Category Archives: Eastern Europe

by Joel | 18 February 2008 · 6:45 am

Kosovo, 1998: Origins of the KLA

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 320-324:

The fresh red blood on the fresh white snow looks unreal, like a new avant-garde exhibit at the Tate Gallery in London. But it is entirely real. This is the blood of two dead Serb policemen, shot at dawn, almost certainly by the soldiers of a tough local commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), violating the October cease-fire….

Our knowledge of the KLA is still fragmentary, partly because this guerrilla army is itself quite fragmentary. It has, as one Western military observer politely puts it, a “rather horizontal” command structure. Each region is different, and regional commanders behave like local bandit chiefs. Nonetheless, we can establish a few significant things about its history, leaders, and support.

First and foremost, Its emergence is the result of Kosovar Albanians despairing of the nonviolent path that they adopted after the province was robbed of its autonomy by Milošević in 1989 and Yugoslavia began to fall apart in 1990-1991. Under their unofficially elected “President of the Republic of Kosova,” Ibrahim Rugova, they organized an extraordinary alternative state, with its own taxes, parliamentary committees, private health service, and, most impressive, unofficial education system, from primary school to university. To the frustration of Western policy makers, Rugova was unbending in his commitment to the goal of independence. To their relief, he was equally unbending in his attachment to nonviolent means. How did he propose to square the circle? By the “internationalization” of the Kosovo problem.

Even in the early 1990s, there were those who thought change would come only with the help of more traditional methods. Many Albanians from this region go to Western Europe for training and to earn money to send home. So did they. Ramush Haradinaj, the local commander almost certainly responsible for that blood in the snow, went off to get his military training in the French Foreign Legion. In Priština, people recall first hearing of a KLA in 1993. But then it was something like one of the terrorist splinter groups from the Western European student movement of 1968. One of the KLA’s more important current political leaders, Hashim Thaci, code name “Snake,” was a student activist in Priština who then went to study in Albania and to raise funds in the West. But most of the political activists who came from three generations of formative student political protest—in 1968, 1981, and 1990-1991—were still for nonviolence.

What changed the balance? The startling answer I am given is: “Dayton.” I’m told this by the veteran political prisoner Adem Demaci, who is now the KLA’s political representative. He dates the true emergence of the KLA to spring 1996, just a few months after the November 1995 Dayton agreement on Bosnia. I’m also told this by Veton Surroi, a favorite source for visitors from the West, whose influential daily newspaper nonetheless supported (some even say inflamed) the armed struggle. And by several others.

They say they drew two lessons from Dayton. After more than five years of their Gandhiesque struggle for independence, the United States made a deal with Milošević over Bosnia without securing even a restoration of mere autonomy for Kosovo. So, lesson one: Nonviolence wasn’t working. Meanwhile, in Bosnia itself, the Dayton agreement went a long way toward recognizing ethnic realities created by force. Lesson two: Force pays.

There’s an element of retrospective rationalization in this account. This is not what these same people were telling me in Priština in March 1997. But there is also an uncomfortable element of truth. So long as Rugova kept the lid on his own people, and so long as we felt we had to deal with Milošević over Bosnia, we weren’t going to push him on Kosovo.

The armed rising then grew from two further developments: the looting of arsenals during the violent implosion of Albania in spring 1997, which gave the KLA access to Kalashnikovs galore, and the brutality of Serbian “reprisals” against whole extended families and villages, starting in February 1998. As always, an oppressive army and police were the best recruiting sergeants for the guerrillas.

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Filed under nationalism, U.S., war, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 17 February 2008 · 2:12 pm

Bucharest, 1984/2008: Back to Tineretului

One of our goals during our very brief visit to Bucharest in January was to see how much things had changed in the neighborhood we used to live in during 1983–84. The first change we noticed was that we could get there on the M2 north–south metro line, getting on at Aviatorilor and getting off five stops later at Tineretului. In 1984, the metro line (now M1) only ran in a broad northeast-to-west arc from (I think) Republica to Semănătoarea (lit. ‘the inseminator’), apparently designed to serve the huge housing blocs in the most populous new suburbs. So the Bucharest Metro has improved a lot since 1984.

We lived at Bulevardul Pionierilor 25, Blocul Z7. Note that Romanian place names look a lot like those in other Romance languages, except that the definite articles are suffixed, as in the masculine singular bloc, blocul ‘bloc, the bloc’, and feminine singular semănătoare, semănătoarea ‘planting machine, the planting machine’. (The masculine semănător, semănătorul indicates a human planter.) There are a few wrinkles. On masculine nouns that end in -e, like câine ‘dog’, the singular article is -le, as in câinele ‘the dog’. On feminine nouns that end in stressed -a, like the Turkish borrowing cafea ‘coffee’, the singular definite article is -ua, as in cafeaua [kafjáwa]. And on the huge majority of feminine nouns that end in unstressed -ă (schwa), like casă ‘house’, the singular article -a replaces the schwa, as in casa ‘the house’.

Like quite a few other streets in Romania, Bulevardul Pionierilor changed its name after the “Revolution” (or lovitură de stat ‘coup d’état’) in 1989. The Young Pioneers were so discredited under Communist rule that the boulevard is now named after the neighboring Parcul Tineretului ‘the Park of the Young’ (in the sense of tinerime ‘collective offspring’). Compare the adjective ‘young’, tânăr/tineri for masc. sg./pl., and tânără/tinere for fem. sg./pl., each stressed on the first syllable; and the noun ‘youth’, tinereţe/tinereţi fem. sg./pl., stressed on the penultimate syllable. Compare also the masc. sg. vs. pl. genitive forms, tineretului ‘of the young’ vs. pionierilor ‘of the pioneers’; and the fem. sg. vs. pl. genitive forms in fântâna tinereţii ‘the fountain of youth’ vs. poluarea apelor ‘the pollution of the waters (= bodies of water)’.

These genitive nouns are used as place names in their own right, as in other Bucharest Metro stops like Eroilor ‘of the Heroes’ or Industriilor ‘of the Industries’. The first things that caught our eyes when we came out of the metro at Tineretelui were the large video panel and billboard advertisements at the corner of the park. Big, ugly commercial billboards hide a lot of distinctive architecture and scenery in Bucharest these days. There’s a lot more traffic, too, than there was in 1984.

Some things were still the same, though: treacherous winter sidewalks with layers of uncleared snow and ice, litter discarded in public spaces, and the odd open manhole cover. One dark night in 1984, we almost stepped in an open manhole while walking down a street with no lights except those of a passing tram. This year, we noticed that someone had thoughtfully stuffed a Christmas tree into an open manhole on Strada Trestiana, right in our path. We were lucky it was daytime.

Our bloc at Pionierilor 25 contained several other flats housing Fulbright and IREX scholars from the U.S. (and apparently still did in 1995). We were a long way from the nicer northern neighborhoods cluttered with foreign embassies. I remember that, as Halloween approached in 1983, someone in the American, British, or Canadian embassy arranged for the diplomats to borrow costumes from the National Opera for an embassy costume party. We were a little worried that some embassy kids might come trick-or-treating at our doors. We had nothing that would pass muster for treats, but I prepared to shock the kids by offering them the boiled heads and feet of four whole chickens we had managed to find at the local market (rationed at two per customer). The chicken with lots of fresh garlic made a tasty broth, but no one came trick-or-treating that Halloween, so we discarded the heads and feet.

We did not eat too well that winter. Fresh food was hard to find. You had to supply your own containers, but eggs and (unpasteurized) milk, yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese, stale bread, wheat flour, and corn meal were usually available at local shops. Oil and sugar were rationed. However, in order to find fresh meat, hard cheeses, fresh fruit, or toilet paper, we had to keep an eye out for people queueing up at storefronts on our way to and from the city center, then get in line to find out what they were waiting for. At one point, we managed to obtain a big chunk of fresh pork through one of my Chinese classmates in Romanian language class.

On our open balcony, we stored apples, onions, and potatoes in cardboard boxes insulated with newspaper. They were usually available throughout the winter in the central open markets, along with sour cabbage and its broth (used to make ciorbă). The common wisdom for canned goods was not to buy anything that had been produced toward the end of each month, when factories were rushing to fill their quotas. (Each label carried the production date.) We ate a lot of bean soups and stewed apples that winter.

Well, a lot has changed on the food front. Now there is a small but convenient Mega Image supermarket (with signs on the doors saying, “Now hiring“) across from the entrance to the park. We walked in to have a look around and, after a little hesitation, I couldn’t resist photographing the shelves of goods, none of which would have been remarkable had we not longed for such a local market when we lived there 24 years ago. The bread, meat and deli shelves were not in danger of going bare. They even had Romanian-made vegetarian products like tofu in natural, cumin, dill, and pimiento flavors.

However, the prices did not seem very cheap. The average Romanian monthly wage is about 1400 RON (new lei), which works out to about US$600 at current exchange rates, or about $1000 in purchasing power parity. Nevertheless, the Romanian economy has been growing at a feverish pace since 2000. Bucharest, in particular, seems in 2008 to be a bit of a boomtown, much less dreary and downbeat than it was in 1984. But the countryside seems to be lagging behind.

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Filed under food, language, Romania, travel

by Joel | 14 February 2008 · 6:51 am

Bosnia, 1995: Western TV’s Dream Victim

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), p. 173:

In a coffee break, I talk to a girl called Dijana, from Sarajevo. She is in her early twenties and beautiful, with high cheekbones and large, liquid, oval eyes; stylishly dressed in black, carefully made up in white. At first, she is unforthcoming, almost hostile, until I mention the name of a good friend who has been coming regularly to Sarajevo in the worst times of the siege. I add, “You must be totally fed up with all these well-intentioned foreigners always asking the same questions.” “Yes,” she says, and smiles for the first time. “A lot of people come just for themselves, to say they’ve been here, to show off.”

Now she’d like to ask me something. Why did the West do nothing to help Sarajevo? Sarajevo was a very special place before the war. They lived well, better than many in the West. Now their life is utterly destroyed and degraded. Her brother was just starting to study. But he’s been four years a soldier, and she doesn’t think he can ever return to normal life. And the West has done nothing—nothing—just watched them being killed. She wants to say to UNPROFOR, “just clear out and give me a weapon to fight with, and I’ll see if I can avoid being raped or whatever.” Anger polishes her English.

What is she to do? Perhaps she could emigrate, but she doesn’t want to be a dishwasher somewhere. “My children might become Canadian or whatever, but I wouldn’t be—I’d always be Sarajevan.” At the independent Radio Zid, she and her friends try to pretend they live in a normal country. They do reports on films, play pop music, and give their listeners beauty tips. For example, water after rice has been boiled in it is very good for the skin. She smiles, an angry smile.

Like it or not (and she doesn’t), Dijana is a Western television producer’s dream victim. Beautiful in black and white, eloquent, bitter. Victim, the new fragrance from Calvin Klein.

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Filed under U.N., war, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 13 February 2008 · 6:08 pm

Serbia, 1997: What Nationalism Achieved

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 234-235:

Consider what Milošević has done for them. Ten years ago [= 1987] there was a country called Yugoslavia, “and I thought it was in Europe,” says my friend Ognjen Pribičević, one of Belgrade’s brightest political analysts. Economically, they were quite well off compared to the Czechs or Poles. Belgrade looked smarter than Warsaw. Schools and courts functioned more or less normally. They could travel freely. Yugoslavia had a good name in the world.

Now they live in a country known as Serbia, and it is—everyone agrees—not in Europe but in the Balkans. (Before I came out I looked in five popular tourist guidebooks to Europe. Serbia featured in none of them.) Serbia is an international pariah. To be a Serb abroad is like being a German after 1945. Provided, that is, you can even get abroad. You need a visa for almost everywhere. Distinguished professors stand in line for five hours in the cold and are then refused.

Physically, the whole place is battered and run-down. Belgrade reminds me of Warsaw in the late 1970s. If you look at the cars, the clothes, the shop windows, you feel that Poland and Yugoslavia have changed places. According to the (unreliable) statistics, average per-capita income has shrunk from around $3,000 to less than $1,000. The official unemployment figure is close to 50 percent. I visit Kragujevac, a town once made prosperous by the large Zastava car, truck, and arms factory. The war decimated the production of cars (since parts came from all over the former Yugoslavia) but was good for the arms factory. Now the peace has cut the production of arms. Most of the Zastava factory workers are paid some $20 to $25 a month for doing nothing. They line the streets selling blackmarket goods: trinkets, Nescafé, chocolate bars, cigarettes smuggled in via Montenegro.

Back in Belgrade, I am taken to a vast black-market bazaar, full of new Western consumer goods, all imported without paying taxes. There is a great double line of people hawking Western cigarettes, but watch out for the “Marlboros”: They are made in Montenegro. Fake Calvin Klein, Versace, and Nike clothes adorn the stalls—mainly produced, I am told, in the Sandjak of Novi Pazar.

Crime, corruption, and lawlessness are endemic. A notice in the hotel foyer asks you to hand over your personal firearms to the hotel security department. A security man hovers watchfully with a metal detector: Does my tweed jacket suggest a local criminal or a Western businessman? I have never seen so many obvious gangsters, not even in Russia. I note that the phrase used about the election fraud is “when Milošević stole the elections.” Elections are just one of so many things being stolen here.

People don’t trust the banks, so they keep their money in cash. Here, as throughout former Yugoslavia, the deutsche mark is the real currency. “I don’t take dollars,” says one small businessman—”they are too easily forged.” When your money is stolen, you have no redress. Insurance? You’re joking. And the courts? A friend is meant, according to the law, to inherit a flat. But to get it he needs to pay DM 10,000—as a bribe to the judge.

Politics and corruption are deeply intertwined, as in all the post-communist demokraturas. The ruling parties run much of the state as a private business; private businesses protect themselyes by supporting the ruling parties. But one would not like to inquire too closely into the finances of opposition parties, either. The moral environment is as degraded as the physical one.

And what of the Serbs for whom the nationalist standard was supposedly raised: the Serbs in Kosovo, the Serbs “across the Drina” in Bosnia, the Serbs in Croatia? The Serbs in the Krajina, in Croatia, have been completely expelled. The remaining Serbs in Bosnia, impoverished and brutalized, wander around the remnants of their tinpot para-state. There are at least five hundred thousand Serb refugees in Serbia, most of them still without citizenship, let alone economic assistance from the state.

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Filed under economics, Europe, nationalism, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 7 February 2008 · 5:53 pm

Croatia, 1995: In Cleansed Krajina

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 167-169:

Two more days in the “ethnically cleansed” Krajina, this time heading south with my friend Konstanty Gebert, a Polish writer, and Ana Uzelac, his Serbo-Polish colleague from Belgrade. On the roads, there is no traffic except the Croat military police at the roadblocks, a few white-painted UN vehicles, and, incongruously, the occasional smart BMW or Mercedes with German number plates racing past. Presumably Croat Gastarbeiter revisiting family homes or just on safari.

For hour after hour, we drive through the most spectacularly beautiful countryside, along the wooded valleys of the Plitvicka National Park, across the karst uplands, and down to the fortress of Knin. For hour after hour we see nothing but devastated, burned, plundered houses. Roofs burned out; windows smashed; clothes, bedclothes, furniture, papers strewn across the floor. Everything of value removed. Orchards, vineyards, fields, all with their crops gone to waste. No cars left, no tractors, no farm equipment, no cattle, no dogs. Only a few cats survive.

And, for mile upon mile upon mile, we see no single human being. Nobody. Ana has brought from Belgrade the addresses of Serb families that fled, but their houses are very difficult to find, because the villages no longer have the landmarks the inhabitants remember. Could this have been a grocer’s shop? Was that once a white wall? But there is no one to ask for directions.

Cleansing is in an awful way the right word for what has been done here. The Krajina, an area the size of several English counties, has literally been picked clean. This was not random looting. The plundering and burning has been done quite systematically—for the most part, it seems, by Croats in one uniform or another. The object, apart from booty, is simple: to ensure that the Serbs don’t come back. Croatia is to be, so far as possible, Serb-free. Serbenrein.

According to the local UN office, some one hundred elderly Serbs who stayed in their homes have been murdered since Croat forces retook the area. At Gračac, we find fresh graves in the cemetery, numbered neatly on the identical wooden crosses. However, here, as elsewhere, the Orthodox church has been left standing, to show that the Croats are western, civilized people, unlike those barbaric Orthodox Serbs, who raze Catholic churches to the ground. But the vicarage has been torn apart. A children’s Bible and a church calendar for 1996 lie among the litter on the floor.

At Kistanje, once a pretty, small town, we find three family photo albums laid out on stone tables in the marketplace. The wedding. A son’s christening. The ceremony to celebrate his joining the Yugoslav army. As we turn the pages, a white armored personnel carrier of UNPROFOR, the so-called United Nations Protection Force, roars through the deserted town. Ludicrous protectors of nothing. The UN self-protection force.

In places like this, journalists say, “the story writes itself.” Wherever we look, journalistic “color” and clichés offer themselves wantonly, like the whores in Amsterdam. Outside a plundered home, a doll is sprawled across the road, one foot torn off. In the ruins of the family home of Milorad Pupovac, leader of a small would-be liberal Serb party in Croatia, I find a book of children’s verse, Robber Katja and Princess Nadja, published in Sarajevo in 1989. Ana can recite some of the verses from memory. The last poem is entitled “How Our Yugoslavia Grows.” In the rubble of another house I see what looks like a white scroll. Unrolling it, I discover a black-and-white photograph of Tito—the kind that once hung in every public place and in many private houses too. It has a bootmark pointing toward the face.

Knin was the capital of the self-styled Serb Republic of Krajina. Now “liberated,” its imposing hilltop fortress, with the checkerboard flag flying from the top, forms the background to the main election poster for President Tudjman’s nationalist HDZ movement. In the foreground you see Tudjman himself, waving both fists above his head like a victorious football manager. Before the war, some 37,000 people lived in Knin; now even the local government claims only 2,000. Croat soldiers and military police, baseball caps reversed, speed along the deserted streets in their stolen—sorry, “liberated”—cars: a smart Mercedes, a Renault, a Mitsubishi Jeep with the name of the German dealer still advertised on the back. We climb to the top of the fortress and discover the largest flag I have ever seen in my life. It must be at least thirty feet long. Young girls in black jeans and T-shirts are photographing each other literally wrapped in the flag. The cliché made flesh.

As the sun sets over the mountains like a holiday advertisement, we drive down to the Adriatic, across the invisible line to the part of Croatia the Serbs never occupied, and suddenly there is ordinary life: houses with roofs, electric light, curtains, cars, a young couple canoodling on a scooter. In Šibenik, one of the beautiful resort towns on the Dalmatian coast, we gape at the cheerful, well-dressed crowds, the nice hotels and the Café Europa.

Ah, Europe—but we’ve been there all the time.

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by Joel | 6 February 2008 · 8:53 pm

Poland’s Abnormal Normality

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 206-207:

It is now commonplace to observe that Poland has become a “normal country.” But what does this mean? Certainly, to arrive in Warsaw these days is more like arriving in Lisbon or Naples than it is like arriving in Warsaw before 1989. A smart modern airport. No need for a visa. When the passport officers call Polish passport-holders to a separate gate, you simply can’t tell the difference—in dress, accoutrements, hairstyles, and so on—between the two lines, Polish and Western. A relatively clean taxi, and you are actually charged the local-currency price on the taxi meter. Familiar shops, goods, cars. The same TV commercials. Smart offices. Mobile phones. Professional friends who are now overworked and defend themselves with answering machines. More and real money, but also more money worries: “Half our income goes in tax, the other half on school fees!” Great contrasts between rich and poor.

Of course, if you dig just a little deeper you find extraordinary things. The man in the Mercedes is a former politburo member. Your mobile-phone salesman is a former secret policeman. In the countryside, you still see peasant houses out of Brueghel. Priests chunter on about “neopaganism.” But Europe—our “normal,” “Western,” Europe—is also full of extraordinary things. Between observing the Polish elections and writing this essay I had to drop in to Naples for the Premio Napoli awards. The Grand Hotel Vesuvio was even better than the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw, but driving through the city I could see the dreadful slums—far worse than anything in Warsaw—where people still go in fear of the Camorra. Among the Premio Napoli prizewinners was a Jesuit priest, who was being honored for his fight against usury. (“Why don’t you in Britain have a law against usury?” he quizzed me.) The popular postcommunist mayor was asked at the televised prize-giving ceremony what he thought of his rival, the postfascist Signora Alessandra Mussolini (daughter of you-know-who). And, incidentally, was it true that they have been romantically involved? While denying romance, the mayor said that Signora Mussolini had made a very positive contribution to solving some problems in the city. All normal?

So the spectrum of contemporary European “normality” is very wide, and Poland is now definitely within it. But there is another measure of “normality”: diachronic rather than synchronic. What has been normal for a country historically over, say, the last two hundred years? By this criterion, Poland today is quite spectacularly abnormal. This country is free, sovereign, prospering? Germany is its best ally in the West? It is not immediately threatened even by Russia? Surely we’ve got our countries mixed up. I asked the Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki when before in its history Poland had been so well placed. Scarcely hesitating, he replied, “Probably the second half of the sixteenth century.”

Poland’s transition from normal abnormality to abnormal normality is already a fantastic achievement. The challenge for the next five years is to secure it, internally and externally—which means in the EU and in NATO. Only then will we, and the Poles themselves, begin to see what the Polish version of European “normality” really looks like. This Polish normality may well not be as interesting as the old abnormality. Indeed, it may at first look like a cheap copy of the West. But, if that is freedom’s price, it is surely worth paying. And, anyway, who knows? As the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper once wryly observed: History is full of surprises, and no one is more surprised by them than historians.

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Filed under democracy, economics, Europe, Germany, Italy, Poland

by Joel | 4 February 2008 · 5:22 am

Calculating the Cigarette Value of Books

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 224-225:

The black market epitomized everything that Vichy disapproved of. It went with selfishness, materialism and indifference to the authority of the state. Denunciations under Vichy often concerned black-market matters, and were couched in interesting terms. Someone describing himself as ‘an average Frenchman who suffers from restrictions’ blamed the black market on Jews. In the south-east, black markets were often blamed on the Italians.

In practice, most Petainists used the black market. Sometimes Petainist officials were blatant practitioners: the Graeve family in Chinon trafficked wine at a time when both the son and daughter of the family held positions in the Vichy administration. Vichy bodies and local authorities often used unofficial channels in order to get food for their own employees. The Vichy government itself came to recognize that suppressing the black market entirely was not possible or desirable. A law of March 1942 regulating the black market specifically excluded transactions to cover personal needs, and a circular to prefects in the summer of 1942 talked of ‘struggle against all traffickers of the black market but complete freedom left for family supply’. Policemen turned a blind eye to small quantities of illicit goods. Even the Church, normally marked by intense moralism and asceticism, did not wholly condemn the black market. In December 1941 Cardinal Suhard stressed the need to obey the law but then distinguished disobedience from ‘the modest extra-legal transactions by which the extras judged necessary are procured and which are justified both by their small scale and the necessities of life’.

Black markets were not, in any case, wholly black. Transactions did not always involve strangers selling goods in a completely free market for cash, and they did not always involve people who thought of themselves as criminals. Money did not necessarily mean much during the occupation. At a time of rapid inflation, everyone preferred goods with a more tangible value. The coupons that gave particular companies the right to buy certain raw materials were traded, illegally. The barter that might normally have operated at village level became institutionalized. One firm advertised a swap of typewriters for bicycles. Cigarettes acquired particular importance, both because nicotine-starved smokers wanted them and because they provided a convenient unit of exchange. Both Micheline Bood, the Parisian schoolgirl, and Charles Rist took a touching interest in the cigarette value of books. A peasant boy in the Corrèze bought an hour of violin lessons for a pound of butter.

Sounds a bit like Romania during the 1980s, where the black market Cigarette Standard was Kents, for some reason I have never discovered. An unopened package of Kents was a serious offer, although some medical procedures might require a whole carton—or a bottle of imported Scotch.

UPDATE: During our year in Romania in 1983-84, I always kept a carton or two on hand in case the need arose. I only dispensed a full package on four occasions: two to the embassy driver who dealt with the customs officials when we first arrived (with lots of luggage); one to help friends book a room in a big, empty hotel in Brasov, where we attended a wedding; and one to a band of gypsies who serenaded my wife and me with naughty lyrics that I made an effort to translate in an otherwise empty venison restaurant in snowbound Poiana Brasov.

My wife also gave a carton of Kents to a neighbor lady who needed a medical procedure. (It may have been an illegal tubal ligation, or even an abortion, but we didn’t dare to ask. In a totalitarian society, it’s best not to.) Her obsessive homeopathic health-nut of a husband later brought the carton back and scolded us for encouraging the evil habit of smoking. So my wife later gave his wife a bottle of Scotch instead. I assume it went to a doctor without the husband finding out about it.

I kept one carton in reserve in case we had any trouble crossing the Bulgarian border by train on our final departure. After we had crossed without incident, I shocked a team of Romanian boys and their coaches who were on their way to a football match in Sofia by donating my carton of Kents to them. After they recovered, the coaches came back to our compartment to tell me they had never been so surprised in their lives. I told them that Romania had given me a surprise or two as well, and wished them luck in their match. They just nodded knowingly, thanked us again, and returned to their team.

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Filed under economics, France, Germany, Romania, war

by Joel | 30 January 2008 · 10:22 pm

Not the Orient Express

On our first trip to Romania in 1983, we booked our reservations with an agency who knew what they were doing—Thomas Cook, I believe it was. We took the Orient Express from Paris to Bucharest. This time we bought our Eurail passes online and booked our reservations as we went along. Being well into middle age, we bought the First Class Saver passes (for groups of two or more people) good for 15 consecutive days of travel, which we planned for the first two weeks of January.

Our first mistake was buying the passes from eurail.com, which offers no help with reservations after the sale. Other rail pass vendors, like railpass.com or eurail-pass.com or raileurope.com, will book reservations for people who bought passes from them. Commercial travel agents are not very interested in Eurail pass bookings for just a fraction of the small reservation fee; and national railway systems, even within the EU, may work well with their immediate neighbors, but not with national systems farther down the line.

Romania is pretty far down the line from France. A helpful agent of the SNCF in Strasbourg booked us to Vienna (via Stuttgart and Munich), and gave us the timetable of an overnight train from Vienna to Bucharest, but could not reserve us a sleeping car. (The current Orient Express only runs between Strasbourg and Vienna.) The DB office in Munich had no problem booking us through to Bucharest. The DB certainly impressed us as the gold standard for train travel on both sides of the Atlantic, while Lufthansa similarly impressed us as the gold standard for air travel across the Atlantic, especially after they upgraded us to business class for our Xmas Day flight from Boston to Frankfurt (for no good reason, unless we looked like Herr Santa und Frau Klaus).

On the 1983 Orient Express, we stayed in the same Wagon-Lit compartment both nights (between France and Germany and between Hungary and Romania), but we noticed a degradation in quality at each change of dining car. We enjoyed an excellent German breakfast in a spotless dining car as we passed through Bavaria the first morning. That evening we enjoyed a pleasant dinner in a clean Hungarian dining car as we headed for Budapest. The dingy Romanian dining car at breakfast was full of smokers drinking ersatzkaffee and plum brandy.

Crossing the Hungarian border at Hegyeshalom around sunset the night before was memorable, but not nearly as traumatic as our wee-hour awakening at Curtici on the Romanian border, where we were asked to open our luggage and tell the officials if we had any bibles, dynamite, or typewriters—a dangerously subversive trinity. The only bright spot was that it was my first real chance to use Romanian since finishing Army language school in 1970.

This year our trauma—and long-awaited dormant language revival—began much earlier, as we tried to find car 419 in the train awaiting us across the platform when we arrived at Wien Westbahnhof. We found car 420, then backtracked to 418, then 417, then forward again, then even farther back to—lo and behold—car 419. This was but the first indication that our train was not the Orient Express, but the Dacia Express (D 345). The second, third, and fourth indications were that the car attendant spoke Romanian, that he had to evict a hopeful squatter from our 2-berth compartment, and that the car was labeled vagon de dormit as well as wagon-lit and carrozza letto.

When I went looking for a dining car after the train got underway, I noticed that several of the outside doors were chained shut, and that chains also hung at the ready from doors separating first and second class. I quickly retreated to our compartment, where the car attendant soon stopped by to explain that we should use the extra deadbolt lock to keep out the regular midnight burglars that plagued the border area between Hungary and Romania, and that we were to make sure that anyone who knocked on the door was a real border control official before opening up. Fortunately, the door had a peephole, and we had enough snacks and drinking water to last until our arrival.

The Romanian border crossing was far more pleasant this time around, though still at an ungodly hour. When I responded in Romanian, the customs official asked where I learned it. I said I learned it in the US Army the first time around, then revived it later during a year a the University of Bucharest. He suggested that perhaps I had been a democracy activist. I protested that I had never done anything very useful with the language.

In the early hours before dawn we could see the highway from our train window. We saw a good bit of truck traffic and well-lit gas stations at regular intervals—quite a change from the Romania we remembered—but the Transylvanian countryside looked a lot bleaker after sunrise, with poorly built, poorly heated houses in silent, sleepy, snow-covered towns with many abandoned factories between the occasional clusters of plants newly built by foreign investors and fed by much more robust powerlines than we saw in the rest of the countryside. (Further observations about changes we noticed will have to wait for another blogpost.)

For our return trip from Bucharest to Vienna on Saturday, we boarded the same overnight train (D 346) after stocking up on food and drink at a grocery store in the station. And we got the same lecture about securing our compartment door overnight, this time from a new car attendant with a new trick that employed a coat hanger. He also explained that the teams of burglars only infested the train between Curtici, where it stopped for Romanian customs, and Békéscsaba, the first station on the Hungarian side of the border.

We survived the border crossing unmolested, but also unmoved. We arrived about 2 a.m. and spent most of 3 hours at a standstill, far more than the time required for the Romanian and Hungarian passport control. We finally got underway about the time we should have been arriving at Budapest Keleti, where we had missed the train that was supposed to pull our cars to Vienna. Instead of pulling in to the platform, we spent two hours waiting at a siding, periodically trundling to and fro in front of Budapest’s new Arena Plaza.

Our car attendant hibernated while the Keleti station loudspeaker blared forth long announcements, only in Hungarian, to otherwise empty platforms. I couldn’t find a Hungarian speaker among the Romanian passengers to translate. So I finally walked up the tracks to the engine and asked the driver if he spoke Romanian, German, or English. He spoke just enough German to tell me that we would not be leaving until after 9 a.m., about the time we had been scheduled to arrive at Vienna and make our connection back to Strasbourg. The engine had had some kind of trouble.

We finally made it into Wien Westbahnhof around noon on a sleepy Sunday. When we informed the solitary, unsympathetic clerk at the ÖBB travel desk that our train from Bucharest had missed its connection, she was not at all surprised. She said we would have to contact the DB, which sold us the reservations, to get any refund, and she gave us the choice of spending the next 20 hours changing trains and waiting in various German stations at ungodly hours, or boarding the real Orient Express for another overnight trip into Strasbourg. We chose the latter.

How many people would resent having to spend 8 hours in Vienna on a Sunday? Well, we did. Almost every shop and restaurant on Mariahilfer Straße was closed. We wanted to treat ourselves to a nice long lunch, but nothing was open. The Russian Vladimir restaurant was closed until five, but we finally found a Greek restaurant, Mythos, run by an Egyptian couple with a cute 2-year-old boy who came around to our table to play with his retractable tape measure, whose housing functioned as a self-propelled vehicle. Thank goodness, once again, for the Mediterranean work ethic in Northern climes.

The rest of the way back was uneventful. Service on the Orient Express was excellent, door locks were unnecessary, and our couchette mate was an Algerian man who spoke no German, but decent English and much better French than I did. It was nice to get back to Strasbourg, even though we had a rather long wait in Karlsruhe, to be unhooked from the cars headed for Amsterdam, and again in Kehl, to be hauled across the Rhine from Germany to France.

I would love to make another trip to Romania, but not by overnight train.

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by Joel | 27 January 2008 · 10:18 pm

How Best to Reharvest a Ruined Past

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 276-277:

There is probably no such thing as a good purge, even if it is politely called lustration. The Czechoslovak lustration was prompt and crudely effective but deeply flawed by procedural injustice. The German “gaucking” has been procedurally more just: careful, individual, appealable. But it has sometimes been perverted by media abuse, and it has suffered from elephantiasis. Did postmen and train drivers really need to be gaucked? Again we come back to the question of who is doing it, for would the West Germans ever have done this to themselves?

Yet Poland has shown the price of not purging. The Hungarians, with their nice habit of taking the German model and then improving on it, came up with a defensible refinement: It applied careful individual scrutiny only to those seeking senior positions in public life. But this was seven years late. Now Poland has finally followed suit, with a law that is probably the most scrupulous of them all.

I believe the third path—that of history lessons—has been the most promising in Central Europe. Much of the comparative literature comes to a similar conclusion for other countries: What is somewhat biblically called “truth-telling” is both the most desirable and the most feasible way to grapple with a difficult past. This is what West Germany did best in relation to Nazism, at least from the 1960s on. What united Germany has done in this regard since 1990 has been exemplary: the parliamentary commission, the open archives, the unique opportunity for a very personal history lesson given by access to the Stasi files.

To advocate the third path does, of course, assign a very special place to contemporary historians. In fact, I do think that if you ask “Who is best equipped to do justice to the past?” the answer is, or at least should be, historians. But this is also a heavy responsibility. Truth is a big word, so often abused in Central Europe during the short, rotten twentieth century that people there have grown wary of it. Studying the legacy of a dictatorship, one is vividly reminded how difficult it is to establish any historical truth. In particular, across such a change of regime, you discover how deeply unreliable is any retrospective testimony.

Yet studying this subject also strengthens one’s allergy to some of the bottomless, ludic frivolities of postmodernist historiography. For this is too serious a business. Carelessly used, the records of a state that worked by organized lying—and especially the poisonous, intrusive files of a secret police—can ruin lives. To interpret them properly tests the critical skills that historians apply routinely to a medieval charter or an eighteenth-century pamphlet. But, having worked intensively with such records and read much else based on them, I know that it can be done. It is not true, as is often claimed, that this material is so corrupted that one cannot write reliable history on the basis of it. The evidence has to be weighed with very special care. The text must be put in the historical context. Interpretation needs both intellectual distance and the essential imaginative sympathy with all the men and women involved—even the oppressors. But, with these old familiar disciplines, there is a truth that can be found. Not a single, absolute Truth with a capital T but still a real and important one.

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by Joel | 26 January 2008 · 10:59 am

Prague, 1994: Fractured Intelligentsia

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), p. 141:

The intelligentsia—one of the characteristic phenomena of modern Central and East European history—is now everywhere engulfed in sweeping change. This world of “circles of friends,” of milieux, where artists, philosophers, writers, economists, journalists all felt themselves to belong to the same group and to be committed to a certain common ethos (albeit often honored in the breach), was something anachronistic in late-twentieth-century Europe—but also something rich and fine. Its extraordinary character was summed up for me in a phrase that Ivan Klíma used in describing how he and his fellow writers had set out to revive the dormant Czech PEN club in 1989. “I was,” he said, “authorized by my circle of friends.” The peculiar world of the intelligentsia under communism was one in which you sought authorization from your circle of friends.

Freedom has changed all that. With remarkable speed, the intelligentsia has fragmented into separate professions, as in the West: journalists, publishers, academics, actors, not to mention those who have become officials, lawyers, diplomats. The milieux have faded, the “circles of friends” have dispersed or lost their special significance. Those who have remained in purely “intellectual” professions—above all, academics—have found themselves impoverished. Moreover, it is the businessmen and entrepreneurs who are the tone-setting heroes of this time. Thus, from having an abnormal importance before 1989, independent intellectuals have plummeted to abnormal unimportance.

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