The case study is part of a doctoral dissertation that seeks to reconstruct the everyday life of the seventies and eighties of the Gyergyó Basin in the light of recollections and informality. The present study undertakes to present an entertainment and recreation opportunity of the examined period, and to ethnographically describe the entertainment habits based on Western media products, which were widespread in the Gyergyó Basin in the period under study. I analyze the phenomenon of videography from the point of view of the operators and the participants. I examine how intertwined it was with the authorities, under what informal conditions the necessary tools were procured, the conditions were created and what impact the new kind of media content had on people. On the other hand, I am also reconstructing the operation of an exclusive group of videographers, not only religious-themed film screenings organized within the framework of the religious classes of the parish of Gyergyószárhegy. Videotaping was a modernization adaptation in the period under study, resulting from the slow infiltration of Western media products and consumer goods into Eastern Europe. In parallel, a top-down modernization pressure was also felt by the state, which was the so-called communist modernization. The mixing of the two effects, a typical feature of Eastern European modernity of the era, can be seen in the case study.

Keywords: videotaping, entertaining, informality, modernization, socialism

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The present paper attempts to provide an insight into the microrayon, a form of socialist urban planning perfected in the 1960s, by presenting the development of the ideological and spatial model of the microrayon and its adaptations in Romania through two architecturally and urbanistically significant residential districts of different scales. The microrayon is considered one of the most effective propaganda machines of socialist modernity in the Eastern Bloc countries, amidst an offensive of communist values freed from the oppressive connotations of Stalinist socialist realism. The ideological apparatus, condensed into the broader concept of socialist microrayon, had three main components. The first concerned the specific urban configuration of the microrayon, which, although inspired by Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit, was presented as an original Soviet concept, a microcosmos of the ideal socialist community. Therefore, the discourse around the microrayon was all about collective life and the rejection of independent existence in favour of belonging to a complex system. The second mechanism of the ideological impregnation of housing operated at the level of the built space, by reducing housing types to a few standardised models of prefabricated blocks of flats, which, apart from being the result of economics taken to the extreme, were the embodiment of egalitarian politics and communism’s excessive desire for uniformity. At the third level of the intimate family space, the emphasis was on the new, the standardised and the minimal, both in regard of interior space and family life. Another important objective of the study is to shed light on the contradictory relationship between plans and realisations that characterised the communist era housing projects in Romania.

Keywords: microrayon, socialist-modernism, Romanian mass housing

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Everyday life under state socialism was characterized by a series of antagonistic values. How was it possible to maintain a coherent, consistent value system, behavior and mentality under such circumstances? The present analysis is focused on the theft of state property, which is undeniably a reprehensible moral issue, still it was a widespread practice. Through the example of theft, I argue that practical coherence of the value system was maintained – among others – by the psychosocial mechanisms of selective moral disengagement. I also sketch the related processes of institutionalization and socialization through which theft became a socially embedded practice.

Keywords: theft, state socialism, moral disengagement, self-exoneration, Eastern Europe, Romania

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The term “decret child” refers to the exceptionally large cohorts born after the abortion ban of 1966. The paper reviews the demographic antecedents, population policy goals and instruments of the decree, as well as its failure and consequences. Then, in the second part, it traces the social integration of the decree-child generation through formal education to the transition to the world of work. All this is embedded in broad social historical processes such as the change in the social organisation of work during the period of state socialism (the transition from backyard informal work to wage labour embedded in an organisational framework) and the expansion of formal education. The analysis, based on the processing of statistical data and on a second analysis, is essentially a failure story, since the evolution of the collective life of the decree children is also a process of exacerbating the contradictions of the project of economic and social transformation undertaken by state socialism.

Keywords: abortion ban, controlled fertility, socialist modernization, system integration, Romanian state socialism

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