PAVILION

meetings and the factory square meeting (a
communist informal and systematic meeting
form, where all the members of a facility
were amassed to formed a square formation
with an open side; the workers were praised
or criticized in front of all the other people,
including for their personal life). Now the
APACA workers had to justify at their working
place not only their professional activity,
but also their personal life. The decree gave
men the possibility to free themselves of any
responsibility concerning their family life,
except the financial support. As the access
to contraceptive methods was prohibited,
the women became children production
units, and they took automatically the
responsibility for the children’s education.
The women comrades from the factory
could trust no one any longer, as anybody
might be an informer. They had no chance to
avoid the system; their only option was to
obey the rules. The stress was governing
their lives, although was known in the communist
block as ‘the capitalism disease”. In
the ‘70s APACA was among the few factories
that were still functioning at full capacity,
so as to set a good example for the
Romanian industry.
The repression in a primitive vulgarity
became their only retreat, and it was
propped up by envy and hatred towards the
intellectuals and those who managed to isolate
from the rules ad the restrictions of the
system and who assumed their freedom
(insofar as this was possible). This way, they
had an opportunity to ignore their problematic
existence. Their social life was reduced to
tattling on the social life of those they
despised.
The APACA women took part in all the panegyrical
marches and shows that acclaimed
the Ceau[escu spouses and the “achievements”
of the Romanian party and people.
Their conformism provided them with the
comfort granted by the lack of personal concerns,
transforming them into easily manipulated
propaganda agents. The factory was
often visited by high officials of the
Communist Party, and it functioned as a laboratory
for experimenting social control programs;
the workers reacted mimetically, as
they were expected to.
For the Party APACA kindergarten was
another object of pride. The new communists
were forged here. Șoimii Patriei
(approx. “Fatherland’s Falcons”, communist
form of organization for the school and preschool
Romanian children between 4 and 7,
founded in 1976) was meant to contribute to
the ethical and civic education of the children,
in the spirit of humanity, love for the
fatherland and the people, for the Romanian
Communist Party. Women brought their children
here every Monday morning and took
them back home only in Sunday evening.
Because of the exhausting work schedule,
rarely a mother visited the children during
the week. The position achieved by the children
from APACA kindergarten was a very
special one: they were favoured by the
model citizen files that their parents had
(PCR had files for all the Romanian citizens,
and they determined the individuals’ social
position and status). Children of low extraction,
from modest worker families, without
any academic degrees, were preferred by
the Party; it was thought they would accomplish
the New Man ideal, so they grew up in
very special conditions, better than in their
homes. They never lack indoor heating,
while other children of their age were freezing
in cold, dilapidated kindergartens; they
were permanently fed with meat products,
eggs, and milk, even though one couldn’t
find such stuff in any store. Over 500 children
between 2-8 years were educated to
become trusted men of the system right in
that factory, the former military barracks. Of
course, they were constantly visited by the
high officials’ wives, and they participated at
all the festivities honouring Ceaușescu
spouses.
Although they were expected to have a different
kind of reaction after 1989, the
APACA workers continued to support the
neocommunist system that went on functioning
in Romania. During the street riots
from University Square, in Bucharest, in the
fights between revolutionaries and the state
forces, the miners engaged in the battle
against the students, as ordered by the
president Ion Iliescu. At that moment APACA
women got out in the streets, acclaiming the
miners and their violent interventions, with
many wounded and dead people. They were
also chanting “Death for the students!” and
“Death for the intellectuals!”, while they
enjoyed watching the miners beating up,
coldbloodedly, any youngster that seemed
to be a student.
After 1992 most of the APACA sectors
closed down or privatized, and the vast
majority of the workers was forced to search
for a new job. The women still working at
APACA have now children who have
become students (as those they wanted
dead a few years ago), but they still accept
to be the victims of the political and election
campaigns; they still sell their vote for a
flower at Woman’s Day or a concert with the
manelists of the day, that bring tears in their
eyes. (A manelist is a manea singer; the
manea is a sinister combination between the
gipsy fiddler music and Oriental tunes, promoting
a basic and primitive lifestyle, centered
upon material values - luxurious cars,
wealthy husbands, big houses, etc.)
The APACA women’s case can stand as an
example for the way it functioned - and it is
still functioning - the manipulation in the
communist regime, in the neocommunist
one, and then in the capitalist regime. Using
the systematic repression, the permanent
control and the restriction of any independent
action, all the systems have managed to
transform the human beings into auxiliary
machines of the system - of any system.
This type of systematic and highly aggressive
oppression came from the system, was
accepted by most of the citizens, and
exhausted all the personal resources for
many Romanians, apparently leaving them
without any other option, except the social
compliance and mimetism.
Why did those women continue to assume
their function as instruments of a system
that, theoretically, had ceased to exist after
1989? Why did the APACA women reject,
with such hatred and contempt, the new
democratic concepts and the new kind of
morality, based on individuality and freedom
of expression? The answer may be found in
their own history, which overlaps the history
of the system they protected: the failure to
cope with progress and change. Obstructing
the access to general information, to entertainment
or religion was an important element
of the oppression, and the final result
was the involuntary rejection of the new values,
brought by the new capitalist and democratic
system. As they lived in a world that
denied any kind of moral value, the APACA
women (who were, essentially, illustrative for
an entire society) developed a high level of
social frustration and an inability to perform
in the new democratic society. Even if this
time it was enveloped in the attractive wrapping
of capitalism, and projected on them in
a different manner, it is the same kind of
repression that preserved the function of
political instruments for those apparently
ostracized.
Before the revolution they were the victims
of the communist system and their own torturers;
starting with 1990, they were the revolutionaries’
torturers and their own victims.
This text was originally published in "Exploring the
Return of Repression", the publication in the frame of
the exhibition with the same title, curated by Răzvan
Ion, 2009.
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