Turning West

A cherished aim of Rumania's in dependent Communist boss Nicolae Ceausescu is to see his country out grow its role as the melon-and- cucumber patch of Eastern Europe. Nothing will change, he realizes, if the Russians have their way. So Ceausescu stubbornly resists the integration of Rumania's economy with the Soviet bloc's Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). Instead, he relies largely on Western technology to turn his country toward industrialization.

Bucharest these days is aswarm with West German, British, French and Jap anese visitors peddling such industrial tools as airplanes, chemical equipment and textile machinery. Already half of Rumania's trade is with non-Communist countries, compared with only 20% a decade ago. Rumania's industrial pro duction grew 12% in 1968, the great est increase of any country in the Eastern bloc. The expansion was more than twice as rapid as that of Czechoslovakia or Hungary, and it exceeded the U.S.S.R.'s growth rate by one third.

The Rumanian effort is evident at Galati, once a quiet town of peasants and fishermen on the Danube, where the blast furnaces of huge new steel mills now light the night sky. When fully completed next year, the complex will lift the country's annual steel output from 4,400,000 tons to 6,900,000 tons, almost as much as Australia's production and more than Sweden's. Petrochemical plants are rising at Ploesti, next to Rumania's oil wells, which until recently constituted the country's only significant industry. In conjunction with Yugoslavia, the Rumanians have nearly completed the Danube's largest dam, for hydroelectric power, at a point where the river foams through the Iron Gate gorge in the Carpathian Mountains. Within two years, Rumania's expanding machine-tool industry should become an important source of exports.

Forced industrialization has left scars on the country's economy. Housing shortages persist because industrial construction has priority. Though the average Rumanian's material lot is somewhat better than it was five years ago, his monthly pay is still only about $67 and the goods he can buy are generally shoddy because better-quality products of farm and factory are sold abroad. Meat is a once-a-week delicacy and Bucharest butcher shops offer mostly sausage. Lately, Rumanian planners have begun to worry that factories may be pulling so many workers off the under-mechanized collective farms that crop shortages will develop. However that problem turns out, Ceausescu's biggest economic gamble is political. He banks on his faithful adherence to Communist political doctrine--and a police state-to outweigh Moscow's annoyance with his trade ties to the West. Rumania's leaders reckon that they can and must take that risk if they are to build a modern state.

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