“The social construction of reality itself is a massive political process. All governments live or die by their ability to manipulate public opinion so they can reinforce their claims to legitimacy. Information is selectively released, altered, or withheld in an attempt to gain public approval and support for their policies” (Newman, 2010, p. 62).
It is hard to imagine a government more involved in manipulating news in order to construct a reality for its citizens than Romania, during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu from 1061 until December 1989, just two months before I was born there.
Nicolae Ceausescu was, in a way, my father. He wasn’t my father in the biological sense, but during the later years of his dictatorship, he came to control nearly every aspect of Romanian people’s lives. He controlled the food they ate. He sold off most of the country’s meat and vegetables, and he put Romanians on a meager ration of substandard food that could not be sold abroad. Ceausescu controlled the housing Romanians could live in, bulldozing villages and private homes and moving people to huge, poorly constructed concrete block apartments in the cities, many without inside plumbing. He controlled all transportation, rationing gasoline for the few who had private cars and severely limiting any other means of travel for those without cars. Ceausescu controlled Romanians’ access to basic necessities like electricity and water. Electricity use was severely limited to just one 40 watt bulb per apartment, and in most buildings water was turned off entirely for most of the day, and could be used only for a few hours in the early morning and early evening.
Nicolae Ceausescu even controlled people’s reproductive rights, which is why I say that, in a sense, he was my father. Wanting to increase the population of Romania to produce a larger work force, Ceausescu outlawed birth control and abortion and instituted a policy requiring every woman to have at least five children. I was conceived under this policy, the fourth child of very poor Romani peasants who had no means to take care of me. Like my sister before me, I went straight from the maternity hospital to the orphanage. My birth mother became a hero of the state, bearing at least seven children, five of whom were turned over to the state for their care.
The list of ways Nicolae Ceausescu controlled the everyday reality of Romanians goes on and on. So how did this one man manage to control so completely nearly every aspect of Romanians’ lives? For starters, nearly one out of every five Romanian adults was an informer or watcher, and order was kept by a ruthless and well-armed secret police called the Securitate. But what really kept everyone in line was that Ceausescu controlled the news and nearly all forms of communication in Romania. The only newspapers were controlled and produced by the state. The only radio was controlled and produced by the state. Telephones were in very limited supply, and calls were monitored by listeners. International calls were impossible to make. Travel into and outside of Romania was forbidden for nearly everyone except certain trusted high ranking Communist Party members on official government business.
But above all, Nicolae Ceausescu controlled Romanian television and used it to create his own version of “reality” for the Romanian people. His rule has been described as a personality cult. He had Romanian artists and photographers and sculptors create thousands of huge images of himself as Romania’s beloved leader. Ceausescu’s likeness appeared in every square and on every corner so that Romanians were never far from a larger than life depiction of their brilliant leader. Ceausescu had huge pageants produced starring thousands of Romanian singers, dancers, marchers, and performers, to celebrate himself and his amazing accomplishments. These pageants were performed in giant stadiums and televised so that citizens across Romania could see, nearly every night during the couple of hours that the one and only state-run television channel was available to them, just how brilliant, kind, wise, and just plain wonderful their beloved leader was. It was a construction of reality on a huge scale, and the message was always the same: Everything is great in Romania, thanks to our beloved leader.
When severe drought and aggressive export policies led to severe food shortages and strict rationing of food for all Romanians, Ceausescu turned to television to create a different “reality” for Romanians. With the television camera rolling, Ceausescu visited several dairy farms to show Romanians that milk was plentiful, even though it was never in the stores. Romanian television viewers didn’t see, however, that the cows in the story were actually trucked from farm to farm for these reports, because most of Romania’s dairy farms had sick and skinny cows or none at all! When Ceausescu visited the produce farms at harvest time for benefit of the Romanian television viewers, the images of the bountiful harvest were, in fact, created with the help of painted wooden props of apples, pears, tomatoes and the like, and green paint sprayed on the dead brown grasslands. The message on Ceausescu TV was that food is plentiful in Romania, notwithstanding its absence from the store near you. In fact, that was the message every night on Ceausescu TV: Everything is great in Romania, thanks to the wise policies of your great leader.
In a twist of irony, it was Ceausescu’s state-controlled television that eventually brought him down and led to his summary execution in December, 1989 as the Iron Curtain of Communism fell all across Eastern Europe. In Ceausescu’s case, the revolutionaries managed, early in their uprising, to gain physical control of the Romanian state television. They used Ceausescu’s own television station to help secure the removal of Ceausescu and his cronies from power. Romania’s short revolution culminated in the capture of Ceausescu and his wife Elena, their summary trial, lasting less than an hour, and their execution before a firing squad, all in a matter of a few days. Someone videotaped the executions, and soon, the executions were being shown every day on Romanian television. As Newman writes, “sometimes realities change almost instantaneously” (Newman, 2010, p. 53). Yes they do.
When my adoptive parents traveled to Romania in October, 1990, life was still pretty hard then as Romanians struggled to reinvent their government and to rebuild their newly free country after so many years of Communist rule. The orphanages containing me and an estimated 300,000 other children were no longer secret, and people traveled to Romania from many countries to try to adopt us. Pictures of the miserable conditions in these institutions were televised around the world. I was one of the lucky ones who got out.
My adoptive parents say that in October 1990, food was still in short supply and water and power were still rationed as Romanians worked to figure out their new reality. But my parents also remember that there were already several television channels and many newspapers just a few months after the revolution.
And on one of the new Romanian stations, the Ceausescu executions were still being shown every day!
Work Cited:
Newman, D.M. (2010). Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life. 8th Ed. Pine Forge Press: Thousand Oaks, California
If you are interested in learning more about Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule in Romania, I recommend the following:
Pacepa, Ion Michai. (1987) Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus’ Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption. Regnery Gateway: Washington, D.C.
Klugman, Gail. (1998) The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. The University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California.
