On this page:
- Artificial Intelligence and the Rebirth of the Soviet Union
- Romania: Thirty Years After Communism
- The Man Who Had Funny Hands
- Scarred Bodies, Broken Psyches under Soviet Communist
- Marx Got Economics Right, Comrade
- America, America, I Love You, Let Me Count the Ways
- Cracking the Genetic Code: Stalin’s New Soviet Man
- Ho Chi Minh: Communist Words versus Communist Deeds
- Why the Communists Make War on Religion
- Walmart’s T-shirt homage to mass murder
- DOWN WITH THE WORMS! - ‘Confront, Harass, Create a Crowd, and Push Back!’ (Maxine learned it from Fidel)
- Uncle Joe and Anti-Anticommunism - Deflating Nostalgia for the Golden Age of Terror
- Revolutionary Communists Capturing Hearts and Minds Inside Prison and Out
- Buddhist Letter Implores New U.S. Ambassador to Support Religious Freedom in Vietnam
- A Happy Life in China (YouTube Exchange)
- Socialism’s Cruel Illusion - Feeding the Body, Starving the Spirit
- I Was There: The Monstrous Atrocities that Marxism Has Committed Against Humankind
- Socialist Serfs Reduced to Bartering for Aspirin in Cuba
- Great Leap Backward: Human Rights and Rule of Law in China
- Import Drugs from Cuba? NO WAY!
- “Reflections on a Ravaged Century” (conference report)
- Why Are Communist Atrocities Ignored?
- The Brutality of the Berlin Wall
- WHAT CUBANS HAVEN'T LOST and WEATHER FORECAST FOR CUBA (gallows humor)
Artificial Intelligence and the Rebirth of the Soviet Union
- Can AI Replace the Invisible Hand?
by Darian Diachok
May 2020
PERMALINK
“Whatever can be invented already has been invented!”
What year was that frankly naïve statement made? And who could have made it? You’d be wrong if you thought it was recently, like, in this decade. No, would you believe 1899 – and by none other than the Commissioner of the US Patent Office, Charles Duell. What could have possibly spurred Mr. Duell to make such a statement over a hundred years ago? Well, by 1899, mankind had witnessed a full quantum leap in technology throughout the 19th Century, and along with it, a complete technological break with the past. A rapid sequence of astonishing inventions kept stunning the world in that watershed era – Volta’s first battery, Faraday’s first electric motor, Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone, Edison’s first light bulb, Edison’s first power station, Benz’s first automobile, Roentgen’s first X-Ray machine, and so on – each invention revolutionizing its sector. It was hard to disagree with the Commissioner’s assessment that society had advanced from an era of primitive mechanical power to one of advanced electromagnetic power. With every sector so transformed, it seemed that society had finally closed the circle of change. Really, what else could be invented?
As the 20th Century dawned, Communist revolutionaries shared this sentiment. Since everything major had already been invented, the world was now ripe for the next step, a political transformation. It was time to transfer the ownership of these new technological wonders from the capitalists who exploited them to the laborers who worked them. Revolutionaries imagined a new society where they could plan out and spread the benefits equally.
In 1917, with hopes sky high, revolutionaries in Russia got their chance to create their first new Communist society. Communism, they chirped, was “Socialism plus Electrification.” Technology, now at the service of the working man, would usher in the wonders; electricity for all would substitute for manual labor, and the newest invention, airplanes, would deliver goods of every kind in undreamed of quantities. How to achieve this social and technological utopia? The Soviet Union’s first premier, Vladimir Lenin, took Marx quite literally – just dismantle the old order enslaving the working man and then … and then the new order would spontaneously materialize – within the State’s protective embrace of course. The working man would know how to do it – after all, it was in his nature. And with Communism finally achieved, the State would wither away, if not just vanish outright.
With Czarist Russia’s old supply chains, trade agreements, and banking institutions all finally dismantled, and the bourgeois exploiters deported or executed, the promised workers’ utopia still somehow refused to materialize. Instead, with those newly broken chains came – not liberation, but starvation. Desperate people began joining in protest. The bewildered, hard-pressed government kept sending in the army – not to rescue the protesters, but to shoot them. After more drastic government measures under the name of “War Communism” failed to revive the economy, Lenin had to concede that destroying the old order had not been the hardest revolutionary task after all – but in fact, the easiest. He retreated from Marxist dogma and took a step sideways, enacting a program he called the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed free markets to partially recover. The farming sector immediately rebounded. Food became available. But not so manufacturing, which the revolutionaries had nationalized. Industry lagged far behind agriculture – creating a huge mismatch in buying power between city and country.
The Revolution reached a crossroads: either fully restore the free market or double down on State control. Joseph Stalin, a hardline Marxist, opposed even a hint of private initiative. After seizing power, Stalin pushed the levers of state hard left. In 1928, he wheeled out a rival economic plan, “Material Balances,” an input and output scheme that flatly rejected traditional economics. Hmmm, Material Balances – where had the world seen this before? A century earlier – as a utopian experiment in New Harmony, Indiana – but the scheme, though heavily subsidized, collapsed after just three years. This time though it would work! Stalin would make it work! The Revolution had to be saved and this was the way to do it!
- Can AI Replace the Invisible Hand?
by Darian Diachok
May 2020
PERMALINK
“Whatever can be invented already has been invented!”
What year was that frankly naïve statement made? And who could have made it? You’d be wrong if you thought it was recently, like, in this decade. No, would you believe 1899 – and by none other than the Commissioner of the US Patent Office, Charles Duell. What could have possibly spurred Mr. Duell to make such a statement over a hundred years ago? Well, by 1899, mankind had witnessed a full quantum leap in technology throughout the 19th Century, and along with it, a complete technological break with the past. A rapid sequence of astonishing inventions kept stunning the world in that watershed era – Volta’s first battery, Faraday’s first electric motor, Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone, Edison’s first light bulb, Edison’s first power station, Benz’s first automobile, Roentgen’s first X-Ray machine, and so on – each invention revolutionizing its sector. It was hard to disagree with the Commissioner’s assessment that society had advanced from an era of primitive mechanical power to one of advanced electromagnetic power. With every sector so transformed, it seemed that society had finally closed the circle of change. Really, what else could be invented?
As the 20th Century dawned, Communist revolutionaries shared this sentiment. Since everything major had already been invented, the world was now ripe for the next step, a political transformation. It was time to transfer the ownership of these new technological wonders from the capitalists who exploited them to the laborers who worked them. Revolutionaries imagined a new society where they could plan out and spread the benefits equally.
In 1917, with hopes sky high, revolutionaries in Russia got their chance to create their first new Communist society. Communism, they chirped, was “Socialism plus Electrification.” Technology, now at the service of the working man, would usher in the wonders; electricity for all would substitute for manual labor, and the newest invention, airplanes, would deliver goods of every kind in undreamed of quantities. How to achieve this social and technological utopia? The Soviet Union’s first premier, Vladimir Lenin, took Marx quite literally – just dismantle the old order enslaving the working man and then … and then the new order would spontaneously materialize – within the State’s protective embrace of course. The working man would know how to do it – after all, it was in his nature. And with Communism finally achieved, the State would wither away, if not just vanish outright.
With Czarist Russia’s old supply chains, trade agreements, and banking institutions all finally dismantled, and the bourgeois exploiters deported or executed, the promised workers’ utopia still somehow refused to materialize. Instead, with those newly broken chains came – not liberation, but starvation. Desperate people began joining in protest. The bewildered, hard-pressed government kept sending in the army – not to rescue the protesters, but to shoot them. After more drastic government measures under the name of “War Communism” failed to revive the economy, Lenin had to concede that destroying the old order had not been the hardest revolutionary task after all – but in fact, the easiest. He retreated from Marxist dogma and took a step sideways, enacting a program he called the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed free markets to partially recover. The farming sector immediately rebounded. Food became available. But not so manufacturing, which the revolutionaries had nationalized. Industry lagged far behind agriculture – creating a huge mismatch in buying power between city and country.
The Revolution reached a crossroads: either fully restore the free market or double down on State control. Joseph Stalin, a hardline Marxist, opposed even a hint of private initiative. After seizing power, Stalin pushed the levers of state hard left. In 1928, he wheeled out a rival economic plan, “Material Balances,” an input and output scheme that flatly rejected traditional economics. Hmmm, Material Balances – where had the world seen this before? A century earlier – as a utopian experiment in New Harmony, Indiana – but the scheme, though heavily subsidized, collapsed after just three years. This time though it would work! Stalin would make it work! The Revolution had to be saved and this was the way to do it!
In Material Balances, the central government attempts to build the new society by reimagining the national economy as one big, interconnected machine. Planners try to identify the exact inputs and outputs for each economic sector – but for 10,000 individual economic sectors and no less than 24 million different products. For example, how much wiring, rubber, and steel does a factory need to make a generator? Then how many generators, windshields, and tires would another factory need to build a tractor? The next step is to coordinate each sector with every other sector into a vast, interlocking, three-dimensional input-output matrix – with the object of getting the whole economy to work like a single synchronized machine – reducing the workforce to an army of compliant robots serving this machine. But if say an engineer were to suggest an upgrade in his specific sector, the whole meticulously constructed matrix would go out of whack – with central planners having to recalculate each affected item. Of course, it was an impossible task, never achieved. By the USSR’s collapse in 1991, Soviet planners had managed – and only partially for each sector – to model about two thirds of the economy – an economy that kept changing and squirting out of control as the Soviet Union was forced to try to keep pace with its rival, the more autonomous and innovative West.
Although initial Soviet strides did alarm the West in the mid-20th Century – especially in heavy industry, which grew by an order of magnitude – eventually the Soviet Union did collapse, bankrupt, polluted – with its populace demoralized if not downright traumatized, their life expectancies sinking. The system had not been able to overcome a series of problems, problems that included planning rigidity, chronic shortages and overproduction, poor product quality, and unproductive enterprises devouring scarce resources.
Well, a full generation has passed since Soviet Communism collapsed. Sometimes dreams die hard. Can some new technology or some new planning technique come to the rescue and revive the dream, as some stubborn Socialists insist? What about the information revolution? Can’t computers take on the formidable data processing challenges – those unruly statistics and complex planning chores? Aren’t recent advances in Artificial Intelligence up to the task of making Stalin’s Material Balances scheme viable? After all, isn’t the news reporting that computers can now beat the world’s top chess players?
Alright, let’s have a closer look at Artificial Intelligence.
Although initial Soviet strides did alarm the West in the mid-20th Century – especially in heavy industry, which grew by an order of magnitude – eventually the Soviet Union did collapse, bankrupt, polluted – with its populace demoralized if not downright traumatized, their life expectancies sinking. The system had not been able to overcome a series of problems, problems that included planning rigidity, chronic shortages and overproduction, poor product quality, and unproductive enterprises devouring scarce resources.
Well, a full generation has passed since Soviet Communism collapsed. Sometimes dreams die hard. Can some new technology or some new planning technique come to the rescue and revive the dream, as some stubborn Socialists insist? What about the information revolution? Can’t computers take on the formidable data processing challenges – those unruly statistics and complex planning chores? Aren’t recent advances in Artificial Intelligence up to the task of making Stalin’s Material Balances scheme viable? After all, isn’t the news reporting that computers can now beat the world’s top chess players?
Alright, let’s have a closer look at Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) differs significantly from its antecedent, conventional computer programming. Unlike a static computer program, an AI application can learn. It can sense its environment and adjust its internal algorithms appropriately – an algorithm simply being a clear set of machine instructions. Algorithms, through their variety, provide a lot of programming flexibility. Algorithms can be logical, or associative, or statistical in nature – or even pattern-perceiving, and, when programmed in AI applications, algorithms can learn and interact with each other. Some AI applications can even create new algorithms as they tackle their missions. AI applications are already available, for example, that can interpret scans for cancer – by learning from human inputs; others can decode light reflections from crops to determine irrigation needs; and yet others can enable self-driving tractors to seed croplands. These AI applications, though impressive, remain firmly focused on what AI researchers call “narrow tasks.”
When AI attempts to tackle something as broad and complex as a national economy, however, programmers must first develop something like a ‘rational mind,’ or what they call an ontology, a fancy word for a coherent vision by which the AI system will operate. Stated in another way, programmers must identify the guiding concepts that will run the economy, and then interconnect these concepts into an interlocking hierarchy. Such ontologies are notoriously time-consuming and devilishly difficult to construct. And they would need to precisely replicate Marxist thinking. Note too that an ontology for the Soviet economy would necessarily avoid the key free market concepts of profitability and efficient resource use – simply because Communist ideology rejects these concepts as ‘bourgeois’ – what Marxists rebelled against to begin with. The operational outcome of an AI Material Balances application therefore cannot be expected to generate an economy that operates with anything but deficits and resource waste – as the Soviet economy did – the application having no way of calculating profit and loss or benefits versus costs. Using the AI application would not rescue the Soviet economy, but simply help it to reach bankruptcy a lot more efficiently.
At this point, let’s look more closely at where Stalin’s system failed and where AI technology, “narrow” or otherwise, might have contributed. The Soviet economy suffered from chronic problems in planning, in production management, and in distribution. Let’s briefly analyze which of these problems lend themselves to Artificial Intelligence solutions, and which to a paradigm shift toward a more flexible economy.
When AI attempts to tackle something as broad and complex as a national economy, however, programmers must first develop something like a ‘rational mind,’ or what they call an ontology, a fancy word for a coherent vision by which the AI system will operate. Stated in another way, programmers must identify the guiding concepts that will run the economy, and then interconnect these concepts into an interlocking hierarchy. Such ontologies are notoriously time-consuming and devilishly difficult to construct. And they would need to precisely replicate Marxist thinking. Note too that an ontology for the Soviet economy would necessarily avoid the key free market concepts of profitability and efficient resource use – simply because Communist ideology rejects these concepts as ‘bourgeois’ – what Marxists rebelled against to begin with. The operational outcome of an AI Material Balances application therefore cannot be expected to generate an economy that operates with anything but deficits and resource waste – as the Soviet economy did – the application having no way of calculating profit and loss or benefits versus costs. Using the AI application would not rescue the Soviet economy, but simply help it to reach bankruptcy a lot more efficiently.
At this point, let’s look more closely at where Stalin’s system failed and where AI technology, “narrow” or otherwise, might have contributed. The Soviet economy suffered from chronic problems in planning, in production management, and in distribution. Let’s briefly analyze which of these problems lend themselves to Artificial Intelligence solutions, and which to a paradigm shift toward a more flexible economy.
Another thorny problem to address: the design of an efficient automated Planning & Scheduling capability for the entire economy – a task facing a nearly infinite array of possibilities at the onset. The task quickly runs into a problem AI programmers call “Combinatorial Explosion,” where the amount of time and computer resources needed to solve a problem grow exponentially and overwhelm finite cyber capabilities. For example, should capital goods A and B go to factory X or Y before being processed as feedstock to factories C and D, or can raw materials E and F partially serve as feedstock substitutes to factories C and D, etc., etc.? To avoid Combinatorial Explosion, Soviet managers would have to exercise human judgment and limit the range of possibilities. And so, a general, all-encompassing AI program could scarcely run the entire economy by itself – one with workers merely cogs in the machine, rather than active planning participants.
It should be clear that Soviet Communism’s ailments were more ideological in nature than technological, ailments that AI computer technology cannot entirely resolve. But if a Communist government were indeed to address these problems by adopting the suggested market solutions, the economy – or parts of it – would transform into something suspiciously similar to a western economy – which is exactly what Soviet premiers Nikita Khrushchev and Alexei Kosygin had once separately proposed, and what the Chinese have in fact actually done.
It should be clear that Soviet Communism’s ailments were more ideological in nature than technological, ailments that AI computer technology cannot entirely resolve. But if a Communist government were indeed to address these problems by adopting the suggested market solutions, the economy – or parts of it – would transform into something suspiciously similar to a western economy – which is exactly what Soviet premiers Nikita Khrushchev and Alexei Kosygin had once separately proposed, and what the Chinese have in fact actually done.
When Mao Zedong died in 1977, China’s new leader Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s longtime rival, viewed his devastated, backward land and conceded that Mao, like Stalin, had been wrong in trying to impose a single economic model on the country. Deng believed that Lenin had been right to supplement the command economy with the New Economic Policy (NEP), where at least part of the Soviet economy, agriculture in this case, for a while functioned semi-autonomously. Never surrendering his Marxist principles, Deng adopted Lenin’s reform idea and created a novel economic system that has come to be known as the “Socialist Market Economy.” This new Chinese economy rejected the rigid Stalinist input-output structure, and instead adopted the much more adaptable technique of Indicative Planning with its system of flexible goals.
Indicative Planning acknowledges the problem of imperfect information reaching top planners. It also acknowledges that the complexity of the consumer economy does not lend itself to central planning’s heavy hand. Under the Deng system, several distinct economic layers have evolved, each with a varying degree of autonomy – but all still answerable to the Communist Party. To put this new “Socialist Market Economy” in operation, Deng temporarily broke with Marxist orthodoxy and permitted different forms of ownership – ranging from total state control of the economy’s ‘commanding heights’ – to government-private sector joint ownership of medium-sized companies – to nearly autonomous private ownership of consumer enterprises. This transformation toward mixed ownership has successfully attracted so much Direct Foreign Investment into China’s vast market that the economy grew by a factor of ten since Deng took over – a tribute some would say to the vigor of private initiative. Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist Party still exerts total control of the commanding heights – sectors like metallurgy, energy and communications – and rigidly sets prices for the key commodities – in keeping with good Marxist practice.
Clearly, China’s decentralized multi-level system does not lend itself to a single overarching AI control system to direct the economy either. The uses for AI in China will instead likely continue to focus on so-called “narrow uses,” such as robotics, in which the Chinese government has been lavishly investing.
To dispel any misconceptions about the intentions of Communist China’s leaders, Deng made it quite clear that, in keeping with Marxist orthodoxy, China needs to pass from the agrarian phase through the capitalist phase before it can “achieve Communism.” These liberalization measures should serve merely to accelerate China’s evolution toward the Marxist Promised Land – and eventually be discarded. The Chinese Communist Party in other words has absolutely no intention of relinquishing control.
Perhaps with China’s recent successes, Socialists’ naïve hopes are rising again throughout the West. And why not? Society is again undergoing a technological revolution as it did over a century ago. And just as electromagnetism transformed every sector of the economy back then, so Artificial Intelligence is showing similar potential now, although AI is not without its serious vulnerabilities.
_________________________________________________
Darian Diachok has been working in international development for several decades, with major postings in the Former Soviet Union. Darian is author of Escapes: A True Story, available on Amazon.
Indicative Planning acknowledges the problem of imperfect information reaching top planners. It also acknowledges that the complexity of the consumer economy does not lend itself to central planning’s heavy hand. Under the Deng system, several distinct economic layers have evolved, each with a varying degree of autonomy – but all still answerable to the Communist Party. To put this new “Socialist Market Economy” in operation, Deng temporarily broke with Marxist orthodoxy and permitted different forms of ownership – ranging from total state control of the economy’s ‘commanding heights’ – to government-private sector joint ownership of medium-sized companies – to nearly autonomous private ownership of consumer enterprises. This transformation toward mixed ownership has successfully attracted so much Direct Foreign Investment into China’s vast market that the economy grew by a factor of ten since Deng took over – a tribute some would say to the vigor of private initiative. Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist Party still exerts total control of the commanding heights – sectors like metallurgy, energy and communications – and rigidly sets prices for the key commodities – in keeping with good Marxist practice.
Clearly, China’s decentralized multi-level system does not lend itself to a single overarching AI control system to direct the economy either. The uses for AI in China will instead likely continue to focus on so-called “narrow uses,” such as robotics, in which the Chinese government has been lavishly investing.
To dispel any misconceptions about the intentions of Communist China’s leaders, Deng made it quite clear that, in keeping with Marxist orthodoxy, China needs to pass from the agrarian phase through the capitalist phase before it can “achieve Communism.” These liberalization measures should serve merely to accelerate China’s evolution toward the Marxist Promised Land – and eventually be discarded. The Chinese Communist Party in other words has absolutely no intention of relinquishing control.
Perhaps with China’s recent successes, Socialists’ naïve hopes are rising again throughout the West. And why not? Society is again undergoing a technological revolution as it did over a century ago. And just as electromagnetism transformed every sector of the economy back then, so Artificial Intelligence is showing similar potential now, although AI is not without its serious vulnerabilities.
_________________________________________________
Darian Diachok has been working in international development for several decades, with major postings in the Former Soviet Union. Darian is author of Escapes: A True Story, available on Amazon.
Romania: Thirty Years After Communism
- Today, Romania still has more than a thousand state-owned companies, most of which are operating at huge losses paid for by taxpayers. The country is still the poorest of the former communist countries.
by Jody Hadlock
Dec 24, 2019
Originally published at Medium.com
Reposted with permission of the author
PERMALINK
Thirty years ago this month Romania’s communist house of cards began to fold, culminating with the execution of its hated dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife on Christmas Day in 1989. Sadly, the struggle for true democratic reform still continues in the Eastern European country.
Like many Americans, I saw the stories of the horrific conditions in Romania’s orphanages after the revolution exposed the atrocities of Ceausescu’s authoritarian policies. Wanting to build up his work force, in the 1960s Ceausescu mandated every married couple have at least one child or face higher taxes. Families with several children received special recognition, just like the Nazis celebrated large families. But most Romanians lived in poverty and couldn’t afford to raise that many children. Within a few years, orphanages started opening around the country.
Seeing the pictures of warehoused children, many of them with severe disabilities, I wanted to do something, but at the time I was in my early twenties and couldn’t afford to travel to Romania. A few years later I got my chance, as a journalist.
First Visit
In November 1993, I made my first trip there with a group of American volunteers. I had presumed since communism had ended that the country was making an easy transition back to its former glory. Bucharest had once been known as the Paris of the East, with its similar Belle Epoque architecture and vibrant literary and artistic circles. I was naïve and wildly wrong.
Our plane landed on a snowy, somber grey evening at Bucharest’s Otepeni airport. By the time we reached our hotel two hours away in Alexandria, because of rationing, hot water was no longer available for the day.
The next morning we went to the orphanage, which housed about 150 children from birth to four years old. It was overwhelming to see the crowded rooms. Children starved for attention clamored around us. One young boy I held had crossed eyes. The way he looked at me, with sweet, wide-eyed curiosity, made me burst into tears.
Slow Reforms
After Ceausescu, the man who took over as the country’s president had been a longtime member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and it resulted in Romania becoming one of the least progressive of the Eastern bloc countries in adopting democratic reforms. But even with slow reforms, the new post-communist Romania was better than under repressive rule.
Under communism, “all the stores were empty and when they would have some items, there were huge queues,” a friend, Adrian Curelea, told me. “There was no freedom of expression, no freedom of movement, no citizen rights.” After communism? “It’s like you’re out in the sun after a long time in the dark,” he said.
Curelea’s daughter was four years old at the time of the revolution. Her first memories of life after communism were being able to watch cartoons on a VCR. During Ceausescu’s reign, items such as videocassette recorders were rare, expensive, and only sold on the black market. “At first I thought it was a lie,” said Andreea Curelea, “but I was truly happy when I realized we actually owned a VCR and I was no longer confined to watching the five minutes of cartoons that the national TV station would broadcast each day.”
A Stark Contrast
Throughout the 1990s, I visited Romania several times, as a journalist and then as a volunteer in the orphanages. I traveled around the country — had dinner as a guest in a home that had been taken over by the communists, displacing the family for nearly 50 years; stayed in the hotel where Ceausescu’s son barricaded himself against the military, the windows on his floor still blown out, the walls still riddled with bullets; and of course, I saw Dracula’s castle.
I also kept visiting that one boy I’d met on my first trip and determined to get his eyes fixed. After that trip, in 1997, on the way back home I stopped in Prague for a few days. The difference between the two countries was visible and startling. Unlike Romania, the Czech Republic didn’t allow a “reformed” communist to take over and embraced economic reform. Prague was thriving, bustling; you could feel the unbridled energy of the capital city.
And unlike the former Czechoslovakia’s nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” during the “Fall of Nations,” when communism collapsed throughout central and eastern Europe, Romania was the only country with a violent overthrow of its government. More than a thousand people were killed, many of them young. A few hundred of the revolutionaries are buried in the all-white marble Heroes Cemetery in Bucharest.
One Party Domination
The political party of the president who took over after Ceausescu has dominated Romanian politics the past three decades. Today, Romania still has more than a thousand state-owned companies, most of which are operating at huge losses paid for by taxpayers. The country is still the poorest of the former communist countries.
“Bureaucracy is quite harsh, which impacts small businesses tremendously. There are a lot of things to change,” said Claudiu Nasui, a member of Romania’s parliament with a newly-formed party, the Union to Save Romania.
Nasui’s parents were one of the lucky ones who escaped communist Romania, in the mid-1980s, when Ceausescu wanted to show he was opening up to the West. Claudiu was five years old when the revolution happened and remembers his mother watching it unfold on television at their home in Chicago.
After the revolution Nasui and his mother moved back to their homeland. As a young adult, he founded Liberty Café, a group that’s been meeting weekly for more than 10 years. Through Liberty Café, he met Andreea Curelea and they co-founded an NGO, the Society for Individual Liberty. Nasui became an economic advisor to Romania’s finance minister and in 2016 was asked to run for Romania’s parliament. He was elected that year at 31 years old.
Romania Today
I ended up adopting that young boy I visited at the Alexandria orphanage and can tell you firsthand how he lives with the effects of a totalitarian madman. His eyes have long been fixed, but he still has a vision disorder, a severe communication disorder, and general developmental disabilities due to the lack of care, nutrition, and attention usually given to infants.
In June this year, my husband and I took Marius back to Romania, his first visit there since he came to the U.S. 20 years ago. Nasui gave us a tour of Ceausescu’s palace. It’s the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon, built at great cost while the dictator’s people were starving, a building so monstrous it’s sinking into the ground two-tenths of an inch every year, a reminder of the weight of the late dictator’s boots that had crushed his people. If Romania ever had a Dracula, it was Ceausescu, sucking the lifeblood out of his country.
The gargantuan building now houses Romania’s parliament. As we walked through the vast expanses of the palace, much of it unused, Nasui said, “Everything communist is big, expensive, and useless.”
Adrian Curelea has his hopes for a better Romania set on the younger generations: “New generations, unaffected by the communist mentality, who are more educated, are coming up, and I hope they will succeed in creating a political elite that will lead Romania more efficiently.”
The 2016 elections could prove to be a game changer for Romania. This decade has witnessed hundreds of thousands of citizens engaging in anti-government protests, particularly against attempts to decriminalize political corruption. In 2015 the prime minister was forced to resign. And just this past October, the Union to Save Romania and other opposition parties successfully ousted the Social Democratic government.
“The way Romania’s future will look like depends on what we manage to reform now,” said Nasui. “A good step forward is that we managed to bring down the Social Democratic government. The next step is to do well at next year’s general elections in order to get the political support we need to bring change.”
Once again, just like the 1989 revolution, it’s the young people who will save Romania.
___________________________________
Jody Hadlock traveled to Romania several times in the 1990s as a journalist and volunteer in Romania’s orphanages, where she met her adopted son.
- Today, Romania still has more than a thousand state-owned companies, most of which are operating at huge losses paid for by taxpayers. The country is still the poorest of the former communist countries.
by Jody Hadlock
Dec 24, 2019
Originally published at Medium.com
Reposted with permission of the author
PERMALINK
Thirty years ago this month Romania’s communist house of cards began to fold, culminating with the execution of its hated dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife on Christmas Day in 1989. Sadly, the struggle for true democratic reform still continues in the Eastern European country.
Like many Americans, I saw the stories of the horrific conditions in Romania’s orphanages after the revolution exposed the atrocities of Ceausescu’s authoritarian policies. Wanting to build up his work force, in the 1960s Ceausescu mandated every married couple have at least one child or face higher taxes. Families with several children received special recognition, just like the Nazis celebrated large families. But most Romanians lived in poverty and couldn’t afford to raise that many children. Within a few years, orphanages started opening around the country.
Seeing the pictures of warehoused children, many of them with severe disabilities, I wanted to do something, but at the time I was in my early twenties and couldn’t afford to travel to Romania. A few years later I got my chance, as a journalist.
First Visit
In November 1993, I made my first trip there with a group of American volunteers. I had presumed since communism had ended that the country was making an easy transition back to its former glory. Bucharest had once been known as the Paris of the East, with its similar Belle Epoque architecture and vibrant literary and artistic circles. I was naïve and wildly wrong.
Our plane landed on a snowy, somber grey evening at Bucharest’s Otepeni airport. By the time we reached our hotel two hours away in Alexandria, because of rationing, hot water was no longer available for the day.
The next morning we went to the orphanage, which housed about 150 children from birth to four years old. It was overwhelming to see the crowded rooms. Children starved for attention clamored around us. One young boy I held had crossed eyes. The way he looked at me, with sweet, wide-eyed curiosity, made me burst into tears.
Slow Reforms
After Ceausescu, the man who took over as the country’s president had been a longtime member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and it resulted in Romania becoming one of the least progressive of the Eastern bloc countries in adopting democratic reforms. But even with slow reforms, the new post-communist Romania was better than under repressive rule.
Under communism, “all the stores were empty and when they would have some items, there were huge queues,” a friend, Adrian Curelea, told me. “There was no freedom of expression, no freedom of movement, no citizen rights.” After communism? “It’s like you’re out in the sun after a long time in the dark,” he said.
Curelea’s daughter was four years old at the time of the revolution. Her first memories of life after communism were being able to watch cartoons on a VCR. During Ceausescu’s reign, items such as videocassette recorders were rare, expensive, and only sold on the black market. “At first I thought it was a lie,” said Andreea Curelea, “but I was truly happy when I realized we actually owned a VCR and I was no longer confined to watching the five minutes of cartoons that the national TV station would broadcast each day.”
A Stark Contrast
Throughout the 1990s, I visited Romania several times, as a journalist and then as a volunteer in the orphanages. I traveled around the country — had dinner as a guest in a home that had been taken over by the communists, displacing the family for nearly 50 years; stayed in the hotel where Ceausescu’s son barricaded himself against the military, the windows on his floor still blown out, the walls still riddled with bullets; and of course, I saw Dracula’s castle.
I also kept visiting that one boy I’d met on my first trip and determined to get his eyes fixed. After that trip, in 1997, on the way back home I stopped in Prague for a few days. The difference between the two countries was visible and startling. Unlike Romania, the Czech Republic didn’t allow a “reformed” communist to take over and embraced economic reform. Prague was thriving, bustling; you could feel the unbridled energy of the capital city.
And unlike the former Czechoslovakia’s nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” during the “Fall of Nations,” when communism collapsed throughout central and eastern Europe, Romania was the only country with a violent overthrow of its government. More than a thousand people were killed, many of them young. A few hundred of the revolutionaries are buried in the all-white marble Heroes Cemetery in Bucharest.
One Party Domination
The political party of the president who took over after Ceausescu has dominated Romanian politics the past three decades. Today, Romania still has more than a thousand state-owned companies, most of which are operating at huge losses paid for by taxpayers. The country is still the poorest of the former communist countries.
“Bureaucracy is quite harsh, which impacts small businesses tremendously. There are a lot of things to change,” said Claudiu Nasui, a member of Romania’s parliament with a newly-formed party, the Union to Save Romania.
Nasui’s parents were one of the lucky ones who escaped communist Romania, in the mid-1980s, when Ceausescu wanted to show he was opening up to the West. Claudiu was five years old when the revolution happened and remembers his mother watching it unfold on television at their home in Chicago.
After the revolution Nasui and his mother moved back to their homeland. As a young adult, he founded Liberty Café, a group that’s been meeting weekly for more than 10 years. Through Liberty Café, he met Andreea Curelea and they co-founded an NGO, the Society for Individual Liberty. Nasui became an economic advisor to Romania’s finance minister and in 2016 was asked to run for Romania’s parliament. He was elected that year at 31 years old.
Romania Today
I ended up adopting that young boy I visited at the Alexandria orphanage and can tell you firsthand how he lives with the effects of a totalitarian madman. His eyes have long been fixed, but he still has a vision disorder, a severe communication disorder, and general developmental disabilities due to the lack of care, nutrition, and attention usually given to infants.
In June this year, my husband and I took Marius back to Romania, his first visit there since he came to the U.S. 20 years ago. Nasui gave us a tour of Ceausescu’s palace. It’s the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon, built at great cost while the dictator’s people were starving, a building so monstrous it’s sinking into the ground two-tenths of an inch every year, a reminder of the weight of the late dictator’s boots that had crushed his people. If Romania ever had a Dracula, it was Ceausescu, sucking the lifeblood out of his country.
The gargantuan building now houses Romania’s parliament. As we walked through the vast expanses of the palace, much of it unused, Nasui said, “Everything communist is big, expensive, and useless.”
Adrian Curelea has his hopes for a better Romania set on the younger generations: “New generations, unaffected by the communist mentality, who are more educated, are coming up, and I hope they will succeed in creating a political elite that will lead Romania more efficiently.”
The 2016 elections could prove to be a game changer for Romania. This decade has witnessed hundreds of thousands of citizens engaging in anti-government protests, particularly against attempts to decriminalize political corruption. In 2015 the prime minister was forced to resign. And just this past October, the Union to Save Romania and other opposition parties successfully ousted the Social Democratic government.
“The way Romania’s future will look like depends on what we manage to reform now,” said Nasui. “A good step forward is that we managed to bring down the Social Democratic government. The next step is to do well at next year’s general elections in order to get the political support we need to bring change.”
Once again, just like the 1989 revolution, it’s the young people who will save Romania.
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Jody Hadlock traveled to Romania several times in the 1990s as a journalist and volunteer in Romania’s orphanages, where she met her adopted son.
The Man Who Had Funny Hands
- Scarred Bodies, Broken Psyches under Soviet Communism
by Christopher Szabo
October 7, 2019
PERMALINK
I grew up among refugees. My parents had fled from Communist Hungary after the 1956 Revolution was crushed by the Soviet Union. We had many Hungarian friends, but also knew people from Albania, East Germany, and Poland. All had their stories, the one more dreadful than the other.
I remember one story among many, when we visited a couple, let’s call them “Joe” and “Cathy”. When we were leaving, thinking they were out of earshot, I blurted out: “Why does Uncle Joe have funny hands?” My mother hushed me quickly and the whole thing was forgotten. But some years later, when I was old enough to be counted among the adults, the same Joe was telling some of his stories.
He had studied to be a priest but had left the seminary before finishing. I don’t know why he left, it might have coincided with the Communist takeover, or not, I don’t know. But he was arrested one day because of his ties to religion.
The Soviet goal was to initiate a Five-Year Plan aimed at undermining religious belief that was supposed to destroy religious thinking in two generations. They nationalised (stole) churches, lands, monasteries, and schools. They banned religious education, religious orders were dissolved, and some 1,500-2,000 people were formally sentenced on trumped up “charges”. One out of every four Catholic priests or monks were imprisoned.
Uncle Joe was not formally charged, sentenced, or any of that fancy bourgeois nonsense. He was just arrested and tortured. He was accused of being part of the “clerical reaction”. This “reaction” meant anyone who was not OK with the introduction of Communism, with its value-free and anti-humanist message.
Uncle Joe talked about the torture. He was beaten and thrown into a cell. Later, he was taken out and interrogated about his “fellow conspirators”. (Because the Communists were conspirators themselves, they saw conspiracies everywhere.) Of course, there was no conspiracy and Uncle Joe was at this point an ordinary factory worker. He was a fitter and turner, in other words, precisely the social class Marxism is supposed to help.
What surprised me was some of the tortures used on him. The reason he had ‘funny hands’ was they hit his hands with iron bars and tore some of his fingernails out. Some had grown back (sort of), some not. But the one that I would never have made up was hitting the soles of his feet. He described that they’d put him on a table, take his shoes and socks off, and hit the soles of his feet with truncheons. He said that was worse than the fingernails.
“Uncle Joe”, as we’ve called him, was one of many people I knew who experienced the joys of Communism, who lived in the “Worker’s State”, and who was himself a real worker, but who experienced the reality of Marxism-Leninism. Thank goodness it’s all over and nobody believes in that claptrap anymore!
___________________________________________________
Christopher Szabo is a freelance journalist in Pretoria, South Africa
- Scarred Bodies, Broken Psyches under Soviet Communism
by Christopher Szabo
October 7, 2019
PERMALINK
I grew up among refugees. My parents had fled from Communist Hungary after the 1956 Revolution was crushed by the Soviet Union. We had many Hungarian friends, but also knew people from Albania, East Germany, and Poland. All had their stories, the one more dreadful than the other.
I remember one story among many, when we visited a couple, let’s call them “Joe” and “Cathy”. When we were leaving, thinking they were out of earshot, I blurted out: “Why does Uncle Joe have funny hands?” My mother hushed me quickly and the whole thing was forgotten. But some years later, when I was old enough to be counted among the adults, the same Joe was telling some of his stories.
He had studied to be a priest but had left the seminary before finishing. I don’t know why he left, it might have coincided with the Communist takeover, or not, I don’t know. But he was arrested one day because of his ties to religion.
The Soviet goal was to initiate a Five-Year Plan aimed at undermining religious belief that was supposed to destroy religious thinking in two generations. They nationalised (stole) churches, lands, monasteries, and schools. They banned religious education, religious orders were dissolved, and some 1,500-2,000 people were formally sentenced on trumped up “charges”. One out of every four Catholic priests or monks were imprisoned.
Uncle Joe was not formally charged, sentenced, or any of that fancy bourgeois nonsense. He was just arrested and tortured. He was accused of being part of the “clerical reaction”. This “reaction” meant anyone who was not OK with the introduction of Communism, with its value-free and anti-humanist message.
Uncle Joe talked about the torture. He was beaten and thrown into a cell. Later, he was taken out and interrogated about his “fellow conspirators”. (Because the Communists were conspirators themselves, they saw conspiracies everywhere.) Of course, there was no conspiracy and Uncle Joe was at this point an ordinary factory worker. He was a fitter and turner, in other words, precisely the social class Marxism is supposed to help.
What surprised me was some of the tortures used on him. The reason he had ‘funny hands’ was they hit his hands with iron bars and tore some of his fingernails out. Some had grown back (sort of), some not. But the one that I would never have made up was hitting the soles of his feet. He described that they’d put him on a table, take his shoes and socks off, and hit the soles of his feet with truncheons. He said that was worse than the fingernails.
“Uncle Joe”, as we’ve called him, was one of many people I knew who experienced the joys of Communism, who lived in the “Worker’s State”, and who was himself a real worker, but who experienced the reality of Marxism-Leninism. Thank goodness it’s all over and nobody believes in that claptrap anymore!
___________________________________________________
Christopher Szabo is a freelance journalist in Pretoria, South Africa