Romania: ceausescu's last folly

...There is more to this than simply bad economic planning...

...Unwanted children, secret botched abortions, and the miserable prospect of living with an unwanted spouse for many years were common...

...Not the least of the ironies of the Ceaqescu regime is that when it ends, the Russians will regain greater control than they have had since the early 1950s, but, this time, all of Romania will welcome them...

...they have façades with false columns, fake arches on top, and heavy balconies...

...But only Romania has tried to pay back its debts while simultaneously accelerating the old, failed plans...

...But even with this, the level of protest is insignificant compared to what might Into the Depths Each issue of Commentary strikes a new low in intellectual vulgarity and political reaction...

...As the gap between promise and reality grew, and his popularity fell, Ceausescu turned to an ever narrower circle, primarily to his family...

...one people, one SUMMER • 1988 • 271 folk...

...How could leaders subject so many of their people to such toil for the sake of personal vanity...

...Lesser "urbanization" projects exist in minor cities, too, including a plan to tear down peasant houses built during the relative prosperity of the 1960s and early 1970s and replace them with modern blocks that will have only one bathroom per floor...

...Shortages continue to get worse each year, and each winter there is less heat, less electricity, less food, less transportation, and more words...

...For one thing there was that peculiar Ceausescu obsession with population...

...Like Hitler, who also planned to rebuild his capital, he has come to hate his people for letting him down...

...Ceausescu's plan was to create a modern, united Romania that would be a world-class producer of all the main industrial products—steel, automobiles, heavy machinery, petrochemicals, and much else...

...Solid phalanxes of buildings stand in neat rows, on average some ten to twelve floors high...

...Since 1966 abortion and contraception had been illegal and most grounds for divorce abolished...

...He is portrayed as the liberator the Romanians have been seeking for two millennia...

...He wanted Romania to 272 • DISSENT develop ever more quickly and to become totally independent, not only of the Russians, but of Western bankers, too...

...That small escape valve, to which only high officials and top intellectuals have access, accounts for much of their passivity...

...Half of the friends I had in the 1970s have escaped, and most of the others are too frightened or ashamed to answer letters...

...Once Ceausescu's friend in Iran was overthrown, matters worsened...

...The peasants were almost reconciled to the forced collectivization of the late 1950s and early 1960s...

...the growing stock of housing created more options...

...As for the Russians, it has become clear that they no longer fear Romania's supposed independence...

...There Ilie Ceausescu delivered a harangue about Romania's 2,050 years of struggle for independence, and the Americans listened respectfully, fawning on the strutting little general because, they said, it was important to "keep one's options open and maintain access...

...But if the thinking of the ancient Egyptians eludes us, Ceausescu's does not...

...unbroken historical tradition...

...To further improve the trade balance, he also cut down on fuel imports, but this was not supposed to affect heavy industry...

...This has happened often enough to produce the sickest of the large crop of sick jokes now circulating in Bucharest: "What is the difference between Hitler and Ceau~escu...

...During the day, the huge swath cut out of the city is a surrealistic terrain of noise and dust with thousands of workers and hundreds of machines crawling about, mingling indiscriminately with ordinary citizens, who must make their way through this creation...

...All of Eastern Europe has done better...

...The language the Romanians speak is a mixture of old Latin and old Slav modernized by nineteenth-century intellectuals who borrowed from French...

...The only time it played a political role in the twentieth century was in the 1930s, when many young priests joined the fascist Iron Guard...

...At night, most streets are unlit...

...As it is, when workers protest, they have no organization or leaders, and so each disturbance is treated separately...

...The pseudohistory and pseudosociology of the prewar fascist intellectuals were once again in favor—racial purity...

...Ceausescu enjoyed a limited but very real popularity for having won a small degree of independence from the USSR and for having allowed Romania to reopen contact with the West...

...The two must have recognized a common, shared megalomania, as do Ceausescu's other great international friends, Kim II Sung and Richard Nixon...

...But who knows...

...He monopolized the news, gave instructions to peasants, students, and workers about how to perform their jobs, and acquired semidivine omniscience...

...They are so universally loathed that no one gives them much chance of survival...

...He also began to rotate important officials through a bewildering series of jobs to make sure they would never build a base of their own...

...Yet, the Ceausescu regime has resurrected this Dacian myth, once a favorite of extreme nationalist and fascist intellectuals in prewar Romania, to promote loyalty to the regime...

...In 1982 the situation worsened again...

...Bucharest's old center had a charming elegance that, if did not match that of Paris, was at least substantially grander than Sofia's and a lot prettier than Belgrade's...

...Old churches and architectural gems were leveled...

...In their diversity, all these countries have problems, but none has seen its standard of living slip back to what it was at the height of Stalinism in the early 1950s...

...He screams at the architects, spits with contempt at what he doesn't like, and has new constructions destroyed if he doesn't like what he sees...

...A new subway line has been built, with gleaming escalators going into it...

...The Soviets certainly do not want a total economic collapse, because they would have to pick up the pieces and rush in aid...

...Eventually, the half-constructed parts will be finished, and much of the rest will be left as empty lots to be abandoned to dust and weeds, standing next to the neofascist architectural monuments that will be bitterly mocked...

...This project will overshadow all his failures and make him an immortal...

...Ceau~escu, just the opposite...

...The work site of the pyramids might have looked like this...

...have been expected from Poles, Hungarians, or even Czechs and East Germans had they been subjected to such a monstrous regime...

...He wanted to create a modern wonderland, a legacy of what is now officially called Romania's "Epoch of Gold, the Epoch of Ceausescu...

...His brother Ilie, who fancies himself a great military historian, was promoted to general and installed as watchdog over the army...

...This was the nonsense spread by Octavian Goga, a poet who had been Hitler's hireling in Romania, and Lucian Blaga, an obscurantist philosopher who claimed special virtues in Romania's "peasantness...

...So they are carefully working with the regime, reestablishing tight economic links, and undoubtedly keeping their eyes on certain key people for the future...

...That was the cause of the conflicts with the Soviet Union, not any incipient liberalism...

...Their language, presumably part of the Thracian family, is unknown...

...Undoubtedly enraged by his failures (there are rumors that his behavior is increasingly erratic and nasty), Ceausescu launched his final great plan a few years ago—to level a wide swath of central Bucharest, over half a mile wide and perhaps ten miles long, and build in it a vast array of gleaming white office and apartment buildings, public halls and palaces, and great avenues...

...And a program for destroying Hungarian culture in Transylvania was begun...

...He frequently inspects the work site and the plans...

...Now, most of their privileges have been removed, but they have generally bowed their heads quietly, hoping to keep a choice apartment or the right to travel to the West every so often and eventually, when things get too bad, to escape...

...Wrecking cranes and tractors began moving in with only a few hours warning, ordering people in this most densely populated part of the city to pack up their belongings...

...On the contrary, they hold it up to the other East Europeans as an example of what happens to those who try to become too independent...

...Inside buildings there is virtually no heat...

...Economists who study Romania believe that there must also be an element of personal vengeance in it...

...To favor them meant to undercut his base in the old apparatus...

...They are brightly white...

...To be led by a mad old despot with grandiose dreams is not uniquely Romanian, either, but aside from Hoxha's Albania, Europe has seen nothing like this since the death of Stalin...

...Both the wartime fascist government and the early Communist government had sent political prisoners to work on it...

...Finally, Ceausescu launched a project he had been planning for a long time, the reconstruction of Bucharest...

...Fantastic statistics were published trumpeting extraordinary economic successes...

...Construction more than five years old is starting to fall apart...

...As Romania has sunk into economic chaos, the percentage of its trade with the USSR has risen sharply, because increasingly it is the only source of many raw materials...

...There is no meat, there are lines for every basic necessity, and the terribly crowded, overburdened public transportation system is breaking down...

...Why are there no protests...

...By 1973, it was all beginning to go wrong...

...There are so few alternate leaders available that Elena Ceau~escu or favored son Nicu could take power for a time...

...More food is rushed into the affected area, the potential worker leaders are jailed or shot, temporary wage concessions are made, and the event is isolated...

...Hitler used to kill people by turning on the gas...

...Two-thousand fifty years ago there were indeed people called Dacians in most of what is now Romania...

...Yet in 1970 Bucharest was better off...

...The housing shortage made all this much worse...

...These laws led to cruel dilemmas for many young urbanites...

...The country needed more people, said Ceausescu, and he meant to have them...

...In 1979 I attended a conference of American and Romanian historians in Cluj, the old capital of Transylvania...

...New roads and electrification were bringing the most remote villages into the modern world, and if the lovers of old Romania thought it a pity that store-bought clothing, better health, social mobility, television, universal literacy, and an end to confining superstitions were going to ruin that beautiful folk culture, they were a minority defending an obsolete order...

...There are almost no taxis or private automobiles...

...He makes changes...

...There were no identifiable independent Romanian political entities until the twelfth or thirteenth century, though there have certainly been shepherds in the Carpathians speaking a form of Slavicized Latin since the seventh and eighth centuries...

...In return, the Soviets have been setting up special deals with enterprises in Romania capable of delivering the semifinished industrial products they need...

...The little river Dimbovita, which runs through the capital, has been rerouted to feed a canal and artificial lake designed to make Bucharest a major seaport...

...Just as there is little doubt that the conquest of the area by the Romans in the second and third centuries left a deep cultural mark on the country, so is it certain that almost nothing that preceded the Romans has left any trace at all...

...Part of the calculation was that Romania would be able to use its petroleum resources as a source of cheap energy...

...But a few blocks away, older escalators built in the 1970s are already broken and unused...

...The birth rate was falling again...

...Once ignored by the Communist regime, they were now posthumously rehabilitated...

...But in the center, the giant construction project goes on under powerful lights...

...When it turned out that there was not enough available, Ceausescu made friends with the Shah of Iran and planned to import cheap oil...

...What about the intellectuals...

...The corners are rounded...

...Investment in heavy industry continues...

...Weak light bulbs barely light up rooms where the temperature hovers at about 50 degrees, falling lower when gas and electricity are turned off, as they often are...

...They are the only ones who can help, and Romanians have long ago given up any hope that the West will provide any significant political, economic, or even moral support against their loathed leader, who continues to be one of the American State Department's favorite Communist leaders...

...Ceausescu likes symmetry...

...To ensure quality, they deal directly with these enterprises and send experts to manage them...

...Some said it was to ensure the survival of a Latin outpost in a sea of Slays, but more likely it was the wish to have a plentiful supply of young workers...

...Laws limited contacts with foreigners...

...Nicolae himself became the object of a cult of personality of inane proportions...

...More attention should be paid to another European example of this genre, now spinning out the last years of a grotesque reign, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania...

...Whoever they may have been, they were entirely submerged by the next fifteen centuries of migrations...

...There is enough in common between the Guardists' ideology and Ceau~escu's to satisfy many in the Church...

...But it was in 1974 that the price of oil began to go up, and in any case the quality of Romania's industrial production was far too low to compete in world markets except in a few light-industry sectors...

...They once liked Ceau~escu because of his nationalism...

...This remark, verging on or crossing into racism, is an instance of that dehumanization of the adversary that has been a curse of our century...

...He began to curtail academic and intellectual freedoms and to demand greater personal loyalty...

...The rising young technocrats did not respect old party loyalties, and Ceausescu became suspicious of their Western orientation...

...There are...

...What a colossal, stupid, vainglorious waste...

...For the unsuspecting traveler, winter in Bucharest is an unnerving experience...

...Ceau~escu's megalomania has clearly become mixed with deep resentment that his plans have not worked...

...Many who owned their houses and apartments were only minimally compensated...

...But, at least, by the early 1970s, people had begun to adapt...

...As for the great building project in Bucharest, it will never be finished...

...They were shipped out to tawdry new high-rise blocks on the distant outskirts of the city...

...Few get into newspapers, though recent strikes and violent demonstrations in Bra~ov did come to the attention of the American press...

...His wife, Elena, was proclaimed a scientific genius and given control over all cultural activities...

...At night, people huddle in their cold apartments, often turning on the kitchen stove to try to warm themselves...

...Women are constantly badgered and forced to undergo medical exams to test for pregnancy, in order to increase the birth rate...

...Though Bucharest is still a very large city with close to two million people, after dark there is almost no traffic noise...

...On Sundays the churches are full, but Romanian orthodoxy made its peace with the regime a long time ago...

...Then there were new freedoms, a dawning automobile age, restaurants with food, plenty of heat, increasing prosperity, and a taste for openness in literature, even in politics...

...Faced by the same debt crisis that afflicted Poland and Latin America, Ceausescu decided to pay off Romania's debts at an accelerated pace...

...Even in rural areas and in small towns in the early 1970s there was a certain welcome prosperity...

...To have misplanned industrialization and gone into debt is not unique to Romania or even to communist regimes...

...When the terrible old man dies there will be a struggle between the forces of sanity and the surviving Ceauw family members...

...How will all this end...

...Even the Russians warned him that his Stalinist vision couldn't be achieved in such a small country...

...By the winter of 1978 the night lights of Bucharest were already dimmed, and those in party posts were afraid to meet old Western friends...

...Another sign in the early 1970s seemed more amusing than sinister...

...All except Albania offer more personal freedom and greater material benefits...

...He sees that an existing tram line entering the project is SUMMER • 1988 • 273 crooked, so he orders more buildings torn down to straighten the tram tracks...

...In the May 1988 issue there appears an article, "Israel and the Intellectuals" by Ruth R. Wisse, with the following sentence: "The obvious key to the success of the Arab strategy is the presence, in the disputed territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River, of Palestinian Arabs, people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery...

...If they have fallen asleep, the gas may come back on and poison them before they are aware of what is happening...

...Without priests, intellectuals, or dissident Marxists or party members to help them, protesting workers are no better off than the old Romanian peasants, who also used to rise in rebellion from time to time...

...Gorbachev is popular with the intellectuals, especially since he was publicly 274 DISSENT snubbed by Ceausescu during his visit to Bucharest last spring...

...By the end of the century, they will begin to crumble, the new canals and artificial port will be choked with silt and garbage, and Bucharest will have turned, indeed, into a monument to the catastrophe that one unconstrained madman can inflict on society, a living reminder of the "Epoch of Gold, the Epoch of CeauFscu...

...As Romania's major ethnic minority, the 1.5 to 2 million Hungarians were particularly vulnerable to the rebirth of Romanian xenophobia, whereas the Jews and Germans, important links to the West, were better treated and usually allowed to emigrate...

...Already, a useless Black Sea–Danube canal has been finished...

...Romanians who seek greater solace are converting to illegal Protestant fundamentalist sects...

...These measures lessened efficiency at the very time when the fundamental assumption behind all these plans was shown to be wrong...

...The style is 1930s Mussolini...

...Huge resources were mobilized...

...But this was not all...

...illegal abortion rings had developed...

...That was the increasing attention paid to the Daco-Romans and Dacians, the supposed ancestors of modern Romanians...

...In all this, Marxism plays a very marginal role...

...Some of it is completed...

...Romania cannot afford it...

...What went wrong...

...Industrial exports, he calculated, would pay for the import of raw materials...

...So he continued his policy of frenetic investment, squeezing his population harder to increase exports of the only things the outside world really wants to buy from Romania, light consumer goods and food...

...Elevators in ten-story apartment buildings are avoided lest they get stuck...

...The city has been cut in half so that it is impossible to go from one side to the other without crossing the project...

...The open question is the attitude of the Soviets...

...Even in the early 1970s there were signs, but few saw them at the time...

...When she travels to the West, Romanian embassies are charged with obtaining honorary degrees for her, and a few institutions with no self-respect can always be rounded up for such purposes...

...Much of the forced saving in electricity and heat is of no real use...

...Janos Kadar of Hungary is known to have mocked Ceausescu's habit of traveling with a food taster to prevent poisoning, and Bulgarian leaders, not usually noted for their sense of humor, laugh at the mention of Ceausescu...

...When the gas, too, gets cut off, there is a danger...