Being a Historian of Romanian Communism, 23 Years After

This article aims at presenting some of the difficulties of the nowadays research of the recent past. Three aspects will be put under scrutiny: the difficulty of dealing with the sources, the conceptual tools at the disposal of the researcher in order to depict his/her findings, and the ethical and political issues which surround the research on communism. We will show that the sources, as well as the concepts we use, are never innocent; and that no historical account of the recent past can be separated by the political and social environment in which it was produced.