Romania Isolated by Ceausescu’s Stalinism in Changing East Bloc

CLUJ, Romania —  On a languid Sunday in this once-glorious European city, a foreign car is the center of attention as it pulls into the long evening shadow of the medieval cathedral.

People stare from a safe distance, mindful of laws that mandate the reporting of any unauthorized conversations with foreigners.

A father leans over to his son, muttering, in English, that the man behind the steering wheel is a “driver.”

A bolder spirit, a well-dressed woman, approaches the strangers, asking in flawless French if they will change some money. She retreats crestfallen back into the shadows when they refuse.

In a nearby cafe, a waitress wearily explains to the foreigners that there are no snacks, no coffee, no tea and no mineral water, a familiar scenario across Romania today.

Just soc (colored water that tastes of chemicals), she says.

Unsmiling Guests

An aging band grinds out slow, almost bluesy versions of Hungarian ballads as unsmiling guests drown any sorrow in barely audible chatter and free-flowing “cognac.”

Romania 1989: a European country where European visitors are an object of suspicion for authorities and mute curiosity for friendly but frightened citizens, a polyglot nation where European cultures blended for centuries and now vanish behind official intolerance.

In Cluj and other towns, stylish but shoddily built apartments sprout in record time, while old villages crumble away, depopulating “naturally” as their lone stores and schoolhouses are closed.

Across the fertile land, rationing is in force and food stores grow more bare with each year of the vaunted “golden era” of President Nicolae Ceausescu. Yet officials spouting statistics about Romania’s advances on the march to Utopia blandly assure foreigners that the meat they cannot see on shelves is available, just stored in refrigerators.

Last winter, the fifth in a row of government-imposed energy rationing, six Communists who once held senior posts implored Ceausescu to change course.

Can’t Move Romania to Africa

“Romania is and remains a European country,” they insisted in a letter that later reached the West. “You started changing the geography of the countryside, but you cannot remove Romania to Africa.”

The 71-year-old Ceausescu, the visibly healthy and unchallenged ruler since 1965, swiftly squashed the protest before it had any chance of spreading to other party members.

According to Western diplomats in Bucharest, the six were repeatedly interrogated. Refusing to recant, three were exiled outside the capital and the three others were removed from comfortable homes into rougher quarters in the city. Police guards reportedly prevent diplomats from approaching the new abodes.

Mircea Raceanu, the adopted son of one of the six and a senior diplomat who served six years in the United States, was arrested and charged with treason as media articles and rallies rammed home the dangers of contact with foreigners.

No one knows where Raceanu is, and a question about him clearly rattled officials at a news conference during the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest in July.

Professor Disappeared

Authors of other protests share this anonymous fate, according to Romanian emigres and Western diplomats. Former Cluj university professor Doina Cornea has not been seen since June 6, following her third protest letter to Ceausescu.

Writers Andrei Plesu and Mircea Dinescu were under virtual house arrest after penning protests, while another writer, Dan Desliu, spent two weeks in a Bucharest asylum for his dissent.

And the march to Utopia continues, cutting deep into the peasant traditions of Romanians, and into the culture and mutual tolerance nurtured for centuries by 1.7 million ethnic Hungarians and 200,000 Germans in the rolling hills of Transylvania.

In German villages, freshly painted lettering over courtyard gates proudly proclaims the family of the owner, and the date the house was built. In Cluj, Hungarian-language theater and other cultures still thrive, to judge by posters advertising the events.

But the city’s Hungarian Consulate was closed last year in the escalating war of words between Bucharest and Budapest, whose traditional rivalry over Transylvania is exacerbated by sharp ideological divisions over the future shape of communism.

Vestiges of Tradition

A Cluj schoolteacher now in Hungary, one of thousands of such refugees from Romania, tearfully recalled how efforts to preserve vestiges of Hungarian tradition in class were slowly eroded by reprimands and the appearance of more and more Romanian-speaking pupils.

Transylvania’s ethnic Germans, hard-working farmers who have tilled the fertile soil for centuries, are fleeing the country at the rate of 13,000 to 15,000 a year--and would go faster if Romania let them.

Fear of endangering this emigration once muted West German protest at Romania’s human rights record. Now, Bonn is as outspoken as other capitals. Emigration has not suffered, diplomats say, but the wife of the West German consul was brutally kicked and beaten by a uniformed policeman on a Bucharest street this spring.

Ceausescu is isolated, too, from most Eastern bloc nations. To visitors, but not in articles, Soviet journalists based in Bucharest make plain their distaste for a familiarly Stalinist government. They say they are watched and harassed by Romania’s KGB, the dreaded Securitate, but insist that open hostility would only ruin relations and any chance at helping to shape the country’s future.

Ceausescu appears to firm believe that his brand of Stalinism offers more social security and Marxist equality than Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s topsy-turvy reforms in the Soviet Union or Hungary’s open dash toward free elections and a free market economy.

Surreal Statistics

As proof, his supporters cite surreal statistics--that living standards are 135 times higher than in 1945, that 675,000 new apartments are available under this Five-Year Plan, that industrial investments will increase 30% and the annual harvest surge from 30 million tons to 40 million tons a year by 1995.

Failing to mention the cost in shortages caused by food exports from this bountiful land, Romanian officials boast of their unique feat of repaying the entire foreign debt, $11 billion, from 1980 to last March.

Consumers have noticed no improvement in the stores since. But their diet of propaganda proclaims proudly that, for the first time in its turbulent history, Romania is beholden to no one.

Credit for all this goes to Ceausescu, who is the object of a strong personality cult and has installed several close relatives--including his wife, Elena, son, Nicu, and brother, Ilie--in powerful positions.

The draft program for a November party congress describes him as the “most beloved son of the Romanian people, the man of genius and architect of modern Romania.”

‘Wonderful Achievements’

“We can and must assert most powerfully that only socialism could make such grandiose and wonderful achievements of our nation possible,” Ceausescu insisted at a Communist Party meeting in June.

Private ownership, small farms and the encouragement of profit-seeking entrepreneurs, he emphasizes, are not communism. Neither are “any attempts to denigrate socialism.”

Western diplomats in Bucharest say Ceausescu cites the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in China or the deaths of protesters in the Soviet city of Tbilisi as evidence that his policies are correct--he does not kill, so therefore criticism of Romania over human rights is misplaced.

Given the grip of the Securitate, and the disappearance of the leaders of a spontaneous protest by 10,000 workers in November, 1987, it seems unlikely that popular unrest will erupt.

Romania has weak democratic traditions--a favorite proverb has it that “a stooped back cannot be broken by a sword”--and outside influences that might stir mass protest are few.

No Trips Abroad

Ceausescu, once an inveterate traveler courted in the White House and Buckingham Palace as a communist maverick, has made no trips abroad this year, and receives no top visitors from the West these days.

Western diplomats report that even Romanian officials and intellectuals once permitted carefully reported contacts with foreigners have all but stopped attending embassy parties.

There are no Western or even Soviet bloc newspapers broadly on sale, and imports--and hence contact with Western businessmen--are dwindling now that fresh foreign credit has been outlawed. Romanian TV works two hours a night on a heavy diet of Ceausescu, and the more interesting offerings from Bulgarian, Yugoslav, Soviet or Hungarian television can be received or understood only on the nation’s fringes.

“It’s just becoming a dinosaur of a country, if you like,” says a Western diplomat who asked not to be identified.

A Romanian official counters, “We had to cut ourselves off.”

“When you’re getting beaten from all sides, you withdraw to a place where it’s safe,” he adds, smiling. “We’ll see who’s right.”

Romania At-A-Glance Square miles: 91,699 Location: Southeast Europe on the Black Sea Size: Slightly smaller than New York and Pennsylvania combined. People: Romanian (89%), Hungarians (7.9%) and Germans (1.6%) Population: About 23,155,000 (1989 estimates) Official Languages; Romanian, Hungarian, German Religions: Eastern Orthodox 80%, Roman Catholic 6% GNP: $137.0 billion (1986) Imports: $8.1 billion (1984) Currency: The Leu (Mar. 1988: 13.96 equal $1 U.S. dollar) Chief industries: Steel, metals, machinery, oil products, textiles, shoes, tourism Chief crops: Corn, wheat, oilseeds, potatoes Labor Force: 28% agriculture, 37% Individual Government: Communist Head of State: President Nicolae Ceausescu