Northern Illinois University Press Ceauşescu's Children: The Making and Unmaking of Romania's Last Socialist Generation (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)

Ceauescu's Children examines the remembered experiences, institutional structures, and ambivalent ideologies of childhood under Nicolae Ceauescu (1965–1989), reconsidering dominant narratives of state socialism in Eastern Europe and histories of childhood in contemporary Europe through the lens of Romania's last socialist generation. Juxtaposing previously unexplored archives against personal recollections, Diana Georgescu argues that children and teens led normal lives in extraordinary times. They attended schools and afterschool clubs, cultivating ideological skills alongside cultured behaviors, playing expert roles of historians and ethnographers of their motherland on scientific expeditions, or serving as cultural ambassadors in international camps in the Soviet bloc and Western Europe. Georgescu investigates how children performed daily practices of socialist patriotism and internationalism under the guidance of teachers, youth activists, and parents, emerging as socialist-cum-national subjects. Ceauescu's Children challenges the notion that late socialist education and state children's organizations were exclusively collectivist and homogenizing. Moving beyond binary representations of complicity or resistance, Georgescu argues that children, parents, and educators often met the socialist regime halfway, adapting its policies and ideologies to their interests, needs, and aspirations.