Elena Ceausescu: Greatest Scientist Ever – except she was a fraud
paperpile.com
paperpile.com
One of my favourite stories is about one of the metro lines in Bucharest. Elena Ceausescu managed to see some of the plans for the metro and told the engineers to scrap a particular station - Romana station - because of her bias against students. The engineers realized that this is stupid and that they will likely have to retrofit the station at some later point anyway, so they built it in secret, masked as a maintenance necessity. As a result, the present Romana station is very narrow, unlike any other metro stations in Bucharest.
Makes me wonder how much planning was done based on the rulers' whims.
A short summary of the full story + photos can be found on Wikipedia. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pia%C8%9Ba_Roman%C4%83_metro_s...
Romanian economy collapsed after fall of the Soviet union in 1988
First of all, Romania wasn't the one of the wealthiest countries in the Eastern bloc at almost any point. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and even the USSR for a while were ahead.
Secondly, even if that were true, Ceaușescu went on a North Korean craze (the OG kpop fan), massive parades and autarky (economic self sufficiency) included. The Romanian economy reached its relative Communist peak before 1980, because Ceaușescu crashed it afterwards trying to pay all foreign debt. Not some, all of it. Oh, and he built the second largest building in the world (current day Palace of the Parliament), spending roughly 1 full state budget on it).
Romania crashed hard because we were making stuff nobody wanted. We were selling it inside the Eastern bloc to captive buyers. On top of that privatization was delayed and initially it was only to internal cronies.
The only leader from the East who was welcomed with full regards by the West at every opportunity. Understandable since as a dictator Ceaușescu only cared about himself not Communist ideology.
I gave a citation as well. You can also look here to see the strong per capita gdp growth rate pre 1989 in the 70s and 80s. Romania started off very poor.
https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/romania
https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/romania?year=1990
Romania grew to a per capita gdp of ~2600$ in 1988 from ~600$ in 1970, while N Korea has a gdp per capita of $600 today - after 50 years.
Also, I didn't comment about Ceaușescu. So, I am not sure what you are responding to.
Ceaușescu was the dictator for the entire period you're mentioning, any discussion about Romania in the 70s and 80s implicitly refers to him.
Other than that, Romania's growth was fake from many aspects and almost no Romanian alive at the time will agree with you that the 80s where better for Romania, economically, than the 70s.
Romania's economy was geared towards exporting everything useful, including food, to non competitive markets. Figures were inflated at every level. Vanity projects were taking up half the Romanian economy.
Backyard furnaces 2.0. Make stuff nobody wants or needs, of crap quality, while not feeding people.
And regarding North Korea, it's well documented that Ceaușescu was emulating Kim. But otherwise we were more developed than North Korea since at least the Korean War, so those numbers don't say much. If anything we went down, closer to their level, during the 80s.
Are you Romanian? Does one have to be Romanian to know Romanian history? Are the rest of the world ignorant to our comings and goings? Do only Romanian opinions on Romania count? Will a Romanian shepherd's opinion on the economy be more accurate than a professional Economist that just so happens to be unfortunate enough to not be born Romanian?
>Other than that, Romania's growth was fake from many aspects and almost no Romanian alive at the time will agree with you that the 80s where better for Romania, economically, than the 70s.
Romania's growth wasn't fake.
Yes, it was an economy geared towards exporting to other bloc countries. The act of exporting caused an economic boom for the country relative to other countries. Budgets were growing, more goods were being produced, and lots of money was being made year over year, but this money wasn't being redistributed back to Romanians. It was lining pockets of party members and used on megalomaniac projects, while food shortages and blackouts were increasingly common because most goods were produced for exporting. Ceausescu incompetently and ignorantly tightened the belt too much. His party members lied to him, and the delusion of the country's prosperity was no longer sustainable. This eventually resulted in a massive disconnect that we all know the end result of.
Finally, people were worse off in the 90s than the 80s. Everything was scrapped and industry in the country essentially died overnight. Whatever profitable entities existed were sold off. random314's comment is correct. No history was rewritten.
The fact that it felt worse for you, a Romanian, in the 80s isn't a result of a lack of growth. It's a result of austerity measures designed to increasingly deprive you while the benefits of growth were distributed unevenly.
By all accounts, this is not the case in N Korea - the propaganda there has been much more drilled into people, and I've even seen interviews with defectors saying that they still couldn't bring themselves to say bad things about Kim, or touching S Korean leaflets, for fear of divine retribution.
You can still see a river of false propaganda common among the Russian people in their beliefs about the US. It's all over YouTube in interviews-on-the-street type videos. The Russian people still live under a totalitarian regime that directly controls all media, all democratic actions and tries to control all information.
Makes one wonder how much of what's believed in the West isn't self-owned propaganda.
The only real employment they can get is giving interviews about how awful and insane North Korea is.
That's not to say it isn't, of course.
https://euobserver.com/news/30890
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/18/nicolae-cea...
etc
They were supposed to get Bessarabia, but for some weird reason they also got the Hertza County, which has never been part of a non-Romanian state.
The only way that makes sense looking at a map is if someone lazily drew a straight line and the other side was too afraid to point out the stupidity.
The similar Stalin story is about the Hotel Moskva, as depicted on the label of Stolichnaya vodka. The architect allegedly didn't know which of two possible designs Stalin wanted to approve, so one wing was built to each design.
> Not a single scientist in either the West or the East ever wondered why she never participated in scientific debates
These two statements don't go well together at all. She was never "lauded" anywhere realistically. She got praises like any third rate movie would get today, "fake reviews". All the praise was negotiated and countries like the UK and others just saw a great deal: they'd get a lot of good business in return for a cheap gesture. I remember Queen Elisabeth being "grilled" for inviting the couple to Buckingham and making public appearances together, in what we later found out was an exchange for some very lucrative military contracts. Turns out nobody is below a good arse-kissing for the right price, no matter how high they sit. Good deal nonetheless.
On the other hand nobody on any side of the continent, in academia or anywhere else, had any interest in pointing out the obvious. There was just nothing to gain from doing it, other than a few extra enemies and ruining a deal for your own country.
The lack of punishment and amount of cynicism here would allow one to discard the science, or at least science institutions, in general.
What punishment would be fitting? At best an institution could posthumously retract the degree.
I agree it's a shame that university are issuing honorary degrees in exchange of publicity, but nobody takes those cardboards seriously.
Perhaps the authors are unfamiliar with Indira Gandhi (or Golda Meir).
The fact that he threw in Margaret Thatcher (who was not a dictator, and thus didn’t have as have much raw power) kinda shows that the author was just pulling opinions out of thin air, or exaggerating for effect, rather than carefullly measuring ‘raw power’.
Her power to dictate the life of civilians in her country was less than that of dictators; her ability to influence the world beyond her country's borders far greater.
And I'd venture to say that for that time period at least Romania had a far bigger geo-political significance for Europe and the Western world than the Philippines did for the same or for Asia.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57136969-children-of-...
Perhaps a good insight into how invisible the internet (or internet as the only / usual source) may make pre-internet individuals.
One thought that still lingers in my mind after many years: what would happened to Russia, if Russians ended-up shooting the apparatus, the same way Romanians got rid of Ceausescu ?
What happened to Russia in the 1990s was such a humiliation and shock of epic proportions- think Weimar Republic. And the European Union wasn't going to save them with money. Turned out the old apparatus was actually better than the new democracy.
In essence, if you have power, it's just as easy to get people to call you Professor Doctor Engineer as it is to get them to call you Grand Poobah or Supreme Chancellor.
Would never happen in the capitalist west, where the only names on scientific papers are people involved in the experiment, and the name order is by who did the most work!
However, I'm not really implying a qualitative difference - I'd fully agree that anyone in the capitalist west who has "made" all their publications by somehow arranging to be included in the authors' list should be considered not as scientists but as frauds, just like Ms. Ceausescu.
The truth of any invention is murky, but Einstein was the first to bring cosmology to the masses. So for those people who would not have known of such things, and feel more satisfied celebration of a name then understanding of an idea, he is the true inventor. Maybe it works the same way for the Romanian lay with regard to polymer science. They don’t really care about the science. They’re looking for a heroic myth.
> This final touch to Mr. Ceausescu's two‐week coast‐to coast tour served to symbolize his independent role in international affairs, which President Nixon described in a White House dinner toast last night as “rather unique.”
> A friend of the United States, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and Communist China, the soft‐spoken President Ceausescu came to Washington to offer Mr. Nixon his view of the world from his special vantage position in the Communist community.
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/28/archives/ceausescu-ends-u...
Ceausescu was also given an honorary knighthood. I think this article from 1990 (not even a full year after the fall of their regime) gives better context, though it is scathing. In particular, I think it's hard to argue that everything bestowed on the Ceausescu's was "forced". Quid pro quo, more like. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12517004-500-forum-le...
> At the time of the Ceausescus’ state visit to Britain in 1978, the Callaghan government was anxious to finalise a lucrative deal with British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce. Like other Western governments, it also laboured under the delusion that Ceausescu was a latter-day Tito and turned a blind eye to an appalling record on human rights.
Edit: I've just noticed that this is listed as a source in the OP -- still, I think it's a better source. More context, giving a better understanding. Just a bit less color.
Driven by a desire to be powerful and respected, and buoyed up by Stalinist ideas about gaining prestige through scientific acumen, Elena turned to the field of chemistry. Mircea Corcioveci, one of the top scientists at the Institute, eventually discovered that Elena "didn't know what a chromatograph was and didn't recognize the formula for sulfuric acid," which was "taught to first-year chemistry students." Nevertheless, on December 8, 1967, she obtained a PhD in chemistry after defending her thesis on the "Stereospecific Polymerization of Isoprene on the Stabilization of Synthetic Rubbers on Copolymerization." Romanian law decreed that doctoral candidates had to publicly defend their theses. To avoid the public defense of a thesis that she likely did not write, the law was changed so that she only needed to submit a written defense. Ultimately, she became Chair of the National Council for Science and Technology and controlled all scientific research in the country, although she knew nothing about it. "We were told: no paper can be written or published, no conference delivered without Elena Ceausecu's name appearing in first place...We were producing papers with words which, we knew, she could not pronounce, let alone understand." She was not even very bright—in fact, almost illiterate—but, through devious and fraudulent means, she managed to become one of the most lauded chemists in the mid-twentieth century.