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After the fall of the Romanian communist regime in December 1989 and, consequently, the opening of the borders for the citizens, a period of economical baffling followed. After fifty years of communist dictatorship, everyone was now allowed to set his/her own business. So many incidental entrepreneurs mushroomed overnight and some even flourished.
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A subjective history of the 1990s and a lifestory as well, seen through the lens of the author's favourite cigars.
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A subjective and picturesque view of Romania's difficulties to adjust to democracy after nearly half a century of communist regime.
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I only started my business in 1993. I had acquired the notion that I ought to set up some kind of “private business”. Such a notion had previously been completely foreign to us. I had reached the conclusion that, as an engineer, there wasn’t much that I could still have achieved at the institute where I worked. Research had limited my options. After only three years it was obvious for anybody too see that research activities weren’t going anywhere in Romania. There were no money available for investments in the field and Romania had clearly become a retail marked for the rest of Europe! I watched how things went around me and I set off to do something other than research.
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A subjective journey back to the 1990s and the social and personal shift they generated , seen through the lens of the books and music prefered by the teenager back then, nowadays a researcher at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest.
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The miner riots in 1990, having taken place shortly after the fall of the communist regime in December 1989 and generally perceived as an outbreak of boundlessand unfounded violence and cruelty, are narrated in this interview from the inside: voices of some of the miners recall those confusing and terrible moments.
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In June 1990, I was working at the Technical Engineering University in Bucharest while living relatively close to my job, so that on 14th June, in the morning, when the miners arrived in Bucharest, I wasn’t present in the city centre. Hardly had I reached the University when I received a phone call from a former student, a police officer, who warned me not get near the city centre, regardless of the situation. Why? Because I was bearded, bespectacled and I used to wear jeans. In other words, I fit the description of a ragamuffin from Universităţii Square perfectly.
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On 5th January [1990, after the recent fall of the communist dictatorship in Romania], I reckon, I was summoned by the Ministry of Education. Schools were about to start and, according to the syllabus, pupils in various grades- 8th, 11th, 12th- were studying the period after the Second World War. The inspectors didn’t know which way to turn because nothing fit anything: not the glorious accomplishments of the popular democracy, not the collapse of the colonial imperialist system and not even the “golden age” apotheosis.
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I had no idea about the Romanian government’s scholarship politics. The National Bureau for Scholarships Abroad was set up in 1998, and I had been to the States on scholarship from 1995 till 1996. Everything was still at the beginning; people either improvised a lot or followed old procedures. We were the Guinea pigs for an entire host of education experiments.
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We often play on the Internet, and the players are from all over the country, and sometimes from abroad. Your Internet server is not in Bucharest but in Buz`u or in some other city or even abroad. Our partners were the two, three, four, five guys in the café and others all over the country. You access the Internet and you get a list of all the players who have nicknames, one weirder and crazier than the next, and it’s only normal that after countless hours of playing together you get to know them all. During the game we can communicate with each other in writing. When we meet each other in the street we call each other by our nicknames simply because we don’t know the others’ real names.
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Due to the December coup d’état, I ended up having a different destiny than the one I had prefigured. I, as well as my entire generation, had to live the tumultuous nineties. Those were years of complete reconstruction. Years when I learnt to stand on my own two, like a baby, even if I had already turned twenty. Step by step…
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The first Romanian real estate agency was set up in April 1990, while now they are at least “three in each block of flats”, as a real estate agent once remarked. The amplitude reached by this phenomenon is closely connected with the country’s transition from a totalitarian regime to democracy, from a centralized economy to a capitalist one, from common property and stateowned factories to private property. Most of the people living in cities became owners of their flats virtually “over night”, and all they had to do for that was to pay a symbolic sum to the state. Once that deal was perfected, the flat became an exchange object on a market that was free, yet new, uncertain and unstable. The Pandora box now open, all the ills of the trade have come to the surface (cheats, speculations, theft, frauds), as well as the hope trade gives you (solving a problem, a better life). The image of the real estate agent is perceived against this dual background. In our analysis, we viewed the real estate market as a system, and the real estate agent as the representative figure for the system. In other words, the analysis of the representative category will suggest the evolution of the whole system.
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We really enjoyed the moment when private televisions appeared. And that is because at the same time we could watch something different from the twin-brother-like news bulletins we were used to. We could say that we had the possibility to watch pieces of news which weren’t always respectful with those holding the power, thus sharing with us things which had been unconceivable until 1990.
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I talked to a number of randomly-chosen teachers who were acquaintances of friends of mine. They are generally young people who entered the system after 1990, and some even graduated from faculty after the Revolution. I asked them for an honest opinion regarding the wins and losses that the Romanian education has experienced after 1990, and I also asked about the manner in which they were affected by the frequent changes in the quality of education services. My other questions regarded the existence of a crisis situation in the domain of education, the changes undergone by the student-teacher-parent relationships after the Revolution, and by the relationship all three have developed with the school as an institution; they also referred to the social status of teachers, to the way in which they are viewed and assessed by parents, students and society, to the differences between past and current generations of students, to the specific difficulties with which teachers have to cope and about the way they solve these problems. Their personal ten-year experience has allowed them to form some clear opinions and these opinions have a lot in common. I have chosen only one speaking voice because the discourse is actually a synthesis of virtually all the problems met by those who struggle to apply an education system whose effects will only become visible in time.
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13th June 1990. North Railway Station. I was just getting off the train with my mom and dad. Two people in their sixties. Close to the exit, a manly voice clearly whispers to me from behind: ‘Get lost, the miners are coming!’ A tall man, wearing a navy blue suit and a white shirt, passes me by skimming the ground.
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The bewildering experiences of some professionals during the first postcommunist years of Romania, when the transition from state-owned business to private enterprise, the flourishing of market economy and thus, the reconfiguring of the whole economical system meant a period of anarchy.
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When I went there for the very first time I was already working for “Arta public?”, I had a job, but she said, “Godmother – ‘cause she’s Silvia’s godmother; one of them anyway – come with us to the market”. And there was a devilish Gypsy woman and a drunkard sleeping there in a room they had given her. They cooked there and everything, you know, all in that room? There were rats there. Well, in the end the manager invested in the place, modernized it and had tiles put on the walls and floors, it was the most beautiful market at the time, a real place of luxury. The first private market in the whole country it was.
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The author effectuates a timeline of the first decade of Romania after the fall of the communist regime in December 1989, scoring, in a personal and self-assumed manner, the main events which have influenced Romanian recent history.
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Before, you shouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb when everybody else keeps a low profile. Now I see that having ideas is in great fashion and everybody is keen on being top of the heap. And if you don’t like this or that, you just go and work for another employer. You go back to square one. When you get the job, you start squabbling over money, over ideas, over your own person. But there’s a catch here, and a big one this is – you must know a good trade, not just one that is in demand, but one that you know in and out, like the back of your hand; and you must be tough, ‘cause you don’t want people coming and blowing your chances away from you! You keep your chin up, but not without good reason. And that makes you a winner.
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How I got in this business … I passed the faculty entrance examination during Ceauşescu’s regime, at a time when a student was just a student and the prospects of getting a job were null. I couldn’t get money from home because there wasn’t any to send, and all the money I could count on was the pension I got from my dad. So I slowly began to learn: I divided my ration card … Back then they didn’t give us the scholarship money directly. We had a ration card and a seat a day or something like that … When I was in my second year, I took a part-time job at a school, and so did a colleague of mine from the faculty. We supported each other and together we began to sell things to students in the hostel.
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