Sorin Antohi - Controversy

Controversy

In a 2006 open letter published in the Bucharest-based 22 review, Antohi admitted to having collaborated with the Securitate, the secret police in Communist Romania, during the 1970s and the 1980s. He also claimed that he had been persecuted, and physically abused by the same Securitate as a member of the Jassy Group of anti-communist intellectuals, which included Dan Petrescu, Liviu Antonesei, Luca Piţu and others. As an informant, he claimed that he offered non-detrimental information on the political views of many of his close friends.

On October 20, 2006, the Romanian press reported that representatives of the Romanian Ministry of Education discovered that Antohi never defended his doctoral thesis in the country. It appears that he failed to write his PhD thesis, and was expelled from the doctoral program of the University of Iaşi in 2000. His Curriculum vitae at the Central European University also listed several books that Antohi claimed were published by Polirom press, but which journalists from the Ziua de Iaşi daily were unable to locate; Antohi was unavailable for comment.

In October 2006, this sequence of scandals led him to resign from his position as head of the history department at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and from the Pasts, Inc. Institute for Historical Studies. He is still an editor of the academic journal East European Politics and Societies.

As of December 21, 2006, Sorin Antohi is still an editor of the academic journal East European Politics and Societies, where his collaborator Vladimir Tismăneanu is chair of the editorial committee.

The scandal broke out again in July–August 2008, in Germany and Romania, after having co-directed a Conference with the financial help of the Institute for Cultural Studies. Newspapers in Germany and Romania alleged that Antohi had, in public forums over the course of the previous year, represented himself as the director of two research institutes, one in Germany and one in Romania, which do not exist. At this time the scandal was, in part, revived by the Romanian-German author and Nobel Prize Winner Herta Müller who, in a letter in the Frankfurter Rundschau, asked how it was that Antohi, who had been an informer since the age of 19, and who had falsified his PhD diploma, had been invited to an event at a Romanian cultural institute in Berlin.