Surviving on Soy Salami: Dissidents, Exiles, Prisoners, and the Rhetoric of Affect in Postcommunist Romania

After decades of being seen, or rather heard, through Radio Free Europe as moral and political authorities preserving Romania’s values and hopes from abroad, exiles of the Cold War had a disappointing political career in the postcommunist transitional society. The main figures hailing on behalf of historic pollical parties failed to win the election in 1990, and failed to convince the electorate that they could lead them to freedom and democracy. The former dissidents who had lived overseas likewise did not manage to become opinion leaders, at least not compared to local intellectuals, and eventually damaged each other’s reputation in public fights and scandals. Why weren’t these exiles, once so full of promise for a democratic future in Romania, more impactful? The answer may point to their systematic undermining orchestrated by the neo-communist power brokers of the transitional era. Yet the answer is rather more complicated, one that this paper offers by focusing on the rhetoric of the early postcommunist decade and its emphasis on the shared deprivation experienced under communism. The slogan built around hunger—“who ate soy meat with us”—was part of a larger effect of political survivalism that viewed exiles as outsiders. I show that the contest of moral superiority, pitting those who had been imprisoned against those who had fled, fed a rhetoric of suffering that would eventually marginalize the exiles and any political contribution they could have made after 1989.