A few days ago, I watched a program on a news channel: the percentage of young people, starting at age 14 and going all the way up, who follow TikTok shows glorifying Nicolae Ceaușescu’s achievements and communism in general has reached a level that sets off collective alarm bells. In recent years, more than 150 million users have consumed praises dedicated to the “Golden Age.” Ceaușescu is seen as a hero, a genius, a victim of conspiracies, a martyr of an anti-Romanian Revolution.
I can understand that some of them hear nostalgic fairy tales from grandparents, uncles, or neighbors about how good life supposedly was under Ceaușescu: we were all equal (!!), there was no unemployment (hmmm), every family received an apartment, people were well-mannered, there was more civic respect, stricter rules for living together in society. Obviously, all these recollections are tinted by the nostalgia of those who lived through the Ceaușescu era. Distant youth casts memories in a different light.
But beyond these accounts told in a nostalgic, backward-looking register, there exists – here as elsewhere – a tendency among young people to gravitate toward authoritarian political regimes run by macho-charismatic leaders. There are examples around the world; I won’t list them here. Democracy is wrinkled, outdated, tired. Politicians, parliamentarians, democratic leaders are not cool – they’re oldish, lost in regulations and bureaucracy that “truly” free people no longer want to hear about.
At the school where I’ve worked for 16 years, I have high-school students of the best human and moral quality. I doubt their parents are filling their heads with communist nonsense. But since prevention is the mother of intention, and even if history doesn’t learn from its own mistakes, it’s still good to at least be aware of those mistakes, the Romanian language and literature department decided to allocate a few of the very few hours available in a British-curriculum high school to studying, through literature, film, and drama, the era we call “recent” communism.
The 1980s – years of the Ceaușescu family’s dreadful dictatorship, years of basic material shortages, but above all of fundamental deprivations of human existence: freedom, freedom of speech, the freedom to travel the world, women’s freedom to decide over their own bodies. We began with a set of lessons for grades 10 – 12 as an introduction – actually an immersion into the Ceaușescu era. Photos of daily life, interiors, clothing, mass gatherings and congresses, queues, empty stalls.
We talked about the Revolution of December 21st, 1989. My tiny advantage is that I was a witness – at times recklessly involved – to the uprising at University Square on the afternoon, evening, and night of December 21st. My students understood, I hope, that in exceptional circumstances, ordinary people can behave in extraordinary ways and overcome fear and their many fears. And perhaps they understood that freedom is truly the priceless good of the human condition. A freedom that, for me at least, during the 30 years I spent in communism, was cut off from the cradle. And one that – even now, in strange and confusing global circumstances – we will hold on to.
