Roaming in Romania: October 2010

Roaming in Romania: October 2010

November 2 was election day in the United States, and on the Internet I read about the "Tea Party Revolution" sparked by dissatisfaction with President Obama and the Democrats.  Earlier in the day I stood on Revolution Square where a local told me his memories of that fateful day 25 years before, on December 25, 1989.

"I was a teenager, son of a pastor, and one of my earliest memories was of my father lying on the bed with an oversized transistor radio propped on his stomach, tilting the case to the right then the left trying to find a signal for Radio Free Europe, which the communists kept jamming.  We had heard of riots in a northern city, set off by the arrest of a Hungarian Reformed pastor, with 100,000 people gathering in the square to protest.  No one knew the whole story, of course, just wild rumors, and on December 22 the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu stood on the balcony of his palace in Bucharest to calm the crowds and restore order.

He began the speech using the predictable socialist phrases.  Suddenly a firecracker went off.  The security agents jumped to attention.  Someone in the audience jeered, another whistled in contempt and soon something unimaginable happened: the crowd of tens of thousands, who had stood through many such speeches and loyally applauded, shouted back in open contempt.  A tomato was launched from the crowd toward the balcony.  Or was it a rock?  Ceausescu's mouth dropped open and a look of terror flickered across the faces of his bodyguards.

The sound of gunfire rang out.  (Later some speculated that the secret police had played a tape of it as an excuse to fire back at the protesters, a theory made plausible by the fact that the bullets all came from the government buildings.)  More gunfire, including bursts of machine guns.  People fell to the pavement or ran away.  Within seconds the television transmission abruptly ended, and that's when we knew: it's over.  The reign of terror has ended.  The witch is dead."

I came to Romania to speak to a large gathering of pastors and Christian leaders as well as a conference of medical students.  I knew little about the country, other than the stereotypical accounts of Romanian orphans, gypsies, Dracula, and Nadia Comaneci.  While there I listened to story after story of life "after the revolution," a phrase you hear nearly every day in this country.  Communism fell at the very end of 1989, yet even today its shadow darkens the land.  Last year, for example, a book came out naming collaborators within churches.  Imagine your reaction if you learned that for years your pastor had been reporting to the secret police on you and other parishioners, including the content of private counseling sessions.  Or, imagine a presidential election in which both major candidates had held high offices under Ceausescu's regime, one of the most brutal and corrupt of modern times.

Under Ceausescu, as many as one in eight Romanians worked for the secret police.  Two million citizens, one-tenth of the population, were murdered.  The remainder lived in a constant state of fear and mistrust.  Let alone hunger.  I noted that my hosts seemed inordinately obsessed with meals: "Do you have lunch plans?  What about dinner?  Do you have snacks in your room?"  Finally one told me that this obsession stems from the years of hunger when each day a family member had to stand in a long line and wait an hour or two for a meager ration of milk or bread and, very rarely, vegetables or meat.

Meanwhile one-third of the national budget (!) was going toward construction of the "Palace of the People," Ceaucescu's Brobdingnagian building project taking shape on the highest hill of the capital city.  He knocked down 35,000 houses in one of the loveliest sections of old Bucharest, cleared the rubble, and set out to construct the second largest building in the world—only the Pentagon is larger.  The residents of those destroyed houses had to move into matchbox-sized apartments in ugly Stalinesque apartment blocks.  (To this day hundreds of dogs roam the streets of Bucharest, abandoned by their owners who were forbidden to bring them into apartments.)  Constructing the palace required 700 architects and 20,000 workmen on round-the clock shifts.  The building used a million cubic yards of marble for its floors and walls and a million cubic yards of crystal for its chandeliers.  Like any egomaniacal dictator, Ceaucescu made sure the building flattered him: a short man, he reduced the height of all stairs, and designed the halls in which he addressed the people as echo chambers so that applause for him would ring loud and long.

Meanwhile Nicolae Ceaucescu's wife Elena was making her own mark.  Romanians swear she owned more shoes than Imelda Marcos.  In order to overcome the inferiority complex she got by flunking third grade, she aspired to become a great scientist, proudly attaching her name to papers written by legitimate scientists and naming herself to prestigious positions over research institutes.

On Christmas Day 1974 Ceaucescu boasted that in 25 years atheism would triumph in Romania, meaning the lovely churches that pierce the skies from every tiny village would survive only as museums and historical artifacts.  He proved no better as a prophet than as a politician, for on Christmas Day 1989 Ceaucescu and his wife were both killed by a firing squad after a kangaroo court trial.  The revolution had triumphed, and church bells rang out once more.

As I look back on my life, the fall of communism stands as the most  climactic event of a climactic era, one that never got the attention it deserved.  In Atlanta I grew up practicing drills in case of nuclear missile attacks from Cuba; bomb shelters were my high school's favorite science projects.  Then in that magical year of 1989 the Iron Curtain rusted and fell in a heap in places like Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Moldova, Albania, Latvia, and Lithuania.  Of the Soviet bloc countries, only Romania experienced much violence in the process.  Some say 3000 died in the uprisings—shot, clubbed to death, crushed by tanks—though officially the count is 1100 dead and more than 3000 injured.  In the major cities, crosses mark the exact location where protesters, most of them teenagers, gave their lives.

Modern Romania has joined the European Union and NATO, something inconceivable to the older generation.  Said the man who showed me Revolution Square, "Twenty years ago, if someone had told me that I would be standing in this place talking freely and openly to a Christian author about the end of communism here—I would more easily believe that I would be standing on the moon!"  He drove us down a street once named Victory of Socialism Boulevard.  For better or worse, it might as well be renamed Victory of Capitalism Boulevard, for billboards advertising Coke, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's dominated the landscape.  When the first McDonald's opened in Bucharest, 35,000 people showed up to buy a hamburger.

Huge problems remain.  The number of Romanian orphans has decreased from 50,000 to 10,000, but some have grown up almost as feral children, living in the heating pipes and storm sewers under the cities.  Six million Romanians have fled the country, creating a diaspora in the West.  Romanian is the third most common language in Silicon Valley, California, and England, France and Spain staff their hospitals with doctors and health workers from Romania.  The temptation to leave is hard to resist. We spent a day with a couple, both doctors, who work twelve-hour days and receive about $400 per month salary.  A few Romanians have become billionaires while in the countryside millions still work the farms using scythes, donkey carts and wooden wagons.  In the cities, platoons of workers sweep the streets with straw brooms and gather leaves by hand, using simple rakes.

And yet, and yet…freedom lives.  Romanians speak of the wonder of being able to express their opinion, out loud, without whispering or scanning the room for bugging devices.  Though not all can afford quality goods, shops now have them on display.

I like the Romanian people.  They have a kind of shyness and humility, no doubt forced on them by years of oppression, but the expressive Latin temperament also comes through.  They are warm without being pushy and physically attractive without being vain.  I counted it a privilege to speak to them on Grace, something citizens of post-communist countries badly need.  The church is full of problems, and I heard of many first hand.  Yet it withstood the worst of a brutal atheistic regime.  One more freedom has opened up in recent years, the freedom to worship.

Listening to election returns on CNN, I felt a rare moment of patriotic nostalgia.  Ah, how much do we Americans take for granted, how little do we know of real suffering compared to other parts of the world.  And I say that in full awareness of the problems facing our own country.  When in doubt, I think of Romania.