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Title: “The Restructuring of Free Time in 1980s Communist Romania. The Case of the 23rd

August Works”

Author: Adriana Speteanu

How to cite this article: Speteanu, Adriana. 2012. “The Restructuring of Free Time in 1980s Communist

Romania. The Case of the 23rd August Works”. Martor 17: 157‐172.

Published by: Editura MARTOR (MARTOR Publishing House), Muzeul Țăranului Român (The

Museum of the Romanian Peasant)

URL: http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista‐martor‐nr‐17‐din‐2012/

Martor (The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review) is a peer‐reviewed academic journal established in 1996, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology, museum studies and the dialogue among these disciplines. Martor review is published by the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Its aim is to provide, as widely as possible, a rich content at the highest academic and editorial standards for scientific, educational and (in)formational goals. Any use aside from these purposes and without mentioning the source of the article(s) is prohibited and will be considered an infringement of copyright. Martor (Revue d’Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain) est un journal académique en système peer‐review fondé en 1996, qui se concentre sur l’anthropologie visuelle et culturelle, l’ethnologie, la muséologie et sur le dialogue entre ces disciplines. La revue Martor est publiée par le Musée du Paysan Roumain. Son aspiration est de généraliser l’accès vers un riche contenu au plus haut niveau du point de vue académique et éditorial pour des objectifs scientifiques, éducatifs et informationnels. Toute utilisation au‐delà de ces buts et sans mentionner la source des articles est interdite et sera considérée une violation des droits de l’auteur.

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The structure of time in communist countriescan be viewed within the parameters of astructural modification imposed by the ideol-ogized targeting of resources and the work-force. The vision of advancement towards anegalitarian societal form led to a process oftemporal remodeling in relation to a prioriconclusions resulting from the problematic in-terpretation of segments of Marxist theorydealing with the theory of value.

The socio-economic particularities ofcommunist systems gave rise to an intermedi-ary category of time, beyond the ordinary pat-terns, such as work time and free time. Thisrestructuring forms part of an ideologizationof time. The first great temporal modificationsin human society occurred during the Indus-trial Revolutions, when chronological spacebecame subordinated to the mechanisms ofproduction. It was at this point, around the1790s (Thompson, 1967: 69), when time be-came structured at an individual level for thepurpose of improving the structural efficiencyof production activities through the connec-tion established between temporal units and afactory-dependent “modus operandi”. Beyondthe compulsory nature of a salary-based work-day, this new form of what I would call a

“time-bound consciousness” was establishedthrough the distribution of personal clocksand watches. This technologically determinedmodification of the worker’s relationship totime served to stabilize a pre-existent categoryof time, whose delimitations had been flexibleup to that point.

The attempt, in countries governed byStalinist bureaucracies, to transpose radicalsocio-economic restructuring into reality, re-sulted in a different process in terms of tem-poral criteria. Given that social and spatialpolicies were subordinated to production im-peratives (Sampson, 1984: 54), this representsa contextualization of a new category of timein which human relationships are neither indi-vidual nor collective, but alienating, for theypresuppose the forced rallying to the utopianprojects of the decision makers. We shouldnote that this process, although apparentlyconnected to a series of ideologically based de-cisions, is more related to certain economicprocesses, such as industrialization or themore recent corporatization of capitalism, allof which lead to various degrees of socialalienation (Gupta, 2002: 70).

Any form of cultural analysis of time im-plies the social system in its entirety. In com-

The Restructuring of Free Time in1980s Communist Romania.The Case of the 23rd August Works

Adriana SpeteanuAdriana Speteanu is a teaching associate at the University of Bucharest, Faculty ofHistory.

ABSTRACT

This paper represents an analysis of the nature, contextualization, and implica-tions of the phenomenon of time restructuring in the industrial sector in latecommunist Romania in the context of difficult economic circumstances. Thesetemporal modifications resulted from a channeling of resources and labor intovarious industrial activities that served to alter workers’ control over their ownfree time.

KEYWORDS

Time, industry, factory, working class,communism.

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1) For communist holi-days, see S. I. Ducaru,

“Religia cincinal\ –func]iile s\rb\torilor co-

muniste”, in L. Boia(ed.), Miturile comunis-

mului românesc,Bucharest: Editura Uni-versit\]ii din Bucureşti,

1995.

munism, time for the first time becomes aform of capital in the possession of the state, abureaucracy posing as a revolutionary actorthat governs it, manipulates it, and restruc-tures it. In 1980s Romania, far from being ac-celerated, time gradually slowed down, wasflattened, immobilized and rendered non-lin-ear (Verdery, 2003: 63). The non-linearity oftime was anchored to a set of newly intro-duced milestones: the dates of official anniver-saries, the commemorative days in thecommunist calendar, parades, and state spon-sored holidays that emphasized, through theirpredictability, the pre-modern circularity oftime1. Accordingly, the forms of officialdiscours e had a recurrent nature that sug-gested the same conclusion. On account of thecyclical nature of time, the present as mani-fested in the official discourse was a corporealpresent with a spatial dimension.

Is there a dynamics in the compression oftime? How did people relate to individual andcollective time? What did the communist con-ception of time presuppose? The theoreticalapproach to time as a social construct must

state the political context in which time is ex-perienced and the policy by which it is created.From a cultural point of view, the social con-struct of time must be understood as a politi-cal process (Verdery, 2003: 71). Therefore,political and economic constraints in the laterstages of the Ceaușescu regime led to new ty-pologies of control.

Norman Manea proposes the term “stati-zation” of time, in the sense of a plannedseizure by the state of the private time belong-ing to the ordinary citizens (Manea, inVerdery, 2003: 72). Similarly Verdery definesthe effort invested in the partitioning of timeas a struggle between the authorities and thegeneral population. The communist partydominated, through various means, a largepart of the time people would normally haveallocated to their personal use. Through pa-rades, official visits to production facilities,Party meetings, daily work schedules, and de-crees, the state apparatus imposed its controlover time itself, obliging people to become in-volved in certain activities. The feeling of timemonopolization is experienced differently in

photo©Cornel Radu

the rural environment in comparison with theurban environment. It can be said that the ten-dency of the decision makers to manipulatethe segmentation of time itself was unavoid-able, given that the artificial economic crisisoccurred in a political space still dominated bythe Stalinist paradigm.

In light of these considerations, it is neces-sary to perform an analysis of the variousmeanings attributed to the time spent in alarge factory. This can be achieved by extrap-olating on the representations of memoriesformed within the private sphere by differentsocio-professional categories, both in urbanand rural environments (i.e. commutingworkers). This type of analysis is made possi-ble by an understanding of the relationship be-tween the different hierarchies of bureaucracyand the informal structures of society. The na-ture of this relationship could vary from beingparasitic to being a complementary manifes-tation of socio-economic interaction (Samp-son, 1991: 18). Conclusions can also be drawnby ascertaining the extent to which the possi-ble consequences of the arrhythmicity charac-teristic of late Romanian communism were, infact, the maintaining of the people in a state ofcontinuous imbalance, the undermining of arational societal order, and the establishmentof uncertainty as an existential reality. In thecontext of an integrated functionality of socio-economic elements, temporality, as well asspace, can be transformed from a natural ele-ment into a political project (Verdery, 2003:63), for they are susceptible to manipulationthrough decisions emanating from the politi-cal sphere.

In understanding the self as an ideologi-cal construct that institutionally binds individ-uals to social environments throughnormative restrictions and distinguishingthem from the surrounding world, Verderyobserves that “temporality can be deeply im-plicated in definitions and redefinitions of theself, as selves become defined or redefined inpart through temporal patterns that markthem as persons of a particular kind” (Verdery,2003: 93).

The reconfiguration of time in the contextof ideologically motivated economic decisionsled to the erosion of sociability and had a neg-ative impact in terms of relations betweenthose in positions of socio-economic proxim-ity. In the case of Romania, this change can beconsidered to be the result of ideological as-sumptions, but when taking into account thesame alienating effects of present economic re-alities, such as corporate capitalism (Perelman,2005: 21), this ideologized world view appearsonly an ad-stratum to what were pre-existentobjective economic realities.

The economic condition of Romania inthe 1980s determined, through the contract-ing of large loans and the attempt to repaythem within an unreasonably short period, amodification of cognitive patterns developedin relation to a fluctuating typology of time.The logic of production of late communismcontradicted the paradigm of a relationship totime as it is allocated in the West based on cri-teria determined by the absorption of prod-ucts resulting from economic processes.

The crisis, which resulted from the erro-neous long term calculations of economicplanners, reversed the way people related tothe daily rhythm of life. The concentration ofeconomic activity on the production sectors ofheavy industry led to a form of restructuringof the socio-economic system and a changingof temporal reference points. Anthropologistslike Gerald Creed emphasize the constant ten-sions and contradictions resulting from the in-tegration of the political, economic, and socialstructures into a bureaucratic network of coor-dination. The paradoxical nature of this deter-minism lies in the fact that the attempt tostabilize certain sectors and to find solutionswas intrinsically related to the condition ofother areas of society (Creed, 1995: 531). Ro-mania’s economy in the 1980s can be placed inthe heterodox category of economies centeredon the production of goods that were non-as-similable on the internal market. This direct-ing of goods towards export with the purposeof eliminating the foreign debt led to the birthof a shortage economy and an alteration of the


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internal consumer market.Under normal circumstances, the level of

production of consumer goods determines thenature, structure, and contextualization ofleisure time. This relational typology, impliedby the prioritizing of certain economic activi-ties, led to a restructuring of the notion of freetime. The practical impossibility of reducingthe salaries of workers imposed the need todevelop artificial means of avoiding a rise inthe inflation rate. This was generally achievedthrough increases applied to durable con-sumer goods. It is important to note these is-sues, given that free time also signifies amonetary exchange implying the acquisitionof symbolic or utilitarian products.

The general policy of concentrating pro-duction by following the logic of extensivegrowth determined an increase in the numberof hours spent at the workplace and led to theparadoxical situation of state monopolizationimposed on a type of time that would other-wise be used for other types of economic activ-ity and monetary exchange. This negation ofthe potentiality of another type of productivebehavior, albeit a consumerist one, in the senseof the production and assimilation of con-sumer goods, was made possible by the em-phasis placed on the production of industrialgoods destined for export as a means to gener-ate hard currency. Thus, the workers werefaced with an intrusive adjustment to their freetime, in which they could have been engagedin certain types of absorptive economic activ-ity, based on the results of their own labor.

A decree issued in 1981 emphasized theneed for discipline in the state enterprises, andindustrial units were managed in strict fash-ion. Incentives for the boosting of productionwere increased, salaries at all professional in-stitutions were linked strictly to output, andthe minimum wage was discarded, a measurethat stood in contradiction to the principles ofsocialism. Although levels of pay were deter-mined by production efficiency, this decisiondid not affect individual salaries, which re-mained on a similar level, because state enter-prises were obliged to accept a global

agreement that set wages based on a generalfactory contract. This meant that more highlyproductive workers, who exceeded the re-quired output, did not obtain higher salariesthan their peers, but contributed to a generalrise in salaries in their section or factory. Ab-senteeism was also penalized through pay. Asa result of these measures, worker productiv-ity was supposed to rise by 10% between 1982and 1983 (Durandin, 1998: 334). According tothe Official State Bulletin of 1983, while onpaper a worker could have an unlimited in-come, in reality his earnings were limited tothe provisions stipulated in the individual con-tract and depended on the fulfilling of the“Target” itself by the factory where he worked.The “stabilizing” component of the contractpresupposed provisions through which work-ers had their employment guaranteed for fiveyears, but the socio-economic conditioningwas pre-existent to the employment itself. Byrestricting the choice available to young peo-ple, the authorities channeled them in the di-rection of production activities, be thissecondary education mixed with labor orobligatory postings to a factory after comple-tion of vocational school (Kornai, 1992: 216).During the “trial” period, which lasted for oneor two months, a new employee received onlyhalf of a Category I salary, the other half beingstored in the bank by the factory managementand withdrawn only if the worker did not leavethe factory during this period. This latter sit-uation, although rare, would have meant a lossof this amount of money in terms of cumu-lated salaries, but also the years of experienceas recorded on the work permit (Shafir, 1985:121).

The discursive function in the process ofreconstructing social and individual space isessential as a justification mechanism of theassumed economic choices. Chris Hann re-jects the idea of an analysis in terms of “dis-course” for communist Europe, believing thatthe relationship between practice and dis-course can be applied to any society, withoutnegating the specific characteristics of com-munist discourse and ideology (Hann, 1994).

Also important is the way in which such a dis-course can affect social practice. Even if thereare common characteristics in communist ide-ology, there are also differences in its imple-mentation among Eastern Europeancountries. Hann suggests that a model of sep-arating the practices of different communistparties can be undermined by closely inspect-ing the activities of ordinary citizens againstcommunist regimes. The difficulty of estab-lishing a generic model of late communismalso relates to the problems of correlating fac-tors, such as the economic conditions in Hun-gary and those in Romania during the 1980s.

Time in late communist Romania was of aparadoxical nature: while apparently static ata macro level, it was unpredictable on an indi-vidual level in the sense that it modified theplans and perceptions of ordinary people. Forthe Party, time was conceptualized as flowingto an undefined chronological moment, as thegrand project of achieving, through socio-eco-nomic engineering, the ideal of a communistreality gradually became more and more dis-tant. Pavel Câmpeanu describes the sentimentof temporal accumulation and transformation:

“Becoming was replaced by unending repeti-tion. Emptied of substance, history itself be-comes atemporal. The perpetual movement isreplaced by perpetual immobility. [...] History[...] loses its lasting quality.” (Câmpeanu, inVerdery, 2003: 99).

The rhythm of the “new man” was notcharacterized by religious holidays, but by sec-ular holidays, like the National Day of 23rdAugust, New Year’s Eve, 1st May, Woman’sDay, and Mother’s Day, to which were addedthe anniversaries of Ceaușescu, other commu-nist leaders, war heroes, and various rulersfrom Romania’s past.

Recurrent parades, a typical means ofcommunist symbolic justification, represent astructuring factor of time in the proximity ofthe sphere of industrial production. By replac-ing the time dedicated to labor, the paradesrepresented an attempt to emphasize theworker’s necessary solidarity with a systemwhose aim was the achievement of commu-nism, but they also underlined the presup-posed intrinsic connection between theworking class and the Party. The employees ofthe 23rd August Works participated in parades


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in impressive numbers. The staging of a pa-rade was organized in advance, usually amonth before the event, by the Party secre-taries and by those of the U.T.C. At factorylevel, some 7,000-8,000 people participated,the lists being drawn up by the Party secre-taries and by the president of the union. Thoseexempted from participating in these eventswere pregnant women or elderly or sick work-ers. In theory, in one form or another, every-one was obliged to participate. Those selectedwere taken from their various production sec-tors to specially designated places for re-hearsals. Usually, these were also Partymembers. The clothing permitted did not in-clude flamboyant colors: men, for example,had to wear dark trousers and white shirts.The most important parades were those heldto mark 23rd August and 1st May, alongsidethose held in stadiums for the commemora-tion of historical events. The meeting pointwas Piața Aviatorilor, where the official view-ing platform was set up. The parades beganwith members of the army and the PatrioticGuards, who were followed by the main se-quences composed of workers and sportsmen.Although they began at 9 am, the participantshad to assemble much earlier, at 5 or 6 in themorning, at various different meeting points,either at the factory or along the parade route.As a propaganda symbol of solidarity andunity, the parades were broadcast on nationaltelevision, almost in their entirety, untilaround 1-1:30 pm. After the parade, the restof the day was free, but participants had to re-turn to work the following day.

As the factory was closely monitored byCeaușescu’s party apparatus, the parade had toproceed without incident. The spectacle cre-ated during the parades implied an appropri-ate direction, the script being developed byprofessional choreographers, supervised bythe Party secretary.

In the following section of this article, byusing a selection of excerpts from a series ofinterviews, conducted in the period 2004-2010with former employees of the 23rd AugustWorks, I will establish the structure of per-

sonal relationships to the temporal modifica-tions inherent to the abstracted socio-eco-nomic directions of the 1980s in the case offormer employees of the factory.

The stringent control of time within theparameters of the bureaucratic organization ofactivities, with their planning and purpose,had a series of consequences in the event ofnon-participation in these parades, predomi-nantly on a professional level. This might af-fect the frequency of promotion exams or theposition on the waiting list for apartments – aworker’s absence met with the negative conse-quence of losing the points he had accumu-lated. A. R., a locksmith, describes theconstraints imposed by the absurd logic of“voluntaristic” participation:

It was a constraint. If there was a promo-tion coming up, it wouldn’t be given before 23rdAugust. The economist would come to you andsay: “You have to be there; otherwise you cankiss your promotion goodbye!” Or anyone whoneeded a place to stay, even if he or she workedon the Oltenița Line. They would blackmailyou, give you the thumbs down. Everybodywould attend out of obligation.

The repercussions are also described by S.S. and N. B. The former talks of the conse-quences on a professional level, while the lat-ter describes the way in which a refusal torespect the rules of participation could con-tribute to stigmatization by fellow workers.There was a fear that failure to participatecould affect group cohesion and placed a cer-tain section of employees in a delicate situa-tion in relation to the administrative and Partyauthorities:

They would keep an eye on you, you know...They would often give you trouble... if youwanted a promotion, they would say: “Well, youdidn’t come to the Party meetings or the pa-rades.”

Wait till you hear what happened to methere, in the Locomotives section. This guycomes to me, a Gypsy from my neighborhood,who used to be part of one of the work teams,and says: “Hey, B., we’re in the same row!” “Seeyou there, then!” But, in the end, I didn’t go. He

kept on saying to me, every day for a month:“Hey, you’re in row 3!” “Row 3, mister!” Butwhen the day came, I didn’t go. Afterwards, Iwent to work, I was on the night shift; this ishow the shift was. [...] I get to my machine, andI see 100 men who’d come for a trade unionmeeting. It was as if I were on death row.“Where were you? What were you up to? Whowere you talking to?”

M. P., a foreman in the factory’s Motor de-partment, recalls other types of public gather-ings people were forced to attend against theirwill. In spite of the glorifying images of a soci-ety advancing towards a utopian ideal, thepractical result of the presumed “proletariansolidarity” manifested itself in the effect ofalienation, which could be seen as paradoxi-cal in a societal model supposedly opposed tothe values of competition inherent to capital-ism. It was a time of waiting, an intermediaryspace, neither work nor leisure related:

Then, there were the parades held in stadi-ums, where you had to wear certain clothes, awhite shirt if it was too hot, a coat and trousersin dark colors, and a tie…. It wasn’t to every-one’s liking. Sometimes you would get sleepy,tired, all sweaty, but you had to stand still. We’doften wait a whole hour for Ceaușescu to come;we weren’t allowed to move, drink water, or goto the toilet; some would literally pee on them-selves.

From the account given by the engineer G.A., conflicts of interest resulted from the non-participation in parades. Consequently, de-spite the Party’s intention to strengthen socialsolidarity through public gatherings at whichthe achievements of the 23rd August Workswere presented as constituent elements of theprocess of moving forward towards commu-nism, the practical result was exactly the op-posite: the emergence of a conflictual situationbetween those who participated in the eventsand those who were absent from them:

For instance, people would sometimes re-fuse to go, but then the others would come andsay: “He didn’t go, how come I have to go eventhough I’m older and he gets away with it?

You should remember that when handing

out bonuses!”Commuting workers were also not ex-

empt from participating in the parades. Herethe mill operator N. B. again describes, with acertain amount of humor, his only participa-tion in such an event, which didn’t even spanon the entirety of the parade:

When the Patriotic Guards were establishedin ’68, they put me on the list for the parade.“Hey, B., you have to come, too, there’s no oneelse left!” So I went. When I got to Dinamo, atthe Calea Floreasca crossroads, we were stand-ing together in a wedge-shaped formation, whenTram 24 pulled up, and I said: “What if I getinto the tram!?” I went to the front of the tram,

and who do you think I see at the back? Thevery boss who’d called me. “Well, son, where doyou think you’re going?” “You should beashamed of yourself?! You call me “from Bul-garia”, and then you go home yourself?” “Shutthe hell up! Let’s go home!” After that I didn’t goanymore, that was the first and the last time.

If parades represent one of the systemicniches for the ideologized monopolization oftime, especially in the sphere of those involvedin industrial activities, then queues for food-stuffs and other household products can beviewed as a determining factor for the spend-ing of even the small quantity of free time thatstill remained. This situation came about as aresult of the inefficiency of the aforemen-tioned economic activities. Consequently, it


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can be said that Romanians found themselvesin the paradoxical situation of being obligedto glorify, by means of a parade that took placein the first half of the day, the economicachievements of the system – only later, duringthe same day, to be obliged to spend a numberof hours standing in queues, something whichin fact contradicted the presumptions madeduring the parade itself.

Queues for food products in big citieswere among the most frequently publishedimages in the Western press during the 1980sin respect of the situation in Romania. Accord-ing to Pavel Câmpeanu, queues functioned asagents of accumulation, reducing the oppor-tunities when money could be spent. Theyalso consolidated the power of the administra-tive centre, reducing the number of occasionsin which money could be spent, and servedwider central accumulation processes throughan unequal exchange, which was their practi-cal content (Câmpeanu, 1994). Another rea-son was to avoid growth in the inflation rate.The artificial economy resulted in this short-age of consumer products that unavoidably ledto long queues. A large section of the urbanpopulation, with the notable exception ofParty or Securitate members, was obliged toallocate a significant part of its free time tostanding in queues. The procurement of foodimposed on many Romanians the necessity ofdeveloping a system of relations throughwhich overpriced products that were non-ex-istent or scarce on the market could be ob-tained. Because the economic system wasunable to cope with demand, and because ofcorruption, the Securitate tacitly accepted thisillicit commerce, which eventually became aparallel economy. After the compulsory intro-duction of ration cards in the early 1980s, ac-cess to food products2, in the sense of staplefoods like bread, milk, sugar, oil, and eggs, be-came a constant problem for Romanians. G.A., an engineer, describes this state of precar-iousness and the reality of the creation of un-derground trade that ensured access to certainproducts, simultaneously creating a new cate-gory of time dedicated to the search for and

establishing of relations:... It was difficult, we had no food, we had

to stand in the line, as you know, or read; thestores were almost empty. But the strange thingis everybody had a full fridge. [...] Everybodyhad a fridge full of everything that could befound. There was an underground supply sys-tem. If you had a “connection” at a restaurant –a waiter, a cook – they would sell you pork for100 lei per kg, when the official price was 38 lei.

The paradox of the command economycentered on exports is that, although the levelof remuneration was relatively high relative togeneral prices, money earned this way couldnot be spent. Another engineer, N. D., ac-knowledges that the system of relations offeredeverything that was needed. In this way, infor-mal relations became a form of social capital,possession of which influenced the structur-ing of time at an individual level, having thecapacity to eliminate the hours lost spentqueuing in front of grocery stores:

I can’t say I ever went hungry. The paradoxwas that we had the money, but there was noth-ing decent to buy; people had to wait in longqueues, but they would manage. This was acommunity in which you could always find peo-ple with connections. […] Although the foodwas scarce, everybody had everything theyneeded in their fridge, due to these connections.You were able to buy anything if you had a con-nection.

The importance of connections in termsof access to foodstuffs is also emphasized by E.C., an engineer, and M.P., a foreman:

You came to realize what it meant not tohave this kind of connection at a food store or acafeteria. Even if you had the money, you werelikely not to find what you needed unless youhad such connections...

People would wait in the line from eveninguntil the next morning, when the store got a de-livery of cooking oil. What could you do? Killeach other over a bottle of oil? So, instead of 11lei you paid 20 lei. This was what you spentyour money on, and, God forbid, you had tomake a choice. I needed one connection to buymy coffee from, another to buy my meat from…

2) See the analysis onthe meaning of food andeating habits by S. Vul-

tur, “Daily Life and Con-straints in the

Communist Romania ofthe Late 80s. From the

semiotics of food to thesemiotics of power”,

www.rememberingcom-munism.org.

M.Ș., an engineer, remembers the prob-lems of procuring and preparing food in acontext of mono-alimentation:

Problems with the supply; I’m not one totake pride in the fact I used to eat soya salami:I didn’t eat it because I liked it. But, sometimesI’d manage to get hold of food through connec-tions; I used to eat a lot of poultry, as it was themain source available, but I had no idea how tocook it differently, so it would look different.

S. D., an electrician, expresses the samegeneral state of powerlessness caused by thelarge amounts of time spent procuring food.This situation affected the time reserved forother activities, like time spent with the family.In these circumstances, queues became anatypical space of socialization, of conversation,and even of spending time with the children:

We all used to wait in queues a lot, some-times several queues at a time, and then waituntil the next delivery... [...] Even in ...’88-89,we used to switch queues. My daughter grew upcarrying the basket from one queue to another.

The memory of never ending queues inwhich all the family members would stand isalso described by the worker L. N.:

Don’t mention the queues! I had to wait inthem with my kids, sometimes getting some-thing on the run. […] You had to stand in thecold for your ration, to get your ration of sugaror oil, and only from the food store you hadbeen allocated to. Sometimes, the kids wouldstand in the queue, too…

P. I., an engineer, describes this uncertainrhythm of life in his own words:

You’d be up at 5 in the morning to get yourmilk at 7; you’d have to stand several hours inline for 1 kg of cheese or chicken legs, wings andnecks.

E. C., also an engineer, recalls the feelingthat people were reaching the limit of their en-durance:

It felt like we were always waiting: howmuch longer could we take it? There were manyrestrictions. There was no hope. You wouldstand in those queues like a fool; I remember Ionce waited four hours for a box of detergent,four hours in the rain!

Nonetheless, opinions as to the insecurityof life tend to differ from case to case, depend-ing on the occupation of the interviewee. Forexample, E. P., a worker, believes that standingin queues allowed people to procure enoughfood to last a long time:

Somehow, we managed to get by, despite allthe restrictions... The stores were full, but wehad to stand in immense queues… and that’swhat we did, we would get our supplies for twoweeks, a month... We used to put everything inthe fridge, and then buy more still, if we couldfind it...

The systemic inefficiencies of economicplanning and the imperative of a high exportrate led to the reality of a shortage economy.This became a generalized condition of cen-trally planned economies during the 1980s,due to the chronic imbalance between supplyand demand at the micro and macroeconomiclevels (van Brabant, 1990: 161). The 23rd Au-gust Works also featured the phenomenon ofparallel networks for supplying workers withproducts such as meat, coffee, and cigarettes.M.P., a foreman, describes the proliferation ofthis form of commerce, which represented aform of social capital extended to an organi-zational level:

Do you want to know how we used to getour food? There were these guys at work, at 23rdAugust, who brought steak. [...]100 lei per kg.They would bring 3,5, or 10 kg, however muchyou wanted. They would trade anything, coffee,instant coffee and other things; you could buyanything if you had the money. Prices were howthey were...

Another means of supply, especially forthose from the rural environment, was pro-vided by trips to the villages to procure meat.This presupposed the dedication of a certainamount of time to travelling, on weak infra-structure, and, last but not least, the posses-sion of an automobile and the fuel it required.N.D., an engineer, is conclusive in this matter:

They [the workers] used to go to their rela-tives in the countryside to slaughter sheep,lambs, pigs, or a calf – in the latter case illegally.So, nobody went hungry, let’s be serious! We


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shouldn’t complain about it...The phenomenon of commuting was also

a constant feature of life in Ceaușescu’s Roma-nia. The unrelenting pace at which industrial-ization proceeded, through the procurementof a large labor force from the rural environ-ment, was typical of the policies put into prac-tice by the Romanian Communist Party. Thelack of housing in Bucharest meant that morethan half of the factory workers came to workfrom the rural environment, mainly via theOltenița to Bucharest rail connection. A con-siderable proportion of the population of thevillages lying along this route also worked atthe 23rd August Works. The asymmetry oflabor time, occurring as a consequence of theinteraction between intervals of inactivity andperiods of intense activity dedicated to meet-ing the requirements of the “Target”, led tofeelings of dissatisfaction, especially amongworkers living outside the capital. Many ofthese had plots of agricultural land in their vil-lages, the cultivation of which required timeand effort.

The large number of commuting workersthat had to use buses or trains to reach the fac-tory sometimes faced the problem of a lack oftransport, the only alternatives being the bicy-cle, walking long distances, or, on rare occa-sions, a car. That being said, possession of a carpresupposed access to fuel, which was also ra-tioned. The commuter trains were, in turn, ex-cessively crowded, most of the workers having

to travel in a state of physical discomfort. AsP. I., an engineer, recalls:

Half our men commuted. They were fromthe countryside. For instance, almost the entirevillage of Frumușeanu worked at our factory.There were entire villages of workers, some ofthem Romanians, some Gypsy.

The 8-hour schedule was longer for thosewho commuted to get to work. It would takeseveral extra hours for them to complete thejourney by train, or by bus and train, depend-ing on whether or not their village had a rail-way connection. For example, N. B., a milloperator, would get up at 3 in the morning inorder to be at work by 7, thus spending fourhours on his way to work and another four forthe journey back home. He describes the com-muting conditions:

... I have been a daily commuter here for 30years, on foot, through the rain, wind, storms...

The irregularity of commuting times cor-related to the degree of discomfort. This con-dition expanded the spectrum of existentialuncertainty:

If the travel schedule was regular, it wouldtake no longer than 45 minutes; but it couldtake as much as two hours with the Gypsiesdelaying it...

The irrational industrial decisions of thelate Ceaușescu regime created dysfunctionsbetween urban and rural sociability networksthat could still be felt even after 1989. Manyformer commuters were made redundant andobliged by their new circumstances to concen-trate solely on agriculture. For example, N. B.,after 30 years of commuting to the 23rd Au-gust Work, defines himself as a farmer, and nota worker.

Beyond the relationship vis-à-vis ideolog-ical conditioning or the rationalization of non-durable goods, another form of perceivingtime in 1980s Romania is constituted by theholiday-event-celebration triad, which pro-vides a good viewpoint from which to analyzeeveryday life. Everyday life overlapped withpublic holidays and vacations, and representedthe opposite of the daily work schedule, de-fined by routine. We have noted how, during

photo©Vlad Columbeanu

the 1980s, time was to a large extent confis-cated under different forms by the authorities.As Sundays in some instances gradually be-came working days, the time spent at the fac-tory amounted to a larger temporal entity thanthat dedicated to free time. While views onthis problem vary from one group to another,workers as well as engineers were both con-fronted with the same chronic lack of time.

Time tends to be invested differently at asocio-professional level. Employees with ahigher level of education were inclined tospend their free time reading, listening tomusic, going to concerts, the cinema, and thetheatre, or practicing sports (this was one ofthe few activities where engineers and work-ers interacted). Workers also participated ingroup activities, like walks in the parks, daytrips, or going to a bar or to the stadium towatch a football match. Individual activitiesconsisted of holidays spent at seaside ormountain resorts, usually in accommodationprovided by the factory through the system oftrade union packages.

The factory itself in turn offered the pos-sibility for employees to spend time in groupsthrough activities organized by the FactoryClub. This meant evenings of socializing, filmscreenings, concerts and day trips; however,this controlled environment was not to the lik-ing of the younger employees, who preferredthe seaside as of 1st May.

Although the number of destinations waslimited, the holidays spent during the commu-nist era are viewed positively by most respon-dents, given that most of them only rarely gotto travel after 1989. The length of holiday wasdecided at the level of each work team by theforeman. Those with the most seniority en-joyed 30 days of holiday, while new employeesgot 15 days.

For some types of production activity,Sunday also became a work day, being com-pensated for by a free day during the week.The control exercised by the Party over timeis exemplified by the fact that Romanians hadthe longest working week in Europe. Personaltime was increasingly controlled and limited

in terms of the number of free days. An unsta-ble work schedule affected the rhythm ofeveryday life, which was already affected bythe lack of electricity, foodstuffs, and heating.As noted, those who worked on Sundays got afree day during the week in return. Despite theregulatory eight-hour work schedule of threeshifts (7 am-3 pm, 3 pm-11 pm, 11 pm-7 am),the administrative staff, the foremen and theteam leaders usually worked overtime. How-ever, not all employees of the plant went towork on Sundays. For example, as N. B. and B.R., both workers, the former also a commuter,recall:

I didn’t go to work on Sundays that often.[...] Working on Sundays was a mess...

This was the logic of the Party. I used to tellthem at work: “Leave me the hell alone, whyshould I come to work on a Sunday?!” “Youshouldn’t just sit around doing nothing, youshould always be busy with something or you’lllose your mind!”

The possibility of skipping a working Sun-day was denied to E. C., an engineer and amember of the Design department. In her po-sition, missing a Sunday at work was out of thequestion, unlike for other workers:

The hell you could refuse! Excuse me! Theproduction departments, the workers maybe,but here we always came to work on Sundays.You couldn’t afford to say no...

P. I., an engineer, describes in a similarmanner the factory work schedule on a Sun-day:

I’m telling you, on Sundays we actuallyworked with a diminished workforce. And we,the management, came to work at least twoSundays a month.

Some positive connotations of time aredetermined by its association with the youthof the persons interviewed. It was an arche-typal time, whose value, albeit within certainlimitations, produces the consciousness of apositive and unrepeatable condition of exis-tence. M. Ș., an engineer, explains:

The good thing was that we were younger,sort of carefree, we had our group of friends whohad no children or family obligations yet; some


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of them were still single, and we used to go tothe mountains.

Holidays at the seaside and in the moun-tains constitute a pleasant memory for allsocio-professional categories represented inthe 23rd August Works. Every year, throughits Youth and Trade Union organizations, thefactory offered travel and recuperation pack-ages for approximately 10,000 employees atholiday resorts throughout the country. Be-sides packages for the seaside or the moun-tains, the factory also scheduled short trips atthe weekend. M. B., an engineer, remembersthe vacations at the seaside and how the real-ity of the economic crisis affected people evenwithin the supposedly protected space of theholiday. For example, the restaurants at theseaside stayed open until only 6 pm because ofsystemic food shortages:

What we did have and enjoyed were thestudent camps, which were affordable; thenthere were the annual vacations on the seaside,which we would always look forward to. Wecould afford them, we could afford to savemoney since there was no food; and so youcould save money for a whole year to go to theseaside. But once you got there…the restaurantswould close at 6 pm. But we still enjoyed the sea,the sand, the water… and that was about it. So,in the end, so much for having fun at the sea-side!

C. A., an engineer, describes the atmos-phere during days off, accompanied by the dis-regarding of certain rules by restaurantmanagers and the necessity of procuring prod-ucts on one’s own:

We used to go to the seaside and it was cool,there were so many people and so much fun thatsome restaurants would disobey the rules andclose later in the evening, at 10 pm, when theyhad students there. Generally, once the examsession was over, the students would be every-where: at the seaside, in the mountains, Sinaiaor Predeal. You would go for a walk in Sinaiaand bump into your fellow students. Studentswould also go to the seaside on 1st May. Theytook everything with them – soda, cigarettes…

R. B., a laboratory technician, is one of the

employees for whom time spent at the seasiderepresented a positive chapter. In his capacityas head of the Sports-Tourism factory depart-ment, he organized trips for 1st May:

1st May was the best occasion to have fun,everybody had a few days off and went to theseaside. You’re too young...[...] For those whowere irritated by the “Workers 1st May”, wherethey had to clap their hands… […] this was aunique chance to go to Vox Maris in Costinești,where it was full of students and you had thechance to do lots of things for those times andstrike up brief friendships. It was interestinghow the railway company wouldn’t schedule anyextra trains, so we travelled on slow trains, oneof top of the other, literally.

The structured distribution of time wasin some instances the responsibility of theParty-affiliated bodies, like the Workers’ TradeUnion. For performances that took place at thefactory club the tickets were handed out forfree, while for those that took place in the citythe tickets were sold for a fee. Tickets for foot-ball matches were a great success. As O. R., alocksmith, recalls:

We would also get tickets to see the footballteam Metalul; so that’s where we went. Wewould meet on Sundays and go there in an or-ganized way. At 11 am, we’d have a wash, getdressed and off we went, accompanied by ourforeman.

Football matches provided a way of elim-inating occupational hierarchies, these beingthe moments that brought together distinctprofessional groups, as, for example, workersand engineers. R. I., a worker, explains:

Take the interdepartmental football cham-pionship, for instance. The finals were playedwith an audience. There was also the SpringFestival, there were shows that culminated withthe Final. Of course, it was interesting to see theforeman, the locksmith, the engineer all playingtogether… People would go; the stadium wasfull, here at 23rd August.

Tickets for the Opera or the Athenaeumsuffered an unpredictable fate, given that theperson in charge of handing them out foundfew willing recipients. I. B., a locksmith, illus-

trates this case:What need was there for me to go to the

Opera? I didn’t go because I lacked the rich cul-ture needed to go and listen to an opera or asymphony. Why should I go?

Hence, the factory offered tickets for thetheatre, pop music, and folk music. This sys-tem was supervised by the Trade Union andby the Communist Youth Union (U.T.C.). N.B., a psychologist, was a beneficiary of suchtickets from the share reserved for the factoryby the institutions organizing the events:

There were Trade Unions representativeswho kept in touch with the theatres and concertvenues, and they assigned a number of ticketsfor the workers from the factory. I often went tothe shows with tickets I got from the factory.This lasted until 1990.

Holidays spent at the seaside and in themountains were usually more accessible tothose living in Bucharest. Commuter workerswere tied to the rural environment, manychoosing to use their holidays to work in thefield. Still, in some exceptional cases, they alsoenjoyed short holidays:

I used to spend my spare time at the C.A.P.[agricultural cooperative]. I didn’t go to work onSunday much. But I used to work the night shift,so I would sleep for four hours and work theother four. I had my vineyard and everything Ineeded here, but I would take leave in autumn,on 15th September. And where to spend it? Har-vesting the beet... [...] The hell I went [on holi-days]?! But I did go on a holiday in ’81, becauseI fell sick. I suffered from facial paralysis threetimes in thirty years and when I got sick in ’81,they sent me to Mangalia to recuperate. That’swhen I saw the sea for the first time in my life...

The Stalinist ideological context deter-mined the attempt to apply supposedly volun-taristic principles. The real purpose was, infact, the quantitative reduction of paid labor.Voluntary or patriotic work organized at thelevel of the state enterprise by the Party appa-ratus, the Trade Union, and the U.T.C. was,likewise, a practice in which employees wereobliged to invest a part of their free time. Per-formed on a Saturday and Sunday, this type of

work presupposed that people be placed on alist for activities like sweeping, digging, plant-ing trees, cleaning the streets of leaves and re-moving snow. Each department of the 23rdAugust Works was assigned a cleaning area.The area in the immediate proximity of thefactory, including Titan Park, represented apriority area. These activities were supple-mented by the patriotic work performed in thevillage of Cățelu, where the factory owned live-stock farms, vegetable gardens and green-houses. Another area where the workers of thefactory where assigned cleaning activities wasthe pier on the river Dâmbovița, where, afterthe working day came to an end, the workerswere sent to sweep.

R. I., a worker, and M. P., a foreman, de-scribes the moment they performed “volun-tary” work at the inescapable request of thestate:

...There were 4, 10, or 15 of us from eachdepartment, sweeping every day after work;then we’d go out for a beer, a movie, or play foot-ball.

...During the work schedule, they wouldcreate groups of 30, 40, or 50 men and say: “18Decembrie Boulevard, as it’s called now, youhave to clean away the snow between post Xand Y!”

...They used to send us to 30 DecembrieBoulevard to plant roses, sweep the pavements.[...] This kind of patriotic work needed to bedone twice a month. But it was done in stages;


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it was impossible to send out an entire section.There’d be 10-20 this Saturday, other 10-20 thenext Saturday...

M. P., a foreman, describes the generalstate of the patriotic work performed towardsthe end of the 1980s. Voluntarism, as a workpractice, lost its meaning in a paradoxical way,becoming imposed by the state itself, and notresulting from personal choice. This type oflabor came to be a means of achieving an in-creasingly stringent control over personaltime:

...The plant was in sector 3, and coordi-nated by the Party secretary over there. Each ofthem used to work with their people. We wouldwork during working hours or on overtime, butmostly during working hours, because after-wards there was hardly anybody willing to stayon, they would throw away their shovels andleave.

Participation in agricultural activities con-stitutes another chapter of patriotic labor.Given a shortage in the workforce in the ruralareas because of the commuting of the popu-lation from the villages to the cities, the Partywas obliged to resort to the unpaid labor of

high school pupils, university students, andfactory employees. At a factory level, a con-tract was drawn up with a State AgriculturalEnterprise (I.A.S.) through which youngeremployees in particular were obliged to workin the fields. During the autumn, the factorysent workers to harvest corn, potatoes, sugarbeet, and grapes. These moments could con-stitute temporary spaces of socialization. ForE. C., an engineer, this agricultural work rep-resented a means of relating to a period of herown youth:

Then there was the work in the field, but,as I told you, I didn’t take it personally or as anaffront, it’s also part of my youth.

Recreation outside of holidays was also animportant factor in the process of analyzingthe temporal structure of late Romanian com-munism. The means of recreation seemed in-sufficient and excessively politicized for theengineer, I. M.. What in the beginning werepositive events were hijacked in the 1980s byCeaușescu’s propaganda. I. M. describes thestate of the youth of the day, whose freedomshe saw as being limited:

It was sad because young people, like we


were back then, couldn’t express themselves.Apart from the national festival, “CântareaRomâniei”, which was mostly political, therewas nothing else. Parties where young peoplewould dance would only last one or two hours,the TV broadcast was only for two hours, as thepeople were supposed to get their rest, to be atwork the next day, as they [Party leaders]hoped. Lots of politics...

Again I.M. talks about a categorical sepa-ration between the different ways of spendingfree time in the case of educated people andthat of workers. For a society that claimed tobe heading towards the elimination of socialclass distinctions, these were still visible in thestructuring of free time by occupational cate-gories:

In fact, there were two ways of living life inthat period. There were those who had somekind of education, and there were the greatmasses of the workers. For them parties meantgoing to some bars on the outskirts of Bucharestor going for picnics. The others would struggle toget tickets. [...] They screened “The Reenact-ment” for one week only. It was a miracle I sawit. Then there were Dan Piț a’s and Veroiu’sfilms...

In terms of the religious calendar, the un-official policy of the party was to replace itwith the economic and ideological calendar.The continuous appropriation of time in 1980sRomania removed people from the usualrhythm of the religious holidays. The holydays in the religious calendar were hijacked bydifferent types of activities. M. B., an engineer,relates how work was used as a means to cre-ate artificial calendar priorities:

If you think about it, we didn’t even haveany spare time. We had no 1st or 2nd January,no Easter, no Christmas. It was all continuouswork. They would deliver the materials right be-fore the holidays on purpose. I can also tell youthat the hijacking of religious holidays was ex-treme. We would crack Easter eggs under thetable.

The linearity of time was affected in 1980sRomania by hectic production processes, un-realistic targets, and bureaucratic control. The

incongruence of time in late Romanian com-munism led to a transformation of behavioralpatterns. We can speak of a modified and at-omized form of the human being, in the con-text of a focus on production, statization, andcompetition dressed up as solidarity. Behaviorwas reduced to a cyclical series of choices inthe context of daily life, directed by the politi-cal-administrative bureaucratic apparatus forthe purpose of ensuring production efficiencyand eliminating political dissent. Ideologicalconstraints and the abstract ideal of creatingthe “new man” manifested themselves throughthe appropriation of private time and the at-tempt to eliminate religious holidays. Simi-larly, tactics were devised in order to engenderan arrhythmic typology in the case of social-ization within the Party, through the organi-zation of meetings at irregular intervals.

The transformation of time into a form ofsocial capital paradoxically contributed to thestrengthening of class based differences, a re-sult that contradicted the plans and promisesof the Party to gradually equalize socio-eco-nomic conditions. Illustrative of this are theconditions endured by commuters, who wereobliged to modify their biological clocks, theplight of those deprived access to informalnetworks of food supply and, last but not least,the workers forced to participate in parades,unpaid labor, and various official events.

From this discussion about temporalmodifications in late communist Romania, wecan note that in capitalist societies time wasalso subjected to different phases of modifica-tion, beginning with the late 18th century, inthe context of the gradual economic processesinvolved in profit targeted calculations of out-put and consumption. In communist Roma-nia, this utilitarian component ofindustrialized societies disappeared in the1980s due to flawed economic decisions, thusproducing the phenomenon of a greater mo-nopolization of time.


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