THE GOOD OLD, BAD OLD DAYS
Noel Malcolm explains
why Rumanians voted to keep the communists in power
Bucharest FOUR days before Rumania went to the polls, the regional headquarters of the National Peasants' Party at Bacau (a small city 100 miles north of Bucharest) fell like an outpost under siege. In the middle of my meeting with the local leaders of this anti-communist party, we heard shouting outside, followed by the sound of broken glass. Someone had just hurled a bottle of ink at the entrance doorway.
Inside, the wizened, wiry and energetic local president, Professor Ciobanu, was reading out a list of graver incidents like a machine-gun. 'At Tirgu Ocna: party head- quarters destroyed two times. At the com- mune of Vulturieni: the local representa- tive of the party beaten up, admitted to hospital with two broken ribs and stran- gulation marks. At Onesti: party head- quarters ransacked, three party workers beaten up; one of those responsible was caught by the police, and fined 50 lei . . . (At the official rate, 50 lei is £1.40. At the unofficial rate, it is about 25p.)
Sitting next to the professor was Mr Craciun, the party's representative in the nearby town of Buhusi. One week before, he had been besieged in his workplace (a medical clinic) by a mob of 70 or 80 people. When he telephoned the police, the local police chief told him that this was a political matter and that therefore he could not intervene. The mob broke down the door, knocked Mr Craciun to the ground, and might have kicked him to death but for the arrival of workers from the factory across the road. When he later asked those workers whether they would vote for him, they said no. They had rescued him be- cause they disliked the idea of one of the clinic's technicians being kicked to pulp on their doorstep. But they too, like the members for the mob, would vote for the National Salvation Front.
And that, metaphorically speaking, was the hardest blow of all. However much jiggery-pokery there was at the polls on Sunday (and all the official observers I have spoken to agree that they could find no wholesale vote-rigging — only retail), the fact remains that many millions went to the voting stations and voted willingly for the one party which aims the most closely of all at the preservation of the communist system: the Front. And however much intimidation there was towards the two main opposition parties (the Peasants and the Liberals), the uncomfortable truth is that these assaults and mob-protests did not need to be organised by scheming officials from the Front: many of them were so devoted to the Front that they were prepared to shed their blood for it or, preferably, somebody else's.
How can it possibly come about that the country which broke so dramatically with its old regime should instal a new govern- ment which will be full of old communists? Part of the explanation lies, of course, in the gross inequalities of the electoral cam- paign during the last two months. The opposition newspapers, so freely available near the international journalists' hotels in Bucharest, have been unavailable in many parts of the country. The editor of Timpul, an anti-communist weekly paper, told me that in some regions the post office chiefs job to owed their job to the old regime) refused to distribut his paper. At one news kiosk in the nort astern city of Iasi I was offered a copy of Dreptatea (the Peasants' Party daily) which was ten days old, and told that I could only buy it if I also bought a copy of the Front's paper, Azi. Television, a more powerful medium than print in the countryside, has remained firmly under Front control; time has been allocated fairly to the parties for election broadcasts, but the news bulletins and discussions programmes have been assi- duously slanted towards the Front.
`Bang goes the tarts' vote.' And the most powerful mass-medium of all — rumour — had been working over- time against the opposition parties. Rumour had it that Mr Ratiu, the émigré millionaire who became the Peasants' pres- idential candidate, was planning either to buy the whole country or to sell it. Rumour had it that Doina Cornea, the dissident who is now on hunger strike, was Ratiu's mistress, and that her daughter (a teacher in Paris) was planning to buy the Ruma- nian steel industry. Rumour even had it that Mr Ratiu (who comes in fact from a famous political family which fought against Hungarian rule in Transylvania) was really a Hungarian called Jonas Rac.
But the most important rumours, which may have gained millions of votes for the Front, were about jobs and money. The workers on the collective farms were told that they would lose their pension rights if the land was redistributed (because the pensioners have hitherto been paid by the collective farms), and that their elderly parents would therefore become destitute overnight. The factory workers were told that if capitalists were let into Rumania they would buy their factories and close them down. 'Surely', I said to Liviu Antonesei, a dissident sociologist, 'they must realise that we in the West are richer because we have a capitalist system?' No,' he replied. 'They think you are richer because somewhere in your country you have a mass of starving workers whom you are exploiting. All they know about capi- talism comes from school textbooks, which come from Marx and Engels. They think you are still living in the Manchester of the 1850s.'
At this point it becomes clear that the true reasons for the Front's victory do not lie just in the last few months of campaign- ing. They lie in the previous 42 years. A whole population has been brutalised, poorly educated even by communist stan- dards, and starved of information about the real world. It is no accident that the stronghold of support for the Front is the north-eastern province of Moldavia — geographically the furthest away from the West, insulated by distance from the influ- ences of Western tourism in Bucharest, Hungarian culture in Transylvania or Yugoslav television in the south-west. 'The highest level of well-being these people could imagine', a school-teacher In Bucharest told me, 'was to be a citizen of Leipzig or East Berlin. Everything that was miserable and oppressive about the Ruma- nian system they blamed on Ceausescu, not on communism'.
Since the revolution-cum-coup-d'état of December, their standard of living has risen — thanks partly to Western aid, partly to a relaxation of the export drive and partly to the Front's decision to increase wages in those key industries (such as mining) where it was looking for electoral support. The queues for food are a little shorter, and the power-cuts a little less frequent. Because of these achieve- ments, Mr Iliescu, the leader of the Front, is regarded by many simple souls as a cross between Superman and Father Christmas. A popular chant at the mass-meetings of the Front goes as follows: `Iliescu has come among us! The sun has risen!'
When I asked Alexandru Zub, a disting- uished anti-communist who is perhaps the country's greatest historian, to explain the popularity of the Front, he told me an old Jewish story. Isaac went to his rabbi and complained that his life was a misery, his wife was a scold, his house was too small, his children too many. What should he do? The rabbi told him to put his geese in the house. Next week he told the rabbi: 'It's even worse now — the geese are honking and quacking all day long and there's goose-shit all over the carpet.' Now bring your chickens indoors too,' said the rabbi. And so on. When, eventually, Isaac was told to take the animals out again, he became the happiest man in the world his house was so calm, so spacious. . . .
The mental narrowness of the urban and rural proletariats, their bankruptcy of im- agination, is a big part of the explanation for the Front's success. But it is not the whole truth. Again and again I was told by dissidents, by taxi-drivers, even by Geza Domokos, the former Central Committee member who now heads the 'Hungarian Democratic Union' party in Rumania that the country's problem was its lack of a `middle class': that there is a huge mass of workers on the one hand, a small elite of intellectuals on the other, and a gap in the middle. It is a convenient formula, laying so much of the blame on blameless ignor- ance; but it will not do. There is a Professional class, of doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers and so on — less numerous and less well trained than its Czech or Hungarian counterparts, but important nevertheless. It is important because it furnishes so many of the activists and organisers of the Front. For what sustains the Front (apart from the com- munist administrative structure, of course, which survives almost intact) is an alliance between ignorant workers who fear the unknown and quasi-educated professional people who fear what they do know about the likely effects of Westernisation in their country. They fear that they will be ex- pected to work.
This is something they have never had to do before. Their professional qualifications were obtained by bribery. The price simply for admission to a university course (paid Into the professor's pocket) ranges from 20,000 to 150,000 lei, depending on the faculty. (The average wage is 25,000 lei a Year.) To get a good degree you will need to slip your teachers a similar amount. You will then spend your professional career receiving bribes, avoiding real work, pull- ing strings and exchanging favours. This culture of fraudulence was partly a survival of old traditions, partly a reaction to communism and partly a collaboration with it. Whatever the causes, the result is a society which is strongly motivated, at all levels, to preserve the old structures of power.
There are moments when the visitor to Rumania wants to throw up his hands and say, 'let them keep the system they, de- serve'. But then one remembers all those good people who are locked up with them and are intelligent enough to realise that the geese and chickens — locusts, rather have never really left the house. And then one's despair becomes a little darker.
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