This is all false. Source: I was there.
I was there before 1989 and grew in the small town in a house. Not a village, but a small town.
We had electricity only a couple of hours per day.
I don't know of any specific rule against refrigerator but it was not useful to buy one as you cannot connect it to anything.
The main source of light during winter was the fire and some kind of liquid gas (I don't know exacly what was that) that we used with a gas lamp.
The same goes for kitchen: most of the cooking was done using the stove or using some gas tanks that were limited - I think one per family per month or I am not sure. But the gas tank was a precious possession there.
The same was true for bread or any other food that was produced by the state. There were rations of how much we can buy.
That's the mentality of a communist dictator.
My dad told me relatively recently how sometime during a winter from the late '80s a lady from the power company showed up at our apartment's door and told my father that we should lower our energy consumption, i.e. not use an electrical heater to, well, heat the house. That would have course meant having a freezing house, which wasn't ideal for kid me, so my dad, logically, called that lady some names and invited her inside the apartment to share the bed with all of us (because of the cold I was sleeping as a kid between my parents during the winter, we couldn't physically heat two rooms at the same time). Interesting times.
Bonus points for us, kids, booing and swearing out loud when the power was being cut off in the evening, and cheering when it was being restored, like true "freedom" fighters against the regime (I'm talking about the summer months when we were all outside to play well into the evening/dark hours).
That the access to electricity was limited?
You are saying
> "the power was being cut off in the evening"
How is not the power limited if this was happening? :)
But, yeah, on a more general level whoever was designing any electrical-related stuff had to have that in mind (the power cuts and the reduced power consumption asked from us, that is).
This discussion also reminded me that, as a kid, I was really in awe in how the (analogue) telephone network was still working even when the power went out, it seemed like magic. There was an article posted yesterday here on HN about how we're expecting rolling black-outs in our mobile phone network over parts of Europe, goes to show that in some ways the system back then that we had in Romania was a lot more resilient in face of power-cuts compared to what we have now available over most of Europe.
Same. Pretty sure we vacuumed regularly and never unplugged the refrigerator.
If you were in a state heated apartment building after 1980, the heating was limited to non existent though. And there may have been a hot water schedule. More like twice per day not twice per week though.
Also for other people reading this, please note that all stores in most of the country (with exception of capital city and a couple others) were controlled by the state. Leaving the country was forbidden in general.
So if they wanted people not to use refrigerators on large scale or vacuum cleaners they could just decide to not sell them. It was that simple to restrict something like electronics.
Just add more: again in most of the country there were very few cars running as there was a limited supply of petrol/gas for cars. You could have a fixed amount of gas.
They even decided at one point that on Sunday to restrict circulation of cars the following way: one Sunday cars that have an odd number are allowed, the other Sunday cars that have an even number were allowed.
The beauty of communist central planning, nothing really worked unless you were in communist party.