This reminds me of Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption.
With respect to crime in the former Eastern Bloc, it seems logical that the breakdown of the state led to an increase in crime just like it would everywhere, especially in a society with pervasive corruption, but I will note that one of the world’s worst serial killers was active in Rostov from the '70s to 1990. The Killer Department is a book which details the hunt for this man, Andrei Chikatilo, and points out that in one year during that period in Rostov, there were 400 murders (unrelated to Chikatilo).
The position of criminals is complicated in that kind of regime. The same is true in South Africa. They play on a kind of Robin Hood status as bucking the system - even if (s I suspect was true at least in Russia) they relied on the system too, like the corrupt sheriff running the only moonshine still in the dry county. Eventually the black market became strong enough to become just The Market and didn’t need ‘Communism’ any more.
As far as birth control goes, it depends where you are. ‘Socialist’ measures like unemployment pay and child support often did not exist under Communism: you had a legal duty to work and the State told you where; only a married woman might opt out to run a home and children. Contraception was nowhere very good but abortion was available. It would be interesting to see just how much that has changed in Romania because both Orthodox and Catholic churches have been fighting something of a turf war there. The Catholic influence in Poland as formerly a kind of unofficial opposition has restricted birth control and abortion much more than in Communist times (something similar to what happened in Ireland where Catholicism had been seen as affirming national identity opposed to Britain).
Abortion was a leading (if the the leading) form of birth control in the Soviet Union. Real contraceptives could be hard to find and were often of low quality (I’ve heard Soviet diaphragms refered to as “tire quality”.
No, I'm not living in Romania anymore. I've lived in Bucharest untill 2004 (college + another 2 years). Never liked the city itself too much, but overall was quite fun (college + friends + parties + big city = always something new and interesting to do :) ). Bucharest is not a destination for tourists, there is not much to see (except for that big, ugly, megalomaniacal People's House, but I guess you couldn't visit it due to the 40 or so presidents being in there due to that NATO summit). It can be fun, though, if you're in the right company.
OTOH, Bucharest is a “fine” example of typical socialist “architecture”: poorly designed and built apartment blocks, not enough parks, buildings crowded into each other…
Strangely enough, I cannot comment on differences/similarities between Romania and Bulgaria. I’ve never been to Bulgaria (my maternal grandparents village is 10 km from the Danube and the bulgarian city on the other side of the river - Silistra - can be easily seen from their backyard…but I never set foot in Bulgaria.)
Actually, I think it matters quite a lot from where to where this transition goes.
In communism, the number of choices one had to make was limited. Do you want a car or not? You had (almost) no choice about its engine, number of doors or even its color. Do you want an apartment? The state will give you one (technically speaking, you were renting it from the state, but the rent was very small), but again, you had no choice about the number of rooms, location, balcony and so on. Do you want a job? Sure enough, the state will have one for you, in a location of his choosing. Of course, some of the jobs, apartments and cars were better than others, but usually the access to those was based on how many important people you (or your family) knew, not on your own merits. One’s creativity and resources was generally put into extending and maintaining this network of well placed people, party members, etc.
When democracy arrived, things changed dramatically. Suddenly, you were supposed to have clear goals and to make plans for yourself on order to achieve them. You were supposed to make choices all the time, and about everything. You had to find yourself a “market” for your skills and talents, and take steps to improve them if necessary. In short, this transition required a 180 degree turn in one’s mindset.
What is a “kvetching”? In case you have not noticed, romanian and bulgarian are quite different (though I strongly suspect that to a foreigner the accents are very similar. I always thought that romanian sounds like italian spoken with a bulgarian accent :rolleyes: )
The ones that are complaining the most are the two first generations, like your landlady's and the next one. People born in the 50s and early 60s were born in communism, grow up in communism and spent most of their active lives in communism. It's no wonder that they had a hard time adapting to the new realities. Then, the generation born in late 60s and 70s was only 20 years old in 1989. They were the most flexible and able to adapt quickly, either in their own country or abroad.
Yes, I think you’re right. Partly because, as you and others pointed out, when the state collapses, bad things happen. The police (former militia) was not trusted too much, since they have been an important part of the repressive communist machinery. Also, people were not at all accustomed to the idea that they had rights and the state was supposed to respect and defend them. The fact that the public functionaries (and, more generally, the state) were paid by the citizens and therefore they were at the citizens’ service was… a strange and exotic one. I remember seeing a payment flyer that my mother got from her job (this was in the 80s), and there where some “taxes” taken from her salary. So I’ve asked her:
“What are these taxes?”
“An amount I have to pay”
“To whom?”
“To the state, of course”.
“But…why? You’re paid by the state, why do the state gives you this amount and then take a part of it back?”
You see, the state was not employed by the people, but it was the employer of the people. The only employer.
Going back to the criminality, I have not doubt that it raised when the communism collapsed. What I dispute is the perception that some nostalgic people have about what “safe haven” communism was. There was simply no way to find out about violent crimes, unless someone you knew was involved.
Yes, it was specific to Romania. I guess our madman was madder than the rest of the est-european lot. Actually, their plan succeeded. Of course, this being a centralized and planned economy, one would think that the effect of this population increase would have been considered. Well, it was not the case. In the 80s, the schools where so crowded that there were 3 shifts of students daily and the duration of the classes was decreased in order to accommodate all 3 shifts into one day.
I didn’t see it yet, but I’m familiar with its subject (it won the Cannes festival 2 years ago and there was some talk around it). I don’t think that the movie is about abortion per se, more about the fucked up situations in which one could find itself in a fucked up system and the even more fucked up choices one had. The abortion issue served quite well to illustrate this point…but I didn’t see the movie, so I’ll stop here with the speculations.
OTOH, you might be interested in “Children of the decree”; it is a documentary (in english or with english subtitles, IIRC) about this very subject.
You’re also right about using abortion as a contraception method. I never understood this one, especially since condoms or birth control pills are relatively easy to fabricate. So, why the communist states didn’t encouraged more other contraceptive methods? The reason might be a very stupid one (like “latex is a very expensive product, comrade. We cannot give money to those capitalist pigs for some fucking rubber”)… Some of the communist governments where mad and strong enough to pull a “we have always been at war with Eurasia”, so some of their reasons might remain unknown. BTW, a conspiracy theorist would have had a field day back in the communist era: there was so little information and so much secrecy that everything was possible.
Didn’t see this movie either, sorry.
You have a point here, in that the black market related activities, while illegal, where not regarded as being wrong by the majority of the population. People engaged in this sort of activities where not “villains”, but no Robin Hoods either. As a side note, sailors were such a category. They where bringing from “outside” a lot of goodies (chewing gum, t-shirts, jeans, VCRs, video tapes, stereos, cigarettes, etc) and they were selling everything for a nice profit.
OTOH, violent criminals were never seen as heroes or fighters against the system, AFAIK. One notable exception is those who fought the communist regime at the end of the 40s. There was some armed resistance is the mountains, and of course they were regarded as criminals by the communists. I don’t know exactly how the general populace regarded them, though.
Speaking for Romania, there was a form of child support (a monthly allowance for each child). Actually, during Ceausescu’s last speech, he promised to increase this allowance in order to calm down the crowd. Didn’t work very well for him
You mean, what happened after '89? I’m not very knowledgeable about the current legislation, but IIRC the abortion is allowed up to the 3rd month of pregnancy. Contraception of any kind is widely available.
Unlike like the polish catholic church (which actively helped Solidarnosc, IIRC), the romanian orthodox one was much more submissive during the communist era.
My BIL grew up in communist-era Czechoslovakia. His family was well off (his father was an amy officer). They had a house, and food was not scarce; although he recalled clothing as being very expensive. The family had a car (a czech-made “Wartburg”)-it had a 20 HP engine, and could barely make 50 MPH. Parts for the car were hard to come by-most of the time, they made do with used parts from a junkyard.
Life wasn’t too bad, but getting into a university was difficult-you needed connections and friends in high places.
Keep in mind that Czechoslovakia was highly industrialized befoe WWII, and its people enjoyed a living standard comparable to Germany or France. Communist rule was bad for Czechoslovakia, but not (apparently) fatal.
“Kvetch” by the way, is not Bulgarian; it’s Yiddish - a native language of Eastern European Jews and a dialect of German - brought to America where in certain cities, like New York, it entered the popular idiom.
Kvetch = to complain, often about minor things, or repetitive way.
OP, if you can get a hold of the book “MiG Pilot,” the author Viktor Belenko tells his story of growing up in Russia, and life in the Russian military up to 1976, when he defected in rather spectacular fashion.
Svejk, you missed that I said I didn’t quite know what point Stranger was making. In fact that’s because I didn’t know whether he (or she) was just one of the many Eastern Europeans who have nostalgia for the old days, or whether he (or she) had an idiological point to make.
I’m more than willing to admit that while I try to intellectually understand how people can have nostalgia for the old days, it just doesn’t somehow make sense to me. Is it the chaos of the transition period? The DDR may have had the least confusing transition, but the nostalgia among Ossies is still very strong. My sense is that that the take-no-prisoners transition in the Soviet Union leading to the powerfull oligarchs is part of what led to the popularity of an authoritarian regime there. And that there is less nostalgia for the old days in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the successor states of Yugoslavia.
Svejk and Dan_ch, is that a correct assessment in your view?
My parents escaped from Hungary in 1956. I spent every summer of my youth from 1970 to 1985 or so in Hungary, for a total of more than 2 years. I learned to speak idiomatic Hungarian through immersion, and I maintained contact with the same core group of friends throughout those years, both in rural Hungary and in the capital, Budapest, where I live today. Some things I remember:
Budapest was quiet after 10:00 PM. There was nothing to compare with the nightlife of today. Now there are dozens of places to go until the wee hours of the morning. Back then, not so.
There was no graffiti back then, and there were no homeless.
The Russians were reviled, and jokes about them were common. Open dissent, however, was unheard of.
Armed Soviet soldiers were a common sight on city streets. Or open trucks carrying entire squads of soldiers could be seen – it was not unusual.
Television broadcasting was limited to the hours from about 4:00 PM to 11:00 or so (my guesstimate). There was no broadcast at all on Mondays.
Did you ever see the Simpson’s episode where Krusty the Clown attempts to outsource the cartoons for his show and he ends up with a Communist cartoon called “Worker and Parasite?” The production values from that cartoon were pretty accurate for Soviet-era cartoons. That is, they stunk.
Similarly, marketing and window display techniques were primitive by Western standards. A window display might be a box with a piece of cloth draped over it, with a pair of shoes on it and a lightbulb suspended overhead. Customer service was nonexistent. The employees were paid the same whether they were pleasant or not. Most chose not.
In the small town (about 8,000 people) where I spent half the summer there was one telephone that I or anyone in my family knew of. It was a pay phone, next to the bus station in the center of town. The quality of the line was completely unpredictable. But if you wanted to make a phone call, that was your only option.
In Budapest, a few (percentage-wise) people had telephones, but you had to wait years after requesting one to get it installed. And the quality of the phone lines was miserable.
Likewise with a car purchase, it usually took years. My uncle (Mom’s brother) was able to leapfrog to the head of a few lines because my father gave him dollars to use instead of the local currency. Even then it took more than a year of waiting to buy a Soviet zsiguli – Fiat knockoff. Most people did not have cars, and there was no such thing as a teen boy (or girl) working and saving up to buy a car. It just couldn’t happen. It took years and/or hard cash and/or connections to get a car.
Young pioneers wore their red kerchiefs. The red star of Communism adorned all government buildings. Streets were named after heroes of Communism or important dates in the history of the Revolution. There was a statue of Lenin in the city park, and lots of other statues celebrating worker-heroes in that (to me) grotesque style now found mostly in Tim Burton’s “Batman” movies.
Kids were taught in school (so I was told) it was unhealthy to wash their hair more than once a week. The most common kind of soap was a big brown bar (same color as the toilet paper someone mentioned above) the size of a brick.
Kids also learned Russian in school, starting fairly early and on up through high school. Few kids I knew were any good at speaking Russian. However, most were at least a couple years ahead of me in math, science, etc. So what I learned in 6th grade, they had already covered in 4th grade.
Many (most?) women did not shave their legs, and certainly not their armpits.
There was a day after birth control pill available by the mid 80’s. Many things we needed prescriptions for in the US were available over the counter in Hungary.
One time we got into a heated discussion at my grandmother’s house about the differences between the US and the Soviet systems. My grandmother told us to lower our voices because the next-door neighbor was a bigtime Communist. I don’t think we would have been jailed or anything, but she didn’t want us to call attention to ourselves with the authorities.
Police were reviled and made fun of even more so than the Russian/Soviet oppressors. The police had a reputation for stupidity and brutality.
Hungarians over 14 had to carry a person identification card – basically an internal passport – at all times, and police could stop you and make you produce your card at any time for any reason or for no reason. I do not know what the penalty was for not having you ID on you, but I know everyone made it a habit to carry their ID with them. You didn’t want to give the police any excuse to live up to their reputation.
I heard stories from people about how it was unsafe to go out on the streets of the US at night because of all the gunfire. This was despite the fact that much popular TV programming came from the US. My grandmother was a big fan of “Columbo”.
Milk came in plastic bags. There was no peanut butter (one of the staples of my US diet). It was a huge breakthrough (for me) when pizza arrived in the early 80’s. Likewise, Western-style cereal didn’t show up for a long time.
I, as a young teen, and kids far younger than myself, routinely traveled throughout Budapest, a city of 2 million, on public transport without concern for our safety.
I guess I could keep going. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about those days.
From what I can see today, the nostalgia for the past breaks down along generational lines. People over a certain age remember what it was like to be free from worry. Under the socialists, everyone had a job and a roof over their head. It wasn’t a good job, and it wasn’t a good roof. But at least they could count on one. Now there are no more guarantees. I can understand why it is unsettling to see homeless people where before there were none, or for people to experience layoffs.
But the younger generation is looking forward, even while the older generation is looking back.
This is still the case in Bulgaria. I was never stopped by the police, but I never ever ever went out without my Litchna Karta (“personal card”), just in case, since I was obviously a foreigner and my LK demonstrated that I was a legal resident. A lot of Communist-era bureaucracy is still in place. Anecdote time:
About three weeks before I was due to leave Bulgaria, I was in Sofia for some last-minute crap and while walking on Vitosha Blvd., the main shopping street, someone picked by pocket and stole my wallet. Obviously this is never good, but having my LK missing was going to be the biggest problem. Naturally, my phone battery was dead, so I went into a shop and asked to use their phone, which I used to call the Peace Corps Office. (It’s a good thing this happened to me in Sofia, if I’d been in another city, I would have been SOL.) They had me take a cab to their office, and were waiting with cash to pay the driver. The PC Security Officer and I then got into a car and drove around downtown Sofia until we figured out what police district I had been pickpocketed in. Turns out if you’re the victim of a crime, you can only report the crime in the specific district the crime was committed. Lucky for me (HAHA), I had been at a major intersection where six different districts come together. So we had quite a time figuring out which police station to go to.
Eventually we got there, where we stood around in an anteroom for four hours. I have some pictures of it somewhere that I can’t find, dammit. Anyway, it was bleak and depressing, just like you’d imagine a Bulgarian police station to be. There weren’t any chairs, so I sat on the cement steps of the station while the security officer waited inside. Eventually, I got to go in and explain what had happened to a police officer. (“I was walking and then I realized my bag was open and my wallet was missing.” Police officer: “Did you see any groups of gypsies around?” Me: “No, but awesome racial profiling.” Part of that may have only been in my head.) Anyway, the policewoman typed this whole thing up into a computer, printed it out and - this is the best part - made me copy it out onto a piece of paper. I was like, “can we make a photocopy and then TAPE it to this piece of paper?” No. Of course no. I’ve told this story to people before and they’re always like, “what? WHY would they make you do this?” I HAVE NO IDEA.
So that took like an hour just to recopy my TYPED STATEMENT in my shitty Bulgarian handwriting that, in case I wasn’t clear, they already had TYPED UP MUCH MORE LEGIBLY. By the time all this was done, I had missed the last bus home to my village and I hadn’t even gotten my intended errand done. And I was agonizing over canceling my credit card, which I hadn’t been able to do yet, and I had no idea what to do with about my Litchna Karta, because I only had three weeks left in country and it takes longer than that to get a new LK. Then I had to stick around for another couple hours while…I seriously don’t know. Possibly the police officers had smoke breaks? All in all, reporting my wallet stolen took about six hours.
To my amazement, I got a call from a totally different police station the next day telling me they’d found my wallet - with everything but the (tiny) amount of cash intact. Including my Litchna Karta. Of course, picking it up took another hour of signing documents.
Not everybody belongs to the drivel that is facebook … now if you could put the picture up somewhere that doesn’t require a forced membership to see the pictures …
But the Soviets caused that themselves … they mandated that their pilots were just so empathic towards the vietnamese that they took their aircraft with them [that they signed for and more or less ‘owned’] to help their communist bretheren … so of course he ‘owned’ his mig, he had signed for it.
I’ll comment some more on nostalgia - but I’m not actually an Eastern European, I just lived and worked or studied but also travelled there extensively, and my main research interest as a political science PhD student deals with this question in particular.
Let me say first that I don’t think that Notassmartasithought’s assessment that nostalgia is going to be worse in Russia is true - but not in all post-Soviet Union states. The Baltic states mostly associate the end of communism with the end of what they call the Russian occupation, and they’re generally quite happy about regaining their independence; the Balts, that is, not the ethnic Russians living there. On the whole though, post-communist nostalgia is by no means limited to Russia; In the Czech Republic, for instance, a good 15 to 20 per cent of the people will argue that things were better before 1989, with about the same number of people saying they don’t know. The remainder of the respondents is split equally between people saying things are better today and a group saying that it’s fairly similar and you really can’t tell (both groups about 30-35%; source [PDF; Czech only, unfortunately]).
Importantly, in order to compare post-communist nostalgia from one country to another, it is necessary to establish what it is that a person is nostalgic for. When people say that things used to be better, what exactly do they mean? In Russia, for instance, people pine for the time that the Soviet Union used to be a world power. They feel that, nowadays, Russia is small and dismembered, having lost its sattelites in the West and the South, and they feel that Russian interests are threatened and that Russian dignity is jeopardized - in Georgia, in the Ukraine, by the placement of a missile defence system in Poland, by war against Yugoslavia and the arrest of Milošević. All of this they (to be more precise: many Russians) see as an insult to Russia.
There’s also a strong economic aspect. No matter how hard the communist economy sucked, some people still managed to lose after 1989. State pensions are worthless, people on the state payroll make very little money and a whole bunch of things that used to be free or very inexpensive are now increasingly expensive - health care, education, public transport. The transition from communism to a free-market economy (and radically free market economy in some cases) was not beneficial to all. A strong mechanism at work here of course is that if you have nothing and neither does anyone else, it doesn’t really matter because you’re all fucked, but if you’re the only one who has nothing, even if that ‘nothing’ is a lot more than it used to be, you’re relatively worse off.
A final element is more political and social. Democracy and freedom are acquired tastes, like it or not. People are not natural-born democrats. Especially if democracy is accompanied by scandal and widely publicized political corruption, then it takes courage to stand up for it. Similarly, if you take graffiti, flashing billboards and advertisements and punk kids, hepped up on goof balls, and loud rock music, there’s going to be a whole bunch of people who will associate this ‘decadence’ with westernization and democracy, and they might not be too happy about it. Some people like starkness and austerity, and people in broad circles discussing Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce and Lev Tolstoy because they can’t watch crap American films or sitcoms on TV since these are considered to be decadent by the regime.
Finally: it is in many cases only nostalgia - it is pining for a past that people realize is gone forever, and such pining can be perfectly harmless because many people who will assert that ‘Things weren’t all bad’ and that ‘Democracy did not make things perfect’ will still support basic tenets of democratic rule in most cases, and they’ll admit that the collapse of communism was in the end a good thing.
What do the vietnamese have to do with it?? Perhaps you’re not familiar with the story - Belenko was stationed at a Siberian Airbase when he defected. He was out on a routine training run, when he bugged out, flew low to avoid Soviet radar and the fighters trying to shoot him down, and landed on a commercial airport in Japan with 30 seconds worth of fuel in his tank.
Regarding violent crime in communist countries, my experience is limited to Cuba, so be warned. There is plenty of violent crime in Cuba, from theft, to murder, to domestic violence, to rape. I grew up in very poor circumstances, and hardly a week would go by where a house was broken into, or someone was knifed, or a woman was put in the hospital from a beating from her husband or boyfriend. For a time it seemed that every month someone was being set on fire, usually because of a love affair.
The lack of guns means that most of the violent crime involves knives, clubs, or just brute force.
The main difference is that the news media does not cover any of it. To an outsider it might appear that Cuba is a peaceful society, but don’t be fooled.
Some friends of the family from the USSR came to visit sometime around the early 80s. We had to do some grocery shopping, so we took the mother with us to the store.
She was so overwhelmed by the variety and abundance of the food for sale that she began to hyperventilate and had to leave the store.
You seem to be mistaking me for an apologist for the Marxist-Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Let me assure you that this is not the case. The horrors visited upon the populations oppressed overwhelm the effects of predatory crime (civil crime, if you like, to distinguish from government-sanctioned crime). It’s also the case that the data “collected” by the Communist regime does not accurately reflect anything of actual conditions during the time; however, the many anecdotal recollections from people I have known from Eastern Europe during the Cold War is that street crime was negligible, and after the collapse of the East Bloc it increased to extraordinary levels.
Personally, I’d rather live in New York City in 1977. At its worst it was better run and safer than either of your alternatives.
(my maternal grandparents village is 10 km from the Danube and the bulgarian city on the other side of the river - Silistra - can be easily seen from their backyard…but I never set foot in Bulgaria.)