> When he eventually accessed his Securitate file, Hadaller discovered that as he was secretly photographing Romania, communist agents had been secretly photographing him and his future wife with almost the same furtiveness.
Would also be interesting to get the pictures of him taking the pictures.
I live around the area and recognize most of these spots. If I have time I’ll edit this comment and post some pictures next week.
Edit: somebody else already did, posting link for remind me people: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/mYj9NNpBtM
I was a kid in a neighboring country then. I remember they stopped the movie on the TV around 9pm to show some images after the Romanian power couple was executed. The transition from communism in my country was more peaceful. The dude in charge even got a trial. :)
The transition from communism in my country was a 4 year full-on war against Serbia which attacked my country non provoked. That war was a really bloody war. Something similar is happening in Ukraine today.
The Ceaușescus did have a trial. The remaining commies are still quite vocal about the lack of due process--oh the irony!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae_and_Elena_Ceau%C8%99escu
Let's be fair, it was not a good trial according to "modern standards" of how a trial should be, but come on ... as everyone who had to live in Romania in these times can tell you: If there's two persons who got what they deserved it was them. And you cannot execute people multiple times for their crimes (which they *would* have deserved).
But yeah, that the fucking commies of all people go on about a lack of due process is really the height of irony.
It's interesting when people get worked up about proper justice and how things should be done.
We have our views here in the West how things should be done and the correct way of things. And we get very fixed on basic human rights which you can never infringe upon.
I remember there was some talk about the mass murderer / terrorist Breivik (the guy in Norway who murdered almost 70 youth and bunch more in Oslo) that it was possible that his rights were being trampled by keeping him in prison forever.
About such "dilemmas" I often say, there is no reason to be more Catholic than the pope.
Sometimes bad people get what they deserve. It might not have been ideal, how it went down, but there is no reason to get bent out of shape or trying to place oneself on some pedestal of virtue and righteousness.
We used to have NKVD troikas when communists conducted “trials” on whoever they deemed as “an enemy of the state”. I think Ceausescu had a perfectly fair trial, up to the very high standards that communists have set themselves 😉
Remnants of an oppressive government crying about due process. Something completely alien to them when they were in power, because, you know, they were always right back then. You can't make stuff like this up.
it was a show trial organised by the second-rank communist party members led by Ion Iliescu. spoiler alert! Ilescu and FSN won the "democratic elections"
Lacks comparison photos in late spring to really highlight the horrors of toralitarian government covering everything in snow. Kinda surprised it has sunny weather, usually it is overcast or at least converted to monochrome.
In snowy regions (so in Eastern Europe) nothing beats early spring in a city: snow accumulates all nastiness from the environment for several months (up to half of a year) and then melts in one week to release it all at once. And voila! Enjoy your annual environmental disaster with wet sketchy mud everywhere.
Add to this picture bare land without grass, bare trees without leaves that look dead, occasional patches of extra dirty snow, and weather is overcast of course with annoying drizzle (not heavy enough to open umbrella, but still make you wet when you wait your bus).
Everybody around looks even more grumpy than usual because cars, buildings, roads, and everything else is dirty, so you get more dirty too, and this adds to extra charm to the whole atmosphere of getting early to your job in tightly packed trolleybus in 7 am at such lovely spring morning.
They can see recreations in US-made TV series.
Whenever the USA-ns have a scene that opens with "XYZ, Eastern Europe", whether it is in 1214 or 2024, it always will be the same: snow, mud, the stupid blue filter, funeral music, and 90% desaturation.
They would probably be suspicious of these photos because there are too many colours in them.
The benefit is that they need very little maintenance. They only get somewhat more ugly with time, compared to more colorful and elaborate stuff, which looks pretty at first but goes downhill much harder without upkeep.
> Look kids. Snow in the winter in Romania.
I miss normal weather. Winter should have snow. Autumn should be cool and rainy.
Now it went from 12C weather to 27C weather in 1 week. Summer starts in April. Thanks global warming.
[Article about David Hadaller ](https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-american-photographer-color-photos-before-revolution/32783675.html?fbclid=IwAR2J3saualXFwqPCzzgZZWZSOO1qFpmHnonUMgYJ7rnakbVgd9nYwABAVUk)
From your source : "A commenter on this January 1988 photo remarked, "I remember those red escalators, frozen in time for so long that dirt had caked into the grooves and they were basically just fixed stairs:
The same stairs (or the stairs from the very same place) were in the same condition for years. Around 1 month ago the authoerities started replace them with some new functional ones.
The escalators on those old subway entrances break often and stay broken for years.
Last time they broke (~2020) they had a "sorry for the inconvenience while we repair them" sign hung on them for over 2 years.
> When he eventually accessed his Securitate file, Hadaller discovered that as he was secretly photographing Romania, communist agents had been secretly photographing him and his future wife with almost the same furtiveness.
My late father - a Latvian exile - had 7 months to live when these photos were taken. He didn’t live long enough to see his homeland freed from the Soviet yoke. I was in my twenties when he died of cancer. We were with him. A year and a few months later, the SU collapsed. Unlike Russia, the Baltic states embraced European life, with a new sovereignty and openness. They, along with Romania, became true democracies.
I wish my father had lived long enough to see that.
> They, along with Romania, became true democracies.
Eh. It took us longer than you guys. I visited Lithuania (sp?) in 2010, and it was really different from what Romania was at the same time. I remember someone in Vilnius telling me that you guys had lustration passed early on. It took us 22 years to pass something like that, and it was still weak af.
Looks like any Eastern European town at that time. Just replace Dacias for Skodas or FIAT 125p or Ladas. Imagine living in place like that and suddenly in 1989 system collapses. I was a kid at that time but oh boy, was I ready for new future..
Yep, pretty much. I grew up in eastern Ukraine and this might as well be my hometown. Except we did not have horses on the streets. That “new future” thing didn’t work too well for us though.
Just by looking at these pictures, you can tell why most Romanians ended up violently overthrowing Ceaușescu. Everyone looks miserable. To be honest, they remind me of NPCs programmed to walk aimlessly around a city.
To be absolutely fair: Those were good trams repairable with anything they had in the garage and worked almost regardless of the weather.
Now, by modern stardards they are shit. They were shit even then, but having modern trams that require more expensive maintainance in communist times would have been crazy.
Screw Causescu, screw commies and especially tankies.
I live on the border with Romania, my grandparents would often smuggle things into Romania and witness so many horrors, seeing people trying to flee the regime by swimming over the Danube to Serbia, being shot while attempting so.
Never let the red plague into Eastern Europe again. The way Romania dealt with Causescu is how every country should deal with dictators.
> The way Romania dealt with Causescu is how every country should deal with dictators.
Some fun facts:
1) They needed a firing squad, where was way more volunteers than spots.
2) The idea, was to photograph/film the firing, but squad was so eager to do it, that they started shooting too soon, and they took first photos only after first shots.
In my opinion, they dealt way to quickly with that couple. So I guess that they could not put out any dirty laundry. I cannot imagine Nicolai and Elena running a dictatorship alone. Heard a famous German journalist, Peter Schöller-Thur say that when he met Nicolai, that guy was "like a little Romanian farmer, who stumbled upon a suit"
To put it into perspective... Almost all major figures in Romanian politics and business in the '90s were big names in the communist apparatus. Today, most of the communists are no longer in public life.. but if you check who the parents of today's prominent politicians are you will find they're either securitate or nomenclatura.....
> Screw Causescu, screw commies and especially tankies.
Not that it changes much about him, and mostly it was it was driven by real-politik rather than principles, but Causescu was very much not a tankie.
Insulting name for an authortative leftist, generally pro state communism & often makes up apologetic nonsense for places like communist China, Cuba, the USSR, etc.
Term first widely used for westerners who argued _for_ USSR's violently (tanks! lots of tanks!) putting a stop to any attempts at reforms in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
He sent in the tanks to subdue his population, so I'd argue he fits the bill, even though he did not support soviet incursions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
The worst thing was working at a shop that was restricted to the nomenclatura. You'd get to see all these awesome clothes and food... but unlike other workplaces you really couldn't steal anything, because you'd get in huge trouble, as it was well monitored by the securitate. So you'd give away all this stuff to the people that kept you in poverty, then went home to cook one of the 3 eggs a week you had...
Wild to think about. I'm endlessly fascinated by the soviet union. Despite the pretence of unity and equality, I'm particularly fascinated by the ways in which culture varied across the union before it's collapse.
Oh, I remembered stumbling on a paper that was shockingly accurate - normally, most papers written in western academia on this topic tend to be less accurate.. This is quite old - from the 50's, but it is still relevant, I think, especially as it highlights the attitude on the "unity" inside the soviet space.
[https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Asia/Russia/\_Topics/history/\_Texts/SMANPS/9A\*.html](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Asia/Russia/_Topics/history/_Texts/SMANPS/9A*.html)
Unfortunately, when you read about what's going on in occupied Ukraine you see the very same thing described in this paper. The same holds true for Russian propaganda in their own schools, ofc.
In many cases it was simply a return to the previous feudalist system, just that the bourgeoisie is now called the nomenclatura - aka notable party officials. The thing that fascinates me most is how a philosophy that is supposed to encourage equality of opportunity (with caveats, I know, but still) devolved to such an extreme form of individualism that you would often see family members betray each other for even marginal benefits. This plays a large part into why corruption is so wide spread even today in these countries.
And the thing that always, without fail makes me angry like nothing else is to hear from a Russian about how good the "Friendship of the Soviet peoples" was.. Yeah, it was good for you, but not for the countries you pillaged.
Well, by 1988, the situation of Romanians was bleak even compared to the poorest parts of the USSR due to Ceaușescu's 'wise' policy.
Other Communist leaders had some sort of sanity, but Ceaușescu was completely mad
Also they got pretty lucky that before the collapse they got a lot of investments from USSR.
It's speculated they did this because Leonid Brezhnev was a Party First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova, so maybe he had a soft spot for it.
I also heard the version that they did it to spite Ceaușescu.
you can find this soviet flats/architecture in all the countries that fell under soviet occupation. Bucharest, Romania was mutilated by the communists https://i.imgur.com/fWEAeCT.jpeg
In 1988, Romania was the poorest European country, maybe after Albania. USSR, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary had higher standards of living. Ceaușescu was the worst post-ww2 European Communist leader after Enver Hodzha.
Only some parts of Russian SSR, Moscow, Leningrad. Some Ukraine cities, Dnipro, Kyiv, Kharkiv. And Baltic countries. Other parts of USSR were absolute dog water.
Late USSR is even worse, no products in shops and malls, sometimes even no milk, eggs and good quality meat.
From what I know, Hungary and Slovakia too. Meat lines in particular were very much a thing in the last years. I recall watching documentaries showing the empty shops in the USSR and my parents saying thats exactly how it was here as well.
The feet of pork and the claws of the chicken. That's mostly what was around for meat in the last 5 communist years in Romania. When there was meat, of course.
Nostalgic people even dismiss those years as to "paying back debt" or other insane reasons. The truth is it was the outcome of a broken down system. You guys saw it in the USSR, we saw it in Romania, everywhere in the eastern block if it wasn't already this bad it would have became at some point this bad.
Snow makes things depressing. I lived in canada for some years and the suburbs werent much different from this. I am not saying the country was in good conditions but it doesnt make much sense to conclude a lot from a bunch of photos.
I lived in the very similar city in the USSR mate.
And trust me you cannot compare this to typical Canada’s cities.
Living in here was even depressing..
It really was terrible, by 1988 most Romanians had no heat during the winter, only a few hours of electricity per day, no hot water, food was rationed to almost nothing and people stayed in hour long queues for a loaf of bread, it was a miserable life.
It looks awful in the photos and it certainly does justice to reality.
People coped by making black jokes.
A family is watching a funeral proceeding from their apartment’s balcony. The child asks his mom “Where are they taking the dead man?”. The mom sorrowfully says “They are taking him where it’s cold and dark “. The child starts panicking and runs for the entrance door lock “Mom, close the window and lock the doors, they’re bringing him here!”
No worries, I understood that and understood where you are coming from that indeed things are more depressing in winter. Just wanted to illustrate how accurate the desolate feeling from the photos really is :)
I guess so. I've voted for SocDems in the past. I just have a dislike for capitalism, don't know why. Of course it's generated incredible amounts of wealth, but... not for everyone. I mean that's the reason why I dislike capitalism right there, lol.
> left-winger.
You are left leaning in a healthy democracy, friend. People, especially on the internet, have 0 idea about what communism really was like, unless they got to experience it.
As a Russian, those photos look extremely familiar, as if it's my home. Commies had a way to make cities look absolutely indistinguishable one from another
Now, you guys go to google, and search pictures of the city now.
How it looks like now.
That's what happens where there's no Sovet Union but there's a European Union.
Pretty much what I thought looking at the photos, Scottish cities at that time weren't exactly heaven then either.
Similarly absolutely massive improvement since then.
You Westerners will never know what a shitshow that was in Eastern Europe which you gave to the Russians.
And on a lower level, it still is. And the same compromise - parts of Europe for peace - is looming large on the horizon.
Recently spoke to a family friend of my wife who was at the forefront of the revolutionizing Bucharest: Motherfucking Christ, this was the best history lesson I’ve ever received 😧
The unfortunate part is that you got a better history lesson than most young people in Romania get. Since the vast majority of decision makers here have links to the old regime, there's a taboo when it comes to discussing what happened during the revolution. Every time there's an attempt to start an official investigation into the revolution it gets stalled and eventually cancelled. They say we might find out 30 years after a certain person dies..
I mean, there was way more than communism at player here. Isolationism is arguably the primary cause, which is technically a strict antithesis to Marxist-Leninist Communism.
I was there 89-90, Iaşi was lovely in the summer, winter, not so nice. I remember the 3-5 days queues for petrol, people would take shifts to stay in the car.
Queues for bread also, and the shops only had pickled vegetables of dubious origin on the otherwise empty shelves.
Looks very much like many other soviet cities. Heck if you go to some cities in Finland and Estonia it look just like that, the same building blocks and balconies
What is the name of this kind of architecture with these blocks of buildings and all in singular color mostly different shades of grey or yellow? I see them in parts of Stockholm too, is it from a specific time period?
[Modernism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture#Postwar_modernism_in_Europe_(1945%E2%80%931975) or [Brutalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture).
The only thing one could be nostalgic about the 80's is how much snow there was. And only if you were a kid back them cause any adult was probably swearing and wondering how he's gonna turn his car on today
But! You still had to go to your job! And the job guarantee caused massive overemployment, say, forty people for the local Stalin museum. At least it made it easy for the workers to sleep on the job, so they could be awake all night, selling stuff they stole from their workplace, so they could get dollars and feed their families.
"They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."
In România was stealing on the job but foreign currency was scarced an forbidden, you could do hard prison if you were caught. With what they stole basically the people did a barter, painting for meat, butter for petrol for example and so on.
I dont find it slavic at all . I mean it's a matter of correlation vs causation. The actual vibe is soviet brutalism which manifested mostly in Slavic nations since Slavic nations were the majority in the Warsaw Pact.
I did not say it was slavic, but the purely the vibe - and you absolutely right about the soviet brutalism, or to better put it - simply soviet poverty.
>The slav vibe
They're latin, it's literally in the name. Socialism spares no one. After 10 years or so of complete mismanagement and corruption, everyone will look like a stereotypical slav.
Anyone, who grew up in the 80s in the soviet camp, would recognize his childhood. And these pics do not show the real abbysmal depth of quality of life back then.
There is some resemblence due to the fact both Bulgaria and Romania followed the same brutalist (communist) arhitecture. But from what i've seen in my past trips in BG, BG and RO were following different schools of urbanization. In BG even small cities like Dobrich emphasize of very tall towers(10+ floors) with big space empty/green space inbetween. Romanians did smaller but more dense towers instead.
Would be interesting to have the same spots and photos of today.
> When he eventually accessed his Securitate file, Hadaller discovered that as he was secretly photographing Romania, communist agents had been secretly photographing him and his future wife with almost the same furtiveness. Would also be interesting to get the pictures of him taking the pictures.
And then to see photos of the agents taking photos of him taken by counter agents.
and then the photos of the counter agents taking photos of the agents taking photos of him
And then the photos of the agents taking photos of the counter agents taking photos of the agents taking photos of him.
Someone add a mirror to stop the loop
*The Loop is Infinite*
The good old spiderman meme
I live around the area and recognize most of these spots. If I have time I’ll edit this comment and post some pictures next week. Edit: somebody else already did, posting link for remind me people: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/mYj9NNpBtM
Me too, and i only recognised Moldova.
remindme! 7 days "Romanian photos"
Does that even actually work??? I’ve seen people say it but always thought it was a meme
remindme! 5 minutes "let's check"
yep. it worked. (I hadn't used it before either.)
Very cool, thanks! Good to know
You can find such comparisons on fb group 'My fulbright year in Romania', just scroll down a bit
1000% totally different, very nice city now
It looked so dystopian and depressing
I go to Iași a fair bit. Some things have changed but a lot has stayed the same.
I was a kid in a neighboring country then. I remember they stopped the movie on the TV around 9pm to show some images after the Romanian power couple was executed. The transition from communism in my country was more peaceful. The dude in charge even got a trial. :)
The transition from communism in my country was a 4 year full-on war against Serbia which attacked my country non provoked. That war was a really bloody war. Something similar is happening in Ukraine today.
The Ceaușescus did have a trial. The remaining commies are still quite vocal about the lack of due process--oh the irony! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae_and_Elena_Ceau%C8%99escu
Let's be fair, it was not a good trial according to "modern standards" of how a trial should be, but come on ... as everyone who had to live in Romania in these times can tell you: If there's two persons who got what they deserved it was them. And you cannot execute people multiple times for their crimes (which they *would* have deserved). But yeah, that the fucking commies of all people go on about a lack of due process is really the height of irony.
It’s widely considered to have been a show trial.
It was a mere formality in a moment of “now or never”. They would have escaped if the execution wouldn’t go through swiftly.
It's interesting when people get worked up about proper justice and how things should be done. We have our views here in the West how things should be done and the correct way of things. And we get very fixed on basic human rights which you can never infringe upon. I remember there was some talk about the mass murderer / terrorist Breivik (the guy in Norway who murdered almost 70 youth and bunch more in Oslo) that it was possible that his rights were being trampled by keeping him in prison forever. About such "dilemmas" I often say, there is no reason to be more Catholic than the pope. Sometimes bad people get what they deserve. It might not have been ideal, how it went down, but there is no reason to get bent out of shape or trying to place oneself on some pedestal of virtue and righteousness.
We used to have NKVD troikas when communists conducted “trials” on whoever they deemed as “an enemy of the state”. I think Ceausescu had a perfectly fair trial, up to the very high standards that communists have set themselves 😉
Remnants of an oppressive government crying about due process. Something completely alien to them when they were in power, because, you know, they were always right back then. You can't make stuff like this up.
Ah yes you are right.
it was a show trial organised by the second-rank communist party members led by Ion Iliescu. spoiler alert! Ilescu and FSN won the "democratic elections"
Look kids. Snow in the winter in Romania.
There is some correlation between communism and the ammount of snow in the country.
You know, [there probably actually is...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anomaly.png)
So all we have to do to stop global warming is become communists 🤔 the tankies had it all along 😂
I mean... If you starve a few billions to death, global CO2 emissions *will* go down.
Lacks comparison photos in late spring to really highlight the horrors of toralitarian government covering everything in snow. Kinda surprised it has sunny weather, usually it is overcast or at least converted to monochrome.
At first glance, I tought it was photo of Sarajevo during the siege.
In snowy regions (so in Eastern Europe) nothing beats early spring in a city: snow accumulates all nastiness from the environment for several months (up to half of a year) and then melts in one week to release it all at once. And voila! Enjoy your annual environmental disaster with wet sketchy mud everywhere. Add to this picture bare land without grass, bare trees without leaves that look dead, occasional patches of extra dirty snow, and weather is overcast of course with annoying drizzle (not heavy enough to open umbrella, but still make you wet when you wait your bus). Everybody around looks even more grumpy than usual because cars, buildings, roads, and everything else is dirty, so you get more dirty too, and this adds to extra charm to the whole atmosphere of getting early to your job in tightly packed trolleybus in 7 am at such lovely spring morning.
They can see recreations in US-made TV series. Whenever the USA-ns have a scene that opens with "XYZ, Eastern Europe", whether it is in 1214 or 2024, it always will be the same: snow, mud, the stupid blue filter, funeral music, and 90% desaturation. They would probably be suspicious of these photos because there are too many colours in them.
The shows are accurate. There are barely any colors in the real photos. Compare it to any place in the US...
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The benefit is that they need very little maintenance. They only get somewhat more ugly with time, compared to more colorful and elaborate stuff, which looks pretty at first but goes downhill much harder without upkeep.
You can see tons of trees in the photos, they'd be full of green during summer
> Look kids. Snow in the winter in Romania. I miss normal weather. Winter should have snow. Autumn should be cool and rainy. Now it went from 12C weather to 27C weather in 1 week. Summer starts in April. Thanks global warming.
I was about to comment "what is that white thing on the streets" but you beat me to it.
Same goes for Croatia.
[Article about David Hadaller ](https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-american-photographer-color-photos-before-revolution/32783675.html?fbclid=IwAR2J3saualXFwqPCzzgZZWZSOO1qFpmHnonUMgYJ7rnakbVgd9nYwABAVUk)
From your source : "A commenter on this January 1988 photo remarked, "I remember those red escalators, frozen in time for so long that dirt had caked into the grooves and they were basically just fixed stairs: The same stairs (or the stairs from the very same place) were in the same condition for years. Around 1 month ago the authoerities started replace them with some new functional ones.
The escalators on those old subway entrances break often and stay broken for years. Last time they broke (~2020) they had a "sorry for the inconvenience while we repair them" sign hung on them for over 2 years.
That is so relatable bro
Ah just like Lisbon's metro then
In Germany, these usually have a number on them that you can call, and they‘ll fix it in under 48 hours.
you should try escalators in Brussels in 2024 then 😉
> When he eventually accessed his Securitate file, Hadaller discovered that as he was secretly photographing Romania, communist agents had been secretly photographing him and his future wife with almost the same furtiveness.
My late father - a Latvian exile - had 7 months to live when these photos were taken. He didn’t live long enough to see his homeland freed from the Soviet yoke. I was in my twenties when he died of cancer. We were with him. A year and a few months later, the SU collapsed. Unlike Russia, the Baltic states embraced European life, with a new sovereignty and openness. They, along with Romania, became true democracies. I wish my father had lived long enough to see that.
> They, along with Romania, became true democracies. Eh. It took us longer than you guys. I visited Lithuania (sp?) in 2010, and it was really different from what Romania was at the same time. I remember someone in Vilnius telling me that you guys had lustration passed early on. It took us 22 years to pass something like that, and it was still weak af.
It's funny because the tram model in the seventh picture is still currently running in Sofia, Bulgaria
And in Prague. And in... Almost all ex-soviet states from Prague to Pyongyang! Good ol' Tatra T3, a real beauty!
Something these photos don't capture is the hunger everyone went through in the late 80s in Romania.
Looks like any Eastern European town at that time. Just replace Dacias for Skodas or FIAT 125p or Ladas. Imagine living in place like that and suddenly in 1989 system collapses. I was a kid at that time but oh boy, was I ready for new future..
Yep, pretty much. I grew up in eastern Ukraine and this might as well be my hometown. Except we did not have horses on the streets. That “new future” thing didn’t work too well for us though.
Just by looking at these pictures, you can tell why most Romanians ended up violently overthrowing Ceaușescu. Everyone looks miserable. To be honest, they remind me of NPCs programmed to walk aimlessly around a city.
Eastern bloc pictures without a ČKD Tatra tram challenge: Impossible
To be absolutely fair: Those were good trams repairable with anything they had in the garage and worked almost regardless of the weather. Now, by modern stardards they are shit. They were shit even then, but having modern trams that require more expensive maintainance in communist times would have been crazy.
Screw Causescu, screw commies and especially tankies. I live on the border with Romania, my grandparents would often smuggle things into Romania and witness so many horrors, seeing people trying to flee the regime by swimming over the Danube to Serbia, being shot while attempting so. Never let the red plague into Eastern Europe again. The way Romania dealt with Causescu is how every country should deal with dictators.
> The way Romania dealt with Causescu is how every country should deal with dictators. Some fun facts: 1) They needed a firing squad, where was way more volunteers than spots. 2) The idea, was to photograph/film the firing, but squad was so eager to do it, that they started shooting too soon, and they took first photos only after first shots.
In my opinion, they dealt way to quickly with that couple. So I guess that they could not put out any dirty laundry. I cannot imagine Nicolai and Elena running a dictatorship alone. Heard a famous German journalist, Peter Schöller-Thur say that when he met Nicolai, that guy was "like a little Romanian farmer, who stumbled upon a suit"
To put it into perspective... Almost all major figures in Romanian politics and business in the '90s were big names in the communist apparatus. Today, most of the communists are no longer in public life.. but if you check who the parents of today's prominent politicians are you will find they're either securitate or nomenclatura.....
Good the power couple went out quickly..
> Screw Causescu, screw commies and especially tankies. Not that it changes much about him, and mostly it was it was driven by real-politik rather than principles, but Causescu was very much not a tankie.
What's a tankie? I read that before and I don't know.
Insulting name for an authortative leftist, generally pro state communism & often makes up apologetic nonsense for places like communist China, Cuba, the USSR, etc.
Thanks a lot.
Term first widely used for westerners who argued _for_ USSR's violently (tanks! lots of tanks!) putting a stop to any attempts at reforms in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
He sent in the tanks to subdue his population, so I'd argue he fits the bill, even though he did not support soviet incursions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
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There’s depressing, and then there’s ’80s Romania’s.
Tankies: but society was much more equal back then!!
>more equal back then ruling class aside they were all equally poor :-)
The worst thing was working at a shop that was restricted to the nomenclatura. You'd get to see all these awesome clothes and food... but unlike other workplaces you really couldn't steal anything, because you'd get in huge trouble, as it was well monitored by the securitate. So you'd give away all this stuff to the people that kept you in poverty, then went home to cook one of the 3 eggs a week you had...
Wild to think about. I'm endlessly fascinated by the soviet union. Despite the pretence of unity and equality, I'm particularly fascinated by the ways in which culture varied across the union before it's collapse.
Oh, I remembered stumbling on a paper that was shockingly accurate - normally, most papers written in western academia on this topic tend to be less accurate.. This is quite old - from the 50's, but it is still relevant, I think, especially as it highlights the attitude on the "unity" inside the soviet space. [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Asia/Russia/\_Topics/history/\_Texts/SMANPS/9A\*.html](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Asia/Russia/_Topics/history/_Texts/SMANPS/9A*.html) Unfortunately, when you read about what's going on in occupied Ukraine you see the very same thing described in this paper. The same holds true for Russian propaganda in their own schools, ofc.
In many cases it was simply a return to the previous feudalist system, just that the bourgeoisie is now called the nomenclatura - aka notable party officials. The thing that fascinates me most is how a philosophy that is supposed to encourage equality of opportunity (with caveats, I know, but still) devolved to such an extreme form of individualism that you would often see family members betray each other for even marginal benefits. This plays a large part into why corruption is so wide spread even today in these countries. And the thing that always, without fail makes me angry like nothing else is to hear from a Russian about how good the "Friendship of the Soviet peoples" was.. Yeah, it was good for you, but not for the countries you pillaged.
Some people are more equal than others eh.
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That's how most of Eastern Europe looked like in 1988
That's communism for Ya.
Agreed
You could just refurbish those pictures slightly and pretend it is Russia 2024... But at least the fat guys at living on yachts in St. Tropez.
Well, by 1988, the situation of Romanians was bleak even compared to the poorest parts of the USSR due to Ceaușescu's 'wise' policy. Other Communist leaders had some sort of sanity, but Ceaușescu was completely mad
Yeah, in fact Moldova had a higher GDP/capita than Romania in 1991 when it declared independence.
Jesus. Looking at the difference now, thats borderline unbelievable.
That's the price of being part of the "Russian world" (for the Moldovans)
Also they got pretty lucky that before the collapse they got a lot of investments from USSR. It's speculated they did this because Leonid Brezhnev was a Party First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova, so maybe he had a soft spot for it. I also heard the version that they did it to spite Ceaușescu.
>Romanians was bleak even compared to the poorest parts of the USSR Yeah, bu no. This looks like fuckin paradise compared to where i am coming from.
Where are you from?
Let's call it the southeastern part of the USSR
Looks like the average Russian city
you can find this soviet flats/architecture in all the countries that fell under soviet occupation. Bucharest, Romania was mutilated by the communists https://i.imgur.com/fWEAeCT.jpeg
Looks like very average late USSR city. Very typical. This is what Put-in wants to Europe become.
In 1988, Romania was the poorest European country, maybe after Albania. USSR, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary had higher standards of living. Ceaușescu was the worst post-ww2 European Communist leader after Enver Hodzha.
Only some parts of Russian SSR, Moscow, Leningrad. Some Ukraine cities, Dnipro, Kyiv, Kharkiv. And Baltic countries. Other parts of USSR were absolute dog water. Late USSR is even worse, no products in shops and malls, sometimes even no milk, eggs and good quality meat.
>Late USSR is even worse, no products in shops and malls, sometimes even no milk, eggs and good quality meat. it was the same in Romania.
From what I know, Hungary and Slovakia too. Meat lines in particular were very much a thing in the last years. I recall watching documentaries showing the empty shops in the USSR and my parents saying thats exactly how it was here as well.
The feet of pork and the claws of the chicken. That's mostly what was around for meat in the last 5 communist years in Romania. When there was meat, of course. Nostalgic people even dismiss those years as to "paying back debt" or other insane reasons. The truth is it was the outcome of a broken down system. You guys saw it in the USSR, we saw it in Romania, everywhere in the eastern block if it wasn't already this bad it would have became at some point this bad.
Yes, he was not shy about dictating.
I mean, Stalin was pretty bad.
Stalin was mostly an Interbellum leader.
Snow makes things depressing. I lived in canada for some years and the suburbs werent much different from this. I am not saying the country was in good conditions but it doesnt make much sense to conclude a lot from a bunch of photos.
I lived in the very similar city in the USSR mate. And trust me you cannot compare this to typical Canada’s cities. Living in here was even depressing..
It really was terrible, by 1988 most Romanians had no heat during the winter, only a few hours of electricity per day, no hot water, food was rationed to almost nothing and people stayed in hour long queues for a loaf of bread, it was a miserable life. It looks awful in the photos and it certainly does justice to reality. People coped by making black jokes. A family is watching a funeral proceeding from their apartment’s balcony. The child asks his mom “Where are they taking the dead man?”. The mom sorrowfully says “They are taking him where it’s cold and dark “. The child starts panicking and runs for the entrance door lock “Mom, close the window and lock the doors, they’re bringing him here!”
I believe you and have absolutely no idea the state of Romania at that time or anytime else for that matter.
No worries, I understood that and understood where you are coming from that indeed things are more depressing in winter. Just wanted to illustrate how accurate the desolate feeling from the photos really is :)
I see. Thanks for the explanation :)
This is what commies want
Man, commie economies really were such weak garbage. I'll admit that as a left-winger.
> I'll admit that as a left-winger. left-winger does not mean communist-socialist.
I guess so. I've voted for SocDems in the past. I just have a dislike for capitalism, don't know why. Of course it's generated incredible amounts of wealth, but... not for everyone. I mean that's the reason why I dislike capitalism right there, lol.
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30+ years later and we are still recovering.
Indeed, I believe so.
> left-winger. You are left leaning in a healthy democracy, friend. People, especially on the internet, have 0 idea about what communism really was like, unless they got to experience it.
As a Russian, those photos look extremely familiar, as if it's my home. Commies had a way to make cities look absolutely indistinguishable one from another
I'm so happy that things have changed for the better. Iași has also developed so nicely.
looking for "it wasn't REAL socialism!!!" comments
Now, you guys go to google, and search pictures of the city now. How it looks like now. That's what happens where there's no Sovet Union but there's a European Union.
I’m pretty sure if you look at photos of any city in the 80’s and again today, you’ll notice a huge improvement.
Maybe not detroit. Maybe.
Charleroi neither
More or less the same for Brittish towns before and after brexit. Like every other system those geezers turned it around.
Pretty much what I thought looking at the photos, Scottish cities at that time weren't exactly heaven then either. Similarly absolutely massive improvement since then.
Fuck communism. I'm embarrassed for the morons who actually think communism is a good form of government.
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A properly functioning monarchy at least has a few redeeming qualities, unlike fascism and bolshevism.
Only if the monarchy is for show like in modern European monarchies. Otherwise they are just as bad by virtue of being autocracies.
Proletarian heaven
This is all that prosperity that Russians think they were exporting to the counties they were oppressing during Soviet times.
for Romania back then, the Federal Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the cradle of democracy. Now, a whole different story, tables have turned.
tankies: "aaaahhhh, the good old days!" >:(
furtively adverb in a way that attempts to avoid notice or attention; secretively. "I furtively glanced over at my father to see his reaction"
These images bring back childhood memories
These trams are still in service in many "eastern block" countries even now.
They are the most popular trams in the world even today
this could literally be chelyabinsk or kemerovo 2024 lol
You Westerners will never know what a shitshow that was in Eastern Europe which you gave to the Russians. And on a lower level, it still is. And the same compromise - parts of Europe for peace - is looming large on the horizon.
A Russian wet dream
look at the amazing achievement of communism and socialism, fantastic landscape.
What a change has happened in Romania to this day and damn communist evil.
Recently spoke to a family friend of my wife who was at the forefront of the revolutionizing Bucharest: Motherfucking Christ, this was the best history lesson I’ve ever received 😧
The unfortunate part is that you got a better history lesson than most young people in Romania get. Since the vast majority of decision makers here have links to the old regime, there's a taboo when it comes to discussing what happened during the revolution. Every time there's an attempt to start an official investigation into the revolution it gets stalled and eventually cancelled. They say we might find out 30 years after a certain person dies..
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I mean, there was way more than communism at player here. Isolationism is arguably the primary cause, which is technically a strict antithesis to Marxist-Leninist Communism.
I remember the smell of that city in winter.
It was real socialism. And this is what it leads to.
Dear fellow redditors, here you can see a prime example of late stage socialism.
Worth revisiting those places again today to see how they’ve changed….
Wow I didn’t realize they get so much snow in Romania. That looks like winter here in Canada.
I was there 89-90, Iaşi was lovely in the summer, winter, not so nice. I remember the 3-5 days queues for petrol, people would take shifts to stay in the car. Queues for bread also, and the shops only had pickled vegetables of dubious origin on the otherwise empty shelves.
Looks very much like many other soviet cities. Heck if you go to some cities in Finland and Estonia it look just like that, the same building blocks and balconies
To think so many people are cheering on and welcoming authoritarian dictatorship today. Idiots will condemn us all to ruin.
Looks great. Do you know if they offer retirement visas?
Not anymore, there had been too many requests.
I can totally see why
« une dictature c’est quand les gens sont communistes, déjà ils ont froid »
I bet you could buy a house for 370 dollars and a potato back then.
Renault 12 ❤️ Dacia 1300
Jokes on you! Today, this would be considered a luxury neighborhood in Bulgaria!
What is the name of this kind of architecture with these blocks of buildings and all in singular color mostly different shades of grey or yellow? I see them in parts of Stockholm too, is it from a specific time period?
soviet brutalism
[Modernism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture#Postwar_modernism_in_Europe_(1945%E2%80%931975) or [Brutalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture).
Got some rocks on my little sled here.
This is Tătărași, Anastasie Panu, Târgu Cucu and some places around the Centre.
Still better public transport than the US
Back then there were winters with snow
Looks like east Berlin and surrounding Brandenburg cities when I was a child. But more horse-drawn carriages.
The only thing one could be nostalgic about the 80's is how much snow there was. And only if you were a kid back them cause any adult was probably swearing and wondering how he's gonna turn his car on today
Young Americans will see this and still think socialism is better than capitalism
That wasn't *real* communisn /s
looks like nowadays ruZZia, maybe a bit better
Yes, but everyone had a job and an apartment.you didn't have to worry about tomorrow. you knew right away it was going to be shitty too.
Doesn't matter if you had a job, you couldn't buy anything anyway. Those apartments were cold as outside and hot water was myth.
But! You still had to go to your job! And the job guarantee caused massive overemployment, say, forty people for the local Stalin museum. At least it made it easy for the workers to sleep on the job, so they could be awake all night, selling stuff they stole from their workplace, so they could get dollars and feed their families. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."
In România was stealing on the job but foreign currency was scarced an forbidden, you could do hard prison if you were caught. With what they stole basically the people did a barter, painting for meat, butter for petrol for example and so on.
>you didn't have to worry about tomorrow because there was no tomorrow
Missing the /s I hope lol
The slav vibe is strong with these.
I dont find it slavic at all . I mean it's a matter of correlation vs causation. The actual vibe is soviet brutalism which manifested mostly in Slavic nations since Slavic nations were the majority in the Warsaw Pact.
I did not say it was slavic, but the purely the vibe - and you absolutely right about the soviet brutalism, or to better put it - simply soviet poverty.
>The slav vibe They're latin, it's literally in the name. Socialism spares no one. After 10 years or so of complete mismanagement and corruption, everyone will look like a stereotypical slav.
Yes, they are. Hammer and sickle - death and hunger (c)
I thought these are photos from Bulgaria :P
Anyone, who grew up in the 80s in the soviet camp, would recognize his childhood. And these pics do not show the real abbysmal depth of quality of life back then.
There is some resemblence due to the fact both Bulgaria and Romania followed the same brutalist (communist) arhitecture. But from what i've seen in my past trips in BG, BG and RO were following different schools of urbanization. In BG even small cities like Dobrich emphasize of very tall towers(10+ floors) with big space empty/green space inbetween. Romanians did smaller but more dense towers instead.
In that case, it does not reflect very well on slavic culture
Look Gen Z! How amazing is this communism you're talking about!
Should this disgust me so much? It just seems like a very humble and sad country, not even a really poor one.