Makarenko's and Țurcanu's Re-Education Projects: Debunking a Myth in Romanian Historiography

Abstract

This article discusses two “re-education” campaigns that have often been colocated by Romanian historiography: Anton Semyonovich Makarenko’s re-education of delinquents in the Soviet Union (1917–1936), and Eugen Ţurcanu’s re-education of prisoners in Romania (1949–1952). My aim is to demonstrate that although Makarenko’s and Ţurcanu’s projects of engineering a New Man show structural analogies, the texture of the experience was very different. I therefore propose an original Nietzschean reading of both projects, not from a historical perspective but rather as a history of ideas, where “‘[a]ction at a distance’ seems to be admissible in the field of intellectual influences” (Wiener 537). Without arguing that Makarenko and Ţurcanu were directly drawing on Nietzsche, my exploration of how their contemporaries distorted and adjusted Nietzsche’s dream of the Übermensch, as well as his ideas of the “will to power” and asceticism, can shed new light on the differences between the two projects. Makarenko was in charge of manufacturing the New Man in two self-supporting orphanages for besprizorniki (street urchins), the Gorky Colony (1917–1928) and the Dzerzhinsky labor commune (1928–1936). His reflections on the former appeared in Pedagogicheskaia poema (The Pedagogical Poem, translated as The Road to Life: An Epic of Education), and those on the latter in Flagi na bashnyakh (Flags on the Battlements, translated as Learning to Live). Ţurcanu’s program took place in the gruesome period of Stalinization when re-education was sought to turn political prisoners into New Men. By 1952, when news about Piteşti Prison spread in the West, the regime needed to prove itself innocent and therefore charged Țurcanu and his assistants with conspiracy. Alexandru