Existing studies of censorship in the Eastern Bloc have focused on victims of censorship and strategies of by-passing the censorial system. This project moves beyond the moment of decision-making to consider more broadly the everyday life of censorship from the perspective of its practitioners. I reconstruct intimate knowledge of the censorial system and practices from archival documents, memoirs, biographies, personal memories of first-hand experiences of censorship, and interviews with former censors. It offers rare glimpses into the complexity of censorial mechanism of a collapsed authoritarian state and it has both a historical and current anthropological value which should be evaluated comparatively: the analysis of the practices of censorship in communist Romania can shed light on other economies of representation of knowledge inside authoritarian states in our present world.

A full-length study is available here.