Living Under a Dictatorship
To all of you who wrote about living under dictatorships, I am grateful for the conversation. [Some of the other postings can be seen on pages 82 to 84 of the April 2021 Present Time.] You made a big impression on me. It is rare that a discussion on the RC e-mail discussion lists speaks so directly to my experience. For that, I thank you all.
Since the topic was opened, I have been discharging a lot on my personal experiences of living under dictatorships and have written this e-mail many times in my mind.
Growing up under a dictatorship has become a feminist issue for me. I have come to the conclusion that dictatorships are vehicles for the worst oppressive patterns. I’ve found that the details of people’s lives are affected much more than most people realize. Even if the policies espoused by dictatorships are “correct,” the dictatorships invariably have big negative effects on the lives of people living under them. The main reason is that people living in dictatorships are never free to organise to make their lives to go better. In particular, women are not free to organise to move women’s issues forward, and, in my experience, this has a big detrimental effect on the whole society.
I was born in Romania and lived there until I was twenty-two years old, under the brutal dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. He was in power beginning in 1965, three years before I was born. His dictatorship was preceded, from 1946 to 1965, by several other successive Communist Party regimes that were close to the Soviet Union. All of these were dictatorships led by men. Coming up to and during World War II (from 1939 to 1945), Romania was under the dictatorship of fascist general Antonescu, who worked in collaboration with the Nazis. Immediately preceding World War II, our country was briefly under a dictatorship instituted by King Carol II of Romania, who had dissolved parliament in 1938 and seized sole power.
By the time all these governments had fallen, in 1989, my country and people had been under one or another dictatorship for more than half a century. Before that, for less than eighty years, there had been democratic governments—which had been preceded by feudalism. While Romania is not currently under an autocratic regime, several countries in Central Europe, including the one in which I currently live, are led by autocratic governments that are veering toward being dictatorships.
In my experience, this history has left profound negative effects on people living in this part of the world—effects that we collectively underestimate. And they have not generally been the subject of extensive discharge and re-evaluation within the RC Communities. One reason for this I can see is that the RC Communities where dictatorships are a way of life are too new to RC to take on [undertake] discharging on such huge historical issues. Also, people living in societies that have not been dictatorships are simply not aware of the realities of living under these regimes. In addition, workshops that seek to deal with related themes are often led by RCers from outside the countries that have experienced dictatorships. These leaders lack personal experience and understanding of what it is like to live under dictatorships, day in and day out [continually].
I will try to describe my experience of living under such a regime and the effects it had on my and other people’s lives. I take a feminist viewpoint. This means that I give prominence to details, knowing that nothing that happened to people was trivial, that the personal was actually what mattered most when it came to politics, and that politicians and others in power (who were mostly male) did not give an accurate representation of the realities of everyone’s lives.
The propaganda—which I find is often believed in countries outside the so-called former Soviet Bloc—was that communism, introduced in my country in 1946 and in other countries in my region even earlier, was able to make big improvements in people’s lives, with full employment, free childcare, readily available health care, education that was not segregated, and opportunities for all to contribute to society regardless of background.
In my experience, these were myths invented and propagated by a regime, ruled by men, in which patterns of harshness and lack of caring were allowed to run rampant. The realities of people’s personal lives, in my experience, were very different. They will never be known unless we listen to personal stories, especially stories of women and of young people growing up under such a regime.
THE MYTHS AND REALITIES
Here are some examples of the realities behind the myths:
The myth of full employment. Throughout my life, a strictly enforced policy required workers, especially if they were university graduates, to go and work wherever the need was greatest (this happened in other countries, too, under the name of National Service). This meant that there was full employment. However, mostly people could not choose the location or the conditions of their employment. Because of this policy, my mother and father were forcibly moved to a place in the country where they knew nobody and were left on their own with a new baby. My mother subsequently left my father and me for almost a year to work in another place. Until I was one year old, I was neglected, underfed, and in cold and miserable conditions. My parents’ marriage never recovered, although later we pretended to live together as a happy family.
The myth of free and available health care. Like countless others of my generation, I was born only because the government suddenly decreed in 1968 that abortion was illegal. (An interesting documentary on this is Children of the Decree <www.idfa.nl/en/film/86cfee49-f6f4-4ee1-865e-a912c054a91f/children-of-the-decree>.) I was an unwanted child—a burden to my mother who would have preferred that I not be born—because a male doctor had decided she could not have an abortion.
Throughout my life I have had many traumatic experiences at the hands of the health care system. If my family could not bribe the doctor, it was not clear that I would be treated. Male gynecologists performed compulsory virginity tests on young girls like me without consulting our parents. When I was in hospital as an adult, tests were performed on me without my consent or an explanation of what was happening. I was treated like a guinea pig. Medical treatment was and continues to be male dominated and pharmaceutical, even if women perform it. Before 1990, women’s and other alternative practitioners’ health care knowledge was never valued in Romania; it was even outlawed. For example, Roma women who were healers, herbalists, or therapists (wise women) were considered to be doing witchcraft and were not allowed to practice. The same also happened to many other traditional practitioners.
The myth of universal childcare. There were indeed nursery places for all children whose parents wanted to put them there. However, my nursery and kindergarten were places of horror. The staff were underpaid, undertrained, and without supervision. They beat us up to make us go to sleep in the afternoon. They threatened to “feed us to the rats” and take us to the dungeons if we did not show enough respect. When we were no more than three years old, they took us on holiday to camps where we were treated like cattle and terrorised and humiliated if we did not go to the toilet when they wanted us to. Our parents knew nothing about the conditions in these childcare facilities; there were no parent-teacher associations to fight for children’s rights.
The myth of education for all. Much of what I learned in school was how to be obedient to the communist leadership. We learned by rote. We were physically punished on a regular basis (beatings and kneeling in corners). My high school economics teacher’s favourite punishment was to bang students’ heads together if he felt they did not understand what he was explaining. We were severely disciplined if we showed any initiative, even when we were young adults in university. We could not study what we wanted. We had to study what would make us good workers in the communist system. All education was heavily politicized. Many lessons were about the way we were building a “new human” rather than about the subjects we were studying.
NON-EXISTENT PROFESSIONS
Many of the professions that people in non-dictatorships take for granted and that make people’s lives better never developed or were illegal in the societies in which I grew up. For example, for the whole time I was growing up, the profession of midwife did not exist in my country, and to my knowledge still doesn’t exist today. People typically do not understand what I am talking about when I say “midwife.” Social work was also a non-existent profession and only got introduced once communism fell. It was illegal to be an artist, especially a free-thinking one. Rock music was suspect and heavily controlled. It was illegal to do yoga, meditation, or other alternative practices for well-being. Organised religions were outlawed. Members of some of these (for example, Baptists and Pentecostals) were considered dangerous aliens, and we were told in school not to play with them.
THE POLICING OF PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
It was illegal to have any relationships with people from outside our country, especially from outside the Communist Bloc. When I was a teenager, I was picked up by the police and nearly arrested for kissing a Norwegian young man in a seaside resort. The implication was that any young woman seen going out with a man who was not from her country was a prostitute. When I was a student, the (mostly male) students from Asia and Africa were strictly forbidden to be friends with local people, especially the local women.
BRUTALITY
There is a lot more to say. I have discharged a lot on these topics over the years. I am starting to have these sessions with more people from my Community, especially the women. We find that brutality was a feature of all of our childhoods, even in the countries where socialism had a “human face.”
A friend of mine has written a book in which she details the brutal treatment of young people—especially of Roma young people, but not only—that continues to this day in Russian and Hungarian schools. For example, Roma children in today’s schools still believe that they are dirty and contaminated and little more than animals. They are told this by their teachers to such a degree that a child will say, “My pen broke because my hands were not clean enough to handle it.”
People that I counsel with have stories of extreme unchallenged physical and mental brutality from their families, from police, and from the state.
Before I was born, concentration and work camps were common, and even factories and building sites were run as camps, with much brutality and hardly any health care for the workers.
I write these things down in such great detail to illustrate that the so-called well-intentioned policies that governments come up with [devise] in dictatorships turn into the nastiest of realities for people living under them. A policy of “everyone is equal” can easily become a reality of everyone being equally starved and frozen and humiliated, which was our reality in Romania in the 1980s.
NOT BEING ALLOWED TO ORGANISE
The biggest reason why these conditions develop in dictatorships seems to me that people are not allowed to freely associate and advocate for the things that would make their lives better and change society. (Incidentally, in the last two years of our communist dictatorship, RC was practised in hiding, and those of us who started RC would have been put in prison if the change of regime had not come just in time. I had the secret police at my door threatening to do just that.)
This means that in dictatorships, people—in particular, women, young people, people targeted by racism, and others who are different from the male-dominant norm—are not free to come together and think about the changes they would like to see for themselves, their families, and their societies. It also means that huge amounts of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of vulnerable people goes unchallenged.
People were horrified when they found the conditions under which orphans and people with “mental health” conditions lived. I worked in those institutions and can confirm that for our societies those conditions were “normal.” For example, “mental health” patients were literally kept in cages and not allowed out, were lost to their families, and were heavily drugged to keep them quiet.
I have come to the conclusion that under dictatorships, time stands still—that the progress made in other places, because people can freely organise to bring it about, simply does not happen. I think this is one of the main reasons why the regimes in the so-called Soviet Bloc never had a chance to make real changes. The big endeavors—industrialisation, urbanisation, infrastructure development, workers’ emancipation, and education—were the only ones that mattered. People’s individual lives did not. Mostly white men in positions of power in all institutions (but especially in the structures of the one party in power) had the ultimate say in what happened, and any diversity was heavily punished.
THE TARGETING OF EACH OTHER
Having lived through that system, and having discharged on it for many years, I cannot see much that was good about the way it was structured. People often say, “We were together, and we could talk to each other,” but in my experience that togetherness was driven by fear and desperation. Also, the groups of people who stuck together (families, friends, neighbours) simply took out on [targeted] each other with the same big oppressions that the regime was forcing on them. Within my teenage group of friends, for example, there was solidarity and love and resistance to the oppressive education system, but as a group we ruthlessly bullied other young people, and nobody challenged us on our brutal behaviour toward those who did not belong to our group.
WHY WE DO NOT TALK ABOUT THESE THINGS
One more observation: I think the reason why we from my part of the world do not talk about these things to those of you who are not from here is because we know that you will think badly of our people. So instead we protect our families and pretend that things were okay. But they were not. One reason why I can speak about this more freely is because of my relationships with Roma communities, who experience such depths of oppression that they feel they have nothing to lose and will talk about the brutality of their lives, giving the rest of us white people a gift and an opening to be similarly undefensive. All too often, however, white people in our countries keep up the facade of “the good old life,” so that they can fit in and assimilate with those in other parts of the world who look the same as they do but have a completely different experience of life.
With love and respect to all,
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of wide world change
(Present Time 204, July 2021)