May be of interest?
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“Always in the wrong place
by Anthony Daniels

On the relics of oppression.

When I went to Romania shortly before the downfall of the Ceauscescu regime, the Romanians (to judge by the displays in the bookshops) seemed to be a nation of stereochemists: for displayed to the exclusion of almost everything else in the bookshop windows was a volume entitled The Stereospecific Characterization of Isoprene. Perhaps the authorship, or the alleged authorship, of this volume explained its strange popularity: that of Elena Ceauscescu, Doctor of Science and Member of the Romanian Academy.

I did not know why the dictator’s wife had chosen chemistry as the realm of her supposed genius and world-fame. Nevertheless, I considered buying a copy, but then thought better of it. Surely any assistant in a bookshop would suspect me of wanting to expose it to satire, ridicule, and mockery on my return home? In a totalitarian society, participation in the cult of personality is easily interpreted as subversive, while failure to participate is tantamount to rebellion. In other words, where lies are the very lifeblood of the state, paranoia is inevitable.”

“The book stand at the London Book Fair, nearly twenty years later, was sufficient proof of a revolutionary change. A mad monomania had been replaced by a healthy—or is it merely normal?—diversity. By this, I mean real diversity, not the academic Newspeak form that means a combination of submissive mental conformity and public profession of adherence to certain secular pieties. For people who live by ideas, no change could be more profound or important.

Among the books on the stand I found one that had an almost physical effect on me. It was a book of photographs, with the title Kombinat: Ruine Industriale ale Epocii de Aur, translated as Kombinat: Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era.[2] The Golden Era, of course, was the name that Ceauscescu and his acolytes modestly gave to the period of their own rule, and anyone who had the slightest experience of it could not mistake the depth of the irony of the book’s title, a symptom of a pent-up fury and despair so great that sometimes a brief verbal snort of contempt seemed, and seems, the only possible, constructive, and self-preserving response. But of course it is not enough.

There was a time not so very long ago when I despised books of photographs. I took the opposite view to that of Alice,…”.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Always-in-the-wrong-place-4112