STEPHEN FISCHER-GALATI.  20th Century Rumania.  2nd ed.  New York: 
Columbia University, 1991.  Pp. x, 246.  $9.00.


Stephen Fischer-Galati does an admirable job of unraveling (or at
least illuminating) some of complex and knotted tapestry of
twentieth-century Rumanian history.  Much of his work is concerned
with debunking the Romantic myth that noble Rumania's problems have
been cause exclusively by outside (oppressive) agents.   Rather,
Fishcher-Galati paints the modern condition of Rumania as the
extension of an unfortunate political past.<1>  He contradicts the
Cinderella-like image that Rumanians have of themselves as
"prevented from attaining national liberation and political
unification" by these interfering forces (8).  In place of the
Cinderella myth, Galati offers as explanation a luckless
combination of traditional infighting, and cultural purges that had
their dark beginnings under Soviet occupation.
     Galati breezes from the 'foundation of Rumania' through the
nineteenth century in little more than a score of pages.  This is
not because he believes that a more in-depth analysis would be
impossible or unimportant, just that further illustration of the
point would be tiresome and somewhat redundant.  The static<2>
nature of Balkan civilization makes it so.  There is a constant
white noise of political chaos and infighting that, although made
up of a murderous form of Brownian Motion at the micro-level, from
a distance shows its true nature:  no forward motion at all.  There
are occasional major lurchings-about, but nothing resembling
progress in the Western sense of the word.  These lurchings have
been used by Galati for chapter headings.
      The first these, after the introductory chapter, is the
"royal coup d'etat" by King Ferdinand in the early 1920's. 
Unhappily this authoritarian bid was unable to provide enough
coherent structure to do the Rumanians much good.  As Galati notes
with a literary sigh, "National disunity had become an integral
part of Rumanian political life by 1921 (37)."  Galati then goes on
to analyze the effect of Carol II, and the subsequent
occupation/liberation of Rumania by Soviet forces in 1944.
     Galati's analytical and literary skills come to good use in
the chapter "Loss of national Identity."  Carefully, insightfully,
he reveals the cultural sabotage that occurred when the Soviets set
up Groza and Gheorghiu-Dej as puppets while making it appear as if
the new governmental structures were formed around legitimate
Rumanian nationalists.

     The "Rumanian legitimacy" of the de facto communist
     regime could be derived only through...the revolutionary
     activists of 1944...Thus identification with the
     claimants of the Rumanian progressive tradition and 
     engineers of the uprising that in effect allowed the
     "liberation" of Rumania by the Russian armies was sought
     and obtained (100-1).
This official blurring of the lines between real and pretending
nationalists was discarded as unnecessary after the allegedly free
election of November 1946.
     Subtlety no longer valued by Soviets, Galati shows that there
was a conscious effort on the part of the occupiers to destroy the
bourgeois/nationalist culture and its advocates, the historians and
writers.  In this section is a good example of how Galati dissects
an event with an objective knife:  while he must abhor this
eradication of Rumanian culture, he notes that "The attack against
the national culture and its creators or exponents was politically
justifiable (113)" in the Machiavellian sense.  By maintaining this
unusually high level of objective analysis, Galati provides a
refreshingly clear voice on a topic most often characterized by 
stridency or propagandic misinformation.
     In the later, revised, chapters on the increasing decadence of
the Ceausescu "neo-Stalinist regime (192)" and post-Soviet Rumania
Galati returns to the earlier themes of personality cult,
brutality, and general manipulation and oppression of the Rumanian
people.  He worries about the ability of the current Rumanian state
to function smoothly in the New World Order.  Very little, in other
words, has changed.

          Jason Carr
          University of Texas at Arlington
          Arlington
                             NOTES



<1>"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as
they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and
transmitted from the past."  Marx.

<2>"Backwater" would be less kind.
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/