Almost some thirty years after the Romanian revolution of 1989, political scientists, historians, social psychologists, and film makers have continued to delve into the myriad ways that the Romanians remember their experiences of lives lived under the communist system (1945–89). Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu have assembled a collection of superb essays that offer fresh insights into the multidimensional aspects of transitional justice in Romania. The Romanian task of remembering the past is also complicated by the existence of multiple pasts that continue to haunt the country. For example, one past consists of the interwar Fascist Iron Guard period and the military dictatorship of General Ion Antonescu during the Second World War. The second past consists of the communist regime that lasted from 1945–89. The third part consists of the 1989 revolution. As the authors point out, the collective memory of the revolution is still marked by the fake trial of the Ceaușescus. A key point is that the second tier of the communist Nomenklatura filled the power vacuum that was left by the collapse of the Ceaușescu regime, as civil society had not been able forge a viable opposition to the regime.

The central element of the book consists of a discussion of the relationship between memory and transitional justice. Transitional justice can take a number of different forms, such as trials, lustration laws, truth commissions, memorialization through statues, monuments, museums, and retroactive or retrospective justice. The book also deals with social and cultural memory, remembrance, redress, and reconciliation. It is divided into three parts. The first part deals with some theoretical issues that involve the relational or sociological and psychological aspects of memory. Part two consists of an extremely comprehensive empirical set of studies of a historical and comparative nature. Part three deals with the victims and perpetrators, as well as the bystanders to the crimes of the communist regime. In Chapter 1, Cristian Tileaga criticizes the truth commission that was chaired by Vladimir Tismaneanu, whose report on the communist dictatorship in Romania is criticized for being too narrowly based on the archives of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police. Tileaga argues that the memory of the Romanian communist past needs to be placed within its proper relational contexts and analyzed through the framework of social psychology and sociology, as well as being based on a historical analysis of archival sources. Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu in Chapter 2 engage in a rich discussion on the binaries of collaboration and resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, and repression and dissent in communist societies.

Stan and Turcescu delve into the distinction between collaboration, source, agent, and Securitate operatives in Romania. They place special emphasis on a historical and comparative discussion of the motivations that lie behind the intent to collaborate. The work also stresses that in the early post-communist period, there was not a real transition from communism, rather a transition without a transition. For example, lustration laws that were adopted by the Romanian parliament were repeatedly declared unconstitutional by the constitutional court. As Chapter 5 stresses, legal culture has been an overlooked factor in helping to explain the slow Romanian transition to democracy. Legal culture refers to the internal set of values and ideology that were held by the judiciary in post-communist Romania, putting more emphasis on the priority of domestic law over international human rights law. Moreover, the delayed transition was also because the socialist legal code remained in effect until 2014, and contained a fifteen-year statute of limitations for such crimes as homicide. International human rights law was coopted into the Romanian criminal code only in 2014. The authors stress that an important turning point in remembering took place when President Traian Băsescu presented the Tismaneanu report to the Romanian parliament. President Băsescu condemned the past communist regime as “illegitimate” and “criminal.” The book contends, however, that the Tismaneanu report did not have much of an impact on the public because of the politics of “oblivion” in which the Romanians wanted to forget their traumatic past and move on. The year 2006 was also important for remembering because the Securitate archives, which had been physically withheld from the public, were turned over to a government body known as the Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS).

Another important theme of the book is the comparison of transitional justice in Romania to other former communist states. The authors find that Romania, after a slow start, could be placed somewhere behind the central European states of Hungary and Poland, at the same level as Bulgaria, and ahead of Russia, the Central Asian states, and Albania. Fresh insights are also provided by Duncan Light and Craig Young in Chapter 7, which contains an excellent discussion of the process of decommunization that followed the revolution and consisted of erasing the landscape of communism. Statues, monuments, and museums show how the public landscape and space are used to remember and memorialize the past. Cultural memory is also important. Chapter 8 focuses on the role of art and provides fresh insights by discussing films, plays, documentaries, and paintings in remembering the communist past.

The rich diversity of the book is also underscored by discussions of the relationship between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the communist regime. The Orthodox Church collaborated with the communist regime. Part of the explanation for this collaboration is because the Orthodox Church benefitted from the expropriation of the property of the Greek Catholic Church. The work stresses that the official Church historiography is in need of rewriting to reflect the truth about its collaboration with the regime. Romanians are still struggling to break free from the legacy of corruption left from the communist era, as the former communist elites and Securitate agents flourished in the transition, emerging as oligarchs.