Sure,but Lenin didn't ship oil to the Americans while fighting the whites
Nor did he proceed to win and let the powers of the time run amok in Russia,that came later
I get your point,but is it crazy to say that they could've done more? What exactly is worth preserving in a leftist formation if for most of its existence it served as a helper to the US and Israel? Will the Kurds be any freer now? Will having the people who made multiple deals with multiple archduke's of hell to survive in charge be considered an acceptable price for completely selling out?
After 1990 the US was ascendant,and yet Cuba isn't a capitalist nation
I get not wanting more war in a place that bled for decades at this point,but cozying up with Turkey's hand puppet is not a moral move nor a winning move
family's social position during communism (working class, apparatchik or other)
family's social position now (working class, bourgeois or peasants) and whether they moved with them or are still in Romania
(less so but still important) opinion on Roma, many dislike communism because the Roma were treated marginally better then they are now
(less important) which part of Romania they're from (east is poor, Transylvania is richer and has more wannabe euros, think western lib mindset or worst case scenario Iron Guard fetishists, this applies for Bucharest too)
I'm Romanian,living in Romania, but I will admit my knowledge of the communist period doesn't go far from what we're taught in school and some less anti communist sources, but it's not much, so I won't be giving out any takes on what we had more than, some good,some bad
Pre Ceausescu mostly alright, considering WW2 had ended, initial Ceausescu ok, started to go far into nationalism, spilt from the Warsaw Pact wasn't good, tried to act more independently,ended up somewhat cozying to US, attempted industrialization financed with IMF loans-very bad move, led to austerity, this is where most criticism of the regime comes,seeing as there were actual shortages and people had to wait in line for basic goods this being done to pay off the loans, ironically the debt was paid in full in early 1989, too little too late, legitimate discontent used as fig leaf for military coup backed by western interests in December,start of shock therapy and abysmal poverty,and till now mostly corruption scandals and trying to recover from that period
Plenty to criticize (draconian abortion ban, abysmal orphanage conditions that scarred a generation of kids, excesses like the People's Palace that replaced an entire old quarter of Bucharest, poorly trying to copy the real popularity the Kim family had in Korea, nationalistic historical revisionism, obsessive focus on the dacian side of the Romanian ethnogenesis as the core of Romanian identity, trying to appeal to both sides in Israel and Palestine), but overall created the basis of what we have today (we still depend on the housing they built and the infrastructure from those times) and took a mostly illiterate and poorly developed nation into the modern age with all the growing pains that process involves
That's the extent of what I can say, I would welcome more well read commrades to correct and add to my very limited summary and provide additional context that could help you
To close off, you should expect this to be a lengthy process, I know from experience how deep the anticommunism runs in Romanians, this having to do with it being imposed by the USSR for a good reason, but still tapping into more or less two centuries worth of previous attempts by Tzarist Russia to add Romania to itself led people to believe the communist period was a continuation of previous Russian imperialism, and the previous things I mentioned, and this goes doubly for those who left,as they were the ones most disillusioned by the failure of capitalism to save post communist Romania, leading them to develop an inferiority complex and blame the "communist heritage" the country had
Oh,and as a final addition,if they make any mention of the "Social Democratic" party that is in power in a coalition with the liberals at the moment as being some "red plague", dismiss that out of hand
Both big right wing parties in Romania at the moment have their roots in the "Front of National Salvation" in the nineties, a political party created by those who orchestrated the military coup and were in power for most of the nineties, they are as communist as Labor is, though forced to be somewhat less rabid in the neoliberalism department due to the circumstances present here,they are peoples favorite thing to point to and pretend the PCR(communist party) is still alive and to blame for all of modern Romania's ills (corruption mostly)