Coal Miners’ Raids and the Rewriting of History. Instruments of Legitimation and De-legitimation in the Romanian Press of the 1990s

Abstract

The coal miners’ movements towards the capital constitute a pretext to examine the confrontation of miners and journalists, perhaps the most important pressure groups in post-communist Romania. Considering the social structure of these groups, this divergence mirrors their conflicting reactions towards the political system that was instituted after December 1989. Yet, notwithstanding their separate perceptions of democracy, the author proposes to investigate the arguments used in this confrontation. The causes and evolution of the miners’ visits to Bucharest as gauges in the evolution of the Romanian democracy, the legitimation and delegitimation of their actions since the events of June 1990 are thus traced in three daily newspapers, Adevãrul, România Liberã and Dimineaþa, which the author monitored over the corresponding tidal periods: January-September 1990, September-December 1991, and January-March 1999. One method of undermining the other’s legitimacy is that of twisting history though partisan interpretation or even by re-writing those historical events that shaped the adversary’s particular identity. Such events that built the miners’ image are the strike of 1929, which the communist regime considered an essential episode of the fight against the bourgeois oppression of the workers, and the strike of 1977, which, on the contrary, produced an anti-communist alibi. Nevertheless, the latter representation began to fade, especially after the events in June 1990, as some editorialists questioned the incomplete resistance of 1977, the miners’ feeble participation in the uprising of December 1989 and their unconditional support for the communists who remained in office. The most striking case is that of the January 1999 miners’ raid, when the strike of 1929 receives completely opposing connotations in România Liberã and Dimineața.