The research project entitled "The leaders of the Romanian Communist Party, 1921-1944. Prosopo-graphical analysis" is relevant for several reasons, which we state below:
The poor representation in Romanian historiography of social history subjects in favor of political history, focused on the short span. Note that while in both Europe and the United States this field is widely represented, in Romania, however, this field is underdeveloped.
Focusing on the proposed project, it is worthwhile noting that since 1990 the researchers were particularly concerned with the postwar history of Romanian communism (after the Communist Party took power) and most efforts were directed towards the political aspects, as shown in the previous paragraph. Works on the history of the underground activity of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) are written in the same manner. Up to the present, there hasn’t been any applied analysis of the trained human resources of the RCP’s leadership, validated by clearly defined research methods and techniques which would be accepted by specialists in the socio-humanities field.
The recent release of an abundant archival material (the most important collections and archives referring to the history of RCP between the two World Wars) gives way to the creation of a subject such as this, respecting the quality standards required by the historical field.
Once the issue of access to archival sources is tackled, the researcher faces the problem of enriching the methodological instruments necessary for a scientific analysis of impressive amounts of complex data. Studying the examples given by Western historiography, particularly the French one, we believe that prosopography (bio group) is a suitable method for analyzing the Communist Party’s leadership during the interwar period. Note that in the last decades, this method has been applied successfully, at first by archaeologists and historians studying the middle ages, and later for exploring the recent history. Nonetheless, the application of this theory is accompanied by an important theoretical debate among specialists. Furthermore, it is also relevant to note that some ongoing projects that investigate subjects regarding Romanian history up to the First World War suggested prosopography as the main method of research.
The peculiarities of studying recent history (especially poor access to sources and the sequential aspect of historical data, difficult to analyze in a holistic manner) made it difficult until now to apply the prosopographical method for the recent past. We believe that such an analysis, as carried out in the vast majority of European countries and farther, would be a step towards synchronizing the Romanian historiography with similar endeavors in Europe and worldwide.
The globalization and changes in contemporary world, by which no scientific research has remained unfamiliar, led us to regard the project results in two registries: a database accessible on the Internet and a number of studies resulted from processing, analysis and interpretation of the information contained in the above mentioned database.
Thus, the project entitled "The leaders of the Romanian Communist Party, 1921-1944. Prosopographical analysis" will release a significant amount of data in the scientific circuit that can be accessed and processed by anyone, based on their research interests; on the other hand, it is obvious that developing the methodological instruments, be they modern or not, represents only one of the duties of the researcher. Consequently, the aim is to create a number of academic studies that will offer the academic setting a unique interpretation of the documentary material studied. In Romania, this kind of historical databases are at a pioneering level. Such instruments are used mostly by sociologists. The goal of the prosopographical projects mentioned in the previous paragraph is to develop this kind of instruments, but so far, no historical database available to researchers has ever been established in Romania.
