Eastern Europe: The Third Communism

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(8 of 10)

European cynicism: titled 100 Stories: Or the Unfulfilled Plan, it contains precisely 16 stories.

"Baby or Car?" But if Rumania brings up the rear in cultural freedom, it is nonetheless surging forward economically. With a growth rate of 13% annually, Rumania runs well ahead of the others, and even when measured by the solid standard of gross national product, it ranks fourth of seven: behind East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, but ahead of Yugoslavia, Hungary and Bulgaria. In order to keep hopping on its canny leap forward, Ceausescu's regime relies on an abundance of natural resources—oil and timber, coal and untapped rural labor reserves. In other European countries, the supply of working men and women dwindles inevitably in inverse proportion to the desire for luxury goods. "Baby or car?" asks the Hungarian young married couple. In Budapest, where "it's easier to get an abortion than to cure a toothache," services-hungry city dwellers have dragged the birth rate down to a level that, if continued, could lead to a population loss by the end of the century. Rumania, with a birth rate of 14.5 per thousand, is in no such trouble, and since the main reason for Western capital investment in Eastern Europe is access to a cheap labor supply, Ceausescu & Co. seem assured of a sound future.

Rumania's trade with the West has risen a significant 13% in the past decade: from 20% in 1955 to more than a third of the total last year. During the same span, trade with Russia fell from 69% to 41%, nearly as much as with Rumania's Red neighbors. "Why should we send corn to Poland?" asks Premier Maurer. "So Poland can fatten its pigs and buy machinery from the West? We can sell our corn direct and buy the machinery we need ourselves."

Rumania has been buying from a horde of hungry Westerners. The West German firm of Gutehoffnungshütte won a $20 million share in building the mammoth Galati Steel Mill at the Rumanian end of the Danube—and when the deal was consummated, at a candle-light-cum-gypsy-violin blowout in Bucharest, the Rumanian Deputy Minister for Heavy Industry, Constantin Nācutā, executed a neat hora on the tabletop. Demag and Siemens, Krupp and M.A.N. all add to a German investment in Rumania that exceeds $50 million. Italy's Orlandi is building a $1,000,000 bakery in Rumania; Pepsi will soon be bottling in Rumania; the Japanese sell ships to Rumania in exchange for timber, which the Japanese then cleverly turn into musical instruments. France's Pechiney has a contract for an aluminum plant at Slatina; Sweden's ASEA is building $10 million worth of electric locomotives to replace Rumania's wheezing steam behemoths. Chatillon of Milan has a rayon-cord-tire factory in the works near Brăila, while Italy's Carle & Montanari will add to Rumania's already ample waistlines with a chocolate works in Bucharest.

Bridges to Pest. Trade with the West is one thing; adoption of Western economic devices is quite another. Though Rumania has yet to employ such capitalist devices as profit incentives and supply-demand marketing, Poland and Hungary are working in that direction. But it is East Germany and Czechoslovakia that lead the region in dynamic planning. Long dogmatic in its imitation of the Soviet pattern, the Czech party last December took a