Filenews 18 July 2022
By Robert D. Kaplan
In 1984, during the darkest period of the Stalinist rule of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, I visited Targoviste, more than an hour northwest of the capital, Bucharest, on the Wallachian plain. It was a hellish city, with mud-filled streets, some troubled cars, with no decent place for food and garbage everywhere. People looked (and smelled) bad.
Two weeks ago, I visited Targoviste again for the first time in almost four decades. It is now a sparkling, vibrant city with new roads with speed-limiting bumps, well-groomed flowers and fences, new supermarkets and restaurants and state-of-the-art cars everywhere. People looked and dressed like anywhere in the West.
Targoviste is a miracle made possible by Romania's membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union. The first provided a seal of approval for the initial investment in 2004, and the second has been providing assistance and development standards for years.
Westernization revolution
The provincial regions not only of Romania, but also of other Central and Eastern European states that joined NATO and the EU in the first decade of the 21st century resemble the picture above. A revolution of Westernization occurred beyond the capitals of the former communist Europe. The idea put forward by many in Washington's political community that the expansion of NATO and the EU was a mistake - and inevitably led to the war in Ukraine - is resoundingly refuted by reality on the ground, as it is evident that the political and economic stability of the West has now extended to the full range up to the Russian border.
If Targoviste and other cities in its north as far as Poland had not developed in the last three decades, the US and its democratic allies would have faced a sharp economic and cultural division of Europe similar to that of the Cold War, with colossal Russia, under any regime, sowing disorder.
Not all countries have reaped exactly the same benefits in two decades. But the authoritarian populism of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the political turmoil in Bulgaria are just a small taste of what could be happening in much of the European continent without the enlargement of NATO and the EU.
Worry
However, Romania, with the largest population and territory in southeastern Europe, is a country of concern. It is trapped historically because of its proximity to Russia, whose army has now invaded next to its "door". Romania and Romanian-speaking Moldova have a longer border with Ukraine than Poland.
Romania, Moldova are alarmingly close to the warfield
The so-called "Greater Romania", including Moldova, has been occupied (at least in part) by Russia 10 times since 1711. At a seminar of Romanian intelligence and defence experts in Bucharest, in the conduct of which I helped, several reported that I was visiting the country on the anniversary of the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia - the historical name of the region of Moldova - on June 28, 1940.
Situated at the point where many empires - Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg, Nazi Germany, and so on - have clashed, Stalin's subjugation of Bessarabia was not uncommon, given the history. The prognosis regarding developments in Ukraine among those who were at the Bucharest conference was, as you can imagine, gloomy.
Romanian experts believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin will continue to advance slowly and torturously in eastern Ukraine and eventually annex the Donbass region to Russia, stating that any further Ukrainian military activity there will constitute an attack on Russia itself. They expect Putin to slowly build a land bridge to Crimea and beyond, eventually reaching Moldova and the self-governing Moldovan region of Transnistria.
Although Putin, whose troops are advancing slowly in Donbass, does not currently have the ability to invade Moldova, he does not even have to do so. Moldova, a former Soviet republic, is a weak in terms of institutions state of only 2.6 million inhabitants, with an inflation rate of 29% in May, which is constantly on the verge of destabilisation.
Trust
As for the European allies and whether they will arrive for rescue, the Romanians have no confidence in France and Germany at all. French President Emmanuel Macron is believed to have sacrificed any authority to make France an intermediary between Russia and Ukraine.
As for the Germans, they have already built two Nord Stream pipelines for Russian gas. "And what is built is finally used," a local analyst told me. It was a pattern of thought that I heard from others: when winter comes and Germany and other parts of Europe suffer from energy shortages, then Europe's determination towards Russia will be eroded.
Despite the economic growth of the last three decades, the West still has to prove its potential here. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Romanians waited in vain for a liberation effort by western democracies to overthrow the ruthless communist regime of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.
I remember what the late Silviu Brucan, the great elder of Romanian communism, said to me in 1998, when I asked him why he had become Stalinist in his youth: 'Why?' he asked rhetorically. "Because the West did not lose Eastern Europe in Yalta in 1945, it lost it in 1938 in Munich. You weren't anywhere. So after Munich, the only option for the Romanians was between Hitler and Stalin."
The expansion of NATO and the EU in 2004 and 2007 occurred while Putin's Russia was still comparatively weak. So, in the eyes of the Romanians, only now comes the real test for the West. People are afraid that Europe's fortitude will weaken. Only US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (who is soon to leave office) inspire confidence in Bucharest.
Lesson
I came to Targoviste to visit the place where Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were tried and executed on Christmas Day 1989 - an event that is directly related to what is happening in Ukraine.
Due to a trick with the angle of the camera, the impression of the distorted snapshots of the events of the time is about a large hall. However, the hasty "trial" of the Ceausescu took place in a tiny room, in an old school near the railway tracks.
Having more than drunk the "cup" of power, having met presidents and prime ministers, having boarded a coach with Queen Elizabeth and having become an object of admiration at passionate gatherings, the two found themselves trapped in a corner of the narrow room in front of a plywood table and sitting in two kindergarten-style chairs, with their judges a few feet away. Just two days earlier, they had practically owned a palace literally comparable in size to the Pentagon.
From the trial courtroom they were led through a small corridor to a courtyard, where they tied their eyes and shot them. All the good things that have happened in Romania start from that moment on. In all the visits I have made to Romania for decades, I have never identified remorse for how the couple came to an end.
Ceausescu's foreign policy was superficially independent of the Soviet Union, but Romanians, unlike many in the West, were never fooled. The world knew that if the Soviet Union had not been so neighbouring from a geographical point of view, Romania would have escaped the communist nightmare of almost half a century.
Through all the adversity of weak and corrupt democratic governments from 1989 onwards, life here is better and safer than at any other time in the country's history. It is a rule of law, dedicated to the rights of the individual and not to some mythical collective will and fate, such as Ceausescu's Romania and Putin's Russia.
Ceausescu and Putin
Putin's authoritarian rule is not on the scale of the Ceausescu regime, which operated authentic slave labour camps, put a ration on food and proceeded to destroy a vast historical area of the Romanian capital - thrown into oblivion to pave the way for a Stalinist "City of the Dead", which housed gloomy government offices.
But, like Ceausescu, Putin, invading Ukraine, has embarked on an extreme and dangerous journey whose end cannot be prescribed. There is even a lesson for Putin from the fall of Ceausescu.
Ceausescu never smiled. He always seemed "restless and busy," one of his nephews told me a few years ago. Romania, among so many others, gives doctrines about the horror - and loneliness - of absolute power. From dominating a gigantic palace, then within a period of about 24 hours sleeping in campaign beds in a small room without toilet or heating inside a winter night, eating from tin cans, waiting for their trial and execution - this was the fate of the Ceausescu.
Romanians, as pessimistic as they may be about the West's determination, are nevertheless wise that something similar may one day happen to Putin.
Source: BloombergOpinion
