Anthropological adventures with ’s Wizard of Oz, 1973–1989

Katherine Verdery

Abstract: Throughout the , most people in the US saw the commu- nist party-states of the Soviet bloc as all-powerful regimes imposing their will on their populations. The author, a child of the Cold War, began her fieldwork in Romania in the 1970s in this belief. The present essay describes how her ex- periences in Romania between 1973 and 1989 gradually forced her to see things differently, bringing her to realize that centralization was only one face of a system of rule pervaded by barely controlled anarchy and parasitism on the state. It was not simply that the regime had failed to change people’s con- sciousness; rather, the system’s operation was actively producing something quite different. These insights contributed to the author’s developing a new model of the workings of socialism. Keywords: communism, Eastern Europe, Romania, weak states

In a special report entitled ‘Death of a dicta- frightened little man, who has inspired fear tor’, aired in April 1990 on the US television and trembling with smoke and mirrors.”1 channel ABC News, newsman Ted Koppel leads viewers into the surveillance head- Although I doubt that the modest bank of quarters of the widely feared Romanian se- equipment was all there was to cret police, the Securitate. There he points to surveillance, Koppel’s conclusion aptly states a modest bank of tape recorders, which (we one of the chief messages I drew from my 25 are to believe) have been monitoring the con- years of research in socialist Romania: the versations of Romania’s 23 million inhabi- centralized power of the Communist Party tants over the previous five decades. “So, was much overestimated. The image of po- here it is”, says Koppel, tency it projected was in considerable meas- ure illusory, like the smoke and mirrors be- “Securitate’s main listening center in Bu- hind the fearsome Wizard of Oz. charest, the principal monitoring location for It was a conclusion hard won, for like the Romanian . It is, to put it gen- many US citizens, when I began my research tly, something of a let-down – rather like the in Romania in 1973 my image of the commu- scene in the Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy nist east was of stern, oppressive and all- pulls back the curtain to reveal not the all- powerful party-states exercising terror and knowing, all-powerful wizard, but a rather coercion upon their citizens. I had chosen to

Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology 43 (2004): 134–145 Anthropological adventures with Romania’s Wizard of Oz | 135 work there not from a commitment to social- 1989: eighteen months in 1973–4, four in 1979– ist ideals, but rather from a fascination with 80, eleven in 1984–5 and five in 1987–8. Each the totalitarian image (see Verdery 1996: 9), of these trips was funded by the International which governed my perception of much that Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), a US happened to me during my first several trips organization established in 1968 by a con- to Romania. Only in the mid-1980s did I sortium of US universities to organize re- begin to reconsider the image in light of search exchanges with the Soviet bloc.2 Al- what I experienced daily during my re- though by the mid-1980s Romania would be search, as events set up a contradiction be- (with Albania) the most repressive regime in tween the forbidding totalitarian state of my the region, the early 1970s were a good time imagining and the Red Wizard of Oz I even- for US researchers there: the country was tually came to see behind it. relatively open, and the exchange-program To say this is not to deny that people suf- handbooks even listed anthropology as one fered terrible persecution at the hands of the of the disciplines it welcomed.3 For that rea- Romanian and other communist parties: son, Romania hosted more Western anthro- state terror was not simply a matter of West- pologists during the 1970s than any other ern misperception but, for some, a devastat- socialist country. ing fact of life. By the time of my research, Part of the exchange-program agreement however, state terror – large though it loomed was that grantees were assigned to a Roman- in my anticipation – was mainly a thing of ian academic institution, with one of its the past. I arrived in Romania during a pe- scholars as research supervisor. When I first riod of unprecedented opening. Nicolae arrived in August 1973, I was assigned to the Ceaus¸escu had been in power for eight years, Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in his popularity consolidated by his having as the ward of its director, Prof. condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Mihai Pop. A man of extraordinary warmth Czechoslovakia, and living standards had and personal charm, he played an indispen- improved dramatically for many Romani- sable role in getting me into a village (Vlaicu) ans. Although the situation would deterio- in Transylvania and smoothing my way with rate thereafter, I began my work when Ro- county and commune officials. I attribute to manian socialism was at the apogee of such his interventions the relatively trouble-free favor and success as it would ever achieve. experience I had during my first field trip. In spite of this, my image of an omnipotent Although a few villagers kept their distance party-state persisted for over a decade – tes- from me, convinced that I was really a spy, timony, in part, to the power of totalitarian most were hospitable and receptive. I knew propaganda not only in the US, but also in that commune authorities kept track of where the socialist countries themselves. I went if I left the village and occasionally In this essay I describe how my experi- asked my landlord how I spent my days, but ences as a fieldworker in Romania between no one was interrogated about my visits (in 1973 and 1989 gradually forced me to change contrast to what would happen later, in this image. I concentrate on the years 1984–5, 1984–5). In 1979–80 I returned to Romania a time of heightened austerity and surveil- again for four months, three of them in lance – facts that paradoxically revealed the Vlaicu and one in the city of Cluj. The main system’s weaknesses with unusual clarity. difference from before was that I now heard more grumbling about regime policies, a subject on which my respondents had not Fieldwork in socialist Romania been overly critical in the earlier period. For my third visit, in 1984–5, the condi- My fieldwork in Romania during the social- tions of life in Romania were vastly differ- ist period consisted of a total of just over ent from those of my earlier visits. As of three years altogether between 1973 and 1980, Ceaus¸escu’s government – alarmed at 136 | Katherine Verdery the effects of the Solidarity movement in the as Wizard Poland – began imposing an austerity pro- of Oz, I present some anecdotes in which this gram designed to repay the foreign debt. most salient characteristic of Romanians Valuable manufactures and foodstuffs such does not figure. I do not want that fact to ob- as meat and eggs were exported for hard cur- scure my appreciation of what so many hos- rency. The policy was ratcheted up during pitable people offered me. the difficult winter of 1984, when prolonged cold throughout Western Europe increased the demand for fuel; energy of all kinds Socialist disorganization joined Romanian foodstuffs on the road to export. Inside the country drastic fuel ra- As I have said, then, I first went to Romania a tioning left Romanians shivering in cold firm believer in the image of a totalitarian apartments and offices, unable to drive their power. I vividly remember how I felt in July cars, and waiting interminably for public 1973 as I stood on the platform in the train transportation that never came (see Verdery station in Sofia, Bulgaria, waiting for the So- 1992). In addition, imports were cut to im- viet-bound train that would take me to prove the balance of trade, so that it now be- Bucharest (I was traveling from Greece). came almost impossible to find the coveted Night had already fallen. Suddenly out of Pepsi or Kent cigarettes so essential to bribes nowhere, it seemed, a bullet-headed engine and gifts. (The situation was so bad that even drew into the station almost without a sound, those people with enough pull to obtain a bearing a huge sign that read ‘MOCKBA’. rare Pepsi at a tourist hotel might do so The excitement I felt was no match for the under cover, as I learned when a new friend fear and dread of what the name ‘Moscow’ took me out for a drink. The sort of guy who signified to me then. could always get the best thing in the house, Yet for a country in which the Party was he ordered us Pepsi, but what came was a pot supposed to have tight control over every- of tea and two tea-cups – camouflage for the thing, Romania was a fairly anarchic place, Pepsi, so the waitress might avoid trouble had I chosen to notice. In my very first week with other customers.) These conditions still there, I was invited to join four couples on obtained during my two brief research trips their vacation at the Black Sea; they passed in 1987 and 1988. Because the government as- the week spiriting me past the hotel recep- sumed that these conditions might rouse cit- tionist to keep me from being discovered as a izens to opposition and that an American foreigner, subject to higher room rates. What might foment it, scrutiny of my activities I noticed, instead, was that the Party in- during the 1980s increased dramatically, tended to follow foreigners’ every move- compared with before. In the house across ment. Similarly, the woman I stayed with in from my room, I learned after 1989, there was Bucharest spent every evening with her ear round-the-clock police surveillance; worst of glued to the radio listening to Voice of Amer- all, villagers I interviewed that year were de- ica, setting the volume very low (as she ex- briefed by police afterwards. plained to me) so that her neighbors would Nonetheless, even in these bad times I en- not hear it and report her. I noticed her worry joyed working in Romania, for the people I more than her subversive behavior. encountered in both cities and villages were An agent of my early education into the marvelous company. Their buoyancy of spirit, disorganized ways of Romanian socialism incomparable jokes and frequent generosity was the Mobra motorbike for which I paid in the grimmest of circumstances kept me $200, a source of endless mirth to my Ro- from losing heart, and their flat rejection of manian acquaintances. I had walked into a Party-imposed constraints created an envi- special ‘dollar store’ for foreigners, signed ronment I found very invigorating. I empha- the papers and paid up, expecting the bike to size this because in pursuing my theme of be brought out to me on the spot. Instead, I Anthropological adventures with Romania’s Wizard of Oz | 137 was told to go and pick it up at the factory, as best I could, telling him about my tour of way off at the outskirts of Bucharest. Several the county, the officials in the capital who bus rides and an hour or two later I arrived had set it up, the people who were waiting at the factory just before the main office for me to arrive for the night. At length he closed; come back tomorrow, I was advised. went into his office, leaving me in the hall- Somehow I persuaded the clerk I needed the way, and telephoned police headquarters in bike now, and so after an unseemly wait, I Deva. Because he had to shout to be heard, I was presented with a green bike and was could follow his every syllable, as he went asked whether I had brought gasoline and a from forthright to cautious to anxious to battery with me – which, of course, I had not. servile. He returned to tell me that it had In retrospect, I realize I was supposed to been his mistake to stop me, that my trip was have been bribing people at each step to all approved and that I was to continue as smooth my acquisition of the bike, but at that planned. I asked how I could conduct a point I had not yet been initiated into this year’s research if there was a sign prohibit- most basic rule of all social intercourse in Ro- ing entry to foreigners, to which he replied mania. A kindly bystander gave me some that there was a military base up the road, gasoline from his own gas tank, and some- but if I had permission to be here… When I how a battery was ‘found’; getting it charged insisted that I ought to turn right around and took several more days and mounting aggra- go back to Deva, he became alarmed and vation at the discrepancy between this pur- said I must continue, for my trip had been chase and comparable undertakings at home. arranged by the authorities. He insisted so Buying the bike was my first indication that ardently that I at length complied. consumer satisfaction was not the driving What impressed me in this episode at the force behind the command economy, an im- time was the degree of surveillance, the fact pression that the bike’s performance repeat- that by calling county headquarters he had edly confirmed. found an officer who knew who I was and The ordeal of its purchase was the first of where I was supposed to be. What I over- many frustrations to which this bike would looked was the holes in the chain of com- expose me, frustrations similarly illuminat- mand: somehow no one had communicated ing of disorganized Romanian socialism. downward to the local police the informa- Commencing with the arduous process of tion that I was to be allowed to ride my mo- registering it and getting license plates (with torbike into a restricted military zone. As I a bright red ‘TC’ on them, meaning ‘Consular negotiated with the policeman, it escaped Transport’ and visible at great distance), they my notice that he was desperately trying to continued with the reconnaissance trip I took cover up this failure, even revealing the loca- on it to the county I was supposed to work in. tion of the military base as he did so. In a Arriving in its capital city, Deva, I was given word, the episode revealed that while con- an itinerary organized by two of Prof. Pop’s trol may have been well orchestrated at the former students, now low-level apparatchiks center, it was poorly coordinated with levels in the county bureaucracy. As they handed below. I was more receptive to the former me my list of contacts, they advised me cryp- conclusion than the latter. tically, “Be careful when you get to place X” The same was true on many other occa- [the first stop on my tour], with no further sions, such as when I arranged to have a set elaboration. At place X, however, I was of nude photographs taken by a photogra- stopped by a policeman, who could scarcely pher who turned out to work in the so-called miss the bright red TC license plate branding Scînteia building (Casa Scînteii). This hu- me a foreigner. Had not I seen the sign on the mongous and forbidding structure of quin- road, he demanded, ‘Entry prohibited to for- tessential Stalinist type housed the Commu- eigners?’ What was I doing here? In my still-ru- nist Party daily newspaper, Scînteia, along dimentary Romanian I explained my presence with some other major newspapers, some 138 | Katherine Verdery publishing houses and a government min- ‘liberation from the fascist yoke’ in 1944. istry or two. When I realized that this was Since I knew this was supposed to be a major where I was supposed to take off all my Communist Party event marked by an im- clothes and be photographed, I was struck mense parade, I thought I should witness it dumb, but my photographer did not seem to close up; I asked my official contact at IREX’s feel there was anything problematic about it. partner office if I could sit in the bleachers at Once again, instead of noticing that in this Piat,a Aviatorilor, where Party officials and bastion of communist propaganda it was other dignitaries would review the parade. possible for a photographer employed by the He regretted that there was too little time to Communist Party paper to take nude photos arrange this and advised me simply to watch of an American and to do so with noncha- the parade from the sidewalk. Meanwhile, lance mixed with only a little nervousness, I when I asked my acquaintances about their terrified myself with the thought of what the plans, they surprised me by saying they powerful communists would surely do to us would get as far away from the parade as pos- if we were caught. I did not consider that he sible – take a trip to the beach, the moun- judged the likelihood of trouble as small tains… August 23 meant, for them, not a cele- enough to permit him to take the chance, but bration of communism but a chance to escape. was instead overwhelmed by the look of the No one had any interest in accompanying me building and what I believed it represented: to the parade or explaining why August 23 power and repression incarnate. Thus, I was such an important date. I would have to failed to note in this episode the serendipity, carry out my anthropological research method if not the outright laxness, of central control of ‘participant observation’ on my own. over Romanians’ activities. That afternoon, dressed in my usual nonde- script outfit except for the enormous camera I carried in a canvas handbag, I headed off for The ‘new socialist man’ the parade route. Emerging from a side street onto the main boulevard, I started walking Despite my respect for the rigors of surveil- along the sidewalk parallel to the parade in the lance, I had plenty of other evidence that so- street. Suddenly, I was accosted by a grubby- cialist control was far from absolute. For one looking man wearing a red armband that said thing, there was the obvious lack of anything Ordine (Order): his job was to keep the crowd resembling socialist consciousness among in line. “Get back into the parade”, he snarled. most of the people I dealt with. Somehow I My Romanian was inadequate to explaining had imagined that Communists brainwashed what I was trying to do, so I did what he or- their subjects into believing all their propa- dered – joined the parade. I fell in with a group ganda; it did not take long to give the lie to of young men in their twenties, who re- that notion. Although few villagers among sponded to my asking, “Where are you from?” whom I spent most of my time during the with [residential] sector 2 and the name of a 1970s expressed criticism of the regime, this factory. When they returned the question and I was not true of people I met in towns and answered “California”, a ripple of excitement cities, who criticized it endlessly. Only much spread through our portion of the otherwise- later did I began to see these complaints as apathetic crowd. One of my companions ea- part of a ‘lamenting’ pattern often used with gerly offered me his plastic flower to hold aloft foreigners (cf. Ries 1997); at the time I found as we passed in front of Ceaus¸escu in the re- them startling evidence of unreconstructed viewing stand; he was relieved not to have to mindsets, of the regime’s failure to produce carry it himself. We had now arrived at the the much-trumpeted ‘new socialist man’. edge of the square, and a man with a bullhorn Perhaps my first lesson in this respect was trying vainly to whip the crowd into some came within a month of my arrival, on Au- semblance of enthusiasm for slogans like gust 23 – the holiday marking Romania’s “Ceaus¸escu – PCR [Romanian Communist Anthropological adventures with Romania’s Wizard of Oz | 139

Party]”; the response was a tepid, embarrassed thing about socialism is that unlike in your chanting that turned immediately to muttering country, where ‘no’ always means ‘no’, in so- and complaint as soon as we had passed the cialism no door is ever definitively closed. group of dignitaries. I had just had my first di- We can always figure out how to get through rect experience with the revolutionary fervor them if we just try.” of the Romanian proletariat. Time spent in Romania meant innumer- Even I, raised in a Republican-voting able encounters with just this principle. An household, seemed to have more socialist con- art in which Romanians truly excelled, get- sciousness than those around me. For instance, ting around the system was something in one day in 1974 I sat in the kitchen of my clos- which they took great pleasure. For example, est village friend and her neighbor, two at the end of my stay in 1984–5, I decided to women then in their fifties, while they ex- buy an oriental carpet with the sizable rem- pressed their contempt for Gypsies as people nants of my research stipend. Having found who are lazy and whose work, when they do a nice carpet that cost a good bit of money, I it at all, is shoddy. For these two women, those suddenly realized I had a problem: at our de- qualities were innate to Gypsies as a race. I parture, grantees were allowed to take with began to argue, explaining heatedly that peo- us goods totaling no more than 10 per cent of ple in certain structural locations are deprived our total fellowship income for the year, and of the opportunity to develop the qualities my my rug alone put me well over that limit. I companions admired and that with an end to would have to present receipts for all of my racist discrimination, Gypsies would show purchases as well as an affidavit from IREX’s themselves as industrious as anyone else. At exchange partner, confirming my salary. this, one of the women turned to the other and Thinking out loud, I explained my difficulty remarked, “She’s more of a socialist than we to the clerk at the store. “No problem”, she are!” It was then that I began to understand replied, “I’ll just break the purchase price the limitations of the ‘Vanguard-Party’ ap- into two halves and give you two receipts for proach to building socialist consciousness. the rug. You throw away one and present the Then there was ‘socialist reciprocity’, rang- other at the airport. Will that do?” Although ing from the simple exchange of favors be- the clerk was doubtless pleased that I gave tween friends, kin, or acquaintances to out- her a fat tip for her advice, it was clear that right bribery. I never wholly mastered this she had offered the idea simply because it form, but as I attempted to do so it began to was fun to outwit the authorities. We ended dawn on me that these practices were both our transaction in wonderfully high spirits.4 subverting the purposes of socialism and Much later, I came to see these forms of manifesting people’s lack of socialist ethics. reciprocity not as ‘failures’ of socialism but Parents, evidently assuming that merit would as fundamental to its operation (see, e.g., not be rewarded, worried about how to in- Verdery 1996: chap. 1). Similarly, what I first fluence the examiners for university entrance saw as a lack of ‘socialist consciousness’ I so their children might succeed; consumers would come to understand as a result of so- strove to evade the stringency of socialist re- cialism’s workings: it was not simply that the distribution by working out arrangements regime had failed to produce new socialist with saleswomen in stores; friends, relatives, men, but that the system’s operation was ac- people born in the same place and school tively producing something quite different, classmates all arranged things for one an- as I will now explain. other; clerks in all manner of offices sub- verted socialist policies for wage equity by providing the required services only for an Austerity and anarchy extra sum. So much for the premise of equal- ity, I observed to a friend in the Ethnography So far I have been organizing my tale around Institute. She disagreed: “The wonderful an image of ‘innocence abroad’. I started my 140 | Katherine Verdery work in Romania knowing very little about newspaper stories, museum exhibits, histori- either Romania or socialism, other than that cal symposia and evening extravaganzas at both were supposedly totalitarian. I tended Houses of Culture. At first I assumed that to find repression in events that could also be they had been ordered up from some min- interpreted in other ways, and when I found istry in Bucharest, but conversations with a evidence that Party control was not absolute, few of the people behind such events (some I tended to see the reason as nothing more historians, a museum director, a publisher than resistance and subversion, rather than and so on) led me to think otherwise. Dis- finding therein a more complex logic. What cussing with a museum director, for example, served to ‘open my eyes’ and encourage a the ‘Horea spectacular’ he had sponsored the slightly different understanding were the evening before, I asked him who had told him grim conditions I encountered during my to do this: “No one!” he replied, adding that fieldwork in 1984–5, as I described them ear- he had figured the Horea bicentennial would lier. Perhaps because a social system reveals be a good way to find some extra money and its soft underbelly more dramatically when it visibility for his museum, whose revenues is in extremis than at other times, I began to from regular visitors were evaporating. see aspects of life in Romania in a new way. As I pursued this line of inquiry, I learned The project for my year’s research con- that others thought like this man. Enterpris- cerned the role of history-writing in national ing members of History Institutes applied to consciousness. As my work progressed, how- the Party’s Culture Committee in the various ever, I found myself increasingly interested counties, gambling that the Party would find in the broader domain of intellectual pro- money for symposia on this subject and that duction as it was then unfolding within the the organizers would gain notice for their pa- new austerity program, which aimed to cut triotism in honoring such an important Ro- bureaucratic costs, particularly in the do- manian hero. Novelists and playwrights main of culture. More and more sectors of profited from Horea, as did their publishers, activity were cast adrift into ‘self-financing’, all presenting themselves as promoters of the where they were supposed to develop other national history. It seemed as if myriad Ro- sources of support besides state subsidies. manians, far from being directed by the Museums no longer received their accus- Party to enact its dictates, had colonized it, tomed full support, publishing houses and taking advantage of its obsessions, and were cinemas and literary magazines were sup- busily making their careers on its back (see posed to make it on their own, and there Simmonds-Duke 1987: 214–5). was much-heightened competition for ac- This insight into the world of cultural pro- cess to those limited central funds that were duction reoriented my interpretation of my still to be disbursed. Pursuing my project daily experience as a participant-observer in not just in Vlaicu but in academic libraries, I Romanian society. I became more attentive to spent much of the year living in the Conti- the ubiquitous signs of anarchy that both be- nental Hotel in Cluj, where my every move- lied the Party’s pretensions of control and ment was visible. were the active consequence of its attempts to The year 1984–5 marked the bicentennial exercise that control. In 1984 the straitened celebration of a Transylvanian peasant upris- circumstances of people’s existence made ing, led in 1784–5 by a peasant named Horea. their survival strategies more visible and This was a significant event in the history of more daring: everyone vied for resources Romanians, and it became even more so with they could fasten onto, whether these might the Party’s fetish for round-number com- come from the state directly (such as goods memorations. As I have described elsewhere one could sell from one’s workplace) or indi- (Verdery 1991: chap. 6; Simmonds-Duke rectly (such as opportunities for career-build- 1987), the year was packed with Horea events: ing around famous heroes), from kin and novels, plays, student discussion groups, friends (such as food grown in villages, or Anthropological adventures with Romania’s Wizard of Oz | 141 places to board one’s children in town), or some money for the minutes she had not from free-floating sources such as foreigners charged to my room – she was giving me a like me. Perhaps the desperation to which lower rate per minute than I would other- Romanians were driven by Ceaus¸escu’s aus- wise have had to pay and she did not add on terity policies in the mid- to late 1980s made the 15 per cent hotel charge, so it was a good unusually clear how their adaptations were deal for both of us, she said. Seeing no alter- eroding Party power precisely when it seemed native, I paid her the money. On another oc- most oppressive. casion, she called to ask whether I would not From my vantage point as a prisoner of like to say hello to my mother in the US, the Continental Hotel, I both witnessed and cheap. She made the connection immediately participated in many of these survival strate- (this was almost unheard of), and when I gies. I selected one of the head waiters in the went up later she presented me with a very hotel restaurant and made him my conduit large bill, nonetheless smaller, she insisted, to food from the kitchen. I always paid him than it would have been officially. for it (who knows what he did with the Over the next several months, this opera- money), and I got reasonably good things to tor extorted from me not only cash for un- eat when this was by no means an easy ac- charged phone minutes but pounds of coffee complishment. If friends invited me to din- and whole cartons of cigarettes, for which ner, I had a source for the special salami or she begged me when her son got into trouble delicious smoked pork tenderloin that my with the police and needed a suitable ‘gift’. hosts would otherwise not find or not be able My own participation in this scam had sev- to afford. The other waiters soon learned that eral motives. First, I wanted to be able to I was the protégée of their boss, so they were count on good service when I needed to less likely to cheat on my bill if they served make a call, once I saw what hours of exas- me breakfast, and they might supply my peration could be spent waiting for a con- needs if he were off duty. The premise of this nection out of town. Second, I was learning set of arrangements, of course, was that wait- interesting things from this woman about ers had access to delicacies that normal peo- how the ‘informal economy’ worked, things ple did not, and that they were happy to that made me a more cautious hotel guest serve others through their good fortune – at when I stayed in other establishments. For evident cost to their socialist enterprise, example, she explained to me the source of which likely received nothing for the food I the minutes she could ‘give’ at cut-rate. The procured from it. switchboard equipment automatically timed My relationship with one of the hotel all calls made, so she was not actually giving switchboard operators was somewhat more me minutes that no one knew about. Many sinister. Since my phone calls could so easily foreigners stay in this hotel, she said, and be monitored, I made few from my room, they make phone calls, sometimes abroad. chiefly to people who were on my official list By adding 30 or 60 seconds to the bill for of contacts. After one lengthy call to the IREX those calls, she gradually accumulated her contact in Bucharest soon after I had settled own minutes: other guests had already paid into the hotel, my phone rang. It was the for them on the hotel bill, and now she could switchboard operator: “Your call was 10 min- sell them for herself. For her, I was a miracle: utes, but I charged you for only 7.” She made someone who would stay a long time and some small talk, then suggested I come up to thus prove a regular client for her accumu- meet her sometime. When I replied that I lated minutes (as long as I would also make thought no one was allowed in the switch- calls, something I at first resisted doing). board office but the operators, she said I Third, I continued in this game because I should just sneak in when no one was look- admired her ingenuity in setting up the ing. Curious, a while later I went up. She in- whole thing, ensnaring me in it and thereby vited me to sit, then told me that I owed her solving her life-problems in a way that a 142 | Katherine Verdery person cooped up all day away from face-to- the police, too, had their Five-Year Plan, their face contact cannot easily do. While at first I activity targets, their career ambitions and had thought of her as chiefly a Securitate their sins to hide. I think I was a godsend for agent who would report all of my calls (what local police and the county Securitate. I was police organization would not want in its their meal ticket, a resource to be exploited pocket the person with direct access to for- rather than merely someone they had been eigners’ phones?), I now saw her as someone ordered to watch.6 To realize this was not to who had her own life-problems to resolve. say that the Party had no power at all, but Like everyone else, I realized, she had turned rather to shift the emphasis: to see its power her state job into a base for subverting the as much more dispersed, as based in peo- Party-state’s purposes, in pursuit of her own ple’s appropriation of the opportunities it af- needs and plans. forded rather than in its capacity to compel It was in this light that I began to recon- people to do its will. Jan Gross (1988) de- sider certain kinds of events that had always scribes this notion of the party-state’s power seemed to instantiate the Party’s power most with the concept of the ‘spoiler state’. Using unequivocally: surveillance and intimidation as his example the phenomenon of denunci- connected with my presence. When I learned ation, Gross argues that by making the about how the police – one man in particular means of terror widely available, the ‘spoiler – were disrupting my 1984 research back in state’ of made everyone complici- my village, I began inquiring about this po- tous with it. In this way, it produced subjects liceman and learned that he was heavily in- who reveled in turning the instruments of volved in black-market theft of timber from rule to their own purposes. Sometimes these the forestry division in the nearby hills. Log- purposes might further the exercise of rule, gers would load their trucks with wood from but often they subverted it, perhaps espe- state forests and drive down at night through cially when the people who turned those in- the commune center – there was no other struments to the service of their own projects road out – to sell the stolen timber on the sly. were the Party’s agents themselves – police- They had bribed this policeman, who would men, local officials and so on. It was they tip them off as to when he would be on night who knew most surely that Party control duty, and he would sign their falsified pa- rested on an illusion, for they were the Wiz- pers and let them through. According to the ard of Oz. logger who told me this story, that policeman The closest I came to witnessing first- was in it up to his neck, and if he were ever hand the alienation of these very people caught, he would be in very big trouble. Sud- from the system they ostensibly served was denly his zealous surveillance of me made in a conversation sometime during this same sense: if he were arrested, he could point to 1984 research trip. One day I had planned to the dossier in which he had recorded all his meet a colleague for lunch. When I arrived I ‘evidence’ of my spying and other illegali- found him in the company of two other men, ties, and perhaps present himself as the one of whom, Mr. A., was known to me as super-patriot who kept that infamous Amer- the former number 3 man in the Communist ican from destroying Romania. Given how Party leadership of that county (I had met crucial I was to his black-market livelihood, him a couple of years earlier). About two he did not actually require orders concerning months before this lunch, he had been sum- me: he had his own good reasons to keep me marily expelled from his high post and as- under close guard.5 signed to some trivial directorship. Now This interpretation also cast new light on here he was, a virtual nonentity, having other episodes in which my friends had been lunch with his university friend, a US an- called before the police and asked to report thropologist and another man of no particu- on me. It was not necessarily that the All- lar status. The waitress brought us some hot Powerful Party had ordered them to do so: tea; testing it, I burned my lips and hastily Anthropological adventures with Romania’s Wizard of Oz | 143 put it down, but our erstwhile apparatchik power, a totalitarian state, initially frightful Mr. A. tossed back a large swallow. “How like the Wizard of Oz and (as I grew older) could you do that?!” I asked in amazement, even more sinister and evil. to which he replied: “My throat is well It took years of exposure to Romanian so- trained from shouting slogans.” During our ciety for me to modify this view, just as it lunch he aroused much mirth with frequent took US political science years to reconsider sotto voce remarks of this kind, including one its totalitarian model. This exposure was in whose prescience would be revealed only part simply from living day to day in Roma- five years later. The men were discussing the nia, trying to buy train tickets, obtain food, recent demotion of (who was to make phone calls and do all those other become Romania’s first president after 1989) things that required more thought and inge- from yet another central Party post. One of nuity there than they did at home. But my re- them observed that Iliescu was finished, for assessment of the nature of the party-state ‘like water’ he was moving inexorably down- coalesced as a result of my research on the hill. To this Mr. A. replied with mock gravity, politics of intellectual and cultural produc- “That just shows you don’t understand the tion. From this work, together with my daily dialectics of water.” It was doubtless true, of pursuits, I gradually came to see socialist Ro- course, that this man’s manifest disaffection mania not as the fiefdom of an omnipotent was linked with his removal from power. party-state but as host to contradictory cen- What surprised me, rather, was that he tralizing and anarchic forces, the anarchy would speak this frankly with a foreigner every bit as crucial to the outcome as was the and in the presence of two other Romanians, centralization. Groups and individuals in all at the height of such a repressive period. It areas of life became parasites on the party- made me wonder how many other appa- politic, pursuing their daily requirements and ratchiks might be similarly embittered, cyni- their careers by milking the party-state and cally manipulating the reins of power to cre- eroding its effective centralization as they did ate the illusion of its effectiveness. so. This was not a party whose power was concentrated at the top – though there was in- deed effective and often vicious action taken Conclusion there – but one in which elements of the ap- paratus of power were made widely avail- Born in 1948, I was a typical Cold War child. able. Police intimidation worked more signif- The was invented shortly before icantly by being believed in than through my birth. The McCarthy hearings took place actually being applied,7 and when it was ex- during my formative years. Although I was ercised, the reason might be no grander than not exactly keeping track of the daily news the careerism of some lowly officer. A Wizard then, I must have imbibed the atmosphere to of Oz, indeed. some extent, for when Sputnik was launched In offering these personal reflections on in 1957, I clearly recall sensing the astonish- my research during the socialist period, I have ment and worry among adults around me emphasized the question of party power in that somehow ‘the Commies’ had gotten socialist Romania because my ruminations on ahead of us. I remember the same anxious re- that theme pervaded both my research and ception of news about the U-2 incident, the my personal existence; it was a subject that Cuban missile crisis and Khrushchev’s per- held a thoroughgoing fascination for me. I formance with his shoe as he vowed, “We cannot claim that my ruminations enabled me will bury you!” My parents voted Republi- to predict the collapse of communist-party can and my father, in particular, was overtly rule in the East bloc in 1989, nor that I was anti-communist. No surprise, then, that I alone in my assessment – one shared with should grow up thinking of the communist people like Casals (1980), Gross (1988), Rév world as ruled by a fierce and diabolical (1987) and Shue (1988), all working towards a 144 | Katherine Verdery more satisfactory understanding than the ob- lessen the surveillance over me, I found that solete totalitarian model of before. Nonethe- this was not so. In 1993–4 I went to Vlaicu to less, as a result of my thinking about the na- begin a new project on decollectivization. ture of the party-state, I was perhaps less When I returned in 1996 to continue it, three surprised by that collapse than I might have of my friends reported having been ap- proached during my absence by the Securi- been otherwise, for I had at least an inkling tate operative in the nearby town of Ora˘s¸tie, of the smoke and mirrors behind the Roman- who wanted to know what I had been up to. ian Communist Party’s appearance of ab- I also learned in my first week in 1996 that a solute power. local policeman had come around inquiring whom I was speaking with and what I was discussing; he told people I had come to spy Acknowledgements on the local elections, which were just then being held! On the advice of a friend in Buch- My thanks to Phyllis Mack for her contribu- arest who was then in Parliament and had the tions to this essay. personal telephone number of Virgil Ma˘gure- anu, then head of the Romanian Information Serve (SRI), the successor of the Securitate, I telephoned Mr. Ma˘gureanu and made an ap- pointment to see him. (Interestingly, when I Notes met him on the steps of the government building, he asked whether I preferred to go 1. ABC News, ‘Death of a dictator’, with Ted indoors or talk outside.) I explained that I had Koppel, aired April 2, 1990. hoped I would be of less interest to the local 2. IREX was funded by private foundations such police and Securitate after 1989 but had lately as Ford and Rockefeller, as well as by the US been finding rather the opposite. His reply to Congress through its Title VI and Title VIII my story was, “I doubt that it’s directed from programs. For more information on IREX, see here” (nu cred ca˘e pe linia noastra˘). When I its web site at http://www.irex.org/about/ said that I realized this but thought it impor- history.asp. tant for him to know what was being done in 3. This was partly from the Romanian govern- the name of his organization in the prov- ment’s mistaken belief that the label referred inces, it seemed to me that we both under- largely to work in physical anthropology, as stood the potential for local officers to exceed was the case with the Romanian discipline of their mandate. antropologie. The kind of research that US an- 7. I underscore, again, that I refer to Romania as thropologists usually conducted fell some- of the 1970s, not earlier. where between Romanian disciplines labeled etnografie and sociologie; there was no field com- parable to US-style socio-cultural anthropology. 4. The story had one more chapter, for as I put together all of my papers in Bucharest to pre- References pare for my departure, I realized that my other purchases for the year had put me over ABC News 1990. Death of a dictator. Special Re- my 10 per cent limit. The person who admin- port with Ted Koppel (aired April 2). istered my grant offered to write me a false Casals, Felipe Garcia [Pavel Campeanu] 1980. statement of my income, declaring it to have The syncretic society. White Plains, New York: been much larger than it actually was, so that M.E. Sharpe. my 10 per cent threshold was now high Garton Ash, Timothy 1997. File: a personal history. enough to cover all my purchases. New York: Vintage Books. 5. Tina Rosenberg (1995) and Timothy Garton Gross, Jan T. 1988. Revolution from abroad: the So- Ash (1997) make similar points about the secret viet conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and services of other Eastern European countries. Western Byelorussia. Princeton: Princeton Uni- 6. I received interesting confirmation of this versity Press. possibility in 1996. Although I had imagined Gross, Jan T. 1989. Social consequences of war: that the events of might preliminaries to the study of imposition of Anthropological adventures with Romania’s Wizard of Oz | 145

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