The Romanian Revolution of December 1989

As you may well remember from watching the news 20 years ago, Romania’s revolution of 1989 was a very big deal. Coming at the end of a turbulent autumn, in which the vast majority of the Soviet satelite states of Eastern Europe had by and large peacefully thrown off one-party communist rule, Romania’s revolution was the bloodiest of them all.

Yet to this day, 20 years on, nobody has been brought to justice for the deaths of the more than 1000 people killed in December 1989. That the vast majority were killed after Nicolae Ceausescu had himself been executed is one reason why.


So those of you who might have been expecting mass celebrations in Bucharest along the lines of those held in Berlin in October to celebrate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall will be disappointed.

While small-scale memorial services were held in Bucharest’s Piata Universitatii and Revolutiei on December 21, there was little political (or even, truth be told, public) will for anything bigger.

That such an event might well be attended by those directly responsible for the killing is a prospect few are happy with. Better then, to do little or nothing.

And in all likeliness, the 30th anniversary of the revolution will pass by without much fanfare too.

And the 40th...

Then, perhaps, in 30 years time, when Romania will celebrate 50 years since the fall of communism, the full, true story of Romania’s revolution will finally be ready to be told.

Here’s hoping.

For the time being, you will have to make do with our take on events...

Communist Romania

For most foreigners over the age of 30, the revolution remains the first thing about Romania that foreigners think of. Few however remember the equally bloody Mineriada of June 1990: a brutal, three-day long, government-approved riot. The revolution and Mineriada are linked: the latter had its roots in the former.

First, some history.

As with the majority of central and eastern European nations that found themselves under Red Army occupation in 1945, it was the Soviets that decided the country's fate.

They installed Petru Groza as prime minister in March 1945, despite both Groza’s Ploughmen’s Front and the Romanian Communist Party performing poorly in elections - and through him the Soviets controlled the Interior Ministry (and with it the army and security apparatus), and the Justice Ministry, and placed its officials in high ranking positions in all other ministries.

The façade of democracy was preserved until the summer of 1947, when the pre-war political parties, who had been harassed and persecuted since 1945, were all banned, and its leaders imprisoned at the notorious prison at Sigheţul Marmaţiei, in the north of Romania. King Michael was given an ultimatum in December 1947: exile or arrest. He chose exile, and abdicated on December 30.

Petru Groza remained Prime Minister until 1953, though real power rested in the hands of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, General Secretary of the Romanian Workers (Communist) Party. Dej was a barely literate former railway worker who had led strikes on the Romanian railways in the 1930s. He was the leader of a group of communists who had remained in Romania during the war, and which by the late 1940s had defeated another group of communists, led by Ana Pauker, who had spent the war in Moscow. By 1954, Dej’s only rival for power was the moderate and popular Lucreţiu Patraşcanu, who supported a policy of de-Stalinization. Dej had him shot as a traitor and his supporters arrested.

Life for most people under Dej was tough: the need to pour resources into industrialization meant that the production of consumer goods was neglected, and there were perennial shortages. The rights of workers were non-existent, and conditions in factories were generally awful. In the countryside collectivization of agriculture had reduced most farmers to a status little better than slaves, though in some remote parts of the country (including parts of the Apuseni and Maramureş) opposition to collectivization had been so strong that local party cadres simply gave up trying to implement it.

Ceausescu

Dej died in 1965, just two months before the Ninth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party. The keynote address of the congress was delivered by the relatively youthful (he was 47) Nicolae Ceauşescu, who, to the astonishment of his audience, denounced the abuses of the Dej years. The Congress confirmed Ceauşescu as General Secretary of the party, and most delegates left full of promises of a more liberal and open society.

Initially their hopes were fulfilled. American films were again shown in cinemas, foreign books translated and foreign plays staged. Russian disappeared from the school curriculum, replaced with French. In 1968 Ceausescu pulled off a political masterstroke by memorably condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a move that secured him superstar status at home, in Washington, in Paris and in London.

His reward was billions of dollars in foreign loans, which were spent on consumer goods and on industrialization. Yet these loans were taken at a time when country was already heavily in debt, and its capacity to repay its debts had been based on overly-optimistic export projections.

When exports failed to meet desired levels, the country was in trouble. By 1981 the country’s external debt reached $10.2 billion. In 1967 it had been $3.6 billion.

Yet astonishingly, in December 1982 Ceausescu announced that Romania would repay its entire foreign debt by 1990, in order to preserve the country’s independence. To achieve this goal, however, meant exporting almost everything produced in Romania, resulting in a sharp drop in living standards (which were none to clever anyhow).

At the beginning of 1983 rationing was introduced in some provinces for flour, bread, sugar and milk. By the end of the year only the capital was free of rationing. Other restrictions were placed on the consumption of petrol, electricity (there were constant power outages throughout the 1980s) and gas. From 1986 onwards many homes – even in the capital – went unheated in winter.

By 1989 Romania was a failed country. It had a leader and a government, but little else. Schools closed early in winter for a lack of heating, nobody worked as people spent all day queuing for basic foodstuffs, and a rampant black market saw speculators and corrupt officials make small fortunes.

Yet even as late as November 1989, when the Communist Party held its four-yearly congress, electing Ceauşescu as president for another four-year term, there was no sign that the regime was in any trouble. As communist regimes crumbled all over Eastern Europe, Ceauşescu held on.

Timisoara

Always a city whose people were better informed than the rest of the country (they could watch Yugoslav television) the population of Timişoara staged their first demonstration on December 16, initially in protest at the demotion and transfer (for openly opposing the regime) of a popular local Hungarian priest, Laszlo Tokes.

Quickly however, the demonstrations became political, and spread. On December 17 tens of thousands gathered in front of the city’s Orthodox Cathedral. Ceauşescu ordered the army to fire on the protestors, which it did. The protestors dispersed and the next day the city was calm, with soldiers and secret policemen everywhere; Ceauşescu proceeded with a planned two-day state visit to Iran.

The Revolution in Bucharest



Ceauşescu returned from Iran on December 20, and the next day a rally in Bucharest was organized to reassure the population that he was still in control. He wasn’t.

On the morning of December 21, 1989, the large crowd brought in to dutifully cheer him in the time-honoured way in fact  jeered him - on live television - during a rally in Piaţa Revoluţiei.

Ceausescu's face when he realises he is being booed is astonishing, and has been called his 'Dorothy Moment' in reference to the scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz when the facade of a great mysterious power is torn down to reveal nothing more than a frail old man

The rally then quickly became a riot, and the square was soon out of control. The crowd was eventually dispersed by gunfire, though to this day it is unclear if the gunfire was ordered by organs of the Ceausescu regime, or by the Ion Iliescu group of former communist nomenklature - known as the National Salvation Front (FSN) - that was about to sieze power. It may also have simply been the result of mass confusion, with many young army conscripts simply not knowing what was going on. 

Later on the night of December 21, an angry, anti-Ceausescu crowd assembled in Piaţa Universităţii, where it stayed until dawn of December 22, before again being fired upon, and, as morning broke, dispersed: there were hundreds of arrests.

During the night however the army had abandoned Ceausescu (following the mysterious death of Vasile Milea, the army's commander-in-chief), and the pendulum swung decisively.

The revolutionaries regrouped in Piaţa Revoluţiei, Piata Universitatii and at the headquarters of Romanian television. A fierce battle was fought here, but by the evening of December 22 the revolutionaries - with army assistance - had gained control of the television building.

That night the poet Mircea Dinescu made the first speech on free Romanian television, ending with the immortal words „Dictatorul a fugit. Am învins! Am învins!” (“The dictator has gone. We’ve won! We’ve won!”)

By this stage Ceauşescu and his entourage had indeed gone, fleeing in a helicopter from the top of the building of the Communist Party's Central Committee as the angry mob entered below. They were caught a few hours later, and shot on Christmas Day, 1989.

The power vacuum he left was quickly filled, with Ion Iliescu, a one-time loyal lieutenant of Ceauşescu and life-long socialist forming a provisional government. It is important to note here that though this new government was allegedly an independent body representative of every sector of Romanian society, Iliescu refused to allow any surviving members of Romania’s pre World War II governments join.

Important figures - including Corneliu Coposu, a leading liberal politician of the 1930s and 1940s who had served time in Romania’s brutal communist prisons – were prevented from entering the Central Committee building, where various factions were trying to form provisional governments. (A bust of Coposu now stands opposite the building, on the other side of the road in front of the Cretulescu Church).

The Mineriada

Iliescu’s new regime initially stated that it would be nothing more than a transitional government. Late in January 1990 however, Iliescu announced he would stand for election as president, and that the FSN would field candidates for parliament. Given that Iliescu and the FSN had complete control of every facet of government, including a media-monopoly, their crushing victory in elections (held in April 1990) was hardly surprising. Unhappy with what they viewed as one dictatorship replacing another, large numbers of protesters began demonstrating in Piata Universităţii early in May.

Led by students from Bucharest University the demonstrators soon occupied the entire square, declaring that it was the only part of Romania genuinely free of communism. As support for the protests grew, it became an embarrassment to Iliescu and his regime.

On June 13, 1990, Iliescu ordered miners from the Jiu Valley to Bucharest to brutally put down the revolt, and to ‘reoccupy the square in the name of the revolution.’

Over the next three days the miners killed more than 100 people. Iliescu then went on television to thank the miners for their ‘revolutionary zeal and spirit.’



More on the Sights of the Revolution

The best account of the revolution (in any language) is The Romanian Revolution, by Peter Siani-Davies.