ROMANIA

It was the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership in 1985, however, that ushered in the most dramatic political and economic changes in Eastern Europe since the Russian Revolution in 1917. Gorbachev assumed office with an agenda calling for a liberalization of the Soviet political structure, a reform of the Soviet economic structure, and a policy of self-determination for the Soviet satellite nation states of which Romania was one (Govbachev, 1987, pp. 24, 76, 113). Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one's perspective, Gorbachev initiated his reformist policies before establishing new

structures to manage and control the pace and direction of the reforms. As a consequence, the reforms soon went out of control on all fronts--political, economic, and the satellite nation states. In turn, Marxist political and economic control collapsed all across Eastern Europe beginning in 1989, and the Soviet satellite empire in Eastern Europe disintegrated along with the Marxist collapse leaving countries such as Romania with greater political discretion than they had enjoyed for four decades.

The political changes that began to occur in the Eastern Europe socialist bloc in the summer

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a, a so-called "velvet divorce" has been effected between the two major ethnic groups--the Czechs and the Slovaks In Romania, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and most of the other Eastern European countries, the economies are in much worse shape than they were under the former Communist system (Hogan, 1991, pp. 303-317, 361-367). Writing the Communist Party out of government in Romania made it possible for the introduction of economic changes that, it was hoped by reformers, would put an end to Romanian socialism. Unfortunately from the perspective of the reformers, the centrally -planned economic system of Stalin-style communism has never been completely replaced in post-socialist Romania ("Black Sea Bubble," pp. 49-50). Hopes and dreams ran high in newly independent Romania, where many in the citizenry expected foreign investors to set up factories that would transform cheap raw materials from Eastern Europe into manufactured goods for export to the countries of Western Europe (Hefheinz, 1991, pp. 68-70, 74). As is true of most dreams, things look different in the cold light of day. Instead of an economic boom in which the west supplied the capital and Romania supplied cheap raw materials and labor, Romanians watched as the co
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