photos: imre saboDemonstrations that would overthrow the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu began on December 16, 1989. After the authorities used force against the demonstrators, even more people took to the streets. At a rally in Bucharest where Ceausescu wanted to condemn the participants of the protest, people started chanting against the dictatorship. There was an escalation of violence, a split in the security forces and clashes between the army and parts of the Sekuritatea. General Vasil Milea committed suicide after refusing Ceausescu's order to withdraw the army. Nicolae Ceauศescu and his wife Elena fled Bucharest on the morning of December 22. They were arrested in Trgoviลกte. A military court sentenced them to death, they were shot on the spot. The fight for their inheritance soon flared up among the revolutionaries. Details about the rule of the Ceausescu couple, who surrounded themselves with magnificent luxury in a country where people were literally starving, surfaced.
This text about the Romanian Revolution of 1989, due to circumstances, has been waiting for publication for thirty years. The story of the murder of Nicholas and Elena Ceausescu on Christmas Day, the persecution of members of their regime, the Shakespearean twists and turns of the fates of certain actors, the suicide of the president of the court who pronounced the death sentence on the Ceausescu couple, the death of their children Nick and Zoe, the imprisonment of a general who played an important role in their overthrow, we publish in three installments.
All the suffering of the population, all the discontents are projected in 1990 into a satanized figure of a tyrant, who almost loses his human dimensions.
Which of these is true? It is not possible to verify the data on the billion or more dollars in the Ceausescus' account, but every day some affair appears that hints that this was one of the biggest personal robberies of the 20th century. Pacepa, an escaped Romanian policeman, discovered that Ceausescu had been spying on the Americans for the Russians and stealing their chips. "I knew microelectronics was the thing of the future, but I can't believe that these almost invisible chips could be so crucially important to the survival of communism," he said when his intelligence service showed him a military chip it had managed to steal from Texas Instruments.
The "Washington Post", however, revealed that the Ceausescu clan also spied on the Russians at the expense of the Americans and supplied them with secret Russian weapons. The payments, twenty percent of the value of the transactions, were allegedly made to the Ceausescus' account in Switzerland. The "Washington Post" disclosed that from 1973 to December 1989 there was a spy operation whose main corridor went through Romania, where, with the knowledge of the head of state Nicolae Ceausescu, the main job bearers were his brothers, the deputy minister of defense Ilie Ceausescu and the head of the Romanian trade mission in Vienna, Marin Ceausescu, who committed suicide in the capital of Austria after the fall of tyranny.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
In an operation in which the US allegedly invested 250 million dollars, the latest Russian air defense system was delivered to the Americans through a "Romanian connection". It was not announced whether the points in Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria were "so highly rated", but the fact that there were was unearthed. Immediately, denials began to arrive from all the mentioned countries. The new Romanian interim government soon stated that it had no information that such a transaction had existed, that the weapons in question were not in the hands of the Romanian military, and that the government had not yet traced the Ceausescus' account in Switzerland.
Revelations of this kind are a convenient tool for political compromise, so they should, like many personal testimonies, be received with a grain of salt, especially when they are launched in election campaigns. There is no doubt, however, that there was a lot of corruption in that system. In terms of corruption, Romania was not an exception, it was just the most drastic example.*
*How is the 26th?. December 1989. wrote" New York Times" about forty relatives of Nicolae Ceausescu were in positions of power, including his son Nick, who was party secretary in Sibiu in Transylvania. The second son Valentin was a nuclear researcher, and daughter Zoe Elena, director of the Institute of Mathematics in Bucharest; brother Ilia was a general and deputy minister of defense, Nikolae Andruta, Police General and Deputy Minister of the Interior, Jon was in charge of state economic planning, Marin was a diplomat, and Florea the editor of the party paper "Scintheiaโ; Vasil Barbulescu was the party secretary in charge of agriculture, and brother ฤorฤe Petrescu in charge of trade unions.
Nico Ceausescu was detained by the army on the 22nd. December 1989. at the entrance to Bucharest. He was arrested and charged with genocide for shooting people and taking children hostage in Sibiu. He is 26. pestle 1990. sentenced for inciting serious murders and the death of 102 people to twenty years in prison, for violating the law on weapons for five years. He was sentenced to prison in 1991. reduced to sixteen years. Due to health reasons in 1992. he was released. He died in Vienna on the 26th. September 1996. The causes of death were diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver caused by chronic alcoholism.
HUNGER AND LUXURY
Not even the gold worn by Ceausescu's daughter Zoe, nor the underground marble corridors, the silver and gold kitsch in the presidential palace, the swimming pool, the boxing ring, the handball hall for one family, which drastically deviate from the general personal poverty and suffering of the population, do not deviate much from the model. Bolshevik courts.
The building of 7.300 rooms, the huge building of the unsuspecting Palace of the Central Government in the Boulevard of Victory of Socialism, with which they now do not know what to do, is not really a great exception, although, due to the time of famine in which it was built, it paints the psychology of imperial ambitions in a special light.
They say that the dictator, like some kind of stubborn brat, even sent leftover food from his own kitchen to the market and demanded that the money be returned to him. The main cause of the Romanian famine, however, is not so much the luxury and greed of the Ceausescu clan, as the unsuspected big failures of national enterprises.
It was announced that the Conductor sold 80 tons of gold, slipping the national reserve accumulated over seventy years, in order to repay international debts in the amount of 10 billion dollars. It was claimed that the return of the debt caused the famine that reigned in Romania, thereby justifying the rationalization of everything and everyone. Recent findings indicate that the famine was primarily the result of the collapse of his voluntarist strategy. Fifteen years earlier, Ceauศescu threatened the production of small rural farms, which produced 12 percent of milk, 54 percent of meat, 47 percent of fruit and 55 percent of vegetables on 43 percent of arable land. Instead of encouraging that small production, he sought to destroy it. According to Silviu Brucan, this is the main cause of food shortages in Romania.
The situation in Romanian industry is more tragic than in agriculture due to closedness and obsolescence. An indoctrinated engineer was in the midst of the revolutionary events in Bucharest, turning away from the habit that no one listened to him, even though there was shooting around, saying that everything was the fault of "illiterate Elena" and that Ceausescu was, in fact, a "good president" because , says that staunch supporter, "we didn't buy licenses, we won the production of five types of tanks ourselves, we won half of the helicopters, we also had an ambitious nuclear program...". Structural change in production in Romania will take at least ten difficult years. So far, general promises are still being made about the revitalization of the economy and the removal of barriers to private initiative.
BLANK SHEET OF PAPER
I had in my hands a graphic document - it is a sheet of clean paper from the table in front of "box 14" in the Timisoara opera house, on which is written in ink Declaratie a Comitetu Frontulu Democrat Roman din Timisoara, then in a new line under serial number one more Frontul Democrat Roman... The writer then left that sheet of paper and moved on to another, struggling to define the political goals of the revolution that took place spontaneously out of necessity. In the first declarations, these are, as you know, freedom of political organization, freedom of speech, conscience, religion, travel, revitalization of the economy.
The new government first began to remove the mechanisms of violence, first of all the infamous Sekuritatea was dismantled. The abolition of forced "voluntary work", the abolition of forced "shareholding", which was a form of artificial wage reduction, and the abolition of rationed supply were the first economic decisions of the new government. Abortion will be allowed. The discussion on reducing the price of electricity was interrupted when someone said that the state of the budget should be reviewed first.
The Romanian revolution, above all political, means the removal of a monstrous organization for violence against the population, an organization that tried to prolong the life of the dictatorial model and to prevent a political upheaval with an arsenal of intimidation, which was planned in advance and which included public terror, even poisoning the water in Sibiu (โฆ)
The key moment for the fall of the dictator may not be the escape from Bucharest, but the moment when the crowd, brought to the rally to cheer him on, started shouting insults. Every revolution, before or after, crystallizes some leadership. In Timisoara, only seven members of the ad hoc formed illegal Democratic Front led the multi-day demonstration.
Ceausescu, in fact, already fell when the people did not stop even though they were shooting at them. The fact that there are still sharp mass conflicts over the authorities speaks against the thesis of a conspiracy.
SPLIT IN THE NEW ELITE
The center of resistance to the regime was formed wherever possible. The young president of the new Romanian government is Petre Roman*, born in 1946, the son of Walter Neulander, alias Walter Roman, a pre-war member of the party and a Spanish fighter, a dissident from an old rabbinical family from Arad in Transylvania, a post-war member of the military staff and the former minister of telecommunications of Romania. who was removed as a potential "Titoist", then rehabilitated in 1953 and appointed director of a party publishing house.
The son of Petra, whom his friends call Pedro because of his mother Hortensia, a Spaniard, was educated in Bucharest and Toulouse, speaks fluent French and Spanish, is a professor at the Bucharest Polytechnic, joined a few years before the coup in a non-political, informal group formed by a member of the Romanian Academy science professor Mihaj Draganesku, for the purpose of discussing the progress of science and technology. Petre Roman was interested in environmental problems. They chose him as president because he is very educated, because he was brave and persistent during the revolution, because he is cold but communicative, because he is young and can bear the burden of difficult times, and because he looks good.
* Petre Roman was the prime minister of the revolutionary government in 1989. while in 1990 1991. were not brought down by the miners with a series of demonstrations called "mineriadโ; from 1996. to 1999. he was president of the senate, to 2000. Minister of Foreign Affairs, and after the break with the National Front of Jon Iliescu, one of the founders of the Democratic Party.
Professor Petre Roman is, therefore, an intellectual dissident, but still a part of the former nomenclature. In his youth, as the "International Herald Tribune" writes, Petre Roman was "close, even very close" to a young lady named Zoรซ Ceausescu*, whom the revolutionaries arrested with gold and who was spoken to very badly.
* Zoe Ceausescu (1949 2006) were arrested by the revolutionaries in 1989. Her property was confiscated.. She was released in mid-1990, but she could not return to the mathematics department of the Institute of Science technological research where she was the head. She died of lung cancer.
VENGEANCE ENERGY
That's how it happens in revolutions. All of Bucharest was talking about her gold and Niku's "kenta" boxers and sports socks, bleeding on Christmas (...)
The main man of the National Salvation Front, Ion Iliescu, the number 1 figure of the Romanian revolution, also belonged to that circle around Draganescu. He was the Minister of Youth, then the Secretary of the Central Committee of the RKP in charge of ideology, but due to a split with Ceausescu, he was dismissed and sent to Timisoara as the first secretary of the party, and from there he was demoted to the position of director of a publishing house, where he waited for the outbreak of the revolution. He was attributed certain connections with the KGB.
In the late spring of 1990, demonstrators in five cities accused Ion Iliescu of being a "neo-communist". The main demand of the students was to pass a law that would remove former communist activists from power for ten years.
Much more vengeful energy will be released. The main dissatisfaction, it seems, is still directed towards the repressive apparatus that was the essence of Ceausescu's rule. Opponents of the new leader Ion Ilijeskus blamed the fact that "only a few" Sekuritatea members were brought before the court* for violating human rights.
* Stanculescu was in the revolutionary government in 1989. was the Minister of Defense, and then the Minister of Industry. When his protector, President of Romania Ion Iliescu, stepped down from power, In 1997, Stanculescu. brought to court and after ten years of trials and appeals finally found guilty in November 2008. for the bloodshed in Timisoara on the 16th. December 1989. and together with the Minister of the Interior, Mihai ฤiฤaku, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He defended himself with words: "I didn't give orders to anyone. And I did not order any unit under my command in Timisoara to carry out any act of repression... " Victor Stanculescu was released from prison in 2014. and he died in 2016. At 86. year.
* The National Salvation Front is in the parliamentary elections on the 20th. pestle 1990. won 70 percent of the vote. After tensions with Peter Roman, the newly elected president of Romania, Ion Iliescu, separated with his supporters and founded the National Democratic Salvation Front, which grew into the Party of Social Democracy of Romania, and it was later renamed the Social Democratic Party. Ionescu was president of Romania from 1989. to 1996. and since 2000. to 2004. Public prosecutor Augustin Lazar accused him in April 2019. accused of crimes against humanity committed in 1989, and as the BBC reported, he dismissed the accusation as political revanchism. Roman remained at the head of the National Salvation Front, which would later be renamed the Party of Democratic Power, then to the Democratic Party.
** In a report from Jelava prison, where General Stanculescu was serving a fifteen-year sentence for the bloodshed in Timisoara, The BBC is on the 25th. December 2009. quoted the chairman of the Communist-era Crime Investigation Committee, Stejarel Olaru, who said: "I often wonder if Ceausescu would, if he were alive today, had a chance if he ran for president? And I believe he would have... "
In November 2018. a survey of public opinion by the CT agency was published&Research (https://www.romania-insider.com/survey-ceausescu-most-important-historical-figure), commissioned by the Black Sea University Fund, which showed that 64 percent of Romanians have a positive opinion of Nicolae Ceausescu, and that a quarter of Romanians consider him to be the most important statesman in the history of Romania.
They are followed by Michael I (the last king of Romania in 1921 I 1930 1940 1947) he knows 21,4 percent; King Ferdinand I (1914 1927) he knows 11,6 percent; King Karol II (which in 1938. led a personal dictatorship to prevent the fascist Iron Guard from coming to power, and then brought Ion Antonescu to power, who made an alliance with Hitler) he knows 5,4 percent.
Ceausescu publicly minimized Russian "perestroika", defending against any thought of its application in Romania. He claimed that Romania implemented "perestroika" as early as 1965. They remembered (and returned) the sentence that the regime will change in Romania "when the poplars bear pears".
Intimately, Ceauศescu did not think badly of Stalin at all, on the contrary: "In my opinion, the general idea of โโStalin's personality cult is false, because someone is a realist, it is not a personality cult." In twenty years, Stalin raised Russia from an underdeveloped country to the second most powerful country in the world. Of course, he made mistakes. It is easy for someone to say that Stalin did nothing positive. But he won the war. He made nuclear weapons. He did everything a person should do in life.
When I was in Moscow for the first time in 1950, the shops were full of food, clothes and other goods... Now everything that is bad in the Soviet Union is associated with the Stalin period even though Stalin has been dead for forty years."
Ceausescu said this. off the record in an interview with "Newsweek" in August 1989, four months before he would order the shooting of the people in defense of tyranny. That assessment was published after his death, in January 1990. It is quite certain that this intimate assessment best illuminates the nature and political philosophy of this "independent Eastern Bloc statesman", one who played the role of independence from Moscow, a statesman who refrained from sending troops to Czechoslovakia in 1968, the undisputed ruler of Romania for the last 25 years.
He was, in fact, a Machiavellian. In choosing the intimidation technique he used abundantly, he could have had at least two role models: the bloody peasant uprising in Romania at the beginning of the century (in the peasant uprisings of 1907-1908 in Wallachia and Moldavia, 11.000 peasants were killed) and the Chinese massacre at Tiananmen, which he ordered or endorsed by a man who was also considered a communist liberal. Those bloody events actually put a big question mark on the very notion of "Bolshevik liberalism". Is it even possible to be a liberal in a system that in principle does not allow opposition?
Ceausescu, writes the former, fugitive Romanian policeman Ion Pacepa, that nevertheless biased source, during his visit to America, asked members of his secret service to immediately kill the organizers of the demonstrations against him in Washington. "They should be killed immediately this very night, let it be a warning to everyone to never do anything against my safety again." Let professional criminals kill them. You must do it tonight," he ordered his officers through clenched teeth. After all, he applied the technique of intimidation continuously, and he demonstrated the draconian suppression of rebellion two years earlier during the miners' strike in Brasov.*
* At the Steagul tractor factory they are pouring (Steagul Ross) in Brasov, in Transylvania, workers on election day 15. November 1987. revolted due to salary cuts and layoffs around 15.000 people in that city. They were joined by Hidromehanika company workers (hydromechanics) and citizens, so it's about 20.000 people marched through the city and shouted "Down with Ceausescu! i "We want bread! ". They broke into the party committee and threw things and papers outside. The army and Sekuritatea blockaded the city, surrounded the demonstrators and broke up the protest at dawn. About 300 people were arrested. At least 100 people were sentenced to prison terms of up to two years. Some were exiled to other cities. There were no casualties. And then they are, naturally, "the poplar gave birth to pears" and the tower of his dictatorship fell apart in an instant, along with the party, scenography, with flags, slogans about "Carpathian thoughts" i "Danube of wisdom" powerful speakers, Elena and her artificially produced scientific fame. A frightened old man stood on the terrace of the presidential palace. First, they burned his books and defaced his posters.
Bookstores had to stock thirty volumes of his speeches, abbreviated version newsstands, and record stores speak his language. Artists paid tribute to his greatness, and everyone was expected to jump to their feet at gatherings when a song like "Ceausescu Rumunija, our pride and respect! ", he wrote "New York Times" 26. December 1989. Nothing is forever, neither the Bolshevik dynasties nor their deification.
For years, the West hailed Ceausescu as a renegade, an Eastern European leader who dared to defy Moscow.
Romanian independence was most conspicuously demonstrated by his refusal to participate in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ceausescu extended diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 war, unlike the rest of the Eastern Bloc, and hosted world leaders from Richard Nixon to Jordan's King Hussein. The West then saw Ceausescu as a weak point in the chain of the Warsaw bloc and they were inclined to support him morally and materially. At that time, Romanians had more rights to free speech than in other Eastern European countries. During the 1970s, foreign books were sold in Romania, and the program of foreign radio stations was not interrupted. People could talk freely with strangers, and the Sekuritatea secret police stood in the shadows.
Now all that has changed. The Russians no longer needed such a quasi-liberal and a man to communicate with the West in the shadows. It never occurred to the West to defend a renewed Stalinism. Arms buyers in the Middle East were minding their own business. Everyone moved on, and he was left alone with his exaggeration of dead Stalin. World leaders didn't land in Bucharest that often anymore, and flattery for Ceausescu now had to be entirely domestic. There was plenty of it. Many lives have been wasted in flattering him. Poets wrote verses to Ceausescu, or at least those poets whose books were printed. Books and magazines brought ritual chants of praise to the "Enlightened One". Again, as with Marquess, it was "a pack of learned politicians and shameless courtiers who proclaimed him the supreme corrector of earthquakes, eclipses, leap years, and other errors of God."
Extinguishing the national conflict
Part of the head X Horror on the streets of the city Mareลก Square, 12. pestle 1989.
The package from the past looks like a mine that has not yet been dismantled. National conflicts, fueled but also hidden under an ideological veil, flared up after a short harmonious truce during the revolution through spontaneous conflicts on the street, but also through party struggle. The national harmony that was reflected by the Christmas greetings on Romanian television, written in Romanian, Hungarian, German and Serbo-Croatian languages, lasted for a short time. The victory of the revolution promised that the nations would quickly come together. It was believed that only the restoration of human rights would give room for a much happier national policy. On Christmas Day, December 24, 1989 (in Romania, the Christmas of Orthodox Romanians and Catholics coincide) in the village of Dendi near Timisoara, near the monument to those killed in 1914-1918, where it was not allowed before, Catholic, Romanian Orthodox and Serbian Orthodox priests held a joint commemoration of those killed in the December revolution in Romania. The Baptists sang first, and the Serbian Orthodox ended with "vecnaja pamjat". "Since our people do not know what freedom is, we are fighting to learn what the word freedom means, so that we do not turn it into anarchy, God forbid, and we are also fighting to unite the people, so that there is no hatred between us," said Jovan Andrejiฤ .
A few months later in the city of Mares Square, in the bloody clashes between Romanians and Hungarians, the pendulum was on the other side. The world is appalled by the scene of the beating in front of the TV cameras. National tensions, which in Romanian-Hungarian relations almost reached a state of war, which the regime intensified in order to strengthen itself, simply now worked more openly.
The fact that about 1,7 million Hungarians live in Romania (until 1918 Transylvania was Hungarian), despite the statement of a Front official that "Romanian Hungarians" were united with "Romanian Romanians" during the revolution, remained one of the most difficult Romanian problems. . In the city of Trg Mareลก, the world was once again stunned by scenes of violence. Ceausescu's bills will take a long time to pay.
On another sensitive border with Soviet Moldavia (which belonged to Romania until 1940) commotion is still felt today.
Why is there nothing else between the overcome regime and the changes? What does the regime mean when it says it is defending Serbia? Why is the Student Movement indomitable? Who has the knowledge and real experience, and who leads without a day of work experience outside of politics? And why students win
After almost two years of protests, hundreds of kilometers walked, arrests, persecution and unprecedented social mobilization, Serbia is holding elections that could mark the end of a political era. Sociologist Marija Baboviฤ tells "Vreme" that the hope for change has not been so great since October 5, 2000, but she also warns of the danger that, if changes are not made, the country will face an even tougher authoritarian regime.
Their only weapon now is the media they control: like, we don't have an agenda, which is not true; as, we will betray the national interest, which is not true. One of their arguments is that we are afraid to go to the debate with Vuฤiฤ. They do not understand that it is their punishment. This is a punishment for Aleksandar Vuฤiฤ, who for 14 years conducted exclusively a monologue. For fourteen years he did not allow anyone any kind of dialogue, and now he would like to be rewarded or pardoned with the opportunity to talk to us. Well, he won't be able to. What he sowed is now reaping
These elections are not elections about Serbia's membership in the European Union, Kosovo and Metohija, gay marriage, tax policy or any other single political issue. Although parties on the fringes of political power try to impose these themes, at the heart of the upcoming political election is a much simpler dilemma: change or preserve the existing order. For more than a year now, surveys have shown that this is the primary dilemma on the ballot
In the RS, 19.800 people registered for the elections in Serbia, who will be able to vote at 28 polling stations. It remains unknown how many of them will cross the Drina on October 25 and vote in Serbia. In any case, I do not believe that the voters from Republika Srpska are the ones who will decide the winner of the elections in Serbia. Realistically, the voters from Republika Srpska can influence a little, but it seems that they are symbolically very important to both Vuฤiฤ and the opposition.
There is, literally, no difference between the one who claims it is day in the middle of the night, or the one who claims to be a giraffe, from the claims we read on billboards: that Vuฤiฤ is working to unify Serbs and that Serbia is doing better and better day by day.
The pre-election arrests due to the alleged "overthrow of the state" testify to the regime's panic. The bad news for them is - they can't arrest the whole people who decided to defend themselves from progressive beatings and election theft
The ring that tightens around ฤaciland Student list is getting narrower. Because there are more and more spoiled people who see the false prophet for what he is: a street obscener who is fighting Serbia
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