ARTICLE, 2023

The Fabrication of Otherness
in Romanian and Hungarian Historiographies
during the Communist Era

Sorin Mitu

Abstract: The article presents the way in which the study of history was used in communist Romania and Hungary in order to build polemical mutual images. The main sources used were the historiographical writings of that period.

Rezumat: Articolul prezintă modul în care studiul istoriei a fost utilizat în România și în Ungaria epocii comuniste în vederea construirii unor imagini reciproce polemice. Principalele surse utilizate au fost scrierile istoriografice ale perioadei respective.

Babeș-Bolyai University, sorinmitu2@yahoo.com

Keywords: Romanian historiography, Hungarian historiography, communism, culture of memory, Ceaușescu regime.
The shared Romanian-Hungarian past
At the beginning of the communist period, the two Marxist regimes from Romania and Hungary made tremendous efforts to rewrite their shared history with a view to promoting the good understanding between Romanians and Hungarians. Past conflicts were not denied but were explained solely through the lens of the class struggle theory. Throughout history, the Romanians and Hungarians never actually fought one another, and the disputes in which they were engaged were always between the exploiting and the exploited classes, situated on different sides of the barricade. In the Middle Ages, the Romanian, or the Hungarian peasants’ uprisings were targeted against the nobility. Later, when the Romanians were deprived of their national rights, in the age of dualism, this was due to the reactionary classes of Austria-Hungary. When the Romanian troops conquered Budapest in 1919, they were driven into battle by the bourgeoisie and the great landowners in Romania. Not at least, Horthy, Antonescu and the legionaries were fascists. The historians who presented things in this way were right to some extent. This view was not embraced only by the communists. Its roots went back into the Romantic age, when the poets believed that nations were holy and predestined to live in harmony and perfect understanding. In the interwar period, Nicolae Iorga endorsed similar opinions, and the idea that ordinary people get on very well while conflicts are provoked solely by politicians who follow their selfish agendas is very widespread today. As can be noticed, this benign contemporary perspective is marked by the communist legacy and, further back, by the romantic ideology.
On the other hand, communist historians and ideologues were wrong because of the rigid and exaggerated way in which they promoted the Marxist dogma about the indestructible solidarity of the exploited classes, not to mention the fact that the scholars who refused to credit them were sacked or sent to prison. The truth is that throughout history it was possible for one Hungarian or the other to get really upset with a Romanian, even though they were class peers, as shown by the documents that bourgeois historians perused with shaky hands if they were still allowed to consult the archives. The past was far more nuanced than the utopias invented by Marx and Engels let transpire.
In Romania, Victor Cheresteșiu, a long time Transylvanian communist militant and an advocate of close relations between Romanians and Hungarians, who wrote some of the best Romanian-Hungarian dictionaries, published a pamphlet entitled Români și unguri [‘Romanians and Hungarians’] in 1947, in which he drew attention to the social oppression both of the two nations had suffered over the course of history. As N. D. Cocea, the author of the preface, wrote,

Hatred-spewing chauvinism has divided the two nations, Romanian and Hungarian, over the centuries. But these nations don’t hate one another. The reason for mutual misunderstanding and lack of knowledge, so detrimental to both nations, lies with the far from innocent manoeuvres of the reactionary, oppressing and exploiting cliques (Cheresteșiu, 1947, 3).

One of the methods used to denounce the “bellicose, imperialist” nationalism was to compare the chauvinism promoted in either country. In contrast with the traditional view that our people are always right, Cheresteșiu stated that Romanians were no better than the Hungarians, or the other way around. Atrocities against the Other were committed by Hatvani, in 1849, and Urmánczy, in 1918, or by the “Maniu guards,” in 1944. In the interwar Romanian state, the “indigenous element” was to have “primacy” over the foreigners, just like in the “Hungarian nation-state” the “state-supporting” element had a privileged position, which meant that the Romanians were oppressed “under Hungarians,” and Hungarians were oppressed “under Romanians” (Cheresteșiu, 1947, 83-90). The Hungarians oppressed the Romanians and the other way around. But why should one be under the other, Cheresteșiu wondered, and why can’t they live as fully equal nations? To overcome this sad legacy, it was imperative that the history that had been distorted by the two rival nationalisms should be rewritten in the spirit of truth, and according to this truth, the Romanians and the Hungarians had never been enemies during the centuries in which they lived together:

Chauvinism still haunts the Romanian and Hungarian intellectuals. Re-educating them is a difficult task and can’t be rushed. What can be done is to prevent a falsified history from being taught in schools. This history talks about a millennial national struggle between the Hungarians and the Romanians, when in fact, in Transylvania, for centuries on end, the struggle has not been national but social, pitting on the one side, the Romanian serfs and the Hungarian serfs, and on the other side, the privileged class (Cheresteșiu, 1947, 90-91).

One year later (1948), Makkai László (the son of the former Reformed Transylvanian Bishop Makkai Sándor) published a book on the relations between Hungarians and Romanians in Hungary. It was entitled Magyar-román közös múlt [‘The Shared Hungarian-Romanian Past’] and was re-edited in 1989 (Makkai, 1948; Makkai, 1989). Unlike Cheresteșiu’s work, this was not a propaganda pamphlet, but a well-documented work, written in an attractive style, of the highest academic standard. The idea that the Hungarians, most of the times, wrote very well-articulated studies on the topic, while the Romanians replied with rather tenuous booklets reinforced a stereotype that was embraced by the Romanians, who declared their own lack of rigour by contrast with the Hungarians’ well-researched arguments, which meant that they were more serious scholars, even though their ideas were profoundly wrong. In any case, The Shared Past was the best work of synthesis that had appeared on the topic, and it still is one of the most important such undertakings. It continued the line of the Hungarian works published in the 1940s, which tried to highlight the historical interferences between the two nations, including as an ideological argument in favour of their living, side-by-side in Central Europe. Although these historiographic works had a national Hungarian component, they started from the premise that if the Hungarians wished to continue having close relations with their conationals across the frontiers, then they had to build bridges of mutual understanding and cooperation with the nations around them, as were, for instance, the Romanians alongside whom the Transylvanian Hungarians lived. As the historian Miskolczy Ambrus states, Makkai’s work could have launched a new era in the relations between the two historiographies (Hegedűs, 2023, 190) because its author extended a very generous hand to his Romanian colleagues.
Makkai showed, in an erudite and professional manner, how close relations between Hungarians and Romanians had been throughout history, for instance, in the Middle Ages, when the two Romanian voivodeships withstood the Ottoman threat with aid from the kings of Hungary and the princes of Transylvania. He also discussed the way in which the Hungarian institutions and political models influenced the neighbours across the Carpathians (Brătianu, Makkai, 1994). The idea that the Romanians’ history owed so much to their relations with Hungarians could offend the Romanians’ national pride, echoing the older superiority complexes of the Hungarians. Makkai was very much aware of this danger and openly criticised the Hungarians’ tendency to pose as cultural tutors of their neighbouring nations. At the same time, he argued that the Romanian historians’ refusal to admit the importance of those influences was the sign of a prejudice that was detrimental to historical knowledge and affected the good relations between the two nations. If we knew how much we owe to one another, and how our ancestors cooperated in the past, we could get along better. Makkai drew attention to the serious errors made by the Hungarians in the past, including by refusing to grant the Romanians their national rights in 1848 or during the dualist period, but he also disapproved of the far radical agenda of the Romanian leaders.
In short, what any reasonable reader could say is that this work is proof of a balanced and empathetic viewpoint, even where it deals with topics that have traditionally divided the historians of the two camps. It is true that Makkai did not believe that the Romanians were present in Transylvania upon the Hungarians’ arrival. His main argument was that they appeared later in the documentary sources, confirming, therefore, what the Hungarian medievalists and scholars from other historiographic schools had contended. But there were also plenty of topics on which his views were unlikely to meet the Romanian historians’ disapproval.
But this was not meant to be. Despite its qualities, the book was not sufficiently Marxist for the 1950s, and its author was regarded as too nationalistic even in Budapest. The Romanian comrades reacted most fiercely and condemned the book with proletarian anger, claiming that Makkai had written a conflicting history of the relations between Romanians and Hungarians, infested with germs of chauvinism. In 1948, the Romanian communists did not trust the “bourgeois” historians, who were bitterly persecuted at that time, and Mihail Roller, the official historian of the regime, could not read in Hungarian. As a result, the task of combating the historiographic nationalism in the neighbouring country was interested to a Hungarian propagandist, the journalist Robotos Imre, who wrote only in Hungarian in the official party mouthpiece Romániai Magyar Szó, and then in the pamphlet entitled Az igazi román-magyar közös múlt [‘The real shared Romanian-Hungarian past’] (Robotos, 1948). This rejoinder was destined exclusively to the Hungarian readership in Romania, as a lesson meant to show very firmly what the party line was on this matter. It’s very likely that no Romanian managed to read the dangerous Hungarian attack allegedly waged by Makkai’s book, considering that the Romanian intellectuals, famished and terrorised, had very different priorities in 1948. But to Dej’s surprise (Nastasă, 2003, 558), comrade Vasile Luca, who furiously accused the comrades in Budapest of nationalism, blamed this book for “falsifying history” in front of Rákosi, who was on a visit to Bucharest. Their conversation was in Hungarian and would sound very hilarious to readers today (Nastasă, 2002, 615).
So, the tradition of inflamed – and also very rudimentary – reactions to the opinions of the Hungarian historians (which continued, rather unexpectedly, the polemics of the “bourgeois” historians) was born during the first year of proletarian power, when, in fact, the two historiographies should have cooperated most harmoniously. Why did this happen? Because the Romanian comrades would have been the most uninspired politicians if they had not exploited the discursive opportunities that disputes on historical matters offered them to justify various positions and attitudes in their relations with the Hungarians, or later with the Soviets or any other partner of interparty dialogue. To put it quite inelegantly, it was a topic one could cackle on indefinitely!
It is true that some of the best works that highlighted the good historical relations between the Romanians and the Hungarians were written during these years, from a cleanly Marxist perspective. Studies on personalities with a modest social background who illustrated this collaboration (Nicolae Bălcescu or Ecaterina Varga) occupied an important place. Other studies were dedicated to Hungarian heroes of the working class in Romania, who had fought alongside the Romanian comrades for the Republic of Councils. Peasant uprising became a favourite topic of the Romanian historians because they shed light on class struggle, and on the cooperation between the Romanian and the Hungarian peasants who had fought, side-by-side, in Bobâlna (1437) or under the leadership of Gheorghe Doja (1514). Hungarian peasants participated, together with Romanian serfs, in Horea’s uprising – a heroic battle against social oppression. The reaction was personified by the Hungarian nobility, the Court in Vienna, and the Romanian intellectual elites, who had failed to stand in solidarity with the rebels. This was not far from the truth if we ignore the rather hilarious rhetoric of that age. Urban toponymy, the names of streets, squares, schools, and factories familiarised the masses with the figures of Bălcescu, Doja and Ecaterina Varga.
The historians in Hungary approached such topics as well. People did make an effort, so to speak. Massive and carefully edited collections of documents referring to the national problem were published. One example was the volume compiled by Kemény G. Gábor (Kemény, 1952-1999) which shows how terrible the Romanians felt in Austria-Hungary. For the Hungarians, Bălcescu became the brightest figure in the history of the Romanian people because he strove, together with Kossuth, to lead the Transylvanian Romanians into the camp of freedom, that is, against the Imperial Court, with which they had become allies in 1848.
I. Tóth Zoltán was the most important historian specialising in Romanian topics in the 1950s. He was one of the few Hungarian scholars whose works were also accepted by the Romanian researchers. One of his works – rara avis! – was translated into Romanian. It focused on the peasant uprisings in the Apuseni Mountains (I. Tóth, 1951; I. Tóth, 1955) and complied both with Marxist demands and with Romanian historiographic views, obsessed as they were with the endless struggles of the Romanians in Transylvania against social and national oppression. His fundamental work on the beginnings of Romanian nationalism in Transylvania (I. Tóth, 1946), written from an angle that was very favourable to the Romanians, was somewhat too little Marxist in terms of its topic and approach, so it had to wait for a Romanian translation until the year 2001 (I. Tóth, 2001)! Even after his tragic death, during the revolution of 1956, several important works on the topic Magyarok és románok (I. Tóth, 1966), which had been left in manuscript by this Hungarian historian, were edited in Hungary. A great Romanian-phile, he wrote the following in the late 1940s:

The Hungarians and the Romanians do not see eye to eye because they do not know each other. Even today the Hungarian public opinion is very keen on belittling the Romanian people, disrespecting their history, or claiming that it does not exist. It is certain, however, that, of late, interest and esteem for the Romanian nation has been on the rise. There are already many people who would like to know the Romanian history and culture more closely, even if not knowing the language is clearly a hindrance […] My belief is that nothing will contribute to a better cohabitation between the Romanian and the Hungarian nations than revealing the historical truth at the highest human level possible (Györke, 2020).

One of his students (who later became the editor of his posthumous writings) was Csatári Dániel, another author with a passion for the Romanian-Hungarian relations. In the 1950s he wrote works about the “contribution of the Romanian people to the liberation of Hungary from Hitler’s occupation” and addressed the problematic years 1940-1945 from a viewpoint that was very close to that of Romanian historiography, condemning “Horthysm” very heavily (Csatári, 1958). Notwithstanding all this, it appears that his views were not close enough to those of the Romanian historians, who guided themselves after the motto of their Latin ancestors: beware the Greeks – that is, the Hungarians – even when they bring gifts! Consequently, Csatári failed to receive recognition from his Romanian colleagues, beyond a few quotations from his books in French that served the purpose of punishing some alleged deviations from the orthodox line of Romanian interpretations (Csatári, 1974).
This last detail shed light on the key issue (others might see it as inconsequential) of the Romanian-Hungarian historiographic dialogue. Whereas the historians in Hungary who were interested in Romanian topics studied period documents and the bibliography in Romanian (since most of them had been born in Transylvania and studied in Romania), most of the Romanian historians during the communist era read only the works published in French or German by their Hungarian colleagues, not to mention the historical sources. Older generation historians like David Prodan, Silviu Dragomir and Ștefan Meteș could speak Hungarian, but the younger scholars, particularly those who were educated outside Transylvania, rarely, if ever, learned Hungarian and not very well. After all, they didn’t really need to. While the historians in Hungary wrote histories of the Hungarian-Romanian relations or of Romania as a country (I. Tóth, 1957; Trócsányi, Miskolczy, 1992), Romanian historians very seldom engaged with aspects of Hungarian history. When they did, they approached them solely in the context of the Hungarians’ relations with the Romanians, as part of histories of Transylvania (which was nothing but a component of the Romanian territory) or even Romania.
So, what was the point of learning Hungarian? The idea that it was an exotic language that Romanians could only learn with great difficulty quickly became a stereotype. Neither Polish, nor new Greek was easier, but the Romanians who studied Poland or the Phanariot reigns learned those languages (which didn’t have the ill repute of unintelligibility) with greater or lesser difficulty. To give just one counterexample, American historians who came to study Transylvania, from Keith Hitchins to Holly Case, diligently studied Romanian, Hungarian and German, without complaining too much about the hardships of genuine scholarly effort.
In any case, this led many Romanian authors to write about different aspects of Romanian-Hungarian relations using only bibliography published in languages of international circulation. They took advantage of the fact that Hungarian historians had published quite substantially in foreign languages, including in the communist period. Of greater concern were their heavy polemics with the Hungarian scholars, whose works they had not read in the original. Not that this was such a big problem: everyone knew what the Hungarians were thinking, and they only wrote because they wanted Transylvania! And the truth is that even the findings of the Romanian historians who could read Hungarian weren’t so different from those of the non-Hungarian speaking researchers. This was a further reason why those who embarked on studying the history of Romanian Transylvania didn’t even bother to learn the languages of those national minorities.
Hungarian historians had been interested in understanding the premises of Romanian nationalism ever since the nineteenth century, since the time of Jancsó Benedek, when they asked themselves: what do the Romanians have against us and how come they consider us savages? It is not surprising that Marxist historians took over the topic and analysed it in detail. They showed that Romanians had plenty of reasons to be disgruntled with the national politics of the dominant Hungarian classes. At the deepest level, this was an explanation of the present circumstances that helped us understand better the dramas in Hungary’s recent history. Studying the Romanians’ historical movements and tendencies can show why Transylvania belongs to Romania today. This is a country with which we must have cordial relations since we are still interested in the fate of our conationals there. As the above-quoted words suggest, historians in communist Hungary made serious efforts to adjust the Hungarian historical consciousness to contemporary reality and, to some extent, to improve imagological relations with the Romanians.
It’s time we made a little history
On the other side of the ethnic barricade, things were quite different. The research of the Hungarian scholars had very little impact among the Romanian historians. Despite a few awkward attempts in the 1950s that approached Romanian-Hungarian relations from a more conciliatory view (which would be partially criticised over the following decades), Romanian historians continued to be concerned with defending the justice of the Romanian point of view, and not to understand the Hungarians. What is there to understand if they’re always in the wrong? Moreover, their error is a sign of ill will! This mentality of a fortress that is continually under siege by Hungarian heresy, denial and untruth survived and was reinforced in Romanian historiography, especially during the Ceaușescu period.
The party’s relinquishment of the internationalist line was amply reflected in the study of history. The comrades in the leadership of the PMR – and not the vulnerable historians of the old regime, who lost their lives in Sighet Prison in the 1950s – were the first to feel the need to take a stand against the nationalist derailments they detected in Hungary.
The solution they came up with, echoing the formula advanced by Dej, was to incite Romanian nationalism against the Hungarians (a nationalism that was kept on a long leash that the party nonetheless controlled). This meant also releasing from prison some specialists on the history of Transylvania, as was Silviu Dragomir (Bottoni, 2010, 295). In 1965, his monographic study of Avram Iancu was published posthumously. Not only did he resume a very delicate historical topic, but he approached it almost like in the past. Dragomir claimed that in his historical duel with Kossuth, the Romanian hero of 1848 may have made a few minor ideological mistakes, but they were well-nigh undetectable. Yet the judgment of history – in its Romanian tribunal – proved beyond a doubt that Romania had almost always been right about all important matters, while the Hungarians, including their most illustrious historical figures, had done unforgivable wrongs.
Historiography in Romania had returned to its traditional purpose: showing how just the Romanian perspective had been throughout history, in the polemical dialogue with Hungarian historians, most of the time. One year before the publication of Dragomir’s book, Kossuth Avenue in Cluj was rebaptised Lenin (Mitu, 2020, 35). In the minds of the Romanian comrades, this was a very agile solution (quite hypocritical, in fact) because no one could be officially accused of Romanian nationalism for such a change. Everyone knew the reason behind it: the Hungarians’ hero was no longer desired in the streets of Romanian Transylvania.
In Hungary, the Hungarian comrades were also outraged when they learned about the nationalist abuses in Romania. After a while, as always in the conflict between the two parties, it was difficult to tell who started it, and who was to blame: Rákosi’s claims on Transylvania, the nationalist quips in Hungarian almanacs, or the dismantling of the Hungarian university in Cluj? The truth is that neither camp could abstain from this because the historians’ eagerness to write about what they thought was true and vital derived from a century-old cultural tradition. Communism couldn’t erase it, but rather tried to put it to some good use.
In 1959, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej reiterated his discontent with the social-political preoccupations of the comrades in Hungary:

It is not by chance that during the counterrevolution, an organisation of beheaders appeared in the streets of Budapest. Carrying human heads that hanged from the tips of their bayonets, they kept shouting that they wanted Transylvania. I am sure they will eventually calm down because they don’t have any kind of argument, and no one can meet their demands. Instead of minding their business and building socialism, shoulder to shoulder, they cause trouble with others, they do such things […] What if we started referring to the Tibet and inquiring about it, when it is clear that it belongs to China (Nastasă, 2003, 560).

Despite his usual, reconciliatory tone and the hope that things would gradually turn back to normal, Dej (who thought that the Hungarians’ interest in Transylvania was comparable to the Romanians’ hypothetical claim on the Tibet) concluded that we couldn’t sit by and had to counterattack:

It’s time we made a little history. There is this manuscript by Marx, where he refers to the peasant wars. In principle, he refers to Transylvania, expresses his views on Transylvania, calls Kossuth a traitor, says that he betrayed his Slovaks and serves the Hungarians. He shows how the Romanians, the Czechs, and the Slovaks are oppressed, he shows that two-thirds of Transylvania’s population is Romanian. Marx even began to learn the Romanian language. In a place there were some Romanian words, instead of țară he wrote tzară (Nastasă 2003, 560).

Marx, who was Romanianised and lured to our side in typical Romanian proto-protochronist style, was the supreme argument one could use to deal a heavy blow to the nationalist Hungarians. But those who had to write down this task trusted by the party were the historian comrades who laboured in the field of Romanian research. And how could they refuse to carry out such a task? They could hardly wait to do it! And also, to tell again the truth about Transylvania!
Two volumes entitled Din istoria Transilvaniei [‘On the history of Transylvania’] were published not long afterwards, in 1960 and 1961. This was the first attempt to approach this topic from a perspective that was simultaneously materialist-historical and national-Romanian. This was the golden formula that would dominate the following decades. Besides Victor Cheresteșiu, who had given up much of his internationalist rhetoric, the other authors were Constantin Daicoviciu, Ștefan Pascu and Cornelia Bodea. The rigid Marxist tenets of the 1950s were still visible in it. Episodes in which the Romanian and Hungarian peasants cooperated in their common struggle against social oppression were ubiquitous and very annoying because of how relentlessly they were foregrounded.
But something had changed almost imperceptibly. For instance, in 1948 and 1918, the Romanians’ stance was just and progressive, on account that those events had been the work of the masses, which were infallible, in Marxist terms. Even bourgeois leaders like Bărnuțiu (who “mistook the Hungarian ruling class for the Hungarian people… and created enmity and distrust between the two nations”) had committed numerous ideological mistakes, the general course of history showed that the Romanians have been right in Transylvania (Daicoviciu et al., 1960-1961). Leaving aside the fraternity of the Romanian and Hungarian exploited classes, the most important thing was that the authors of those studies approached Transylvania as a component of the Romanian territorial conglomerate – a reality not just of the present but of entire history:

Transylvania lies of the core of a unitary territory, not just in terms of its genesis and evolution, but also through its complex economy, and this is a territory inhabited by the Romanian people (Daicoviciu et al., 1960-1961, I, 17).

For the comrades in Hungary, who interpreted Marxism and the just solving of the national matter by examining the map of the Carpathian Basin or the medieval history of the Kingdom of Hungary through a different lens, this was too much. In 1961, having just published an anthology of Romanian poetry in Hungarian, Köpeczi Béla, a historian who served as cultural dignitary in communist Hungary and translated the work of Bălcescu into Hungarian, voiced his discontent with the volume that appeared in Bucharest in front of a Romanian diplomat accredited in Budapest:

The publication of the volume On the History of Transylvania has produced much “noise” in the historians’ circles in the Hungarian People’s Republic […] Almost everyone who has read it believes it has a negative influence on Romanian-Hungarian relations […] it is a manifestation of Romanian nationalism (Nastasă, 2003, 672).

Köpeczi was convinced that the work had been approved for publication by the Romanian party and state leadership, which created a delicate and upsetting situation in Hungary:

Why do the Romanian historians have permission to publish such works, while Hungarian historians are prohibited from publishing research that might irritate the “neighbours” (Nastasă, 2003, 672)?

As these replies reveal, the Romanian-Hungarian rivalry, visible even in a sketchily phrased question like “who is allowed to curse the other more?,” continued to work even during the communist period. Köpeczi and his colleagues would have to stay put for twenty-five more years, until 1986, when they finally took revenge on the topic of Transylvania’s history.
The truth is that the Hungarian historians’ expectations regarding their Romanian colleagues’ tempered attitudes were far too great. They were vexed even by what was essentially an anti-nationalist work like On the History of Transylvania. The Hungarians and the Romanians literally lay in wait for each other, eager to punish any deviation that was deemed unacceptable. In 1957, Demény Lajos, a Hungarian historian from Romania, thought that even comrade Mihail Roller (regarded by his Romanian peers as the mouthpiece of proletarian internationalism) had a “rather nationalist stance… on issues of Hungarian-Romanian history” (Nastasă, 2003, 294). That Roller should have been seen as a nationalist is downright hilarious! But the young Szekler historian, who had settled in Bucharest and would become a DAHR senator later in life, who had studied in the USSR and would publish erudite studies on old Romanian books, honestly believed that the Romanians and the Hungarians had to be friends and that nationalism was a bad thing. Consequently, he was highly suspicious of any deviation from these principles.
            Historians in Hungary failed to understand how important “nationalist positions” were for the Romanian scholars, even though they were communists. In the Hungarians’ opinion, once we have set foot on the path of brotherhood and we, in Budapest, are trying to write about the peasant uprisings in the Apuseni Mountains and Nicolae Bălcescu, it would be much appreciated if the Romanian comrades set aside more delicate topics that hurt Romanian-Hungarian relations and focused on moments of understanding and good cooperation. As Köpeczi said,

In the Romanian People’s Republic energy and funding are futilely spent to elucidate clarified issues. The new relations between the Romanian People’s Republic and the Hungarian People’s Republic consecrate a reality: they recognise that it is right for Transylvania to belong to the Romanian People’s Republic, it is known that most of the population in this province is Romanian. It is no longer there necessary for Romanian historians and archaeologists to “waste” their time looking for evidence about the birth of the Romanian people and about the continuity of the Daco-Roman population on the territory of Dacia (Nastasă, 2003, 672).

Romanian historians, on the other hand, wished to leave aside aspects they thought were irrelevant and to lay emphasis on the great battles in the Romanian nation’s heroic history: Horea’s uprising, the Revolution of 1848, the struggle against Austro-Hungarian dualism, Transylvania’s union with Romania, that is (surprise, surprise!), the very moments in which the Romanians and the Hungarians, regardless of their class, had situated themselves on adversarial ground. As regards the problem of “Daco-Roman continuity” and the forming of the Romanian people, it was clear that the scholars in Romania would continue to “waste” their time digging for the keystone of Romanian historical identity. As I. Toth had noticed in the interwar period (I. Tóth, 1944, 74-78), the Romanian historians could not let go of that issue. The fact that they were communists now hadn’t changed a thing.
In time, there also appeared theoretical and methodological differences insofar as the object of study in the discipline of history should be. This led to a widening of the gap between the Romanian and the Hungarian historians. The former preferred event-history, with its focus on the countless political and military conflicts of the past. The latter, with a stronger Marxist agenda, were more interested in the economic, social, and cultural aspects, but also in everyday life and mentality traits. These research areas shed light on the way the two nations had lived together and influenced one another in positive ways. That is why the few Romanian historians who also engaged with such topics, in the spirit of the Annales School, had much less to reproach their colleagues in Hungary.
Historians and secret police officers, at war with Erdélyi története
The Ceaușescu period was the golden age of historiographic disputes between Romanians and Hungarians. The term “war” – a war that was waged on paper – can be used here without reservations. Much of what Romanian historians wrote acquired official status. The “historiographic front,” as this field of “intellectual labour” was called, aimed to combat the historians in Hungary, whose scientific works were perceived as threats to Transylvania. The publication of books on contentious topics and the Romanian historians’ participation in international conferences where they attempted to refute the Hungarians’ “inimical theses” were of interest not just to the party propaganda, but also to the “Securitate [Romanian secret police] organs.”
As the communist regime became more unpopular, many Romanian historians tried to limit their collaboration with it, and honestly do their job, avoiding official indications as far as possible. However, the ground on which disputes referring to Transylvania were carried was very slippery. Many Romanian scholars believed that when they were engaging in controversy with the Hungarian historians, they were not supporting the Ceaușescu regime, but defending the “historical truth” and the “national interests,” which, in their view, coincided. Even the Securitate officers, some of whom had realised that the regime was in deadlock, looked for moral justification and alibis for their zealous participation in activities designed to undercut Hungarian historical propaganda. Because of that, the hundreds of historical studies that were published and the even greater number of informative notes stored in the Securitate files consolidated this key theme of the Romanians’ perception of the Hungarians, which reached its apogee in the communist period: the Hungarians were a nation whose historians denigrated us and distorted our history in the hope of contesting our claim over Transylvania. This was an image with which the Hungarian scholars who were convinced they were doing solid scientific research did not resonate.
The most illustrative episode of this war took place in 1986, when a group of Hungarian historians led by Köpeczi Béla, who was Minister of Culture in the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic at that time, published a work entitled Erdélyi története három kötetben [‘The history of Transylvania in three volumes’] (Köpeczi, 1986). This book was a blockbuster and was re-published several times, including in an abbreviated edition, followed by translations into English, French and German. Its authors (including Makkai László, Trócsányi Zsolt, Miskolczy Ambrus, and Szász Zoltán) were the most outstanding historians in Hungary and had deep knowledge of the history of this province and of Romanian history in general. Some of them wrote many studies about it throughout their lives. The impressive bibliography of each chapter comprised the most important works of Hungarian, Romanian, and Saxon historiography, which they had studied in the original, discussing and analysing them critically. Even though they amended them if they deemed it necessary, the authors of this collection of studies consistently tried to present the viewpoints of each historiography, all the more so if sensitive issues, which could generate diverse interpretations, were at stake.
For the Romanian historians, the most unpleasant challenge posed by this work – which is also, to this day, the most difficult to accept – was its scientific standard. The authors of these three large volumes were very well acquainted with the sources, bibliography, and research methodology. Even though one did not approve of some interpretations or conclusions of the Hungarian colleagues, one could not ignore this essential aspect. But the Romanian historians did. During the Ceaușescu regime, every Romanian author who reviewed or simply referenced it vehemently condemned it in the following terms: an unscientific work, full of errors, dangerous and without merit! The effect of this verdict was still felt in the subsequent decades, when most of the Romanian researchers expressed their disagreement with its premises, as if it were a shameful or cursed book.
            Many important Romanian historians had good personal relations with their Hungarian colleagues. They met at international symposia and, after 1989, also at the sessions of the joint committee of Romanian-Hungarian history, a debate venue of the two academies. If you listened to the others and read their works, you couldn’t tell them they weren’t professional historians. And yet, their most representative work was never discussed in the open. It was an aporia that logic couldn’t provide an answer to. In fact, things were much simpler: they were Hungarians, so they couldn’t be reasoned with, at least on some topics. The reverse also made sense. The Hungarian historians had no interlocutor to reason with on this issue.
            The stigmatisation of this meritorious work written by the Hungarian scholars was one of the most unreasonable reactions of Romanian historiography of all time. If we read it, we can realise that it was far from “malefic,” which begs the question whether the Romanian historians who criticised it so assiduously had read it. In the late 1980s, there was a typed translation into Romanian of the infamous work at the History Institute in Cluj, strictly for internal confidential use. It had been completed in a great rush at the request of the party organs and was meant to be read only by the historians who had been summoned to refute it. The quality of the improvised polemical effort behind this translation was illustrated by the fact that the name of the Visigoths, for instance, was translated into Romanian as “water Goths.” The translator had indeed heard about the Goths but thought that this was the best equivalent for the Hungarian term vizigót, considering that víz meant “water” in Romanian and gót was easy to infer.
            Leaving these anecdotal details aside, we can notice, for the first time in such a massive scientific volume, that Transylvania was no longer treated as a part of Hungary, as the Hungarians had insisted ever since they came here and baptised the place. As viewed by these Hungarian historians, Transylvania was a province whose identity was predicated on the cohabitation of these three nations: Romanians, Hungarians, and Saxons. Consequently, its history, in which the Hungarian element was deeply entrenched, was no longer seen to legitimise the fact that this territory belonged to Hungary, but to outline the idea that the Hungarians were, much like the Saxons and the Romanians, one of the components of its historical identity. The political implications that could be inferred from this (if we insist on it, since the authors of the volume refrained from any comment of this kind) were that, in view of the history they shared, the three cohabiting nations in Transylvania should each find a place in its symbolical and constitutional architecture, because they were the political communities that had founded this province.
            In other words, in the historical dialogue on Transylvania in which the Hungarians had previously claimed that this province belonged to Hungary and the Romanians had shown that it was Romanian land, the view imparted by the authors of this volume was clearly positioned in the middle, as a sort of compromise. It’s not just ours, it’s not just yours, it is a historical condominium that we must manage together, in full awareness that we share a past in this place.
            But if we were to be suspicious of the above-mentioned historians’ intentions (in keeping with a good Romanian tradition), we could suspect their thesis of being an artifice meant to save whatever was left of their symbolical claims on Transylvania, now that all hope to recuperate this territory had been lost. However we looked at things, it would be difficult to say that the history of Transylvania is anything but the story of entwined relations between the ethno-cultural communities that have lived here. Transylvania is, in the most objective and profound way, the territory of several such communities, just like so many other similar territories in Europe – such as Alsace, Switzerland, Savoy, Silesia, the Catholic Netherlands and Northern Ireland, whose history equally includes Germans and Frenchmen, Germans, Frenchmen and Italians, Frenchmen and Italians, Poles and Germans, Walloons and Flemings, Protestant Irishmen and Catholic Irishmen – regardless of the different political solutions reached in each and every one of them.
The Romanian historians refrained from sophisticated interpretations of these matters. They saw the work of their Hungarian colleagues, simply as a reprehensible attempt to deny the Romanians’ historical claims on Transylvania and ultimately to question the legitimacy of contemporary frontiers (Velimirovici, 2020). Transylvania could by no means be a “space of complementarity.” Transylvania did not belong to the Romanians and the Hungarians (and the Saxons). It belonged solely to the Romanians. It was “Romanian land,” it was ours, since always and forever. We may accept the Hungarians to live beside us, and we may agree that we have many a time got along quite well, that we have cooperated sometimes and that ordinary individuals had peaceful relations, but despite all this, they remain a minority population. They were migrators in the beginning, foreigners to us and to this land that is ours alone. As the poet Adrian Păunescu wrote, “this is our country, we don’t live on rent” (Păunescu, 2003, 511). But they do, we might add, they do live like tenants in our house. The Romanian public did not realise how unfair this conception was, from a historical viewpoint, for the Szeklers, the Hungarians and the Saxons in Transylvania, who had lived for over a millennium in the mountains, towns, and fortified villages here, who also thought this land belonged to them and their forefathers since the beginning of time, and who rarely met Romanians in the regions in which they lived as compact communities.
On the other hand, the Romanian historians’ polemical reaction was commissioned by the party. Ceaușescu condemned the book of the Hungarian historians in a speech, and the party documents regarded it as “an open attack against Romania’s territorial integrity, which officially supports the political dismemberment of the contemporary Romanian state” (Velimirovici, 2020, 520). However exaggerated, the opinion according to which the Hungarian historians’ erudite studies imperilled Romania’s frontiers became a keystone of the Romanian, political and cultural imaginary. It shed light on the obsessive fear that Transylvania was permanently threatened by the Hungarians, both from within and from without, so any such event had to be dealt with very vigilantly. Why did we lose Northern Transylvania in 1940? A key strategy in this fierce battle was the propaganda abroad. That is why the Romanian state purchased advertisement space in the Western press, where it published outraged comments on Hungarian historiography (Velimirovici, 2020, 520). The volume of studies Jocul periculos al falsificării istoriei [‘The dangerous game of falsifying history’], which teemed with similar uncouth diatribes, was translated into English (Pascu, Ștefănescu, 1987). Party activists, historians, and the Securitate cooperated very closely in the fight against Hungarian irredentism and revisionism, as long as the main weapons of this enemy were history books published in Hungary, or pamphlets about Ceaușescu’s aberrant policies printed by the Hungarian diaspora.
Many Romanian historians called to fight in this imagological war were delighted with this role. Mediocre scholars, such as the well-known official historians of the regime Mircea Mușat and Ion Ardeleanu, could hope to stand out by writing propagandistic works, although these had no scientific value. Even professional historians, as were Ștefan Pascu and Ștefan Ștefănescu, answered the party’s call with enthusiastic docility, to obtain symbolical benefits, to be recognised as leaders of the Romanian historiographic battlefront, and to confirm their own conviction that they were performing acts of patriotism. An older-generation Transylvanian historian like Ștefan Pascu could remember the persecutions he had suffered at the beginning of his career, when he learned the bitter lesson of obedience to the party, and the dramatic loss of Transylvania in his youth. He also liked to add his signature on hundreds of history books that were published during those years (at least as the author of their forewords).
The fear of the Hungarian threat had therefore become an efficient tool for luring Romanian intellectuals to the side of the communist regime. The secret police played an important role in this process. It demanded reports from the historians who were allowed to make professional visits abroad, instructing them how to spy on their colleagues in Hungary, and even commissioning historical studies meant to dismantle their hostile theses. Important representatives of Romanian historiography were recruited as collaborators of the secret services (Hodor, 2018). The fact that their purported mission was to defend the cause of Transylvania, rather than to consolidate the Ceaușescu regime, offered a moral excuse to those who refused to see themselves as simple informants of the secret police.
To carry out their duties, the Securitate officers exploited their collaborators’ human weaknesses, ranging from fear and professional ambition to the desire to obtain a travel visa. In this context, anti-Hungarian sentiment and the disquietude of Romanian nationalism were used as “specific means” to pervert the conscience of people. Historical culture was bizarrely entwined with repressive activity because both aimed to achieve the same goal: to counter the Hungarian threat. In its efforts to defend the communist regime, including against the Hungarian peril, the Securitate used the whole arsenal of weapons available to it, from the simple gathering of information and “positive persuasion” to threats, violence, and assassinations. In September 1989, for instance, újvárossy Ernő, one of the close collaborators of the dissident minister Tőkés László, was found dead in a forest on the outskirts of Timișoara.
We could find just how far the anti-Hungarianism promoted at the end of the Ceaușescu regime, with its original blend of police repression and topics pertaining to the Romanian historical imaginary, went from a threat letter that was sent to the historian Mihnea Berindei in 1989. Berindei was an anti-communist thinker who lived in Paris, and had signed the Budapest Declaration. He was under Romanian secret police surveillance because instead of fighting against the Hungarian threat, he had made a pact with the enemy and militated against the Bucharest regime, together with the democratic opposition in Hungary. The historian appeared to have betrayed the national ideals even in his family life, considering that his wife had Hungarian roots! The heading of this letter, which ended up in a batch of documents declassified by the FBI, contained an overturned hatchet, with the blade facing downwards and with the handle featuring the Dacian wolf, next to a curved Dacian dagger. These insignia were accompanied by the slogan “the sword alone can decide,” believed to have been uttered by Avram Iancu, the Romanian hero from 1848 – a serious distortion, because Iancu had written the exact opposite: “weapons can never decide” between the Romanians and Hungarians. The message was signed “The sons of Avram Iancu. A radical patriotic organisation of the Romanian exile.” This was a made-up entity created by the Securitate, dissimulated among the members of the Romanian diaspora who had legionary sentiments. The text went as follows:

Mr. Berindei, we are very sorry for you, but it appears you won’t understand reason. You have sold yourself to the Hungarians. You have sold your soul. You have poisoned your blessed Romanian seed, which you’re hardly entitled to carry, by mixing it with Hungarian blood. You have shamelessly baptised your bastard with a name that is dear to us, Romanians, Vlad. Do you love him? Then MAKE UP YOUR MIND! Or start watching over him, moment by moment, inside the house, or during his walks, or give up the recreant work through which you have put yourself in the service of Hungarian revisionism, which attacks our dear Transylvania – as the most despicable traitor of the Romania nation! You like to say that you didn’t leave Romania to remain Romanian! Go on, then, be a Frenchman, a Turk, a Hungarian, or a gypsy, be whatever you want, but stop what you’re doing while you can! If not, for the sake of your own life, dear Mihaly, then for that of your beloved Katalin and the mongrel you are cradling (https://newsromania.net/anchete/dosarele-fbi-asasinarea-profesorului-ioan-petru-culianu/).

Ethnic slurs, revisionism, legionarism, the Dacian wolf and dagger, our dear Transylvania, Avram Iancu, mongrel infants cradled by Hungarian mothers, betrayal: it was the perfect cocktail of the Romanians’ perception of the Hungarians, and a significant component of the Romanian historical imaginary. A poisoned potion prepared by the Securitate and the historiography serving the Ceaușescu regime, using the cultural resources and the historical anguishes collected from the dark groves of Romanian nationalism.

References