Word: bucharest
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Refuting the Lie. Back home in Bucharest this week, Nicolae Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-shess-coo) quietly celebrated the successful completion of his first full year in power. Under Ceausescu and his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who died of pneumonia just a year ago, Rumania has utterly disproved two-thirds of Czar Nicholas' caustic calumny.* Rumania today is indubitably a state, defiantly a nation, and quite proud to admit the Czar's final point about professionalism. Moreover, it was Rumania that in many ways set the pace in the quiet repudiation of the Czar's successors-a chain...
...almost prewar. Men stalk the narrow, cobbled lanes of Warsaw's "Old Town" clad in ankle-length leather overcoats. The taxi fleet of Budapest is made up largely of Russian Pobedas, whose grillwork and lumpy chassis resemble those of ancient Plymouths. In the faded plush elegance of Bucharest's Athenee Palace Hotel, violins sob Wien, Wien, Nur Du Allein with a sentimentality unmatched since Grand Hotel. More than 300,000 Westerners made Hungary their destination; there they dined on goose liver sautéed in butter at Gundel's, or listened to an Eddy Duchin-like piano...
...Krokodyl, or simply stare at the Vistula when the city's drabness overcame them. Rumania stands in warm counterpoint-from the white sand beaches of Mamaia on the Black Sea, where 30 well-appointed new tourist hotels stand, to the clean, well-lighted cafés of Bucharest's Boulevard Magheru, where one can sip sweet Pinot Noir or bitter Turkish coffee. Fully 200,000 Western tourists visited Rumania last year, and a quarter as many again will go there...
Ceausescu did not inherit his predecessor's taste for luxury, dresses modestly, has no penchant for publicity; there are no photographs of him in Bucharest's streets. He keeps his private life so quiet that no one is sure where he lives. Dej had a chain of villas-one in Sinaia, one in Predeal, another in Mamaia, and one replete with private movie theater, a television screen that covered a wall, electronic door openers and infra-red radiators. Hard-working and humorless, clever but cautious, Ceausescu is infra-Red all by himself...
Gaullism East. Ceausescu's Rumania shares few similarities with its Eastern European neighbors-other than a predilection for national dissimilarity, and a profound suspicion of Russia. Rumania is, in many ways, the Gaullist France of Eastern Europe. The label fits not only in Bucharest's relations with its allies but physically and culturally as well. Fully 65% of Rumania's foreign-language students are learning French; Bucharest even boasts an Arc de Triomphe. Berets are de rigueur in Bucharest's working-class bistros, and the nascent Rumanian film industry-a mere 15 years old-has borrowed...