Romanian Revolution of 1989

The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was a week-long series of riots and protests in late December of 1989 that overthrew the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. The increasingly violent riots culminated a cursory trial and the execution of Ceauşescu and his wife Elena. The revolution took place as other Eastern European nations were transitioning peacefully to democracy; Romania was the only Eastern Bloc country to violently overthrow its Communist regime.

Before the revolution

See main article Communist Romania

As in neighboring countries, by 1989 the bulk of the Romanian populace were dissatisfied with the Communist regime. Ceauşescu's economic and development policies (including grandiose construction projects and an austerity program to enable Romania to pay back its entire national debt) were generally blamed for the country's acute shortages and widespread, increasting poverty; furthermore, the secret police (Securitate) had become so ubiquitous as to make Romania generally a police state.

Timişoara

On December 16 a protest broke out in Timişoara as a result of an attempt by the government to deport a dissident Hungarian Methodist priest, László Tőkés, who had recently spoken out against the regime and was charged with inciting ethnic hatred. Many passer-by religious Romanian students, not knowing the details and being told by supporters that this is an action of state against religion, spontaneously decided to join the manifestation. The mayor, Petre Moţ, promised not to evict Tőkés, but the crowd had grown impatient—because Petre Moţ refused to make official papers to counter the deportation—and started to demonstrate and shout. The police and Securitate forces appeared. Some of the protestors tried to burn down the building that housed the District Comittee of the Communist Party of Romania (CPR). The Securitate responded with tear gas and water jets, while the police beat up rioters and arrested many of them. Around 9:00 p.m. the rioters withdrew, regrouped around the Romanian Orthodox Cathedral and started going around the city, but again they were confronted by the security forces.

Riots and protests resumed the following day, December 17. The rioters broke into the District Committee, and threw into the street Party documents, propaganda brochures, Ceauşescu's writings, and other things. The rioters again intended to burn the building, and started to make a fire, but were stopped this time by army soldiers. The presence of the army meant that orders had come from the highest level, presumably from Ceauşescu himself. The army failed to establish order, but succeeded in making Timişoara a living hell: shooting, death, injuries, fights and the burning of cars, Transport Auto Blindat (TAB) armored personnel carriers, tanks and shops. After 8:00 p.m., from Piaţa Libertăţii (Liberty Square) to the Opera there was wild shooting, including in the zones of Decebal bridge, Calea Lipovei (Lipovei Way) and Calea Girocului (Girocului Way). Tanks, trucks and TABs (Armoured personnel carriers) blocked the entries to the city whilst helicopters continued reconaissance flights. After midnight the protests calmed down. Ion Coman, Ilie Matei and Ştefan Guşă inspected the city, which looked like it was in the aftermath of a war: everywhere destruction, ash and blood.

On the morning of December 18, the center of Timişoara was guarded by soldiers and plain-clothes Securitate. Mayor Moţ convoked a Party meeting at the University to condemn the vandalism of the previous days and declared martial law, prohibiting people from going about in groups larger than two people. Despite the danger, a group of 30 young men headed for the Cathedral, where they stopped and waved a flag from which they had removed the Romanian Communist coat of arms. Knowing that they will be fired upon, they started to sing "Deşteaptă-te, române!", an earlier national anthem that had been banned since 1947. They were, indeed, fired upon; some died, some were seriously injured, others escaped.

On December 19, Radu Bălan and Ştefan Guşă visited the workers in factories, but were unable to make them resume work. On December 20, workers entered the city in massive columns. 100,000 protesters occupied Piaţa Operei (Opera Square - today Piaţa Victoriei; Victory Square), and started to chant anti-government protests: "Noi suntem poporul!" ("We are the people!"), "Armata e cu noi!" ("The army is with us!"), "Nu vă fie frică, Ceauşescu pică!" ("Have no fear, Ceauşescu will fall"). Meanwhile, Emil Bobu and Constantin Dăscălescu were sent by Elena Ceauşescu (Nicolae Ceauşescu being at that time in Iran), to meet with a delegation of the protesters; however, they refused to comply with the protestors' demands and the situation remained essentially the same; the next day trains with workers from factories in Oltenia arrived in Timişoara to join the protests. One worker explained: "Yesterday, the comrade factory boss and the Party official rounded us up in the yard, gave us a stick and told us that in Timişoara the Hungarians and the hooligans devastated the city and we have to go there and crush this revolt. But now I realize that this is not true."

Bucharest

The event was largely mediated by the popular Voice of America radio and by the Timisoara students returning home for Christmas holidays. A group of conspiring generals in Securitate used the opportunity to launch a coup in Bucharest. The coup, prepared since 1982, was originally planned for the New Year feasts, but was spontaneously replanned to catch the good moment. Their leader, Stanculescu was the closest man of Ceausescu and convinced him to hold a mass rally in a plaza that was prepared with remotely controlled automatic guns. During the talk of Ceausescu, the remotely controlled automatic guns were set to fire randomly over the crowd and agitators started to cry in loud-speakers against Ceausescu. Scared, the people first tried to run away. Being told with loud-speakers that the Securitate is firing on them and that a "revolution" is going on, the people were convinced to join the "revolution". This turned into a protest demonstration and in the end a real revolution emerged.

On the morning of December 21, Ceauşescu, having hastened back from Iran, made a public speech from the balcony of his palace, the Casa Poporului in Bucharest, to condemn the violent protests in Timişoara. As he addressed the crowd from the balcony of a government building, most of the people shouted approval but, unprecedentedly, some booed and whistled. Ceauşescu visibly paled. The live transmission of that speech was interrupted, but the people who watched, saw enough to realise that something is going on.

The jeers and whistles erupted into riot; after a firework exploded in the air, people fled the immediate location, but took to the streets, placing the capital, like Timişoara, in turmoil. Slogans were shouted both to support Ceauşescu "Ceauşescu şi poporul" ("Ceauşescu and the People") "Ceauşescu–PCR" ("Ceauşescu–Communist Party") and against him "Jos dictatorul!" ("Down with the dictator"), "Moarte criminalului!" ("Death to the criminal"), "Noi suntem poporul, jos cu dictatorul!" ("We are the People, down with the dictator" - the slogan in the above picture), "Ceauşescu cine eşti/Criminal din Scorniceşti" ("Ceauşescu, who are you?/A criminal from Scorniceşti"), "Ceauşescu nu uita/Vrem pantofi din pielea ta!" ("Ceauşescu, don't forget / we want to make shoes from your hide"). The center of the city, from Piaţa Kogălniceanu to Piaţa Unirii to Piaţa Rosetti to Piaţa Romană, filled with protesters. On the statue of Mihai Viteazul on Boulevard Mihail Kogalniceanu near the University, a young man waved a tricolour without the Communist coat of arms.

As the hours passed, many more people took to the streets. Soon the protestors — unarmed and unorganized — were faced with soldiers, tanks, TABs (APCs), USLA troops (Unitate Specială pentru Lupta Antiteroristă, anti-terrorist special squads), and armed plain-clothes Securitate officers. The crowd was fired upon from buildings, side streets and tanks. There were many deaths, by shooting, hitting, stabbing, squashing by armored vehicles (one TAB drove into the crowd around the Intercontinental Hotel, crushing people—a French journalist, Jean Louis Calderon, was killed that day; a street nearby Universitate square was named after him). Firefighters hit the demonstrators with powerful water jets and the police beat and arrested people. Protestors managed to build a defensible barricade in front of Dunărea ("Danube") restaurant, which stood until after midnight, but finally was torn apart by escalated repressive forces. Intense, continuous shooting continued until after 3:00 a.m., by which time the survivors had fled the streets.

Records of the fighting that day include footage shot from helicopters — sent to raid the area and to record evidence for anticipated reprisals — and by tourists in the high tower of the centrally located Intercontinental Hotel, next to the National Theater and across the street from the University.

Ceauşescu falls

Doubtless, in the wee hours of December 22, Ceauşescu thought he had quashed the protests. Hoevever, before 7:00 a.m., his wife Elena recieved the bad news that workers from many industrial platforms (large communist-era factories or groups of factories concentrated into industrial zones) were marching in columns towards the center. The police barricades that stopped access to Piaţa Universităţii (University Square) and Piaţa Palatului (Palace Square, now Piaţa Revoluţiei — Revolution Square) proved futile. By 9:30 a.m., University Square was full. Security forces (army, police and others) reappeared, but this time they defected to the protesters' side; why they did so remains a mystery. It remains a matter of dispute whether army and other leaders turned against Ceauşescu out of sincere revulsion at his policies (as many later claimed) or simply out of opportunism.

By 10 A.M., when the radio broadcast announced martial law and a ban on groups larger than 5 persons, there were hundreds of thousands of people in central Bucharest, gathering for the first time from own initiative. (The previous day's crowd had come together because of Ceauşescu's announced intention to address them.) Ceauşescu tried to address the crowd from the balcony of the CPR Central Committee building, but was met with a wave of disapproval and anger. Helicopters spread manifestos — which didn't reach the crowd, due to a wind — to tell people not to fall victim to diversions from the last days, but to go home and have a happy Christmas. The rioters forced the doors of the Central Committee building and tried to reach Ceauşescu, but he fled by helicopter; why he fled by helicopter, when he could have used the intricate tunnel system of the Central Committee building also remains a mystery. After 11 A.M., Victor Stănculescu, now head of the army (Vasile Milea, Ceauşescu's minister of defense, had commited suicide), ordered them to withdraw, and then reported that the crowd has invaded the Palace Square.

Securitate General Victor Stanculescu, the main advisor of Ceausescu, the mastermind of the coup d'etat of 1989, the first defence minister after the Revolution, used to be (during communism) the only man to handle the payments of Arab countries for the secret commerce with weapons (according to the book of Col. Dumitru Burlan). Prior to the coup, Ceausescu was in an international trip to Arab country and this was the moment when millions of dollars paid by Arabs for weapons were entering Romania in cash. Stanculescu was in charge of handling these money into banks and paying the weapons factories. Stanculescu chose the moment of the coup as the moment when he had a large amount of cash on him, to secure the capitalist continuation of his life. Immediately after the coup, the unpaid factories of weapons made fast bankrupcy.

On December 22 the army was without a leader, since Ceasescu (the official chief of the army) disappeared, being sent by his conspiring advisor (Stanculescu) to the country-side, and since the minister of Defence Vasile Milea was dead (initially the "revolution" leaders claimed that Milea was assasinated by Ceausescu, but might have equally been killed by the plot under the guise of a suicide because he might have refused to join them). Confused, the army officers decided to avoid conflicts by simulating that they would fraternize with the demonstrators (at least these were the orders and explanations they gave to soldiers at the sites of the major events in Bucharest).

Ceauşescu and his wife Elena fled the capital by helicopter with an aide holding a gun to the pilot's head. The pilot landed after faking an engine failure, and the Ceauşescus were captured by the armed forces at a road block. On December 25, Christmas Day, the two were condemned to death by a military kangaroo court on a range of charges including genocide, and were executed by firing squad in Târgovişte. The revolutionaries, having captured the state television outlet, immediately broadcast images of the dead couple to the public. With Ceauşescu dead, the anti-revolutionary resistance quickly died down.

Aftermath

After Ceauşescu fled by helicopter, the crowds in Palace Square bentered a celebratory mood, perhaps even more intense than in the other former Eastern Bloc countries because of the recent violence. People cried, shouted, and gave each other gifts. The occupation of the Central Committee building continued. People threw writings of Ceauşescu, official portraits, and propaganda books out the windows, intending to burn them. They also promptly ripped off the giant letters from the roof making up the word "comunist" ("communist") in the slogan: "Trăiască Partidul Comunist Român!" ("Long live the Communist Party of Romania!"). A young woman appeared on the rooftop and waved a flag with the coat of arms torn or cut out. New, occasional speakers were applauded where a few hours earlier Ceauşescu was booed, among them Mircea Diaconu, Alexa Visarion, Ernest Maftei and Sergiu Nicolaescu.

Fierce fights occurred at that moment at Bucharest airport between troups sent one against another under claims that they are going to meet terrorists. It a case discussed on Romanian TV in 1989, a garrison of Securitate affiliated soldiers (they were draftees in 1.5 year service related to Securitate) that received orders to go and defend a city against Ceausescu's terrorists (that were believed at that time to be a disobediant faction of the Securitate, since the Securitate openly fraternized with the revolution), while in the city it was announced that the Securitate soldiers are coming to attack the regular garrison. Hundreds of people volunteered to fight against the expected Securitate. In that particular case, the chief of the Securitate garisson felt that something is wrong and refused to enter the city. According to Colonel Dumitru Burlan's book, (the bodyguard of Ceausescu) the generals that were part of the conspiracy (led by general Victor Stanculescu) tried to create such fictive terrorists to instigate fear, to draw the army on the side of the plot.

However, the victory of the new National Salvation Front (FSN) was yet complete. Forces considered to be supporters of the old regime (spontaneously nicknamed "terrorists") opened fire on the crowd and attacked the vital points of socio-political life: the television, radio, and telephone buildings, as well as Casa Scânteii (the center of the nation's print media, still serving a similar role today under the name Casa Presei Libere, House of the Free Press) and the post office in the district of Drumul Taberei; Piaţa Palatului (site of the Central Committee building, but also of the central library, the national art museum, and the Ateneu Român, Bucharest's leading concert hall); the university and the adjoining Piaţa Universităţii (one of the city's main intersections); Otopeni and Băneasa airports; hospitals, and the Ministry of Defence.

During the night of December 22–December 23, Bucharest residents remained on the streets, especially in the attacked zones, fighting (and ultimately winning, even at the cost of many lives) a battle with an unseen and dangerous enemy. With military now on both sides, there were true battles with dead and wounded. At 9:00 p.m. on December 23, tanks and a few paratrooper units arrived to protect the Republic Palace.

Meanwhile, important messages of support come from all over the world: the U.S. (George H. W, Bush), the USSR (Mihail Gorbachev), Hungary (the Hungarian Socialist Party), the new East German government (at that time the two Germanys were not yet formally reunited), Bulgaria (Petar Mladenov, general-secretary of the Communist Party of Bulgaria), Czechoslovakia (Ladislav Adamec, leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and Vaclav Havel), China (the Minister of Foreign Affairs), France (François Mitterand), West Germany (Hans Dietrich Genscher), NATO (Manfred Woerner), the United Kingdom (Margaret Thatcher), Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Japan (the Communist Party of Japan) and Moldavian SSR.

In the following days moral support was supplemented by material support. Large quantities of foodstuffs, medicine, clothing, medical machinery, etc. were sent to Romania. Around the world, the press dedicated pages and whole numbers to the Romanian revolution and its heroes.

On December 24, Bucharest had the aspect of a city at war. Tanks, TABs (APCs) and trucks continued to go around the city and surround trouble spots in order to protect them. At intersections near strategic objective roadblocks were formed; automatic gunfire continued in and around Piaţa Universităţii, the Gara de Nord (the city's main railroad station), and Piaţa Palatului. "Terrorism" continued until December 27.

Former Communist Party member Ion Iliescu led the short-lived post-revolution National Salvation Front party and, in 1990, became Romania's first democratically elected president.

The whole sympathy Romania gained from the outside world with the Revolution was lost during the days of 13-15 June 1990.

External link

• The series of 3 articles in the Romanian newspaper Adevarul, 2003, [1] (http://www.adevarulonline.ro) (see archives) titled "I was the copy of Ceausescu", (rom. "Eu am fost sosia lui Nicolae Ceausescu"). (There also exists a romanian book with the same title by Col. Dumitru Burlan)
• Viorel Patrichi, "I was the replacement of Nicolae Ceausescu" (rom. Eu am fost sosia lui Nicolae Ceausescu), in World Magazin (rom. Lumea Magazin) Nr 12, 2001: [2] (http://www.lumeam.ro/nr12_2001/politica_si_servicii_secrete.html)
• Marian Oprea "After 15 years -- the conspiracy of Securitate" (rom. Au trecut 15 ani -- Conspiratia Securitatii), in World Magazin (rom. Lumea Magazin) Nr 10, 2004: [3] (http://www.lumeam.ro)
• Victor Stanculescu "Do not have merci, they own 33 milion dollars" (rom. "Nu va fie mila, au 2 miliarde de lei in cont") in National Journal (rom. Jurnalul National) Nov 22, 2004 [4] (http://www.jurnalul.ro/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=14985)
• The Politicians and the revolution of 1989 (http://www.timisoara.com/newmioc/Politic.htm)
• A picture of a Romanian flag with the Communist coat of arms (http://flagspot.net/flags/ro-1948.html).

The speech of Nicolae Ceauşescu broadcast on December 20, 1989 to condemn the acts of Timişoara: [5] (http://www.infotim.ro/memorial89/articole/articole/art001.01.htm)

References

• Ştefănescu, Domniţa Cinci ani din Istoria României ("Five years in the history of Romania"), 1995. Maşina de Sris, Bucharest.