Public Sphere, Citizens’ Participation and the Legacy of Communism

The author is trying to explain the communist strategy of taking over the Romanian society beginning with coming into power in 1944 and developing during a long period of more than forty years. The author tries to explain most people‘s lack of reaction by their previous experience with authoritarian practices used in the last decades on the Romanian political stage and later on, when repression has been more and more replaced by manipulation, by some strive for normalcy of most citizens. The author does not accept any exoneration of responsibility by the so called resistance “through culture” which is considered to be similar with an almost pathological form of ethical autism when visibility was a political burden, if not, at times, a life risk. All these traditions could explain why politics was and still remains for many Romanians such an intricate burden.