Ceaușescu humbly receiving his “presidential” sceptre.
Writing at the end of the First World War—and, as fate would have it, the end of her life—Rosa Luxemburg almost prophetically proclaims: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” Criticising Vladimir Lenin, she states in her pamphlet, The Russian Revolution, that this sense of liberty has become a special privilege. Yet, the revolutionary’s reservations for Lenin did not prevent her own unsuccessful attempt at achieving a similar kind of utopia—the reader may decide on the accuracy of the term. During the Spartacist uprising of 1919, she was assassinated by gunshot, only to be thrown into the Landwehr Canal, preventing the existence of a communist German state. In a rather different spirit, Romania’s first communist minister of justice, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, intones: “In love, just as in politics, you have to know when to stop.” The statement, although just as romantic as Luxemburg’s dream of communist Germany, is a direct contradiction to her aphorism.
Indeed, Romanian leftism was initially antithetical to its Western counterpart. Free from the symbolism of roses and without indulgence in the fever dreams of surrealist art—no Leon Trotsky to pen manifestos alongside André Breton—Romania embraced a more Soviet approach in its beginning; occupied by Russian forces, bayonets ensured conformity. Of course, many of the party’s leaders were educated in Moscow, the most distinguished of which was Ana Pauker. A Jewish woman of ostensibly Stalinist tendencies, the world’s first female foreign affairs minister and, in the judgement of some, the de facto leader of the communist party shortly after their ascension to power. To say only ostensibly is subjective, but her opposition to Pătrășcanu’s imprisonment and criticism of collectivisation serve as hints. As a side note, the first paragraph of her appearance in Time Magazine, whose cover she occupied, refers to her, among other designations, as a “self-made widow.” In reality, the claims were incongruent with fact. Labelling her as such, in a disgraceful mélange of anti-Semitism, misogyny, and ignorance, the magazine missed the mark entirely. Still, I think a better phrasing of her title would’ve been “widow by choice,” but irony, it seems, is even scarcer than journalistic integrity.
While the first years of Romanian communism were heavily conformist in terms of Stalin’s influence—even after his death, secretary general Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej being heavily opposed to de-stalinisation—Ceaușescu’s period was all but conventionalist. The comrade’s overtures to the West involved visits to and from Richard Nixon, an excursion to Buckingham Palace (a stunning action for an ideologically necessitated anti-imperialist), but above all, criticism of the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. Paul Niculescu-Mizil, the head of the Romanian delegation in Budapest in 1968, even protested by leaving a meeting where the Soviets criticised Romania’s defiance. Yet, these actions do not indicate a deviation from Marxism. Doctrine had been abandoned long ago. They were, above all, attempts to strengthen Romania’s autonomy. This appeal does also seem to suggest a touch of romantic delusion. It was something more idiosyncratic, a peculiar fusion of megalomania and historical grievance. Ceaușescu, haunted by the spectre of Romania’s former foreign domination—whether Roman, Hellenic, Ottoman, Hungarian, or Polish—saw in the Soviet Union the latest in a long line of, as historical materialism would put it, oppressors. Ceaușescu’s Romania had, to quote The Shah of Iran, a “ferocious will for independence.”
However, it does sometimes occur that undergoing an ambitious endeavour leads to an obsession with oneself. The ever so charmingly called, predictably, grotesquely, and execrably manifested “Messiah” complex had infiltrated Ceaușescu. In fact, upon the inauguration of his self-declared presidency, he wielded a sceptre—Salvador Dalí, never one to miss an opportunity for irony, sent his congratulations, recognising in Ceaușescu’s gesture a piece of surrealist theatre that would have made even the most cynical of artists blush. In his terrifically foreseeable fashion, Ceaușescu was oblivious with regards to the message’s nature. This cult of personality led to the building of the Romanian equivalent, though remarkably even longer, of the Champs-Elysees: the “Victory of Socialism” boulevard, now known as Bulevardul Unirii. Because of the dictator’s obsession with size, at its end lies the world’s heaviest building. He even underwent the policy of “socialism in one family” as he elevated his wife Elena to the position of Deputy Prime Minister in a bizarre satire of Marxist egalitarianism. The “Genius of the Carpathians” transformed Romania into a parody: a Balkan North Korea with its own peculiar brand of despotism.
Though, it wouldn’t be a stretch too far to claim that Romanians were rather enamoured with the dictator. The 70s presented themselves as an era of prosperity and, above all, independence. Ceaușescu’s cult of personality was indeed ideologically bankrupt, but it was effective. Political rivals were still silenced, and that is a matter of principle, but long gone were the days of gulag-esque detention camps. Or, at least, the openness with which they were addressed—arguably, a worse state of affairs. And yet, economics stepped in to ruin the nearly convivial atmosphere of pseudo-Marxist society. Paradoxically, autonomy meant the ability to join the International Monetary Fund and benefit from debt; a curious twist for a so-called Marxist state. The oil crises of the 70s offered Ceaușescu a brief illusion of economic invincibility, but the subsequent collapse of oil prices in the 80s brought his house of cards crashing down. No longer could he sell Arab oil to the West at a rather ironic profit. The austerity measures that resulted from his successful attempt at repaying all foreign debt, which encompassed a severe degree of rationing, ultimately gave rise to social unrest and, if speculation is permitted, the revolution itself. Yet, that is a subject for another article.
It may thus be safe to say that apart from hubris, accompanied by a worrying sense of self-reverence, Ceaușescu’s fall was ironically engendered by the profit motive. As Christopher Hitchens put it, he was “the perfect postmodern despot—a market Stalinist.” It does seem that doctrine is never fulfilled in its originally intended manner. Romania’s flirtation with socialism, if it can even be called that, was a tragic farce, an ideology warped beyond recognition by the very forces it sought to oppose. What emerged was not the sublime ideal of a workers’ state but a vulgar, inconsequential parody of one. The great irony of Romania's leftist dalliance is that it managed to encapsulate the very antithesis of what socialism purported to achieve. Here was a nation that had, for centuries, suffered under the boot of foreign empires and indigenous tyrants alike, only to exchange one form of oppression for another, more insidious one. The ideology, which in theory promised liberation and equality, was swiftly co-opted by a ruling class no less rapacious than the feudal lords they replaced. The so-called People's Republic was neither of the people nor for the people; it was a grotesque masquerade, where the banners of Marx and Lenin fluttered over a society rife with fear, surveillance, and deprivation. This was not socialism as envisioned by its early apostles but rather a monstrous mutation—an ideology stripped of its humanist core and wielded as a cudgel by a paranoid elite. What Romania experienced was not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the dictatorship of a single man, whose pathological need for control smothered any resemblance of genuine progress. The factories, the collectivised farms, the grandiose monuments to his "glorious revolution"—all were hollow symbols of a state that had sold its soul, a state where the working masses were reduced to cogs in a bureaucratic machine, ground down under the weight of a failed experiment.
And that, for the reader, is a regretful reminder that history demands proportions. Of course, this is no intellectually honest, carefully assembled conjecture; no satirical pamphlet is. At any rate, our mere ability to assess is revealing of at least a single truth: in judgement, just as in love and politics, you have to know when to stop.
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