Introductory Remarks
by Brigadier General Mihail E. Ionescu

The Institute for Political Studies in Defense and Military History (IPSDMH), is subordinated directly to the State Secretary and Head of the Department for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Defense Policy in the Ministry of National Defense. The Institute's remit is research in the fields of Romania's national security, defense policy and military history.

At the same time, IPSDMH plays a role of interface with the Ministry of National Defense in the latter's relationships with civil society, particularly with institutions, foundations, and non-governmental organizations with similar activities and with similar interests. IPSDMH issues two publications, Revista de Istorie Militara (Military History Review) and Monitor Strategic (Strategic Bulletin), published once at every two months, and, respectively, twice a year, which contain the results of research in the fields of security and national defense and that of military history.

The Institute is a founding member of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Consortium of the Defense Academies and the Institutes for Security Studies, and participates together with other military institutes and military centers of NATO member states or partners in the activity of several workshops (Military History, Archives, Crisis Management, NATO's Future, European Security and Defense Identity/ European Security and Defense Policy - ESDI/ESDP, etc.).

Under the joint sponsorship of IPSDMH and the US Field Army History Center, the first international conference of the Military History Working Group (MHWG) was organized , in April 2001, on "Case Studies of the Cold War". The papers read at the Conference have been published in volume form, under the aegis of the Consortium, in Romanian, English, Russian, and German.

In March 2002, IPSDMH hosted the gathering of the "NATO Future" PfP Consortium Working Group, where guests from the United States, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Finland, Bulgaria, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, and the Republic of Moldova participated alongside Romanian officials and experts.

In 2001, the Institute initiated a joint project with US and European institutions, within the Parallel History Project - PHP, on "NATO and Warsaw Pact Parallel History".

PHP is an independent international body of researchers in the field of Cold War history. Its activity is focussed on declassifying archive documents regarding the Cold War period. Teams or individual researchers associated with this project have undertaken to collect, analyze and interpret these sources, with a view to a better understanding of contemporary history and of the evolution of international relations. In order to meet its goal, PHP assembled historians, archive researchers and librarians, research institutes, universities of several countries in a joint effort to locate, declassify, select, copy, translate, assess and prepare for publication the archive documents. The results of all these activities are made available to the public through publication of volumes of documents, through the presentation of papers at international academic conferences, and through specialist web sites.

IPSDMH is preparing a volume of documents, titled România în cadrul Pactului de la Varsovia - 1955-1970 [Romania within the Warsaw Pact - 1955-1970], to be launched next October at the international conference on the same subject in Bucharest, which is being organized under the aegis of the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) and PHP. Specialists from all the PHP and CWIHP partner or associated institutions have been invited to this event, as well as from the Archives Working Group and MHWG under the PfP Consortium.

The IPSDMH staff's interest in various aspects of Cold War history has become a research priority in recent years. In this respect, IPSDMH organized at the beginning of May 1999 an international colloquium of military history on the evolution of political and military relationships in Central and Southeastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, where Cold War-related subjects were given pride of place. The papers were published, in English, in volume form, under the title Geopolitics and History at the Crossroads between Millennia.

In 2000, Bucharest was the venue of the international conference On Both Sides of the Iron Curtain, organized under the aegis of IPSDMH; the papers read by researchers and analysts from Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, the Russian Federation, Turkey, and Romania were published in a volume entitled On both sides of the Iron Curtain.

In February 2001, IPSDMH organized a seminar on The Cold War in Romania - research methods and progress, which brought together experts from Romanian universities and research institutes.

In December 2001, a bilateral seminar on Romania and Israel during the Cold War Period was organized in Bucharest by IPSDMH, with participation by scholars from Romania and Israel.

IPSDMH's range of research interests is constantly being developed through participation in various joint research projects with local and foreign partners. The activities already completed and those still on the agenda have facilitated closer and deeper relations with similar institutes in Europe and on the American continent.

The efforts made since 1990 in this field have been considerable. They have been made against the background of the restructuring process undergone by the Romanian Army, engaged, like the whole of Romanian society, in the process of integration into the Euro-Atlantic security structures.

The present collection of documents, already computerized, is meant to be a preliminary guide to the labyrinth of archives containing documents and materials relating to the Cold War period. The initiative of the Institute for Political Studies in Defense and Military History is part of a larger project, aimed at offering specialists essential data for investigating the Cold War period on the basis of Romanian documents. The selection of representative documents has been made by Professor Dennis Deletant, a scholar who has published several works on 20th century Romanian history.

The documents have all been collected from Romanian archives - namely, the National Archives and the Military Archives - whose collections containing Cold War-related documents were declassified after 1990. Some of the documents are published here for the first time, while others have appeared in Romanian in collections of documents. They have been selected from specific periods in order to illustrate the changes in Romanian internal and foreign policy during the period 1955-1981.

I sincerely hope that this initiative of the Institute for Political Studies in Defense and Military History, represented by the launching of this present computerized collection of documents, will achieve its purpose by providing a useful working instrument for all those interested.

 

Brigadier General and Ph. D. Mihail E. IONESCU is General Director of the Institute for Political Studies
in Defense and Military History.