Want amid Plenty

Rumanians were once among Europe's most irreverent and uninhibited people. Before World War II, their interest in sex and diverse erotica was legendary. But since the Communists took over, they have imposed so strait-laced a morality that only recently was kissing permitted in Rumanian motion pictures.

Such contrast is typical of Rumania, reports TIME Correspondent James Bell after a visit to Russia's most contradictory satellite. Rising from a low base, Rumania's industrial growth is the highest in Europe (16%), but its people are among the lowest paid ($135 per year). Foreign businessmen fighting for fat government contracts find that waiters in Bucharest restaurants still prefer to be tipped in Western cigarettes; in every hotel lobby there is a government office that offers on-the-spot payment for "articles made of chrome or nickel, cameras, radio sets, nylons, pearls, etc." Broad new highways are being built, but no new car has been sold to a private citizen in two years. Supermarkets have been opened in every town with a population of more than 15,000, but eggs still cost $2 a dozen.

Natural Resources. Rumanian industry is booming because not even incompetent management can fail to make something of the country's impressive natural resources. From the Ploesti oilfields pour 11.5 million tons of crude oil annually; steel production hit 2.3 million tons last year. But little of this prosperity reaches the people because the regime is more intent on shining up the country's industrial image than on improving the lot of the masses.

Though Walachian peasants drive teams of oxen before single-bladed plows, the government last year exported 25,000 desperately needed tractors (total foreign trade was up 17%). Agricultural collectivization is such a primitive mess that grain production last year was 700,000 tons below the target of 11.3 million. The production of consumer goods has low priority as against heavy machinery. Food prices are prohibitive; beef is only available on four major holidays and costs $1.50 per lb. Rumanians are probably Europe's most badly housed people; between 1942 and 1960, there were virtually no new housing starts.

Personality Cult. Durable President Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, 60, has ruthlessly run the country since 1952, when he ousted Red Amazon Ana Pauker from power. Though Dej has only reluctantly subscribed to Khrushchev's anti-Stalinism, he is perhaps the most firmly entrenched of all the Iron Curtain satellite leaders. Despite Khrushchev's tirades against the cult of personality, it flourishes in Rumania. Dej's picture still hangs in every village, and his daughter Lica is Rumania's highest-paid film actress--though she is homely and cannot act. Lica's first husband was fired as Minister of Commerce after she divorced him; her second is now a top bureaucrat. Dej and other top government officials make up a "New Class" far beyond what Milovan Djilas described in Yugoslavia. The chosen few are chauffeured around in limousines, live in servant-crammed villas where they have private showings of the latest ballets, and are supplied with the best in wine, food and women.

The people are cowed by the secret police. There is little underground intellectual ferment, and no jokes about the regime are ever heard. Recently a man who had been muttering about the government was arrested in the middle of the night and sent to jail for 15 years for possessing three old British coins. The charge: economic sabotage. His daughter got five years for not squealing on her father.

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