Background
After a period of rigid Stalinism from 1948, Romanian cultural life experienced a modest trend of liberalisation and ideological relaxation in the early 1960s. This trend accelerated with the IXth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party in 1965. A talented oppositional generation of writers emerged: Nichita Stănescu, Ana Blandiana, Gabriel Liiceanu, Nicolae Manolescu, Adrian Păunescu, and others. Furthermore, at the April 1968 Central Committee plenum, Ceauşescu denounced his predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and rehabilitated Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, executed just two days before Ceauşescu joined the Politburo (thus allowing him to claim innocence and to demote a key rival, Alexandru Drăghici). This opened up even more space for artistic expression. Eugen Barbu's novel Principele ("The Prince", 1969), though set in the Phanariot era, clearly refers to Gheorghiu-Dej — there is even a project to build a canal that claims many of its builders' lives (a disguised reference to the Danube-Black Sea Canal). In Dumitru Radu Popescu's novel F, abuses committed during collectivisation are explored. Augustin Buzura's novel Absenţii ("The Absent Ones", 1970) went so far as to provide a critique of contemporary society, describing the spiritual crisis of a young doctor.
To be sure, censorship remained in place. Alexandru Ivasiuc and Paul Goma had both been imprisoned for their participation in the Bucharest student movement of 1956, and each wrote a novel about a man's prison experiences and efforts to readjust after his release. Goma's Ostinato describes prison life, Securitate methods and the excesses of collectivisation. The censor asked for changes; eventually Goma published the book uncut in West Germany in the fall of 1971. Ivasiuc, in his Păsările ("The Birds"), complied with the censor's demands by justifying the protagonist's arrest and portraying the secret police in a positive light. Nevertheless, most writers were optimistic that the Party would tolerate a broader range of themes in creative literature.
A thaw in relations with the United States, chief adversary of the Communist bloc during the Cold War, also took place and brought with it an impact on citizens' lives. A Pepsi-Cola factory opened in Constanţa in 1967, its product promoted in the press through American-style advertisements. The slogan "Pepsi, drive and energy" ran regularly in newspapers that just a few years earlier made no mention of Western products. Coca-Cola was not produced domestically, but could be found in bars and "Comturist shops", stores with a restricted clientele where Western goods could be purchased in hard currency. In 1968, the first student bar/club opened in Bucharest; a writer for Viaţa Studenţească described "low tables, discreet light... chewing gum and cigarettes, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, mechanical games, billiards... plus a few hours of interesting discussions. Here is why the club bar appears as an answer to a natural need for communication, for exchanging ideas and clashing opinions... in a relaxed atmosphere". Modern American art, harshly criticised during the period of socialist realism, began to receive favourable coverage, as seen during an exhibition ("American painting since 1945") that opened in early 1969, featuring work by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist. Even the US government received praise: President Richard Nixon's world tour of 1969 was closely followed, and the moon landing that July featured in advertisements, was broadcast live (in Eastern Europe, only Yugoslavia did so as well), and occasioned warm greetings from Ceauşescu to Nixon and the American people. Probably the high point of Romanian-American relations during the Communist period came early the following month, when tens of thousands of enthusiastic Bucharesters welcomed Nixon, who became the first US President to visit an Eastern Bloc country.
Writing over three decades later, Sorin Preda, who arrived in Bucharest from Bacău as an 18-year-old in 1970, recalled the cultural scene:
| “ | Inexplicably and in part miraculously, around 1970, time had slowed down all of a sudden. Tired out, history left people alone for a few years, forgetting about denouncements and workers' wrath, about suspicions and ugly memories. It was the artists' time — including those just released from prison. It was the time of the thaw. For Leonce and Lena, the Bulandra Theatre was packed with people who'd come to give standing ovations for Ciulei, Pintilie, Irina Petrescu and Caramitru. Our great visual artists — Maitec, Apostu and Baba, opened a new exhibition almost every month. The Athenaeum and Opera would sell out shows for their entire run, while in bookstores, the works of Eliade, Noica, Preda, Breban, Ţoiu or Nichita were sold on the sly, with much pleading and insistence.
In the 1970s, life in Bucharest really started toward midnight. After a concert or a play, people went for a walk, to enjoy themselves. The elegant downtown restaurants were full of artists and beautiful girls. The best-known writers and journalists dined at Capşa and Berlin, while at the Mignon the first private restaurant had opened, owned by the Chivu brothers, where you could find the freshest seafood, brought that very day from Paris by air. The city adulated its artists, receiving Nichita as it would a handsome and rebellious prince, and Marin Preda like a patriarch. The lights shone on the streets and there were even a few neon signs, American-style. No one was in a hurry. There was time for everything – for books and films, for political jokes and for a glass of good wine. For a moment, Bucharest had recovered its pre-World War II normalcy. A year later, in '71, the July Theses would draw an invisible scalpel line over people, over the white nights of Bucharest, over all our small, guiltless pleasures. A freezing gust of wind heralded the dreadful ideological winter that would soon arrive. In disbelief and naive, people continued to go out, to fill the theatres and concert halls, while Ciulei, Pintilie and Andrei Şerban's bags were being prepared for their permanent departure from the country. Not even when the Mignon restaurant was closed, and the light bulbs downtown disappeared one by one, did people stop hoping. It's as if no one wanted to believe that everything could end so quickly, in an absurd and unfair twist of history. |
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Read more about this topic: July Theses
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