Liberal Anti-communism and historical commissions in Romania and Moldova

This article examines the transnational dynamics that characterised the creation, activities and afterlife of the Romanian and Moldovan historical commissions tasked with dealing with the communist past, including their membership, historiographical approaches, cross-border connections, and embeddedness in international justice discourses. Liberal anti-communist factions within the two bodies appealed to global approaches to reckoning with political violence and sought recognition in foreign academic settings. The commissions? activities intertwined: not only was the former a model for the latter, members of both cooperated with each other. These case-studies indicate that campaigns of criminalisation of communism are not exclusively conservative and revisionist; they can also extol conceptualisations and agendas that go beyond those memory politics that equate Nazism and Communism.