| The Poverty of Post-Communist Contemporary History in Romania |
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Irina Livezeanu Abstract With the end of communism, the discipline of history in Romania is now free from strict ideological control and censorship. By itself, this state of negative freedom has not transformed the ruins of the old communist-nationalist historiography of the Ceauşescu era. Many former "official" historians have continued to produce nationalist works under the new conditions of the market economy. But the burdensome communist legacy on the history profession in present-day Romania is apparent even in certain attempts to break with it. This is particularly true when it comes to contemporary history, the most highly ideologized field under the communist regime. This paper analyzes the problematic emergence of the contemporary history field in post-communist Romania. |



National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) is a non-profit organization created in 1978 to develop and sustain long-term, high-quality programs for post-doctoral research on the social, political, economic, environmental, and historical development of Eurasia and Central and Eastern Europe. More
Aesthetic Politics in St. Petersburg: Skyline at the Heart of Political Opposition
Alexei Yurchak, University of California, Berkeley
This working paper focuses on the plans to construct a skyscraper in St Petersburg, Russia, known originally as Gazprom-City and recently renamed into Okhta Center, and on the controversy that developed around these plans. The paper uses the skyscraper debates as a lens to discuss a particular "aesthetic politics" of St Petersburg, the meaning of "world cities" and "global architecture" in Russian and international contexts, post-Soviet forms of political and corporate governance, the mobilization of civic opposition to such projects and the ability of such urban protests to translate into a more unified and politically oriented opposition than has been possible in other contexts in Russia.