Romania Dances on Volcanoes

This is the tenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week the newly installed President Trump issued a series of diktats that boiled down to the political concept of L’état, c’est moi—to lead the United States into a golden Age of Grievance.)

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The night train from Budapest (Hungary) to Bucharest (Romania). Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

From the Bucharest Jewish Museum, located near the rebuilt Old Town (which in the 1970s was little more than vacant lots and piles of fallen bricks), I slowly biked back to the Gara du Nord to catch a local train to Bucharest’s Henri Coandă International Airport, which is located in the village of Otopeni, ten miles from downtown.

For a while I had thought of riding my bike to the airport, as my flight to Ankara, Turkey, wasn’t until the afternoon, but I had a second breakfast in the Old Town, and then needed to move toward my airport check-in with more speed than my bicycle could provide.

I didn’t have a box for my folding bicycle, but I did have an IKEA Dimpa bag (Brompton owners will understand), which I stuffed with clothing to protect the bike frame and shrink-wrapped at one of those spinning machines seen in airports.

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Once I had my boarding pass and was checked on, I had nothing to do for several hours, so I carried on with Paul Kenyon’s history of Romania, which I found riveting.

Not only does he write with grace and felicity (a skill lost on many historians), but he was writing about subjects that I find fascinating—the political history of 20th century Romania, which went from a kingdom allied with Austria-Hungary to Ceaușescu’s cult of personality.

Ever more to my liking is that Kenyon dwells on Romania’s diplomatic history, which since 1900 has had to deal with the encroachments of Austro-Hungary, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia—not to mention the Balkan intrigues of its neighbors.

For example, Romania is the only country that fought on both sides in the two world wars, although technically it can be argued that Romania was neutral from 1914-16 before it joined the Allies. To secure Transylvania, Romania joined the Allies in 1916 and sent legions in the attacks on Hungary.

In World War II, Axis member Romania gleefully invaded Russia alongside the Germans and brutally sent its forces all the way to Crimea. Then in 1944, as the fortunes of war were turning against the Nazis, it joined the Allies. What motivated both changes of heart was the dream of retaking Transylvania, which worked after both world wars.

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During the 20th century, the country tried every form of government—monarchy, fascism, democracy, communism, and dictatorship—and all of them failed, many in operetta fashion.

In the early part of the century, Romania (smaller than its borders today) came under the rule of King Carol I, a dynastic German prince who served until the start of World War I, in which Romania was initially neutral (thanks to its pro-German leadership).

At that point most of what was known to the outside world about Romania came from Bram Stroker’s lurid novel, Dracula, which appeared in 1897 and drew on central and east European tales, although he set the book in the castles of Transylvania.

Only through its diplomatic maneuvering in World War I and at the 1919 Peace of Paris did the modern state of Romania emerge. Kenyon writes:

When the announcement of territorial awards was made in the series of treaties that followed the Paris Peace Conference in 1920, it was nothing short of sensational for Romania. Bucharest would receive all of Transylvania, nearly all of Bukovina, Bessarabia, the southern Dobruja and two-thirds of the Banat. Overnight, Romanian territory would more than double in size. So too would its population, from 8 million to 16 million. Having almost disappeared at the hands of the Germans, it was now the fifth largest country in Europe. This was the birth of Greater Romania…

Some reports have suggested that the ravishing Queen Marie (the wife of Ferdinand I) secured Romania’s enlarged borders by sleeping with a variety of Allied statesmen in Paris, including the American President Woodrow Wilson, although proof for such allegations (other than Marie’s flirtatious manner and good looks) remains scant.

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Throughout the 1920s, despite having a monarch (Ferdinand I), the Romanian center could never hold, and politically it lurched left and right, depending on parliamentary whims.

In the 1930s, Romania had some 25 different governments—of all different persuasions—and the country became something of a battleground for the competing influences of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. (Kenyon writes: “Romania’s geographical position had always left it teetering on the fault line between East and West.”)

King Carol II acceded to the throne in 1930 (he overthrew the regents that his late father, Ferdinand I, had appointed to run the country). With him at court came the improbable figure of Elena (Magda) Lepescu, a red-headed bombshell who provided the king with favors, both financial and sexual. She was installed in a villa near the royal palace but was never far from Carol II’s heart.

Kenyon quotes the king’s mother, Queen Marie, on the nature of his reign:

At Independence Day celebrations in Bucharest in 1936, Marie sat near the back of the stage and described her son’s arrival ‘on a huge white horse with the attitude of Kaiser Bill… surrounded by brilliant uniforms and busy sycophants’. His autocratic behaviour combined with his fragile mental health, she told her diary, was a dangerously combustible mix. Her son, she said, was ‘dancing on a volcano’.

Carol II could never make up his mind whether Germany or Russia offered the best alliance. Kenyon writes: “If, though, he backed Russia, the Germans would undoubtedly respond by encouraging Hungary to storm into Transylvania. Carol was in trouble whichever way he turned. Being trapped in the middle was the curse that every leader of Romania had wrestled with since the medieval period.”

Carol II went with Germany, and shortly after the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, the Russians swept into Bukovina and Bessarabia, which brought down Carol II’s opera bouffe kingdom. After 1940 he was just another European monarch in exile on the Portuguese Riviera with his lover and a train of luggage (a fate easy to imagine for Donald Trump).

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In the early years of World War II, Romania was under the firm grip of Ion Antonescu’s fascist government that aligned Romania with the Axis powers and saw numerous pogroms directed against Romania’s large Jewish population. Kenyon describes one such operation:

The human toll in the Iaşi [a city in northeastern Romania] pogrom and the ‘death trains’ that followed was in excess of 4,000 people. Some historians put the total as high as 12,000. It had been planned by the Romanian Secret Service, whose operatives had passed on information about the location of Jewish homes to the Romanian and German military in Iaşi to make the hunt more efficient, egged on by the rhetoric and orders of General Antonescu.

The German alliance had come at the cost of transferring Northern Transylvania from Romania to Hungary, but that transfer only lasted a few years, and in 1944 Romania changed sides in the war and attacked Hungary.

After the war, at the direction of Stalin, Transylvania was taken from Hungary and awarded to Romania, on the proviso that in the coming Cold War Romania would be a Soviet satellite.

That said, as Lucien Boia writes in his history Romania: “Romania stood out as a country to which Communism was particularly foreign. It was predominantly rural, without a strong left-wing tradition and with no sympathy for anything coming from Moscow.”

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By 1948, the weak monarchy of King Michael I (he succeeded Carol II in 1940) was swept aside for Soviet dancing bears, including Gheorghiu-Dej, a gruff railway worker and union organizer from the town of Dej, which is just beyond Bánffy Castle near Cluj-Napoca.

Gheorghiu-Dej managed to hang on as Moscow’s man until he died in 1965. His successor—the last of the dynastic Communist line—was Nicolae Ceauşescu, a shoemaker’s apprentice who handled party politics better than anyone else. He managed to distance Romania from Soviet dominance and develop an economic system that maintained some contacts with the West (which explains why my father was there “calling on the trade” in 1975).

Ceauşescu’s power also came from the police-state politics of repression, although Romania had greater press freedom, for example, than Poland or Czechoslovakia. Kenyon writes: “400,000 Romanians were informers out of a population of 22 million. That was where the real psychological damage was done. Every floor of every block in the country had its own Securitate informer.”

Ceauşescu and his dreary wife Elena (nominally she was a senior scientist in the government, Academician Doctor Engineer Elena Ceausescu, but could not pronounce the symbol “CO2”) lived as well as did earlier German princes, what with their 1,000 room palace in Bucharest and Mercedes limousines. But with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union in 1989, and the looming bankruptcy of their people’s republic, they were chased out of town.

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The presidential couple fled Bucharest in a helicopter, but didn’t get very far when the Romanian military instituted a no-fly directive. Kenyon describes the grounding of the presidential helicopter:

It must have been a surreal sight: Nicolae Ceauşescu still dressed in his elegant fur-lined coat, silk scarf and expensive leather shoes; Elena also in a fur, with a Hermès scarf and high heels, clambering around aimlessly in the frozen mud. The President and his wife – who had once entertained Nixon and Mao and who had slept on goose-feather pillows in Buckingham Palace and been showered with marigolds in New Delhi – now ditched in a field of dead corn with two thick-necked minders.

The president’s security detail (those two with thick necks) tried to wave down a few passing cars. One man, a doctor driving a Dacia, refused to pick up the stranded president and his wife.

Finally, a bicycle mechanic drove them into the nearby regional city of Târgoviște, where the police arrested them. A few days later, after a trial that by most accounts “lasted about an hour,” the first couple were executed for their crimes against the Romanian people.

In their obituaries no mention was made that they had spent many evenings in the presidential palace watching rebroadcasts of the American cop serial “Kojak”.

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On my bicycle I passed many wall plaques on which were engraved the names of citizens—most were young—who died in the 1989 revolution to oust Ceauşescu. At the same time, Bucharest still has some of the air that it had in 1975—neither East nor West, not Slavic but not Western European.

In theory, the 1989 revolution was supposed to have produced yet another new class of government officials and voters skilled in western democratic practice and the market economy.

Romania joined the brave new worlds of NATO in 2002, and the European Union in 2007, and downtown Bucharest has high rise office buildings, a restored Old Town, boutique hotels serving French wine (not that it is necessary, as Romania produces excellent wine), and fleets of late model sedans and SUVs.

On the train going out to the airport, I fell into conversation with a man who despaired at all the local and political corruption, the quality of the health care system, the bad air in Bucharest, and the organization men of the new parties (left undefined) who were making off with state assets. I might well have stumbled into a conversation with Count Dracula, who said after all: “We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways.”

Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails, Appalachia Spring, andThe Revolution as a Dinner Party, about China throughout its turbulent twentieth century. His most recent books are Biking with Bismarck and Our Man in Iran. Out now: Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure, about the 2016 and 2020 elections.