Romania Still Haunted by its ‘Stolen Revolution’

Our BIRN correspondent recalls the stirring events of 20 years ago, which toppled a hated regime but which now leave many people feeling ambivalent.

One night twenty years ago I had a nightmare. In this bad dream, a horrifying creature, a strange robot with many arms, came suddenly out of a wall and tried to kill me. Its metal branches beat against me, its many mouths with sharpened teeth clawed away while the creature’s eyes glinted malevolently.

“No… Must not let him catch me!” I started to run very fast. “Ahh!” I screamed, popping out of my bed. I was shaking. Cold sweat lined on my neck.

Just a few months later, the Romania’s own nightmare ended. During the last days of December 1989, on potholed streets gripped in ice and darkness, together with thousands of my fellow countrymen in Bucharest, I greeted the downfall of the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. The robot he had sent me in the above mentioned nightmare was finally destroyed. Or was it?

Romania, towards the end of the Ceausescu regime was, indeed, nightmarish. People endured savage rationing. Items such as bananas and oranges had become precious luxuries as a result of the dictator’s determination to repay the country’s foreign debt at breakneck speed. Even basic commodities like bread, meat, cooking oil and butter were severely limited. Power blackouts were common and in winter almost every house was cold and gloomy.

Ceausescu had made himself the subject of an intense personality cult, styling himself “The Father of the Nation”, among other things, and ruling the country as his personal fiefdom. He imposed enormous economic projects on the country, building huge industrial complexes while at the same time destroying old villages and churches.

The revolt against the Communist regime began on December 16 in the western city of Timisoara. That trigger was an attempt by the authorities to forcibly remove an ethnic Hungarian pastor, Laszlo Tokes, a critic of the regime, to a remote rural parish.

His supporters gathered outside Tokes’s house and soon the protest grew and spread across the city. Over the following days, the army and the police gunned down more than 100 people in the city who had rallied against the system.

Despite official attempts to keep the massacre in Timisoara secret, the news spread. I was at the time a young engineer in Cernavoda, site of Romania’s sole nuclear power plant, and heard the news on Radio Free Europe. People were shouting at the soldiers: “We are Romanians, like you!” then there was a brief silence, and then gunfire. More gunfire. Silence again.

For their part, state radio and television were still broadcasting their usual nauseating propaganda about Ceausescu and his wife, Elena. Finally, on December 21, Ceausescu attempted to regain control of the situation, delivering a speech in front of a crowd of some 100,000 people gathered in central Bucharest. But his predictably grandiloquent discourse soon met boos from the crowd. Fazed by the show of popular anger, Ceausescu and his wife fled in a helicopter to an unknown destination.

That night, Communist rule imploded as impoverished but jubilant Romanians flooded the streets, hoping for better times. “We are free!” “Down with the communism!” The joy and hope I felt when joining the crowd in the capital made me feel proud to be Romanian for the first time in my life.

But soon after, fighting erupted in Bucharest between alleged government loyalists from the secret police, the Securitate, fighting desperately to save the Ceausescu regime, and regular troops and ordinary people who had got hold of arms. Some 1,100 people died in the fighting.

On Christmas day, Ceausescu and his wife were executed after a summary trial. Days later, Romanian TV broadcast images of the Ceausescus' bullet-ridden corpses.

The regime fell but was replaced by ex-communists who made many efforts to block inquiries into the events of 1989. This led many Romanians to believe that the people’s revolution that began in Timisoara quickly turned into a putsch. Many Romanians now refer to it as the “stolen revolution”.

The following ten years were in many respects a lost decade in Romania’s history. Now a journalist, I witnessed the social and political turbulence of country ruled mostly by ex-communists who either resisted change altogether, or proved incompetent to preside over it.

After joining NATO in 2004 and the European Union three years later, Romania started to change, witnessing a surge of optimism as well as foreign investment. Annual growth rates of about 8 per cent and rocketing real estate prices became the new norm. But corruption, an unreformed state bureaucracy and continuous political infighting still hinder the country.

Twenty years after the revolution, most people still have ambivalent feelings about the legacy of Communism. Those nostalgic for the old times say the shifts to market capitalism and the EU membership have deprived the country of social stability and created huge inequalities.

On the other hand, those who had the greatest expectations in the early 1990s are now the most disappointed, as they believe that an elite tied to the communist regime has managed to preserve its privileged position in society.

Romania, it seems, remains troubled by the legacy of Nicolae Ceausescu. Ironically, the former dictator remains Romania’s most loved – and most hated – political leader. According to a poll conducted by Soros Foundation two years ago, Ceausescu is seen as the country’s best leader during the past century. At the same time, he is also ranked as the leader who has done most harm.

From my point of view, Romania is still haunted by its nightmarish past, is still searching for an identity and for some years to come will remain a dysfunctional society.