Arts and Culture: 35 Years and counting...

PART I

The Effects of Propaganda Through Art in Europe’s most repressive Communist Regime Thirty-five years later it still doesn’t go away. 
 It doesn’t wash off, it doesn’t fade, it doesn’t transform, doesn't want to die, except perhaps cynically, together with the minds it continues to parasitize. Worst part is that sometimes it becomes transgenerational. Propaganda delivered through art and mass media stains deeper than tar. What I want to do in the following lines is bring, to whoever happens to read this in this space — a space anyway largely condensed into a Western socio-cultural paradigm — fragments of memories that also reached me indirectly. Some inherited, some absorbed, some inoculated. They speak about methods belonging to an older school of political engineering. Methods that often resemble something close to KGB-style cultural management, yet infused with unmistakable Balkan improvisation and, occasionally, with shades of Kim Il-sung's North Korean personality cult. These are things I did not experience directly. I was born in 1990, one year after the fall of the regime in Bucharest led by the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. But their echo travelled through the transitional years of the 1990s and early 2000s, in a country where ideological alignment often felt interchangeable with the color of the tie worn by the one holding the ladle above your otherwise empty soup plate.

The universality of these mechanisms has been demonstrated repeatedly through academic research, testimonies of people who operated within such systems, and sometimes simply through the basic common sense of recognizing the same poison when it is sold again and again as an elixir.

Still, from time to time, a refresh is useful. Especially when the times seem to ask for one, thus I write these lines from the position of a second-hand witness. There is nothing here that pretends to be definitive. At best it is anecdotal. But in order to establish a minimal framework, this first part needs to offer a short overview of what will be developed further in Parts II and III of this small series. Historical Context: Subject: "Song to Romania"

The Romanian national festival “Cântarea României” (Song to Romania) was established in 1976 during the presidency of Nicolae Ceaușescu and continued to be orchestrated until the collapse of the socialist regime in 1989. The word orchestrated is not used here lightly. The festival functioned as a nationwide cultural competition organized across multiple administrative layers. Activities began at the level of schools, factories, agricultural cooperatives, military units, and local cultural houses, and advanced through county and regional stages before reaching national finals.

According to official statistics published in the Romanian press of the period, millions of citizens participated in successive editions of the festival, making it one of the largest state-coordinated cultural programs implemented in socialist Romania [1][2]. The program included numerous artistic categories — music, poetry, theater, choreography, and visual arts. Visual exhibitions associated with the festival typically included painting, sculpture, graphic design, scenography, and decorative arts, produced both by professional artists and by amateur participants affiliated with cultural institutions [2].

The festival received extensive coverage in state media. National television broadcasts and radio programs regularly transmitted performances or reports from festival events, while newspapers documented the progress of regional and national stages. Through this media infrastructure the festival became a recurring presence within the official cultural calendar of socialist Romania [2].

Documented reactions to the festival varied across different segments of cultural life. Some artists participated directly in its institutional framework, either as competitors or as members of professional juries. At the same time, memoirs, interviews, and later academic studies indicate that certain artists adopted strategies intended to maintain distance from the ideological aspects of the program. These strategies included the use of ambiguous visual symbolism, the preference for genres considered politically neutral — such as landscape or still life — or the simple reduction of participation in official competitions [3]. Historical sources also mention the informal expression “șopârle” (“lizards”), a term used within artistic and journalistic circles to describe subtle symbolic details inserted into works that allowed for multiple interpretations. Although the precise meaning of these elements often remained ambiguous, the term appears frequently in recollections of cultural production during the period [2].

For an already exhausted segment of the population, the name Cântarea României became, ironically, Cântarea PCR,(Song of the Romanian Communist Party) a subversive reference to the ideological yoke already visibly placed upon the so-called “new, multilaterally developed socialist individual.”

The festival remained part of Romania’s official cultural system until the final years of the socialist regime and ended after the political changes of December 1989, when the institutional structures that organized it were dissolved. However, the administrative personnel who had occupied many of these positions did not simply vanish. While many ordinary people adapted ideologically to the new political environment, the bureaucratic apparatus itself transitioned toward the democratic system at a noticeably slower pace than the civic energy that had triggered the regime change from the streets. For this reason, Part II of this write-up will focus on the social continuities that allowed certain cultural mechanisms associated with communist propaganda to persist long after the fall of the Ceaușescu regime.

Bibliography 

[1] Vladimir Tismăneanu. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. University of California Press, 2003. 

[2] Claudiu Oancea. Song to Romania: The National Festival “Cântarea României”. PhD Dissertation, Central European University, 2007. 

[3] Magda Cârneci. Artele plastice în România 1945–1989. Polirom, 2017.

PART II

Propaganda delivered through art and mass media stains deeper than tar. But the blood of innocent student protesters shot in University Square by their own army wipes easily off the red ties already stained with the wet ink of the Party membership book, a book that not many were in a hurry to burn just yet. A minimal gesture of common decency. To enjoy the sound of burgundy cardboard crackling as it melts away what remained of the old “new man.”

What for the West looked, through the television broadcasts of the time, like a scream of liberation from rusted chains embedded in a collective mentality grown atrophied, was in reality far more complicated.

Yes, it was a scream of hunger as much as a scream of famine. A hunger for personal self-governance. What made things complicated was that this hunger was not evenly distributed, comradely, as one might expect in communism. Class struggle had become something abstract.

Because despite what was visible on the screen, namely a flag with a hole in the middle, people cutting the communist emblem out of the Romanian tricolor, and crowds shouting slogans like “better a hooligan than an activist, better dead than a communist,” a significant part of the population stood grieving at the symbolic “wake” of the former dictator.

In reality there was no wake and no state funeral. Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were captured on 22 December 1989, subjected to a brief military tribunal in Târgoviște on 25 December, and executed by firing squad the same day.

Tens of thousands of state officials and their families chose to defend and mourn the earthly remains of a system that had suddenly become defunct, and on which they had depended. State institutions began an accelerated process of rebranding, yet the biological bureaucratic apparatus largely remained intact.

Nothing new was ready to replace it because none of the hoi polloi had been prepared for what had just happened in those days of the Romanian Revolution.

The 1990s became years of transition, a decade in which society tried repeatedly to reinvent itself. One could almost call it a kind of red washing, red as the symbol of communism. But something seemed to trip the process again and again, even when the effort was sincere.

That something was nostalgia.

Nostalgia for a time without back pain. Nostalgia for hard asses, hard dicks and tits. Nostalgia for long nights drinking without a headache the next morning. Nostalgia for youth.

Something deeply human and natural. But dangerous in this particular context.

This type of nostalgia had its own soundtrack and backdrop, embedded through endless repetition and rhetoric.

When people deal with loss, especially the loss of identity, nostalgia often becomes a coping mechanism. For many bureaucrats of that era their jobs, their privileges, and their social status were not just employment. They were their entire identity.

When that identity suddenly disappeared, adapting to a new social order became extremely difficult.

Even if the regime itself collapsed, life still had to continue. People still had to survive, to work, to raise families. In order to cope, memory tends to smooth things out. From a temporal distance the past no longer feels as brutal. The grass appears greener in hindsight, the sky bluer, the songs not quite as oppressive or extreme as they once felt.

Compromises begin to look understandable.

For some this becomes a psychological way to move forward. For others, the memory remains.

Circling back to Cântarea României, what from the outside could appear as a harmless patriotic festival functioned very differently depending on who experienced it.

Millions were pulled into the spectacle. Schools, factories and cultural houses fed it participants, while the themes were already fixed: socialist labor, national mythology, loyalty to the state. Professional artists often stood next to amateurs promoted for loyalty rather than talent. A new form of shallow cultural kirsch emerged.

In that system propaganda, nepotism and amateurism went hand in hand.

The victim here is not only the individual, although on a personal level many suffered deeply. The entire circumstance could also function as a trap for an idealistic youth, inexperienced in the subtle art of the șopârle, those coded gestures and small acts of dissimulation required to remain true to oneself under censorship.

This drama is better understood at a collective level.

The only real antidote against propaganda slowly diluted, edition after edition. That is what I meant earlier when I said nostalgia has its soundtrack and picturesque backdrops.

An entire generation grew up inside a system built on obedience, nepotism and survival within rigid hierarchies.

Those who collaborated with the Securitate often climbed the hierarchical ladder toward an even smoother ideological uniformity.

The young people of that time, many of whom are adults approaching old age at the moment of writing this text, had internalized the message that the world they lived in was permanent, inevitable, even perfect.

There were few reasons to imagine adapting to a different society built on different values.

When later, during the democratic transition after 1990 and into the early 2000s, they were confronted with concepts such as meritocracy or institutional transparency, many found themselves unprepared because those mechanisms had never truly existed in the world they had grown up in.

To suddenly live without a socialist safety net was something entirely new for some.

Critical thinking is a muscle. It has to be exercised and passed from generation to generation. In a system where a small circle dictated almost everything, that muscle had very little room to develop.

What remained instead were reflexes.

Reflexes of survival.

For younger generations this environment functioned as cultural conditioning. Mass performances, choreographed enthusiasm, staged patriotism, North Korean style parades, slogans force-fed like geese being prepared for foie gras.

These patterns echoed long after the regime collapsed and shaped generations that were forced to improvise new identities without clear models to replace the old ones.

In that sense, even when the system itself disappeared, many of its cultural reflexes remained as long as the last drops of blood continued to circulate through a body that was still warm.

PART III