Socialist Heritage

The Politics of Past and Place in Romania

Emanuela Grama

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780253044815
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

This prize-winning study of post-WWII Romania examines the fraught relationship between national heritage and Socialist statecraft.
In Socialist Heritage, ethnographer and historian Emanuela Grama explores the socialist state's attempt to create its own heritage, as well as the ongoing legacy of that project. While many argue that the socialist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe aimed to erase the pre-war history of the socialist cities, Grama shows that the communist state in Romania sought to exploit the past for its own benefit.
The book traces the transformation of Bucharest's Old Town district from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. Under socialism, politicians and professionals used the district's historic buildings—especially the ruins of a medieval palace—to emphasize the city's Romanian past and erase its ethnically diverse history. Since the collapse of socialism, the cultural and economic value of the Old Town has become highly contested. Its poor residents decry their semi-decrepit homes, while entrepreneurs see it as a source of easy money.
Such arguments point to recent negotiations about the meanings of class, political participation, and ethnic and economic belonging in today's Romania. Grama's rich historical and ethnographic research reveals the fundamentally dual nature of heritage: every search for an idealized past relies on strategies of differentiation that can lead to further marginalization and exclusion.
Winner of the 2020 Ed A. Hewitt Book Prize

1

TENSED URBAN VISIONS

Making Bucharest into a Socialist Capital

IN JUNE 1956, BUCHAREST’S CITY ARCHITECT, POMPILIU MACOVEI, found himself, once again, in front of the members of the government. He was summoned to the government’s headquarters to inform the party leaders about the progress that he and his team had made on the planning of a socialist Bucharest. The Romanian communist regime viewed the transformation of Bucharest into a modern capital as the most tangible proof that the Party-state could and would keep its promises to deliver a better life and guarantee a brighter future. Since 1949, many architects had been working on Bucharest’s master plan for urban development (henceforth, master plan), and their specific suggestions had already been discussed over and over again among the members of the government. However, all that talk led to nothing.

Five years after the work on the plan had started, the political leaders were still frustrated with the slow progress. Macovei tried to address their concerns by insisting on the pressing need for mass housing in a capital that was rapidly expanding, while noting the significant limitations of funds and, in particular, expertise. However, he could not prevent government officials’ criticism. One of the ministers in the room, who was also an architect and the head of the State Committee for Architecture, complained about Macovei’s presentation of the plan as being “too modest” and for failing to make Bucharest into “a future city that would be more optimistic, more luminous, as a communist capital should be.”¹ At this point, Macovei lost his patience and retorted, “If we are too bold, we would break our neck!”²

This exchange captured the competing visions of state officials and of different architects commissioned to change Bucharest. A source of tension stemmed from the question of where they should start: to intervene first in the city center or to begin building new neighborhoods on the periphery. One of the major goals of the government was to find a rapid solution to the postwar housing crisis, because a successful industrialization was contingent on the government’s ability to provide housing to workers. At the same time, the regime aimed high. They wanted to transform Bucharest into a radically new city, an “optimistic and luminous” capital, as the minister put it, standing for a new political ideology. In November 1952, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (Dej, henceforth), the party’s first secretary and de facto leader of the country, presented Bucharest’s transformation as a pursuit of national significance and a source of pride for every Romanian citizen: “Everyone in the country will find it a high honor . . . to visit the capital to see something different from the anarchy and disorder of the past, which we want to gradually eliminate within fifteen to twenty years.”³

However, the architects had to acknowledge multiple limitations of labor, funds, and expertise. Such constraints created further problems. First, in a capital facing a massive population expansion, the lack of state housing forced many newcomers into the city to build their own homes in the form of rudimentary constructions often without access to water and electricity. These unauthorized houses defied the architects’ attempts to bring order into the city via a centralized urban planning. Moreover, these constructions signaled the inability of the local authorities to gain and maintain control—not only over the urban development but also over the people’s actions. The second problem was the narrow pool of expertise. The government simply could not find enough architects to work on Bucharest’s master plan. The question was whether to continue to rely on expertise from abroad—that is, from the Soviets—or to seek alternatives within the country, such as the older professionals who had been marginalized due to their former political convictions. This was a particularly important dilemma in the conditions in which, after Stalin’s death in 1953, the Dej-led government began seeking a relative autonomy from the Soviets. The debates around Bucharest’s planning reveal the Romanian communist leadership’s attempt to curtail the Soviets’ control in a manner that did not appear to be overtly political.

And all these tensions derived from another: the infighting among different factions within the party leadership, which involved not only struggles for power but also different priorities and distinct visions about what a socialist society is and how it should be governed. After World War II, postwar Central and Eastern Europe became a laboratory for testing the possibilities and limitations of socialism as an alternative social and political order. All of the new regimes in the region mobilized architecture as a sign and tool of rapid modernization. Soon, architects gained significant political clout among the new structures of power as the experts who would literally “build socialism.”⁴ From the late 1940s to mid-1950s, the new regimes used the large-scale destruction caused by the war to justify rebuilding their urban landscapes according to the principles of socialist urban planning. Together or separately, architects from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and Romania traveled to Moscow to meet with and receive guidance from their Soviet colleagues.⁵ These architects visited Soviet institutions of urban planning in order to see with their own eyes how they were organized and how they functioned, and then they reported back to their party leaders, bringing with them planning strategies to launch their own building projects at home.

Starting from the ongoing negotiations mentioned above, this chapter examines postwar urbanization in Bucharest as a process directly linked to state formation. It views state making as an attempt to extend control over and signal power via urban space, especially when a new political order was to be embodied by a new urbanity. This chapter argues that Bucharest’s master plan for urban development served as an arena in which different political actors attempted to subtly assert their power through tense discussions about buildings, parks, streets, and squares. It follows the negotiations around Bucharest’s master plan chronologically throughout the 1950s. It begins in 1949, when a team of architects began working on a plan for the capital that drew heavily on the 1935 plan for Moscow, and ends in 1959, when the authorities declared Bucharest’s master plan completed.⁶ I outline the main recommendations of the initial plan and follow them through their subsequent developments—exploring to what extent they were pursued and how the initial solutions were adapted (or abandoned) due to changes in the political context.

Before examining these debates, I offer a brief overview of the political and social changes occurring in Romania after the war. In contrast to other countries in the socialist bloc such as Czechoslovakia, the Romanian Communist Party had been nearly invisible as a political presence before and during the war. Once it came to power, it encountered a country deeply divided along class and ethnic lines. The party leaders had to work hard to gain people’s trust. That became especially challenging when the new officials were trying to figure out how to govern—how to persuade institutions to work together in a centralized political system, how to envision and plan an entire economy, how to assess its future needs in detail, and especially how to reassure their citizens that they knew what they were doing, while they themselves were trying to find out.

A New Order: Romania’s Sovietization

In November 1940, Romania entered World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany. However, Germany’s economic exploitation of the country’s resources and the staggering number of soldiers sent to fight for Germany on the Eastern Front deeply embittered the population. By 1943, emboldened by the defeat of Germany on the Eastern Front and the war’s overall turn, the semilegal opposition sought to regain political power. The liberal and conservative historical parties responded to the call of the then illegal Communist Party to secretly form the National Democratic Bloc, whose aim was to annul Romania’s military and economic commitment to Nazi Germany. This group of powerful politicians eventually persuaded the new king to oust Marshal Ion Antonescu and the country’s pro-German government via a coup d’état in August 1944, and have Romania join the Allies.

Even though it changed sides in the eleventh hour, the country still had to pay a heavy price for its former alliance with Nazi Germany. In September 1944, Romania signed an armistice treaty whose terms were imposed by the Soviets. Although it recovered northern Transylvania, the armistice required Romania to comply with other harsh conditions, including ceding another part of its territory to the Soviet Union and paying $300 million in war reparations. The real cost of Romania’s losses ultimately turned out to be much higher; it has been estimated at $2 billion.⁷ In addition to economic losses, the war exacted a severe human toll: between 1941 and 1944, as many as 400,000 soldiers were killed or went missing, while on the home front 260,000 Romanian Jews and 25,000 Roma were deported to death camps.⁸ Despite these losses, the armistice with the Allies seemed to have given Romanians a new sense of hope. The end of Antonescu’s military dictatorship and the change of allegiance to the Allies initially triggered—despite the pain of war—a new wave of optimism among Romanians.

Derek Patmore, the same British journalist who had noted the colorful life of the Old Town when he had visited Bucharest for the first time in 1938, returned to Bucharest in late August 1944, shortly before the Soviet army entered the city. He wrote optimistically about a city that seemed to be coming back to life: “Already Bucharest’s beginning to recover from violent events which liberated the country from German occupation. Bombed buildings are repaired and damaged shops and restaurants are opening again. . . . Bucharest, which, despite its Parisian elegance, has always been a mixture of east and west, has now become cosmopolitan again. Famous Athénée Palace hotel, which was shut when I arrived, has now reopened its doors, and its great bar [is the] meeting place for officers of many nations. Here one meets American [pilots], British RAF officers, members of the Allied Commission, Russian officers, and members of the Anglo-Saxon press.”⁹ In a city reeling from heavy bombing, Patmore found that the rich ate “plenty of caviar” in Bucharest’s luxurious restaurants, while ordinary Romanians shared with him their elation about having the Transylvania region returned to Romania after the armistice. Patmore wrote of a country where people were “exulting over their newfound freedom,” where new political groups were popping up like “mushrooms,” where booksellers could not keep up with the demand for “English and Russian novels,” and where theaters rehearsed a new repertoire of British and Russian plays to compensate for “four years of dreary German drama.”¹⁰ Drawing on his conversations with the political leaders of the National Peasants and Liberal parties, who returned to the limelight after Antonescu had banned them, Patmore noted that the new government was “bent on proving Romania’s sincere friendship and intentions towards Russia.”¹¹ In October 1944—the same month Churchill and Stalin drafted the now-notorious percentage agreement that brought Eastern Europe under the Soviet sphere of influence—Patmore ended one of his cables on a high note, one that captured a profound sentiment of relief and anticipation of the end of the war and the defeat of fascism: “Today Bucharest is proud to be liberated by the Red Army and as I walk through the streets I see the flags of Russia, Britain, and America in every shop window.”¹²

The presence of Soviet troops was, in fact, the first sign that the sovietization of the country was already underway. Right around the time Patmore was cabling his articles, in October 1944, the Romanian and Soviet governments signed a memorandum that stipulated the number of Romanian forces that would join the Soviet army, as well as the units that would be demobilized or dissolved (Békés et al. 2015, 39). This accord violated the armistice agreement signed in September 1944, which had already reduced the number of Romanian troops necessary to maintain internal order and had replaced them with Soviet troops (39).

With direct support from the Soviets, the Romanian Communist Party exploited the tensions and frustrations ignited by the war and eventually maneuvered its way to fully control the government. This was quite an accomplishment for a party that had been banned during the interwar years, had rejected the post-1918 formation of Greater Romania, and had around one thousand mem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Sources
• List of Abbreviations and Short Names
• Introduction
• 1. Tensed Urban Visions: Making Bucharest into a Socialist Capital
• 2. Matters of State: Archaeology, Materiality, and State Making
• 3. Time-Traveling Houses and Histories Made Invisible
• 4. Lipstick and Lined Pockets: Strategic Devaluation and Postsocialist Wealth
• 5. Displacements: Property, Privatization, and Precarity in a Europeanizing City
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author