Communist “Perks” for the Proletariat

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Young generations today believe that communism is a much better form of government than capitalism. Their strong beliefs come from the fact that they have never studied communism in public schools and have no idea what happened to the population at large, the so-called proletariat under the oppressive regime of Bolsheviks.

All young Americans know is the indoctrination they received from their teachers who told them that in communism all their needs will be met, and they would never have to work for this faux security blanket which the government will provide.

Those who survived communism and those who were lucky enough to escape it know the heavy price they had to pay for living under the oppressive boot of the Communist Party.

What kind of “perks” did we receive from the Communist Party? For starters, they confiscated our guns by saying that we do not need them, we would be protected by the party. We just did not imagine at the time that we would be on the end of the raised guns if we did not obey their orders and laws.

The villagers’ parcels of land were confiscated without any payment and, if they had too much land, they were sent to prison and hard labor camps for being “bourgeois.” One uncle went to a lead mine for 17 years and another went to prison for 7 years. Grandpa escaped because he was smart enough to deed parcels of his land to his six children. They were still confiscated but he did not go to prison.

All jewelry, gold, coins, and cash were also confiscated; if the people tried to protest, they were summarily shot. If some had precious paintings that had been in the family for generations, their decreed “illicit” possessions were also confiscated and distributed to the homes of the upper echelon and faithful Communist Party leaders. And these fancy homes were the confiscated homes of citizens they sent to jail for having too many possessions.

Villagers were crowded near each other in order that the land be used strictly for agriculture for the benefit of the Communist Party and their scheme of hard currency exportation to the West of the best grain harvested on these lands.

One American politician who visited Romania during its communist heyday, asked from an airplane flying over Romania, upon seeing endless fields of wheat and corn, where are the farmers’ homes? He had no idea that they had all been herded into villages and their isolated farm homes destroyed. He did not get an answer, the translators accompanying him remained silent.

Another “benefit” of the proletariat was that they all received about the same pay regardless of qualifications or degrees. This forced most people, to survive, to look for other ways to make extra money:

-         Black market selling of extra food purchased legally or illegally.

-         Hoarding food even though it was punishable by law, then selling it for confiscatory prices.

-         Barter with stolen goods from the factories in which they worked; when certain individuals, who did not share what they had stolen with others, were found out, they were made harsh examples for the rest and were sent to jail as a theft deterrent. It never worked; people continued to steal to survive.

-         Bacșiș (bribes) for medical care, lab tests, x-rays, hospital stays, hotel rooms, tickets, beauty services, medicines in pharmacies, and even medical excuses to avoid going to work, longer post-natal stays at home with full pay, and many other bribes.

-         Doctors and other medical personnel received envelopes with “walking around money” which patients and their families carried to make sure that they received timely and proper medical treatment; the patients’ name was inscribed on the envelope. When my daddy died, his sister demanded the 5,000 lei which his doctor had pocketed to take better care of him. Since no medical care was given to him, she demanded the money back.

If one was not on the take, they were either stupidly poor and hungry, or honest to a fault, like my daddy. Today “bacșiș” is legal in restaurants, it is posted on the bill and represents 10 percent of the bill.

An important “privilege” of the proletariat was to stand in interminable lines for food and basics daily to find bread, dairy, and other items in short supply such as toilet paper, cooking oil, and medicine.

Each family member stood in one designated line daily. Even small children stood in lines and learned at an early age to be responsible and not leave their place.

It galls me when people in this country accuse us of “white privilege.” That was my “white privilege,” living poorly, starving, and standing in lines. Nobody gave us generous welfare. We had to be responsible for our own survival and it had nothing to do with skin color.

In summertime we had the “choice” to buy produce from peasants who grew a few extras in their home gardens. The prices were steep, and the average salary barely covered a family’s survival expenses even though natural gas and electricity prices were subsidized. We were not paid enough and never had enough food, medicine, heat, hot water, and medical care.

Like the skinny dog whose master just gave him enough food to survive from day to day, citizens living in misery became dependent on their Communist Party masters and had to chase food every day to survive.

Last, but a "perk" nevertheless, was the subsidized vacations by yourself once a year at the government-sanctioned spas where one took the mineral waters "cure." Spouses vacationed separately as only one spouse was allowed to buy the subsidized vacation ticket.

There was a minority group who were paid informants of the Communist Party; they lived well, shopped at special stores reserved for the members and were paid extra for their snitching. Shamefully, they often snitched on their own families for more crumbs. The communist life was a survival of the fittest existence.

 

 

 

You Can’t Miss What You Don’t Have in the First Place

Growing up in the proletariat class of communism, we never had much time to ponder over our perennial hunger or our miserable state in life, we were too busy trying to find something to eat, most of the time standing in lines daily to fight over the supply of food allotted that day by the benevolent socialist government run by the Communist Party.

Most of us were quite thin, malnourished, lacking vitamins and proper nutrition, but we were all in the same boat and we could do nothing about it as we had no arms to mount a rebellion to overthrow the Communist Party.

The communists and their sycophants ate well, lived well, and enjoyed all the luxuries they accumulated by stealing everything of value that the proletariat at large had owned prior to the Bolshevik revolution. Their bank accounts were full, they took nice vacations and often, and we watched with resentment from afar.

We did not have the opportunity to better ourselves, or to develop the inner talents we were born with. We were too busy following the Communist Party rules and absurd regulations, to make sure we did not violate any of them or else we were imprisoned or re-educated in Siberia.

Creativity and allowed speech had to follow strict Party guidelines or else be censored for violating communist community standards, not unlike the social media moguls’ dictates today. But instead of being in Facebook jail for 30 days, you would find yourself in real prisons and the jailers threw away the key until they saw fit to let you go. Nobody followed the law, the law was what various Communist Party apparatchiks decided on a whim.

Individuality was verboten and nobody developed new ideas, projects, research, and other technical gadgetry. Worthless group-think with strict guidelines that augmented the collective was allowed.

I saw through the windows of nice restaurants an abundance of food that was sorely missing in our government-run empty stores. These restaurants were off-limits for us as only the communist movers and shakers could afford such luxury. Mom was making 800 lei per month which, divided by the artificially pegged exchange rate of 12 lei to the dollar in 1980, it was about $67 a month from which we had to buy food, pay for water, electricity, rent, bus fares, and medicine. Dad was making slightly more, about 1,200 lei per month, a whopping sum of $100.

A fresh college graduate with an Economics degree earned the huge sum of 1880 lei per month, about $157 per month which allowed such a graduate to live a much better life if they could find food and lived together with their parents in a small 600 square feet concrete block apartment, standard government issue subsidized housing for all.

The proletariat knew they were missing a lot – they saw how rich Texans lived on the television series “Dallas” and their make-believe oil tycoon family. For some reason, the decadent capitalist show passed the censors. Perhaps they allowed the series on TV in order to show how evil capitalists were and that is why we lived so poorly, they were stealing it from us. At least that was the daily propaganda we heard on the two black and white television channels.

We were riveted weekly to another episode so that we could live vicariously and imagine what it would be like if we had their food, clothing, and the comforts of a real home instead of the drab match boxes we were stacked on 5-9 stories high after the wise Communist Party stole our private properties, homes, and land.

Before the show ended, I moved to the U.S. in 1978 and, as the next season of Dallas played on American television, my family back home was flooding me with questions about the show such as “who killed J.R. Ewing,” but most of all, did Americans live so well and did they have so much food?

I never thought personally that food would become an issue 42 years later in America due to a tyrannical government lockdown of the population under the guise of protecting them from a flu virus. The lockdown caught many people unaware who were buying food in smaller quantities and less frequently because many Americans ate in restaurants several times a week.

As an escapee from communism, the lockdown affected me much worse than it did many Americans around me. They were happy to hide behind masks, stay home, watch TV, get paid weekly for doing nothing, let government tell them what to do, where to go, how, and when. They were happy to comply. But to me, removing the choice of staying home or going out felt like the former communist life.

I went to restaurants just like my American brethren and now, the government closed them down and locked us in our homes with only permission to go to the grocery store and pharmacies. Suddenly, once the state government removed any opportunity to go to a restaurant, it felt much worse than when, under communism, we could not afford to go. I felt the tyranny on a much deeper level.

The entire communist country where I grew up was one big lockdown prison, with borders guarded with machine guns, heavily armed soldiers, and razor sharp barbed wire. But in the U.S., where radicals want to erase borders, we were bombarded by PSA propaganda, i.e., “we are in this together,” “alone together,” “you are not alone,” etc., all meant to increase and maintain population compliance. The country became one big masquerade ball with masks made of all sorts of materials including, as my friend Alexis joked, “Dr. Fauci’s underwear.”

I thought that this was a much more insidious form of tyranny. When it became evident that it was just a flu, the state and local government bureaucrats did not relent their socialist control of the populace and people continued to remain cowardly subdued, afraid of dying of the Covid-19 flu virus, while losing constitutional freedoms each day without as much as a whimper.

The moral of both experiences compared is that you can’t miss what you don’t have in the first place, but it sure feels much worse when you do have something and that something is taken away permanently.

How Much Did the Equally-Poor Proletariat Travel?

A rare photograph of my mom and dad, second row left and of
my grandma on the first row (taken in the village)

For the first twenty years of my life, I never traveled much.  I have actually seen more of the world since I escaped the clutches of Ceausescu’s communism than I had actually seen of my own country as I was growing up. I changed that in the last five years when my husband and I did cover at least half of Romania. But I still have not seen the other half and I find that to be so sad because Romania is not that big of a country. It is beautiful, with stunning vistas and a rich history, but very small when compared to the United States. And I have seen a lot of the United States!

I wanted to visit the world then, to get away from the communist oppression, but my parents were very poor, everybody was really poor, and the only people allowed to travel were communist elites and their families.

Athletes, ballet dancers, and famous opera singers were given visas to go on tours after much debate, interrogations, investigations, and threats that the remaining loved ones would be imprisoned should they decide not to return.  Political operatives were assigned to follow them like shadows during the entire foreign trip. There were not many opportunities to escape the political babysitters.

The rest of the proletariat was equally exhausted and miserable to care whether they went anywhere or not. It was hard enough to find food and to trudge each day from work to a cold home in winter, no water, no hot water, no toilet paper, no medicine in pharmacies, no food on shelves, just long and endless lines. Who had energy left to even dream about traveling?

People ran from work with a jute shopping bag in hand to join a huge line forming around the block, not knowing what was on sale, but they knew whatever it was, it was in short supply, and they would need it.

Once, Joe told me, a long line formed in Bucharest in the mid-80s to sign a book of condolences for a Russian communist dignitary who had just passed away. People stood in line winding around several blocks and were madly disappointed and furious when they got to the front of the line after hours of standing and there was no food or toilet paper with splinters for sale. I actually saved a small scrap of this toilet paper and have shown it to my students over the years but it seems that the lesson flew by their ears and eyes as they voted in droves for communist “social justice” in this country.

One evening, going home to his safe house, my friend Joe bought a tray of freshly picked cherries for his friends who were coming over to watch a movie. It was common for people who did not own TVs to get together on weekends at someone’s house that had a TV and watch whatever movie was on that night. They ate the tasty cherries in the dark when suddenly, his daughter who went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, screamed in horror. The table was crawling with white worms from the empty cherry crate. Nobody bothered to tell Joe that almost all fruits, but especially cherries, plums, and apples, had worms due to lack of pesticides. Like everything else, chemicals were in short supply as well and fruit flies overwhelmed the crops. The five year communist party plan worked like a charm from the Tower of Babel – nothing made sense, it was just communist rhetorical babble, impossible to translate into real life.

To this day, mom views with suspicion any fruit that I bring her to eat. She even thinks that bananas, when they turn slightly brown, have worms. I wrote a story about her titled, “Wormy Bananas.” http://canadafreepress.com/article/wormy-banana

It was a real treat to go see my aunt and uncle at the Black Sea during summer vacations. Mom and dad scrounged enough money for the train ticket and the daily bus fare to the beach; my parents hoped that Mom’s brother fed me for the duration. I was used to little food so being fed once a day was no big departure from my routine.

I honestly don’t know how I lasted every day at the beach without food and water, without passing out. My skin turned a honey brown hue after a few burned layers peeled off and a few treatments with yogurt to draw out the heat from the burned skin. I had no lotion with SPF to protect my skin nor sunglasses to shield my eyes from harmful rays. And I could not swim at the time. The water was murky black from the algae, hence the name, the Black Sea, dangerous to be in at any speed.

My aunt and uncle were considered much better off than we were simply because she worked in the port and got to bring home whatever things may have spilled in the cargo of a ship, including the famous barter currency, Kent cigarettes, while my mom’s brother worked in a wine factory where it was easy to barter wine for other foods. They were not starving for sure, had a well-stocked fridge and pantry, and a small but much nicer furnished apartment, and they certainly ate well.

My uncle owned a dark green Russian made car that had seen better days twenty years earlier. He drove it once in a blue moon; most of the time it sat in a garage being washed, hand-polished, and tuned every weekend as if it was a prized jewel.

He even bought a motorcycle, an unprecedented luxury that attracted the attention of the financial police. I am sure he bribed his way out of that investigation predicament. His wife and daughter had the nicest clothes from the west, bought from foreign tourists who discarded their clothes upon leaving for home in favor of hand-made souvenirs. Some commercial ships would bring in brand new goods they would sell on the black market to people like them who had excess cash.

I think my aunt and uncle took me once to Tomis, then a beautiful art deco restaurant at the edge of the sea and made fun of my disgust upon seeing for the first time, shrimp, frog legs, and escargot.

I would look at all the foreign young people having a good time in places we, the proletariat’s children were not allowed in, such as discos, but the children of the moneyed communist elites were invited in with open arms.

I traveled in 1977 to Sofia, Bulgaria, shortly after the 7.2 Richter scale earthquake which took place that spring. It was a distraction my parents could barely afford but they wanted me to keep my sanity in college when I had to pass by mounds of rubble of collapsed buildings with the stench of death.

It was then that I realized how truly incompetent the communist regime was in the face of disaster and how inadequate in its heavily promoted care for the people. They were so dishonest in their outright theft that they even stole the donated blankets from the west – we knew because they appeared for sale in certain department stores. The commie elites only cared about themselves and their rich lives.

Once in a blue moon, my mom would pay for me to go on a school trip, usually to Sinaia, at Peles Castle, to a museum, or to Poiana Brasov, then an unspoiled mountain meadow with a winter ski resort for the elites and the European rich. My dad was skittish about letting me go. He always had a morbid image that his only child might roll into a ravine with the school bus. Sinaia was not far away from our hometown, Ploiesti, but it was at the end of a mountain road composed of constant hairpin curves. I never did appreciate my dad’s fear until I drove through it myself, decades later. The vertiginous drops at the bottom of the mountain were breathtaking and scary.

The proletariat was allowed to go on picnics on Sundays, a good distraction from attending church which was frowned upon. Grills were fired up in the communist-owned outdoor restaurant or people brought their own food to eat on a blanket on the green grass. It was such a treat to feel grass under your bare feet because stepping on grass in the city resulted in a big fine and signs everywhere alerted the pedestrians to stay away.

Children were happy, playing ball, hide and seek, tag, and picking wild flowers, not a care on their minds because they did not understand the world around them.

Beer was abundant and relatively cheap at these outdoor booths and many got drunk to forget their dreary lives. At the end of the day, the forested patch of green heaven on the outskirts of town looked like a trash pile. This bad habit to discard refuse in nature has not died today.  I saw with my own eyes the trash dumped in beautiful and pristine areas. At the same time, the tiny trash bins were empty then, absent or overflowing today because nobody empties them often enough.

Ceausescu had hired crews of gypsies to sweep the streets with big brooms made of twigs but the recreational green areas were not tended to with as much care or picked up as much.

The extent of most people’s travels was to the neighboring villages were their relatives and parents still lived, on a radius of maybe 20 miles. The buses were old and rickety, spewing black smoke and the travel was not comfortable and it certainly was not fun. Visiting relatives and returning home with a dozen eggs, a pat of cheese, one liter of fresh milk, or a live chicken helped the family survive for the week.

Baptisms, weddings, and burials were valid reasons for travel but again, relatives did not have to go very far because mobility was not encouraged by the totalitarian regime – you had to have a permit to move from the village to the city. If you were caught living in the city without a permit, you were fined, and possibly arrested. People were born, lived their entire lives, and died in the same town or village, no possibility of upper or lateral mobility.

Trains took us further out but a one hundred- mile journey could take all day as they stopped at every little village. The faster trains that stopped less were much more expensive and beyond the reach of most people. Flying was something only stars did in the movies and the president and his entourage.

The proletariat was rewarded for their hard work with subsidized tickets to a two-week wellness resort run by the state. During this time each person was treated to massages, mineral water wells, mud baths, cafeteria food, and a hotel room. The sad thing was that they could not travel as a family. Only one person per family at a time was allowed such a luxury and they could not pick the time, the communist labor union did.

My parents went together to such a resort years after I left Romania. Growing up, I don’t ever recall when my parents went on vacation together and only a handful of times when they went to a nice restaurant – those were reserved for the fat elites. And children were always left at home.