On this page:
- Romania: Thirty Years After Communism
- The Man Who Had Funny Hands
- Scarred Bodies, Broken Psyches under Soviet Communism - 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)
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.
___________________________________
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
Marx Got Economics Right, Comrade
Talk at the Heritage Foundation
by Darian Diachok
ACAT Speakers Bureau
July 2, 2019
PERMALINK
Why is Communism relevant today? Ignorance! Just ask around. You may be shocked to find that nearly no one under twenty-five has ever heard of Stalin, whose genocide exceeded Hitler's by a factor of five.
Communism is being repackaged in this atmosphere of ignorance. Films like “Motorcycle Diaries” and “Young Marx” portray Che and Marx as wise, prophetic figures fighting for mankind's betterment. Idealistic youth is responding enthusiastically in their need for heroes. If you travel abroad, say to India or South America, you can see full-scale marches complete with red banners and portraits of Stalin.
How do you get through to the youth? Philosophical arguments? Theism versus atheism? We can argue these issues, but let’s for a moment examine the one thing Marx was sure he got right – economics – economics, where the rubber meets the road, the proof of the pudding, so to speak.
Brief review: The worldwide Communist Revolution began when Marx published the Labor Theory of Value – a theory that seemed intuitively obvious to lots of folks – that employers exploit the laborers they hire. Specifically, Marx said that the price of a product comes from the labor to produce it, and that therefore the laborer, and not the employer, is entitled to the proceeds. He dreamed of a world where no one exploited anyone else. Borrowing from Hegel, Marx believed history was evolving through a series of political convulsions from private ownership to communal ownership – toward a utopia where all of mankind equitably shared the fruits of labor.
Curiously, Marx didn’t specify how this new utopia would function – but he did paint the most negative picture of the institutions that he believed stood in the way: the worst offenders being, free enterprise, the rule of law, the family, and religion. Only a final violent convulsion could overthrow these institutions. And once the Revolution came, the State, run by idealistic Marxists, would set up the new economy. But until utopia materialized, the State could not permit the individual any economic freedom, since individual enterprise would lead back to exploitation. The State also had to eliminate anyone at all who opposed it.
All of this seems fanciful and even crazy, but it’s exactly how Communist revolutionaries thought – and still think. How did this theory work out in practice?
When we first arrived in 1993 in the Former Soviet Union, two years after the fall of Communism, things seemed familiar – men wore ties, women skirts, people drove on the right side and used forks and knives. But there were hints that things were radically different. My Ukrainian co-worker’s daughter was bitten in the face by a dog in school. He left immediately – to apologize and to pay a hefty fine. Why? The dog represented State authority and the girl must have been misbehaving. That same week, a shopkeeper slapped my son for touching a toy. Why? In an economy of scarcity, the customer must be on his best behavior if he hopes to make a purchase. And one day I bought my wife the only iron I could find, but one almost too heavy for her to lift. Why too heavy? Let’s get back to the Communist Revolution to understand.
After the brief revolutionary euphoria in 1917, no one quite knew what to do next. Slogans about creating a new world were fine but people needed specific incentives. How, exactly, were they going to reach this utopia? The new rulers’ appalling incompetence – they had assumed that destroying the old institutions would produce instantaneous brotherhood – their incompetence quickly produced nothing but scarcity and famine, with the Army called out again and again to shoot protesters.
The Communists regrouped and finally created incentives – a system of artificial quotas. One State organ would set production quotas for every single item – from ball bearings to trucks – another would distribute them. The rules for managers? Reach your quota or face the consequences, firing or prison. Meet your quotas and good things happen. Oh, yes, and the State would set all prices to avoid “exploitation”. Okay, but one major problem – the complexity of the economy far exceeds any planner’s ability to accurately model it. Totally planned economies inevitably produce shortages of some goods and overproduction of others.
In this new system, factory managers rarely got all they needed to make their quotas. So, they learned to informally wheel and deal to get missing parts. A factory in Kazakhstan might have extra glass; one in Kiev might have extra batteries. Eventually, an underground bartering system developed – but in secret, since no one could accuse the State of incompetence and live to tell about it. It is estimated that half of the Soviet Union’s rail freight eventually shuttled illicit goods back and forth to make monthly quotas. It was like that when we arrived – with managers keeping two sets of books – one for State inspectors; the other for themselves.
Managers learned other tricks. For example, some factories welded heavy pig iron plates to the bottom of sewing machines and even radios to increase their weight to make their tonnage quotas. Production therefore became a numbers game where quality mattered little. Soviet emigres estimate that about a quarter of all Soviet production was pure junk, another quarter useful if repaired; another quarter sort of serviceable, and the top quarter reserved for the military and the Party.
Quotas also controlled mining. Whereas Western firms extract hydrocarbons only from fields that give a profit on investment, Soviet enterprises ignore operating costs. Costs of labor and equipment were artificially set anyway. Our teams were stunned to find that Soviet engineers had never even heard of the concept of economically recoverable reserves. They simply extracted to meet quota regardless of cost. It became clear that realistic profit and loss in the Soviet Union was impossible to calculate. The economy operated in the dark and was kept artificially afloat – a recipe for bankruptcy.
In our work with Moldova, for example, the chief accountant for the country’s powerplants explained that management conducts yearly inventories and simply transfers funds to plants running at a loss – which eliminates any incentive to improve operations.
Finally, in retail outlets like bookstores, shopkeepers learned to hoard bestsellers as barter for hard-to-get items, like milk. In short, everyone at every level learned to game the system – to survive.
The Soviet Union finally collapsed of its own weight in 1991 – with State enterprises, like the powerplants we worked with, left bankrupt, about to fail. But despite the collapse, the economic system still lives on in the minds of its victims, the people who were supposed to be led to utopia.
I’d say we encountered good people, sincere people, but with a deeply imbedded culture of corruption that the system itself created. We all detected a tendency for ex-Soviets to tell us exactly we wanted to hear. Under the old system, they had learned to toe the line, to pretend to be on board, but to go around us and to milk the system for everything it was worth.
Perhaps the most disturbing legacy we found was management’s inability to plan, to set priorities and to develop realistic workplans – I suppose because taking such initiatives had been severely punished and even called, “guerilla warfare against the prerogatives of the State.” Initiative, such as it was, was limited to scheming for whatever you could finagle for yourself and your family.
In addition to the unworkable economics and a devastated environment, we knew the Communist system constantly eliminated the best people since it wouldn’t tolerate independent thought and action. It also forbid independent literature and art, and any open inquiry, all of which led to a gray, pervasive cynicism – still a legacy; and finally, it forbade religion – but without providing a substitute for mankind’s perennial concerns about the realm of the spirit and of life after death.
Today, no honest economist takes Marx seriously. Yet we're seeing a wave of Socialists and would-be-Communists surging into the political light, to the applause of a generation raised in historical ignorance. I pray that we can show this youth – this youth that believes in universal brotherhood and social justice – that these pied pipers can never lead them to a utopia.
---------------------------------
Darian Diachok has been working in international development for several decades, with major postings in the Former Soviet Union. This piece appears as a chapter in his book, Escapes: A True Story, available on Amazon.
Talk at the Heritage Foundation
by Darian Diachok
ACAT Speakers Bureau
July 2, 2019
PERMALINK
Why is Communism relevant today? Ignorance! Just ask around. You may be shocked to find that nearly no one under twenty-five has ever heard of Stalin, whose genocide exceeded Hitler's by a factor of five.
Communism is being repackaged in this atmosphere of ignorance. Films like “Motorcycle Diaries” and “Young Marx” portray Che and Marx as wise, prophetic figures fighting for mankind's betterment. Idealistic youth is responding enthusiastically in their need for heroes. If you travel abroad, say to India or South America, you can see full-scale marches complete with red banners and portraits of Stalin.
How do you get through to the youth? Philosophical arguments? Theism versus atheism? We can argue these issues, but let’s for a moment examine the one thing Marx was sure he got right – economics – economics, where the rubber meets the road, the proof of the pudding, so to speak.
Brief review: The worldwide Communist Revolution began when Marx published the Labor Theory of Value – a theory that seemed intuitively obvious to lots of folks – that employers exploit the laborers they hire. Specifically, Marx said that the price of a product comes from the labor to produce it, and that therefore the laborer, and not the employer, is entitled to the proceeds. He dreamed of a world where no one exploited anyone else. Borrowing from Hegel, Marx believed history was evolving through a series of political convulsions from private ownership to communal ownership – toward a utopia where all of mankind equitably shared the fruits of labor.
Curiously, Marx didn’t specify how this new utopia would function – but he did paint the most negative picture of the institutions that he believed stood in the way: the worst offenders being, free enterprise, the rule of law, the family, and religion. Only a final violent convulsion could overthrow these institutions. And once the Revolution came, the State, run by idealistic Marxists, would set up the new economy. But until utopia materialized, the State could not permit the individual any economic freedom, since individual enterprise would lead back to exploitation. The State also had to eliminate anyone at all who opposed it.
All of this seems fanciful and even crazy, but it’s exactly how Communist revolutionaries thought – and still think. How did this theory work out in practice?
When we first arrived in 1993 in the Former Soviet Union, two years after the fall of Communism, things seemed familiar – men wore ties, women skirts, people drove on the right side and used forks and knives. But there were hints that things were radically different. My Ukrainian co-worker’s daughter was bitten in the face by a dog in school. He left immediately – to apologize and to pay a hefty fine. Why? The dog represented State authority and the girl must have been misbehaving. That same week, a shopkeeper slapped my son for touching a toy. Why? In an economy of scarcity, the customer must be on his best behavior if he hopes to make a purchase. And one day I bought my wife the only iron I could find, but one almost too heavy for her to lift. Why too heavy? Let’s get back to the Communist Revolution to understand.
After the brief revolutionary euphoria in 1917, no one quite knew what to do next. Slogans about creating a new world were fine but people needed specific incentives. How, exactly, were they going to reach this utopia? The new rulers’ appalling incompetence – they had assumed that destroying the old institutions would produce instantaneous brotherhood – their incompetence quickly produced nothing but scarcity and famine, with the Army called out again and again to shoot protesters.
The Communists regrouped and finally created incentives – a system of artificial quotas. One State organ would set production quotas for every single item – from ball bearings to trucks – another would distribute them. The rules for managers? Reach your quota or face the consequences, firing or prison. Meet your quotas and good things happen. Oh, yes, and the State would set all prices to avoid “exploitation”. Okay, but one major problem – the complexity of the economy far exceeds any planner’s ability to accurately model it. Totally planned economies inevitably produce shortages of some goods and overproduction of others.
In this new system, factory managers rarely got all they needed to make their quotas. So, they learned to informally wheel and deal to get missing parts. A factory in Kazakhstan might have extra glass; one in Kiev might have extra batteries. Eventually, an underground bartering system developed – but in secret, since no one could accuse the State of incompetence and live to tell about it. It is estimated that half of the Soviet Union’s rail freight eventually shuttled illicit goods back and forth to make monthly quotas. It was like that when we arrived – with managers keeping two sets of books – one for State inspectors; the other for themselves.
Managers learned other tricks. For example, some factories welded heavy pig iron plates to the bottom of sewing machines and even radios to increase their weight to make their tonnage quotas. Production therefore became a numbers game where quality mattered little. Soviet emigres estimate that about a quarter of all Soviet production was pure junk, another quarter useful if repaired; another quarter sort of serviceable, and the top quarter reserved for the military and the Party.
Quotas also controlled mining. Whereas Western firms extract hydrocarbons only from fields that give a profit on investment, Soviet enterprises ignore operating costs. Costs of labor and equipment were artificially set anyway. Our teams were stunned to find that Soviet engineers had never even heard of the concept of economically recoverable reserves. They simply extracted to meet quota regardless of cost. It became clear that realistic profit and loss in the Soviet Union was impossible to calculate. The economy operated in the dark and was kept artificially afloat – a recipe for bankruptcy.
In our work with Moldova, for example, the chief accountant for the country’s powerplants explained that management conducts yearly inventories and simply transfers funds to plants running at a loss – which eliminates any incentive to improve operations.
Finally, in retail outlets like bookstores, shopkeepers learned to hoard bestsellers as barter for hard-to-get items, like milk. In short, everyone at every level learned to game the system – to survive.
The Soviet Union finally collapsed of its own weight in 1991 – with State enterprises, like the powerplants we worked with, left bankrupt, about to fail. But despite the collapse, the economic system still lives on in the minds of its victims, the people who were supposed to be led to utopia.
I’d say we encountered good people, sincere people, but with a deeply imbedded culture of corruption that the system itself created. We all detected a tendency for ex-Soviets to tell us exactly we wanted to hear. Under the old system, they had learned to toe the line, to pretend to be on board, but to go around us and to milk the system for everything it was worth.
Perhaps the most disturbing legacy we found was management’s inability to plan, to set priorities and to develop realistic workplans – I suppose because taking such initiatives had been severely punished and even called, “guerilla warfare against the prerogatives of the State.” Initiative, such as it was, was limited to scheming for whatever you could finagle for yourself and your family.
In addition to the unworkable economics and a devastated environment, we knew the Communist system constantly eliminated the best people since it wouldn’t tolerate independent thought and action. It also forbid independent literature and art, and any open inquiry, all of which led to a gray, pervasive cynicism – still a legacy; and finally, it forbade religion – but without providing a substitute for mankind’s perennial concerns about the realm of the spirit and of life after death.
Today, no honest economist takes Marx seriously. Yet we're seeing a wave of Socialists and would-be-Communists surging into the political light, to the applause of a generation raised in historical ignorance. I pray that we can show this youth – this youth that believes in universal brotherhood and social justice – that these pied pipers can never lead them to a utopia.
---------------------------------
Darian Diachok has been working in international development for several decades, with major postings in the Former Soviet Union. This piece appears as a chapter in his book, Escapes: A True Story, available on Amazon.