Finding the Enemy Ethnicized State Violence and Population Control in Ceau , sescu’s Romania ✣ Stefano Bottoni The analysis of state violence in Communist societies as a complex system of ideological prescriptions, normative values, and everyday practices has been emerging as a major topic in the study of Soviet-type regimes. 1 New historio- graphical approaches regard the Soviet-type state as a heterogeneous organism of agencies and individual actors, with mixed and at times contradictory in- terests. Scholars have increasingly put at the center the changing patterns of physical and psychological violence from the 1940s onward. In Hungary, sem- inal work by political scientist Ervin Csizmadia showing how the post-1956 regime under János Kádár transformed itself into a “discursive dictatorship” in the 1960s has stimulated further research about “soft violence” and accommo- dation mechanisms between the party-state and society. 2 Michal Kopeˇ cek and Michal Pullmann have put forward concepts like “civilized violence” and the “routinization of the ideological” in their analyses of the shift that occurred 1.For an overview, see Jan C. Behrends, “Gewalt und Staatlichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert: Einige Ten- denzen zeithistorischer Forschung,” Neue Politische Literatur, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2013), pp. 39–58. On the internal logic of Soviet-type state violence, see Peter Holquist, “State Violence as Technique: A Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism,” in Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford: Stanford Univer- sity Press, 2013), pp. 19–45. On the need to focus more on ordinary perpetrators in the discussion of state violence in the Soviet context, see Lynne Viola, “The Question of the Perpetrator in Soviet History,” Slavic Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Spring 2013), p. 22. 2. See Ervin Csizmadia, Diskurzus és diktatúra: A magyar értelmiség vitái Nyugat-Európáról a kés˝ o Kádár-rendszerben (Budapest: Századvég, 2001), p. 78; and the research projects “Hatvanas évek Magyarországon,” “Kádárizmus,” and “ Búvópatakok: A két világháború közötti magyar jobboldali- konzervatív és széls˝ ojobboldali gondolkodás és képvisel˝ oinek sorsa 1945–1989 között,” 1956 Institute, http://www.rev.hu/en/node/34. For a fresh attempt at turning the study of state security files and ev- eryday collaboration with the system into social history, see Sándor Horváth, ed., Az ügynök arcai: Mindennapi kollaboráció és ügynökkérdés (Budapest: Libri, 2014), which was included in a thematic is- sue: Sándor Horváth, ed., “Everyday Collaboration with the Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe,” Hungarian Historical Review Vol. 4, No. 1 (2015), pp. 1–196; János M. Rainer, ed., “Hatvanasévek” Magyarországon: Tanulmányok (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2004); and János M. Rainer, Bevezetés a kádárizmusba (Budapest: L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2011). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 113–136, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00766 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 113