SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT Eyewitness to the unfolding political revolution in Romania

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A first-hand account of the new situation in the only Eastern European country to experience a mass suspicion of mew gow"t By LYNN HENDERSON BUCHAREST—I arrived in Romania on Jan. 5, on the first commercial flight into Bucharest's Otopeni airport since the revolutionary upheaval that swept away the Stalinist Causescu regime. From my first hours in Bucharest it became apparent that much more than the Causescu regime was swept away when the government fell on Dec. 22.

While the upheaval in Romania is part of the continuing anti-Stalinist revolt that is shaking all of Eastern Europe, events here have gone significantly further than in any of the other so-called "socialist" countries.

Throughout the rest of Eastern Europe the hopelessly discredited Stalinist heads-of-state and/or heads-of-party were ignominiously but peacefully pushed aside and new governments organized, consisting of some form of coalition with the "reformed" Communist parties.

In Romania, literally overnight, the Communist Party ceased to function or even exist; and the head-of-state, head-of-party was captured, tried, and executed. An armed uprising of the population took place in which the chief repressive instrument of the state, the Securitate, was physically crushed. The only institution of state power remaining intact is the army, and its hold is partial and tenuous.

At Otopeni airport, customs and passport control was being handled not by government officials but by young army draftees ranging in age from 18 to 22. They were supervised by newly mobilized reserve army officers in their mid-twenties.

In Bucharest itself, police were nowhere to be found. Romanians explained to me that on the first day of the uprising the people in the streets, later joined by the army, disarmed and removed the police. In some cities outside Bucharest police officials were lynched.

Armed worker self-defense guards One of my major goals while in Romania was to interview workers involved in organizing the new free trade unions that were spontaneously springing up throughout the country. [A series of these interviews will appear in next month's issue of Socialist Action.-ed.] As I visited factories, first in the Bucharest area and later in Brasov, the largest industrial city in Romania, I found that the factories were being defended by armed worker self-defense guards organized out of the factories themselves. In small and middle-size plants, such as the 2000 employee Feber computer factory outside Bucharest, these defense guards appeared to be operating completely independently.

In the largest plants, such as the Red Flag Truck factory and the Tractor Enterprise Works outside Brasov, each with 20,000 workers, the self-defense guard had been at least nominally placed under the "command" of senior army officers. But the arms remained in the hands of the workers.

This was the situation despite an official decree by the National Salvation Front demanding that all arms must be turned back over to the army.

Universal distrust of ruling Front The National Salvation Front itself, which is operating as the self-appointed provisional government, is viewed with almost universal skepticism by both students and workers.

When asked about the Salvation Front, a common response from representatives of the newly forming trade union units is a long pause followed by the simple statement that, "We support the program of the National Salvation Front, but we are independent of the Front and in no way connected with it."

They go on to explain that the Front is a temporary formation and its primary function should be to organize elections as early as possible-and then go out of existence.

Individual workers and students are much more blunt. They openly question who chose the members of the Front. While they were fighting in the streets against Causescu's Securitate, how is it that the Front became the provisional government? 35 8 8075 ments all drew a virtual equal sign between "democracy" and private ownership of the factories. I asked them what they thought of that, and if they thought this was the direction in which Romania would or should go. The idea that democracy meant privatization of their factory was overwhelmingly rejected everywhere I went. While you could find workers who thought that they could do better under a system of private ownership, the large majority of workers felt that the demise of the Communist Party opened up for the first time the opportunity for workers to control their own work place and operate the plant cooperatively.

It should hardly be surprising that some Romanian workers might think they could do better under a capitalist market economy. They probably concluded that they could hardly do worse than they've done in the past few years under so-called socialism.

Stagnating economy

The economy in Romania, like in the rest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, has been essentially stagnant for the entire decade of the 1980s.

Despite the dead weight of a parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, Romania had a respectable, while not spectacular, rate of growth in the 1960s and 1970s, averaging around 5.2 percent yearly. This was a higher rate of growth in GNP than the United States has achieved since 1839.

But in the 1980s, Romania's rate of growth stagnated at zero, and during the first half of the decade Romania even experienced an absolute fall in GNP, largely due to bureaucratic mismanagement and widespread corruption by the ruling Stalinist party.

The parasitic character of Stalinist bureaucracy was dramatically exposed when public pressure forced the National Salvation Front to announce on Jan. 18 the confiscation of all property and assets privately held by the defunct Communist Party.

Included among these were 21 large palaces used by Ceasescu and his wife. Silviu Brucan, a member of the Front's executive committee, also revealed that the assets included huge business enterprises directly held by the party-for the party. "The business of the Romanian Communist Party was business," commented Mr. Brucan.

Altogether, 60 industrial enterprises were run directly by the party under a holding company called Carpati, the Romanian word for the Carpathian Mountains. Annual output totaled 60 billion leu and profits amounted to 2 billion leu. The leu is officially traded at 9 to the dollar.

In addition, the Communist Party under Ceausescu directly owned 123,500 acres of agricultural land on which 45 agro-industrial enterprises, employing 18,000 workers, produced an annual total of 40,000 tons of meat, 20,000 tons of milk and 40 million eggs. These agricultural goods were apparently distributed almost exclusively to party members.

Besides the 21 palaces, Mr. Brucan re(continued on page 10, in “INSIDE: Interview with Romanian Rent workęhe seTup I Student rally underscores”) 114-70

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