Christmas was erased from calendars, and the
subjugated people did not protest. The Christmas Tree was renamed the Winter
Tree. December 25 and 26 were normal workdays. Church attendance was frowned upon,
and only old people went to regular and holiday church services. Nobody had any
Bibles as they were forbidden. Traditional carols and caroling were forbidden
and replaced by patriotic songs on TV and radio, singing praises to the dear
leader and his wife. People were allowed to celebrate the New Year and nothing
else.
The Press
was controlled by the Communist Party and only what they approved was printed,
broadcast, or distributed. In the northern part of Bucharest was a building
which looked like a copy of the Soviet architecture in Moscow. It was called
The Free Press House. It was expressly built to print Scinteia, the
Communist Party newspaper. Its original name was Combinatul Poligrafic Casa Scinteii.
Built in
1952-1957 on land where horse races were held at Baneasa, the shockingly large
building was paid for with forced subscriptions of 20-30 lei from workers who had
money taken from paychecks every month without their permission. The average
salary of a worker was eight hundred per month, but nobody dared to object the
monthly “contribution” for the propaganda printing house.
The building
is an identical copy of the Lomonosov University building in the former Soviet
Union, another place of propaganda and indoctrination into communism. The Culture
Palace in Warsaw, Poland, was also an identical copy. It was Stalinist-approved
and dictated architecture.
The Romanian
Free Press House as it is named today has decorative elements borrowed from Curtea
de Arges Monastery, Cozia, and Horezu, which embellish the frontispiece of the
building and four towers were inspired from Sucevita and Dragomirna. So, the Stalinist
building is decorated by Romanian folkloric and church freezes in a country
where the regime jailed priests if they did not follow the communist dictates.
The 96-meter-tall
building was constructed to resist earthquakes. Boris Caragea sculpted a 7-meter-tall
statue of Lenin in 1960 which was placed in the front courtyard. In March 1990,
following the anti-communist coup, the statue was taken down in three days. All
that was left was the base. In 2016, on the same base, a new statue was erected
called the Wings, dedicated to the heroes of the anti-communist resistance.
The building
was taken over by various printing houses of newspapers and magazines after the
anti-communist revolution. Its name was changed to the “House of the Free
Press.”
Sadly, the
first elections held after the communist dictator was deposed on Christmas 1989,
elected another communist president who had been Ceausescu’s best friend and
installed all the former communist cadre back in power.
It is
important to mention and to remember that once socialism and communism are
installed, it is near impossible to vote the country out of communism unless bloodshed
takes place.
Food was difficult to find on the market,
but alcohol was cheap and easy to acquire. The population was skinny and
malnourished. People stood in endless lines daily for pathetic supplies that
were not sufficient for twenty plus million people, thus rationing coupons were
introduced.
An
interesting story reveals how Pepsi had made its way to Romania. The first
bottle of Pepsi appeared in 1967 while the communists were in power. How did Pepsi
appear during full communism before the reintroduction of capitalism in 1990?
In 1959, a
guy who eventually became the CEO of Pepsi had a brilliant idea to sell Pepsi
beyond the Iron Curtain and presented President Khrushchev with a glass of
Pepsi Cola.
In 1966, the
communist regime of Romania built a department in a factory called “Munca” in Ovidiu,
near the town of Constanta, a section which bottled Pepsi Cola to be sold in
the resorts at the Romanian Black Sea shore. The first bottles of Pepsi rolled
out in May 1967 and produced seven million liters per year. Coca Cola only
arrived in 1991.
To Romanians
Pepsi represented a delicious meal and a vacation on the seashore, relaxation
from the drudgery of work. Pepsi was something that the proletariat could afford
to buy if they had the money to go on vacation by the Black Sea.
The state
paid for the Pepsi concentrate with Romanian wine and then mixed the
concentrate with CO2 and bottled the Pepsi on site. The Soviets made a similar
exchange deal but with vodka.
In the 1980s
when the food situation and shortages under the communist regime became more
dire, Pepsi drinks became a sort of medium of exchange. It was sold on the
black market or exchanged for other goods. It was where I had my first bottle of
Pepsi in 1977.
