Nostalgia for what, exactly?

by Craig Bennett*

I’ve written in this space about nostalgia before. But the eventual yearning for a slower, quieter, friendlier past seems to be hard-wired into the human psyche, along with the tendency to forget the bad things about the past and remember only the good. The August 8, 2025, issue of the news magazine The Week features a rather surprising editorial from Romania’s Evenimentul Zilel. Surprising because it reveals that a recent poll found that 66% of Romanians believe “that Ceausescu was a good leader” and that his years of brutal, corrupt, and self-serving rule that gave the citizens of that country a lower standard of living than even their Communist neighbors were actually something to be remembered fondly and even missed.

I’ve been to Romania. In 2009, through a classified ad in the Appalachian Trail Conference Bulletin, I hooked up with a group of mostly New Englanders to spend a week hiking in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania under the leadership of a rather remarkable old fellow who organized such excursions frequently. It was a very interesting trip. One of the reasons I wanted to go was to see some of Europe that had remained much as it was between the two World Wars before it became “Disney-fied” like so much of the western part of the continent. And that’s about what I saw.

The neglect was readily apparent. In stark contrast to the countries I’d visited in Western Europe, all the houses appeared to need paint. Roads had not been well maintained. Out in the countryside, horse-drawn hay wagons (with inflatable rubber tires) were common, as there was very little farm machinery in evidence. Everything everywhere just looked as if it had belonged to someone without the means to maintain it as it should have been or replace it with something newer and more efficient when it became available.

Except in the capital, Bucharest. There Ceausescu’s huge (and very costly, entirely at the expense of the citizenry) presidential palace sat at one end of the magnificent boulevard that had been cleared of houses, apartment buildings, and offices to make way for it. And the palace was rather unique for its time. It had no air conditioning. At all. Ventilation was entirely natural, for Ceausescu was terrified of the possibility that someone might introduce poisonous gas into an air conditioning system and kill him.

And yet, he was convinced that the people loved him. Both he and his wife were dumbfounded when a popular uprising hunted them down like vicious criminals and executed them both on Christmas Day of 1989. But the country was gradually recovering and trying, among other things, to develop its attraction for tourists. That was in 2009. Exactly what might be happening there to provoke nostalgia for the “good old days” under Ceausescu is open to speculation.

But it’s not happening just in Romania. The same editorial reports that in what used to be East Germany, 66% of the population waxes nostalgic for the Communist years. And in Russia, 42% (a minority, at least) apparently miss the brutality and corruption of Stalin’s regime.
What’s going on here?

The author suggests that many of those who claim to miss the years their country spent ruled by a Communist government “either weren’t alive then’ or can’t imagine that anything [they] went through 35 years ago could be worse than ‘the misery of everyday life’ now.’’ And therein may lie a clue.

Nostalgia is, as I noted above, the yearning for a slower, quieter, friendlier past. But if all you’ve known for the bulk of your life (or the past three decades-plus) is the cutthroat competition for dominance in the marketplace; surrendering your life to your job because this is what the company demands; having your living, your retirement income, your medical insurance, etc. wide open to the vagaries of the market; and the back-room, under-the-table conniving of Big Business to cooperate in taking fullest advantage of every advance in technology that will enable the elimination of jobs in favor of robotics and artificial intelligence, it’s difficult to imagine that things have always been like this. Somewhere, sometime, there must have been that slower, quieter, friendlier time when the average person was treated more humanely by his employer, his government, and his neighbor. But when?

Might it be, perhaps, back when “America was great,” the touchstone of the nostalgia that’s currently being promoted at the highest level of government in this country? Back when Black Americans “knew their place” and moved to the back of the bus without protest? Back when Jews were not admitted to the more prestigious universities? Back when parents hesitated to allow their children to go swimming at a public pool in the summertime for fear of polio? Back when penicillin had yet to be discovered and people were dying from infections that could now be cured with a single hypodermic injection? Back, perhaps, to the Great Depression, after free enterprise capitalism had exhausted its treasure trove of beneficence and plunged not only the United States but the rest of the Western world into financial collapse? Exactly when was that magical, golden era, and exactly what is it about it that we miss? Or are we simply giving in to an innate psychological trope without realizing what we’re doing?

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and most book stores

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