A red's white elephant: in Ceausescu's palace, gigantism and heartache

National Review, June 6, 2005 by Anthony Daniels

THERE is no building in the world more philosophically instructive than the Palatul Parlamentului--formerly the Casa Poporului--in Bucharest. It is worth going all the way to Romania just to see it, for it has layers of meaning that provide an almost infinite scope for reflection. No one who has not seen it can grasp the full potential of human megalomania.

It is 15 years since the downfall and death of Ceausescu, the man who instigated the construction of this colossal edifice and its surrounding Centru Civic, destroying a wide swathe of old Bucharest in the process; and it is a testimony to the incompetence and venality of the local politicians ever since the revolution that nostalgia for the rule of the Romanian Nebuchadnezzar is by no means uncommon. One of his sons has even been asked to stand for president.

Facts about the Palatul Parlamentului tend to come in several versions, often expressed with unjustified confidence in their truth--for example, that 600, 700, and even 7,000 architects were employed in its construction. When the guide tells you that 20,000 people worked night and day on the palace for five years before Ceausescu's death, though, you believe him; just as you would believe him if he told you that 40,000, or even 80,000 people, had worked to construct it. The scale is such that it bears no relation to anything by which you might judge such information. Besides, the details don't really matter. What does it matter if a chandelier has 5,000 or 7,000 globes in a country in which, at the time of construction, the electricity supply was intermittent at best and the president publicly announced that the ideal room temperature in winter was 50 degrees, while 1,000 calories per day were really all that anyone needed to eat?

The exterior of the building looks like the set of an epic film by D. W. Griffith, which is to say not quite real; its style is Hollywood Babylonian. The upper stories are given over to bureaucratic offices (or so we are told), and many of the glass panes of the windows have been replaced by wood. How were they broken, or did they just fall out? While sabotage by bitter bureaucrats is of course a distinct possibility, the latter seems to me more probable, for when you look closely at the construction you see that the workmanship is of the lowest possible standard. There are cracks everywhere; nothing was a matter of pride for the workers, everything a matter of fulfilling a quota with the least possible effort. The wall around the grounds is as uneven as the ground itself. An earth tremor might bring the whole thing tumbling down into a huge pile of rubble; perhaps it wouldn't even require a tremor.

Inside, three stories only are of marble, but the rooms, the staircases, and the corridors are of unparalleled size. The style is classicizing, if not exactly classical. Costa-Gavras, the radical Greco-French filmmaker, used the interior as the set for the Vatican scenes of his film Amen, in which he accused the Vatican of complicity in the Holocaust.

The largest of these rooms is the ballroom, 200 feet high and with a plaster niche at each end to bear colossal portraits of Ceausescu, which fortunately were never painted. How much like dancing anyone would have felt under their gaze is something we shall now never know. Once again the workmanship is poor and crude, despite an apparently unlimited budget. It won't be long before crumbling starts in earnest. The fact is that, even under the direct gaze of the dictator, nothing of any refinement could be produced in a Communist dictatorship. The skills to do so had been lost, because the motive to do so had been lost.

Gimcrack workmanship seems to have been something of a 20th-century tradition in Romania, though, at least as far as public monuments were concerned. In the beginning of her famous trilogy about Romania in the period immediately before the war, Olivia Manning observed of the reconstruction of the Royal Palace: "At either end of the palace workmen had started screwing pieces of pre-fabricated classical facade on to scaffolding. And the first version of Bucharest's triumphal arch had fallen down: It had been built ... by a fraudulent contractor who had used inferior cement. When it fell down, the contractor was put in prison."

There were other parallels with Ceausescu's efforts. King Carol II had wanted to make the square in front of his palace large and regular. He had buildings pulled down to this end: "These buildings had been almost the last of the Biedermeier prettiness bestowed on Bucharest by Austria. The King, who planned a square where, dared he ever venture out so openly, he might review a regiment, had ordered that the demolitions be completed before winter." Describing some of this demolition, Manning wrote, "Nearby could be seen the red wallpaper of a cafe--the famous Cafe Napoleon that had been a meeting-place of artists, musicians, poets, and other natural non-conformists. Guy [a character in the novel] had said that all this destruction had been planned simply to wipe out this one centre of revolt."