Vladimir Tismăneanu Totally Explained

Everything about Vladimir Tism Neanu totally explained

Vladimir Tismăneanu (b. July 4, 1951) is a Romanian and American political scientist, sociologist, and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. A specialist in political systems and compared politics, he's chair of the editorial committee (2004-2008) and editor (1998-2004) of the East European Politics and Societies academic review and director of the University of Maryland's Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies. Tismăneanu is a contributor to several periodicals, including Journal of Democracy, Studia Politica, Sfera Politicii, 22 and Cotidianul.
Tismăneanu's background and work came under intense scrutiny after his 2006 appointment by Romanian President Traian Băsescu as head of the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, which presented its report to the Romanian Parliament on December 18, 2006. There has been much controversy about the choice of Tismăneanu as commission president, about Tismăneanu's choices for commission members, and about the conclusions of the report.

Biography

Born in Braşov, Vladimir Tismăneanu is the son of Leonte Tismăneanu, an activist of the Romanian Communist Party since the early 1930s, and Hermina Marcusohn, a physician and one-time Communist Party activist, both of whom were Jewish and Spanish Civil War veterans. His father, born in Bessarabia and settled in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1930s, worked in agitprop structures, returning to Romania at the end of World War II, and becoming, under the Communist regime, chair of the Marxism-Leninism department of the University of Bucharest. Progressively after Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej acted against Ana Pauker, the Tismăneanus were sidelined inside the Romanian nomenklatura; in 1960, Leonte Tismăneanu was stripped of his position as deputy head of Editura Politică.
   Vladimir Tismăneanu grew up in the exclusive Primăverii quarter of Bucharest. During his years of study at the Lyceum No. 24, which was then largely attended by students belonging to the nomenklatura, he was in the same class as Nicu Ceauşescu, son of communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, as well as the children of Leonte Răutu, Nicolae Doicaru and Silviu Brucan.
   In his preface to the Romanian-language edition of his 2003 book Stalinism for All Seasons, Tismăneanu indicated that, starting in 1970, he became interested in critiques of Marxism-Leninism and the Romanian communist regime in particular, after reading banned works made available to him by various of his acquaintances (among others, writer Dumitru Ţepeneag and his wife, translator Mona Ţepeneag, as well as Ileana, the daughter of Communist Party dignitary Gheorghe Gaston Marin). He stated that, at the time, he was influenced by Ghiţă Ionescu's Communism in Romania, as well as by Marxist, Western Marxist, Democratic and Libertarian Socialist scholarship (among others, the ideas of Georg Lukács, Leszek Kołakowski, Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School). from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Sociology in 1974, and received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1980, presenting the thesis "The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Contemporary Left-Wing Radicalism" (Teoria Critică a Şcolii de la Frankfurt şi radicalismul de stînga contemporan).
   Between 1974 and 1981, Tismăneanu worked as a sociologist, employed by the Urban Sociology Department of the Institute for Designing Typified Buildings in Bucharest.
   In September 1981, a short while after the death of his father, he accompanied his mother on a voyage to Spain, after she'd been granted a request to visit the sites where she and her husband had fought as young people. Unlike Hermina Tismăneanu, he opted not to return, and soon after left for Venezuela, before ultimately settling in the United States in 1982. and hosted by Ziua newspaper, Tismăneanu's doctoral thesis is "a vitriolic sermon against Western values".
   Among the critics of Tismăneanu's early activities stands the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu, who stated that they were incompatible with the moral status required from a leader of the Commission. engaging in a public debate with Cristian Tudor Popescu and Octavian Paler over its implications.
   Beginning in 2004, Tom Gallagher, a Professor of Ethnic Conflict and Peace at the University of Bradford and author of influential works on Romanian politics, expressed criticism of Vladimir Tismăneanu on various grounds.
   In this context, Gallagher authored a series of articles critical of Tismăneanu's involvement in local Romanian issues in the post-1989 era, and especially of his relations with former President Ion Iliescu (one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party, PSD). According to Gallagher, Tismăneanu "was useful to Iliescu in 2004 because the then President recognised the type of figure he was beneath the western reformist image he's cultivated".
   Gallagher writes that Tismăneanu's book of interviews with Iliescu, Marele Şoc, "was ready to depict Ion Iliescu as an enlightened leader who, despite some flaws, had been instrumental in consolidating Romanian democracy", and that the volume, which he called "one of the strangest books to emerge from the Romanian transition", didn't include, to Iliescu's advantage, any mentions of the controversial aspects of his presidency ("any serious enquiries about the mineriade, the manipulation of nationalism, the denigration of the historic parties [theNational Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party], civic movements and the monarchy, the explosion of corruption, or indeed the continuing political influence and fabulous wealth of the heirs of the pre-1989 intelligence service"). In addition, he claimed that, in agreeing to interview Iliescu, Vladimir Tismăneanu had come to contradict his own assessment of the post-Revolution regime, which he'd earlier defined as "of a populist, corporatist and semi-fascist type".
   Gallagher expressed further criticism on Tismăneanu, writing that "he wishes to build up a vast patron-client network in contemporary history and political science not dissimilar to what the PSD did in those areas where it desired control". family in order to overcome the long lasting shock of having been cast into the wilderness for over twenty years when his family fell from grace under Gheorghiu-Dej." He depicted Gallagher's attitude as "an outbreak of resentments", Elsewhere, he responded to claims made about his contacts with Becali by admitting that the visit was inappropriate.
   In 2006 and early 2007, Ziua newspaper repeatedly published accusatory claims that Tismăneanu had left with support from the the Securitate, that he'd settled abroad with assistance from the Communist Party of Venezuela, and that, after escaping communist censorship, he continued to publish materials supporting official communist tenets.
   Based on data which he indicated formed part of his CNSAS file, Tismăneanu also specified that he was the object of constant Securitate surveillance after his departure, that his mother was subject to pressures, According to this document, Tismăneanu was well appreciated for his professional and Romanian Communist Party work prior to 1981, and had held the position of lecturer on the Propaganda Commission of the Communist Party Municipal Committee for Bucharest. while Bukovsky stated "I don't know Tismăneanu, I know nothing about him. I'd like people to understand what they did in the past. He too should understand the part he played". In December 2007, Ziua also published comments made by the American researcher and political commentator Richard Hall, who claimed that Tismăneanu's defense tactic in the wake of the Report having been made public was to answer to "the most stupid calumnies" brought against him, but to ignore reasonable criticism. Regarding Tismăneanu's aproach to the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Hall considers it "amateuristic", arguing that Tismăneanu "must not have read too much on this subject. (examples cited include the Social Democratic Party's Ion Iliescu, Commenting that the anti-Băsescu group was setting itself against "popular sovereignty" and ruling through a "continuous parliamentary putsch", he also claimed that Ziua and other press venues, including Voiculescu's Jurnalul Naţional and Antena 1, were engaged in a campaign to discredit Băsescu. Tismăneanu, who demanded 100,000 Euro in compensation, indicated that he also contemplated suing the two magazines in front of a United States court, in case his case would be denied in Romania. claims to have been excluded after a short while by "the self-styled 'eminent members of civil society'". According to Tismăneanu, this happened only after Goma engaged in and publicized personal attacks aimed at other Commission members, allegedly calling Tismăneanu "a Bolshevik offspring", He also indicated that attacks on Tismăneanu had been prompted by rumors that the latter had sided with other intellectuals in condemning as "antisemitic" the views he'd expressed on issues pertaining to the 1940 Soviet occupation of Bessarabia; Raport Final and the activity of the Presidential Commission did received a full endorsement by the American academic community. Georgetown professor, Charles King, stated the following in his review of the Commission's Raport:

the report is the most serious, in-depth, and far-reaching attempt to understand Romania’s communist experience ever produced. It was released only weeks before Romania’s accession to the European Union and marked the culmination of months of feverish research and writing. It is based on thousands of pages of archival documents, recent scholarship in several languages, and the comparative experience of other European countries, all refracted through the critical lenses provided by some of Romania’s most talented, and most abrasively honest, thinkers. It covers virtually every aspect of communism as a lived system, from the installation of Communist party officials during the postwar occupation, through the scope and structure of the instruments of coercion, to collectivization, the fate of religious institutions, the economy, national minorities, education, and other spheres. [...] The Tismăneanu commission’s chief tasks had to do with both morality and power: to push Romanian politicians and Romanian society into drawing a line between past and present, putting an end to nostalgia for an alleged period of greatness and independence, and embracing the country’s de facto cultural pluralism and European future.

Other analyses of the Raport Final and Vladimir Tismăneanu's contribution to the condemnation of the communist regime in Romania appeared in Journal of Democracy, in Problems of Post-Communism, and are forthcoming in Eastern European Politics and Societies and Journal of Cold War Studies.

Works

Originally published in Romanian

Noua Stîngă şi şcoala de la Frankfurt (Editura Politică, Bucharest, 1976)
Teoria Critică a Şcolii de la Frankfurt şi radicalismul de stînga contemporan (Ph.D. thesis, 1980)
Mic dicţionar social-politic pentru tineret (co-author, under the direction of Virgil Măgureanu; Editura Politică, Bucharest, 1981)
Condamnaţi la fericire. Experimentul comunist în România (Grup de edituri ale Fundaţiei EXO, Bucharest, 1991)
Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej (Editura Univers, Bucharest, 1995)
Balul mascat. Un dialog cu Mircea Mihăieş (dialogue with Mircea Mihăieş; Polirom, Iaşi, 1996)
Spectrele Europei Centrale (Polirom, Iaşi, 2001)
Ghilotina de scrum (Polirom, Iaşi, 2002)
Scrisori din Washington (Polirom, Iaşi, 2002)
Marele şoc din finalul unui secol scurt. Ion Iliescu în dialog cu Vladimir Tismăneanu (dialogue with Ion Iliescu; Editura Enciclopedică, Bucharest, 2004)
Schelete in dulap (dialogue with Mircea Mihăieş; Polirom, Iaşi, 2004)
Scopul şi mijloacele: Eseuri despre ideologie, tiranie şi mit (Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest, 2004)
Anul revoluţionar 1956: revolta minţilor şi sfîrşitulul mitului comunist (Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest, 2006)
Democraţie şi memorie (Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest, 2006)
Refuzul de a uita. Articole şi comentarii politice (2006-2007) (Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest, 2007)
Vladimir Tismăneanu, Dorin Dobrincu, Cristian Vasile eds., Raport final - Comisia Prezidentiala pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din Romania (Bucuresti: Humanitas, 2007).

Originally published in English

The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (Routledge, London, 1988)

Latin American Revolutionaries: Groups, Goals, Methods (with Michael Radu; Potomac Books, Dulles, 1990)

In Search of Civil Society (Routledge, London, 1990)

Debates on the Future of Communism (with Judith Shapiro; Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 1991)

Uprooting Leninism, Cultivating Liberty (with Patrick Clawson; University Press of America, Lanham, 1992)

Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (Free Press, New York, 1994)

Political Culture and Civil Society in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1995). ISBN 1563243644

Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998). ISBN 0691048266

The Revolutions of 1989 (Re-Writing Histories) (Routledge, London, 1999). ISBN 0203977416

Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (with Sorin Antohi; Central European University Press, New York, 2000). ISBN 9639116718

Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003). ISBN 0520237471

World Order After Leninism (with Marc Morjé Howard, Rudra Sil, Kenneth Jowitt; University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006). ISBN 029598628X

Bilingual

Vecinii lui Franz Kafka. Romanul unei nevroze/The Neighbors of Franz Kafka. The Novel of a Neurosis (with Mircea Mihăieş; Polirom, 1998)

Other

Vladimir Tismăneanu has authored the screenplay for Dinu Tănase's documentary film Condamnaţi la fericire ("Condemned to Happiness"), released in 1992. With Octavian Şerban, he's also authored a series about Communist Romania, which was showcased by the Romanian Television Company.
Adrian Marino, provided the following description to Vladimir Tismăneanu’s activity:

The works of the political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu, who owns a double cultural identity, American and Romanian, indicate a full-scale research agenda. His books are first rate, both in Romanian and in English […] They are representative of what has effectively shaped up nowadays into the Romanian political science…When reading and studying Vladimir Tismăneanu, one enters a new realm, where, most importantly, one experiences a novel approach to writing. He rejects the usage of empty and inordinate formulae. He saves the characteristic Romanian creative writing, with its inconsistency and amorphousness, only for the literary trash bin. He sports a jaunty style, utterly lacking any inhibition or obsequiousness. Some label him as “Marxist anticommunist”. I’d rather say he used to be one. It seems remarkable to me the manner in which he achieves a freedom of spirit, lucidly and sharply applied to his present critique. His activity also fills a considerable void. It informs and it disseminates ideas. This is, undoubtedly, his fundamental virtue.

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