Category Archives: 2025 Cruise up the Danube River

A Cruise up the Danube River

2025 Cruise up the Danube River

 

Amazingly, this is a view of the boat on which we sailed.  The Avalon Passion. I had tried all trip to get a photo of it but could not.  It was actually taken in Hungary, the last day we were on the boat. I had not been able to get a good photo of the boat because we were usually tied up at the dock with other boats.  When we were moving, we were in the boat, so I could not photograph it. This photo was taken when I went for a long walk down the Danube all by myself. Christiane was sick with a very bad cold. I was surprised to find an Avalon boat was sailing past the Parliament building of Hungary and thought I could take the photo and pretend it was our boat. WE had sailed with Avalon on the Passion, Well, I was even more surprised when it turned around and went back right in front of me and I was able to see it up close and saw it was the same boat we had travelled on. A weird coincidence.

I called this series of posts. “202525 A Cruise up the Danube”.  Well, it has taken me a while to get to the cruise part of the trip. I know one person for whom it has been too long. Sorry. But I have already warned everybody that I meander. And I won’t stop meandering just yet.

 

Our cruise really started with a visit to Romania, with which I fell in love. That surprised me and I never expected that. After that was over, we were brought to Oltenita Romania on the shores of the Danube River. There we boarded the  Avalon Passion  which would be our home nearly 2 weeks.

This was the second river cruise we had taken. The first one was a cruise down the Rhine river in 2017. [see my post 2017 European River Cruise at https://themeanderer.ca/category/2017-european-river-cruise/]

 

We loved that earlier cruise and hoped we would love this one too. That earlier trip was also with Avalon and we thought they were really good. This one we signed up for on a whim, without much thought.  Frankly, after we had committed we realized this trip was very expensive.  We thought it was maybe not worth what we had to pay. But we were committed. Life is hard when you are stupid. I have to keep saying that.

 

What happened was that 3 of our friends, including Christiane’s sister, were going on this cruise and a year ago told us there were 3 rooms left and why didn’t we come too? We hardly thought this out at all. We got excited and signed up.  They picked the trip and we followed.  Then a couple of weeks later, I started reviewing the itinerary. We would be travelling to Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary. I have never had a burning desire to go to any of these countries. So why was I going?  Good question?

 

I decided to look into these countries a bit more. I quickly realized this could be a great easy trip. The cruise company does all the work.  It is the lazy man’s way to travel. Or an old man’s way to travel. Well guess what?

 

The countries looked fascinating. What would there be not to like?

 

What stood out on the last river cruise was the people with whom we traveled.  Every night, at the end of excursion, or walks through towns on our own, we would meet in the bar of the boat, have a couple of drinks, and discuss all kinds of things, including of course what we had seen and learned. The People were great. And we had a great time.

 

This trip the people were great fun to be around  as well.  We had decided that although we loved our friends we were travelling with, we did not want to confine our visits to them. After all, this little boat had people from around the world. We could see our friends when we got back home. Of course, we were often with them as well. We just wanted to see other people too.

 

Now it would have been great to meet other people. But really, unfortunately, that did not happen much. We had local guides every day and got to know them really well. They were great. We learned a lot from them. A little interaction with locals would have been wonderful however.

 

So, on the boat, we met people from around the world. France, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada.  There were 147 passengers on the vessels, plus a lot of staff. We met all kinds of people. The biggest group was from Canada. From Canada the largest group by far, came from Manitoba. Weird.  But there was an explanation. A keen CAA travel representative in Winnipeg sold a lot of trips. And she was good.

 

Amazingly, we met another couple from Steinbach whom we did not really know. We had seen the husband before as he used to own and operate the local A & W franchise. We had some great discussions with them and their friends from Kenora. We met a woman, travelling alone, from Ste. Anne. 18 km away from home. And another couple from the same small town. The rest were from all over Manitoba. Great people and we had great fun with them. The best part of the trip was time spent with people on the boat. And we learned a lot off the boat.

 

Some of the Americans were Trumpsters. Very nice people.  They loved what Trump was doing for their country.  We quietly disagreed. The large majority of Americans were not Trumpsters. I had a theory that was reinforced by the people we met.  Most Trumpsters don’t have passports.  They like it at home. Foreign lands are not for them. People who travel on river boats have passports, and in my biased view, have more open minds than most Trumpsters. But we enjoyed our time with all of them.

 

Everyone talks about the food on ocean cruises.  We have only been on two and agree the food is pretty good. However, the food on both cruises, but particularly this one, was outstanding. The chef was a magician. Second only to Christiane. The servers were outstanding.

 

The boat was very modern and cruising was very relaxing. Smooth as silk. Or as a curler of note one said, “as smooth as a baby’s ass at teething time.” You could barely notice  if we were moving, unless you looked outside.

 

Most travelling was done at night. That is weird. You go to sleep in Romania and wake ups in Bulgaria and never noticed you were moving. You missed the entire slog of traveling. This is a strange and disorienting feeling. And very artificial.

 

But it was not perfect. If you asked Christiane, she might say it was horrible. At least some of it. If you asked me, I loved it.  Lawyers would say, “we were not ad idem.” [Lawyers love to use Latin to confuse people into thinking they know something when they don’t] The expression means ‘our minds have not met’. More on this later. I will explain.

People’s Salvation Cathedral

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Churches

Looks pretty grand doesn’t it?

 

Just in case you might think Romania’s problems are behind them, I have one last story to tell. Another story about another church. Fitting perhaps for this land of glorious churches.

 

As their former Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu personally demonstrated, Romanians love the extravagantly grandiose. Not just their corrupt leaders.  On our last day in Romania, this country I had grown to love, though not ignoring its blemishes, I noticed a spectacular church near the fantastical Peoples Palace. How could I have missed this? And we were on our way out to our ship for the first time. Too late. As we drove closer to it, I realized it was not yet completed. That made me feel somewhat better. Who needs to see a church under construction?

This church is going to be spectacular. Again, grandiose, but this time we won’t be able to blame any communists. This time the church and current “original democracy” are responsible. But they don’t seem to have learned a lot.

This church is called People’s Salvation Cathedral but  also the National Cathedral. It is an Eastern Orthodox cathedral and is under construction in Bucharest Romania and when complete will serve as the patriarchal cathedral of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

It will dominate the Bucharest skyline visible from all corners of the city. It will be the tallest and largest Eastern Orthodox church building by volume and area in the world! It is the tallest domed cathedral in the world with a height of 132 metres and the 6th tallest cathedral and 3rd tallest domed church.

 

It will have the largest collection of church mosaics (interior decorations) in the world. The mosaic of the altar will be about 3,000 sq. meters. It will have glass from Venice and Carrara stone from Italy. It will also have the world’s largest free-swinging bell. And it will have the world’s largest iconostasis (a wall of icons and religious paintings, separating the nave from the sanctuary in a church).

It will be grand. It will be stupendous. It will cost a fortune to build. Will it be insane for such a small and relatively poor country?  Is it necessary? Or should parishioners reach for the stars?

Patriarch Daniel explained in 2008 that the choice of name “New Patriarchal Cathedral,” is a spiritual manifestation of gratitude to God for the deliverance of the Romanian nation from oppression and alienation. But is it deliverance from oppression into poverty and financial ruin?

As Jimmy Buffet would say, only time will tell.

 

Romanian Revolution

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism

This building reminded me of the transition from communism to “original democracy.”

 

The Revolution in Romania did not happen all at once.  It really started in the city of Brasov where we had spent 2 days. At first it represented a revolt against Nicolae Ceaușescu’s economic policies. On the morning of November 15, 1987, a local elections day, workers at a local truck manufacturing plant in Brasov led to about 20,000 workers refusing to work and marching  toward the communist party headquarters.  There, what had been claims for wages turned into shouts for “Down with Ceaușescu!”, “Down with Communism!” They even chanted anthems of the 1848 Revolution that not everyone had forgotten about. For example, “Down with the Dictatorship” and “We want bread.” These were brave actions in the face of communist dictatorship.

 

Ceaușescu had started to curb food and energy consumption for the good of the country and to reduce workers’ wages. None of these measures were popular of course with working people. 61% of people in labor participated in industry in Brasov. The economic decline of factories in eastern Europe in the mid-1980s hit Brasov particularly hard and led to the collapse of the consumer market. It started when Ceaușescu decided he had to divert payments intended for food production to paying the country’s debts. The state began to ration food stuffs.

 

The protesting workers from Brasov were joined by ordinary people from the city, and the combined mob sacked the communist headquarters building and city hall “throwing into the square portraits of Ceaușescu, and food from the well-stocked canteen.” In a time of drastic food shortages, protesters were particularly angered to find buildings that had been prepared for official festivities with food in abundance in order to celebrate the local communist election victory, which of course was a foregone conclusion. So the protesters celebrated with a massive bonfire of party records and propaganda burned for hours in the city square.

By dusk, Securitate forces and the military surrounded the city center and disbanded the revolt by force. Though no one was killed, some 300 protesters were arrested. Sounds a bit like cities in the US doesn’t it? Meanwhile protesters were being detained and tortured by state “investigators.” The communist party decided to downplay the rebellion as “isolated cases of hooliganism, rather than rebellion so the sentences were relatively light.

 

Though the Brașov Rebellion did not directly lead to revolution, it dealt a serious blow to the Ceaușescu regime, and its confidence in the pliability of the trade unions. Historian Dennis Deletant referred to the incident as demonstrating “Ceaușescu’s inability to heed the warning signs of increasing labor unrest, plunging blindly forward with the same [economic] measures, seemingly indifferent to their consequences.”

 

The Brașov Rebellion showed there was growing discontent among workers against the Ceaușescu regime, even though he believed the people loved him and he could do anything he wanted and get away with it. It was a precursor to the popular uprisings that would bring down the regime and Communism in Romania only two years later, after the fall of the Soviet Empire.

 

 

In 1989 when the massive power of the Soviet Communist party began to crumble  thanks to the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev, anti-government demonstrations in Romania arose in December of 1989.  These were heady times. It seemed like a whole new world order was being ushered in.  Around the world people like me, were excited about the burst for freedom behind the Iron Curtain . A communist regime that seemed invincible, as autocratic regimes always seem, at least until they are not, was losing its grip on power. What would happen next?

 

Things were so bad in the country that many people had to resort to begging in the streets for food.  Sort of like people do in cities of the west today. Amazingly, Ceaușescu thought the people still loved him. That was how out of touch he was. The people hated him. Ceaușescu was told to give up power but he resisted, until finally the people resisted and turned on him and his wife and the Communist regime which had been so powerful people thought it would last forever.  But dictatorships never last forever. Eventually they fall. And when they do it is usually with a crash.

 

In Romania hundreds of Romanians were shot and killed or injured.  When it was revealed that Ceaușescu was responsible, massive unrest spread through the country. When the demonstrations reached Bucharest, it became known as the Romanian Revolution. And that is what it was. In fact, it was the only overthrow of a communist regime in the course of the revolutions of 1989.

Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled the capital in a helicopter, but were soon captured after the armed forces turned on them. When the military turns on its autocratic leaders that usually spells the end of the regime. And it did exactly that in Romania. Ceaușescu was very quickly tried and convicted of economic sabotage and, amazingly, genocide. His wife was included in the trial as well. As a result, both were sentenced to death and they were immediately executed by a firing squad on December 25, 1989. The regime was toast.

The dictator  had absolute power until he had no power. The life of dictators can end abruptly.  Until their power evaporates, they are feared and obeyed. After that they are revealed as little men. No longer giant autocrats.

According to Vio, our guide for this part of our trip.  Ceaușescu had interfered in everything in the life of the people and as a result ruined the country and paid a heavy price in the end. He paid with his life.

Soon, Romania would have “original democracy.” It is far from perfect, but better than communism and outright autocracy.,

 

History is like an Almost Empty School

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, History, Truth and Beauty

 

 

This photograph was taken near a university in Bucharest, Romania

 

The Romanian communist party, like most communist parties around the world, and like the Republican party in the United States, want to control the narrative. That means they want to control history. Which means that they want to control the truth, or at least perceptions of the truth. In the Unites States for example, the Republicans want to erase or minimize history that shows the country was not always at its best. For example, they want to minimize stories about slavery or the assault on the native peoples of North America. Canada did this too when they refused to release information about the mistreatment of indigenous people at residential schools. For example, even though I went to university for 7 years I never once heard about residential schools while I attended university.

 

In Romania, when the communists came to power soon after the completion of World War II, the communists started to erase the royal family from the historical record. Within about 3 years it was if there never had been a royal family.

After the communists lost power in Romania 1989, the truth started coming out. It was then learned that 17,000 teenagers had contracted Aids. No information had been released about this by the communists. The communists wanted people to believe that under communism things were perfect and their leaders were perfect. That is what the communist leader of Romania wanted. I think that is what Donald Trump wants too.

This is unfortunate, because unless a country acknowledges its history—its truth—it can never move beyond that. It is chained to an unacknowledged past. It is like an almost empty school.

A Slaughterhouse of Souls in Romania

2025 Cruise up the Danube River

 

From Wikipedia

A little more about kids under communism.

 

The worst conditions for the orphans of Romania were found in those institutions designed for disabled children. In one institution, a psychiatric hospital, it lacked basic medicines and washing facilities, increasing again the pain and suffering. At the same time, in many institutions physical and sexual abuse was rampant, compounding problems for the hapless children. In some institutions for disabled children, they were often tied to their own beds, or dangerously restrained in their own clothing.

 

Shockingly, because sometimes staff in the institutions failed to put clothes on the children, they were left all day sitting in their own feces and urine. The nurses were not properly trained and even frequently abused them.  They used dirty water to bathe the children and sometimes threw 3 children into a bath at one time to save time and water. Just as happened in Canadian Indian Residential Schools, because of abuses of children by staff, older children learned that they should be abusing the younger children as well. As it did in Canada, this might bring intergenerational trauma. Naturally, many of the children had delayed cognitive development as a result of the conditions in which they lived. Many did not even learn how to bathe or feed themselves.

 

Staff at times used inappropriate drugs to control behaviour. Since many of the children did not have even their most basic needs met in the institutions, many children died of minor illness or injuries that healthy children could have coped with easily. Many actually starved to death. The development of many children was impaired by the condition of the children. For example, sometimes fractures did not heal properly resulting in seriously deformed limbs.

 

Because of the common practice of using unsterilized instruments in the institutions, some of the institutions became infected with HIV/AIDS As a result of the orphanages being infected with HIV/ because of all of this, more than 17,000 Romania teenagers died.  And you can guess what happened to the rest?

 

Some children suffered from multiple transfers to other institutions often without warnings or explanations. The harshest treatments were reserved for children who were considered “irrecuperable” or “unproductive.” Former staff reported that corporal punished was encouraged by officials as appropriate punishment and those who were loath to impose such were considered weak.

 

Unfortunately, the true number of children who lived or died in orphanages during the communist era is not known with clarity, but according to one report in 2015, “Half a million kids survived Romania’s ‘slaughterhouse of souls.”.

In. summary, the best comparison would be to the horrors of the treatment of Canadian children in Canada’s Residential School system for indigenous children.

 

After the fall of communism in 1989 pictures were released around the world that showed images of emaciated children clothed in rags, looking into the cameras with desperate eyes amid the squalor of Romania’s orphanages. It wasnot a pleasant sight.

 

Shaun Walker for The Guardian reported 30 years later that Florian Soare, an investigator as part of investigations that followed estimated that “between 1966 and 1989 there were between 15,000 and 20,000 unnecessary deaths of children in Romania’s grim network of children’s homes, with the vast majority taking place in those set aside for disabled children.”

 

Across the country, there were 26 institutions catering to the “category three” disabled children (“incurable”). Walker reported how the investigators found shocking mortality levels among the children.  Soare said, “They didn’t die from the disabilities they had: 70% of the registered deaths were for pneumonia. They were dying of external causes that were preventable and treatable,” said Soare. In other words, there was negligence or malfeasance or both.

 

Walker also remarked that,

 

“The process of bringing the crimes of the communist period to light is moving slowly. The repression is skimmed over in school classes, said Ana Blandiana, a poet who has transformed a former communist-era prison in the town of Sighet, on Romania’s border with Ukraine, into the country’s only museum of communist crimes.”

 

Many people in Romania don’t like it when such history is brought up because they feel it is a stain on their reputation.

 

When the investigators dug deeper they found some horrifying secrets.  Some children testified that some children died of frostbite, or were literally chewed to death by rats. Some were kept in cages smeared with their own feces.  Soare actually believes it was part of a campaign of extermination. No wonder Romanians don’t want those stories out there. Frankly, I can’t believe that. I have heard of no evidence that showed deliberate systematic murder. Some cases of deliberate murder, but a campaign?

 

Izidor Ruckel who spent 11 years at one of the facilities for supposedly “incurable” children because he had contracted polio, said there were “a number of genuine sadists  on the staff of his institution” and recalled that “you could feel her in her veins that she loved abusing children.”[1] He himself had been subjected to gruesome beatings and other forms of abuse yet amazingly concluded “it was for God alone to judge.”

 

 

After the fall of the communist regime, and people learned what happened in those institutions, international adoption was seen as the answer to the problem of what to do with the orphans. Get rid of the children and at the same time have westerners pay for them. As a result, large numbers of children were adopted by foreigners in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, there were many irregularities encouraged by loose government regulations. In 2004 the government banned international adoptions except to grandparents. The EU supported a ban so that abuses could be curtailed.

 

 

Improving the situation of orphans was made a condition of Romanian entry into the European Union but a BBC investigation in 2009 showed that many problems remained.

 

All in all, it was a terrible mess. Similar things happened in Bulgaria.

 

As a result, a shocking number of children were abandoned and cared for by largely well-meaning, but overwhelmed government employees. The children often did not experience the loving care and attention of a mother or father. This led to children with severe mental health problems that plagued the country and even the families in the west that adopted these children. It was a catastrophe.

 

But thank goodness there is some better news. In September 2005, the European Parliament’s rapporteur for Romania made this very hopeful statement: “Romania has profoundly reformed [from top to bottom] its child protection system and has evolved from one of the worst systems in Europe to one of the best.”

 

The history is miserable; the future is better.

[1] Shaun Walker, Thirty years on, will the guilty pay for horror of Ceaușescu orphanages?” The Guardian Dec. 15, 2019

Communist Kids

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Fellow Feeing, Health, Loneliness

 

If anyone has been following my posts about Romania, they know I love the country and the people of Romania.  There is however one serious black spot on that record. It goes back to the closing days of the Communist regime led by Nicolae Ceaușescu.

 

The one more aspect of the Ceaușescu regime I want to talk about is its attitude to children. This may seem surprising. It was surprising to me.

 

First of all, we must remember that under Communist dictatorship the economy in the late 1980s had sunk badly. Things were so bad that many good people could not feed and clothe their families anymore. Many of them believed they had no choice but to give up their children to the state. Imagine how desperate they were to do that!

 

President Nicolae Ceaușescu’s attempts to implement family policies led to a significant growth of the population and as a result the ailing economy could not keep up and instead the country saw a growing number of illegal abortions and increasing numbers of orphans in state institutions. Frankly, I don’t understand entirely how this could happen, but it was the result of an economic mess.

 

Ceaușescu, like so many conservative political leaders including Donald Trump and his mentor Viktor Orban of Hungary, are Natalists. Ceaușescu for example wanted each Romanian woman to rear at least 5 children. They supported efforts to increase the local population, rather than admitting immigrants.  They wanted more of “us” and less of “them.” Donald Trump really is doing the same thing. In the US, “us’ of course means the white nation who must be protected from the assaults of the immigrants and other strangers. Even though Trump says the country is full and there is no room for more immigrants, he wants the population to grow. Just not with immigrants.

 

The Ceaușescu government increased restrictions on abortion. Added to that, the communist regime was also opposed to family planning. As a result, the population increased dramatically, but could not handle the increase, partly because of their sick economy.

 

In Romania Ceaușescu’s policies led to disaster. These policies together with decaying economics led to a strong uptick in abortions. In Romania, many people felt they could not support families anymore so they gave them up to orphanages to a shocking extent. And orphanages are the not the best place for children to be raised.

 

Money became even scarcer for these institutions when the Ceaușescu regime decided it needed to divert funds to pay for its foreign debt and expenses for the massive People’s Palace that had to be paid. Because of the economic reversal, electricity and heating was reduced as well. Food was often scarce and there were just not enough staff to give the children the loving care they needed.

 

The absence of personal loving care and attention was the major problem in the orphanages. Because of the neglect of the children, many of the children grew up with physical and mental development delays. Some of those children were given false diagnoses from untrained physicians and nurses. Jon Hamilton, a journalist with National Public Radio in the US said this,

 

“A lot of what scientists know about parental bonding and the brain comes from studies of children who spent time in Romanian orphanages during the 1980s and 1990s.”

 

Those studies were made with extreme subjects. The neglect of children there and their subsequent suffering led to many of them growing up with severe mental and physical health challenges. The conditions of the Romanian orphanages showed that not only is nutrition vital to a child’s development, so is “basic human contact.” This is what I call fellow-feeling.

 

Because of the absence of basic human contact, many babies in Romanian Orphanages developed without stimulation which led to self-stimulation such as hand flapping or rocking back and forth. These conditions also led to frequent misdiagnoses of mental disabilities that forced children to go to inappropriate institutions for inappropriate treatments. Many of those children were given the wrong medications or were tied to their beds to prevent self-harm.

 

As many North American adoptive parents learned, after those Romanian children were adopted, the children still had serious problems in forming attachments to their new parents. Some of the them could not discriminate their new mothers from complete strangers. Scientists also learned that many of the children in orphanages grew up with smaller brains than average children.

 

 

I think it is generally acknowledged that the most important aspect of ideal care for infants is for the child to develop a healthy relationship with at least one caregiver. That is essential for the child’s successful social and emotional development. It is particularly important to help the child to learn to regulate his or her emotions and feelings. According to NPR, “In the Romanian orphanages, children had grown accustomed to neglect in early infancy.” These were lonely beginnings so many of the young children of Romania, particularly in orphanages were not nurtured with love and care. Of course, when people from North America and other places came to adopt these children, many of those children had trouble forming good solid emotional relationship with their loving adoptive parents there. Many did not get a good start in America and Canada either. They brought the pain here.

 

This led to absolute disaster. I will talk about that in my next post. It is a gruesome story.

Romania: From World War II to Communism

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism

 

This building has been called Ceaușescu’s office. Nicolae Ceaușescu was the Communist leader of Romania for many years.

 

Romania started out in 1941 as an ally of Nazi Germany when it declared war on the Soviet Union. They did not care so much about England or the United States, or lord knows, Canada.  Russia was their traditional enemy and their King was a member of a great German family. As a result, taking sides with Germany against Russia made a lot of sense to Romanians.

 

However, things change, particularly in European international politics. After the defeat of Germany at Stalingrad, Romanian leaders felt the winds of change. In Romania, on August 23 1944, with the Soviet Red Army on the march, Romania’s King Mihai forcibly removed Romania’s Marshal Ion Antonescu from power when he refused to sign an armistice with the Allies of World II. As a result, Romania brazenly switched sides.

 

Of course, you might wonder what good did it do Romania to switch sides, for Russia, its erstwhile new ally, invaded and took over Romania as soon as the war was over. Romania became part of the Soviet empire.  And, Vio, our faithful Romania guide and interpreter on this trip mocked how the Russians since then painted the Romanians as eternal friends of Russia, which, of course was total nonsense. But nothing prevails more relentlessly in international affairs than nonsense.

 

Less than 3 years after Russia’s takeover of Romania, its monarch, King Mihai was forced to abdicate and vacate the castle. The People’s Republic of Romania—a state of “popular democracy“—was proclaimed.  It of course was no democracy at all. It was a communist dictatorship. The newly established communist regime, was led by the Romanian Workers’ Party which quickly consolidated its power through a Stalinist-type policy aimed at suppressing any political opposition and transforming the economic and social structures of the old bourgeois regime into a typical communist regime that bore little resemblance to Marx’s dreams of a workers’ communist paradise.

 

In 1965 the communist leader of Romania died and after a brief struggle Nicolae Ceaușescu emerged as the head of government.  Like so many autocrats, Hitler, Orban, and others included, Ceaușescu turned into an autocrat after enjoying the power which he later did not want to give up.  As we have seen recently with Donald Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil, it is difficult for some democratically elected leaders to give up their power. It is intoxicating and addictive.

 

In the early 1960s, the Romanian government began to assert some small degree of independence from Soviet Russian domination. I don’t mean to minimize this. It took courage to resist the Soviet Communist foreign policies. Romania did not abandon its repressive internal policies which it of course called “revolutionary conquests” much like Donald Trump calls his slide into autocracy “greater freedom.” Such camouflaging maneuvers are common with every autocratic regime.

 

Upon achieving power, Ceaușescu eased restrictions on the press and actually condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that effectively quelled the Prague Spring and his popularity rose spectacularly.  That popularity however was very brief.

 

Soon the communist regime of Romania became totalitarian and was even considered for a while the most repressive in the Eastern bloc. His secret police, the Securitate, was responsible for mass surveillance and severe repression with human rights abuses being prominently featured in the activities of the regime. He controlled the press absolutely.  It is things like this in history that should give all of us pause when we see attempts to control the press as Donald Trump has done flamboyantly in the US without much opposition. These are not innocent maneuvers. They are at the heart of a dangerous path to autocracy and all of us who cherish freedom must be alert to them and oppose them with firmness and vigor. I am constantly amazed at how cavalier Americans have been about such encroachments onto fundamental rights and freedoms. Such actions by Trump, acquiesced to by his Republican cronies, are dangerous.

 

For a while Ceaușescu was very popular for his efforts to remain independent of Russian foreign policy. But like all good autocrats from Hitler to Trump he grew increasingly authoritarian. That is what authoritarians do. His insistence on his monstrous People’s Palace shown in this photograph is just one example. He foisted it on the people whether they wanted it or not, because he wanted it. Like so many authoritarians, he also liked the grandiose, and insisted on building this People’s Palace, the second largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon in Washington even though Romania could really not afford it and no one wanted it.

 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Communist regime of Romania collapsed with startling rapidity. He thought his people loved him. He was wrong. Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were the victims of a series of anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe in that inspiring year. After a very quick trial they were found guilty and both shot.

 

This was not really a good start for what the new regime called “original democracy.”

Romania Breaks out from Communism

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Free Speech, Freedom

 

This is a photo of 5 Canadian tourists in Romania who I think all came to love that country.

I have loved our visit in Romania much more than I could ever have imagined. As I said before, I never had desire to visit Romania, but here I was and now I know better. The people were great. The country was beautiful. The history was fascinating. The food was excellent. But it has had some wicked problems.

 

Our guide, Vio told us something that surprised us. He asked us who we thought was the greatest man or woman of the twentieth century.  Then he told us who he thought was the greatest man of the twentieth century.  I paused wondering who he would say.  Before I could come up with an answer he said, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. That seemed like a remarkable choice, but Vio had a good explanation.

 

Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to its dissolution in 1991. Ideologically, he at first adhered to Marxist-Leninism, the official doctrine of the Soviet Union, but he gradually moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s. He, not Ronald Reagan, as so many Americans believe, was the driving force behind moving The Soviet Union and its satellites, such as Romania, away from Communism and ending the Cold War too.

 

To Vio however, the reason he admired him so much, and was the greatest man of the twentieth century, was because as a result of him, Vio believed, he was able to speak his mind freely in Romania. Because of Gorbachev, he was free to answer the question I had posed for example about whether Romania was a genuine democracy.  Before the time of Gorbachev, it would have been very dangerous of me to ask such a question, and much more dangerous for him to answer it truthfully, since he lived in Romania, which was part of the Soviet empire. Vio called him “a gentle dictator.” That is what social democracy is too—gentle socialism.

 

As we were driving down National Highway No. 1 of Romania, which Vio said was the only national highway, he warned us that at times under Original Democracy it would become, the “National Parking Stall.”  Of course, we in the west are very familiar with this concept too. Often freeways become the “no free way.”

 

Romania is now part of the European Union which means that it must meet some minimal standards of democracy. Like Hungary which is also a member of the EU, Romania has its own currency.  Their own people acknowledge it is not much of a currency.  They openly call it “funny money”. No other country accepts it, but people who travel through it, like people who work on this boat we were travelling,  will accept Romanian money since they can us it when they sail through it. But few others accept it. According to Vio, this is a product of Original Democracy. Cock-eyed in other words.

 

Since Romania joined the EU, its people must be free to live and work elsewhere. Many of them have taken advantage of that privilege. It used to have 22 million people, now about 5 million of those people now live abroad. They prefer real democracy, or perhaps just better economic benefits than that offered by Original Democracy. Original democracy did not sound very appealing.

 

But now people can speak their minds. And that is worth a lot.