During the 1988 National Conference dictator Nicolae Ceausescu announced a new programme for the Socialist Republic of Romania: the whole country would be ‘systemized’. This is a socialist euphemism for creating an industrial socialist and urban Romania, where there would be no place for rural villages. The systematization of Romania started with the destruction of city centres, in order to create enough space for large communist buildings and community houses. This phase was followed by another, which took place outside the cities. Peasants were forced to leave their rural homes and move to Bucharest. Ceausescu’s forces destroyed the remaining farms and empty villages.

During this period of anti-rural campaigns, Coen Stork was stationed at the Dutch Embassy in Bucharest. Residing in the city, he wasn’t able to get reliable information about what was going on in the countryside. Only after conversations with well-informed Rumanian dissidents, like Mircea Dinescu and Pal Bodor, he realized that Ceausescu’s anti-rural campaigns would have serious consequences for the Romanian people and the social structures in the country. The ‘systematization’ especially harmed minorities like the Jews, Germans, Gipsies and Hungarians. They were thrown out of their homes and sent to large blocks of flats elsewhere. It was easy for the notorious Romanian secret service (Securitate) to control and spy on the citizens in these new buildings. A fact that was asserted by Ceausescu, although obviously not in front of foreign visitors. The peasants that were deported from their villages, were placed in the same enormous blocks in Bucharest’s outskirts, where sanitary facilities or (central) heating were dramatically insufficient.

Soon after realizing the impact of these measures, Stork wrote an alarming message to the Dutch government to raise awareness for the human rights in Romania. This message sorted little effect. In those days it was still common to consider Romania as an anti-Russian ally in the Cold War. In this respect some Western ambassadors didn’t want to face the consequences of the anti-rural campaigns. Some time later Western governments started to criticize Ceausescu’s systematization, but it was too late for many citizens that lost their homes.

Ultimately it wasn’t the Western criticism, nor the small Romanian resistance, but the 1989 revolution that put an end to the ‘systematization’. The dramatic campaign was finally stopped when Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were sentenced and shot to death in December that year. Notably the Romanians did finish the building of some of the megalomaniacal communist structures in Bucharest, even after the fall of Ceausescu. The enormous palace of Ceausescu became the residence of the government. According to Coen Stork, this silent acceptation of Ceausescu’s ‘systematization of Romania’ contributes to a certain post-communist alienation and confusion. The wounds of the communist period don’t seem to have healed – not even today. In every Romanian city or village one can still see the scars left behind after the tragic events of 1988.