Darclé
A Retrospective on Communist Romania and its Parallels to Today By Eric Militaru (20 min)
Iron Curtain
My name is Darclé. I was born under the communist regime in Romania in 1962, so I lived in Romania for 38 years, and then we chased our dream of living a better life in Canada. Communism as a little history lesson: The countries under the Russian influence after the Second World War, when the big powers divided their sphere of influence. So, there were a lot of Eastern European countries that fell under the Russian influence, and the communist parties were following the Communist dogma that was different a little bit from country to country, but they were pretty much the same thing… Following a fearless leader that was a strong man. Everything is in quotes obviously. Nobody could say or do anything except what the party was doing and saying. It was just one party in power and that was it. More like a not like a king, but they were the dictators. Life was, let's say, normal in some ways, but for example, on TV you wouldn't see anything but what the party was agreeing with. You wouldn't have any news of what's happening outside. The west was the Big Boogeyman, the scary thing, the imperialists that wanted to do bad to us. The propaganda was everywhere and all the time, it was continuous. You had some here and there, some music, some shows, some movies coming from the Americas, but in the 70s and 80s, the only thing that we would see would be Westerns and the big show that we would wait every Saturday would be Dallas. And everybody was at home watching the series, because it was interesting for us to see how the rich people in the US are living, and [we were] dreaming maybe about it. We would have forbidden radio stations like Voice of America and Free Europe. It was a life. We would go about our business work, having fun as young people, parties and listened to music that was brought into the country on the low down. People would bring it out through the border somehow. Like I don't know. They were like when the video recorders were invented and they came late into our country, like you would have the big video cassettes coming, and they were like smuggled pretty much. We would have parties with a video at somebody's house. Somebody had the video like the big machine thing and we would come to somebody's house, and we would be 1020 people in, in a living room watching movies continuously for a whole night. That was a highlight for us.
Overtime, voices of dissent — they were there all the time — but they needed a spark, and the spark came with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Right? So, that's when everybody started to think, “okay, we can do this, so let's start doing it.” First, we should go a little bit back because, in the beginning. In the beginning, or when I was 10 years old or something. So in the 70s, life wasn't bad except for the politics and the thing, life wasn't bad. We had everything that we needed, we had resources in the country to sustain ourselves and we had food, we had everything but then the dictator, Ceaușescu, wanted to pay his debts to the to the West. As a country, we had some debts. We didn't import anything. We didn't have anything to pay our debts, and we started not having food. If you want to have a parallel, what that meant was like if you think of COVID times when you didn't find toilet paper on the shelves. We didn't have anything on the shelves like all the shelves in the grocery stores were empty. There was nothing. we would sit in a line because we knew that there's a truck coming with food to our grocery store in the morning, but we didn't know what what's going to be brought. So we would sit in the line nighttime like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. People will be in the line waiting for the store to open the truck to come and we would get something. Whatever was brought, we would get and then there would be rations. We would have one bread per week for a family, 1 kilogram of flour per month. Meat, 1 kilogram of meat per month for family of whatever 2-3 people. So it was it was harsh. It was hard and I was living in the capital, and we were having the good life in comparison with the people in the country and in the other cities that were not the capital.
The Spark
One Saturday night where I was partying, my husband, we were dancing. And it's funny. I remembered it so vividly. We were dancing Lambada, and we were having fun at the party and then all of a sudden we realized that in another city, a border city in Timisoara, people actually revolted and started the revolution. And then it came the next day to Bucharest and everywhere. Well, the regime brought the tanks on the streets with the military, and they [the people] actually blocked the tanks and then the military turned with the people. And it wasn't bloody. People died, but it wasn't like a bloody mess when the people fought with the army. Early on the army turned with the people. And then Ceaușescu and his wife went with the helicopter. They, I think, wanted to go to Iran, but they were caught. They were given a tribunal, put to justice and but to death pretty much. This is the whole history, and from then on it started the process of democracy, which was slow. When the demonstrations on the streets of Bucharest that night were there. He [Vlad (Darcle’s first born)] was a year and seven months old or 10 months old and I could not go out. I would have. I would have been the first one out there, but I could not let him by himself at home so I could not take him with me. So I stayed at home, and I was watching from the balcony how the tanks were passing by our Blvd. I was telling him, “Look, these are the tanks. These are the tanks that are the army, and they wanted to kill people. But now they're with us and everybody, like remember that” I don't think he remembers anything. But it was a teaching moment from me at that point. This is history, you know. And yeah, my husband then went to the demonstration there and it was electrifying. To see all the people coming together and having this feeling of victory. And okay, we did this. We are free. We could, we could do a good thing now. It's emotional still.
The Parallels
So in regards to what's happening now, I was dumbfounded by what happened yesterday. Between Zelensky and Trump, and you could see the “strong man” persona that Trump wants to show, and it's exactly what Putin is. Exactly what he tries to project, and that's his strategy. And if you ask me, it's shameful that a head of state like Zelensky, who's in in a state of war and his people are dying be shamed like that and talked [to] like that. It's absolutely ridiculous, and so that's how a dictator or autocrat behaves. For him, he's the bigger man, the stronger man, the one that has all the cards in hands. His words right? Ah, and nothing else counts. Nothing else matters. From the whole beginning of his presidency, we could see the signs of going towards that. I'm kind of scared for the American people to be honest, that not everybody wants that, and if they're not doing anything now to put a stop to it, you never know where they'll go. Because it's so obvious [that] everybody is kissing the ring. Everybody around him is talking to him like he's a deity. That was the same thing with Ceaușescu and it's the same thing with Putin now, and like nobody can say a bad word towards him because they would be either thrown in jail or thrown outside the door of their job and everything. So there's this megalomaniac uh, persona. Kind of thing, and the idea that I am God. It's exactly what a dictator does and has. It's a psychological thing. It's a mind thing. So and it's ridiculous to say the least that it happens in the United States of America. Like I cannot believe, and the fact that he's like throwing around that 51 state about Canada and that made Canadians to actually feel very proud of being Canadians. I feel very proud of being Canadian too. So yes, there are a lot of parallels between what's happening now and what happened before. And we have to not give in.