Birth of Democratic Citizenship by Maria Bucur

Author:Maria Bucur
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253038494
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Q:You said the president of the committee is a man. Was he involved in repairing the building?

A:Not at all. He just sits there talking. All the organizing fell on G., she is the heart and soul of all this, she organizes us, looks for companies, does fundraising, seeks solutions, supervises the workers. We may be nagging her, but we follow her, side by side. And this is how we managed to have the first building redone in our whole neighborhood. (E.O., sixty-four)

Once they successfully repaired their building, their example caught on, and neighbors in nearby buildings began to organize. These women saw this as an accomplishment: “When spring arrived, people from the local newspaper came. We had just planted some geraniums. They filmed our building and surroundings. And then the journalists called me and asked everything about what we did and how we did it, and I kept saying about what each of us did. And they said, you know, you are unique in town, because nowhere is it so beautiful, with the building finished and flowers in nearly every window. After a month the city council called us and gave us a diploma and a cash prize, which we used to buy flower seeds” (E.B., seventy-seven).

Some of the most active members of this group had strong, collegial relationships that stretched back to their youth. Like other first-generation city dwellers, they lived far from their families and had to build support networks among peers and colleagues. E.B. (seventy-seven), a schoolteacher, remembered colleagues who became friends. She recalled how they helped one another in times of need: “We were all poor—we didn’t have much—but every two or three weeks we had a party with music, played vinyl records as one did at the time. We each brought whatever we could from home, be it sandwiches, food, a cookie, something, meatballs. . . . Colleagues helped each other. . . . Our female colleague had an event, a date or went to a wedding, and said, ‘I don’t have shoes. I don’t have a dress,’ and we each said, ‘Come by my place. I have something.’ And we clothed each other; it was harmony.” The harmony E.B. and other participants invoked correlates to a high degree of scarcity and social homogenization among the communist generation. This was also significant for their discussion of politics under communism, a subject addressed in the following chapter.

Limited Trust: Younger Generations

In contrast, younger generations are less involved with their neighbors. While they engage in polite conversation with them, they do not actively participate in community matters, passively paying their building maintenance bills:

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