Romanian superlife
Adam Nicolson
It is fashionable in Romania to wear clothes with English words printed on them. The meaning does not seem to matter — few people speak the language — and it is only the Englishness, or in fact the Americanness, that counts. Some are real American imports, but it is obvious that most of them are the products of Romanian or Yugoslav factories. On the pavements of Timisoara or Bucharest one swims in the sump of western culture. 'Diet Free Jogging Surf one girl's bosoms say, and her friend's: 'OK Yes Now Club 100%', in the sort of block letters that began life on the back of American foot- ball players. One of them, almost uniquely articulate, reads: 'I'm Nobody'. But in among this jumbled and hopeless eclectic- ism there is at the moment one consistent strain. The words 'Olympic Los Angeles 84' are repeated on chest after chest across the country. You could be forgiven for thinking this a grand, national, democratic cheer for Romanian independence, but it's nothing of the sort. The T-shirts, on the market and to hand, are bought up and worn, but, as with the others, it is the medium that remains the message. Few people look beyond that first surface sign that says 'American'.
To the Olympics themselves, and to Romanian participation in them, there is a general indifference. In the sports world. of course, there is gratitude and even relief, but among those not directly in- volved it ranks far below Liverpool's amaz- ing performance against Dinamo Bucuresti or the genius of Ian Rush. One man in Bucharest told me that it was President Ceausescu's equivalent of the American T-shirt fad, no more than a superficial badge paraded to demonstrate cool, but others find in more worrying. It was a symptom, I was told, of Ceausescu's grow- ing megalomania. There was a suggestion of 'Who does he think he is?' Despite the propaganda — the 66-year-old president is described in one recent publication as 'a mastermind endowed with a rare dynam- ism' — it is said in Bucharest that isolated in his private residences and constantly accompanied by a pair of Dobermann pinschers, he has lost touch with the people he champions abroad. This is the develop- ment of a Romanian Sadat, internationally feted for an unconventional and courageous foreign policy and resented at home for repression of liberties, rigid censorship and a regal style.
Ceausescu may see himself more in terms of a Romanian de Gaulle, behaving truculently towards his allies without ever threatening the ideological basis of the alliance. Oddly enough, the secret of his survival and longevity as the naughty boy of the Warsaw Pact is precisely this failure to motivate those real nationalist forces which Tito, Imre Nagy, Dubcek, Walesa and perhaps now Kadar have all so distur- bingly harnessed. As long as Ceausescu remains distant from the people, Moscow can allow such trivial gestures as boycot- ting the Olympic boycott or removing any reference to Russian communists from Bucharest street names. The Kremlin's toleration of Ceausescu's more serious signs of independence, his open con- demnation of the Russian invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, his refus- al to allow Warsaw Pact manoeuvres on Romanian territory, his rejection of Roma- nia's allotted role within Comecon as the unindustrialised agricultural provider, can be taken as signs of a genuine populism or perhaps a populist realism — still to be found in Soviet thinking. A recalcitrant
'Ignore it. It's the silly season.'
leader and a nationalist party are nothing if the nation has no nationalist feeling itself.
On these grounds it is clear in Romania that the Russians have little need for anxiety. There is a stark gap between those in power and those out of it. Party mem- bers and the propaganda turned out, by the Agerpress agency are almost obsessively nationalistic. The most important aspect of the recently completed Danube-Black Sea Canal, which gives Romania access to the sea away from the Russian frontier, was its construction, I was told, `by exclusively Romanian efforts, exclusively with the contribution of Romanian scientific and technical creation'. Anti-Russianism is now the official reason for the abolition of the Magyar Autonomous Region in Trans- ylvania. 'We have no need of Russian models for our political organisation,' I was told in Agerpress. The focus of this overstated and almost anxious nationalism is Ceausescu and hig wife and family — there are signs of dynasticism. They are frequently invoked in that grim hyperbole with which dictators are always sur- rounded. 'Time, the Supreme Judge of History,' Romanian News said recently, 'has brilliantly confirmed President Ceausescu's confidence in the Romanian nation's heroism as the peaceful construc- tor of its socialist destiny . . .' and so on for many pages — many issues — of grand, insulated dissembling. The mass of Romanians who have no access to this way of looking at things must circulate in a more limited world. The average wage is just over 2,000 lei a month, or, at the black market rate, about $40. Petrol is rationed to 30 litres a month and there is a five year wait for a car. Corrup- tion infects every corner of life. One qualified engineer I met is forced to work as a mechanical draughtsman, having no relatives in the right department. He has been told that a bribe to the director of 10,000 lei, or about five months' salary, would create the opening. He is saving' But the corruption, which extends down to simple tips — a packet of cigarettes to ensure a good international phone connec- tion, a bottle of spirits for an uninspected parcel on the Yugoslav frontier — is onlY one symptom of a far wider phenomenon; what can only be called the dissociation of Romania. There is no continuity between the widely promoted official image of the, country and the way in which life is live
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there. There is a brittle top layer rhal trumpets an unrecognisable 'nation', an beneath it the people, politically adrift, can react only in blank listlessness; by retreat into the personal fractions of their lives; or with black market scheming. The would-bc engineer told me that it was as though .3_ nation of ants was eating away at the fabric which another nation of ants was at the same time attempting to weave. Nothing holds. In these circumstances all that one can have, he said, is 'superlife'. Only late did I realise that this was his too-liters translation of the Romanian word for survival.
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