“Every time the sun sets, our knowledge of Communism evaporates just a little bit. Unless we work hard, day after day, to replenish our dissipating reserves, those of us who have known tend to forget, and those who never knew – the generation coming out of childhood – tend to grow up in ignorance of all those gruesome data about the nature of the enemy we face.” This is how William F. Buckley Jr. described the moral and scientific duties of any academic, journalist, writer, or public intellectual who would like to assess the false promises and unspeakable horrors perpetrated by Communism during the 20th century.This yearbook attempts to meet these expectations. A culture of memory is an indispensable part of our effort of coming to terms with the last century’s traumatic events. First, we should air the ethical concerns of the victims. Eastern Europe is a region where the hammer and sickle flag brought to death millions of lives. The stories emerge from the former Communist bloc exceed the ordinary powers of imagination. Labor camps and prisons, forced exiles and hecatombs require, without doubt, a very close attention to detail. Historians of different methodological persuasion have brought to light the physical and psychological terror experienced in the Gulag. Still, one cannot view Communism simply as a graveyard of global proportions. The unspeakable evil of any dictatorship is measured by its killings. However, the killings do not explain the genesis of that particular totalitarian ideology, and its subsequent unfolding. Unearthing the dead may be a reparatory action (on moral grounds) and a groundbreaking psychological experiment (with great potential for the inner katharsis). But even a worshipper of relics will not deny that there are other acts that complement this practice (i.e., the reading of texts).Despite the rampant fear instilled among ordinary people, under the Communist regime other-than-horrible things took place. Symbolist poets and well-read novelists, great actors in cinema or on the theatre stage, as well as outstanding sports-men or highly qualified professionals in the field of medicine, engineering, military research or education, have made their contribution to a tacit strategy of collective survival. While some quietly endured the hunger and the cold, murmuring perhaps against the nomenklatura, others wrote books; a few told “reactionary” jokes, while an even smaller minority found refuge in spirituality; etcetera. The memory of dictatorship, therefore, must be told, recounted, and analyzed in this full perspective. History-writing must be inspired by the calm figure of Clio, depicted with a book in her hand. Getting the facts right and discerning the contextual meanings of particular actions – this is what inspires the critical study of the archives, the constant reshuffling of hermeneutical categories, the comparative investigation of different collective or individual trajectories.