The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised

The TV show Dallas helped overthrow Ceausescu. Now gangsta rap and pop culture are driving out corrupt post-Soviet thugs.

Matt Welch from the October 2005 issue

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The two liberal parties in the new coalition are already at each other's throats, with Prime Minister Tariceanu offering, then withdrawing new elections and his own resignation, in the wake of disastrous spring and summer flooding that killed more than 30 people, and because the Constitutional Court blocked some elements of the long-overdue anti-corruption and justice reform law. Still, President Basescu rammed the legislation through in July, clearing the single biggest hurdle to European Union accession; he has announced plans to finally crack open the securitate files, fired scores of corrupt local cops, launched high-level investigations into the previous government's involvement in the miners' riots, and introduced a 16 percent flat tax. After the successive scourges of totalitarianism and J.R. Ewing�style oligarchy, Romania is wobbling ahead in the right direction.

"It's going to take 50 years," a senior American diplomat from the U.S. embassy tells me. "They're joining the E.U. in 2007, but that will be about 10 years too soon." I heard a dozen variations on this theme during my month in Romania, mostly from middle-aged Western expatriates who had been living there for several years already and felt burned by previous upticks in optimism, notably the liberal coalition government that muddled along disappointingly from 1996 to 2000. "What you really need is to get rid of the 7,000 to 8,000 people who really run the country," the diplomat says. "Young people? They're clean; they don't have a past."

But they have one hell of an interesting future. On the sweaty bus to MediaPro is a team of handsome young men in their 20s shuttling back and forth from building sets on Cave. They make gentle fun about the complaining Americans, talk unabashedly about the joy of learning new skills and mind-sets, and express hope that at least some of them will be making Romanian films in the near future.

That's not far-fetched at all. "In the middle '90s, Romanian productions were almost [at a] standstill, zero," Moncea said. "And now, last year there were 11 or 12.... [This year] two young Romanian directors won, one in Berlin and one in Cannes, the award for best short films. So it's coming back up."

Pop culture, once beaten down to virtual nonexistence, has now become a valuable export. In the summer of 2004, the Moldavian-Romanian boy band O-Zone scored Europe's No. 1 pop and dance hit, the unbearably catchy single "Dragostea Din Tei," which topped the charts in at least 27 countries and sold more than 8 million copies. (You've probably heard it--think relentless Euro disco, and the phonetic phrase "Numa numa yay.") And popular gangsta rap bands like Parazitii, despite suffering greatly from domestic piracy and the censorious ways of the National Audio Visual Council (which banned one video simply for the reasonable couplet "alcohol is life/life is alcohol"), have still managed to sell nearly 1 million CDs since Ceausescu was shot.

Unlike the 1989 generation of anti-communist students, these twentysomethings didn't taste the clubs of miners, didn't help overthrow an odious tyrant, and didn't worship at the altar of a 1980s TV show that glorified a morally corrupt business tycoon. "We were more into Seinfeld," Parazitii manager Munteanu says. Not to mention foul-mouthed 1990s Compton rap sensation N.W.A. "You really need freedom to do this kind of music, you know?"

But their revulsion at corruption, coupled with a government that shares it, offers serious hope that post-communist Europe's red-headed stepchild will finally emerge from its long, dark shadow and create a country far more free, successful, and interesting.

"On a recent and fairly rare venture into Bucharest's club scene, I looked at the trendy crowd and felt for a moment that I could have been in Manhattan or South Beach," said former U.S. Ambassador Michael Guest, who led a daily crusade against Romanian corruption during his three-year tenure, in an exit interview with the monthly magazine Vivid, one of nearly a dozen English-language publications in Bucharest. "Then a series of young people brought me back to reality, stopping one by one at the table to thank me for speaking [out]....Those who think they're getting away with corruption are just fooling themselves. A new generation is coming, and it will demand, and indeed create, change."�