Posted on 03/05/2016 8:59:40 AM PST by rktman
The sixth installment of my interview across cyberspace with Mircea Brenciu, famous author and editor, adamantly anti-communist, and the founder of many publications in Romania, is coming to a close. A few questions remained to explain the transformation that occurred in Romania since the “collapse” of Ceausescu’s socialist dictatorship in 1989 when the much-touted "workers' paradise" crashed and burned on the ashes of millions of victims who died needlessly at the reckless hands of Bolsheviks who were experimenting with people's lives as dreamed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
As I watched videos from remote villages where people still live and die without electricity, paved roads, gravel roads, running water and sewer systems, trudging through ankle deep mud during rains, I wondered what happened to their standard of living in the twenty-seven years since communism "fell."
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Second post about Romania today. Wow.
I was there visiting my fiancé’s family for a month over Christmas and New Year’s. The village she grew up in has gravel roads, but has had electricity since before Communism fell. One thing that did make me widen my eyes is that there is a single road into the village across a river, and the single lane bridge along that road has only been there since 2000. Before that, there was a ferry that you had to use to get to the village.
My mom grew up in a small town in the bootheel of Missouri in the 50’s and 60’s, and from pictures and tales of her childhood, the village my girlfriend grew up in is about equivalent to the mid-1960’s of my mom’s childhood.
The major cities are modern and most Americans would feel right at home, but the villages and smaller towns are several decades behind where even the most rural U.S. towns are now. But they are catching up.
LOL! Yeah, kinda eye opening. Mrs. rktman and her former boss and bosses husband (Armenian) were given the “opportunity” to go to Armenia after the USSR fell apart to try to educate folks about business and free enterprise. She asked if I wanted to go but I declined. Her first trip abroad outside of the Bahamas. It was eye opening for her to say the least. I knew where she was headed and having been in East Berlin in the early 60’s knew what she was headed in to. Did she kiss the ground when she got back in the states? You betcha. Yeravan wasn’t too bad except for intermittent electricity, running water, transportation, roadside extortion etc. Outside the city, dirt roads, very few what we would call modern day options. Gas tanker trucks were the “gas stations”. Of course the black market/mafia type were thriving. A lot of people have no clue about things like this so their perspective is skewed.
I think Roxana Vancea is a good example of Romanian progress.
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