An impasse on Star Wars continued throughout the Reagan presidency, though that did not prevent a wide range of arms agreements later that eased tensions between the superpowers. Gorbachev was receiving conflicting advice on space weapons. His military men were telling him that Star Wars was a dangerous new threat. His best scientists insisted that the American scheme was a ‘fantasy’ that could not work. The leading physicist Yevgeni Velikhov, Vice Chairman of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Roald Sagdeyev, head of the Soviet space programme, assured Gorbachev that a shield could not be developed that was 100 per cent reliable and could not be penetrated. They told him the Soviets could develop an equally effective system to counter the SDI, using missiles that were in space for only a few moments, which, as Gorbachev said, ‘would cost ten per cent of Star Wars’. The question remains: if he believed that, why were the Soviets so obdurately opposed to the project? Gorbachev’s aides say the reason was political rather than strategic. The more the Americans spent on developing Star Wars technology, the greater pressure he faced from his own military to compete. The harder it then became for Gorbachev to reduce his vast arms budget and redirect money towards domestic spending to save socialism in the USSR.
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Another sceptic of Reagan’s Star Wars vision was far closer to the President ideologically. His great friend and fellow conservative Margaret Thatcher had grave doubts that a protective shield was technically possible, and more serious concerns about its principal aim. She believed that nuclear weapons had kept the peace for four decades. The defence of both superpowers rested on the theory of deterrence, she argued. It had maintained stability, which could be severely disrupted by dreams of a protective shield. She often tried to argue Reagan out of his belief in the project in her usual forthright fashion, but in vain. Reagan told his National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, that he had been ‘handbagged’ and dispatched him to London to persuade ‘Margaret at least to lower the level of criticism . . . She gave me the same lecture she had given [him] and seeing I was getting nowhere I interjected during a pause: “Prime Minister, President Reagan believes that there is at least US$ 300 million a year that ought to be subcontracted to British companies which would support SDI.” . . . There was a long pause and she finally said “there might be something in this after all”.’
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SIXTEEN
‘LET THEM HATE’
Bucharest, Sunday 26 January 1986
IN THE ROMANIA of Nicolae Ceauescu, 26 January was the most important day of the calendar. Celebrating Christmas was, naturally, banned and Liberation Day, which marked the end of World War Two, was a muted celebration. May Day was a big event, with huge parades throughout the major cities. But the dictator’s birthday was turned by the regime into a vast commemoration of the life and achievements of one man. It was the last day of the year that most Romanians felt in festive mood - their Great and Wise Leader had brought the nation to penury. But to look miserable on such a day might be considered politically unreliable, so people brushed up their happy faces. Life in Romania in the late years of Ceauescu’s rule had become, as an old comrade who once shared a prison cell with him said, ‘a permanent ceremonial enacted by the entire country in front of a single spectator’.
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On 26 January 1986 the
Conducor
turned sixty-eight, though on all the many millions of posters and photographs displayed ubiquitously throughout the country he did not look a day over forty-two. The court poets surpassed themselves on the front pages of all the newspapers. ‘I feel bound to praise you and kiss your temple,’ wrote Dumitru Brandescu. The leader’s favourite versifier, Adrian Paunescu, oozed something slicker:
This is no flattery as we portray him. We love him for his struggle and his humanity. We love him, because this country is free under the Sun. One’s soul has the urge to shower him with eulogies.
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The newspaper
Luceafrul
said this was ‘a crucial date in Romanian history by which the nation, glorifying its chosen ones, glorifies itself’. Elsewhere, in all the other special editions, there appeared many of the usual descriptions of the deified leader:
The Giant of the Carpathians
The Source of Our Light
The Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma
The Zodiac
Our Tall Standard
The Great Architect
The Living Fire
The New Morning Star
The Celestial Body
Even Mao Zedong or Stalin might have cringed at some of this nonsense. But Nicolae Ceauescu and his wife Elena, who enjoyed flattery even more than he did, had no sense of humour or of the ridiculous. They believed the gush written about them and surrounded themselves with fawning toadies and courtiers.
A few weeks before his birthday the Creator of this Epoch of Unpre- cedented Renewal, as the Communist Party newspaper
Scînteia
called Ceauescu, announced a further round of food rationing. Always conscious of their own waistlines, he and Elena were not gluttons. He had been diagnosed with diabetes in the mid-1970s and required insulin injections to control his blood-sugar levels. They accused Romanians of being too fat and created a Rational Nourishment Commission that ordered a ‘scientific’ diet: 114 eggs a year, 20 kilos of ‘fruit and grapes’, 54.88 kilos of meat, 14.8 kilos of potatoes, 114.5 kilos of flour. In theory it was not a bad diet. But in practice supplies fell far short of these targets. By the mid-1980s simply obtaining enough to eat required a major effort for almost every family in Romania. At the end of 1985 rationing of bread, milk, eggs, meat and vegetables became stricter and the queues longer. Romania is one of the most fertile lands in Europe and there ought to be abundant food produced. So there was. But Ceauescu’s eccentric economic policy forced deliberate destitution on his people. The leader was determined to be entirely free of foreign debt, as a way, so he thought, of ensuring independence.
Considering the burden Western credits were placing elsewhere in Eastern Europe, reducing the levels of borrowing was no bad thing. But the Great Leader’s way of doing it was disastrous. In 1982 he announced that he would pay off all foreign loans by 1990. In order to do so, he squeezed Romanians. More than three-quarters of the nation’s food production was sold abroad. Energy was rationed strictly so that it could be sold to Italy and West Germany. Romanians were allowed to use only a single forty-watt bulb per room, when electricity worked at all. Electrical heating was permitted for only two hours a day, fuelling few homes but the often repeated, grim joke: ‘In Romania what is colder than cold water? Hot water.’ In bad winters many elderly people died in their own apartments from hypothermia, which was not entirely unknown among the poor in Western Europe. A common Romanian phenomenon was the number of younger people found asphyxiated by gas in their own homes. This was not through suicide but because they had left gas cookers lit to keep warm and they had fallen asleep. The supply had been cut, then restored later while they were still sleeping.
Few streets were lit at night. Even the broad boulevards of Bucharest - once known as the Paris of the Balkans - were deserted and dark after dusk. The last screening of movies in cinemas was at five p.m. Bucharest had been famed for its café culture and nightlife. Now there were no bars or cafés and just a handful of restaurants frequented by Party bureaucrats and their families or hotels where the few foreign visitors permitted into the country stayed. Ceauescu had a plan to reduce oil consumption. One of the announcements he made soon after his sixty-eighth birthday, in the spring of 1986, was to launch a programme of breeding horses so that petrol-guzzling transport could be replaced. On farms which in the 1960s and 1970s used tractors, the harvests were in the 1980s being gathered by scythes and sickles. The leader was taking Romania back to the previous century - or the one before that. In order to maximise production, of natural resources like oil and gas and from the land, he instituted a rota system forcing people to work on Sundays and public holidays, much like the
corveé
in France before 1789.
The country lived in fear and by rumour on a scale unlike anywhere else behind the Iron Curtain. Ceauescu openly admired Stalin, whose funeral he had attended and at which he was seen to weep. Romania was the most brutal police state in the Eastern bloc, but run in an uniquely Romanian way. The Stasi in East Germany was designed to keep order, though it used some terrifying methods to destroy its victims. The Securitate was built to inspire fear. Liviu Turcu was a senior officer in the organisation until he defected in the 1980s and knew from the inside how it operated. ‘Imagine a huge apparatus spreading rumours, fear and terror, an atmosphere in which people felt that if they try to do the most insignificant thing identified as an act of opposition to Ceauescu, they will disappear,’ he said. ‘It was psychological terror that paralysed the Romanian population and the most outstanding piece of disinformation was the rumour, deliberately spread by the Securitate itself, that one out of every four Romanians was a Securitate informer.’ The Securitate had such deep roots within the population and had sown such mistrust, that it is possible there were that many. True or not, people were unwilling to put it to the test. The number of agents or informers was not the important thing. The Securitate spread word of its ubiquity and infallibility through innuendo, bluff and double bluff. The public believed it and submitted. ‘They - the spooks - did not have to keep a watch on people if everybody
thought
they were being watched,’ said Alex Serban, a teacher in a small town outside Bucharest during much of the 1980s. ‘That was one of the most sinister things.’
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For a Romanian to talk to foreigners was not technically illegal. But any conversation had to be reported to the police within twenty-four hours. The inevitable interrogation and harassment afterwards discouraged most people from meeting visitors. There was no Charter 77, Solidarity, KOR or Danube Circle in Romania. A few dissident writers existed, but hardly any opposition groups were formed. One was founded in the mid-1980s with the simple name The Anti-Totalitarian Forum. It consisted of three families. Its leader, Viorel Hancu, explained: ‘If we had taken anyone else in we would have exposed the group to infiltration by the Securitate.’
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Ceauescu dealt with industrial unrest in a robust manner. Miners in the Jiu mining valley went on strike in 1977 for better wages and working conditions. At first the leader was emollient, negotiated and agreed to the miners’ demands. A few weeks after the workers had gone back to work, he had the strike leaders rounded up, executed some and jailed the rest. The following year the wage increase was rescinded. A decade later workers at the Red Star tractor factory in Braov, northern Romania, struck. Ceauescu used precisely the same tactic. He was not a man learned in the classics, but he would often quote the Emperor Caligula to his aides: ‘Better to be feared than loved.’ He removed favourites at a stroke. Ion Iliescu was a rising Communist Party official, fast-tracked for the highest positions. A Minister for Youth in his early thirties, he became head of Party propaganda in his early forties. He was a regular dinner companion with the Ceauescus and often played chess with the leader, wisely permitting him to win. When in 1971 Ceauescu heard Iliescu being talked of as heir apparent, he exiled the younger man to minor posts in the provinces. Later, he was allowed back to Bucharest, but put in charge of a publishing company producing technical manuals.
Nobody knew how many political prisoners there were; the number was never collated, though statistics on practically everything else in the country were. Nor was anybody entirely sure what constituted a political crime. It depended on the Conductor’s whim. In 1982, for no obvious reason, he suddenly began a campaign against yoga. A young Bucharest medical student, returning from an exercise class, was beaten up by the Securitate and told to stop practising yoga. She obeyed - after realising that four secret policemen continued to follow her twenty-four hours a day. It had the desired effect. Once it became known that studying yoga was considered a political act the art all but disappeared from Romania.
People could not find consolation in religion. Ceauescu corrupted the churches, though he had plenty of willing accomplices among priests and rabbis. The Orthodox bishops and the Protestant leaders such as Gyula Nagy and László Papp among the Hungarian minority in Transylvania were deeply compromised by their close relationship with the security services. Like the East Germans, the Romanians encouraged a human cargo of political exiles. Ceauescu could not exact the same price as Erich Honecker managed - Romania got aroundUS$ 10,000 for each German ‘sold’ to the Federal Republic and Jew to Israel. Ceauescu once explained to Ion Pacepa, his counterintelligence chief who defected to the US, that ‘oil, Jews and Germans are our most important exports’. Leaders of the German minority, the Szeklers, and Moses Rosen, the Chief Rabbi, were complicit in this trade and in other dealings with the regime.
Almost no samizdat publishing existed in Romania. There were only a handful of photocopiers in the entire country, mostly in Party or government offices. Under a law introduced in March 1983 every typewriter had to be registered with the police and an example of the typeface from every machine in Romania was kept on record so it could be traced. The decree establishing the law sums up much of life in Ceauescu’s Romania:
The renting or lending of a typewriter is forbidden. Every owner of a typewriter must have for it an authorisation from the militia, which can be issued only after a request has been made. All private persons who have a typewriter must, in the next few days, seek to be issued with such an authorisation. Such a request, in writing, must be sent to the municipal militia, or the town or community militia, wherever the applicant happens to reside, and the following details must be supplied: first and second names of the applicant; names of his parents; place and date of birth; address; profession; place of work; type and design of the typewriter; how it was obtained (purchase, gift, inheritance); and for what purpose it is being used. If the application is granted, the applicant will receive an authorisation for the typewriter within 60 days. On a specified date, the owner of the typewriter must report with the machine to the militia office in order to provide an example of his typing. A similar example has to be provided every year, specifically during the first two months of the year, as well as after every repair to the typewriter. If the application is refused, the applicant can lodge an appeal within 60 days, with his local militia. If the appeal is dismissed, the typewriter must be sold within 10 days (with a bill of sale) or given as a gift, to any person possessing the necessary authorisation. Anyone wishing to buy a typewriter must first of all apply for an authorisation. Anyone who inherits a typewriter or receives one as a gift must apply for an authorisation at once. Defective typewriters which can no longer be repaired must be sent to a collection point for such material, but only after the typewriter’s keys, numbers and signs, have been surrendered to the militia. If the owner of a typewriter should change his address, he should report to the militia within five days.
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