English title: History in the Mirror of Time: Romanian and European Historiography in the Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Historical Sciences (Bucharest, 1980)
https://doi.org/10.47743/RRISXX.2025-3-6
Issue: 3/2025
Pages: 129-159
Language: Romanian
Author: Alexandru-Florin PLATON
Author affiliation: “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania
Abstract: The 15th International Congress of Historical Sciences, held in Bucharest in 1980, was a
major scientific and political event in Romania at the time. Read today, the Congress
Proceedings highlight the strong ideological imprint of the Cold War and the bipolarity
of the world then, also reflected in the historiographical debates among the participants.
The contributions of Eastern historians, steeped in Marxism-Leninism, often stood in
contrast to Western approaches, which were methodologically more diverse. In
Romania, national history—rehabilitated after 1965—was instrumentalized by the
communist regime, producing a canonical “vulgate” exalting continuity, antiquity, and
exceptionalism. The Congress also revealed similar exaggerations within other socialist
delegations, particularly the Bulgarian and Soviet ones. Despite these tensions, the event
also opened up new avenues of inquiry: oral history, imagology, and new
methodological perspectives. In retrospect, it appears as a mirror of a closed,
ideologically marked world, yet one in which certain trends that would gain prominence
after 1989 were already taking shape.
Keywords: Romania, Europe, Marxism-Leninism, national historiographies