Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In the early Eighties, Ceauşescu decided to enhance his country’s international standing still further by paying down Romania’s huge foreign debts. The agencies of international capitalism—starting with the International Monetary Fund—were delighted and could not praise the Romanian dictator enough. Bucharest was granted a complete rescheduling of its external debt. To pay off his Western creditors, Ceauşescu applied unrelenting and unprecedented pressure upon domestic consumption. In contrast to Communist rulers elsewhere, unrestrainedly borrowing abroad to bribe their subjects with well-stocked shelves, the Romanian Conducator set about exporting every available domestically-produced commodity. Romanians were forced to use 40–watt bulbs at home (when electricity was available) so that energy could be exported to Italy and Germany. Meat, sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and much more were strictly rationed. To ratchet up productivity, fixed quotas were introduced for obligatory public labour on Sundays and holidays (the corvée, as it was known in ancien régime France). Petrol usage was cut to the minimum: in 1986 a program of horse-breeding to substitute for motorized vehicles was introduced. Horse-drawn carts became the main means of transport and the harvest was brought in by scythe and sickle. This was something truly new: all socialist systems depended upon the centralized control of systemically induced shortages, but in Romania an economy based on over-investment in unwa...