EASTERN EUROPE
(See Cover)
Rumania, bah! It is neither a state nor a nation, but a profession.
—Nicholas II of Russia
The floods came early to western Rumania, spilling in thunderous green torrents from the snowy Carpathians, slashing roads to ribbons and turning towns into archipelagoes. Food was short, drinking water unsafe. It was a time when people looked to their government for action, and the Communist regime of Rumania was quick to respond. Fully half the citizens of Oradea, a city of 110,000 hard by the Hungarian border, were lining the streets when the train from Bucharest chuffed to a halt.
Through feathers of steam and shrill cries of "Sa trăiască!" (Long life!) stepped a short, square-shouldered man wearing a blue nylon raincoat and a quizzical expression. Within minutes, Nicolae Ceausescu, 48, leader of Rumania's Communist Party and the youngest Red ruler in Eastern Europe, had changed into his "touring outfit" and was ready to roll.
Clad in knee-high black boots, a grey wool lumber jacket, well-worn brown corduroys and a visored cap, Ceausescu moved out through the waterlogged countryside, past peasants in dripping sheepskins and gaggles of screeching schoolgirls, past hat-waving horsemen who offered gifts of bread and salt, past thatch-roofed villages painted sky blue and sienna, past gargantuan collective farms and gleaming new factories. Geese hissed, dogs barked, and Ceausescu listened to gripes. Sometimes speaking from a stack of concrete blocks, sometimes from the back of a wagon, he pressed home again and again a message more familiar to Western audiences than to Communists: "We are moving now; we want your help in building a better Rumania."
Refuting the Lie. Back home in Bucharest this week, Nicolae Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-shess-coo) quietly celebrated the successful completion of his first full year in power. Under Ceausescu and his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who died of pneumonia just a year ago, Rumania has utterly disproved two-thirds of Czar Nicholas' caustic calumny.* Rumania today is indubitably a state, defiantly a nation, and quite proud to admit the Czar's final point about professionalism. Moreover, it was Rumania that in many ways set the pace in the quiet repudiation of the Czar's successors—a chain of events that has subtly altered the nature of European Communism.
As a result there are three Communisms in the world today. The virulent Chinese variety would infect the world with "wars of national liberation." The Russian brand has graduated from the minor leagues of guerrilla warfare, and wields vast military and economic power in hopes of winning the world to Marxism through example. The Red states of Eastern Europe have developed a milder, more "relaxed" strain, one better suited to their lack of economic and military muscle. Fragmented by history and welded by ideology, they have arrived at an almost dialectical synthesis of the tensions tearing at them: nationalist, neutralist Communism.
Under both Czar and commissar, Russia's aim in Eastern Europe since the Pan-Slavism of the mid-19th century has been to dilute nationalism and thereby exert its own will over an area that today contains 120 million inhabitants and represents the world's fourth largest industrial complex