Comrade

Such is the man. Such is the political leader. Such is Ceauşescu, the president who accepts no honour other than that of leading his people, like Moses, to the promised land of prosperity and independence.

M.-P. HAMELET,
Le Figaro journalist, 1971

How to describe him. He is incredible statistics, exponential graphs, constantly increasing production of wheat and vegetables, spectacular growth for the country. He is the vigour, the director, the driver, the beacon. He doesn’t take sides between China and the USSR, participates in the preparations for the Helsinki Accords, talks even-handedly to West and East Germany, receives Arafat without breaking with Israel after the Six-Day War. On 15 August 1968 he leaves for Prague to offer his support to Dubček, and on his return declares to a huge crowd in Bucharest, ‘Romania condemns the invasion of Russian tanks in Czechoslovakia!’ Romania. Condemns. These two words never before placed alongside each other are applauded as far away as the United States. In France, General de Gaulle congratulates himself on this ‘healthy breeze blowing in the east’ and awards him the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. Delighted with the reception he receives in Bucharest, Nixon emphasizes the obvious similarities between the United States and Romania.

There were the Eastern and the Western blocs. He slips between the two, finds a way between one and the other.

What to call him? Comrade seems too familiar for someone who, the moment he was appointed president, ordered an architect to design a regal sceptre for the inauguration. General Secretary of the Communist Party, President of the State Council, President of the Socialist Republic and Supreme Helmsman, all rolled into one. He is the engineer of the future, he constructs the narrative in which they are all to live. He holds out his hand to you: take your place in the story, become part of whatever I imagine. The Comrade talks without even taking time to pause for breath. He declaims, proclaims. The Comrade takes all the parts, and the public applauds. He is resistance against the Russians! He is redis-covered national pride! The man who can dialogue with Western heads of state! Their modern partner, an Eastern Kennedy who nonetheless does not disregard traditions, a monarch from the Middle Ages surrounded by his knights dressed in medieval garb for the national feast day. He is celebrated, feted by poets and writers who sing his praises as ‘the planet’s pre-eminent thinker’, ‘the one who has breathed life back into life’, ‘the thinking pole star, the Danube of thought’. And everyone participates in the building of this new enterprise that is Romania, everybody has a role to play, a message to hold aloft in the stadiums, long live our beloved Conducător!

The country is a rough, shapeless cloth in urgent need of restoration, a filthy peasant’s rag. A cloth that ends up adopting whatever shape it is given, but which loses its shape so quickly it has to be repaired constantly… the rhythm accelerates, we have to make sure that the narrative is the one the Comrade has created, without any errors: legions of revisers and correctors read the articles printed in Scînteia, the national daily, to make sure his name, cited more than thirty times on each page, is spelled properly. CEAUȘESCU.

It is not only words that are needed, but images as well: children. Dressed in white, holding their hands out to him, radiant. And towards her, Comrade Elena, that triumph of will and progress, a woman of humble physique and origins who has become ‘the greatest scientist of international renown’, covered in diplomas thanks to her thesis on polymers, obtained in secret at a university barred to students and guarded by police. Elena, ‘honourable engineer, doctor, head of the National Council of Science and Technology’, the New Woman, mother and at the same time minister of Science, Education, Justice and Health, Elena, around whom flutter the doves released before the filming of the countless reports devoted to her. And the lustrous Nadia is the sign of their success, the New Child they applaud because now she is the spectacle.

‘You’ve done your research,’ she says after a prolonged silence… ‘I’m not saying that what you’ve written did not exist, but you’ve analysed it a posteriori. It was very different to how you describe it. This will shock you, because I know the certainties your supposed liberal democracies have about these things… but there was also a kind of… joy in the 1970s, even though that doesn’t change anything, obviously. I detest the films and novels that talk about eastern Europe, all those clichés. Grey streets. Grey people. The cold. When I tell Westerners that in Bucharest in summer the heat is stifling, they look at me as if I were off my head, even nowadays! Let’s try not to make my life or those years into a bad, simplistic movie. Goodnight to you.’

She hangs up so speedily I don’t get the chance to tell her about my meeting with Mihaela G., a sociologist who explains to me why gymnastics so quickly became a priority sport for those in power in Romania: the gymnasts didn’t eat very much, they were very profitable; too young to have an opinion about what was going on in their country, they were not going to ask for asylum whenever they had a meet in the West.

The little girl from Oneşti brings glory to Romania from the tips of her gym shoes, she makes communism sparkle in the picture-postcard image of a pure white leotard with a red star, the purity of her appetite for hard work is venerated in a West desperate for a secular angel.

The Russians fascinated the whole world with their Sputnik, and they and the United States are bound to keep their military superiority. For its part, Romania makes of the ones Béla likes to call his ‘little girl missiles’ the most adorably fascinating show on earth thanks to his supreme weapon: the bomb Nadia C., who performs what American specialists describe as ‘pure madness, a biomechanical impossibility’. Until, that is, the chief choreographer himself becomes irritated at this tiny shadow who puts him in the shade: Ceauşescu, Mihaela tells me, gives an order in 1981 for singing, dancing and gymnastics competitions to be held throughout Romania in order to obliterate the image of the heroic youngster he himself crowned.