The Uses and Misuses of the Secret Communist Police Files: The Notorious Securitate`s Archives in the Postcommunist Era

Abstract

On December 7, 1999, the Law no. 187, on access to one’s own file and the disclosure of Securitate as a political police, was adopted by the Romanian Parliament. The law established the creation of an institution (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității-The National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives-CNSAS) whose mission is to collect all documents issued by the former Communist Secret Police (the notorious Securitate) and made them available to the researchers and the larger audience upon request as well as to reveal the agents of the repression. My article deals with the creation, its functionning, and the controversies which surrounded this institution from 2000 onwards. I argue that the archive of the Securitate was instrumentalized by various actors of the public space in their struggle for power, namely for controlling the cultural, economic, and political fields of power (les champs du pouvoir) and did not accomplish its mission to reveal the agents of the repression. Furthermore, the disclosure of the collaboration with the former political police of various anticommunist public figures (former political detainees, deportees, dissidents) transfered the responsability for the communist crimes from the main actors of the repression (namely the Securitate officers) to the victims, blamed for their collaboration.