Something I’ve been thinking about is how the AH stories about Ceausescu and his communist regime still being in power after ‘89 are the product of a idea-that of an semi invincible Ceausescu and Romania managing to become the North Korea of Eastern Europe.
Don’t get me wrong though,I don’t come into this hating these kinds of stories. Far from it,they are often some of the best and fun pieces of AH writing in Romanian-almost all written by flawed human people. Cristian Tudor Popescu is often really tremendous as a editor and has the worst hot takes half of the times,but as a writer he’s genuinely good. Dead Time is a genuinely good script for an AH movie where Ceausescu manages to hang on to power by brutally destroying all the protesters and holy shit it’s really good you guys
Like,CTP manages very well to make an atmospheric movie,full of suspense and it’s just so good at imagining how the regime would evolve into the Nineties,with more and more shortages,the Securitate trying every possible to somehow keep the regime from falling apart and Ceausescu backing Milosevic and Saddam and being more and more nationalistic,to the point where it’s hinted that unionism in Moldova is tainted by him and the propaganda that the regime creates of an United Greater Romania after 1991.
Likewise,Adrian Cioroianu and Iulian Comanescu wrote really fun vignettes where they imagined how the figures of modern Romania that were created by the fall of communism would be in a world where it didn’t fell in Romania. They all however suffer from the fact that realistically Ceausescu couldn’t have continued after 1989. Even he managed somehow to put down the revolution,the regime cannot survive beyond 1991-1992 for four main reasons:
1. The regime was genuinely on its last breath and without external help it would have crumbled soon via massive riots.
2. Ceausescu was by ‘89 suffering from various illnesses and by ‘91 he would have most likely died of diabetes or some other disease.
3. He’s gonna come to blows soon with Hungary as his nationalist rhetoric will intensify even more and that might lead to international sanctions or even a war,neither being things that his regime can survive.
4. His only successor was his son Nicu,a drunk playboy who didn’t really believe in communism or anything at all,preferred profiting from his parents who forced him to a higher spotlight that he didn’t want and wasn’t really liked by the important people in the party. Even if he does successfully become Secretary General,he doesn’t have a plan to deal with anything and by ‘91 is suffering from various liver diseases due to his alcohol addiction. He either resigns at some point during ‘93-‘95 and lets democracy happen or dies in ‘96 due to his alcoholism without an heir and the regime just collapses.
Again,like I said in the beginning,it’s not the writers fault for not knowing this. They wrote them before these kind of things were common knowledge and the idea of Ceausescu going on and on and on seemed plausible to a lot of Romanians since there wasn’t any real opposition to him and the Revolution of ‘89 was something that people still can’t properly process. For years they were raised that Ceausescu and the Party can’t be opposed and the Securitate knows everything.Ceausescu’s power seemed to be a thing that would last forever and most got used to it since well they couldn’t stop him.
And then out of the sudden his power just fades away.
So yeah,these stories are clearly influenced by how big Ceausescu’s presence was in the lives of ordinary Romanians and how he never truly left even after all these years in the minds of a lot of people. They aren’t plausible stories about the regime surviving but they are good stories about the regime surviving. And that’s more important in fiction.
Still,it would be interesting to write/read a story about Ceausescu managing to survive only for a little longer til he falls in Autumn ‘90/Spring ‘91.