Latest / Centrally Speaking / Communism and Christianity Part 1: Reflections on Growing up in Romania during the time of Communism

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Communism and Christianity Part 1: Reflections on Growing up in Romania during the time of Communism · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Centrally speaking, it's the Central Schrottfeller Churches podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the middle way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology of the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: Our topic today is communism and Christianity.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Reflections on growing up in Romania during the time of communism.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: We're in a time where there are a number of communist nations: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: Nepal, while not being communist, is also a country ruled by the largest party, which is communist.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, during the time of the Cold War, many countries were formerly communist, such as Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Angola, and others.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, one of those countries was the country of Romania.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: Persecution took place during the times of communism.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: Persecution, of course, is something that is affecting many today.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Open Doors says that over 340 million Christians are living under persecuted countries, many of them being communists.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: A country that experienced a lot of persecution during times of 1945 through 1989 was Romania.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: The most well-known communist leader was Nicolas Chausescu, who was general secretary of the Communist Party from 1965 through until 1989.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: His rule is particularly known as being brutal and being very harsh to Christians.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: Today we're joined by Reverend Dr.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Octavian Boban from the Baptist Institute at Bucharest State University, where he is conferenciar of New Testament.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: He is also a pastor of Bible study and missions at the Syrica Baptista Sunda Joyem, which is a Holy Trinity Baptist Church, and he has served there for 23 years.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: He's grown up during the time of communism, and he and his wife Daniela have been now married for uh some 38 years.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: But Dr.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: Baban's family uh has served in the ministry during the time of communism.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: His uh grandfather was a village pastor, and his great uncle was a pastor in the city of Constanza.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: Octavian, it's very good to have you be a part of uh this uh uh show today.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for joining us.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for this uh nice invitation, Drake.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh a pleasure to be with you, and uh I would like to greet all the listeners to this broadcast.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: No, we're very fortunate to have you and so glad that you're willing to share about uh your background.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: You were born during the times of communism.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm wondering when you first started to realize you were living in a communist nation.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say that uh well uh I was uh born in uh 1961.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: So there were a few years before Causescu has become president.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: I lived a very sheltered life in my childhood.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think I found out about communism really what it means, only when I went to school.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because until then I was as happy as any other child, or like all the children.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: I lived in a nice place uh that in the town of Constanza that was by the Black Sea shore, and there were nice beaches.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, it was not as hot as in Florida or somewhere, but uh during the the summer, the continental type of weather is very hot, and during the winter it's very, very cold.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Not so much, no, but very cold and windy.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed living there.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: I like reading, playing, uh going to the beach.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a pretty nice and free life.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very thankful and grateful to God for it.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't aware that something is wrong, but what did I know at that age?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: We were not particularly rich, we're not particularly uh poor, just middle class, I would say.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was all right.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't feel at that time something was missing, and my parents were very careful not to discuss in front of us any issue because there was a certain fear uh that to the little voices of children, somebody could know what you discuss at home, so they didn't want anybody to their own children should find out that they are discussing and they are against the regime, which they were.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: They don't like what's going on, which they didn't.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: In a way, they spared us, but also spared themselves.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: So until I got to school, I wasn't aware that things are wrong in a certain way.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't affected by it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I was just as free as a bird, and it was a nice childhood.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: And what year would you say that you went to school and started to realize that things might be not what they should be?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh at school things changed a bit because all the classes had a large picture at the front of them, and the halls of the school had in a certain place, in the main place, in a very well uh seen place.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was the the big portrait of the president of Chaoshesku that was already trying to impose his personality cult.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Also, I could see the leaders in the government, the communist leaders, uh, the government, their pictures were there, also hanged on the walls.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then interesting things uh started.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I was being instructed at home to be careful when I say I'm Christian, or at least not to make a big case uh of it.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, if I said I'm Christian, everybody would look at me in a very strange way.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: There were strange things uh happening across the school.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: It was a big Orthodox church.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: We've been told by the teachers that we should not ever be caught crossing the street and going in the courtyards of the Orthodox Church, because it was something good pupils or students won't do.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: That the school had a woman who took care of the children, and he always shouted at us if somebody left the courtyard of the school and would like to go and visit or played in the courtyards of the Orthodox Church.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Then there were a number of communist uh celebrations, like the celebration of the day when the communist party was started.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: That happened every year, and there was a special uh time for music, patriotic, patriotic music, a special uh communist poetry, and uh we all had to participate.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't that was not Christmas, that was not Easter, and still the programs were a bit similar, but in a totally different setting.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was not a church program, and nobody talked about Christ, but everybody talked about social issues and the Communist Party ideology.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Apart from that, we started to learn about history, and history was um taught in a nationalistic way.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's not wrong.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Romanians, of course, were always the best, and they defended successfully against uh all the foreign powers around us.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: The most elevated point in our history would be when the Communist Party took leadership and they were the best in uh helping people reach and attain their ideals.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: We've never been told, for example, that during the two wars and before that, at any time, the communists were never a bigger party than 1,000 people in the whole Romania.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Romania, well, had 16 million people at that time.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: So what 1,000 people, that was the Communist Party.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And only with the help of Russians, they grew in a 4 billion type of party, and uh they needed about 25 years to do that.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: There was no way in which they could accede to power after the World War II.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: And if this happened was under the threat of the Russian guns and tanks in the main square of Bucharest.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: So we didn't know this part of history.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: We just know that we've just been told that good leadership and good democratical values started to be applied only after the communists came, and everything that took place in capitalism uh regimes was uh bad, was having to do with the exploitation of people.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, some of these issues will make me go back and ask my parents about bits of history, and my parents were quite straightforward, and they wouldn't like to explain in very many words, but they will not leave me any impression that any of these things are true.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: So uh from very early age, their jokes, their way of evaluating things, although it was careful, would not leave me in any doubt that this is not good, that we have another type of uh understanding of the world.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: We um listen to Christ, we read the Bible, we uh want to be practicing Christians, we are ready to face persecutions, and we will not back down.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: So these were very strong principles and that were built in by our parents.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that was an interesting thing, for example.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: The director of our school, where I went in our primary classes, uh, lived next to the Baptist church in Constanza.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that was interesting because in the morning on Sunday she would go out for uh for a walk in the morning at 10 o'clock, nine o'clock when the church started.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we as a family, I mean parents and kids, and we were four kids, and we went to the church and we greeted each other.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was obvious.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: So the leadership of the of the school knew, and that was a help for me because uh our colors, let's say, were openly displayed.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: We are going to the church on Sunday morning.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: So it's obvious in school that history was being altered in favor of the communist viewpoint.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Any other uh subjects that were adjusted, or is it mostly history?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Mostly history, not other things, but we also had a certain time of uh or classes of civic education, and uh those uh classes of civic education, sometimes they were discussing general ethical problems very often, and the more time went by, these were even more often uh occurring.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: We discussed the latest documents of the communist parties, and we were reading them.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: We each one of us of the pupils were provided with a copy of the latest conference or the latest printed speech of the president, and we will read to them, and we would be uh taught uh what are the main ideas for the next 10 or 20 years, what are the lines of leadership in our countries, and which are the values.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it was uh political education, and this continued all the time.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I studied under communism in these primary courses, then uh there were classes on political uh uh communist political education, social science, they said, but it was political indoctrination in our high school, and even as a as a student, I studied physics for five years at the University of Bucharest before studying theology.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Each year, despite any and all the other technical courses, which were very good as courses in physics, in all kinds of physics, each year had one course about political thinking.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we were provided with all the documents and we will study, and we have to uh give an exam to say from Marx Engels up to Ciaochescu, and then to praise him that he was uh more illustrious than all the others in a very new and revolutionary revolutionary conception and his thinking.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we had to know their main ideas.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I went to the library of the physics university in order to prepare for these courses and for the exams to read Marx Engels and Chaosescu's documents.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't say that you are not aware of what the Communist Party is saying.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: Aside from schooling and let's say libraries, uh, you would also be bombarded by this over the TV.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, the TV was a bit uh richer and interesting.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Under the Cowoschescu, it was a very strange uh rule.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it makes me think of Nero in the Roman Empire, because Nero, in the first years of his rule, he was very good, and the country boomed economically.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, he had a very good mentor, a certain philosopher.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And uh after he died, Nero turned um towards himself and started to be very uh to uh lead the country in a very erratic way, the empire in a very erratic way and became very strange.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: But the first years of Nero's rule were excellent.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: He was compared with Augustus, Debian Augustus.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: The first uh seven years of Ciaochescu, something like he became president in 65.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: So until 74, 75, it was excellent.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: The country was opening towards the West, foreign books were allowed into, people were allowed to start small businesses, personal family businesses.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: But as soon as he realized that this would democratize uh make the country more democratic, and he would lose control over people's minds, he from 74 on, he started to be very harsh on people.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: We lost everything it was gained at the end.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: So the country became poorer, he wanted to become independent from the West.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: So the TV programs reached the point when there was only two hours every day, from eight to ten.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the first hour was political education, and from nine to ten, sometimes two times a week, there was a uh a movie, a film, a very well uh selected uh film.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say that from time to time, because people like something about America, so some of the programs would allow for such series.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: For example, uh, it was a huge thing about the Dallas serial.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: It went well in the United States, it went very well in Romania, it was the only thing you could say.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: And something else.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: On Sunday, you had three hours, and uh there were 20 minutes of cartoons.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I think that most people would appreciate cartoons.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I never saw something like that.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: People were gather together to see cartoons because it was the only thing that was not political.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: They would laugh, comment on cartoons, of course, Disney cartoons and something like this, but the comments were from anything from childish to adult comments or anything that was going on in the cartoons, but it was the only thing that could not be charged or filled with political content.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, the TV had every day one hour of praising Cowoscu.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and on uh Sundays and on special days in the year, there were programs that would take one hour long, just with many songs and poems, and some of the best actors who would recite odes and uh praises to Ciaochescu and his family or to communism, and those who didn't, they were not giving good parts in anything that was going on in the cultural life on the ages in Romania.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: So from about 74-75 afterwards, Ceausescu started to clamp down, and you could see this on TV.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: It was very different from what was before, but it also affected things like food and trade uh in the country as well.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Chaoscu wanted to be independent.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the country had a debt, something like 10, 12 billion dollars to the West, various Western countries.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Chaosescu had two political lines.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: One was he wanted to gain a full freedom in independence or autonomy, he thought his possible.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: So he wanted to pay all the debts.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: In order to pay the debts, because the country's economy was not very strong, he exported everything and he reduced almost to nil all the imports.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: So everything we produced was exported from tomatoes to iron, anything, to machine tools, anything.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it was the poverty started to creep in.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't find milk, eggs, sugar, chicken meat.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: The food shops had only some canned meat or vegetables on the shelves.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And people would stay in queue for hours on Sunday and Saturday from four o'clock, sometimes from 12 o'clock in the previous night, to get in the morning when the shop would be open, one kilo or two kilos of meat.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a joke, but it was true that elderly people will make some money by selling them Q meter.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because they say I'm staying there during the night, and when you come, you can stay in my place, but you need to pay for this.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was a way of making money.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: So when uh eggs were brought to a shop, I would call my dad, my dad would call my uh my sister, and so on.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, as soon as possible, everybody would come because only 24 eggs you could buy.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: So if there were three representatives from the families, you could take more eggs.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: So life really became difficult.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: That was the thing with sugar, meat, eggs, almost anything.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was very difficult.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: He paid in the end, something like in 87 or 86, he paid the debts of the country, but the social price was exceedingly high.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that was another thing here.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I said they had two political uh uh interests.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: The second was to develop a certain Romanian connection in Africa to help African and Arabian countries, because Romania was quite strong in petrol technology, in petrol extraction technology.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he built refineries in many countries and tried to get money from there.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: So that was the two lines of his uh political connection.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: Did your family ever go without food because of uh rationing?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, but you wouldn't believe what my parents have done.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we lived in the middle of the town of Constanza, had a house, a good house with about five rooms, two bathrooms anyway, and a small courtyard, something like everything with a house with all was something like 300 square meters.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: That would be maybe 900 um square feet.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he built a special place to grow two pigs.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for a couple of years he he fed pigs and growed them, and we will cut them half meat at Christmas and during the winter.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: For another two or three years, he growed, my father has grown about 12 rabbits.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: He would go around to gather grass and uh tree leaves, the things uh and bushes' leaves from the parks of Constanza.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: He would hire himself to cut down the grass in some parks in order to have what to feed um the rabbits.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: So uh he would kill now and then a rabbit, and we have rabbit meat.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: And also they grown some chicken.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: You wouldn't believe, but in that small town, downtown uh house courtyard, we started to grow animals.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: We had what we needed, but it was at the price.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, we the children helped as much as we could, but that was interesting.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we're not living in the countryside, but we had an animal uh section next to our door.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: But even though you had, let's say, animals by the house in a in a city, there probably were some people who were going without food.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes, it was difficult, yeah.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, for all the other luxuries like sugar or something, we wouldn't see bananas or oranges but on Christmas Day.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: That was not among the things you would have normally.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: We wouldn't see cola only in the summer when they sold cola on the beaches.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you would go on the beach to to buy uh three bottles of cola.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: We were not like savages, but there was a deep feeling of poverty.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: You knew what things are, what good food is, but you had it very seldom.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: And then at the same time as um much of the populace didn't have access to good food or I would have to tell you something.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: I realized, I didn't know at that time, but later, when I talked to friends, I realized that the Communist Party, during this shortage time, they had their own shops within the town halls, uh at the Mayor, in the the place uh the main buildings where the towns are being led.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: The mayor, where the mayor and his team, the communist party had special food shops at the ground level or underground level of of the town halls.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: So with a special permit or card that you belong to the communist party, you could go there and while we all queued at everything for everything, they could find there plenty of shops.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: I found it much later.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: I found people would say, Oh, for me, come living under the communist rules was very good.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: I always bought what I needed.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Where did you buy it from?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Oh, we went to the town hall.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it was an underground shop.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: So communism brings, it says that it's about equality.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: I want to make clear to the listeners, it's not, it creates a special type of inequality that nobody would recognize openly, acknowledge openly.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it creates a new type of hypocrisy.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: When democracy is not strong enough to ensure a real equality, I mean, for those who work and have and would want to buy it, not lazy people.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: But and for political reasons, it creates a political elite.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the political elite would have everything because they are well integrated in the ideology of the system, and the rest should fight and struggle and grapple with all the problems in order to survive.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: So socialism for me is not about equality, it's about uh letting uh the natural tendency of people towards injustice to act in a legal way, because it is accepted legally by the communist uh ideology.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it's uh getting all the power into the uh hands of political elite, and then the biggest and the greatest inequality is actually at work.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that would be socialism and communism for me.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: And meanwhile, uh people like uh Nikolai Chachescu and his wife Elena are living in a house with uh gold-plated bathrooms as well as uh with a very large pool in the basement.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: I would have to tell you officially they didn't own anything.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: I told you already about hypocrisy.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, we didn't know what they own.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: At least in a capitalist country, you don't know, you know who is rich and who is poor, and so on.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe you can be either here or there or go from here to there.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody knew.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: We knew after 1809 what kind of luxury they lived in.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: But officially, they had only a small flat in Bucharest.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: Unofficially, they had a special villa or house in every main resort in Romania.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't belong to them, it belonged to the Communist Party, but it was only them who had access and their guests.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: And also there were special hotels for the other communist party members.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: So not everybody would have access to the villas or nice houses where Ceausescu and Nikolai and his wife Elena had access.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that was for them and their family.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: So officially they didn't have anything, unofficially, they had you can't think what they had, because they had in every country of the of the country, they they had uh in the all the special resorts, there was a special hotel or a special villa that was Ceausescu's villa.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody knew there.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: As I told you, communism was a time and a regime of huge uh lack of equality and of huge hypocrisy.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was huge.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: So this is why when I hear that well, some Westerners think in positive terms about socialism, you don't know.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh I I would rather appreciate uh a deep a strong democratic system that checks people in color.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: While in a communist so-called democracy, checking is not efficient.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: Ideology is all powerful.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: You create a hypocritical class of leaders, an elite, a political elite that would have everything and not acknowledge that they have everything.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And they pretend they are asked for and in the name of the state, they don't have anything on the paper, they are not richer than anybody else.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: In reality, there is a system in place very well working, very well supported, that uh makes life different for the Communist Party member than for the rest of the society.