OCR
182 Annemarie Sorescu-Marinkovié Unlike in other socialist eastern European countries, people in Albania caught installing TV receivers or watching foreign TV programs could be sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison. After 1973, TV jammers were mounted in the border zones, but with minimal results as it was usually possible to watch foreign TV even without TV receivers (Idrizi 2016). In 1982, the architecture of public places in Romania changed completely, Dana Mustata remarks, as TV receivers started appearing on the roofs of buildings after the interdiction of broadcasting the world football championship in Spain (2013: 156). This practice was tacitly accepted in Ceausescu’s Romania, where State Security (Securitatea) was controlling every aspect of its citizens’ lives: “The public space of the country remained clear of suppressive measures against reception of foreign television, as well as of any (functional) infrastructures obstructing foreign radio signal coming into the country” (Ibid.: 157). A TVR document from July 4, 1982, with the title Information concerning the Reception of Foreign Television Programmes on the Territory of Our Country, contains a map put up by Securitatea of the “reception zones” in Romania exposed to neighbouring countries’ television (Ibid.: 162). A note to this document explains that in southern Romania 6 to 8 million people were watching Bulgarian TV; 3 to 4 million Romanian citizens were watching Yugoslav TV in southwest Romania, while those in the north and east were watching programs of Soviet TV. According to this document, Yugoslavia had the highest number of transmitters sending signal into Romania (Ibid.: 158). From the above mentioned televisions, Yugoslavia’s was the most liberal and had the most interesting and diverse programs (SorescuMarinkovié 2015). Furthermore, its strong signal was covering the entire Banat, the highest regions of Transylvania, and parts of Muntenia and Oltenia, where it overlapped with the signal of Bulgarian TV. The Others Across the Border: Mediated Memories Even if one of the bloodiest borders of Europe in the 1980s, the Western border of Romania was, in the same time, very porous and greatly facilitated the circulation of goods, people, ideas, and images. As Badenoch et al. put it, “Broadcasting during the Cold War involved complex processes of circulation, appropriation and rejection of broadcasted content that were only ever partially circumscribed by the ideological blocs” (2013: 367). Yugoslav television played a main role in shaping the view on life of the Romanians in the Western part of Romania. This space functioned as a gateway for receiving TV broadcast from the “free world”, introducing the Romanians into the Western world of consumerism, getting them accustomed to Western civilization but also to the Yugoslav system of values. Thus, the Yugoslavs became significant, relevant close Others, whom the Romanians admired and wanted to imitate. Those living near the western Romanian border became a “mass of population living in Romania, but feeling towards Yugoslavia” (Gheo 2006: 122).