Dracula or Jesus?

What do most of us know of Romania? Practically nothing. The best known “Romanian” (he would actu­ally have been Hungarian, for in his day Romanian Transylvania was part of Hungary) is doubtless Bram Stoker’s fictionalized Count Dracula, based on the bloodthirsty 15th-century Prince Vlad “the Impaler.”

But in January 1994, when I was lecturing at Romania’s University of Cluj, I learned considerably more than that about one of the poorest and most troubled countries of eastern Europe. While many of my colleagues were vacationing in sun-drenched Tenerife or Bermuda, I was being subjected to border crossings in the tradition of the old East Germany –with uniformed guards even removing the train seats to make sure no Romanians were illegally concealed there trying to flee the country.

Romania as a nation-state is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. After the Russian defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856), Romanian nationalism grew, the state came into existence, and in 1877 Europe recog­nized its independence from the Ottoman Empire. When Austria-Hungary was defeated in World War I, Transylvania, with a large Hungarian-speaking popu­lation, became part of Romania. A fascist dictatorship took over Romania during World War II and the Nazis were invited in. As the Soviet army approached Romania’s borders, the country changed sides, declar­ing war on Germany. The losses were staggering — 500,000 Romanian soldiers died fighting for the Axis, and another 170,000 died after joining the Allies.

After the war, Romania became communist, but its communism was nationalistic. Soviet troops were entirely removed as early as 1958, and Romania condemned the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslova­kia. Romanian President Ceausescu established an absolutism which lasted 25 years. Though he paid off the national debt (no mean feat), Ceausescu raised nepotism to a new level: His wife was made First Deputy Prime Minister, his son was political boss of Transylvania, and three brothers held key posts in Bucharest.

On December 15, 1989, Reformed pastor Laszlo Tökés publicly spoke out against the dictator. What he said touched a chord in a population thoroughly dissatisfied with the Ceausescu regime, and on December 23 the President and his wife were executed. It is now known that the dictator’s enemies had been preparing a coup for some time, and took immediate advantage of the popular uprising. Their National Sal­vation Front quickly replaced the former govern­ment. Its leaders are former Communist Party members, and the new bureaucracy is in many respects indistinguish­able from the old — except for the replacement of Marxist ideology by rampant nationalism (or, rather, regionalism, since Hungarians among the Romanian population are being treated as second-class citizens) and the removal of thought-control and the conse­quent reopening of places of worship.

What hope is there for this troubled land, whose native genius is reflected in such distinguished 20th-century émigrés as Eugene Ionesco and Mircea Eliade? In my judgment, the sources of life for Roma­nia are its universities and Christian churches.

I was invited by the University of Cluj to lecture on “The Ethical Foundations of Human Rights” by its Rector, the philosopher Andrei Marga. He has called for the ratification by Romanian universities of the Lima Declaration on Academic Freedom and Au­tonomy of Institutions of Higher Education. The uni­versity, in Marga’s judgment, only fulfills its purpose when it commits itself to “the priority of truth, the guarantee of…fundamental individual liberties and rights, equality of chances in argumentation, the right to criticize, political pluralism.” This kind of thinking can, in principle at least, transform the country by educating a new generation of leaders unafraid of critical thinking.

My co-host was Cluj psychology professor Mihaly Tapolyai, who has strong connections with the Re­formed Church. (Romania is the only Romance-lan­guage country that is predominately Eastern Ortho­dox; the Reformed Church is its strongest Protestant denomination; Catholics account for six percent of the population.) I lectured on the meaning of the Christian Gospel, the historical evidences in support of it, and its application to personal and national life — in front of rapt audiences who had heard very little along these lines for more than a generation.

Why is Christianity so important to Romania? Because it stands squarely for freedom of thought and against rabid, discriminatory nationalism.

New creaturehood is indeed available to Romanians, individually and collectively. And since, in its post-Marxist, regionalist disarray, Romania is a true microcosm of the former Soviet bloc, should we not pray fervently that the political Draculas who suck a people’s blood be replaced there and every­where by living faith in the One who gave His Blood as the medicine of immortality to a broken world?