A major new piece of opinion research on public perception of the pre-1989 Communist regime has shocked the tender sensibilities of Romania’s intelligentsia and of the wider “educated classes”. It turns out that 66 per cent of Romanians today believe that Nicolai Ceausescu was a good leader for Romania. The country’s last Communist dictator, swiftly executed by firing squad on Christmas Day in 1989 after a pathetic show trial, is back – back in fashion, and come to haunt his political executioners and their descendants’ rotten “democracy”.
But there is more. The polling delivers an unambiguous verdict: 36 years on, a majority of the Romanian population has positive and very positive views about a great many aspects of life under the former Communist regime. 55.8 per cent of respondents believe that the Communist regime did more good things for Romania, on balance, rather than bad; only 34.5 disagree. A plurality, but not outright majority (48.4 per cent v. 34.7 for the opposite view), think life was better before 1989 than today.
These findings have been met with horror and extreme alarm by “experts”, pundits, politicians and other “influencers”. Who could possibly have anything good to say – in an EU country, in 2025 – about a murderous, totalitarian, anti-Christian regime that has brought so much misery and suffering not just in Romania but across the world? Whose depraved philosophy of egalitarianism and materialism, mocks Nature itself. And especially an ideology whose core economic theory – the supposed unique strength and “genius” of Marxist thought – has been proven wrong again and again. All these things are entirely true. So, how? Why?
Polling details
The rest of the poll provides the answer, loud and clear for anyone to hear – anyone except those who are so deeply invested in the current “democratic” regime and brainwashed with “EU values” that they cannot accept what the people are actually telling them.
To start with, according to the poll, 80.9 per cent of respondents agree that there was less freedom under the Communists; and almost 60 per cent agree that the regime was responsible for “abuses and crimes”. So today’s citizens are well aware of the nature of the regime itself, if you ask them; there is no idealisation going on. Couple this with the fact that a majority (60 per cent) take little and very little interest in the Communist period in general, and what you have is people really taking the polling questions as an inquiry into their comparative experience of daily life and self-regard back then, rather than as some kind of eagerly-awaited opportunity to pass (positive) judgement on the political ideology and philosophical tenets of Marxist-socialism.
But if people are asked about it, they will give you quite rational and well-founded reasons – from their own personal perspective – why the old days compare favourably to our present times. The polling tells us, for example, that 65 per cent of Romanians think there was: less corruption under the Communists than today; less crime, i.e. higher public safety (75 per cent); better access to healthcare (48.6 per cent, with 21 per cent deeming it “the same”); better access to good education (50 per cent).
The Communists are also seen to have delivered: more effective state institutions (according to 58.7 per cent of respondents); healthier food (a whopping 85 per cent agree on this); a more “caring” state, towards its own citizens (66.4 per cent); more nationally manufactured goods (68.5 per cent); promotion of better moral values (48.2 per cent, while 19 per cent think the Communists promoted “the same” values as today); more solidarity between people (80 per cent); less pollution (53 per cent); more international respect for Romania (73 per cent); and better Romanian films (75 per cent), TV shows (58 per cent), and music (72 per cent) – together with a strong view (71 per cent) that Romania has lost its cultural identity since then.
Most of these views are at least reasonable and understandable from the point of view of the respondents, and many (not all) of them are hard to dispute – not least because there is a great deal of subjectivity implied in the questions, and the questions themselves are actually very tightly framed. The panic and pearl-clutching come mostly from those who think that “the real statistical data” goes against these polling results. But on a closer look there are actually very few questions where clear “facts” and statistics can be brought to bear.
One by one
Things like corruption, effectiveness of the state, solidarity or even the sense of public safety, are hard or impossible to measure objectively in this case, as there is no credible, hard comparative data on these things from Communist times. Subjectively, though, it’s obvious that Romanians would look at the blatant corruption of today’s Romanian state and the cumulated history of the past three decades of wild and open thievery and graft on an epic scale by “democratic” political mafias, and conclude – without the help of any “statistics” – that yes, there was less corruption in Communism. And by that they really mean theft from public resources, rather than the petty day to day corruption which of course carried over to the post-Communist period. In fact, “undermining the national economy” – stealing from “state enterprises” etc – was a capital offence, and people were executed for it.
Should we be surprised that Communist “state effectiveness” gets a high rating? Well, people simply look at the vast infrastructure and industrial base built under the old regime and compare it to the failure of “democracy” to achieve even a fraction of that. It’s taken decades to even come close to delivering new motorways, and there are innumerable examples of this sort. For sure, in its latter years the old Communist regime, effectively bankrupt and decrepit, was merely treading water. The age of “great strivings” and major projects had passed, and much of “economic activity and production” had descended into a horrendously inefficient farce. But that is almost certainly not what respondents thought about when answering the pollsters.
The other, and simpler, way of looking at this question is to observe that almost by definition a totalitarian state, even a corrupt one, is more effective in delivering policy at scale if it really needs to – so, again, the answer should not come as a surprise. This relates to the matter of crime which again, was almost by definition much lower given that Communist Romania was literally a police state, so public safety in terms of things like burglaries, criminal gangs, trafficking and the like was tightly controlled.
It is the same with solidarity. The fact that people were more willing to help each other back then, and that there was a stronger sense of community, in general, is not just a Romanian view but one shared across the West as well even in the absence of a Communist experience. The comparison is really made, in Romania as elsewhere, with today’s “atomised” and individualistic world – a phenomenon with multiple causes, of which the distinction between Capitalist and Communist systems of belief is but one.
Was the Communist state more “caring” towards its citizens than today’s so-called democratic republic? This is one of the odder items in the poll, as it is effectively a circular question about whether Socialism is more socialistic than democratic Capitalism. Of course that a Communist regime is more “caring” in formal terms, as this is built into its ideology – in theory it is all about the state providing for every single material need of its citizens (eventually, for free).
In the last few years of the regime everything fell apart as the people couldn’t even find food in the shops, but even this was seen by many as a “temporary” privation as the country was “tightening the belt” to pay off the national debt as decreed by Ceausescu. There is no controversy over the grimness of that final phase of Communism, and over its bankruptcy; hardly anyone would argue this point.
But the question about the “caring state” is likely read by most people as being about the ideal pursued by that regime, by what it “formally” aspired to – certainly compared to the post-Communist state which brutalised them throughout the Transition to the market economy and which (as they see it) introduced the dog-eat-dog individualism of liberal Capitalism. People also tend to put this question in the longer context of the whole of the 40-year Communist period in Romanian history, rather than judging it all based just on the savage late 1980s. This – the longer perspective – likely accounts, too, at least in part, for the apparently paradoxical view of a plurality of respondents that “life was better” back then – even though on this specific question the replies are more evenly divided, 48.4 v. 34.7 per cent.The poll’s findings on healthcare, education and national manufacturing should not be that surprising, either, if one pays close attention to the actual framing of the questions. Romanians are not saying that the Communists delivered better healthcare and better education than today in absolute terms – but that there was better access to these public services; or, conversely, they are saying that today there is worse access to healthcare and to good education. All this is empirically true, as the public healthcare system in Romania is effectively on its knees, with medics pursuing careers abroad in Europe, or in the private medical sector, and with horrific conditions and long waiting times in hospitals across the country.
As for education, this should be the least controversial aspect of the entire poll, given the absolutely general view across Romanian society that the country’s educational system has been utterly destroyed in the post-Communist era. It is precisely the decline of educational attainment – seen not least in runaway rates of functional illiteracy across the young generations – that is held up to be Romania’s main problem. Beyond the stats that back up this story – whether on primary or secondary school completion rate, pupil to teacher ratios etc – there is the empirical, live demonstration of poor education across society in people’s daily experience.The public’s majority view that Romania was “making more stuff” under Communism is also more nuanced than at first glance. The immediate retort from the “educated opinion” of today is that this is obviously wrong since, for example, Romanian industrial production in our times is worth more than in 1989 ($68 billion in 2022, compared to $45 billion equivalent) even though it’s only half the share of GDP it held back then. Furthermore, Romania has retained a diversified manufacturing sector.
Nonetheless, what people implicitly object to – in their reply to this question – is the oversupply of foreign products and the relative lack of domestically-produced items as a share of what they see on sale around them. This is a perennial point of discussion in Romanian society – as it is sometimes in other countries – and it is tied to the fact that Romania has a heavily consumption-weighted economy that ingests a large variety of foreign made products (or made locally but by foreign brands). The fact that this is within the normal parameters of market economics is neither here nor there; the sense of a decline in domestic manufacturing – which affects Western countries as well – is not unwarranted.
Secondly, as with the question of state effectiveness, that of national production is baked into the nature of Romanian Communism itself: under the old regime pretty much everything one could buy was made domestically, with imports (even from other Socialist countries, let alone the West) kept to a minimum. In this context it’s again not surprising – nor, perhaps, wrong – that people would generally think that more things were made locally than today.
Moving on, the results on the questions regarding food quality and pollution are mere common sense and should not be controversial. Of course that 35-40 years ago, in Communist as in Capitalist countries, food was less processed and certainly less pumped up with various chemicals that are now pervasive in our diets. And behind the Iron Curtain there was no notion of such things as “fast food” to begin with. Nor, evidently, was there as much CO2 pollution as today, especially terms of air quality, given the much lower levels of automobile traffic for instance. Again, polling results on these questions should not be taken as endorsement for Communism, but rather as an observation on the inevitable comparative differences that build up in certain areas over time as a matter of historical evolution (or, in this case, involution).
Perhaps the most important polling questions are those towards the end, with respect to culture and national identity. The fact that Romania’s national identity has been utterly torn apart under the twin pressure of internal socio-political strife and lack of leadership, and external pressures – especially as the country was sucked into the EU’s identity-crushing machinery, whose explicit purpose is to destroy the national idea and create a so-called European Identity – is absolutely undeniable. The very rise of AUR, the party of Romanian hard-Right national populism, whose political platform hinges precisely on restoring Romania’s national identity and pride, demonstrates all this.
As regards the cultural field, again, there is absolutely no surprise that a majority of Romanians rate contemporary Romanian cinema, TV and music (which has been overtaken by manele) as much worse than what was being produced in the years before 1989. Romanian films have been quite successful on the European film circuit in recent decades, but in many cases this success was built on exploiting Romanian stories of pain and misery (often set during Communism – see 4, 3 2 – or in the time of the Revolution). This cynical calculation on part of many Romanian filmmakers was proven correct, as Western audiences and jury members were often shocked by the “realism” and “minimalism” of the Romanian New Wave, rushing to reward it. However, this low tactic also ended up promoting a humiliating image of Romania abroad, one that focused on some of the worst aspects from its past rather than the best.
Romanian television programming today can hardly be characterised as anything other than a degenerate, hyper-sexualised, and – most importantly – intensely dumbed-down visual slop. Objectively, the contrast with TV production standards from before 1989 – including the much-loved and extraordinarily gifted TV performers of the time – could not be greater. So much so that until recently on New Year’s Eve some TV channels would re-broadcast NYE programmes from the 1970s and 1980s by popular demand, and because there is nothing remotely comparable today in terms of quality TV.
All this feeds into the question over the moral values promoted by the Communists – and here, respondents to the poll do not mean any “ideological” or specifically “Communist” values, but the general codes of conduct, good manners and old school principles encouraged in personal as well as the public space during that period. From decency and hard work, to self-improvement and love of country, these sort of moral values implied here are all the things that have been largely lost in the West as well. Again, it is not as much a commentary by the respondents on some “virtue” of Communism, as a lamentation about a vanished world and a comparison with today’s Babylon.
The explanation
One of the co-authors of the study – who also directs the national institute for investigating “the crimes of Communism” – has said that this “Communist nostalgia” is a “matter of national security”. He’s wrong on both counts.
The views revealed by this historic piece of polling are not nostalgia, but a sober and logical assessment filtered through 36 years of hardship and disappointments under an increasingly-corrupt “democracy”. None of the questions ask whether people would want to go back to Communism; hardly anyone would. This is not a clamour for a Communist revival. But asked to compare two eras, almost 40 years apart, respondents look at the facts as they experienced them (directly or second hand through close family members), and – importantly – they consider them in the wider historical perspective, rather than focusing just on the last, grim years of the late 1980s. It is post-Revolutionary “democratic” Romania that has failed them, not the other way around. Nor is any of this to do with national security, as the institute director claimed, in the sense that the Romanian society might now suddenly have been revealed to be extra “vulnerable” to Russian information warfare. To start with, the vast majority of Romanians hate the Russians with a passion and that is not going to change.
As for Russian propaganda seeking to turn Romanian opinion against the “West”, in some kind of geopolitical gain for the Kremlin – again, this is hopeless. Only 4 per cent believe the Romania should orient itself towards the East (i.e. to pursue relations with Russia or China). Criticising the EU and the liberal-progressive ideological nonsense emanating from Brussels and the other woke Western capitals is justified in its own right, on national-interest grounds, without any relation to whatever the Russians want or don’t want.
The fact that 66 per cent of Romanians think Ceausescu was “a good leader” has sent the elites berserk. The collective meltdown over this, heavily concentrated amongst precisely the pro-Europe fanatics who cheered the constitutional coup from December last year, is quite a sight to behold.
But in the poll, people were asked about Ceausescu as a leader, not about Communism as a system of government and ideology. People also know that during the brutal last years of the regime Ceausescu was hoodwinked by his own apparatchiks into thinking that everything was fine and the country was actually prosperous. He was the last to know the truth. They used him and then shot him. That is the story people know, together with the fact that Ceausescu made Romania a real player in the international politics of the time, while at home he transformed an agrarian, almost-medieval nation into an industrial society with a pretty good science base and educational attainment.
Why wouldn’t a majority of people think this was good leadership? They look around and see that over 35 years after Ceausescu the Securitate has morphed into a gargantuan web of intelligence security agencies with the largest cumulated intelligence budget among European nations and allegedly running a parallel economy. Or that key state assets have been sold off and foreign capital rules, that corruption is higher than ever and brazen rule-breaking happens absolutely in the open.
They also see that the educational system has utterly collapsed and, as already noted, that functional illiteracy rates are through the roof; that most of the press is bought and directed by the political parties; that the demographics are in freefall, and that in terms of “political freedoms” the best the de facto EU-imposed “democratic” regime can do is cancel elections when the people’s candidate – Mr Calin Georgescu – has won the first round of the presidentials and is about to storm the second in a landslide.
It is not some imagined Communist “nostalgia” that is the problem here, but the delusions and authoritarian instincts of the snakes and thieves who have now taken absolute control over countries like Romania, with the EU’s blessing – and who are willing to justify anything to themselves in the name of “defending democracy”. A democracy that they themselves have discredited and indeed effectively destroyed. Extraordinary things will follow.
The battle for a conservative Romania is only just beginning