Tag #122841 - Interview #89853 (Iancu Tucarman)

When people start blaming all the bad things that this regime had one by 1989 I would like them all to remember the good things as well. That is that houses were built, the people had a place to live. We should also remember those who built all these things because it was the work of my peers and we did not live our lives by doing nothing. On the contrary, we did not have Saturdays or Sundays. Of course, sometimes we were indeed working, other times we were attending meetings. During communism those who were really exploited were the peasants. They said that: ‘we are fighting against the exploitation of man by man’. No other man was more exploited than the Romanian peasant. In a collective farm the norm was 7 lei per working day according to the plan. And what did this mean? That they wouldn’t get even 200 lei a month! Less than a janitor! Why wouldn’t they then work 8-9 hours in the open field? They were really exploited. The SMTs [Machine and Tractor Units] would skin them alive. Weeding, plowing, threshing and so on was done by tractors. We have suffered a lot because we were deprived of food between 1980 and 1989 [due to exporting goods to pay the foreign debt].