The Self-Portrait of the Romanian Communist Perpetrators in Autobiographical Texts
by Dumitru Lăcătușu
At the conference “Encountering Perpetrators of Mass Killings, Political Violence and Genocide”, organized by University of Winchester, 1-3 September 2015, Dumitru Lăcătușu presented the communication „The Self-Portrait of the Romanian Communist Perpetrators in Autobiographical Texts”.
Abstract
Starting from one of the most common genre of literature within the communist states (the autobiographical texts), this paper aims to reconstruct and examine the self-portrait of a certain social and professional group (the communist perpetrators), and also to analyze their justification for crimes committed as state officials.
Therefore, I chose to analyze and reinterpret the so-called ego-documents (autobiographies and memoirs) created by former officials of the Romanian communist state such us the ministers of Internal Affairs, Alexandru Drăghici and Teohari Georgescu, the leaders of the Romanian Secret Police (Gheorghe Enoiu, Gheorghe Plesita) and Alexandru Vişinescu. The last one was director at the Râmnicu Sărat penitentiary, one of the most important political prisons in the communist period. Now he is prosecuted in Romania for crimes against humanity. Selecting them as the subject of this paper is not arbitrary because they represented the structure of the totalitarian crime in Romania.
This presentation is divided in three sections. The first depicts the essential data regarding the former communist officials biographies, the context in which the ego-documents were created and also the purpose of their autobiographies and memoirs. In the second part of my presentation, I will explore the facets of the self-portraits, focusing on the set of stratagems used by the communist officers to describe themselves; Within this part, I will highlight the differences between their own self-image described in the autobiographical texts written in the communist era and the one existing in their memoirs published after 1989. In the last part, I will analyze the different accounts practiced by the former communist bureaucrats to explain the motives behind their crimes and actions.