In 1978, Viajar, a tourist magazine published in Barcelona, invited Spanish tourists to visit socialist Romania and discover ‘the route of Count Dracula’ (aka Vlad the Impaler, a fifteenth-century ruler of the medieval principality of Wallachia) during a two-week trip. One of the Spanish tourists, bolder than the others, even left Count Dracula a note in Bran Castle's museum book: ‘From Seville we came to see Count Dracula . . . Where is he hiding? Dracula, show yourself, do not be shy!’.Footnote 1 The Spanish tourists were not the only ones to show interest in the Dracula story and in its origins in Transylvania. Throughout the 1970s, the ‘Dracula tour’ seems to have sparked considerable interest among Western tourists. This included a group of American teenagers in 1974 who enquired about the presence of Dracula as well before ending their trip to Romania with a visit to Nicolae Ceaușescu himself.Footnote 2
Blending fun activities with more politically-driven events looks like one feature of Romanian tourism during the socialist 1960s–80s. Yet, as pragmatism became the rule of thumb in Romania's economic policies as of the mid-1960s, the tourist officials tried to include more entertaining activities in the tours as opposed to those that highlighted the accomplishments of the socialist regime. This article examines how the socialist regime in Romania moved from sheer ideological rhetoric to commercialism and market-driven strategies in its effort to promote the country as a tourist destination in the ‘West’ between the 1960s and the 1980s. It argues that there was a continual shifting between using tourism to convey the achievements of the socialist regime and a certain pragmatism that was needed to turn Romania into a desirable tourist destination. In this regard, I show that this shift occurred both because of the top-down state policies and because of various state and non-state agents that shaped the tourism industry and promotion in Romania during socialism, especially throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. As non-Romanian authors picked up certain topics related to Romanian tourism, such as Dracula, the political regime in Romania had little control over the messages these materials conveyed. Hence, the Western tourists who visited Romania could choose between various narratives about this socialist country, and so build their own picture about it. As it wanted to attract them, the Romanian socialist state could not afford to completely ignore their expectations.Footnote 3 In this way, Romania's promotion abroad became the task of multiple actors that ranged from the socialist state itself to tourist technocrats as well as tourist agencies and promoters from abroad.
Western tourists’ presence across the Iron Curtain was hardly a new phenomenon during the 1970s. At this time, almost all countries in socialist Eastern Europe had already embraced international tourism for its promise to bring along the coveted hard currencies and to improve their image among the ordinary citizens in the capitalist West against the backdrop of the Cold War.Footnote 4 Not only that Romania was no exception to this, but it constantly looked at its competitors, the more liberal Yugoslavia, Hungary with its Balaton lake, and Bulgaria, with which it shared access to the Black Sea coast, in order to diversify its tourist offer.Footnote 5 Moreover, because the income from beach tourism had a limited ceiling growth due to geographical limitations,Footnote 6 Romanian planners struggled to come up with a more attractive package for the Western market than just the seaside.Footnote 7 In this regard the Orthodox monasteries, the folk culture and even the Dracula story became Romania's trump card.Footnote 8
However, for the Romanian socialist regime, the Western tourists’ interest in Dracula, religious sites and folk culture triggered an ideological dilemma. How should Romania be promoted abroad: as a destination of mystical lands where vampires once lived, or, who knows, might still live and where peasant lifestyle is still rife, or as a land of modernity and high culture? Where should the accomplishments of the socialist regime fit in promoting Romania as a tourist destination? These were questions to which the socialist officials struggled to find the ‘right answer’ while also attempting to attract more Western tourists with their coveted hard currencies. This article seeks to shed light on these debates as reflected by the party documents, tourist guidebooks and magazines. At the same time, it looks at how Western tourist magazines portrayed Romania as a tourist destination in order to learn what kind of message an ordinary tourist from the capitalist West would have gotten about this socialist country as of the mid-1960s onwards. Given the Cold War context, marked by the East-West détente in the 1970s and the return to the so-called Second Cold War in the early 1980s, how did a small, relatively ‘exotic’ and socialist country like Romania use international tourism to get to the hearts and minds of the working people in the capitalist West?
Studies about socialist tourism have focused on either the restorative function of tourism, on tourism as a transnational force, or more broadly on tourism as a political, economic and social project.Footnote 9 As Anne Gorsuch has rightfully observed, tourism did become a transnational force in the Cold War dynamics of the 1960s and the 1970s.Footnote 10 Yet the discussion about the role of tourism in the Cold War remained mostly confined to the role of superpowers, such as the Soviet Union and the United States, and overlooked the ambitions and expectations of small states like Romania.Footnote 11 Similarly, with some exceptions, the topic of international tourism during socialism has remained largely unexplored in the Romanian case.Footnote 12 But the case of international tourism in Romania is of particular interest. Although Romania opened up economically and politically towards the West (both Western Europe and the United States) in the late 1960s, domestically it maintained tight control over its citizens. After having pursued a policy of political liberalisation in the late 1960s and mid-1970s, the regime limited individual freedom, such as the freedom to travel abroad and have access to consumer goods, during the 1980s.Footnote 13 As an economic sector that exposes domestic realities to foreign visitors, international tourism seemed like a thorny choice for the socialist regime in Romania. But, following the model of other emerging tourist countries, such as Spain and Yugoslavia, Romania was also determined to take advantage of the opportunities that international tourism brought about for the developing European countries in the 1960s. Thus, Romanian officials embraced international tourism because of its economic promise to resolve the balance of payments problem, the prospect of selling socialism as a viable political regime and, last but not least, in order to present Romania as part of Europe's cultural heritage.
As most literature on socialist Romania has focused on nationalism and the regime's various control mechanisms, and only recently a body of scholarship has begun to study Romanian socialism from a cultural and social perspective, this study builds on this literature and paints a more nuanced perspective.Footnote 14 It shows how, starting in the late 1960s, the socialist regime paid specific attention to the world market when developing international tourism and promoting the country as a tourist destination in the capitalist ‘West’.Footnote 15 A growing number of studies have shown how socialist countries had to adjust to the global/capitalist market as well, but the Romanian case has been less studied from this perspective.Footnote 16 As anthropologist Steven G. Randall puts it, socialist Romania, like other modern states, used a mixture of policies involving ‘both capitalist and socialist, democratic and authoritarian features in the attempt to avoid the hazards and to gain the advantages of a global system dominated by capitalist accumulation’.Footnote 17
The article uses an array of primary sources ranging from reports by the Romanian Communist Party's Political Bureau (Politburo) and by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to studies by the Institute for Research and Development in Tourism which have recently been made available to researchers, to guidebooks, magazines, and tourist flyers promoting Romanian tourism abroad, together with Western magazines.
The Politics of International Tourism in the 1960s–80s
In the early 1960s, Romania acquired a taste for international tourism. It was the example of the neighbouring socialist countries and the advent of mass tourism in Europe which sparked interest among state officials. Moreover, after using a variety of means (including violence), in the early 1960s, the Romanian socialist regime had secured its internal position.Footnote 18 Thenceforth, its goal became that of consolidating the economy and improving the country's external image. From this point of view, tourism was a safe avenue. Initially, international tourism was mostly a question of establishing friendly relationships among socialist countries, but soon socialist officials came to regard international tourism as a source of much needed hard currency that could help to equalise the balance of payments. In addition, international tourism was a means of selling Romanian socialism as a friendly and successful type of political regime against the backdrop of the Cold War. This led to the design of promotional campaigns aiming to welcome more tourists from Western Europe rather than from socialist Eastern Europe, since these Western tourists paid in coveted hard currency.Footnote 19 Although the number of tourists from capitalist countries never came close to that of tourists from the socialist bloc, the revenue that they brought to the Romanian economy was slightly more.Footnote 20
Such developments were part of larger trends in other socialist countries. In 1955, The New York Times sceptically announced that ‘Tourism is piercing the Iron Curtain’.Footnote 21 While proclaiming that ‘Trans-Iron Curtain vacations as an accompaniment of the current phase of East-West coexistence have begun in earnest’, it acknowledged that Americans could not fully benefit from this opening because the State Department only granted passport validations for travelling to the USSR and Eastern Europe in certain cases. However, in 1955, some British, French and West German tourists did visit Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. Norman Moss, the author of The New York Times article, took a trip to Hungary and, despite his declared anti-communism, admitted that he was able to move freely and to wander through the streets of Budapest with a camera slung on his shoulder. Although the law required films to be developed inside the country, it was rarely enforced. In the post-Stalinist mid-1950s, socialist Eastern Europe was becoming friendlier towards the capitalist bloc, although the Cold War rhetoric was still in place on both sides.Footnote 22 Nikita Khrushchev's shift from sheer military to economic and political ‘competition’ with the United States and his visit to the United States in 1959 seemingly announced the beginning of a new phase of East-West relations in the Cold War.Footnote 23 Moreover, the ‘small states’ in Eastern Europe started to have their own agenda vis-à-vis the capitalist West. Already in 1958, Romania had signed an economic and cultural agreement with France.Footnote 24
International tourism too came to play a role in the East-West rapprochement. First, the socialist bloc made some institutional progress with regard to clear travel regulations and creating an infrastructure for tourism. In the late 1950s, delegates from socialist countries began to meet every two years and discuss ways to develop international tourism.Footnote 25 The meeting that took place in 1961 in Moscow was a turning point in the history of tourism in the socialist bloc as the issue of tourism with capitalist countries was seriously discussed. This was already the fourth meeting of socialist tourist organisations and it included participants not only from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but also from Mongolia, North Korea and North Vietnam.Footnote 26 The second point on the agenda at the tourist delegates’ meeting concerned the ‘importance of developing international tourism between socialist and capitalist countries as a means of popularizing the accomplishments of socialist regimes and of counterattacking the unfriendly imperialist propaganda towards socialist countries’.Footnote 27 The agenda also mentioned that relationships between socialist and capitalist countries in the field of tourism should be based on socialist states being cheaper and more attractive tourist destinations. The meeting also emphasised that socialist countries should find ways to promote themselves in the tourist markets of capitalist countries.Footnote 28 The meeting in Moscow thereby signalled the shift from a ‘domestic’ tourism within the socialist bloc that aimed at strengthening socialist brotherhood to an international tourism with the West that was driven by profit and operated as ‘soft power’ in the Cold War context.
At the 1961 tourist organisation meeting, Romania was not the strongest voice with regard to tourist relationships with capitalist countries. According to the agenda, for 1962 Romania had tourism agreements with Intourist (USSR), ORBIS (Poland), CEDOK (Czechoslovakia), IBUSZ and EXPRES (Hungary), the country's main tourist partners. Romania's representatives presented a report that addressed the issue of ‘restorative tourism’ and the prospects for its development within the socialist bloc.Footnote 29 This stance resembled the classic approach to tourism in the socialist bloc. However, following the 1961 meeting in Moscow, the Romanian government became more open to the possibility of welcoming Western tourists.Footnote 30 Indeed, immediately after the meeting its Council of Ministers asked for a report on the prospects for developing international tourism with Western countries. More than anything else, this report reflected the Romanian government's lack of experience in the sector.Footnote 31 After having acknowledged an increase in the number of Western tourists holidaying in socialist Romania from 7,800 in 1957 to 40,000 in 1961, the report examined how other socialist countries welcomed Western tourists.Footnote 32 Most of the examples were drawn from Bulgaria, Romania's southern neighbour. While in Bulgaria, tourists were offered guided tours to help them familiarise themselves with the history of the country and of the resorts; in Romania, tourists visited selected collective farms, the visits usually ending with a dinner party with ‘comrades’.Footnote 33
Despite this dull itinerary, change was afoot. As of 1962, the National Tourism Office–Carpathians (NTO–Carpathians, the state tourist agency in charge of most tourist activities) and the government still did not have a clear plan for developing tourism with Western countries, but the quality of the advertising materials that promoted Romania as a tourist destination began to improve. Just a year later, another report, put together by the Propaganda and Foreign Relations Section within the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers Party (RWP),Footnote 34 emphasised this progress:
If during the previous years the tourist propaganda and the advertising of our country abroad focused only on general information, in 1962 these advertising materials became more detailed. Both printed materials and commercials advertised specific tourist destinations, including information about the travel conditions, prices, and where one can book a vacation to the RPR [Romanian Popular Republic]. Some of the materials were printed in collaboration with the partner travel agencies from abroad, while others were made at the request of foreign firms to be disseminated in their respective markets.Footnote 35
The same report noted that in 1962 alone, 124 items of advertising material were published with a circulation of 5.1 million copies. Additionally, 5.2 million postcards were made available to promote Romania abroad, and a television network from West Germany commissioned two promotional movies about Romania.Footnote 36 This campaign marked the launch of socialist Romania's concerted efforts to make the country a destination for tourists from capitalist countries.
This, however, did not mean that Romania's socialist path of development was to be completely silenced. In fact, the party elites wanted to have Romania promoted in the ‘West’ mostly as a socialist country with a rich folk culture. The above-mentioned 1963 report complained that ‘traditional folk culture and events related to it and newly erected buildings are not promoted well enough’, while the training of travel guides included ‘few classes about the party's internal and foreign policy and the accomplishments of popular democracy’.Footnote 37 Moreover, only seven of the twenty-three guides working with NTO–Carpathians were party members. The report blamed poor political training for some of the tourist guides’ inability to answer the simple question ‘why is there just one party in our country?’. The RWP critiques were directed at the NTO–Carpathians, which they accused of not following the party's political guidance. It was only as of 1965 when international tourism started to be economically profitable and Romania opened up economically towards the capitalist West, when it became easier for the NTO–Carpathians’ technocrats to counter the political demands.
A 1965 report put together by the representatives of NTO–Carpathians, the State Committee for Planning, the Ministry of Interior Trade, the Ministry of Finances and delegates of the counties where tourism was a key economic activity proposed a number of measures to improve the tourist activity in Romania.Footnote 38 Their conclusion was that international tourism has a high economic efficiency, comparable with that of industries that produced goods to be exported to capitalist countries.Footnote 39 To support their arguments they offered concrete numbers: in 1965, one million foreign tourists visited Romania as compared to only 200,000 in 1960, while the revenue from international tourism had increased from 34.4 million lei valuta in 1960 to 117 million lei valuta in 1965.Footnote 40 The most economically beneficial growth was that of the hard currency income coming from Western tourists. While in 1960, Western tourists contributed 5.3 million lei valuta to the Romanian budget, in the next five years this amount increased sixteen-fold, reaching 88 million lei valuta in 1965.Footnote 41 The report proposed an investment in tourism of three billion lei of which 2.3 billion lei were allocated for international tourism with the mentioning that Romanian tourists could use those respective hotels outside the tourist season and when they were not fully occupied by foreign tourists. The Politburo approved of this measure despite the fact that Romanian citizens’ right to rest was put into jeopardy. In this way, international tourism in Romania, although state controlled, came to follow the rules of a profit-driven market economy, and granted only limited funding to ‘restorative tourism’ for workers that used to be its focus during the 1950s and early 1960s.
The ones in charge for making tourism a profitable endeavour were the tourist technocrats. The fact that many of the NTO–Carpathians’ employees had so-called bourgeois origins and were educated during the interwar period helped them to better adjust to the economic re-opening towards the capitalist West in the 1960s and to welcoming Western tourists.Footnote 42 As international tourism with the West involved frequent contacts with firms and individuals in Western Europe and the United States, these technocrats learned to act in a more business-like way. For instance, in January 1968, Nicolae Bozdog, the head of the NTO–Carpathians, travelled to New York to meet with John B. Gates, chairman of the board of Intercontinental Hotels, to negotiate the opening of an Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. Bozdog and his deputies Gheorghe Leonte and Traian Lupu (who undertook the job as an NTO–Carpathians representative in New York) flew first class from Bucharest to New York, lived in an expensive hotel, dined in fine restaurants, and planned to see a non-political American musical while in New York.Footnote 43 Undoubtedly, this trip allowed the Romanian guests to gain first-hand experience with the capitalist way of life and ‘bourgeois sensibilities’. These visits did not make the socialist officials less loyal to the Romanian socialist state, but certainly influenced their mentality and perspective on East-West economic interactions. Furthermore, Bozdog's visit to the United States and the subsequent good press worked to improve the image of Romania in the United States, which the US media ceased to label as a ‘red country’.Footnote 44
NTO–Carpathians grounded the reports that it sent to the Council of Ministers or to the Politburo of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) on the studies elaborated by the National Institute for Research and Development in Tourism. The Institute, established in the mid-1950s as part of the Ministry of Interior Trade, actively followed developments in other European tourist countries, shared data with similar organisations in both socialist and capitalist countries, and regularly assessed foreign tourists’ preferences and discontents regarding services in Romanian resorts.Footnote 45 Although many times not politically affiliated to the RCP, these tourist technocrats were essential to the socialist state's project to develop international tourism and to strengthen economic relations with the capitalist West, as they spoke foreign languages, knew the jargon of business and understood how international tourism works.
The organisation of tourism in Romania also suggested that the party elites granted more autonomy to the tourist sector as of the late 1960s, lured by the possibility to make tourism economically profitable. In 1967, the NTO–Carpathians asked the Political Bureau of the Romanian Communist Party for permission to be the sole institution responsible for the development of tourism in Romania as they explained this would raise the economic efficiency of international tourism (a 420 million lei valuta revenue from international tourism was projected for 1970), would ensure better training of the tourist personnel and would help to resolve any day-to-day inconsistencies that might occur between the accommodation and food services. The Politburo agreed to grant autonomy to NTO–Carpathians, which gained the rank of a ministry and became directly responsible to the Council of Ministers.Footnote 46 This measure reflected the increased role of tourism within Romania's socialist industry.
As part of its new responsibilities, in 1967 the NTO–Carpathians embarked on building a new chain of resorts (Neptun-Olimp, Venus and Saturn) on the southern part of the Romanian Black Sea coast.Footnote 47 This new string of holiday resorts would complement the already existing Mamaia, Eforie Nord and Eforie Sud resorts located close to Constanta, the main city in the region. Although significant hotel building took place in Mamaia and Eforie in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the capacity of these hotels did not meet the demand and the Western tourists’ rising expectations.Footnote 48 During an Economic Council's meeting on 23 May 1965,Footnote 49 representatives of the NTO–Carpathians emphasised that the enlargement of tourist infrastructure was paramount to the further development of international tourism in Romania for ‘recent studies of the external market shows that the high revenue expected from international tourism is contingent on the expansion of the current tourist infrastructure’.Footnote 50 At the same time, as Johanna Conterio has observed, tourist developments on the Black Sea coast were supposed to showcase the superiority of the socialist approach to urban planning.Footnote 51 From this perspective, the existing hotels and vacation spaces on the Romanian Black Sea coast limited the socialist planners’ ability to meet both their ideological agenda and the increasing demand.Footnote 52 The project to build new holiday resorts on the southern part of the Romanian Black Sea coast could suggest the socialist planers’ wish to break with the design of the tourist city of the interwar period (which included villas and small hotels) and to build larger hotels that matched both the Romanian socialist regime's vision of modernity and the European/world trends of the 1960s–70s.Footnote 53
And indeed, the Romanian government built Neptun-Olimp, Venus and Saturn complexes to cater to foreign tourists, especially those from Western Europe. The plan that NTO–Carpathians sent for approval to the Politburo highlighted the presence of an attractive natural landscape, ‘close to a forest’, which, they said, ‘increases the chances of successfully promoting the resort in the foreign market’.Footnote 54 Most of the accommodation infrastructure consisted of two-star hotels as Romania was mostly catering to working and middle-class tourists from capitalist countries, but also because these were the tendencies in the more developed tourist countries (e.g. Spain and Yugoslavia).Footnote 55 The cost to build the whole resort was around $340 million, and the plan insisted that investment would be recouped in fifteen years. Although the building of this new complex conformed to the rules of the planned economy, the tourist officials paid specific attention to costs and revenues in order to convince the party elites that the resort was worth building. The Neptun-Olimp, Venus and Saturn resorts were just the tip of the iceberg in the growth of tourist infrastructure in Romania. Between 1970 and 1985, the number of hotels soared by 42.3 per cent.Footnote 56
In the 1970s, along with the modern tourist infrastructure that bourgeoned on the Black Sea coast and elsewhere in Romania, a new vision of tourism emerged. This clearly emphasised the commercial value of tourism in Romania. In 1976, Oskar Snak, a high official in the Ministry of Tourism and a scholar of tourism, explained: ‘From an economic and social point of view, the development of tourism refers to the population's growing demands for a better access to tourist services and consumer goods, which in the end stimulates both production and consumption’.Footnote 57 Furthermore, Snak emphasised that the growing number of ‘foreign visitors is beneficial for the development of certain tourist areas and of the Romanian economy in general’.Footnote 58 More than that, he noted, ‘international tourism can positively influence a country's balance of payments, capitalize on a country's natural resources’ and act as ‘an invisible form of exporting services and products, which is very economically advantageous’.Footnote 59 This view on international tourism was nothing different than the tourist philosophy in countries with more tourist experience, such as Spain or Yugoslavia, but it was still not enough to make Romania truly successful with tourism.Footnote 60 The key was better promotion abroad and a cohesive tourist brand that would attract tourists.
How to Promote Romania Abroad and to Make Tourism Profitable
In a 1972 interview published in Recepción, a Spanish tourist magazine, Traian Lupu, General Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism, declared that ‘Romania is essentially a tourist country because of its year-round tourist possibilities, its rich folklore and traditions, thermal spas, and the so-called Romanian miracle’.Footnote 61 Lupu, who previously served as the head of the NTO–Carpathians office in New York, aimed at attracting tourist agencies and tourists in Spain by emphasising what he thought the Spanish public sought from a tourist destination. But his statement illustrated succinctly Romania's tourist strategy. Throughout the 1970s, the tourist officials planned to advertise Romania as a multifaceted tourist destination that could cater to a larger spectrum of tourists, not only from traditional Western markets, such as West Germany, Italy, France and Scandinavian countries, but also from the emerging tourist countries like Spain or Greece.Footnote 62
Nevertheless, in the Romanian case, the path to developing a tourist strategy was thorny as there was a continuous tension between the party officials’ wish to gain swift revenues from tourism and the technocrats’ goal to foster a long-term development plan. This was but one reason why ultimately the tourism development in Romania did not entirely pay off. For one thing, after a promising start, the overall economic results of international tourism in Romania remained below the socialist officials’ expectations. The government was puzzled by this as it had taken various additional measures to increase tourist circulation. In 1967, Romania had abolished visa regulations for tourists from capitalist countries and allowed visas to be obtained at the border.Footnote 63
Although the figure of foreign tourists substantially increased from 200,000 in 1960 to 6.8 million in 1982, the number of Western tourists only reached 899,690 in 1979, which was a peak year.Footnote 64 Likewise, the total income from tourism in Romania remained lower than that in other socialist countries, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and even Bulgaria.Footnote 65 This would only increase in the second half of the 1970s. Whereas in 1975 it was $198 million, in 1980 it increased sharply to $357 million.Footnote 66 But the income from international tourism in Romania would plummet to only $127 million in 1984.Footnote 67 The relatively low income and number of Western tourists compared to the other tourist countries worried the Romanian government, which continuously attempted to find solutions to resolve it.Footnote 68 One course of action was to improve the advertising strategy on the Western market.Footnote 69
Already in 1967, Corneliu Mănescu, a member of the Executive Bureau of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party and later president of the United Nations General Assembly, explained the limited success of international tourism in socialist Romania at the time as follows: ‘We cannot compare ourselves with the Dalmatian Coast, we have abolished visas, but this did not bring too many tourists. We have to make propaganda, to build tourist circuits, to understand that tourism does not mean only the hotel [accommodation] or places such as Eforie and Mangalia, but we can also develop tourism in other places too’.Footnote 70
In the 1960s, NTO–Carpathians along with the Meridiane Publishing House, a press that specialised in literature, art history and travel, began to publish tourist guidebooks to promote Romania as a tourist destination.Footnote 71 Yet these materials only partially met Corneliu Mănescu's suggestion. A tourist guidebook published in 1967 in French (the first such guide to be published in a foreign language during the socialist era) under the supervision of Șerban Cioculescu, a well-established literary critic and historian, looked more like a stiff academic book than an attractive piece written for Western tourists.Footnote 72 The potential visitor to Romania could choose between the twenty-one possible circuits that the guidebook suggested as worth pursuing. In addition, the guidebook included a long list of museums and other high culture venues of potential interest to the foreign visitor, while the last chapter contained practical information about restaurants, hotels, the exchange rate and telephone rates.Footnote 73 The guidebook's introduction did not shy away from describing Romania as a socialist country, but it also conveyed its rich historical past.Footnote 74 This kind of description might have appalled those Western tourists with a Cold War mind-set, although the book aimed to cater to a more intellectually curious audience.
Cioculescu's guidebook opened with a description of the capital, Bucharest, followed by the Prahova Valley, a region only 100 km from Bucharest, and important because of its chain of mountain resorts (Sinaia–Predeal). The rest of the guidebook explored central Transylvania (the Brasov-Sibiu and Brasov–Sighisoara–Sibiu areas), Oltenia (Craiova–Petroșani–Simeria), Banat-western Transylvania (Timișoara–Arad–Oradea–Cluj), the seaside (București–Constanța and the coast) the Danube Delta and finally Moldavia (Bucharest, Buzău, Bacau and Northern Moldavia).Footnote 75 By listing these particular tourist circuits, the guidebook avoided the construction of tourist circuits restricted to only one historical region.Footnote 76 This was especially the case in the western part of the country in regions such as Transylvania and Banat, where important ethnic minorities lived. Thus, the guidebook followed the party's instructions to present Romania as a cohesive unitary space. Although the guidebook included all the regions of the country, it put greater emphasis on Transylvania, since this region was more likely to be familiar to Western tourists because of the Dracula story, or the presence of a large German community, which preserved ties with both West Germany and East Germany.Footnote 77 Nine of the twenty-one suggested tours involved locations in this region. By its structure and preferences, the book created a certain hierarchy of tourist regions that put emphasis on cultural sites.
With regard to the specific tourist places that potential foreign tourists could visit, the 1967 guidebook included both cultural sites and the regime's new industrial plants. For instance, in the case of the Prahova Valley, the guidebook recommended the Peleș Museum in Sinaia, which was described as blending ‘German and Italian Renaissance styles’, the Sinaia monasteryFootnote 78 and the Brazi refinery and the oil equipment plant in Ploiesti.Footnote 79 The inclusion of a refinery and factory, hardly the normal sites for vacationers, suggests that Cioculescu's guidebook sought to balance often conflicting political demands. The description of the Peleș Museum in Sinaia, which was a former royal castle built at the end of the nineteenth century, emphasised its European cultural legacy. The guidebook stressed that the former royal palace contained elements of German neo-Renaissance style, which was a fashionable nineteenth-century architectural style in Italy and former Habsburg lands, but overlooked the existence of a Turkish room, a reference to Romania's oriental legacy. Given the focus of socialist Romania's historians on the medieval Wallachian and Moldavian crusades against the Ottoman Empire and contemporary socialist Romania's leaning toward the West, the author of the guidebook did not hide his preference for Western Europe, while ties with the Ottoman and Russian Empires were silenced.Footnote 80 Of course, stressing links to European culture also served to entice tourists whose hard currency funds the state sought to attract. The emphasis on European cultural heritage worked as a form of soft power against the backdrop of the Cold War.
As the Romanian government attempted to attract more Western tourists, the guidebook tried to present Romania as a familiar and politically friendly zone despite the physical distance and the Iron Curtain. This stance may be surprising at first sight but, in fact, it was part of a larger push to establish preferential cultural and economic relations with Western Europe and the United States. In the mid-1960s, socialist Romania's main trading partner became West GermanyFootnote 81 and in the 1970s it entered into negotiations with the European Economic Community on a preferential trade agreement.Footnote 82 Romania's economic shift towards the EEC and Western Europe was well covered by the Western media in the 1970s, which also helped to increase the number of Western tourists to the socialist country. Yet, the focus of Cioculescu's guidebook on high culture alone and its strong ideological content probably hindered rather than attracted Western tourists. At a time when young people in Western and Eastern Europe were lured by American popular culture, this message was outdated and more specific to the Soviet Union's cultural policies than to those of the Westerners it tried to attract.Footnote 83 Although circumstantial, the volume's ‘outdated’ message seems to have reflected Cioculescu's efforts to satisfy two competing political perspectives.
Another guidebook published in English, French and German in 1968 and authored by Nicolae Minei, a historian close to the Communist Party, did a better job at tailoring its message to the needs of foreign tourists, although it kept an ideological agenda. The travel guide proposed four possible tours contingent on the amount of time a foreign tourist could spend in Romania. The most comprehensive tour, which was suggested for a ten-day visit, would allow tourists to visit ‘Bucharest, the Romanian Black Sea coast, the Prahova Valley, the Danube Delta, the monasteries in Northern Moldavia, go round Romania by car or train, see the ancient Greek and Roman sites, the ancient Dacian and Roman sites and tour the medieval and folk-art sites’.Footnote 84 In comparison with the 1967 guidebook, Minei's travel guide put a strong emphasis on the seaside, as this was one important point of interest for Western tourists, second only to Bucharest. However, when it came to sketching the history of the country, the guidebook kept to the ideological blueprint. Therefore, it emphasised the Romanians’ role in defeating the Ottomans in the Middle Ages when they menaced Christian Europe, and its switching sides during the Second World War against Nazi Germany.Footnote 85 In addition, the 1968 guidebook highlighted the Roman and Greek influences on Romanian cultural heritage, but it did not forget the Dacians, the pre-Roman population that inhabited more or less the territory of contemporary Romania. During the 1970s–80s, the Dacians and their culture became central to proto-chronism, a current of thought instrumentally used by intellectuals and party propagandists to prove the ancestry of Romanian (but not necessarily Roman) culture.Footnote 86 Nevertheless, despite these historical biases, the travel guide offered enough practical information to be a useful aid for tourists who wanted to visit socialist Romania.
Both guidebooks drew a symbolic map of Romania that mirrored the official discourse on tourism during socialism. Besides conveying the accomplishments of the socialist regime and Romania's so-called ‘heroic past’, the focus of the tourist guides was on high culture. This was meant to make the entire country part of larger European developments, in particular the Renaissance and Baroque eras and their architecture.Footnote 87 The two travel guides were anxious to remind European travellers of the Romanian principalities’ role in stopping the Ottomans in the high Middle Ages.Footnote 88 By emphasising this, it placed Romanian lands on the European and Christian side throughout history despite their belonging to the Soviet bloc in the 1960s. At the same time, the two guides emphasised folklore and the Dacian inheritance. On the one hand, folklore showcased Romania's specificity in the eyes of foreign tourists, while on the other hand it played a role in building a nationalist ideology, which the Romanian communist leaders embraced in the mid-1960s. The two guidebooks thereby reflected the tension between the Romanian socialist regime's goal of transforming the country into a major tourist destination and its wish to use tourism in order to convey a more politically convenient view of Romanian history. As a darling of the regime, Nicolae Minei seemed to have more leeway in putting together a travel guide, while Șerban Cioculescu, who had been politically marginalised throughout the 1950s, may have used his authoring of the 1967 tourist guidebook to pay lip service to the party.Footnote 89 That both men sought to balance political correctness and economic necessity suggests that, among the party's leaders, there existed a cautious approach on how to market socialist Romania.
During the 1970s, the NTO–Carpathians ceased publishing large guidebooks and shifted towards releasing concise brochures and flyers, or guidebooks on more specific topics (e.g. spa resorts), which were easier to circulate to a larger audience.Footnote 90 These materials focused on concrete information, such as travel conditions, visas, hotels, eating and entertainment facilities. In addition to French and English editions, the brochures were also published in German, as most of the Western tourists visiting Romania were West Germans.Footnote 91 Because brochures and flyers were physically compact, the ideological undertones were few or completely absent. This marked a difference from the guidebook style that had dominated in the 1960s. For instance, the 1971 cover of Vacances en Roumanie, a tourist magazine published by the NTO–Carpathians in several languages, lured Western tourists to Romania with young women in bikinis.Footnote 92 First published in 1958, the magazine was initially called A travers la Roumanie, while in 1965 it had its name changed to Vacances en Roumanie, reflecting the magazine's goal to become an outlet of tourism promotion in Romania. It was made available in hotels and airports, but those interested could subscribe and receive the publication at home for about $10 per year. Because it wanted to show that its readers matter, the magazine launched a contest that offered prizes to those who provided the correct answers. The winners were offered a free vacation in Romania and their names were announced inside the magazine.
The content of the magazine closely reflected the Romanian state policy regarding international tourism. Whereas in the early to mid-1970s the magazine included articles about the new resorts on the Black Sea coast, Romanian cuisine and fashion, music festivals, etc., in the 1980s, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, graced the cover of Vacances en Roumanie as well. Yet, there was a fine line between ideology and commercialism in the pages of this tourist magazine. The September 1971 issue (the magazine was published quarterly) advertised a night club in Venus, then one of the newest resorts on the Black Sea coast. The lively article describes the opening of this brand-new night club with female dancers who had ‘attractive legs and moved graciously’ and waiters wearing ‘cowboy outfits and very short skirts’.Footnote 93This depiction was far from unique. Also in 1971, a study put together by the Institute for Research and Development in Tourism called for tourist brochures and magazines to include in the presentation of tourist resorts ‘short and engaging stories’, such as that, ‘all female personnel in Venus were selected through a beauty pageant’, and that ‘only beautiful women are admitted into the resort’.Footnote 94 Certainly, when it came to attracting more foreign/Western tourists, Romanian tourist specialists did not shy away from sexualising women despite the regime's prudishness otherwise regarding sexuality.
This type of message mirrored the domestic liberalisation that took place during this time period. Starting already in the late 1960s, ordinary citizens’ access to consumer goods had improved (rationing was completely abolished in 1968), while Romanians were also able to vacation abroad. This inchoate societal liberalisation was brought to a halt as of 1979, when rationing was reintroduced for fuel against the backdrop of the global oil crisis. In the early 1980s, in its attempt to reduce the trade deficit, which in 1980, reached $1.5 billion, the Romanian government cut off investments and imports of technology and consumer goods, which strongly affected the tourism sector.Footnote 95 Yet, it was not just the economic crisis that affected tourism but the more ideological stance that the party was trying to impose. For Vacances en Roumanie this meant more articles on Romania's recent history as opposed to practical and more appealing information about Romanian tourism.Footnote 96
Consequentially, in the late 1970s, the number of Western tourists visiting Romania began to drop. Already in 1980 a report by the Securitate, the communist secret police, complained that only 260,300 people had bought vacations in Romania before 1 April 1980.Footnote 97 In fact, some tourists from capitalist countries cancelled their trips to Romania altogether (West Germany – 5850 cancellations, United Kingdom – 5800, United States – 5445, Italy – 5250, France – 3260).Footnote 98 The tourist firms explained that the cancellations were taking place because of the deteriorating international situation due to the war in Afghanistan, the political situation in Europe, especially in the Balkans, or economic crises in the tourists’ countries of origin, which made them abandon their vacation plans.Footnote 99 In addition, the brand-new infrastructure of the late 1960s and early 1970s had become outdated in the 1980s, and complaints were mounting among tourists about declining tourist services and a lack of entertainment facilities on the Romanian Black Sea coast. Undoubtedly, Nicolae Ceaușescu's decision to pay all foreign debts in 1982, which signalled a turn to self-sufficiency, contributed to the lowering numbers of Western tourists in Romania as well. Yet, the crisis of international tourism in Romania closely reflected the international context. In the early 1980s, economic depression loomed in the so-called developed capitalist countries, and particularly affected the middle-class tourists and the blue-collar workers that Romania was trying to attract.Footnote 100
Since the Romanian socialist government still regarded international tourism as a priority because it represented a source of hard currencies that could alleviate Romania's economic crisis, it designed a new advertising strategy. In 1981, in order to have a better insight into what Western tourists wanted, the Institute for Research and Development in Tourism sent out questionnaires to the main partner tourist agencies from abroad asking what could be improved to keep the tourists coming.Footnote 101 The answers ranged from better services to more informative materials (for instance, American tourists wanted publicity about Transylvania and geriatric treatments) to better food in restaurants and lower prices. Yet, tourist decision makers only partially followed these down-to-earth suggestions since they had to carefully balance both political requests coming from the Romanian Communist Party and the tourists’ demands. The 1983 plan to promote tourism reflected this tension. First and foremost, the plan emphasised that ‘tourism propaganda is part of the general propaganda which the party and the state develop in order to help disseminate, domestically and abroad, the right image of Romania's past and the Romanian people's accomplishments in the era of socialism’.Footnote 102 Nevertheless, despite this dogmatic message, the Romanian tourist officials aimed to adjust the discourse to the prospective audience as well. This is why, in the case of Western tourists, the focus drifted away from a purely ideological position to a more pragmatic stance. The plan stated:
With the purpose of increasing Romania's share in world exchanges of material and spiritual values, the tourist propaganda will present Romania as a country with year-round tourist possibilities which offers an unpolluted climate and a political and socially safe environment together with an array of possibilities for tourism in all regions of the country.
Not only did the tourist promoters insist on issues that they considered of interest, such as safety and the environment, but they also attempted to remain abreast with the latest trends in tourism. In 1984, a report on international tourism techniques noted that 75 per cent of the world's foreign tourists chose European destinations for their vacations and that Romania could be part of this network.Footnote 103 Furthermore, the study emphasised that tourists’ priorities had changed and that modern tourists had become less interested in physical recuperation and more focused on cultural and social enhancement.Footnote 104 Unfortunately, the socialist officials were less willing to adjust the prices to the worsening economic conditions in Western Europe, although they closely followed these developments. Already in the late 1970s, Romania became slightly more expensive than Spain, Yugoslavia or Bulgaria, countries that were actually better known to Western tourists than Romania.Footnote 105
Besides the relatively high costs of tourist services, the Romanian state did little to modernise its offer so as to provide the ‘cultural and social enhancement’ tourists were seeking in the 1980s. Romanian tourist officials ambitiously planned ‘to launch on the European and extra-European tourist markets a number of new programmes and circuits’.Footnote 106 However, as in the 1960s, Romanian tourist officials planned to focus on cultural tours that would exclusively highlight high culture and folklore, while the tourists were seeking relaxation and fun. The planned itineraries centred on personalities that the Romanian socialist government deemed representative: Constantin Brâncuși (a Romanian-born surrealist sculptor who lived most of his life in France), George Enescu (a classical music composer) and Nicolae Titulescu (president of the League of Nations and former Minister of Foreign Affairs in the interwar period). In addition, the newly opened tourist circuits were expected to trace Baroque art and architecture in Romania (which only exists in Transylvania, though the 1984 report failed to mention this) and include a number of folk festivals, such as the Maiden Fair on Mount Gaina (Hen) and the pottery fair at Hurezu Monastery.Footnote 107
Much like the 1960s guidebooks, the proposed tourist destinations sought to portray Romania as part of European high culture (Baroque art, Enescu and Brancusi), or cultural aspects related to events connected with the religious and mythological realms (the Maiden Fair is associated with a religious holiday and is based on a nineteenth-century myth, while the pottery fair takes place at a monastery). Such destinations may well appear out of step with the socialist ideology, which rejected mysticism. Nevertheless, when it came to tourism the Romanian socialist regime had a more lenient approach towards religion and included religious destinations among the historical sites that should be promoted to tourists.Footnote 108 Yet, despite some clear accomplishments in promoting Romania in Western countries, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, the ways in which tourist promotion was applied on the ground left much to be desired. One major deficiency was how tourist materials were distributed abroad. Already in 1973, a letter from the Romanian tourist office in Madrid to the Ministry of Tourism in Bucharest complained about the lack of tourist maps, of flyers about the Orthodox monasteries, of information on car rental prices and hotel prices and of a catalogue with the places that sell handicraft objects, as these were the materials the Spanish tourists were requesting most often.Footnote 109 This incident suggests that despite the abundancy of printed tourist materials, the Ministry of Tourism's bureaucracy and increased politicisation (it was created in 1971 to centralise tourism development in Romania with the NTO–Carpathians becoming only a department within it) in fact limited the capacity to meet Western tourists’ desires.
What Did Western Tourists Want to See in Romania?
Most of the guidebooks and tourist fliers were designed and published by the NTO–Carpathians/Ministry of Tourism, but some were produced by foreign publishers as well.Footnote 110 As a 1981 study by the Institute for Research and Development in Tourism shows, foreign tourists relied on travel guides published in their home countries and fellow travellers’ recommendations when choosing their next tourist destination.Footnote 111 Hence, an examination of these promotion materials is helpful in grasping how Romania was depicted in the capitalist West and what drew Western tourists to this socialist country. Strikingly, in the 1960s their narrative did not differ much from those printed by the Romanian socialist state. Guidebooks published abroad mentioned that Romania was a socialist country, and briefly listed the accomplishments of the socialist regime while underpinning its sunny seaside and folk culture. Much like the Romanian ones, these travel guides focused on persuading tourists to choose Romania as their travel destination despite its location beyond the Iron Curtain. An important difference was that Western publications mentioned this aspect more explicitly. A 1968 guidebook published in France opened with the question ‘Why Romania?’ According to the guidebook, the answer was simple:
This year you'll want to spend your vacation abroad and you'll probably visit the same place as last year. But what about discovering a new destination? A country where you'll feel like home, where you are welcomed like a friend and where you can also find . . . the sun.Footnote 112
As in the 1960s, when tourists sought sunny destinations for their vacations, this introduction aimed to catch their attention. But given that Romania was a socialist country and Cold War rhetoric was still strong in Western countries, the guidebook carefully addressed this issue. After all, tourism was supposed to ease the East–West Cold War relations.
But you will say . . . this is beyond the Iron Curtain. This is true! But I assure you that this trip doesn't entail any hazard. You will be able to move freely much like at home, and you will be positively surprised by the freedom you encounter everywhere as long as you follow the law.
The guidebook also addressed issues such as distance and language. It informed its readers that a trip to Romania only took four hours by plane, which should not be a problem for the modern tourist who sought ‘adventure and friendship’. In addition, it informed French tourists that linguistic misunderstanding would hardly be an issue because, as the travel guide put it, ‘if you don't speak Romanian, they speak French’.Footnote 113 The 1968 guidebook focused on cultural and historical similarities between France and Romania despite the physical distance and presumed political and cultural barriers. Compared to the guidebooks published in Romania, the 1968 French travel guide did a better job at tailoring its message to French readers as it showed a more intimate knowledge of French tourists’ fears and prejudices. Except the short mentioning of the Iron Curtain, the French guidebook looked like a tourist advertising for a country that, albeit geographically distant, shared the same system of values with the tourists. Moreover, the messages of the French and Romanian guidebooks seemed the same: Romania was part of European culture despite its socialist regime (which was rarely mentioned). As in May 1968 Charles du Gaulle visited Romania and both cultural and economic relations between Romania and France were booming, this guidebook was part of the emerging détente between the capitalist West and the socialist East. Against this backdrop Romania was becoming a friendlier tourist destination for the French tourists. Yet the interpretation of these guidebooks cannot be separated from the meanings the potential readers ascribed to it. As scholars of intellectual history have taught us, historical texts should be read in connection with their context – there is no single interpretation of a given text.Footnote 114 Most certainly the ways in which the guidebooks about socialist Romania were read and understood by the French public were shaped by the détente context, but also by each tourist's social and intellectual upbringing and personal expectations and interests. As many Western tourists who visited Romania had working-class backgrounds, one can assume that the message of friendship and social fairness put forth by the foreign or Romanian guidebooks appealed to them.
But the typology of tourists who visited socialist Romania in the 1960s–80s was much broader. One particular group was that of American and Western European tourists interested in the legend of Count Dracula. Although it is not the purpose of this article to examine Dracula tourism, this exemplifies well how the Romanian state balanced commercialism and politics in its tourist promotion. It also shows how Romania's tourist promotion was not just in the hands of the Romanian state. As in the 1970s, the film industry in some Western countries rediscovered the myth of Dracula, the interest in which was high among Western tourists.Footnote 115 Moreover, Dracula literature and popular culture developed particularly in Great Britain, the United States and Spain. In 1972, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu's book In Search of Dracula enjoyed some popularity in the United States, while the New York-based General Tours travel agency and Pan Am airline decided to develop such a tour.Footnote 116 In April 1973, the success of the book led screenwriter Samuel Gallu to approach the Romanian authorities in order to have a film about Dracula shot in Romania. Corneliu Bogdan, Romania's ambassador to Washington, and Mihail Dumitru, director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, received his proposal with enthusiasm because it would have enhanced Romania's image among the US viewers (the audience was estimated at around 70 million people).Footnote 117 Nevertheless, this project had to be approved by a number of institutions, among them the Council for Culture and Socialist Education. As an institution created in 1971 particularly to safeguard the socialist ideology, this body politely rejected the proposal because ‘the Romanian film facilities were fully booked for the rest of the year’.Footnote 118 In the eyes of the Council for Culture and Socialist Education, the story of Dracula was incompatible with the image of Romania as a modern socialist country.
Despite the opposition of more ideologically inclined institutions against the Dracula tourism, in 1978 two tourist agencies in Barcelona were offering trips to Romania advertised as following ‘the route of Count Dracula’.Footnote 119 However, in order to appease those Romanian authorities unhappy about promoting Romania as a ‘land of vampires’, a compromise was reached, particularly in the mid-1970s.Footnote 120 According to a guidebook published in the United States by Kurt Brokaw, with an introduction by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally, this compromise led to ‘a historic tour of genuine sites connected with Vlad's name’ but with the Dracula story as the backdrop.Footnote 121 This became the pattern for other Dracula tours as well. For instance, trips organised by tourist operators in Barcelona dedicated only a couple of days out of fifteen to specific Dracula locations, such as Snagov monastery near Bucharest and the Transylvanian towns of Brasov, Bran and Sighisoara.Footnote 122 According to Kurt Brokaw, on the one hand the Romanian socialist officials were amused by the ‘throngs of people’ who visited the Romanian Library in New York, which exhibited portraits of Dracula, but on the other hand they were keen to make this a profitable business.Footnote 123 Although among Romanian state officials there was a high interest in getting hard currencies from the Dracula tourism, not everybody approved of this. On the one hand, tourist and foreign affairs specialists had a pragmatic approach to this matter, while on the other hand institutions like the Council for Culture and Socialist Education rejected a more commercial approach in promoting Romania abroad. The CCSE's view prevailed as of the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s against the backdrop of Nicolae Ceausescu's personality cult, for which this institution was in fact in charge.
Both the guidebook published in France and the ones published in the United States about Dracula (which included information about Romania as a tourist destination) managed to focus the Western public's attention on Romania. From a ‘distant’ destination in Eastern Europe, this socialist country became a friendlier and a more accessible place to those tourists wanting to casually sunbathe on the Black Sea coast or to trace Dracula in Transylvania.
Conclusions
The Romanian socialist state aimed to act in an entrepreneurial fashion as it attempted to develop and promote Romania as a tourist destination in capitalist countries. Tourist officials closely followed reports on international tourism and attempted to adjust their promotional message so as to attract more Western tourists. This strategy did succeed in bringing more foreign tourists from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, yet not enough to satisfy the demands of the party officials. In their attempts to increase the number of foreign tourists, especially of tourists from capitalist countries, Romanian-published guidebooks presented the country as part of high European culture, at times losing sight of the country's specificity. This reflected a process of cultural Westernisation and re-branding in the context of the Cold War and Romania's more nationalist stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Some foreign publishers and tourist agencies, especially in Western Europe, picked up on this tendency and in the late 1960s started to present Romania as a familiar destination. The emphasis on high culture and European heritage in the presentation of Romania worked as a form of ‘soft power’ in the Cold War context as it aimed to attract more tourists. But the Romanian guidebooks’ focus on high culture was more in tune with the Soviet cultural strategies during the Cold War; hence it failed to appreciate young people's preference for the more American inspired popular culture.
Similarly, the Romanian socialist regime was unwilling to fully give up its political rhetoric and adjust to the whims of Western tourists. This became particularly clear in the case of Dracula tourism. As some of the guidebooks that promoted this type of tourism insisted on Romania's mysticism and backwardness, it was hardly the kind of image that the socialist regime wanted to send abroad. However, even in this case a compromise was reached between the Romanian state and the travel firms, and as long as they mentioned the story of the real historical character and money flowed in, the regime agreed to Dracula tours – although it never included them in its own promotional campaigns. This hesitant attitude may have frustrated those tourists who came on purpose to learn more about the Dracula story, especially as guides were not instructed to offer much information about this topic in most officially organised tours. The adjustment to the rules of the market was only partial because tourism functioned, after all, within a planned economy, although some attempts to decentralise tourism management were made as of the late 1960s. Moreover, a tension occurred between party elites and tourist specialists. The party elites wanted to use tourism to swiftly acquire the foreign currency that international tourism promised to deliver, while tourist specialists had a more pragmatic, economically focused approach. In the end, the balance inclined toward political power, which negatively affected the Romanian tourism industry.
At the same time, despite receiving significant official attention, international tourism in socialist Romania never became a key economic sector like the chemical and processing industries. In the 1960s and the 1970s, specialists in tourism pushed for more investments in tourism and for more autonomy in tourism management, but the global economic recession in the late 1970s and early 1980s along with Nicolae Ceaușescu's increased grip on power curtailed their efforts as international tourism delivered less and less revenue. Hence, in the 1980s, investment in tourism was discontinued (as in all other economic sectors), which led to decaying infrastructure and subsequent complaints from the Western travel firms that took tourists to Romania. If during the 1960s and the 1970s Romania seemed like a promising tourist destination for Western tourists, in the 1980s international context and a dull tourist vibe brought international tourism from the West to a halt. In order to fill the huge infrastructure on the Black Sea coast, the Romanian state tried to appeal to tourists from socialist countries and to Romanian tourists themselves.
However, the short episode of thriving tourism in the 1970s reflects the complexities of a planned economy and of the Romanian socialist regime, which showed a certain ability to adapt to the demands of the capitalist market. Yet when this happened it was less because of the political power and more because of the tourist specialists who were more connected with the tourist and economic developments elsewhere than were the party elites. As throughout the 1980s specialists were replaced by more obedient party aparatchiks, this is but one explanation for the regime's economic failure despite its ambitions to become an active player within the global tourist market.
Acknowledgements
The research leading to this article is part of the project PanEur1970s, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 669194). Thanks to William Chase, Claudiu Oancea, three anonymous reviewers and two Contemporary European History editors for valuable feedback, insights and overall help.
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