Good Old (Authoritarian) Times

For no apparent reason besides having laid my eyes on it, I will dedicate this post to a patriotic book from my childhood, caled Povestiri istorice (Historic Tales), by Dumitru Almas. Please see the cover below. 

This book is part three of three books meant to popularise national history in easy to read stories accompanied by full-page illustrations. The first two books were dedicated to medieval and modern history. This third part is dedicated to the 20th Century, to new history, and I quote: "We are, then, talking about deeds, events, people, heroes of the struggle for justice and freedom, people who lived and worked in the past fifty-sixty years". (the book was published in 1984). 

The author then recalls some of the achievements of the Romanian people. Besides fighting off the Fascists, the war troubles from 1941-45 and the famine of 1946-47, he reminds the audience that the Romanian people also achieved the cooperativisation of agriculture, "and started working the land with machines: tractors, sowers, combines", built the Trans-Fagaras highway across the Carpathians ("up to 2000 metres altitude"), dug out the Danube-Black Sea channel, and "built hundreds of thousands of blocks of flats, in tens and tens of new towns".

All this was made by "millions and millions of people, among whom are your grandparents, your parents, even your older siblings. If you know this thing, if you understand it properly, you too will respect and love all that your forerunners have built and you too will be very eager and proud to follow and surpass them [...] "

"You will succeed making Romania even richer, prouder, more resplendant among the countries of the world, and more loved and respected by all peoples. Towards this goal we are directed by the Romanian Communist Party, at its forefront being Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu, the president of our country, the Romanian Socialist Republic. And you all are growing up protected and watched over by his love. He only asks of you to grow big, strong, beautiful, hard-working, serious, tenacious, daring, and loving the country and the people."

If you made it to this paragraph, you are brave people and I congratulate you. And if you resist a little bit more and analyse some key words in the text, you will see how wrong it is on so many levels. 

However, to give him his due, Dumitru Almas was a great storyteller and I remember enjoying his stories with Romanian princes fighting off the enemies (generally the Turks and Tartars), and heroes doing this and that. The introduction is more or less a set text telling the same things that appeared in countless other books and magazines, so he might not even have written it himself. The phrase "Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu, the president of our country, the Romanian Socialist Republic" was like a mantra, and it appeared everywhere as such, with no variation, like a title of nobility. 

And what did we learn from this? you will be right to ask. We learned that literature obeying diktats is generally of inferior quality, and when you strip away the propaganda it does not stand too well either. But back then, it really was entertaining.