English title: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Working Visits to Iași County. Institutional Organization and the Creation of Political Space for the 1980s Romanian Communism
https://doi.org/10.47743/RRISXX.2025-3-7
Issue: 3/2025
Pages: 161-187
Language: Romanian
Author: Andrei Mihai RÎPANU
Author affiliation: “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania
Abstract: This study aims to analyze the internal mechanisms of organizing and conducting the
working visits undertaken by Nicolae Ceaușescu in Iași during the last communist
decade. The current research moves beyond the historiographical perspective centered
on propaganda and the personality cult, tracing instead the “invisible architecture of
power”: the administrative and coercive system behind these events. To illustrate this
paradigm, the study utilizes documents from political and security institutions (action
plans, Securitate informative notes, and decoration reports). By applying the concepts of
the “production of space” (Henri Lefebvre) and the “frontstage/backstage” dichotomy
(Erving Goffman), the article demonstrates that these working visits were not mere
technical inspections, but political spectacles designed to ensure political legitimation
and mask the system’s economic degradation. The analysis reflects the power dynamics
between the center and the periphery, manifested through coercive territorial control,
the competition among local authorities to demonstrate loyalty, and the symbolic
reconfiguration of urban space. From the design of “popular assemblies” in the central
square to the filtering of the participating social body and itineraries, the research
highlights the practices by which the regime constructed, with each visit, a temporary
reality in which the population played the role of mere extras in a ritualized procession
of unanimous consensus.
Keywords: Nicolae Ceaușescu, working visits, Iași, 1980s, production of space, political
ritual, institutional organization.