Letter from Romania

Extract

More Than Four Years Have Passed Since The Uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. If the revolt of the Romanians, after years in which Ceausescu encountered practically no opposition to his personal harsh dictatorship, surprised the entire world, the subsequent evolution of Romanian society seemed to return to the sad pattern of old: a country with little democratic tradition and maybe the most damaged by communism of all Eastern European countries would be expected to meet great difficulties and take more time to become a freemarket, liberal-based democracy. What is left of this prognosis more than four years after Ceausescu's fall?

Communism is dead, but the communist spirit continues to hover over Eastern Europe. In most of the states there is a peculiar resilience of the class structures imposed by the previous regime. This is not a new situation, which could explain in part the relative popularity of that system even in the countries where it was imported from abroad by Soviet military occupation. To speak nowadays about the popularity of communism, however relative, may sound like an affront to the numerous people who either perished in gaols and camps or barely survived after almost fifty years of political homogenization and isolation.