I also checked out the Romanian dictator he mentioned. This is... uh... freaking horrible.

What the fuck kind of "Communist Party" governed Romania???

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Ceausescu is complicated because beyond the Soviet split he needs to be understood in the context of the IMF and its predatory loans. The suffering of the 1980s was trying to pay off that debt which is engineered to strangle poor countries like Romania. He was a shit and his wife was a joke, but I don't know what the happy path for Romania would have been.

    • LibsEatPoop [any]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      That truly sucks. 1980s were hard on all countries. It's a double tragedy that it led to the downfall of Eastern European Communism and the rise of Western Neoliberalism.

      • Vncredleader
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Seems he also just sucked socially. Banning abortion in the 60s. Every day I realize more and more why Hoxha was as fierce and immovable as he was. He'd piss off every other communist nation on earth if it meant protecting the rights of women in Albania; a true believer

        btw we dont have a Hoxha or soviet Albania emote from what I can find

          • Vncredleader
            ·
            3 years ago

            How did those not show up for me? Thx, though we should have one of him as a partisan https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/partisanhoxhacolor.jpg?w=584 or this cute one of two comrades hanging out https://topwar.ru/uploads/posts/2015-06/1435413981_hodzha-i-stalin.jpg

      • happybadger [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        That was the first country I backpacked through and I met a fair number of people who were like 18-40 during the 80s. The austerity was brutal enough that it made a lot of older people traumatic hoarders. They've got drawers full of little utilitarian items because "paying off all foreign debt" meant selling off all excess production. The country's largest luxury shopping mall, Plaza Romania, was built on the corpse of one of Ceausescu's 1980s public works projects. Collectively they're referred to as "hunger circuses" because he was building monumental domed public markets during a borderline famine. I don't see any leader, much less a mediocre one like Ceausescu, being able to navigate a period like that with the external conditions placed on them. Their past was so shitty that they wouldn't have been able to turn eastward for Soviet help even if the Soviets weren't in the process of Perestroika liberalisation themselves. Maybe the maths work out for partially selling off production and lessening the consumer impact of the decade, but they were facing the austerity that turned the people against their revolution either way.