European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM)

In the realm of intellectual life, the goal of the Communist Party was to annihilate any form of genuine creativity: literature, history, art, and philosophy were to be ideologically subordinated to the political sphere. The whole cultural tradition was reinterpreted in order to meet the new dogmas: the main names of Romanian literaure were obliterated [wiped out] from official publications, censorship was ruthlessly applied to eliminate anything that smacked of 'nationalism'. 'cosmopolitanism', 'objectivism' or other forms of 'bourgeois decadentism'