Romania's last "dictator"

Did I say that she got out? She did, in fact, after 1989. Being ethnic Hungarian, she moved to Budapest, which is where I met her some years later and lived for a time. We also spent a fair amount of time with her family in Transylvania.

Birth control was illegal. They were peasants. Country people don't have a great deal to do other than work and practice procreation. Well, and play music and drink a lot (I miss those times.)

http://www.ceausescu.org/ceausescu_texts/overplanned_parenthood.htm

They got the legacy of collectivism, being raised by those who had been children living in the streets.

 

This is true. My former father-in-law, of Polish descent, grew up in a New York neighborhood. He would frequently wax nostalgic on the topic of how safe his neighborhood was. It was protected by the mafia and no crime would go unnoticed and unpunished by mafia enforcers, unless committed by the mafia itself. People had clean, quiet streets and didn't have to lock their doors. Idyllic, to a kid who didn't run a shop or work in some other business that was regularly shaken down by thugs for protection money.

As for my Romanian friends, they have strong families and strong social relations through their church. There's a great deal of economic desperation, but they survive for these social ties. People survive despite the depredations of the governing state under which they live for these reasons.

 

1. Well, I'm sorry for her. Being Hungarian could have been the problem.

2. Birth control was illegal indeed, they didn't forced you to have kids though. Don't blame the Communist Party for their stupidity. It doesn't require university studies to think if you afford or not another kid.

3. Do you at least know what collectivism was?

 

...

Here, fast forward to 23m00sec.

Jan and Stefan go to visit old Russian friends in their dachas. These are normal Russian people that explain everything, especially first woman called Tatjana.

I never, ever (!), said that life in USSR or Eastern Bloc was all bad.

 

BTW,don't you think you ,Western guys,that a democracy can be in a form of a dictatorship and vice versa,of course?If any Eastern European "dictator" provided general four basic rights - the right for employment,the right for housing,the right for education and the right for health maintenance - this "dictator was much more democratic than all these self-proclaimed Western "democracies"? That every Eastern Europeans with this rights were more free that the westerns?Such is a dialectic.

 

In my opinion the term "Golden Age" is an overstatement of what was Romania at that time.
The only good thing Ceausescu did for Romanians was that he tried to build up the country's economic base, tried to create an industry on the basis of which Romania could on one hand be more independent from the USSR and on the other could export finished goods. I use the term "try" because I don't think he ever acheived this, not even in the best of times back then. After that, the paranoia and the egomania settled in and it went downhill from there.

 

Then I guess all the facilities and fabrics were and ilussion. Casa Poporului (the second greatest building in the world) is an illusion, the metro sistem in Bucharest is an illusion, entire cities rebuilt after the earthquake in 1977 are an illusion? What exactlly were our salaries back then? And what was the power of our currency?

What exactlly have we done in the last 20 years? Apart from destroying everything the communists built.