The song remains the same - former Communists surface in positions of new power in Romania

National Review, March 5, 1990 by Noel Malcolm

THERE IS A POPULAR and old-fashioned Rumanian toy, a wooden doll with a lead-weighted, hemispherical base. Knock them over and they pop back up again. These toys have been featured more than once in Rumanian newspaper cartoons in recent weeks, in recognition of the extraordinary ability of old Communists to pop up again in positions of new power.

Of course, there are Communists and Communists. Membership of the Party was a formality for most people, a minor but necessary qualification for pursuing any sort of career. "It was like having a driving license," one former dissident told me-though with 23 per cent of the adult population as Party members, a Rumanian was far more likely to own a membership card than a car. Students who joined the Party were automatically given a higher grade on their final examination; with the allocation of jobs depending strictly on these grades.

Were there any real Communists in the Party? Again, it depends on what you mean by Communist. A crudely Communist set of assumptions about how the world worked underlay all the Ceausescu regime's policies. But most of those who carried the policies out were crawlers, hacks, and henchmen, people who had chosen a Party career purely because that was the route to privilege and power. In- Moscow and Belgrade you can still find senior Communists who seriously believe in the Marxist theory of the state; but Rumania under Ceauseseu was more like a country taken over by the Mafia, and there is little point in asking a Godfather's sidekicks to define the theoretical bases of mafiosismo.

THE REAL PROBLEM lies not with the corrupt careerists, but with the handful of intelligent Communists who really did believe in what they were doing-who were thereby brought into conflict, inevitably, with Ceausescu, and who are now at the heart of the interim government. The new President, Ion Iliescu, for example, is certainly an intelligent man. Those who knew him in the period (1974-79) when he was demoted to work as provincial first secretary in the northeastern city of Iasi told me that he was the model of a decent technocrat. But the attempt to present him as a man without ideological baggage is unconvincing. He was an idealistic Communist youth leader in the 1950s, a Ceausescuite in the Central Committee apparatus throughout the 1960s, and was promoted to secretary for ideology in 1971. He fell out with Ceauseseu later that year, but only because he thought his plans for a miniCultural Revolution were a diversion from the true Communist path. He stood for the Politburo again in 1974, and remained on the Central Committee until as recently as 1984.

Silviu Brucan, the eminence grise of the National Salvation Front, had been out of favor longer. His early career is more discreditable, however, because he held his high offices (acting editor of the Party newspaper, then ambassador to the U.S. and the UN) during the period of brutal Communist takeover and Stalinist terror. He is deliberately vague now about his ideological commitments: asked recently by a British journalist whether he saw a middle way for Rumania between Communism and capitalism, he replied that he hated isms," and that the middle way was an "ism" too. But it is worth remembering that the letter of protest to Ceausescu which made him famous in March 1989 began with the words, At a time when the very idea of socialism, for which we have fought, is discredited by your policy . . ." William Pfaff, who published Brucan's letter in the West, records that one of the signatories showed him another letter which they had also prepared, "arguing that multi-party government was inappropriate for Rumania today, but calling for pluralism inside the Rumanian Communist Party." Communism modified by pluralism: that, then, is the range of Mr. Brucan's isms," and their order of priority.

According to sources in the Council of the National Salvation Front, it was Mr. Brucan who argued most forcefully in favor of the decision to put the Front forward as a party to contest the national elections in May. It was this decision that led to the huge antiFront demonstrations on January 28, and to the violent counter demonstrations which ended by ransacking the headquarters of the newly revived National Liberal Party. The opposition parties' claims that the Front was turning into a replica of the old Communist Party thus became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Front organized its counter demonstration by bringing in truckloads of workers from outlying factories, in exactly the same manner (and probably the same trucks) as the Communist Party had done in the past. events has temporarily cleared the air. The new interim government is officially separate from the Party organization of the Front, and it includes representatives of all thirty opposition parties. (Mr. Iliescu's glee, incidentally, at the fragmentation of the opposition into such an absurd quantity of parties was unconcealed when he faced the cameras to announce these new arrangements.) As a symbolic compromise, this is better than nothing. As a piece of power-sharing it is meaningless, since real decision-making power continues to reside with an inner Executive Committee (along classic Communist Party lines).