"The consumption of electricity in everyday life was limited (it was forbidden to use a refrigerator during the winter, and the use of a vacuum cleaner was banned all year round), hot water was supplied to apartments twice a week,"
Maybe you were living in a big city like Bucharest, Timisoara ...
I was there before 1989 and grew in the small town in a house. Not a village, but a small town.
We had electricity only a couple of hours per day.
I don't know of any specific rule against refrigerator but it was not useful to buy one as you cannot connect it to anything.
The main source of light during winter was the fire and some kind of liquid gas (I don't know exacly what was that) that we used with a gas lamp.
The same goes for kitchen: most of the cooking was done using the stove or using some gas tanks that were limited - I think one per family per month or I am not sure. But the gas tank was a precious possession there.
The same was true for bread or any other food that was produced by the state. There were rations of how much we can buy.
HN is an English-only site, so here we are. I'd love to see a Romanian HN, but given the general level of discourse I've seen in most Romanian communities online (and in most communities online period), I'm not holding my breath.
Of course it is false but the regime was definitely monitoring private power consumption (I'm also from Romania).
My dad told me relatively recently how sometime during a winter from the late '80s a lady from the power company showed up at our apartment's door and told my father that we should lower our energy consumption, i.e. not use an electrical heater to, well, heat the house. That would have course meant having a freezing house, which wasn't ideal for kid me, so my dad, logically, called that lady some names and invited her inside the apartment to share the bed with all of us (because of the cold I was sleeping as a kid between my parents during the winter, we couldn't physically heat two rooms at the same time). Interesting times.
Bonus points for us, kids, booing and swearing out loud when the power was being cut off in the evening, and cheering when it was being restored, like true "freedom" fighters against the regime (I'm talking about the summer months when we were all outside to play well into the evening/dark hours).
It's false because they weren't explicitly "prohibiting" refrigerator and vacuum cleaner use per se (as the article says), no need to do that, just cutting the power off completely was enough to do the trick.
But, yeah, on a more general level whoever was designing any electrical-related stuff had to have that in mind (the power cuts and the reduced power consumption asked from us, that is).
This discussion also reminded me that, as a kid, I was really in awe in how the (analogue) telephone network was still working even when the power went out, it seemed like magic. There was an article posted yesterday here on HN about how we're expecting rolling black-outs in our mobile phone network over parts of Europe, goes to show that in some ways the system back then that we had in Romania was a lot more resilient in face of power-cuts compared to what we have now available over most of Europe.
Same. Pretty sure we vacuumed regularly and never unplugged the refrigerator.
If you were in a state heated apartment building after 1980, the heating was limited to non existent though. And there may have been a hot water schedule. More like twice per day not twice per week though.
In Bulgaria, there were only two periods (1984-85 and 1990-91) during which electrical supply was interrupted on a planned basis. Rumour has it that the regime was starved for hard currency (US dollars) and was exporting everything it could. As a small kid, I remember spending 2-3 hours in the evening, relying on candles for light. In the rest of the time, electricity was cheap and abundant because the country had an economic profile based on heavy and light industry. Energy efficiency was something unheard of – appliances were power-hungry and inefficient, flats in residence blocks were badly insulated, but heating their home was never an issue for most people.
There were periods when electricity was rationed, usually with rolling blackouts. I've also never heard of a ban on refrigerators at any particular time of year, nor a ban on vacuum cleaners. Problems with hot water were common, but I've also not heard of any particular schedule. Food scarcity was a much bigger problem for that period though, especially in major cities (people would queue for hours for a chance at meat or eggs, for example).
Well, there is no need to put a ban on refrigerators or vacuum cleaners if you could not safely assume that there will be electricity in general.
Also for other people reading this, please note that all stores in most of the country (with exception of capital city and a couple others) were controlled by the state. Leaving the country was forbidden in general.
So if they wanted people not to use refrigerators on large scale or vacuum cleaners they could just decide to not sell them. It was that simple to restrict something like electronics.
Just add more: again in most of the country there were very few cars running as there was a limited supply of petrol/gas for cars. You could have a fixed amount of gas.
They even decided at one point that on Sunday to restrict circulation of cars the following way: one Sunday cars that have an odd number are allowed, the other Sunday cars that have an even number were allowed.
While the state could have prevented people from using refrigerators or vacuum cleaners in various ways (as you say, banning or limiting sales, but also making it illegal and relying on the near-ubiquitous network of infromants to tell on neighbours who vacuumed or used too much electricity), the point is that they didn't. Refrigerators were a common household item in Romanian cities at least, and so were vacuum cleaners. They were produced by Romanian factories and sold very much legally. While electrical blackouts were a problem, they were not prolonged enough to prevent the usefullness of a refrigerator (they commonly happened during the night, and a closed refrigerator can typically isolate well enough to preserve its temperature for 6-8h).
Yes, and you also had to register to the waiting list to be able to buy one (refrigerator, TV, car...). Or you needed to know somebody who knew somebody who was able to get one for you faster, for an appropriate material reward.
The hot water was "scheduled" - usually twice a day. I don't remember that well as I was quite young at the time, but I think I was meant to be on for a couple of hours in the morning and another couple of hours in the evening. In reality however, the hot water was never more than lukewarm at best and the schedule itself was very flexible: I remember whole weeks without hot water.
This was same in Czechoslovakia, I recall my parents standing queue in freezing cold during winter for 2-3 hours so that their sick son could have some mandarines or lemon juice in the tea.
The beauty of communist central planning, nothing really worked unless you were in communist party.
This is all normal in the Philippines. Electricity isn't limited, but many households only need to run phone chargers and a light for each room. Most people have fans, but you can get by without if you have an open design and some shade. I'm not sure I have ever seen anyone use a vacuum here (not many people have carpeting.) You might be surprised at how well you can get by without a fridge. Buy your meat and veggies fresh. Cook only the food people will eat (no leftovers.) Buy ice and other cold things from a community store. I'm assuming the hot water thing is for bathing during the winter, this isn't an issue in the Philippines.
I wasn't there but my parents were and I also haven't heard of any of this. With most "life under communism" stories I'm sure it's a broad generalization that might've applied in a few localities but varied widely
Look inside an old Apple II and you’ll see a sea of chips accomplishing what can be done with only a few today. The Cobra clones looked much the same, but with even more chips. Using whatever they could get their hands on, the students would make 30 chips do the job of an elusive $10 chip. No two computers were necessarily alike. Even the keyboards were hacked together, sometimes using keys designed for mainframe computers but with faults from the molding process. These were cleaned up and new letters put on.
Socialist Romania did not pay to license Western chip technologies. All production was based on stolen IP. Ceausescu had a vast spy network stealing everything they could from abroad. The spy network was dismantled when Pacepa, the mastermind behind it, defected to US in 1978.
Same for East German chips (mainly Z80 and family), but with the Western CoCom embargo in place for anything that was more advanced than a toaster [1] there wasn't really a legal way to obtain a license anyway.
It is to be mentioned, though, that some of the Eastern Bloc chips were only on the outside identical to the Western originals, but featured their own internal designs, some of them even robuster and/or more feature rich than the originals. It wasn't always just copy and paste.
True, at least the East German Z80 clone U880 was most likely "properly" reverse-engineered from a real chip's die photos (similar to how the visual6502 netlist was reverse engineered), with bug fixes applied in the process - because the U880 has a slightly different undocumented behaviour than an original Z80.
There are still conflicting stories to this day though (e.g. some licensed clones from other Western manufactures also differed in behaviour in those areas - so the U880 design could have been stolen from those), the only thing that's for sure is that the U880 isn't a "transistor-perfect" clone of an original Z80.
Participation in cross-border intellectual property agreements is voluntary. Even though it is more "forced voluntary" these days. But it is not an unalienable right.
They didn't just not pay intellectual dues, they actually stole blueprints, plans, any technical info they could get their hands on and tried reproducing locally.
Remember that making optical copies of other people's chips was legal (and not uncommon) in the US up until the 1984 Semiconductor Chip Protection Act was passed.
Romania even license built British designed Jet Airliners during the Cold war era. Also they had a deal in the 1980s with Canada, to build Canadian design Nuclear power station in Romania.
"Devices licensed from Western manufacturers were often named according to the Pro Electron standard. Microelectronica assigned integrated circuit designations according to the underlying technology"
Thank you for sharing this. I'm reminded of my surprise when my Russian language teacher at university told me that Russians celebrated Xmas, and with trees no less. This didn't compute with the typical nationalistic propaganda that passes for 'news'.
"The socialist bloc of countries that arose after World War II was not a monolithic entity, it had significant country and cultural differences."
"Unlike the Soviet integrated circuit designation or the East German semiconductor designation, the Romanian government did not set standards for the labeling of semiconductors."
Huh? I'm Russian and I don't remember when Christmas even is. We celebrate the new year, and yes, there are trees. Christmas is very much a religious holiday for religious people.
Yeah, fully agreed with your take. I dont remember celebrating it even once, aside from a few times when I was keeping company to my grandma who was observing it. And even then, it could hardly be called a celebration.
Also, Christmas in Russia isn't celebrated on the same date as in the US either (Dec 25th), it is around Jan 7th or so due some old-time disagreements about calendar system transitions.
Is Russian "New Year" really different from American "Christmas"? Both are about a certain old man giving gifts to children, both are about a certain kind of tree, etc. From what I gathered, it's not really a religious holiday in USA either - there's little about Jesus. The names are different, the dates and customs are different, but the essence is same.
Yes, it's mostly the same thing. The old man is called "дед мороз", literally "grandfather frost". As a child you'll find your gift from him under the tree in the morning of January 1st. I believe North Americans' Santa Claus puts gifts into socks on Christmas night instead?
By the way, all of this applies to other ex-USSR countries too, including at least Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
US also has gifts under a tree. (There is also candy in socks, but I feel like that’s more of a small children thing and really only in areas where lots of homes have fireplaces.)
> This didn't compute with the typical nationalistic propaganda that passes for 'news'.
"Nationalistic propaganda" told you that Eastern Bloc countries didn't celebrate Christmas, wat? The whole religious aspect of Christmas was extremely toned down of course, but even the communists didn't have the power to dismantle the Church (surveil and suppress they did though).
Not sure about the rest of Eastern Bloc, in USSR the new year took on the big celebration with tree and feast. Which made the following (Julian) Christmas a small, quiet family holiday for people still exhausted by the large one.
You are 100% correct. NYE is the largest celebration of the year that ended up stretching for days somehow, with the tree and drinking and gifts and all. Only pretty religious people observed Christmas, and it wasn't something that was really even considered as a celebration, more like a minor religious holiday.
What makes it strange is that Jesus was a Pisces. Christmas, Christmas trees, mistletoe, carolling, wreaths, and even gift-giving became part of the Roman cover-up of a pagan ritual occurring on winter solstice.
I'd be interested what country's propaganda claimed that Christmas (or the equivalent in the Orthodox church) wasn't celebrated in Eastern Bloc countries, because despite a number of exagerations in Western media of the Cold War era this seems a bit far fetched (having been exposed both to Eastern and Western propaganda in East Germany in my childhood). Christmas in the Eastern Bloc didn't have a 'religious undertone' anymore, but that's also been true for a long time in most civilized Western countries.
Hello,
I'm from Romania, and I never knew we had such facilities.
History is always fascinating and is sad to see parts like this of the industry get destroyed. In every major city, where major industry was (they built quite a lot of things like tractors, cars), now we have Apartment Buildings. In the 90s, after the fall of communism, everything from the industry was bought by members of "Romanian Mafia"(people who had connections and knew how to buy them) and got sold as scrap.
My understanding is that there are healthy startup scenes in Bucharest and other cities, producing companies like https://uipath.com, so even though that old generation got scrapped, the future seems hopeful. And hopefully corruption is rooted out over time.
IT is booming to a great extent in Romania, thanks in large part to a tax cut for IT employment started around 20 years ago. There are still relatively few major success stories, in the sense that the vast amount of programmers are working at international corporations dev offices established in Romania, or in some large outsourcing houses; relatively few are working in startups or in Romanian-owned businesses that are creating their own products. UIPath is more of an exception, but the general situation does seem to be improving.
On the other hand, non-IT Romanian industry is very much struggling on almost all fronts, and most of it is nowhere near where it was in terms of competitiveness or just basic output compared to the communist area, thanks in large parts to what the GP was mentioning (a systematic dismantling for parts by opportunistic apparatchiks after the revolution, but also before the revolution itself, as money dried up and the demented regime became more enamored with grandiose projects rather than any practical economy).
The privatization of the inefficient communist industry was indeed a joke. But the free markets and the switch to capitalism allowed a mixture of home-grown entrepreneurial industry and foreign corporations and investments to more than replace and overtake the centrally-planned dying communist-era dinosaurs.
About 60% of GDP is coming from the Services sector, which were more or less non-existent before 1989; Industry overall is about 27%.
While there has definitely been growth, I doubt industry is more than twice in overall dollars compared to 1989, especially if we exclude IT.
Also note that the largest part of industry today is car making, one of the very few industries whose factories were not entirely sold for parts in the 1990s.
Pre-revolution industry was definitely unproductive and primitive in most sectors compared to EU or US counterparts, but many industries that were actually working, even badly, in the 1970s and 1980s basically don't exist at all today (pottery, clothing, many kinds of chemical industry).
Note that the country is still much much better off today than under the communist regime, in all ways measurable or not - I am in no way seeking to say that "it was better before".
There is, but a lot of romanians like to trash their country. Ops comment for instance is a common point of view around the so called psd electorate (founded by former communist party members). They claim that factories have been converted to shopping malls and apartment complexes to the detriment of industry. A false notion as the old industry was dead anyway. Plenty of new factories replaced the old. And indeed the software startup scene is developing as are the tech industry. Corruption is lower and romania has become a high income economy. Sadly many have been conditioned to repeat statements that demean their own country. A sad example of the Stockholm syndrome at national scale.
Most of the industry in the Eastern European block was completely unable to even sustain itself (or turn a profit) outside of the captive market of the Warsaw Pact though.
The leftist governments tried to keep some of it above water (with money grants and granted monopolies) in the name of "the jobs" at huge costs to the rest of the economy and tax payers. The resulting corruption and various party mafias are still marring those societies today.
But eventually various private enterprises grew, took over and became the success stories of today.
Similar story in Bulgaria. The country had a strong industrial and mechanised agricultural base, with an educated workforce to match. Every small village was electrified and had at least one nearby factory of a small scale. They also had kindergartens, schools, libraries, football stadiums and a small railway station nearby. The planning was far from perfect - factories were built far from the available resources, there were shortages and excesses in the whole chain, but at least the communist leaders recognised the need for modernisation of the society and the economy.
Fast forward to today, where we have an economic centralisation and pollution around 3 or 4 major cities. The economic profile is mainly made up of exports of raw goods and services for local use with a low added value. There is a disconnect between the educational system and the economy, the culture (music, theater) has steadily declined.
I think you're looking at gross and not real GDP. Regardless, GDP growth is probably what you should look at if you want to compare. On that metric, 1988 was actually the highest year of GDP growth and Bulgaria has never reached that level since
Can y’all show some dignity and not turn every thread where either of your countries are mentioned into bitching and whining? Show some dignity and surface the good in your respective countries. I know the eu conditioned you into thinking the two are do nothing sources of cheap labour and perpetual poverty. Both countries are orders of magnitude more developed, and indeed less corrupt and more democratic, than say india or russia yet you dont see people of those countries constantly bitch. The past is a done deal. Was there anything you can build upon? I know in romania there was a bit of innovation even under communism, including in electronics. Old industries died because of poor management and geopolitics. I know the tim-s and hc computers were popular in romanian schools, i grew up there and we did programming from an early age. If you ate roots feed by “mafias” i feel sorry for you but thats not everything and shouldn't dominate your lives.
GDP is a mere indicator based on the total cash sum of all transactions in an economy. Increased consumption of goods and services doesn't necessarily equate a healthier economy.
The former communist economy of Bulgaria was a very different beast altogether. Services were practically non-existent, or entirely in the gray sector where individuals were repairing cars or giving music lessons to children for cash and mutual favours. The structure of society eliminated the need for whole classes of services which are in the private sector today - think private healthcare, travel agencies, consulting agencies, analytic agencies, etc.
The current IT industry in Bulgaria is not a game-changer for the whole country. It consists mainly of outsourcing companies concentrated in Sofia, exploiting the relatively cheap labour there. Few local companies develop their own product and accumulate their capital locally.
- Soviet Union and Eastern block wanted Romania as a supplier of agricultural goods, which Romaina has refused while staying on the block and sticking to its own policy.
- EU wanted Romaina as a supplier of agricultural goods (and exported labor?), which Romania has accepted and realistically had no other choice.
> EU wanted Romaina as a supplier of agricultural goods (and exported labor?)
That is BS. EU never dictated Romania what industries to develop, as Romania is not a planned economy. Private enterprise decides what to create and build, just like in every other free country of the world.
Might I educate you that life just does not work that way.
Japan is a free country yet it had an unambiguous policy to industrialize and produce export goods as a government policy. Which has brought a lot of fruit, but if they didn't have one, Japan might have looked more like Philippines today.
Ditto South Korea whose chaebols (such as Samsung, LG, etc) were created by a government decree with "assigned moguls" to lead them.
Not to mention China which is pouring huge amount of effort not just into infrastructure but also industrial capacity.
I'm also quite confident that post-war France and Germany had programs to keep and develop their industrial capacity.
In this regard, not having a policy and letting private enterprises build whatever they want (and can) using their own money is a policy of itself.
> not having a policy and letting private enterprises build whatever they want (and can) using their own money is a policy of itself
It's called capitalism. And freedom.
But my point was: EU did NOT prevent member countries from investing and growing into whatever direction they want. No purely agrarian economies, no "labor exporters" (unless that's what they wanted, of course).
No, its not. What you are describing is called lack of governance. The western wold has entire industries spawned by government projects one way or another. Either by means of research or outright subsidies.
> EU did NOT prevent member countries from investing and growing into whatever direction they want
Yeah it did. The reason you and your brigade comrade cry over not seeing “factories” around cities is because eu regulation means using standards on par with the rest of the eu. This means the barrier to entry in various manufacturing industries is extremely high. Basically romania is forced to perpetually take eu funding to develop industries, often subsidising those of germany and other eu countries. Instead of starting small and iterating from there machinery used in romania needs to meet the same quality standards as those in richer countries. Surely you understand the issue here.
This is all false. Source: I was there.