Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

When the privileged lose everything

At the Sydney Hiroshima Day march, I became involved in a verbal stoush 
with a young woman from Romania. She was extremely hostile towards 
socialism and especially towards the symbols of socialism, the hammer and 
sickle.

At first I assumed that her extreme hostility ("I had to worship 
that fucking thing every day for 12 years!") was yet another regrettable 
by-product of Ceaucescu's perversion of socialism in Romania. If so, then 
to some extent she had my sympathy.

But then she said something which indicated that her hostility went back 
way before Ceaucescu. It originated before socialism came to Romania and, 
indeed, before she was even born.

Her thesis was that we could not know what socialism was because we had 
never lived under it, whereas she had. To nail her point home she produced 
her clincher: "My grandparents lost everything [when socialism came to 
Romania]."

That revelation gave the game away. Her grandparents had been dispossessed 
by the revolution, so they must have been proprietors of some sort, land-
owners, factory-owners, well-to-do middle class.

They lost their property, their wealth and their position, their privileges 
and whatever power they had possessed. Significantly, she was not angry 
because her grandparents' property had been distributed to the poor or 
taken over by the state and run for the common good.

She was pissed off because her family had lost their property. What became 
of it was not the point: it had been theirs.

You can imagine the tales of woe within the family of a night, about the 
wonderful life grandpa and grandma lived before the Reds came and took it 
away, and about the hardships they had had to endure since then.

And being poor is a hardship, especially if you are not used to it. The 
fact that the rest of the population had always been poor and were now 
determined to pull themselves up out of that situation would have been 
irrelevant.

All that would have mattered was that the family had lost its property, its 
prestige and its self-esteem.

One of the mistakes I think the socialist countries made was to 
underestimate the strength and the persistence of bourgeois and petty-
bourgeois attitudes within families which had "lost" property, privilege or 
position.

I have mentioned before the young Ukrainian migrant from the Soviet Union 
who told me how he knew what really happened in the course of the October 
Revolution in Russia because he had heard it in his family, frequently. He 
too had a clincher: his grandfather had owned three villages [and also 
"lost" the lot to the Reds].

To own three villages means he was a very rich kulak. Three generations of 
the family had experienced Soviet education and Soviet life, but still they 
did not rejoice in the fact that those three villages had gone to the poor 
people who lived in them.

Like the Romanian woman, all he knew was that his family had been robbed of 
its property by Red Revolution.

The poor were fed, the homeless housed, the jobless got work, the 
illiterate were educated. Culture and health care came into the reach of 
all, but all these two families — so different in everything but their 
class position — could whisper about in private was what they had "lost".

Romania had been a landlord-fascist country before WW2, like Poland and 
Hungary. Backed by the Church (Catholic in Poland and Hungary, Orthodox in 
Romania), the most reactionary landed gentry ruled in close partnership 
with the country's small but powerful contingent of financiers and 
industrialists.

Nominally democratic, Romania had its own powerful and active Nazi outfit, 
the Iron Guard (financed from Berlin) and an anti-Semitic, anti-democratic 
king, Carol II. In 1938, Carol made himself dictator.

Nazi Germany eventually decided that Carol was insufficiently conscious of 
German strategic requirements in Eastern Europe and had him ousted in 1940 
in a coup carried out jointly by the fascist General Ion Antonescu and the 
Iron Guard.

Once in power, Antonescu did to the Iron Guard what the German army had 
done to Ernst Roehm and the Brown Shirts: turned on them, crushed them and 
incorporated the remnants into the Army.

Under Antonescu, Romania was an enthusiastic ally of Hitler's, joining in 
the invasion of the Soviet Union with promises of land and loot. After the 
defeat of the Nazi forces at Stalingrad, the "democratic opposition" in 
Romania tried to negotiate a separate peace with the West, but the Soviet 
Union insisted they deal with it.

In August of 1944, the bourgeois political forces (and Carol's son Michael 
who had succeeded to the throne) tried to pre-empt the arrival a few days 
later of the Soviet Army by "overthrowing" Antonescu and proclaiming a new 
pro-Western bourgeois government.

It wasn't and the anti-fascists took government officially in March 1945.

With overt (and of course covert) US and British support, attempts were 
made throughout 1945-1947 to install a pro-Western bourgeois-democratic 
government in Romania, but with the Soviet Army in occupation of the 
country, the Communists and other progressives were able to defeat these 
various manoeuvres.

Finally in 1948 the King, who had been party to all the Western schemes, 
was obliged to hand in his crown and head for the Riviera. Outside the 
middle class, including grandpa and grandma, there would have been few who 
were sorry to see him go.