People’s Police and Legitimisation of Power in Socialist Romania, 1960–1989

Ciprian Cirniala
Completed associated PhD project

Numerous allegories of a James Bond in the service of his people, a figure of Herculean strength or a person in blue appeared in the mass media discourse of socialist Romania from 1960 to 1989. Representations of power collided with social counter-representations (the Fuzz, truncheon-carriers) of law enforcement officers. The performance, but also the limits, of the legitimisation of rule could be discerned from this interdependent modulation of the People’s Police. Alongside a lot of obedient supporters, the order of the People’s Police (i.e. politics, to borrow from Rancière) was confronted by many practices of ‘poaching’ (Certeau). On the basis of a wide range of sources, from strictly confidential files via the press to a selection of crime literature and films from the era, we will probe the direction in which this relationship ultimately leads.