Recycling Romania'S Communist Past As An Entrepreneurial Project

This paper analyzes a series of recent entrepreneurship projects in Romania, whose activity centers on creating economic, social, and cultural value from artifacts created in socialist Romania. The paper takes into account the historical context of post-socialist Romania and the political, economic, and cultural changes which have created a proper context in which the socialist past would be turned into cultural and economic value, through private entrepreneurship projects. The analysis also takes into account such projects within the larger emergent entrepreneurial ecosystem, which has been bolstered by Romania’s accession into the European Union. The paper relies on participant observation, personal oral history interviews, as well as on primary sources drawn from written and digital mass media, as well as social networks. It focuses on several case studies of entrepreneurship projects, such as Ferestroika, in Bucharest, and the Communist Consumer Museum, in Timișoara. The paper argues that while such projects are part of a larger entrepreneurial ecosystem, at a worldwide level, which relies heavily on retromania (I.e. the usage of past models for present and future projects), they also present several local specificities, as their contribution is not only economic, but nuances the ways in which younger generations interpret a communist past they never lived in reality.