Romania

Repression of Communism

Following the Soviet guidelines, the Romanian Communist Party imposed a forced nationalization process. State industrial investments required intense urbanization and population displacements: if at the beginning of the communist period one in four people lived in Romanian towns, 45 years later every other person was a town dweller. A defective administration of the economy at the state level, and the decision of the Communist [Page 749]Party leader Nicolae Ceausescu to pay back the entire Romanian foreign debt of $11 billion in 1982, resulted in an economic disaster in the 1980s. Similarly to the postwar period, food was rationed and the system of food ration cards was reintroduced. Even so, food was difficult to find in shops, just like clothes or medicine.

The failure of the institutional system to fulfill the basic needs of Romanians had the effect of the creation of parallel social networks among individuals in order to ensure survival. Family, friends, work peers, or acquaintances could help an individual provide for his or her family, from food to a videocassette recorder or even a car. It became strictly necessary to have connections and to bribe people—with cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol—in order to establish connections. Killing your own calf to sell the meat instead of sending it to the commune's farm was a dangerous political gesture. It is estimated that 35–40 percent of the income of Romanian citizens came from the secondary legal (peasant and artisan markets) and illegal economies.

A general fear that the Ceausescu era would never end, together with jokes about the political situation and the double talk of the Romanian intellectuals, fueled these social networks but undermined the Communist Party's image. This general state of mind is one of the explanations of the success of the Romanian revolution.

Another explanation is that the army was not a separate caste, with privileges and special treatment. Soldiers were used in agriculture and in the building industry. Thus, they had strong ties to the rest of the population. People were convinced that the army was not going to shoot them. The more than 1,100 deaths in the 1989 events were the result of the army's functioning as a repressive instrument at the very beginning and of the army and the population suffering a massive disinformation pressure through mass media about terrorists attacking different points of the capital city, Bucharest, and in Romania after the escape of the Ceausescu family.

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