Siberian Light has been tracking the Moldovan elections.
Here’s the breakdown of the three parties that forced their way over the five percent threshold and into 101-seat parliament.
- Communist Party: 46.1% / 56 seats
- Democratic Moldova Bloc: 28.4% / 24 seats
- Popular Party Christian Democratic: 9% / 11 seats
But Publius Pundit has a different headline: Communists lose majority in Moldova.
Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, USSR
Andy at Siberian Light notes a report that Moldovans don’t want CIS election observers. He comments:
Moldova does, however, want OSCE and Council of Europe observers.
Can you imagine the hurt and suffering the poor man [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] is going through as he ever so slowly comes to terms with the heartbreaking knowledge that there are people in former Soviet states that actually don’t trust Russia?
Andy’s post attracted a cynical comment that cites an article on the IWPR website about the recent elections in Kyrgyzstan.
This article, perhaps unwittingly, demonstrates that the real protests are not taking place in the name of democracy, but are orchestrated by local regional powerbrokers.
UPDATE: The Financial Times has more on the Moldovan elections (via Instapundit).
At first sight, Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Moldova, an impoverished former Soviet republic wedged between Ukraine and Romania, look like fertile ground for a political battle between Russia and the west.
President Vladimir Voronin, the Communist party leader who came to power on a pro-Moscow ticket four years ago, is confronted by centre-right and rightwing opposition parties.
Following the success of popular protests that forced changes of government in Ukraine and Georgia, Moldova might seem ripe for a similar upheaval. But the parallels are misleading. Far from calling on Moscow for support, the veteran Communist president has transformed himself into a pro-west leader, anxious to build ties with the European Union.
In an attempt to exploit the popularity of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, Mr Voronin has also recently wooed those countries’ new democratic leaders – Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko and Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili.
And, to the Kremlin’s considerable annoyance, he expelled 19 Russian “poll monitors” accusing them of meddling in the election.
Mr Voronin hopes his tactics can help settle Moldova’s biggest challenge – the conflict with its Russian-backed separatist enclave, Transdnestria. But he clearly also hopes his manoeuvres will allow his party to retain control of parliament and be in a position to extend his own power when deputies vote for a new president later this year.
Filed under Romania
Here’s an excerpt from what A Step at a Time has to say about Cold War dissidents.
In the 1960s and early 1970s there existed an almost complete disparity, a dislocation, even, between the dissident movement in Soviet Russia and the radical movements in the West (those which gravitated around the Paris “revolution” of 1968, for example). While Western radicals sometimes paid lip service to Soviet dissidents – and there was a mild flurry of sympathy for them during the events that immediately followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – in general there was an almost total lack of comprehension on both sides. Western radicals could not understand the admiration felt by most Soviet dissidents for Western democracy and culture, while most Soviet dissidents were appalled by the disdain and hatred felt by much of the Western radical left for Western society. Later, this dislocation crystallized out in the situation described by Sharansky in The Case for Democracy, where Western “ban-the-bomb” marchers walked side by side with KGB operatives who were bent on exploiting the radical left-wing and peace movements, while in the Soviet Union, anti-nuclear protesters and peace activists languished in jails and prison camps.
Looking back on it now, it’s hard to see how anyone could seriously have compared the two movements – the radical Western left and the Soviet dissidents. While the Western students and activists were free to utter their opinions, hold public demonstrations and even burn down buildings, in the Soviet Union those who resisted the established order were imprisoned, tortured and killed. “Who could turn away from themselves even under enormous strain, after seeing Ginzburg’s tenacious refusal to compromise?” Cali Ruchala writes. Although the dissident movement was by no means homogeneous, and comprised different levels and qualities of disagreement with the power of authority, the example of fortitude, moral sanity and defiance, even under impossible conditions of repression, shown by Ginzburg and others like him was simply over the heads of most Western observers, even those who for their own political and ideological reasons wanted to sympathize with the Soviet outcasts.
Filed under Eastern Europe, USSR
Siberian Light has dawned upon a blog by longtime Russian translator David McDuff entitled A Step at a Time, which describes itself as “Reflections on the world post 9/11, by a writer and translator who engaged for many years in the debates of the Cold War, and who tends to see the world’s present troubles as a continuation of the old common struggle with tyranny and oppression.” Here‘s his Normblog profile.
McDuff was an exchange student in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and has written a fascinating, serialized essay entitled “Going Back” about his experiences during those years. I’d like to excerpt a paragraph or two from each installment–except the introduction, which I’ll quote in its entirety. (Perhaps it will incite me to set down a few of my memories of life in Ceausescu’s Romania.) So here goes:
In writing the entries about “Dissidents” [link added], I’ve begun to realize that for me the issues in this subject go back a long way – probably to the beginning of my involvement with Russian studies in the early 1960s. In those days, such an involvement also inevitably entailed a prolonged encounter with the Soviet Union. Since for someone from a Western democracy it’s almost impossible to understand cognitively the reality of the fabric of life in a totalitarian state, a Westerner’s memories of contact with that fabric are almost always bound to be selective, personal and subjective to an extent that may make them irrelevant in terms of historical truth. Yet I believe that since part of the legacy of the Cold War has been a consciousness of the old divide between East and West, and the barriers it created between human beings on either side of it, it’s perhaps important for those in the West who did have first-hand experience – however partial and “cushioned” – of life in the Soviet reality, to talk about it and discuss it. For it was a world that was not merely physical and geographic, but also extended far into realms of thought, morality, political awareness, aesthetics, and other regions, while at the same time functioning as a kind of reversing mirror of Western social and intellectual norms.
“A man cannot bear the thought of being crushed by a physical compulsion; therefore he deifies the force that rules over him, investing it with superhuman traits, with omniscient reason, with a special mission; and in this way he saves a bit of his own dignity. The Russian writer Belinsky, for instance, made use of Hegel during a certain phase of his life, to deify czardom.” This is how, towards the end of his autobiographical work Captive Realm, the great Polish-Lithuanian author Czeslaw Milosz illustrates the choice between “madness” (the refusal to recognize necessity) and “servility” (the acknowledgment of one’s complete powerlessness), which he saw as a defining characteristic of life in a totalitarian society. I think it was a dawning consciousness of this choice – or rather, of the fact that in certain conditions of social and political development such a choice might have to be made – that eventually made clear to me, somewhere around the end of the second year of my studies in Russian literature and history, the essential difference between Russian culture and the culture of the West, and made me want to understand it further.
In future postings under this heading, I’ll try to describe how that process of discovery and understanding developed for me.
I’d grown up in Edinburgh, Scotland, far away from the complexities of East European politics, but had had at least some small experience of “physical compulsion” at the school I attended, which in itself in those distant days of the 1950s was probably not unlike a totalitarian entity of some kind, with its cult of obedience, its prefects, its canings and beatings, and its assertion of a monolithic, corporate identity….
Occasionally the Russian department received visits from Soviet writers and public figures, but these were nearly all rather obscure – no one had ever heard of the “poet” who arrived one day, accompanied by two “minders”, with a slim volume of verse in written in the most austere and conventional social realist style. He was an engaging man, who had taken part in the defence of Moscow in 1941, and had later fought in tank battles – he told us that all the skin had been burnt from his body, and had had to be re-grown. As a military man, he was interested in the technical problem of how best to scale the rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands, and I remember that we students spent a long time discussing the logistical details of this with him, as it was good practice for our knowledge of Russian.
I visited the Soviet Union for the first time in the summer of 1966, travelling with my girlfriend in a white Morris Minor convertible which we took aboard the Soviet ship Mariya Ulyanova (named after Lenin’s sister) from London’s Tilbury Docks, via Copenhagen and Helsinki, to Leningrad….
That summer we didn’t stay in hotels, but slept in a tent we’d taken with us, striking camp at official State campsites whose locations were entered on our visas, together with the obligatory time of arrival at each site. We started with a week in Leningrad, then drove to Novgorod and Kalinin, followed by a week in Moscow, then to Kharkov and Kiev, and finally out of the USSR via Vinnitsa and Chernovitsy, into Romania – four weeks in the Soviet Union in all. In general, at first we were surprised at how “normal” everything seemed – the weather was warm and sunny, the streets and thoroughfares of Leningrad looked much like those of any European city, and it was only when we got out of the car and gazed at the actual texture of the place – the strangely rough, unmodernized surfaces of the roads and buildings, the dust that blew everywhere, the absence of commercial advertising, the old-fashioned look of people’s clothes – that we realized we were in another world from the one we were used to. Even so, during those first days I think we were so pleased to have reached our destination that we didn’t really notice much of this – my memories are mainly of visits to the Hermitage and other museums, to the Petergof Palace and park, of walks along the Neva embankment, and so on. For us, it was almost like being back in Vienna or Copenhagen – or even Edinburgh….
Engaging as some of these encounters were, we were, I think, glad to leave Soviet territory. At Chernovitsy, after the car had been searched for nearly 2 hours by Soviet border guards, who extracted every single piece of paper from it, we crossed into Romania, where we underwent the ritual of having the car sprayed against foot-and-mouth disease, and washing our hands in disinfectant by the roadside. We were then told by the Romanian personnel that we could pitch our tent “wherever we liked”, as long as it wasn’t in a forestry zone. The year before, Nicolae Ceausescu had been chosen first secretary of the central committee of the Romanian Communist party.
The drive through northern Romania, Hungary and Austria, back through West Germany to Ostend and the United Kingdom, was fairly uneventful. We didn’t go down to Bucharest, but stayed in the foothills of the Carpathians, where we were treated almost like royalty by the staff of the local tourist office in Suceava, the first town over the border, which didn’t appear to have seen many British tourists in a long while. We tried on local national costumes, let the tourist office director’s twelve year-old cowherd son drive our right-hand drive Morris Minor round a field, much to the boy’s delight, experimented with speaking Romanian, had our photographs taken, drank fruit cordial, had our palms read by the local gypsies, ate in a really nice restaurant, and in general had a pleasant time. It all seemed light years away from the Soviet Union – more like being in France or Italy. Moving on westward the landscape soon become rather more industrial and sombre, and when we entered Hungary there was something of the Soviet ‘feel’ again, especially along the shore of Lake Balaton, with its organized groups of vacationers and their mostly Soviet-made cars. In Budapest I remember the blackness of the uncleaned buildings, and the bullet scars from 1956, which still lay everywhere on the street facades and masonry. Also the incredibly dense and tall barbed-wire fortifications on the Hungarian-Austrian border, just after Sopron….
In January, I had an interview in London with the British Council, in connection with the Moscow visit I was planning to make. The British Council’s offices on Davies Street seemed quite unassuming, and very British, with cups of tea and copies of the Times. One was therefore slightly unprepared for the rather East European nature of the interviewing panel, which consisted of a row of dark-suited personnel, some academic but others very definitely from the Foreign Office, who fired questions at one about one’s plans, intentions and reasons for visiting the Soviet Union. Some weeks later, I received a letter telling me that I’d been accepted as a postgraduate exchange student. Later, there was a briefing session, where all the accepted candidates were gathered together in a room at Davies Street. We were given demonstrations of bugging devices that had been found in university, diplomatic and business premises in the Soviet Union, and then received an illustrated lecture on the workings of two-way mirrors, with a real “live” two-way mirror. We were sworn to secrecy, and told that we must not on any account divulge anything of what we’d seen and heard to the press, or in writing of any kind. Somewhat taken aback, and slightly amused, at the end of the session we emerged on to the street, wondering if this had been a rehearsal for some spy drama.
Filed under Romania
Speaking of uncategorizable Czechs, here’s a bit of what Vaclav Havel had to say about the European Union’s policy toward Cuba.
Coexistence with dictators
It is suicidal for the EU to draw on Europe’s worst political traditions, the common denominator of which is the idea that evil must be appeased and that the best way to achieve peace is through indifference to the freedom of others.
Just the opposite is true: Such policies expose an indifference to one’s own freedom and pave the way for war. After all, Europe is uniting to defend its freedom and values, not to sacrifice them to the ideal of harmonious coexistence with dictators and thus risk gradual infiltration of its soul by the anti-democratic mind-set.
I firmly believe that the new members of the EU will not forget their experience of totalitarianism and nonviolent opposition to evil, and that that experience will be reflected in how they behave in EU bodies. Indeed, this could be the best contribution that they can make to the common spiritual, moral and political foundations of a united Europe.
Filed under Cuba, Eastern Europe
Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003) describes what happened when the German Army’s Operation Barbarossa in 1941 threatened camps full of Soviet prisoners.
The experience of being on a prisoner train during an air raid was relatively unusual, however–if only because prisoners were rarely allowed on the evacuation train at all. On the train leaving one camp, the families and the baggage of camp guards and administrators took up so much space that there was no room for any prisoners. Elsewhere, industrial equipment took priority over people, both for practical and propaganda reasons. Crushed in the West, the Soviet leadership promised to rebuild itself east of the Urals. As a result, that “significant proportion” of prisoners–in fact, the overwhelming majority–who [former Gulag system chief administrator Victor] Nasedkin had said were “evacuated on foot,” endured long forced marches, descriptions of which sound hauntingly similar to the marches undertaken by the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps four years later: “We have no transport,” one guard told an echelon of prisoners, as bombs fell around them. “Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not–all will walk. Those who can’t walk–we will shoot. We will leave no one for the Germans … you decide your own fate.”
Walk they did–although the journeys of many were cut short. The rapid advance of the Germans made the NKVD nervous, and when they became nervous, they started shooting. On July 2, the 954 prisoners of the Czortkow jail in western Ukraine began their march to the east. Along the way, the officer who wrote the subsequent report identified 123 of them as Ukrainian nationalists and shot them for “attempted rebellion and escape.” After walking for more than two weeks, with the German army within 10 to 20 miles, he shot all those still alive.
Evacuees not killed were sometimes hardly better off. Nasedkin wrote that “the apparat of the Gulag in the frontline regions was mobilized to ensure that evacuating echelons and transports of prisoners had medical-sanitary services and nourishment.” Alternatively, here is how M. Shteinberg, a political prisoner arrested for the second time in 1941, described her evacuation from Kirovograd prison:
Everything was bathed in blinding sunlight. At midday, it became unbearable. This was Ukraine, in the month of August. It was about 95 degrees [Fahrenheit] every day. An enormous quantity of people were walking, and on top of this crowd hung a hazy cloud of dust. There was nothing to breathe, it was impossible to breathe …
Everyone had a bundle in their arms. I had one too. I had even brought a coat with me, since without a coat it is hard to survive imprisonment. It’s a pillow, a blanket, a cover–everything. In most prisons, there are no beds, no mattresses, no linen. But after we had traversed 20 miles in that heat, I quietly left my bundle by the side of the road. I knew that I would not be able to carry it. The vast majority of the women did the same. Those who didn’t leave their bundles after the first 20 miles left them after 130. No one carried them to the end. When we had gone another 10 miles, I took off my shoes and left them too …
When we passed Adzhamka I dragged behind me my cell mate, Sokolovskaya, for 20 miles. She was an old woman, more than seventy years old, completely gray-haired … it was very difficult for her to walk. She clung to me, and kept talking about her fifteen-year-old grandson, with whom she had lived. The last terror in Sokolovskaya’s life was the terror that he would be arrested too. It was difficult for me to drag her, and I began to falter myself. She told me to “rest a while, I’ll go alone.” And she immediately fell back by 1 mile. We were the last in the convoy. When I felt that she had fallen behind, I turned back, wanting to get her–and I saw them kill her. They stabbed her with a bayonet. In the back. She didn’t even see it happen. Clearly, they knew how to stab. She didn’t even move. Later, I realized that hers had been an easy death, easier than that of others. She didn’t see that bayonet. She didn’t have time to be afraid.
In all, the NKVD evacuated 750,000 prisoners from 27 camps and 210 labor colonies. Another 40,000 were evacuated from 272 prisons, and sent to new prisons in the east. A significant proportion of them–though we still do not know the real numbers–never arrived.
Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day blog, whose diary entries were among my first inspirations to start my own blog, has been commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (by the Soviet Army) by posting diary entries from that era. Who wrote the following entries? Rainy Day has the answers. Just scroll down.
Nevertheless, he does not expect the immediate collapse of England and probably rightly. The ruling class there has now lost so much that it is bringing up its last reserves. By which he means not so much the City of London as the Jews who if we win will be hurled out of Europe, and Churchill, Eden, etc., who see their personal existences as dependent on the outcome of the war. Perhaps they will end up on the scaffold. We can expect little resistance to them from the masses at the moment. The English proletariat lives under such wretched conditions that a few extra privations will not cause it much discomfort. There will be no revolution, anyway, because the opportunity is lacking. England will thus survive through the winter. The Führer does not intend to mount any air-raids at Christmas. Churchill, in his madness, will do so, and then the English will be treated to revenge raids that will make their eyes pop.”
Last night a transport of two thousand people arrived from Buchenwald concentration camp. The shouting, abusing, crying, taunting, groaning, cracking of the whips and thuds of the beatings could be heard throughout the night.
This morning behind Hut 16 we saw hundreds of corpses being dragged onto a heap and stripped of their clothing. They also removed the gold teeth from their mouths. Never has it been as bad as this. All day, the heap of emaciated, naked bodies was left lying in the sun. Their facial expressions are frightening. They seem to know what is being done to them.”
And Siberian Light cites a memoir in the Guardian by Yakov Vinnichenko, one of the first Russian soldiers to enter Auschwitz.
Just five survivors remain today from the three Soviet divisions which liberated Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945. I am the youngest – I was only 19 when the war ended. But the events of 60 years ago are as fresh in my memory as if they happened yesterday.
I come from Vinnitsa in Ukraine. But my mother took me to Moscow in 1934 because of famine. In the summer of 1941 I went to help my grandad in Ukraine with his vegetable garden. I arrived on Saturday June 21, and the next day we took his cow to the market. At noon, we heard on the loudspeaker that war had begun. Money became worthless immediately. We could have got twice as much for the cow, but it was too late.
Although I was just 15 years old, I was immediately conscripted. We were kept in reserve, but when I turned 17 I was sent to the front. I had my baptism of fire in January 1943, when we kicked the Germans out of Voronezh. The following month, we liberated Kursk. It was a bloodbath: a whole regiment was killed in three hours. Later, I was badly wounded in the chest in the battle of Kursk. On recovery, I caught up with my regiment, under the command of General Vasily Petrenko, who died not long ago. He was a great commander. Under him we liberated Lvov in the summer of 1944, and on January 19 1945 we freed Krakow, a beautiful ancient city
At about 4am on January 27 we approached Oswiecim (Auschwitz). It is a small town on the Sola river. We didn’t even know there was a concentration camp there.
From Doug Muir Halfway down the Danube:
Traian Basescu has won, and will be Romania’s next President.
Final result: 51.2% for Basescu, 48.8% for Nastase.
This was very unexpected, and may lead to a period of political turbulence.
One early development: the Humanist Party (Partidul Umanist Romania, or PUR) has announced that “for the best interest of the country”, it is willing to enter into negotiations with any other party. Since PUR ran on a joint ticket with PSD [the currently governing Social Democratic Party], this is a major slap to PSD, PM Nastase and (about to be former) President Iliescu [the immediate successor to Ceausescu who has remained in charge most years since then]….
Ugly possibility: PSD joins with PRM [the ultranationalist Greater Romania Party]. This would give solid majorities in both chambers. However, it would mean letting PRM into government.
Filed under Romania
The following emails are from a responsible adult Ukrainian friend of a friend who teaches at a university in the western part of Ukraine. It took a while to obtain permission to reproduce them (without naming names). I suspect these sentiments reflect a large number of people who are neither blogging nor talking in front of TV cameras.
27 November 2004
It is crisis. Our students as well as schoolchildren are on the streets. The democracy is at its top – those who want to study, come to Uni and study, those who want to go to meetings, go to meetings. Some Universities are closed, ours is working. The problem is that what is going on is very chaotic. Because many people who supported Ushchenko want to strike and are on strike, but I am not sure whether their salaries are still paid or not – nobody knows! The people of different views who understand the danger of ruining economics work – if we all strike, who will work?
Besides, if our students who paid money want to study, how can we not teach them? If we close for now, when will we work afterwards? On holidays? On Christmas holidays? So, there was a decision as meetings are all day round that from 8 till 1 our students study and then those who are eager to show his/her will, go to meetings. In Vinnytsia all the Unis go to meetings, so I won’t give you the exact number – 2000-5000, etc? With Kyiv it is more complicated – they say up to 100,000 people! Or more! West and East are for different candidates and there are threats to divide Ukraine! Can you imagine, e.g., My situation, if my mom and her relatives come from East, who live there and my husband’s family – all of them – live in West! We are really desperate!
The situation is very unpleasant because the majority understands that politicians who were unable to solve complicated problems at their work are using our romantic youth. The young people who are striking are also different: some of them are really supporting their ideas, others are having fun because of total freedom and friendship, some of them are using the situation not to study, some of them are innocent and idealistic, some ignorant and aggressive. I personally don’t know what is going to happen, but I was shocked to know that our school teachers let their children go to meetings alone! (I am speaking about my son’s classmates, he is 15.)
Thank God everything is friendly so far, but people are getting impatient! In Vinnytsia there are no threats as only one candidate is being supported while in Kyiv the situation is more dangerous – both candidates’ supporters came to the capital. So far everything seems alright, but, you know that there are many indecent people who would like to provoke smth unpleasant. I do pray all the time.
3 December 2004
The situation here is really depressing for those people who tend to think and analyze. I believe that our main problem is that we forgot to count our blessings! It is always easier to criticize than do something. Our Uni doesn’t work now – we have a week holiday. Still all the teachers go to work. From Monday we have to teach our students and plus give them all the classes they didn’t come to!
God knows how hard we have been trying to survive all these years. You do remember the chaotic things a couple or more years ago in Ukraine. I can’t say that we are great now, still, the houses are being built, the roads are repaired, you won’t recognize our railway station! There are MANY pregnant women in the streets, my mom has 464 Hr pension (app $80) and she used to have 153 HR (less than $30). The currency rate was more or less stable, people started using bank accounts to keep their savings and what are we going to do now? Genetically we are scared of everything!
Besides, I can’t understand who is fighting whom, as Yanukovitch is working as Prime-Minister for a year and a half and Yushchenko – from the very beginning of the independency of Ukraine (13 years!). Our town mayor (!) accused the government of frauds, etc. But HE IS THE GOVERNMENT! Our local one, isn’t he? Sometimes, I feel really angry because THEY over there USE Me and MY COUNTRY for THEIR political games. My future, the future of my son!
Yes, the media IS very biased and disgusting. So, I have nothing against Joel getting my e-mail. I do have my opinion which is fortunately supported by many people I love and respect.
Sorry for such an emotional letter, I do love my country, I work hard and I am patriotic, but not nationalistic, racistic, fanatic and aggressive. I don’t believe in the power of ultimatums, because they can and will boomerang and again chaos and disorder will flourish.
The Romanian revolution was a complex affair. It was a dramatic triumph that had the whole world for its audience, a world that keeps wondering long after the final curtain how much of what it saw was real. If I hadn’t lost my normally skeptical head to the euphoria of December, I would have questioned the single most evident source of news about the revolution: television. But it was precisely television that seduced me during my visit and made me lose sight of things I already knew. I have raged enough against TV to know that the medium is eminently manipulatable. But even though I knew that the extraordinary figure of sixty-five thousand dead (used as an accusation against Ceausescu at his “trial”) was considerably lower, I did not ask anyone at the time what caused such astounding discrepancy. I had seen the bodies on television, but only a few and always the same bodies. I didn’t ask how such thing could be possible.
Imagine the shock and dismay of our newsmakers and our idealists–including myself–when most of these horrible events we saw with our own eyes on television turned out not to have happened at all. How could the grizzled, experienced Western journalists who are sworn to hard facts have missed the many clues and glaring contradictions that pointed to artifice? The astounding truth of the matter is that much of the glorious Romanian “revolution” was, in fact, a staged play, a revolution between quotation marks. Let me also say that for all that, there were heroes, martyrs, and true revolutionaries. A mass uprising did take place, but it was skillfully manipulated by the men who run Romania today. It could also be true that for a few glorious moments the first rebels to arrive at the television station created a free atmosphere unparalleled in the history of the country, an atmosphere in which all ideas of “taste” and “propriety” lost meaning. Whatever could be put on the screen was, whether it was a one-legged beggar with a delirious story or a rock video brought out of a secret drawer. But it couldn’t have been long after, however, the young revolutionaries (if that’s who they were) started becoming “responsible,” and the “spontaneous” provisional government showed up with its own TV script. The television station then became the headquarters of the new government, which, as far as most people were concerned, was born out of video like Venus out of the seashell. And hats must be off to the producers of the exceedingly realistic docu-drama of the strategic military center from where, in a charged atmosphere reminiscent of Reds or Dr. Zhivago, generals with telephones on both ears shouted orders at troops on vast invisible battlefields in every part of the country.
Today I stand abashed by my naivete. Much of that Romanian “spontaneity” was as slick and scripted as a Hollywood movie. If I were in charge of the Emmys, I’d give one to the Romanian directors of December 1989. Many aspects of the televised drama remain extremely mysterious. I still do not understand Secretary of State Baker’s offer to allow the Soviets to intervene on the side of the “revolutionaries.” He must have known at least in outline the true shape of the Romanian situation. I cannot believe that the CIA was as taken in by the exaggerated reports of massacres and fighting from East European news agencies as the more naive press organizations were. The administration must have had reasons for going along with the hysteria of the press, in part because it distracted from the U.S. invasion of Panama but also because a deal must have been made with the Soviets, a deal that, I am sorry to say, leaves Romania where it always was: in the Soviet sphere of influence. Many people now believe–in the face of mounting evidence–that the mastermind of the Romania operation was the KGB, that the Romanian revolution was a beautifully orchestrated piece of Kremlin music conducted by Maestro Gorbachev. What’s more, the operation had the full cooperation of the CIA. I recently bought a T-shirt in Washington, D.C., that says: “TOGETHER AT LAST! THE KGB & THE CIA. NOW WE ARE EVERYWHERE.” Even one T-shirt can sometimes be smarter than all the news media.
SOURCE: The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (Avon Books, 1991), by Andrei Codrescu, pp. 204-206
While I agree that even one jockstrap can sometimes be smarter than all the news media, I don’t think Codrescu’s faith in the omnipotence of the either the KGB or the CIA is all that grounded in reality. The CIA utterly failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union (and one or two other things more recently), and the KGB‘s successor FSB did a lousy job of predicting Ukrainian reactions to Putin’s machinations in their elections. There’s a difference between planning a new stampede in a particular direction and belatedly trying to ride herd on a stampede already underway. In 1991, Codrescu predicted that Ion Iliescu’s National Salvation Front would keep Romania in the Soviet orbit. Well, we know how that worked out, even though Iliescu himself has managed to hang onto power.
The Head Heeb‘s guest blogger Alexander has more on the most recent Romanian elections, and so does Doug Muir at Halfway down the Danube here and here and here.
Far Outliers 