You poor Canary, It Wasn’t Real…

On January 1st 2007, a long and agonizing period in the great history of our country, as well as in the little histories of each of us, will end. Of course, there will still be a lot for us to do in order to become a normal country, but we can say that, once we acceded to NATO and the EU, the main part of the transition is over. It lasted a lot more than we had imagined: seventeen more years stolen from our lives, after so many other years wasted before it. We often wonder about the fact that many Romanians are shattered in minds and bodies, but the things we have been going through during these 17 years (fascist and communist dictatorships, endless transitions), we wouldn’t want anyone else to go through ever. Someone told me once: history is like the rings of a tree. One can tumble on an enlightened one or on a dark one, depending on fate. In our case, the rings have been dark for the past three generations…

Could it be different? Could we avoid this long series of catastrophes? Hard to say. During all these seventeen years, our destiny has been decided by the threatening presence of an empire right next to us. We had been caught between such giants in the past as well (the Turks, the Russians and the Austro-Hungarians). However, two of them had lost the First World War and had collapsed. The Russians had also been one step away from collapse in 1918. It would have been great for them and for the entire world. Unfortunately, after the disappearance of the Tsarist Empire, a giant concentration camp, a menace for all its neighbors appeared: the Soviet Empire. The Bolshevism fear pushed the entire Europe towards the other extreme, Nazism. This is what led to the birth of our fascist dictatorships around 1940. After WWII, we had been the victim of a shameful trade between the Occident and the Soviet monster. The insignificant Romanian communist party took the power and destroyed the entire normality of the national life in ten years time. After that, we have lived a sinister Asian type dictatorship based on the fear of the Russians. We could have started riots like the Hungarians in 1956, like the German Democrat Republic or like the Polish. We could have obtained a somewhat softer tyranny. However, we wouldn’t have obtained freedom as long as the Occident didn’t react to the riots in the communist concentration camp. The Phoenix yellow canary couldn’t disappear inside its cage, with his dreams torn apart.

There is a totally different discussion for the after the Revolution period, when the great Russian Empire gave up on the communist doctrine and started to tear. This is when the states in the East took advantage of the extraordinary chance. We missed that chance. Our Revolution was infected by the communists’ coup d’etat. The communists didn’t care about the one thousand people they had killed, or about the fact that they were very close to starting a civil war. The only thing they cared about was to salvage their doctrine. During the entire transition period, the former nomenclature and the former security have done all they could to stop the national progress, which extended the period a lot more than it should have been.

I say it loud and clear: yes, transition could be different. Yes, people that ruined the after-the-Revolution Romania are still among us. The confiscated revolution, the miners, the state-party, the mafia and the generalized corruption can be cast in the dishes of several people, which are still active from the political point of view. I am still waiting for them to pay for the seventeen years stolen from our lives.

Translated by Sorin Balan