Category Archives: Romania

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:

Going Back

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.

Going Back II

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.

Going Back III

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.

Going Back IV

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.

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.

More here

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.

Sarah E. Richards in Slate has a series on Romania that focuses exclusively on the negatives. All that’s missing is Vlad Dracu (Dracula, not Vladimir Putin!).

Nostalgia for communism

“Yes, it was better under communism. You had a job, a house, a car,” said 20-year-old university student George Pascaru. “But you could not have your own thoughts.”

But such talk makes few feel better about the giant elephant making its way east. Romania, a country of 23 million, is lumbering toward entry into the European Union in 2007. Despite robust economic growth and low inflation, corruption is rampant, and the average Romanian makes slightly more than $2,100 a year, or just 30 percent of the EU average in purchasing power….

The mention of the European Union is met with cynical laughs. People tell how Hungarians have been forced to raid Romanian grocery stores because they were priced out of their own when their country joined the union this spring. There are rumors that EU regulations will force polluting old cars off the road, and drivers won’t be able to buy new ones. And how will people buy houses?

Discrimination against Roma

“In Communist times, I worked 30 years in an iron factory,” said Sandu Stana, who is 71 but looks 80. “In capitalism, it’s hard to have a job. When the jobs are open, and they see our face, they say, ‘Sorry, it’s been taken.'”

Activists insist that embracing the Roma identity is the only way to move the community forward. For example, the government recently hired 200 health-outreach workers and set aside 400 university spots for Roma in 2004 compared with 10 earmarked in 1994. About 2,000 have graduated, said Marius Taba of the human rights group Romani Cris. About 80 percent of Roma drop out of the system before high school. For those who do go, there are tales of bus drivers refusing to pick them up and school officials segregating them in separate buildings. Discrimination is everywhere. A French film crew followed Taba and several other clean-cut Roma young men on a night out around Bucharest. Five of eight bars they visited kicked them out.

In an informal ghetto north of Bucharest, Roma residents had more immediate concerns. One woman showed me how they were stealing electricity by attaching wires from the power pole into their apartments because they couldn’t pay their utility bills; they’re worried the police will come soon.

Dysfunctional citizens

Eni Gall has one of the most depressing jobs in Romania. Equipped with a minimal range of social services, a couple of loaves of bread, and an earnest idealism, 25-year-old Gall works as a case manager visiting poor, dysfunctional, and marginalized families. Her assignment is to keep families together so they won’t abandon their children.

Gall is one of a slowly growing number of social workers in a country that, during communism, didn’t recognize it had social problems. Today, Romanians know they have problems, but there is scarce public funding to even begin to address them. They can clean up the orphanage system in an attempt to become a EU–worthy country by 2007, but there’s no mechanism in place to stem the supply of deserted children. “There are no public social services in Romania, only institutionalized ones for the disabled or orphans,” explained Calin Braga, director of Gall’s employer, Arapamesu, a nongovernmental agency founded in 1995 by an American nun and funded by U.S., European, and Romanian donors. It provides counseling, tutoring, support groups, and children’s activities for around 330 at-risk families in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. “We need services, services, services!” he said….

Two years ago, residents of a gypsy ghetto north of Bucharest didn’t even know contraceptives existed. I met health coordinator Florica Petre, who blushed as she recalled showing a roomful of men how to put on condoms. She said that whenever she gets a new delivery of prophylactics, the men scoop them up for visits to local prostitutes. (Apparently, the equivalent of $6 buys a visit to a French or a Japanese [!?] hooker, the neighborhood favorites.)

And the miseries of adoption

It’s not easy to adopt a child in Romania, and at first the Heiseys thought they were following the law by hiring lawyers to notarize the signing over of the birth rights and applying for her birth certificate. That began a local legal brouhaha that involved more lawyers, social workers, court appearances, abandonment proceedings, commission meetings, and mandated visits of the birth mother to the Heiseys’ home to confirm that she did not want this child.

There’s an old joke that Romania is the land of possibility, where anything can happen—anything bad and anything worse. So, when Peter proudly plopped the file containing every single document carefully copied and collated on the desk of Larissa’s assigned social worker at the local office of the National Authority for Child Protection, he wasn’t surprised when the clerk told him she couldn’t send it on to Bucharest. The Romanian government had passed an emergency ordinance forbidding international adoptions. For the previous three years, the government had imposed a moratorium stopping such adoptions after the European Union criticized the country for selling its babies to foreigners for as much as $50,000 apiece.

Hoping to join the union in 2007, the Romanian government said it would resume international adoptions once it had a chance to straighten out the corrupt child welfare system.

Va rog, Domnule Guvernamint, don’t make me abandon my children! Don’t make me steal electricity! Don’t make me suffer through high school! Don’t force me to find a job in a robust economy! Don’t let me use your condoms on foreign prostitutes! Vai de mine! Jos cu libertate! Bring back Ceausescu! Et cetera.

Beware Ukraine! Life is so much worse for everyone in the West. The painful transition can hardly be worth the effort.

via Arts & Letters Daily

The Romanians in Bessarabia awoke in the late 1980s, quipped the writer Ion Druta, but they forgot to get out of bed. The disappointment that many intellectuals felt with the outcome of the national movement was part of a long history of disillusionment experienced by generations of nation-builders. At every turn, Moldova has turned out to be something other than what most observers had either hoped or expected. It was one of the most sovietized of the Soviet republics, with high rates of linguistic assimilation to Russian and marriage across ethnic lines. But it also witnessed a divisive and violent conflict between forces supporting independence and those intent on maintaining the unity of the Soviet state. It was a republic that had no clear historical antecedent within the same borders. But it nevertheless produced a strong movement of national renaissance and eventually independence. It was a republic that Western writers frequently criticized as artificial, the result of Stalin’s redrawing of east European borders during the Second World War, and a territory that if given the chance would surely seek to reunite with its former motherland, Romania. But since 1991 public sentiment has been cool on the idea of unification between the two states.

Most unusual of all was the fact that the Soviet project of building a distinct Moldovan nation yielded a rather ambiguous result. Local political leaders in other national republics came to power in the late 1980s by defending an independent historical and cultural identity, but those in Moldova succeeded by denying theirs. An independent Moldovan state emerged with the breakup of the Soviet federation, but the idea of an independent Moldovan nation seemed to fade with Soviet-style communism. Since then, the legacy of Soviet-era nation-building and the contentious question of the “true” national identity of the Moldovans have remained topics at the center of political life.

Making a Moldovan nation should have been a relatively easy enterprise. The eastern Moldovan lands, both before and after the annexation of Bessarabia, were populated largely by illiterate peasants with few ties to the cosmopolitan cities. They had been politically separate from the closest co-ethnic group–the Romanians–for the past two centuries or more, and had been absent from all the historical turning points in the formation of Romanian national consciousness. They had been the subjects of a variety of contradictory cultural policies: russification in the Russian empire, romanization in interwar Romania, fitful moldovanization in the Moldovan autonomous and union republics, and sovietization in the entire Soviet period. Nation-building also accompanied broader processes of urbanization and industrialization, so that the rhetoric of national identity was linked with other powerful themes of enlightenment and modernity. All this took place among a population that, even before the Soviet Union, still called itself “Moldovan” and within an authoritarian political system that put a premium on ethnonational affiliation and often spared no expense in the effort to engineer it. One can think of plenty of modern nations that have been built under far less propitious conditions.

For all this, though, by the 1990s the Moldovans were still a nation divided over their common identity. For some, they were simply Romanians who, because of the treachery of the Soviets, had not been allowed to say so. For others, they were an independent historical nation, related to but distinct from the Romanians to the west. For still others, they were something in between, part of a general Romanian cultural space but existing as a discrete and sovereign people with its own traditions, aspirations, and communal identity. How one imagines the Moldovans has never been a straightforward issue. In most periods, in fact, the various projects for cultivating a sense of nationhood among them have turned out rather differently from how their designers had planned.

SOURCE: The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, by Charles King (Hoover Press, 2000), pp. 224-225

See also Randy McDonald’s meaty blogpost on Reunifications Deferred: Romania and Moldova. A sample:

If Moldova joined Romania, whether with or without Transdnestr, it would join the Baltic States on the short list of former Soviet territories managing to escape directly to the European Union. Moldovans would be free to migrate (or, at least, as free as their fellow citizens in old Romania) across the European Union; Moldova would qualify for European Union transfer payments.

This isn’t likely, though, simply because the Moldovan state has acquired despite itself an innate inertia of its own, with mass emigration sapping its work force and its energies, the ethnic conflict dominating its conservative post-Communist political elites’ focus, and little incentive for innovation on any front. Moldova, once a prosperous component of the Soviet Union, is now the poorest country in Europe. Moldova’s now of note as a source of sex slaves and organ sellers, which makes the prospect of Romanian and/or European Union expansion all the more difficult.

Romanian reunification might still be possible, if only in the sense that Romanian-identifying Moldovans might mostly emigrate to Romania, leaving their more Moldova-identified friends and relatives at home. At this point, any true reunification–the establishment of a single state, or of a confederation, or of a union-state–seems massively unlikely.

On 14 November 2004, Robert Kaplan published an op-ed piece (filed from Guam!) in the New York Times headlined Barren Ground for Democracy.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, communist satellites like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary promptly evolved into successful Western democracies. This transition was relatively easy because the countries boasted high literacy rates, exposure to the Enlightenment under Prussian and Hapsburg emperors, and strong industrial bases and middle classes prior to World War II and the cold war. In retrospect, it seems clear that only the presence of the Red Army had kept them from developing free parliamentary systems on their own.

But the idea that Western-style democracy could be imposed further east and south, in the Balkans, has proved more problematic. Beyond the Carpathian mountains one finds a different historical legacy: that of the poorer and more chaotic Ottoman Empire. Before World War II, this was a world of vast peasantries and feeble middle classes, which revealed itself in Communist governments that were for the most part more corrupt and despotic than those of Central Europe.

Unsurprisingly, upon Communism’s collapse, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled for years on the brink of anarchy, although they at least avoided ethnic bloodshed. Of course, Yugoslavia was not so lucky. Though democracy appears to have a reasonably bright future there thanks to repeated Western intervention, it is wise to recall that for 15 years it has been a touch-and-go proposition.

Undeterred, Wilsonian idealists in the United States next put Iraq on their list for gun-to-the-head democratization. But compared with Iraq, even the Balkans were historically blessed, by far the most culturally and politically advanced part of the old Turkish Empire. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, constituted the most anarchic and tribalistic region of the sultanate.

In addition, the Balkans are affixed to Central Europe, and were thus a natural extension of it as NATO expanded eastward. Iraq is bordered by Iran and Syria, states with weakly policed borders and prone to radical politics, which themselves have suffered under absolutism for centuries.

Western intellectuals on both the left and right underplayed such realities. In the 1990’s, those supporting humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia branded references to difficult history and geography as “determinism” and “essentialism” – academic jargon for fatalism. In the views of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, group characteristics based on a shared history and geography no longer mattered, for in a post-cold war world of globalization everyone was first and foremost an individual. Thus if Poland, say, was ready overnight for Western-style democracy, then so too were Bosnia, Russia, Iraq – and Liberia, for that matter.

That line of thinking provided the moral impetus for military actions in 1995 in Bosnia and in 1999 in Kosovo: interventions that reclaimed the former Yugoslavia into the Western orbit. But the people who ordered and carried out those interventions, liberal Democrats in general, were canny. While they agreed with the idealists’ moral claims, they realized that it was the feasibility of the military side of the equation that made the interventions ultimately worth doing. Yes, they also favored democracy in places like Liberia, but they were wise enough not to risk the lives of Americans in such endeavors. They intuited that a modest degree of fatalism was required in the conduct of international affairs, even if they were clever enough not to publish the fact.

via Oxblog

I certainly share Kaplan’s “modest degree of fatalism”–if not downright pessimism–but I think he overstates his case as a result of his unfortunate inclination toward historical and cultural determinism (and essentialism), which I don’t share to the same degree. In fact, I’m adamantly antiessentialist. That’s why I like to focus on exceptions and outliers.

For one thing, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland did not “promptly” transform themselves into respectable democracies. They started rather painfully well before 1989. Hungary revolted very bloodily in 1956, Czechoslovakia more peacefully in 1968, and Poland all during the 1980s. Each led eventually to very modest reforms and tiny cracks through which civil society could begin to sprout.

Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania didn’t get the same headstart. I remember a Romanian telling me in 1983-84, “We’re not the Poles. When trouble comes, we take our sheep up into the mountains until it passes.” Maybe this only supports Kaplan’s case for cultural determinism–or essentialism.

A second issue is Kaplan’s claim that Bosnia and Kosovo are now within the “Western orbit.” That doesn’t speak too well for the Western orbit. Remember the exit strategy? It was just around the corner in 1998, and still just a few corners away in 2002. I’m sure European wisdom will prevail eventually, perhaps before the next fin de siècle.

Finally, I think Kaplan underestimates the power of redemptive suffering. I suspect redemptive suffering might help explain how Japan and Germany overcame their catastrophic militarism after World War II, and even how Afghans have begun to overcome their self-defeating fractiousness–at least enough to complete a national election of historic import. But perhaps my notions of redemptive suffering just betray the determinative cultural legacy of my Judaeo-Christian heritage. Or perhaps it was my Shiite, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Plains Indian Sundance heritage in a prior life.

Perhaps the most interesting raconteur I met in Romania in 1984 was Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, who arrived after we did on an IREX grant, but was assigned to the same apartment bloc on the south edge of town as the Bucharest Fulbrighters. His obituary announcement at Cal State Chico barely hints at what a rara avis he was, especially in academia.

Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, professor emeritus of history, died Jan. 23 [2000]. He was 70. He was born in Budapest and attended one year at the University of Vienna. Starting in 1949, he spent seven years in Soviet labor camps. He completed his education at UC Berkeley. Nagy-Talavera taught Russian and Eastern European history in the CSU, Chico history department from 1967 until he retired in 1991. He is author of Nicolae Iorga: A Biography and The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Rumania.

It’s interesting that the official biography neglects to mention that he was of Sephardic Jewish heritage, hence the Talavera, and raised in Oradea, on the Hungarian-Romanian border, to a family of timber merchants and furniture makers. (Nagy [pron. Nodge] is Magyar for German Gross, Romanian Mare; just as Kis [pron. Kish] is Magyar for German Klein, Romanian Micu. Every person and place had at least three names back then–like Peaches in Cluj.)

But Nick’s life was no bowl of peaches. He survived his Bar Mitzvah in Auschwitz, and later survived the Soviet gulag. He survived the latter by sticking with the Ukrainian criminal gangs that controlled the prisons rather than with the political prisoners. As a result he learned Ukrainian and Russian well enough to pass for a native. In fact, he always insisted that the best place to learn a foreign language is in prison.

Perhaps the story that sticks best in my mind involved a starving prisoner one spring. Stealing food in the gulag was considered a betrayal of one’s comrades worthy of capital punishment. Nick described how one desperately hungry prisoner grabbed a loaf of bread and took off running. Nick was among the crowd that ran after him, and he remembered deliberately choosing a piece of wood with a nasty nail protruding from it, the better to kill the thief with. But the thief ran waist-deep into the prison sewage pond, which had thawed in the spring melt, then proceeded to eat the bread, standing chest deep in raw sewage. At that point, the angry posse that followed him had time to stop and think about the level of his desperation, eventually deciding to have mercy and let him live.

Nick also described the hush that came over the camp when the death of Stalin was announced in the spring of 1953–and the genuine sorrow many people felt to have lost the father of their motherland, who had ruled for 30 years, no matter how brutal and capricious he may have been.