students’ knowledge of Vișinescu is impaired, delineating him as being “ruthless”, a “torturer” or “brutal commander”, and his actions as “horrible”, “unimaginable” or “criminal”, but without further information or context. In this way, Vișinescu is ascribed the role of an “anti-hero, removed from the context of his life and circumstances” (Marková, 2008: 259). This portrayal mirrors (social) media coverage, which focused on the image of an angry old man awaiting trial, and later of an old torturer eventually, brought to justice.

Secondly, most interviewees are uncertain about Vișinescu's deeds and the context in which his actions unfolded. The act and scene move into the background or are not included at all while the agent is the only focus. In fact, only three students discuss the prison system and detention conditions (at ‘R.S.’), including political science student Flaviu who states: “From my grandparents I know more because they are from ‘R.S.’ When they walked near the prison there, or Vișinescu's penitentiary, they threw food over the wall, for the prisoners. They simply cried out hungry because he did not feed them, they were whipped, they were mistreated, many of them were killed, even relatives of my grandparents”. Importantly, Flaviu and the other two university students acquired their knowledge about ‘R.S.’ and Vișinescu not through media coverage of his trial. Their available narrative world was expanded through the transmission of family stories. As these stories focus on individual experiences rather than a nationwide repressive system, Vișinescu's actions remain relatively detached from Romania's “obsessive decade” here as well.

By focusing on Vișinescu and his brutal character (agent), and omitting the context both narrowly (the court) and broadly (survivors families) (scene), the students’ accounts display a highly truncated story. In sum, the plot is that of an abnormal (i.e., brutal, ruthless) individual (AGENT) who tortured and committed many crimes (ACT) in the communist regime (SCENE). Political prisoners, i.e., the victims (the court) or heroes (survivor’s families), are also absent, which explains why Vișinescu's purpose (i.e., the elimination of the “class enemy”) is lacking and the act is only rudimentarily understood. Overall, a de-contextualised and de-politicised understanding of what happened at ‘R.S.’ under Vișinescu's command prevails among the young generation.

The abbreviated story about an individual torturer is reflective of how university students portray the communist past. Revealing a simplistic, temporally distorted and personalised reading of communism, their narrative accounts centre on Ceauşescu as the omnipotent figure both of the communist regime, understood as his cruel and mad rule, and the December events of 1989, equated with his assassination. When I asked specifically about the leader ruling Romania before him, more than half of my interviewees could not respond. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, with his “neo-Stalinist” rule from 1948 to 1965, is not part of the general repertoire available to university students when narrating the past The interpretation of the past regime as “Ceauşescu's communism” (Flaviu) not only obscures communist repression in and through political prisons during Romania's “obsessive decade”, but promotes a linear history that understands 1989 as a complete brake with the past. By embodying the (communist) past, Ceauşescu's death symbolises the end of communism, which gives way to a better present. Communism then appears as a bad but “fairly closed chapter” (Claudiu) that does not need to be illuminated because “we got rid of it”.

This understanding reflects the complete break with the past suggested by the official condemnation of communism and provides anecdotal evidence of the risk of turning communism into a ‘foreign country’ (Rusu, 2017). The highly truncated story about communism is an expression of the limited narrative world available to students in the three central sites of knowledge production. In line with other studies on youth memory in Central and Eastern European countries (see e.g., Leccardi et al. 2012), my interviewees use different sources, but especially the school, family, and public culture in the form of novels and documentaries, to form their knowledge about the communist past Taken together, these sites provide only a limited understanding.

Given the silences in public space, the school would be an important arena to impart knowledge. Yet, so far, the “education system has been reluctant to address the communist past” (Light et al., 2019: 580), and little to no time is devoted to communism in history class. Adrian, a cybernetics student, summarises the content taught in school as follows: “[D]uring high school, we did not get to talk much about communism. We had a few lessons.[…] Ok, it was communism, it no longer is communism, it is better. We do not get into the details. We are talking about the victorious King Mihai or Stephen the Great very loudly. But when it comes to communism: / ‘Ask your parents.’” Following a “romantic tradition” that links history teaching to the goal of nation-building (Bermudez, 2019), emphasis is on heroic moments, while unpleasant events such as communist repression in and through political prisons are left out or relegated to the private sphere (“Ask your parents”). In view of these lacunae, the school offers little possibility for the young generation to connect the judicial narrative about Vișinescu to the communist past.

The second and most important source of information are the stories passed on by (grand)parents and other family members or neighbours ¹¹ . For example, Catinca explains that she “gathered [her] knowledge from [her] mother's stories and from the stories of [her] Romanian language teacher about how they felt during communism. These were [her] basics about communism”. While the transmitted personal experiences provide insights into individual traumas or the hardships of everyday life under communism, they do not reveal the context, i.e., the institutional structure and practices of communist authorities. This focus on individual grievances is also found in the third source of information, namely publicly available documentaries or books, which offer little context about the communist regime. In line with this colouring, the central themes in the narrative accounts of university students about the communist past are the lack of freedom, liberty and food, and the rigidity of the authorities.

Taken together, the three sites of knowledge production offer neither a comprehensive view of the past nor a way to connect this to the judicial narrative about Vișinescu. Moreover, they sometimes offer different views that the young generation has to reconcile (Light et al., 2019). For example, political science student Toni identifies a difference between what he learned at school (“communist regime was ugly and bad”) and what he learned at home (“in Ceauşescu's time it was better because everyone had a guaranteed home and a job”). This difference points to two types of remembering often described for the Romanian memory landscape: the official rejection of the communist era and the reconstruction of this period by political elites as a “traumatic past” (Rusu, 2015) on the one hand, and “the popular version of communism as a better alternative to the current society” (ibid.: 29) or the more recently described “nostalgia for the past” on the other. While three students mentioned that their grandparents exhibit this, only one student applies a nostalgic reading herself. As such, my data does not confirm studies that attest to the younger generation having a nostalgic view (e.g., Kasamara and Sorokina, 2015) and is in line with the critique of the nostalgia thesis articulated by Rusu and Croitoru (2021).

Following on, I suggest that university students rather display a detached view of the past. This view is anchored both in their distant positioning to the past, and the restricted narrative world that does not allow them to explore the past and connect with its reality. It reflects the disconnected temporalities (different pasts and the present) and levels (individual and societal) that mark the representation of communism in the different sites of knowledge production. In the midst of continuous silence in public space, the narrative world available to university students provides few stories and characters, and presents them in isolation. Conversely, it offers little narrative resonance, i.e., little context for the story about Vișinescu to be integrated or connected to. Hence, university students do not place this story within the country's history of communism, reflecting the limited narrative world available to them and the wider population. Indeed, the detached view described above also applies to other parts of society, because it is an expression of public silence and the lack of societal confrontation with communist repression, as well as frustration with current politics and society.

The Courtroom as an Arena to Tell but not to Disseminate Stories Broadly

The previous sections have indicated the low and limited reception of the judicial narrative outside the courtroom. I now complement this finding by my interviewees’ perspectives on the trial and its social impact in order to develop the argument of the importance of narrative resonance and coherence for the epistemic function of proceedings in the final section.

Regarding the survivors’ families’ perspective on the trial and the epistemic function of the judgment, three aspects are worth highlighting: First, all three women contributed significantly to shaping the judicial narrative established by presenting the court with memoirs from their relatives or friends as well as documents secured from archives. For them, the trial functioned to authenticate and disseminate the hitherto private narratives of their heroes’ experiences of communist repression in and through a rigid detention system. The courtroom was thus a platform from which private stories of suffering could be told and shared, and a vehicle to disseminate these private stories to the public (Avram, 2020).

Secondly, although each of the three women expressed satisfaction with the course of the trial and the judgment in general, they nevertheless deplore its narrow focus on Vișinescu. This is reflected both in their comprehensive narratives that expand the scene both temporally and spatially, which serves to ascribe responsibility to a wider group of people and to tell a broader story about communist repression. From their perspective, the judicial narrative, although correct, is truncated and did not offer them any new insights.

Finally, the two sisters emphasise the signalling effect of the trial: “Overall, we are satisfied with the result. Not so much with Vișinescu staying in prison […]. The important thing is […] that now there is an official and very clear distinction between good and evil. Those are the people who were heroes of Romania, who suffered unjustly because they were special people, which these [young] generations deserve to know, and on the other side, the killer is called a criminal” (Carmen). By officially designating heroes and criminals, Vișinescu's conviction thus ends public confusion, which is “important for society; it is a matter of hygiene […] morally “ (Laura), and can be educational for the younger generation. However, this classification of society has not been reflected in the students’ narratives, which offer a limited repertoire of characters, of which political prisoners are only marginal.

In general, most university students are skeptical about the capacity of criminal trials to function as a tool to address past violence and repression. An example of this critical perspective is Stefan, a student of electronic telecommunications and IT, who doubts that the task of judges “is to educate as well as to adjudicate”. In relation to the trial against Vișinescu, this perspective can be classified in two ways.

First, interviewees stress the temporal boundary of proceedings according to which the punishment of Vișinescu after 40 years appears as senseless and without any societal effect. For instance, Adrian states: “It is too little, too late. So it does not mean anything. It's a joke”. Similarly stressing the time lag between the commission of crimes and their punishment, Claudiu, a student of computer science, notes: “The idea of punishing is to give an example, to provide a model, something like that. This is the role of justice. To provide a model for people to behave within limits of ethical behaviour. But when punishment is not done in 25 years, this model does not make any sense. It will not have any psychological effect on people”. Other students argue that punishment may be of relevance for the victims’ relatives, but not for their own generation, expressing that they are unsure of “how much people can learn from it now” (Catinca).

Secondly, university students doubt the impartiality of the judiciary and therefore do not consider the courtroom an appropriate forum to educate the public. While many agree that it is important to know the truth, they do not believe that the Romanian justice system is adequately equipped to do so, given personnel continuities and strong political interference. Here, university students contrast the overnight approval of an emergency decree amending the Panel Code in 2017 to the benefit of the ruling elite with the “lethargic mode” (Flaviu) of the judiciary in cases such as Vișinescu's. For Cosmina, the stagnation and delay of proceedings indicates Romania's current state, according to which “everything has been postponed since Iliescu took office”. Like other interviewees, this political science student notes a flawed democracy characterised by high levels of corruption, political polarisation and manipulation. In this context, many express a distrust of politicians and state institutions, which is in line with a study that found the lowest level of trust in state institutions and organisations among young people in Europe (FES, 2019).

Overall, the court does not appear to be a good (or credible) narrator of the past, which is reflected in the limited and impaired knowledge about the trial of Vișinescu and the context of his actions. The critical perspective on the epistemic potential arises not only from the temporal limitations and presumed partiality of the judiciary, but also from the current state of politics, characterised by corruption and manipulation, and society being “exposed to deep polarization and insecurity” (Miroiu, 2013: 217). Yet, “in order to be sensitive to past injustices […] one has to live in a society with a high level of awareness of justice in the present” (ibid.). Accordingly, present injustices distract from the past and prevent the formation of moral sensitivity towards it, which is reflected in opinion polls showing that Romanians “do not live in the past” (Murgescu, 2012: 12). The detached view of university students is thus reflective of the wider population.

Conclusion: Constrained Epistemic Function due to Little Narrative Resonance

As the first conviction for crimes committed during Romania's “obsessive decade”, the case of Vișinescu provided an opportunity to disseminate knowledge about communist repression to the public. This article has explored the epistemic function of this case through a narrative analysis that contrasted the court's narrative with the narratives and perspectives of participants and spectators. It has demonstrated that university students, as representatives of the young generation, have little to no knowledge about Vișinescu and his actions, but also about communist repression or the country's communist past more generally. Their overall de-contextualised and de-politicised understanding of the past is an expression of their available narrative world that is restricted and does not enable them to engage with the country's past in a meaningful way. Yet, as Achugar, Fernandez and Morales (2013) rightly point out for the Uruguayan context, young people need to be able to connect past practices, such as those exposed in Vișinescu's case, with their own life's in the present in order to make sense of the past and, I would add, to receive, elaborate and integrate judicial narratives.

In sum, the courtroom has not been a relevant arena for influencing, supplementing or changing narratives about the past among my young interviewees. This finding, I argue, is due to their restricted narrative world, which curtails the narrative resonance and, ultimately, the reception and interpretation of the judicial narrative. Hence, the story of an abnormal state agent leading an extermination regime is neither compatible with nor relevant to the images and stories conveyed to the young generation that focus on individual grievances in the 1980s and the figure of Ceauşescu. The judicial narrative, accordingly, has little resonance with the narrative world available to university students. Narrative resonance is understood here as the ability to connect themes of broader social, civic, and political significance (such as e.g., coming to terms with the communist past) or narratives (such as e.g., the narrative constructed in the case against Vișinescu) to characters, scenes, or tropes available to the narrator. Conversely, this means that a judicial narrative must connect to existing discourses and narratives, and resonate with the beliefs and ideas of the narrator so that it is received and integrated into her/his distinct narrative world ¹² .

In the case of Romania, where societally available narrative worlds are restricted, narrative resonance of the judicial narrative is overall low. This results from the trial's lack of embeddedness in the public sphere marked by perpetuated silences, and stems from the paradoxical consequence of the official condemnation of communism based on the Final Report. Although the Report has put Romania's “obsessive decade” in the spotlight, the political strategy of mastering the past has promoted an end to efforts, while Vișinescu's conviction remains one of the few consequences and offers “little connection to the politics of the present” (Ciobanu, 2021: 130). In this light, Ciobanu (2021: 108) concludes that characterising Vișinescu's trial as “Romanian Nuremberg is misleading. On the contrary, [it] represent[s] little more than the closing of one unresolved chapter in reckoning with the past”.

Given this sobering assessment of Vișinescu's case and its wider social significance, however, it is important to bear in mind that narratives constructed in criminal judgments are neither static nor definitive, but continually contested and evolving over time (Sander, 2018: 549). Or as White (1985: 168) aptly wrote: “ [I]t is always a question […] what weight and authority the parties will in subsequent years treat [the text of a judicial judgment] as having and by what standards or means it will be interpreted […] The text does not conclude the difficulties of the real world, but begins a process, a process of its own interpretation. This is the process by which the law is connected to the rest of life”. Against this background, the judgment against Vișinescu marks the beginning of an engagement with the past, the outcome of which is still open. The judicial narrative offers a hitherto undeveloped epistemic potential, which is due to factors outside the courtroom. Whereas most studies have so far focused on the reaction of local elites and the politics of memory, this article has highlighted the available narrative world as a relevant contextual factor.