Until the mid-Sixties, Romania had been, so to speak, an ordinary, well-behaved Soviet satellite. Under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Romania was totalitarian, but a state in which there was some room to maneuver. When Gheorghiu-Dej died and Nicolae Ceausecscu took over, he set about closing up that room. He strengthened the Securitate, the secret police. They were now the equivalent of the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB. He instituted his "systematization" program. Rural villages were destroyed, peasant families forcibly relocated. This anti-kulak-style program was to lead to grand new agricultural collectives, which, however, never materialized. Agricultural production dropped catastrophically. Much of what was produced was sold abroad to acquire the funds necessary to maintain the Securitate.
This application of Marxist principles was perhaps one of the most literal to be found anywhere. The relocation of farmers, collectivization of agriculture, and other steps taken are quite directly from Marx's Communist Manifesto and predictably had disastrous results.
Ceausescu also generated a massive personality cult. His picture was everywhere, printed on posters, woven into tapestries, painted on walls. In Bucharest nine thousand houses and sixteen historic churches were bulldozed in order to create the Boulevard of Socialist Victory - an eight-lane road sweeping up to the Palace of Parliament. Before World War II and the Communist takeover, Bucharest had been the most elegant city in the region. Now, British journalist Anthony Daniels remarked that Ceausescu seemed determined to turn the Paris of the Balkans into the Pyongyang of the Balkans.
Romania's rich cultural heritage was indeed partially destroyed. Architectural masterpieces from the 1600's and 1700's were wiped away to create Stalinist monstrosities in the official style of Socialist Realism. All of which was remembered in the deep collective consciousness of the people of Romania, who were in no position at the time to rebel. But they would watch and wait, and the opportunity would eventually arise.
Ceausescu was not prepared to go quietly ... when opposition started to emerge, Ceausescu moved quickly to cut it down. In March 1989, a group of retired Party and government published an open letter accusing him of human-rights violations and demanding an end to the systematization program. All six signatories were arrested. Efforts to communicate with them were blocked.
Although the communist regime was still in control, and able to quickly silence this dissent, the first cracks in the wall of their monolith had appeared.
Then, in December, protests broke out in Timisoara, a city in the Transylvanian region, near Romania's borders with Hungary and Yugoslavia. The protests were sparked by government harassment of the Reverend Laszlo Tokes, a Protestant minister who had been set upon and stabbed by a band of masked men, almost certainly members of the Securitate. On December 16 the protests evolved into a full-scale demonstration. Ceausescu reacted ... Army and Securitate forces, incuding tank and helicopter units, moved in and started firing. The death toll was estimated at an extraordinary four thousand. The United States, Britain, Poland, and even the Soviet Union issued protests. Ceausescu was not in Bucharest to receive them. He was in Iran, going ahead with a scheduled state visit.
By 1989, there was nothing new about such Stalinist indifference - it had been going on since at least 1924 (Lenin's death and the beginning of Stalin's rise), if not since 1917. But what was new was the cultural climate in which ordinary people began to believe that they did not have to accept such treatment.
On December 20, Ceausescu returned to Bucharest and blasted the "fascists" and "terrorists" who were stirring up dissent. The next day at noon he stood on the balcony of the Palace of Parliament to address his people. Television cameras captured the astonishment on his face when his people began to boo and jeer him. Securitate forces swung into action to disperse the crowd. The first casualties were two young men crushed beneath an armored car. Fighting continued through the night, with an estimated forty dead in Bucharest, and another thirty in Cluj, a small city in Transylvania. But as protests erupted in other parts of the country, reports came in that army units were refusing to help the Securitate forces suppress them.
At this point, things began to change very quickly. With an open split between the army and the state police, everyone but perhaps Ceausescu knew that the end was near.
On the morning of December 22, Radio Bucharest announced that Defense Minister Vasile Milea had committed suicide. Neither foreign diplomats in Bucharest nor the Romanian General Staff believed it: they suspected that Milea had been killed by Securitate officers in retaliation for the army's failure to support them.
As often happens in history, when a totalitarian absolutist regime clamps down with its brutal power in an attempt to quell the unrest, it actually merely makes the unrest worse.
That may have been the decisive event. When one hundred fifty thousand protesters gathered later that day in Bucharest's University Square, the army actively joined them in beating back the Securitate. The insurgents captured the Palace of Parliament, the Central Committee headquarters, and other government buildings. That evening the liberated Radio Bucharest announced the formation of the National Salvation Front, which would include Laszlo Tokes and General Stefan Gusa, chief of the General Staff.
Romania was beginning to breathe the fresh air of freedom. One can try to assign credit for this to Pastor Tokes or to General Gusa, but the majority of the credit must go the people themselves, who had been suffering and who saw a chance to topple the individual and the system which caused their suffering.
Soon after the announcement, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, who had fled Bucharest by helicopter that morning, were captured by armed insurgents and handed over to the military. On Christmas Day they were put on trial by a self-described "extraordinary military tribunal" and charged with committing genocide, abusing power, undermining the economy, and stealing government funds. For fear that the Securitate would come in with a last-minute rescue, the army did not disclose the site of the trial, and no outside observers were permitted. However, the proceedings were videotaped, and the entire trial was broadcast on Romanian television the following day. The day after that, we in America could see a short clip on our own television screens - an elderly couple huddled in their overcoats and looking bewildered and almost pitiable. Almost. One of Nicolae Ceausescu's replies to his interrogators reflected his posture: "I am the president of Romania and the commander in chief of the Romanian army. I am the president of this people. I will not speak with you provocateurs any more, and I will not speak with the organizers of the putsch."
Although unpleasant, it was a proper start for the new era in Romania's history to fully videotape and broadcast these proceedings. As painful as it was, this was the new type of openness which Romania needed in order to begin properly a new phase in its national saga.
As for Elena Ceausescu, she was no innocent bystander. She was a Politburo member and first deputy prime minister. A few months earlier, when it appeared that ill health might force her husband to step down, she started jockeying for position to succeed him. Now, at the trial, she occasionally piped up with remarks like "Such impudence! I am a member and the chairwoman of the Academy of Sciences. You cannot talk to me in such a way!"
The couple made it easy for the Romanians. Had they eloquently and humbly defended themselves, they might have gained a modicum of sympathy. They could have never retained any form of power, but they could perhaps have found slightly less harsh treatment. As it was, they only infuriated the people even more.
The trial was not a model of due process (although the Ceausescus were offered a defense counsel, whose services they indignantly refused). But there is no doubt that the couple had done the things they were accused of.
Romania knew it had suffered - and here one is justified in personifying the nation, unlike so many other historical narratives, because the understanding of this misery was ubiquitous in the land - but it could not punish the system. One cannot see to it that a system endures the logical consequences of its actions. One can only ensure that the individuals who operated the system face the consequences of their actions. The system itself cannot be punished, only cast aside. People can be punished.
They were sentenced to death by firing squad. Then there ensued macabre confusion. Accounts differ. Perhaps the officer in charge of the firing squad was apprehensive that the Securitate forces, still active, would storm in before the executioners could do their job. Perhaps he and the squad members were awestruck at having in their power the dictators who had oppressed them for so long. Whatever. The result was disorder. The soldiers didn't wait for the formal order to fire, starting to pull their triggers as soon as the Ceausescus stepped outside the building. No one knows how many bullets were fired, but photographs showed the bloody remains.
As with deaths of any brutal ruler, there is a bittersweet emotion - naturally, one is glad that oppressed nation has been freed, and yet it is sobering to realize that after the deaths of thousand of brave rebels, these two additional deaths were still necessary to bring liberty. Both words in the phrase "necessary evil" make themselves felt.
Warehouses broken open by the insurgents after the execution confirmed the widespread belief that, while most Romanians lived in destitution, Party leaders were copiously supplied with luxuries, including beef, chocolate, coffee, and oranges. As Elena Ceausescu was being led to the firing squad, she cried out, "I was like a mother to you!" Mother ate off gold dishes, the kids starved.
In an instant, all the Marxist sloganeering about a classless society, about a people's revolution, and about equality was shown to be a lie. The communist ideology had never been anything more than a facade to cover the dictator's ability to amass personal wealth at the expense of the people. Romania had suffered bitterly for decades so that the ruler and his wife might enjoy the finest luxuries.
Soon after taking power, Nicolae Ceausescu had outlawed Christmas. Now, against the grisly background of his and Elena's execution, with the fighting still continuing, Romanians celebrated the Feast of the Nativity for the first time in more than twenty years.
The great script of history is written to unfold with precise irony - nobody in Romania planned for the overthrow to coincide precisely with Christmas, and nobody in Romania could have manipulated events so exactly even if they had wanted to. Yet the nation received its freedom as its first Christmas present in more than two decades.
