Comment by rocgf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocgf | Hacker News Reader

There are many stories around both Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu. Since they were supposed to be perfect in the eyes of the people, the news and all available official information portrayed them similarly to how Kim Jong-Un is portrayed today in North Korea. They were supposed to be the best at everything, including science.

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...

Im reminded of the old stalin joke, were the engineers were discussing the best places for the tran-sibirian railroad to run along - and the impatient boss, just took a ruler and made a line. And thats how they build it- including the little bow, were the bosses middle finger was in the way.

Ah, but there were no bosses in stalins sowjet russia. Just some more equal comrades carrying the burden of leadership.

You joke, but I think it's true. In 1940 the Soviets invaded part of Romania, we were forced to give up some territories.

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.

I heard that story about Tsar Nicholas II, in whose reign the first Trans-Siberian railway line (from Moscow to Vladivostok) was actually completed- it was begun during his father's reign, but Nicholas supervised it from the beginning.

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.

There is a similar apocryphal story about the border between Belarus and Lithuania. The story goes that Stalin had set his pipe down on the map, and no one dared move it, so they just drew around it. The result is a conspicuous bulge in the border South of Vilnius.

Sykes & Picot have entered the chat.

Comparing present day North Korea with 80s Romania is pretty far - the communist regime in Romania never had anything close to the same fanatical dedication from its people. Few in Romania ever believed the official propaganda, even if they were forced to spew it. In fact this is common with most dictatorial propaganda: no one believes it, it's more of a show of force - everyone repeating what they know to be a lie, least they get reported for wrong think.

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.

why do you think north koreans believe the state propaganda?

Testimonies from escapees tend to show they sort of believed at least the negative propaganda about the south, western countries, and China. Not so much the godlike powers of the leadership.

It's similarly true about Soviet propaganda. The people living in Soviet territory commonly believed the propaganda about the US and West as well. Even the highest tiers, including eg Yeltsin, believed some of the false propaganda (which is why Yeltsin couldn't believe his now famous 1989 visit to Randall's grocery store in Houston Texas wasn't wholly staged). Yeltsin was on record admitting that even the upper echelons of Soviet power believed a lot of the false propaganda they were fed.

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.

The CIA term for planted stories which got picked up by Western media, and often intel, was blowback. (See the 1977 "CIA and the Media" hearings: https://archive.org/details/CIAMedia1978Hearings/page/n3/mod...)

Makes one wonder how much of what's believed in the West isn't self-owned propaganda.

Russians today have internet access and can travel abroad, it's nothing like back in those days anymore. Also not to defend Putin's regime, which is bad enough, but it's not totalitarian. Totalitarianism is the most extreme form of authoritarianism, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were examples of that. And China seems to be heading in that direction yet again.

But escapees also have an incentive to lie. Nobody will hire them, assuming they're spies.

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.

On the other hand Romania is having startling amount of nostalgia over the communist regime

https://euobserver.com/news/30890

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/18/nicolae-cea...

etc

Sure, but I would attribute that much more to modern propaganda than historical, mostly because many of the communist elites are even today clinging to power (and have been in power since the revolution). Romania is also experiencing all of the ills of modern capitalism, and Ceaușescu is a common nationalist icon, so the same social forces putting Le Pen, Boris Johnson, or Trump in power or close to it are fueling "communist" (populist nationalist) nostalgia in Romania. People pine for "free jobs" and "free houses", "no foreign interference", "tough on crime police", not for Systematization, farming co-ops and other more left-leaning ideals (not that they should pine for those, as they were done in an almost maximally harmful way in practice).

indeed Romania in the 80s was like North Korea

Economically, Romania was one of the wealthier countries in the Eastern bloc in the 80s. The fall of the communist government actually led to an economic downturn which took several years to recover from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Romania#History

Romania was in full crunch mode in the 80's to reimburse quickly it debts. It was at the expense of most Romanians

Romania in 89 was the poorest country in Europe after Albania. a failed state just like the rest communist states

I am talking about the eastern bloc. For eg, Poland, Albania, Ukraine and several other Soviet states were poorer.

Romanian economy collapsed after fall of the Soviet union in 1988

Hi there, history rewriter !

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.

He was also a very popular figure in the West because Romania went against the USSR.

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 did not say Romania was the richest eastern bloc state. It was relatively wealthier amongst them. Poland, Ukraine, n Korea- all of them were poorer.

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.

Are you Romanian? Because your comment seems like one of those jokes about aliens seeing humans cooking and then reproducing what the humans are creating, but without the taste, because their monitoring doesn't capture that.

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? Because your comment seems like one of those jokes about aliens seeing humans cooking and then reproducing what the humans are creating, but without the taste, because their monitoring doesn't capture that.

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.

I guess at some point we're so far off into the weeds that we forget what the initial topic of conversation was.

I have no idea about Romanian history, but I had the opportunity to work with some Romanian software engineers, and they were some of the best I've encountered.

Romania also performs unusually well at the international math olympiad, given its population and economy.

Not surprising given the Romanian education system. It's great for the high-achievers. Extremely demanding and rigorous. Anecdotally I get the impression that it's not so hot for those who don't fall into this category or are late developers. If only they could fix that.

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