The 15th of November 1987
marked the fall of the humane mask that the Romanian communist regime
had been wearing. Self-legitimated as a political regime of 'popular
democracy', yet installed with the help of the Red Army tanks on the
6th of March 1945 and maintained through a combination of populism,
rigged elections, state despotism and terrorism, towards the end of
Ceaușescu's presidency, Romanian communism was only representative
of the dictator and the party nomenclature who enjoyed unlimited
privileges. Following the generalized socio-economic crisis,
determined by a series of catastrophic political decisions, towards
the end of the 80s Romania suffered from cold and hunger, just like
during the war. Food ratios were re-introduced like at the time
Bucharest was being bombed by the Allies, while the shortage of
consumer goods, starting with tooth paste, toilet paper or absorbent
cotton and ending with the basic necessities (sugar, oil, bread) was
widespread in the country.
One waited for whole
nights in fronts of the stores for the most trivial things, while the
application of the long-promised principle of communist allocation of
social welfare, "from each according to his means, to each
according to his needs", was being postponed sine die. In
railway stations I could see how people rushed towards international
trains in order to buy medicine (sulfamethoxazole), cigarettes
(Bulgarian BT or the not so good Albanian Gent) or clothes from
Polish or East-German tourists. When night fell in the cold seasons
(autumn and winter) thousands of villages were left in the dark, on
account of the drastic economizing that Ceaușescu's bureaucrats had
imposed, whereas goods trains carrying whole grain cars meant for
export hurried through railway stations. The situation was not much
better in cities and the capital of the country was starting to feel
the crisis that got deeper and deeper from one year to the next. The
gas pressure was low in the evening, the heat from the radiators and
the central heating lasted for a couple of hours in the morning and
evening, hot water ran for a few hours at the end of the week (not in
every city, though), and saving power meant leaving whole
neighborhoods in the dark. After the winter of 1984-1985, I heard
Bucharesters complaining of the freezing cold they had to put up with
in their flats, converted into fridges, throughout the winter.
One freezing morning,
while queuing for milk, I saw a man collapsing on the pavement, dead.
He had had a heart attack – people had had to wait for a long time
in the cold, starting with 6 am, until the shop opened, so that they
could get a bottle or two of milk or a jar of yogurt. After the milk
was quickly gone, for the rest of the day the shop turned into a kind
of museum. The basic food in most shops was frozen ocean fish and
Vietnamese shrimps, and instead of real coffee, people could only
drink "nechezol", an indistinct mix of dubious substitutes
with a brown color (which was said to have caused countless cases of
pancreatic cancer). Nevertheless, the regime claimed to be extremely
benevolent towards its citizens and especially towards the workers,
whom they claimed to represent like no other regime in history. The
cult of Ceaușescu and his illiterate wife, Elena, had become
grotesque, and Romanians were forced to applaud and honor the two
"beloved children of the people". Some joker launched the
joke that Romanians came to resemble the penguins from the North Pole
– flapping their wings and feeding on fish. Even the socialist
Mitterand, back then the president of France, had to disalign from
Ceausescu's regime and limits further contacts with it, in order not
to compromise himself.
This was the picture of
everyday life in the Socialist Republic of Romania, when, on the 15th
of November 1987, the great revolt of the workers from the Red Flag
truck factory broke out in Brașov, a historical and beautiful city
in the heart of the country. Nobody had expected something of this
kind in Ceaușescu's Romania, where the omnipresent political police
(the Securitate), like Stalin's NKVD, had a large number of
informants and was rigorously monitoring any hostile attitude or
dissidence from the line of the communist party and the 'socialist'
and 'popular democratic' regime in Bucharest. The great revolt of the
workers in Brașov was repressed with an incredible brutality for a
state in 20th century Europe, and Europe was unable to do anything to
prevent it. However, this revolt of the workers managed to unmask the
dictatorship in the country. The political regime that had declared
itself 'democratic' and 'of the workers' was neither in reality. It
worked only for the benefit of the communist nomenclature, whose
lifestyle, through its luxury, privileges and arrogance mimicked the
lifestyle of some tribal aristocracy from a third world country. The
communist totalitarian regime from Ceaușescu's Romania was nothing
but a horrible tyranny, through which a minority was imposing its
will on the popular majority, who was forced to eat frozen ocean
fish, drink cold water (when there was tap water) and repeatedly
applaud Ceausescu's endless demagogic speeches, bearing in silence
all imaginable deprivations.
English version by Roxana
Doncu
Editorial
modification: Raymond Walden
