My partner family lived in communist Romania. They almost starved when the communists stole their fields to collectivize them and then they misused them. Not only that but the “securitate” (Romanian KGB) created real fear between everyone. This was the real problem of communist Romania, not the foreign intervention. Eventually people got tired of leaving in a state of terror and they overthrew the government.
There’s a Spanish book about Communism and the Spanish civil war. In Spanish is “Dime quien soy” something like “Tell me who I am”. It talks a lot about people that really believed in the communist idea but that got killed because of Stalin being a dictator.
Edit: To all of you downvoting me. None of you have addressed the trust issues that the “securitate” created in the Romanian society. Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin’s delusion. I’m not saying that communism is completely evil but Romania was far from a paradise.
And I’m from Poland. The government reversed the decision to collectivize agricultural land in 1956, lowering the amount of state owned farms from 10000 to 1500 after Bierut died.
By 1996, when the last one was privatized, there were roughly 2000 of them at the start of the campaign in 1992 with a total of about 3750 thousands of hectares of a (current) total of 14630 - a quarter of farmland in the country.
Yet Poland, with its mostly private agriculture, was known for the worst supply situation in the Eastern Bloc. Gotta love the hand of the market, especially since the west imposed high interest rates on loans taken in the 70s (as countries do between each other). The government of the 90s, deciding that it was going to get richer faster with the market rather than a planned economy it was barely wanting to have it (as the “communists” of the PZPR were largely just nationalists), went through market reforms and what happened? Prices shot up, poverty increased to dramatic amounts, unemployment was over 20% for a part of the 90s (not even including those who had given up on looking for a job), organized crime started roaming the streets and doing stuff like killing mom’s childhood friends… and of course the farmlands themselves, since this is the topic, became desolate towns with antisemitic graffiti, a 60+ year old average age and nothing going on for them to this day.
But you probably think this is cool and good. After all, the people there can work their asses off at more than 40h/week at a workplace they have even less say in than in the west, to pay German prices for goods of a quality you’d find in the bargain bin here, a food that will kill you over time, and come back home to froth at the mouth about how the “LGBT Lobby” is trying to turn their kids gay while then going on rants against the oh so free government and opposition because they’re “all thieves” anyway… and against foreigners. After all, they’re only following the logic of the market and doing what the west wants of them (i.e. keep the wages low and profits high).
Dude, I talked about (1) how they stole a small piece of land barely enough to feed a family and (2) the terror regime of the communist era. Then you starter rambling about all the foreign intervention.
In my original post I didn’t say that it wasn’t there. I just talked about the internal issues of communist Romania (and also USSR) which mostly was point 2. The state of constant fear that people lived in.
If you think that it was all good. Why does your country hate Russia so much? Do you think that the Russians sang lullabies to the Romanians and that they loved them so much?
Edit: let me add more context that you avoided on purpose:
While this might be true, a key reason behind these results is an institutionalized amnesia regarding communism in Romania, which has not allowed an adequate society-wide debate able to inform the Romanian public. This is because the current political leadership is to a considerable extent formed of former communists, their relatives and business associates, who have no interest in revealing and punishing the crimes of communism, in which they were, to varying degrees, involved.
The only thing on foreign intervention in my reply is the reference to loans, which were taken by the Polish People’s Republic, and indeed the Romanian Socialist Republic - the 80s were a period of austerity to repay foreign debt to continue purchasing specialized goods from the west - that is undeniable.
“Stole a Piece of Land barely enough to Feed a Family”. Anecdotal evidence, one of which I have no evidence of being true or not, and is besides the point of “Communism bad, because they ‘stole’my grandma’s land”.
“The State of Constant Fear” is also anecdotal reference, one which is even harder to verify and can be claimed just as easily as “a very large amount of people are supportive of revolution to overthrow the government because they don’t go and vote”
Aha, the classic. If “Russia” (you clearly mean the USSR, but probably think modern day Russia is the same thing) is so evil and despised across the former Warsaw Pact, why is it still popular in East Germany? In Bulgaria? In Serbia? Even, before 2014, in Ukraine? And besides, what does Russia matter? Does the viability of a political ideology depends on if a state is popular around the world or not? Were that the case, Kingdoms would have been abolished centuries before the French revolution and religion would be gone by now.
“context I avoided on Purpose” No, it’s nonsense you added, and a common tale told around these parts of the world. What do you think Donald Tusk, the Kaczyński brothers, Lech Wałęsa and Bronisław Komorowski, all major political figures of the post-1990 era in Poland all have in common? They were in the opposition to the PZPR. And nowadays the most common political ammunition between parties in Poland is to accuse each other of communism. This is moronic! “Oh he was in the communist party and that’s why he’s corrupt!” is fucking nonsense - and what’s communist about market reforms, joining the EU, befriending America, like the Alliance of the Democratic Left did in Poland in the early 2000s? (and lost 3/4 of their voters after that).
Blame all the problems on socialism all you want, and I know you will, but how long will this continue? 20 years? 50 years? And you want to dig further and uncover more and more “crimes”. All this’ll do is find out that to expand the “Crimes” of communism, you have to go “the fascists from WW2 are innocent victims, actually”
Oh look I talk about the terror regime during communism but users are too busy torturing their relatives to even care about the internal issues of communism.
Ah yes, communists, famous for not debating in intricate technical detail amongst themselves the internal issues of attempts at actually existing socialism.
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science?
My girlfriend in the early 90’s was a Croat refugee after the USSR got couped. Her family fled so that the newly emboldened fascists in Yugoslavia didn’t murder them.
We met working at customer service job for an overseas company. She would always tell me that she works twice as hard here as she did back home; and we don’t even get paid enough to live here.
That’s a real person with real first-hand experience of the before-and-after of the Soviet Union dissolved. I can text her right now. Your pee-paw’s pee-paw in law who lost his plantation to the people can come at me if he wants to talk. But I doubt they’re even alive still; assuming they existed in the first place.
I think I’ll take statistics over your propagandistic anecdote
A 2010 poll conducted by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy provided similar results. Of the 1,460 respondents, 54 percent claimed that they had better living standards during communism, while 16 percent said that they were worse. Moreover, 49 percent claimed that Ceausescu was a good leader, 30 percent believed he was neither good nor bad, while 15 said he was bad. The survey has a 2.7 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
According to a recent poll, many Romanians remain nostalgic for communism, over two decades after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown. The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then. When asked about dictator Ceausescu, 47.5 of the respondents claimed that he had a relatively positive role in Romania’s recent history, while 46.9 said that his role was rather negative. The recent poll was conducted between November 7 and 14, 2014, on a sample of 1,055 participants, with a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
My bad you’re correct I accidentally pasted the paragraphs out of order
Here you go;
According to a recent poll, many Romanians remain nostalgic for communism, over two decades after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown. The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then. When asked about dictator Ceausescu, 47.5 of the respondents claimed that he had a relatively positive role in Romania’s recent history, while 46.9 said that his role was rather negative. The recent poll was conducted between November 7 and 14, 2014, on a sample of 1,055 participants, with a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
A 2010 poll conducted by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy provided similar results. Of the 1,460 respondents, 54 percent claimed that they had better living standards during communism, while 16 percent said that they were worse. Moreover, 49 percent claimed that Ceausescu was a good leader, 30 percent believed he was neither good nor bad, while 15 said he was bad. The survey has a 2.7 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
How does that change the point made and the actual Romanian people’s experience living under communism?
Remind me, who was Romania allies with during ww2? And what did they do to Jewish people in the areas outside of Romania that they helped the nazis invade and occupy?
“I regret the demise of Communism—not for me, but when I see how much my children and grandchildren struggle. We had safe jobs and decent salaries under Communism. We had enough to eat and we had yearly vacations with our children”.
68-year-old retired Romanian mechanic, quoted in George Jahn, “In Romania, Turmoil Fuels Nostalgia for Communism,” Washington Post, January 11, 2011.
My partner family lived in communist Romania. They almost starved when the communists stole their fields to collectivize them and then they misused them. Not only that but the “securitate” (Romanian KGB) created real fear between everyone. This was the real problem of communist Romania, not the foreign intervention. Eventually people got tired of leaving in a state of terror and they overthrew the government.
There’s a Spanish book about Communism and the Spanish civil war. In Spanish is “Dime quien soy” something like “Tell me who I am”. It talks a lot about people that really believed in the communist idea but that got killed because of Stalin being a dictator.
Edit: To all of you downvoting me. None of you have addressed the trust issues that the “securitate” created in the Romanian society. Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin’s delusion. I’m not saying that communism is completely evil but Romania was far from a paradise.
And I’m from Poland. The government reversed the decision to collectivize agricultural land in 1956, lowering the amount of state owned farms from 10000 to 1500 after Bierut died.
By 1996, when the last one was privatized, there were roughly 2000 of them at the start of the campaign in 1992 with a total of about 3750 thousands of hectares of a (current) total of 14630 - a quarter of farmland in the country.
Yet Poland, with its mostly private agriculture, was known for the worst supply situation in the Eastern Bloc. Gotta love the hand of the market, especially since the west imposed high interest rates on loans taken in the 70s (as countries do between each other). The government of the 90s, deciding that it was going to get richer faster with the market rather than a planned economy it was barely wanting to have it (as the “communists” of the PZPR were largely just nationalists), went through market reforms and what happened? Prices shot up, poverty increased to dramatic amounts, unemployment was over 20% for a part of the 90s (not even including those who had given up on looking for a job), organized crime started roaming the streets and doing stuff like killing mom’s childhood friends… and of course the farmlands themselves, since this is the topic, became desolate towns with antisemitic graffiti, a 60+ year old average age and nothing going on for them to this day.
But you probably think this is cool and good. After all, the people there can work their asses off at more than 40h/week at a workplace they have even less say in than in the west, to pay German prices for goods of a quality you’d find in the bargain bin here, a food that will kill you over time, and come back home to froth at the mouth about how the “LGBT Lobby” is trying to turn their kids gay while then going on rants against the oh so free government and opposition because they’re “all thieves” anyway… and against foreigners. After all, they’re only following the logic of the market and doing what the west wants of them (i.e. keep the wages low and profits high).
Dude, I talked about (1) how they stole a small piece of land barely enough to feed a family and (2) the terror regime of the communist era. Then you starter rambling about all the foreign intervention.
In my original post I didn’t say that it wasn’t there. I just talked about the internal issues of communist Romania (and also USSR) which mostly was point 2. The state of constant fear that people lived in.
If you think that it was all good. Why does your country hate Russia so much? Do you think that the Russians sang lullabies to the Romanians and that they loved them so much?
Edit: let me add more context that you avoided on purpose:
The only thing on foreign intervention in my reply is the reference to loans, which were taken by the Polish People’s Republic, and indeed the Romanian Socialist Republic - the 80s were a period of austerity to repay foreign debt to continue purchasing specialized goods from the west - that is undeniable.
“Stole a Piece of Land barely enough to Feed a Family”. Anecdotal evidence, one of which I have no evidence of being true or not, and is besides the point of “Communism bad, because they ‘stole’ my grandma’s land”.
“The State of Constant Fear” is also anecdotal reference, one which is even harder to verify and can be claimed just as easily as “a very large amount of people are supportive of revolution to overthrow the government because they don’t go and vote”
Aha, the classic. If “Russia” (you clearly mean the USSR, but probably think modern day Russia is the same thing) is so evil and despised across the former Warsaw Pact, why is it still popular in East Germany? In Bulgaria? In Serbia? Even, before 2014, in Ukraine? And besides, what does Russia matter? Does the viability of a political ideology depends on if a state is popular around the world or not? Were that the case, Kingdoms would have been abolished centuries before the French revolution and religion would be gone by now.
“context I avoided on Purpose” No, it’s nonsense you added, and a common tale told around these parts of the world. What do you think Donald Tusk, the Kaczyński brothers, Lech Wałęsa and Bronisław Komorowski, all major political figures of the post-1990 era in Poland all have in common? They were in the opposition to the PZPR. And nowadays the most common political ammunition between parties in Poland is to accuse each other of communism. This is moronic! “Oh he was in the communist party and that’s why he’s corrupt!” is fucking nonsense - and what’s communist about market reforms, joining the EU, befriending America, like the Alliance of the Democratic Left did in Poland in the early 2000s? (and lost 3/4 of their voters after that).
Blame all the problems on socialism all you want, and I know you will, but how long will this continue? 20 years? 50 years? And you want to dig further and uncover more and more “crimes”. All this’ll do is find out that to expand the “Crimes” of communism, you have to go “the fascists from WW2 are innocent victims, actually”
“Communism and collectivization were in the closet making babies, and I saw one of the babies, and then the baby looked at me.”
Oh look I talk about the terror regime during communism but users are too busy torturing their relatives to even care about the internal issues of communism.
Ah yes, communists, famous for not debating in intricate technical detail amongst themselves the internal issues of attempts at actually existing socialism.
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science?
My girlfriend in the early 90’s was a Croat refugee after the USSR got couped. Her family fled so that the newly emboldened fascists in Yugoslavia didn’t murder them.
We met working at customer service job for an overseas company. She would always tell me that she works twice as hard here as she did back home; and we don’t even get paid enough to live here.
That’s a real person with real first-hand experience of the before-and-after of the Soviet Union dissolved. I can text her right now. Your pee-paw’s pee-paw in law who lost his plantation to the people can come at me if he wants to talk. But I doubt they’re even alive still; assuming they existed in the first place.
Update: I called her, and she’s living on Okinawa now, with two adult sons! And her partner seems to be out of the picture…
@[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], ANYBODY, send help! I cannot afford plane tickets right now!
I think I’ll take statistics over your propagandistic anecdote
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/communist-nostalgia-in-romania/
But-but-but his family had the egg monopoly and the evil dictator Ceausescu stole it from them! Every egg in Romania!
So, you swap the order of the paragraphs to make your point. Do I look stupid to you. I know how to open the link that you posted.
My bad you’re correct I accidentally pasted the paragraphs out of order
Here you go;
How does that change the point made and the actual Romanian people’s experience living under communism?
Kulak!
Remind me, who was Romania allies with during ww2? And what did they do to Jewish people in the areas outside of Romania that they helped the nazis invade and occupy?
Can you use quote syntax in Markdown instead of code blocks please?
It’s harder to scroll through a code block on mobile
Sorry, we are not adressing crocodile tears shed in bad faith by anticoms. Reddit is that way ->
This is not reddit, you murderous commie.
You’re a kulak