AS THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM SPREADS THROUGH EASTERN EUROPE, ROMANIA REMAINS . . . COMMUNISM`S DARKEST CORNER
By Tira Shubart, Christian Science
Monitor Publishing Society; distributed
by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
Published: Wednesday, December 6, 1989
Section: TEMPO
Page: 1

The trays in the butcher shop`s glass-topped display stands contained nothing but dried bloodstains from the time when meat had last been on sale. The two shop attendants in their white coats leaned against the counter, bored and surly. On the wall, hanging from meat hooks, were a dozen pig`s feet; the Romanians call them ``patriots,`` because they are the only part of the animal that doesn`t leave the country.

The herds of cattle and sheep that graze in the breathtakingly beautiful Romanian countryside are almost all exported as well. Meat has become a memory to most households, and other staples of life are in equally short supply. Eggs, a valuable commodity, are a form of currency, sometimes changing hands a dozen times before they`re actually eaten.

Outside the foreign currency hotels of Bucharest, ordinary Romanians in the dead of winter watch hungrily through the street-level windows of the dining room while people with dollars and Deutsche marks eat their heavy meals. The country that was once known as the breadbasket of the Balkans now exports 90 percent of its food produce, and its citizens have to plan their day around the food queues, which start before dawn.

The free market in the dismal town of Deva offers a limited opportunity for people to supplement meager state rations, at a price. In an empty lot behind rows of shabbily built apartment blocks, peasants sell vegetables brought in from the nearby countryside. The range of food is not great: a few heads of lettuce, some spices, bunches of garlic cloves and a wealth of radishes. The radishes seem startlingly red and appealing, the only color in a gray town.

Nearby, from the back of a pickup truck, a man displays a live sheep for sale. A crowd has gathered to watch the animal being exhibited: It represents a rare feast for some rich person. After furious bidding, an unlikely, slightly dubious-looking man claims his prize and slings the unhappy, bleating sheep over his shoulders.

Perhaps he`s a black marketeer or has relatives abroad who have sent him ground coffee worth the official equivalent of $100 per pound, or cartons of Kent cigarettes, which have assumed an almost mythic monetary power in Romanian society. He walks off proudly, carrying the struggling animal, and envious glances follow him down the street as the bleating grows fainter.

There is a sudden movement around the vegetable stands, and a man, not quite running, deliberately brushes past us. ``Securitate, Securitate!`` he whispers urgently, and slips down a side street just as the police appear. The truck that delivered the fat sheep vanishes as well. The peasant women studiously examine their vegetables.

The police are interested in a far rarer species: foreigners. They escort us to the police station: the first of several such arrests during our visit to Romania. Our crime is having possession of a video camera. We are journalists who, having been denied entry in the usual way, have taken the drastic step of entering the country as tourists. The authorities are nervous about the hostile press Romania habitually receives, and do their best to stop anyone who they think may be crossing the border between ordinary tourism and reporting.

Our big disadvantage is that so few genuine tourists come to a place like Deva nowadays. At the police station we are ordered about roughly but not actually manhandled, and we undergo the usual few hours of police procrastination and routine intimidation before being allowed to leave. For us, as journalists, it is part of our job; what a genuine tourist would make
of it is difficult to say.

Ordinary Romanians are terrified of the vast powers that the police have over their lives. Romania is believed to have the highest proportion of secret police to population in Eastern Europe. Even the man who discreetly warned us in the market was breaking the law: Every Romanian who talks to a foreigner is required to report the conversation to the Securitate within 24 hours.

Police can enter people`s houses under any number of pretexts and confiscate ``illegal`` possessions. The Illicit Goods Law of 1974 declares the ownership of rare metals and precious stones a state monopoly; retaining family heirlooms is therefore difficult. Almost everything has to be registered with the police: fruit trees, vineyards, animals, typewriters. Duplicating machines are banned altogether. A typewriter, of course, may well be the most potent instrument any individual can possess, and so a sample of the typeface from every machine in the country is kept on file by the police, to discourage underground or samizdat literature.

Romanian law says that the freedom of the press cannot be used for goals opposed to the socialist order. An officially announced shortage of paper means that writers are not allowed to publish more than one book a year. The only exception is the most prolific author in Romania, President Nicolae Ceausescu, whose 34-volume series is enticingly titled ``On the Way of Building Up the Multilaterally-Devel oped Socialist Society.`` Every volume has been a best seller.

The Great Conductor

Romania is the most repressive and dictatorial country in the Communist bloc. It operates a cult of personality that is consciously modeled on that of Stalin, though Romania`s ruler has taken the example even further.

Nicolae Ceausescu, who became his country`s leader in 1965, is the first Communist leader to appear in public carrying a scepter. A slow, reverential handclapping, accompanied by the slow chanting of his name, greets his appearance at a Communist Party Congress. The official media have a hundred epithets for him, including ``The Great Conductor`` and ``The Polyvalent Genius.`` Every town and city is dominated by portraits of him, each dating from the years when his hair was dark and his face young and handsome. A vast art gallery in Bucharest is entirely devoted to canvas after canvas of Nicolae and his designated successor, his wife, Elena.

Their son, Nicu, who used to be the chosen heir, has all but disappeared from public view: the victim, diplomats say, of his mother`s ambition. The front page of every newspaper, every day, carries a prominent story on Ceausescu; and Romanian state television, which broadcasts only three hours a night because of the shortage of electricity, devotes much of its allotted time to the activities of the President and his wife.

There are no statues to Ceausescu in Romania; but he intends to leave a concrete legacy. In Bucharest his chosen project is the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism, three miles long and as wide as a football field. Its construction has ripped the heart out of a city that was once called, somewhat exaggeratedly, ``the Paris of the East.`` A dozen churches and synagogues have been demolished; so has any building, regardless of historic value, that is above a specified height.

Only the vast House of the Republic, at the head of the boulevard, is allowed to dominate the skyline. It is under construction, and each time Ceausescu has visited the site he has ordered a new wing or a new floor to what is intended as his future home. I asked our hotel porter about it: ``It`s like the Kremlin and the White House put together,`` he said. The hotel receptionist, however, was less helpful. He was unable to provide a map of the city because, he explained, there had been some building work. ``Anyway, everybody can direct you back to the hotel.``

Peasant homes bulldozed

But it is another project, Ceausescu`s most ambitious one, an attempt at human engineering on a grand scale, that has aroused most international protest. As long ago as 1967, to eliminate the differences between town and country, Ceausescu ordered the destruction of 6,000 traditional villages. Peasants watched as their homes were bulldozed, then they were housed in hastily built concrete apartment blocks, some without plumbing or electricity. Although some wooden sheds for chickens and geese have appeared behind the apartments, the uprooted peasants who once had household gardens are no longer self-sufficient.

Even the party faithful have found it hard to accept the demolition of ancestral villages, and so far only a dozen communities have been destroyed. Significantly, four of the ``systematized`` villages are along the road out of Bucharest that Ceausescu takes when he is driven to his summer residence. The shortage of cement to build alternative accommodations for displaced villagers and intense dissatisfaction with the policy may have stopped the bulldozers.

Instead, subtle pressure has begun to encourage villagers to leave voluntarily. Public transport, health facilities and permits to run food shops and even schools are being withdrawn from villages in a heavy-handed effort to force peasants to move to one of the approved ``agro-industrial complexes.``

A Latin island

Romania has always been different. The Roman emperor Trajan ensured this by colonizing the territory with his troops in the 2nd Century. To this day, Romania is a Latin island in a sea of Slavs, and feels itself to be different from its neighbors in almost every way. Even under communism it has acted independently.

For 25 years, Ceausescu has maintained an independent stance from the Soviet Union. He was courageous in his opposition to Leonid Brezhnev`s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and he refused to allow Warsaw Pact troops to be stationed on Romanian territory. The United States and other Western countries saw Ceausescu`s Romania as a Trojan horse inside the East bloc, a nation that managed to maintain relations with both Israel and China. Ceausescu was rewarded by the U.S. with ``Most Favored Nation`` status and loans from Manufacturers Hanover and the Bank of America. In Britain Queen Elizabeth II gave him an honorary knighthood.

But during the 1970s Ceausescu`s independence of mind became more and more like totalitarianism, and Stalin was his chosen model. By 1988 increasing human rights abuses in Romania, such as the widespread taking of political prisoners and kidnapings of intellectuals, prompted Washington to finally withdraw its Most Favored Nation status.

Nowadays it is the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev that is increasingly liberal, and Ceausescu`s Romania that is a reminder of the bad old days in Moscow. Outside the offices of the Soviet airline Aeroflot on the Boulevard Balcescu, one of the main streets of Bucharest, I watched as a small crowd took turns examining and copying down the schedule of radio programs from Radio Moscow, which broadcasts in Romanian six hours a day. It is almost the only legal source of independent information for Romanians. Other broadcasts for Eastern Europeans-Radio Free Europe, the BBC and West Germany`s Deutsche Welle-are forbidden to them by law, though many people listen even so.

1 light bulb per household

One night I managed to give the slip to the security policemen who were assigned to follow me and visited the apartment of a family with friends in the West. I brought the usual gifts, but it was clear immediately that I was not welcome. The two-room apartment was dark-just one 40-watt light bulb is allowed per household. The only other light was generated by the flickering images of Ceausescu on the nightly television broadcast.

Though I was welcomed with great hospitality, it was obvious that the people I was visiting were terrified of the consequences. We spoke in whispers, our voices covered by the sound of President Ceausescu`s doings on television. It was pure George Orwell.

The woman I had come to see confirmed that she, like every woman of her age, was subject to the official policies designed to counteract the decline in the birth rate. Married women are urged to have five children to bolster the population, which appears to have been declining at a faster rate than in any other country in Europe, East or West. There are tax penalties for childless couples, and birth control is denied to those who haven`t fulfilled their ``quota.`` Abortion is illegal except in narrowly defined medical circumstances.

As a further inducement to procreate, all women of childbearing age are subjected to compulsory gynecological tests. The office where this particular woman worked was visited by a doctor every month.

The door of the apartment closed after me, and I felt my way down an unlit staircase and stumbled across broken pavement in search of my car with not even the moonlight to guide me. I knew I hadn`t been followed. There were no cars around, and customarily at this time of night the streets are entirely empty. The hotel receptionist was very agitated when I returned so late. Somebody obviously would be blamed for my unexplained absence.

A bittersweet vista

The next day my colleagues and I were arrested once more and again wasted several hours in a police station. It seemed clear to us that the woman I had visited must have spent a sleepless night and decided that she must inform the proper authorities of our conversation, just in case I had after all been followed to her apartment.

Later in the week as we approached the border to leave Romania, the security men left us to travel the last miles unsupervised. We were now the responsibility of the border militia. There was the usual period of waiting in line while the guards ostentatiously did nothing. Then much of our car was expertly dismantled and all possible hiding places were searched. Our luggage got an equally professional going over.

The polite men in the customs office exposed every roll of film they found, and tried to erase every videotape cassette with a magnet, though fortunately their technology wasn`t up to the task. After six hours they let us go, and we crossed the bridge over the Danube into Yugoslavia.

In front of us, in the evening light, the river passed through the spectacular ravine known as the Iron Gates. A weight that had hung around us since we entered Romania, more than a week before, was lifted. As the sun went down over the Iron Gates, we looked back at the sweeping hills and forests of the country we had just left. From the vantage point of freedom, Romania at last looked extraordinarily beautiful, and extraordinarily sad.