Comrade Detective

I gave this show a brief paragraph in my blog on Gentlemen Comrades.  That show, running two seasons, covers a pair of Moscow Militia detectives in Russia in 1918.  It seems the nascent Bolshevik police force is short of experienced detectives, so it deigns to hire a previous detective, Varaksin, highly experienced if somewhat aloof and aristocratic.  His high intelligence, affable manner, and street smart experience endear him to his Baltic Fleet sailor partner, Sokolov (“friggin’ soot!”) and his hammer & plough superior.  That is in Russian with English subtitles.  Timing wise, this was during the Russian Civil War, which doesn’t seem to be mentioned at all, nor the Great War still waging in the west until the Armistice on November 11. 

This is a completely different animal, the only common factor being the political orientation of the subject country.  What the producers of this one did was to create a fictional Romanian police drama set in Bucharest in the mid 1980s, back when Reagan was our President and Ceaucescu was running Romania into the ground.  The actors are Romanian and speak Romanian, but it’s overdubbed into English – by A-list American actors, including Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the main pair.  So far it’s only six episodes, all on Amazon Prime.

As it’s pretending to be a Romanian show during the Cold War, naturally the Ceaucescu regime is implausibly praised and everything associated with the US and the West is equally disparaged.  The US Ambassador and her subordinate are sleazy, slutty women.  Monopoly, the board game, is smuggled in – and Gregor’s imprisoned sources explain to him how the game works and its ideological significance: “to indoctrinate American children into capitalism at a young age.”  America is slagged as a country full of crime, poverty, and everyone has AIDS.  Jordache jeans cause pandemonium, and Western radio – with its degenerate rock music (far more entertaining than the propaganda and classical music the Romanian radio broadcasts) – is described as capitalist propaganda hidden in the words and music, to surreptitiously brainwash whoever listens to it.  For its part, Romania’s health care system is “the best in the world”, and its Fiat-copied national car, the Dacia, is likewise described in glowing terms despite its obvious faults.  In fact, even the police (“MILITIA”) use it.  Oh, and fascination and obsession with chess (!!!) is widespread.

The net result is a humorously cartoonist attack on the US and capitalism by a corrupt communist system which comes nowhere close to delivering on its own promises.  US citizens are free to read Marx, Engels, Lenin etc. and many colleges have brazenly leftist faculties.  But Romanian citizens were forbidden to even play Monopoly and aggressively encouraged to inform on each other to the police. 

I’ve noticed many items in our country are well made, some are not-so-well made, and some are outright ripoffs.  One place selling suits now has its suits made overseas and are not to the same standard, but are sold at the same price, as the better made suits.  So I found another place which charges less for better suits.  You do your homework and seek out the best value.  Under communism, however, you had no choices: everything was poorly made crap (except maybe the weapons).  And if you complained about it or wanted a higher wage, off to the gulag.  So yeah, capitalism has its share of fraud, deceit and bravo sierra, but as imperfect as it works out in practice, it’s still light years better than communist countries.  Anyone who has experienced communism first hand knows this.  As Reagan said, we don’t need a wall (Berlin) to keep our people IN. 

Characters (Voiced By…)

Gregor Angehl (Romanian actor: Florin Piersic Jr/English voice by Channing Tatum)

Iosif Baciu (Romanian actor: Corneliu Ulici/English voice by Joseph Gordon-Levitt)

            The main two characters (Gregor on the right above)

Captain Covaci (Romanian actor: Adrian Padruraru/English voice by Nick Offerman)

Daniel Craig, Bobby Cannavale, Kim Basinger, Debra Winger, Fred Armisen, also have voice-over roles.

Bucharest.  Back in 2006 I visited Bucharest and spent some time there.  On one hand, the romantic adventure did not end well, on the other hand I did enjoy it while it lasted, so I can’t complain too much.  My subjective impression of Bucharest is that it’s a decrepit, run down communist version of Paris, France, and even years after Ceaucescu was overthrown, the city still remained dirty and run down, though the downtown area was a bit nicer.  I can’t say what it’s like now, or what it was like back in the mid-80s.  Others who visited had a considerably more generous impression than I did.  As it was, for me the most attractive part of the city was the female companionship I enjoyed (waves at Gia across the Internet).

The show certainly reminded me of Bucharest and my brief visits, and should give viewers some idea of what the city is like, even as of 2006.

Season 2.   I don’t know yet whether we’ll see a second season, but here’s my 2 RON (Romanian currency).  Don’t set the next one in Bucharest: set it in East Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, etc. – one of the other East Bloc capitals.  Each has its own unique charm and its “comrade detectives” can echo their respective nationalities.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  

Red Horizons

Red Horizons, by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa.  Former head of DIE, the Romanian foreign intelligence agency (their CIA/KGB).  He defected from Romania to the US in 1978 and eventually wrote a book about all the nasty stuff his boss, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, was up to during his reign from 1965-1989.  Here are some of the most interesting points:

1.         Yasser Arafat.  Major league homo.  Along with J. Edgar Hoover, another grotescquely ugly homosexual.  Who says they are all handsome perfect saints?  Arafat told Ceausescu that the Palestinians were not ready for their own state and any such state, if created, would be an immediate and complete failure.  Realizing this, however, he was still pushing for Israel’s eradication and refused to agree to any recognition of Israel.  Ceausescu was angling to mediate between Begin and Sadat, i.e. to take the role that Carter would eventually have; instead of a Camp David accord, it would have been a Bucharest accord, and hopefully result in a Nobel Peace Prize for him.  However, we all know who ultimately won that competition.  (In Nelson’s voice: “HA HA!”)

2.         Ceausescu and Arafat were good friends: Pacepa said they were very much alike.

3.         Ceausescu stuttered when he was nervous or under pressure.  His wife, Elena, was a total cunt with delusions of being a scientist; she weaseled various channels to get phony “honorary degrees” and had scientific textbooks ghostwritten in her own name; yet knowing how bogus this all was, still considered herself to be a shining scientific mind in her own right.

4.         The Romanians were the vanguard of the Warsaw Pact’s attempt to steal Western technology for their own military and industrial uses: the top of the industrial espionage tier.  To try to get these secrets, Ceausescu tried to pretend to the West that Romania was independent of the USSR and striving to be even more so, as if Romania would use any such assistance received from the West to promote its independence.  The reality was that it was a game: the Soviets depended on the satellites to get them what they themselves could not get from the West; far from using this technology against the Soviets, the Romanians had every intention of sharing it with them to get favors in return, in a mutual bargaining relationship which continued behind the scenes.   Ceausescu’s predecessor, Georghe-Dej, managed to use a particularly fantastic piece of espionage-theft from the West to get Krushchev to remove Soviet troops from Romania.

5.         Another element was influence.  The usual deal with foreign intelligence is the goal of stealing enemy military technology.  But Ceausescu believed influence was just as important.  INFLUENCE to get US to give Romania favorable trade terms and lower its restrictions on technology transfers. 

6.         Qadafi hated Araftat.  Ceausescu had a great relationship with Mr Libya.

7.         They had three kids.  Valentin and Zoia were actually fairly well adjusted (and embarrassed by their parents).  Valentin was educated overseas and had no use for Marxism.  Zoia managed to discover what life was like for the ordinary Romanians and wasn’t too keen on abusing the system; she tended to have anti-communist boyfriends her parents hated (somewhat like the older daughter in “Beautician and the Beast”).  Younger son Niku was the enfant terrible: boozing, whoring, etc. abusing his position to get whatever he wanted.  Total asshole. Remarkably, despite (maybe because of) his behavior, they considered him perfect to replace his father as ruler of Romania.  They were notorious nepotists.

8.         Ceausescu was heavily anti-Hungarian and anti-Semitic.  He loved “Kojak” and other American crime TV shows.

9.         His wife was very contemptuous of the US, and of Carter and his wife in particular, who she referred to as Mr. & Madame Peanut; there were thought of as peasants, and the weakness of the US system was that even a peasant could end up running the country.  Sounds a bit elitist, doesn’t it?  Aren’t the communists the proud champions of workers and peasants?  Clueless woman.  Overall they looked down on the US.  Hmmm...how many wars has Romania won?  Less than one?  What does Romania have to be proud of, compared to the US?  See, this is arrogance where there is nothing to justify it.  Of course, part of their antipathy to Carter may have been this rivalry to mediate in the Middle East (as noted above).

10.        Also, Ceausescu – probably copying a cue from the Chinese – was cozying up to Nixon, and was super pissed when Congress forced him out of office, undoing all the hard work he had done establishing the personal rapport with Nixon. He did have a problem with US presidential term limits: the maximum amount of time any US President would have in office is 8 years, so every 4 or 8 years Ceausescu would have to start all over.  When it came to Congress, he only focused on influencing Senators (6 year terms) and not Representatives (2 year terms).  He tried to characterize Romania as a “maverick” within the Soviet Bloc and curry favor among Western countries.  Some of it worked, but it dried up when Pacepa defected.

11.        The bright sides are the following:

            A.         The author was the head of DIE, equivalent to the Director of Central Intelligence (CIA Director) – and the highest level East Bloc official to ever defect.  He has all the juiciest details on all the shit Ceausescu was up to, so when he defected, he fucked up Ceausescu big time.  The day he arrived in the US he told the FBI about all the secret ops Ceausescu had all over the US and Western Europe.  He notes that defections and anti-Ceausescu demonstrations drove Ceausescu nuts, physically ill and vomiting.  I can only imagine what happened when Pacepa himself defected.  His defection essentially destroyed the DIE and it never recovered.

            B.         We know now what happened to Ceausescu and his wife, so we know the story has a happy ending.

12.        Ceausescu and his wife visited the US in 1978.  On the trip to New York, his hotel (the Waldorf-Astoria) was surrounded by anti-Ceausescu protesters – Romanians and Hungarians, putting aside their usual mutual ethnic antipathy to attack a mutual enemy – and his limo was pelted with eggs and tomatoes, which really pissed him off.  He complained to the US State Dept., which referred him to Ed Koch, who was then the Mayor (somehow they couldn’t grasp that this was the Mayor’s responsibility, not Carter’s).  Koch was totally cool when he spoke to them in person.  “Hey, they protest me, they protest Carter, no one thinks twice about it.  What’s the big deal?  It was just eggs and tomatoes.”  Ceausescu wanted the protestors shot; his advisors, and the US, said, “uhh, you can’t do that here.” 

13.        When they visited Dallas, Texas, Ceausescu was terrified; this was the city where Kennedy was assassinated (“Texas is the reason the President’s dead!!”).  Apparently he felt Dallas was some dangerous wild place where the local population routinely killed Presidents who visited, and that security was non-existent.  For the record, only three US Presidents were assassinated, and the score is Washington, DC 1 (Lincoln, 1865); Buffalo, New York 1 (McKinley, 1901); and Dallas, Texas 1 (Kennedy, 1963).  I suppose DC gets a half point for Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Reagan, but this hadn’t happened by the time Ceausescu was there.  As it was, we know that Ceausescu and his wife were shot in the capital, Bucharest...not in Dallas.

14.        I was watching TV in Paris with my friend Phil at his family’s house back around 1982-83.  The news came on with footage of French TV from 1974.  It was in black & white!  Shit, 1974, and French TV was still in black & white!  Well, the Romanians have the French beat.  As late as 1978, Romania was one of two countries in Europe (Albania the other) to still broadcast TV in black & white.  The Ceausescus refused to budget money to change over, believing that color TV was a luxury the Romanian people didn’t need.

 With the recent execution of Saddam Hussein, Ceasescu’s fate comes into context: of all the other dictators and tyrants in modern history, aside from Saddam, the only two to face execution were Mussolini and Ceausescu.  Mussolini was killed, and his corpse hanged in public in Milan for the Italian population to spit upon.  Ceausescu was shot in private surroundings and his body (along with Elena’s) put in a mismarked grave.  His corpse was photographed and the photo widely circulated so that the Romanian people could see for themselves that he was DEAD and not hiding away somewhere or in exile.  He escaped Mussolini’s fate. Milosovic and Pinochet “ran out the clock”; Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot all died natural deaths; and Hitler, Goering and Himmler committed suicide, cheating the hangman (literally, in Goering’s case).  The odds of a dictator facing any sort of justice, “victor’s” or otherwise, are extremely slim.  Saddam was executed in private, by hanging (a fairly mundane and unspectacular means of execution) and his body discreetly returned to Tikrit.  He was not publicly executed; he was not summarily shot as he was captured in his spider hole; and he was granted at least the pretense of a trial.  He got off easy, as it is.  He deserves no sympathy or apologies, nor should any apology be made for the trial or the execution.