Chuck Norris vs. Communism

Abstract

In 1989 country after country in Central and Eastern Europe shifted from rule by Communist dictatorships to rule by constitutional democracies. In every case but one the transitions were nonviolent. Indeed, Czechoslovakia's evolution in that year was so smooth that it became known as a velvet revolution. The exception was Romania, where Nicolae Ceauşescu, longtime general secretary of the Romanian Communist party, and his wife, Elena, were summarily executed by a firing squad armed with Kalashnikov rifles after a one-hour trial on Christmas Day 1989. This method of execution presumably was not influenced by the popularity in Romania at that time of Hollywood action heroes armed with automatic weapons. However, as this absorbing documentary film illustrates, many Romanians throughout the 1980s loved watching bootlegged videocassettes of Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and other machine-gun-toting stars shoot all the bad guys without losing their cool. Those sorts of Hollywood films—especially ones that depicted large private homes, supermarkets packed with food, and fancy cars—could not be shown legally in Romanian cinemas or on state-controlled television. So the enterprising black marketer Teodor Zamfir continually smuggled videocassettes across Romania's border with Hungary, often by bribing the border guards. In Bucharest Zamfir had the videos dubbed into Romanian, usually with just one voice speaking all the dialogue on top of the original English-language soundtrack. Zamfir may have owned as many as 360 videocassette recorders, allowing him to make hundreds of copies of each film, which were then distributed by his lieutenants across the country into the hands of ordinary Romanians, who gathered surreptitiously in private apartments to enjoy as many as four or five films per night.