“What’s done is done”: Coming to terms with the memorial de-communization of public space in Romania

Abstract

Postsocialism brought about a massive reconfiguration of the memorial landscapes in Central and Eastern European countries. While the removal of monuments and renaming of places were thoroughly researched by social memory scholars, how these mnemonic changes were received by ordinary people has not piqued academic attention. Drawing on an original quantitative dataset derived from a nation-wide sociological survey (N = 1156), this article sets out to examine the factors shaping people’s attitudes toward the removal of socialist symbols from public space in Romania. Statistical modeling of these data through regression analysis highlights that participants’ coming to terms with the memorial de-communization of public space in Romania varies in terms of the latter’s political values, local embeddedness, and socio-demographic characteristics. Such a quantitative approach contributes to a better understanding of postsocialist transformations of public space and opens up previously unexplored avenues of inquiry into how citizens relate to the coming to terms with a controversial past.