Book of the Month April 2005

Book of the Month

Wrought Asunder
by Andrew Begg
April 2005

Theft of a Nation - Romania since Communism by Tom Gallagher Hurst & Company, London, 428 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-85065-716-5; GBP 17.50, available through www.hurstpub.co.uk, or at Vivid's office through Andrew Begg.

Theft of a Nation - Romania since Communism describes a country that has been tragically and unrelentingly let down by its politicians. It confirms the suspicions of any observer of post-communist Romania: namely, that the December 1989 revolution that resulted in the execution of the country’s hated leader, Nicolae Ceausescu and his equally reviled wife, Elena, and the deaths of more than a thousand Romanians did little to change the attitudes, direction, or political outlook of the country. Rather, Romania was hijacked by apparatchiks who formed themselves into inter-connected cliques which, posing as political parties, sought to largely maintain the status quo. The elite group that ran the country prior to the revolution survived largely intact for the following 15 years, managing to hold much of the machinations of power in its thrall.

The seeds of Romania’s post-communist malaise were sown immediately after the revolution, when the interim power that emerged, the National Salvation Front, or FSN, absorbed the communist party in most areas of the country, took control of state assets and the media and declared itself n caretaker government until free elections could be held. Soon afterwards the FSN - a mix of former communist insiders and dissidents - would contest those free elections as a political party in its own right. Opponents of the FSN accused it of imposing a neo-communist solution on the country, and they weren’t far wrong.

With Ion Iliescu at the helm the FSN resoundingly won the first free elections, held in May 1990. Iliescu would continue to be the single most dominant force in Romania politics – if one does not include the ghost of the Conducator himself, Ceausescu. Throughout the various guises into which the FSN would inevitably splinter, the PDSR and the latter day PSD, Tom Gallagher makes no bones about the duplicitous and manipulative nature of Iliescu’s character. Perhaps the overriding difference between the two is that Ceausescu would intervene at every level of government, whereas Iliescu was happy to decentralise power to local potentates, barons and managers of state-run companies.

Unsurprisingly, few other prominent figures in Romanian politics survive with their reputations intact. Petre Roman, Romania’s first prime minister who resigned after a power struggle between he and Iliescu ended with the storming of Parliament by hundreds of angry miners, is portrayed as vain and ambitious. Iliescu’s choice for prime minister in 1992, Nicolae Vacaroiu, who is today the leader of the Romanian Senate, seems to have been an appointment made for the single objective of hampering the transition of state assets from government to private ownership; an objective in which Vacaroiu was eminently successful, because by the time both his government and Iliescu were voted out in the presidential and parliamentary elections in 1996, only 12 per cent of assets available for privatisation had been sold.
Iliescu’s successor as president, the geologist Emil Constantinescu, might have been well intentioned in trying to hasten privatisation and taking a stand on opening the top-secret Securitate files, but the squabbling and in-fighting of the coalition he oversaw, and the three inept prime ministers that served the country in the space of four years under his watch, put paid to any hope that a centre-right perspective would offer a solution to the socialist policies of the governments that came before.

The years 1996-2000 did little more than confirm the country’s lack of preparedness for the brand of misrepresented democracy offered up by the warring factions that comprised the coalition. By the time Constantinescu made clear his intention not to run in the elections of 2000, the centre-right coalition was a spent force. Worse, it left the door open for the return of Iliescu.

The 2000 election was intriguing because it presented Romania’s hapless voters with a nightmare scenario, pitting the by then remodeled Iliescu against the rabble-rousing racist Corneliu Vadim Tudor, whose party, the PRM, had steadily gathered support by appealing to the nationalist tendencies of Romania’s disillusioned poorest voters. As Gallagher rightfully says:

Without the post-communist left being able to offer a governing alternative to the discredited centrist formations, it is difficult to imagine what could have stopped Corneliu Vadim Tudor.

The PSD won the parliamentary elections, and when Iliescu and Tudor squared off in the second round of the presidentials, voters had little option but to elect Iliescu again – if only to keep Tudor out of Cotroceni Palace. Predictably, another four more years of corruption and cronyism would follow under the PSD and Iliescu.

In between excellent coverage of Romania’s post-communist elections, Theft of A Nation – Romania Since Communism provides extensively researched commentaries on the countless scandals that have blighted Romania since communism, including the Armageddon document, the cigarette smuggling affair, the Bell Helicopters deal, and the Costea affair, to name but a few. It is a pity that Tom Gallagher did not delay publication until after the 2004 election, but one can feel sure that he will write on the progress of Romania’s new government in a subsequent edition.