The present article aims to offer a synoptic picture of communist Romania’s relations with Third World countries during the Ceaușescu regime. Within these relations, economic and geopolitical motivations coexisted along with ideological ones, thus making the topic one of the most interesting and relevant key for understanding RSR’s complex and cunning international strategy. However, I intend to prove that mere pragmatism is not enough to comprehend the drive behind Ceaușescu’s diplomatic efforts in post-colonial Africa; ideological factors need also to be (...) taken into account. (shrink)

Owing to various reasons, Stalinism still represents, according to this essay, a fertile intellectual topic. Therefore, my aim here is to offer a reading of Pavel Campeanu’s works on Stalinism – a relatively unknown Romanian Marxist – through the social history of the Soviet Union in general and of Stalinism in particular advanced by Moshe Lewin. The argumentation advances by taking into account the overall historical frame of the debate (Eastern and Western Marxism during the Cold War) and by stressing (...) some key issues like primitive accumulation, legitimacy, a certain overstretching of the concept of Stalinism and, finally, the issue of totalitarianism. The stake of the essay resides in claiming that Campeanu’s analyses of Stalinism, original and convincing as they are, may favor, in the above-mentioned issues, and regardless the author’s intentions, interpretations belonging to or deriving from the totalitarian school of Cold War and Soviet Studies. (shrink)

Hegel’s philosophy of revolution has been widely studied and much debated. Some scholars see Hegel as a tiresome defender of existing political orders, while others point to his enthusiastic, if partial, support for the French Revolution, as well as for many modern revolutions or insurrectionary movements, both ancient and modern. Following this last line of argument, my paper attempts a Hegelian interpretation of the Russian Revolution, taking into account important aspects such as the subversive dynamic of Hegelian political concepts, the (...) relationship between class and state in Hegel’s political philosophy, the overwhelmingly anti-feudal character of the Russian Revolution, and, finally, the stabilisation and distortion of the Russian Revolution under the Stalinist regime, which, in Hegelian terms, can be seen as a new form of absolute freedom (terror) aimed at solving the main social dilemma of modernity identified by Hegel in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, namely poverty. (shrink)