From Cheap One-Way Tickets to Prohibitive Luxury Rides. Dumitru Popescu on Romanian National Communism and the Post-Communist Transition

As a main ideologue of Ceaușescu’s communist regime during the 1970s and a key public figure throughout its entire existence, Dumitru Popescu’s reflections on Romanian national communism, a local brand of national communism that he helped to create, are not to be disregarded. Likewise, special attention must also be devoted to his analyses of the post-communist transition. So far, Popescu’s political thinking has not been systematically investigated in scientific endeavors. Moreover, it tends to be overlooked or considered as a sort of appendix to his impressive body of literary works and journals. This article aims to explore and critically discuss the way Popescu’s national communism evolved during the 1970s and 1980s and how it endured and recalibrated itself in the first decades after the 1989 anti-communist revolution within a new ideological framework, that of overtly predatory capitalism. It does so by analyzing Popescu’s ideas of personality cult, social class, and youth, all representative of the official socialist discourse.