Reinventing Politics
Page 33
The first visible fissure in the apparently impregnable Romanian Stalinist fortress was a popular demonstration in Brasov, Romania’s second industrial center, on November 15, 1987. Although the regime tried to play down the meaning of that public explosion of discontent, Western radio stations informed the population about the repression taking place in Brasov. People learned that the workers from the Red Flag truck factory had not only demonstrated for economic goals but also chanted antidictatorial slogans. The Brasov rebellion—the protesters ransacked the local party headquarters and burned the portraits of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu—was the first act of the Romanian revolution. But even at the last moment, in 1989, the lethargic Romanian political class did not react to prevent a violent denouement of the crisis.
As the reformist movements were gathering momentum in the other communist countries, Ceausescu grew increasingly nervous. He started to criticize Gorbachev publicly for having abandoned the essential principles of Marxism-Leninism. The regime’s propaganda combined its commitment to hard-line communism with a growing insistence that its national (Romanian) roots were threatened by foreign conspiracies and infiltrating agents recruited among the ethnic minorities. In this extreme nationalist campaign, Ceausescu was not unique. In neighboring Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov, another potential victim of an expanded perestroika, was intensifying his campaign against the Turkish ethnic minority. Faced with the danger of a reform movement encouraged by the revisionist Moscow leadership, the Romanian and Bulgarian communist leaderships resorted to the traditional technique of scapegoating. The marked xenophobia of the antireformist communist leaders took overt or covert forms, depending on the degree of autonomy the regime enjoyed in relations with Moscow. The desperate attempt by Stalinist elites to preserve their power through manipulation of ethnic passions and frustrations was described as “xenophobic communism.” It was an attempt to avoid modernization and reforms by creating a general sense of national danger and resorting to patriotic fundamentalism rather than traditional Marxist universalism:
“Xenophobic communism” is besieged communism in quest of the lowest national common denominator. Its purpose is to mobilize society, a need that it strives to achieve by appealing to national resentment. And while this appeal is by no means novel in communist annals, what makes the ideal-type of “xenophobic communism” sui generis is the fact that its ideological enemies are indistinguishable from its national enemies.64
Indeed, for xenophobic communists, any call for reform is perceived as a betrayal of the national interests. Ceausescu’s hysterical fixation with foreign infiltration, which was to culminate in his final speech on December 21, 1989, represented an extreme version of this baroque combination of intense nationalism and unrepentant Stalinism.
Despite the xenophobic appeals, even within isolated Romania there were calls for a break with the dictatorial methods of leadership and an opening of the political system. At the beginning of March 1989 six former top figures in the Romanian Communist Party addressed an open letter to President Nicolae Ceausescu. The document represented both a scathing indictment of Ceausescu’s disastrous policies and an alternative political platform for the democratization of political life in Romania. Undoubtedly stimulated by Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, the signatories, among whom were two former General Secretaries of the Romanian Communist Party, attacked Ceausescu for having discredited the image of socialism. Without directly criticizing the monopolization of power by the presidential clan, the six prominent members of the party’s “Old Guard” advocated the establishment of a lawful state through the strict observance of the constitution. They considered the Ceausescu-ordered “systematization” campaign an insult against all Romanian citizens and decried their country’s alarming isolation from both East and West. The first paragraph of the letter summarizes the atmosphere of terror in Ceausescu’s Romania: “At a time when the very idea of socialism, for which we fought, is discredited by your policy, and when our country is isolated in Europe, we have decided to speak out. We are perfectly aware that by doing so we are risking our liberty and even our lives, but we feel duty bound to appeal to you to reverse the present course before it is too late.”65 Immediately after the letter was broadcast by the BBC World Service, the six communist veterans were placed under house arrest and subjected to secret police interrogations. But their arrest did not suppress the growing discontent in Romania.
In March 1989 the French daily Liberation published an interview with Mircea Dinescu, a thirty-eight-year-old poet widely regarded as one of the country’s most prominent writers. After he likened the hopelessness of the Romanians to that of guinea pigs used for the experiments of a paranoid dictator, Dinescu outlined the heightened expectations among Romanians and other East Europeans created by Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika:
In the first place, Romania has always looked to the East with fear, which is historically understandable in the case of a people situated on the edge of an empire. In the second place, Stalinism didn’t land on us from Honolulu, but from ideological missile silos imported from the Kremlin. For years we’ve been told—sometimes in a whisper, sometimes through veiled hints—that the “Eastern Bear” was preventing the system from becoming more liberal. And our people believed it. “Soviet troops are conducting maneuvers on the Romanian border”: that was the refrain the authorities trotted out every time we tried to speak our minds. I don’t know whether or not Gorbachev is considered a good tsar by the peoples of the Soviet Union; but in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania, the millions who kept quiet and endured humiliation for dozens of years see him as a preacher of “good news,” a messiah of “socialism with a human face.”66
Confronted with both external pressure and potential domestic unrest, the conducator became increasingly vociferous in his repudiation of any reform. He claimed that Romania had long since inaugurated a reformist policy and that the political system in his country did not need any significant adjustment. Actually, Ceausescu was the most outspoken of all the Warsaw Pact leaders in his refusal to emulate Gorbachev’s initiatives. On various occasions he suggested that Gorbachevism amounted to the rise of a right-wing deviation within world communism and maintained that the “building of socialism could not be achieved through reformism.” In that respect there was no difference between Ceausescu’s stances and the Stalinist views voiced by Ramiz Alia, the leader of isolationist Albania, who lamented the reformist drive in the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Poland for having opened the way to private property and other evils associated with capitalism.67 In October 1989 Scinteia, the official newspaper of the Romanian Communist Party, bluntly rejected the calls for a multiparty system as attempts to undermine the socialist system:
The RCP considers that the thesis regarding a return to the multiparty system in socialism is completely wrong and harmful as it paves the way for a comeback to the anachronistic forms of the capitalist political system. As the Theses for the RCP 14 Party Congress underline, in the new conditions created after the disappearance of the exploiting classes, the existence of a single party of the working class and the consolidation of the people’s unity around the party is an objective historical demand.68
On November 17, a week before the opening of the Fourteenth RCP Congress, and with the other Soviet-bloc countries in full turmoil, Scinteia found it convenient to reprint an interview with the Soviet hardliner Yegor Ligachev in which he endorsed views similar to those expressed by Ceausescu with regard to the need to preserve the one-party system. At the Party Congress Ceausescu again displayed his rhetorical arsenal to convince an increasingly disaffected population that Romania would be able to resist change. Well-orchestrated hosannahs were rhythmically chanted by a totally controlled and obedient party audience. Ceausescu railed against alleged international plots against the independence of small states. Referring to the announced Malta summit between President Bush and General Secretary Gorbachev, Ceausescu gave vent to his fea
r that it could lead to a superpower condominium of the world. At the end of the Congress he solemnly pledged to remain in charge for the foreseeable future, a guardian of the purity of Marxism-Leninism and of Romania’s autarchic socialism: “Almost 60 years ago I first joined the party and in the future I will always be a soldier in the ranks of the Romanian Communist Party.”69
During the Party Congress Romania’s isolation was made clear by the absence of delegations of “brotherly” parties from Hungary, Italy, and, to Ceausescu’s dismay, the GDR. Less than two months before, East Germany had been Ceausescu’s closest supporter in his adamant refusal to accept reforms. In the meantime, the Honecker leadership had been replaced as a result of a mounting wave of popular protest. In the GDR the long-repressed civil rights and pacifist groups spearheaded the revolt and ensured its nonviolent nature. For Ceausescu the end of the Honecker regime was a very serious blow. With Zhivkov under attack within the Bulgarian party, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in Prague and Bratislava, and with the East German government giving in to pressure from below, the Romanian leader found himself totally isolated within the Warsaw Pact. That isolation was accentuated further by the boycott of the RCP Congress on the part of foreign guests as well as by the vitriolic criticism heaped on Ceausescu by the foreign media, including the ones in the allied countries. The East German news agency ADN explained the decision of a number of communist parties to call off their attendance at the RCP Congress by referring to “continued human rights violations, the personality cult surrounding Nicolae Ceausescu and serious violations of socialist democracy.”70
Even in the face of such disdain and isolation, Ceausescu managed to use the propaganda machine of his regime to create the impression that Romanian communists would be able to avoid the fate of their peers in the other Soviet-bloc countries. Less than one week before the beginning of the anti-Ceausescu rebellion in Timisoara, the Western media reported:
In the short run, Ceausescu’s grip on power appears firm. Not only was he unanimously reelected at the recent Communist Party congress, but the tyrant vehemently denied the possibility of reforms. Sending a signal to reformist Hungary, Ceausescu even sealed the border with his Warsaw Pact neighbor. For all his despotism, Nicolae Ceausescu is a shrewd and farsighted politician. Events in Eastern Europe may have caught the West unprepared, but Romania’s present stability indicates that Ceausescu has been ready for quite some time.71
The reality, however, was that neither Ceausescu nor his allies in the rejectionist front had been well prepared for such an upheaval. They reacted erratically and, the moment Moscow ceased to play the protective role it used to play in the past, behaved like political orphans. All over Eastern Europe the communist parties collapsed ingloriously. In some countries, such as Hungary and Poland, the reformist groups within the party elite managed to engage in face-saving negotiations and hoped to be able to preserve some power. In Romania there was no reformist faction within the leadership that could unseat Ceausescu and his clique and engage in sweeping liberalization. The conditions were therefore ripe for a spontaneous popular explosion.
The Romanian revolution began in Timisoara, sparked by the courage of one man, the Reverend Laszlo Tokes, a pastor of the Reformed (Calvinist) Church and a member of the Hungarian ethnic minority. Despite repeated harassment by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, Tökes had been an adamant champion of human and religious rights. On December 15, 1989, when secret police agents tried to evict Tokes forcibly from his parish house, thousands of people—Romanians as well as Hungarians—formed a human chain and unleashed a massive anti-Ceausescu demonstration. During the night of December 16 the city was virtually taken over by anti-Ceausescu and anticommunist protesters. The religiously inspired act of civil disobedience triggered a full-blown mass rebellion against one of the most tightly controlled authoritarian regimes in the world.
On December 17, on orders from Ceausescu, security forces cracked down on the Timisoara demonstrators with lethal force. It became clear that the Romanian dictator would not follow the East German pattern of self-restraint and would use any means to preserve his power. On the same day, news of the Timisoara uprising and its bloody repression reached Budapest, Belgrade, and Western capitals. Western radio stations beamed the story back to Romania. Although the dictator did not seem to recognize it, as he left on December 18 for Teheran, from that moment on the fate of the Ceausescu regime was sealed. How could Ceausescu have been so blind to the myriad signals announcing the imminent reaction against his Draconian rule? Why did he ignore the dissatisfaction that was rampant even among the party, military, and police bureaucracies? The Timisoara uprising came in a period when Ceausescu’s closest allies in the Warsaw pact—Todor Zhivkov, Erich Honecker, and Milos Jakes—had been overthrown. Isolated in the grip of his delusions, the hostage of an unbounded personality cult and a subservient entourage, Ceausescu preferred to neglect reality and to believe the fantasies codified in the party documents, including slogans about the monolithic unity between the Romanian nation and its conducator.
Upon returning to Bucharest, Ceausescu made a colossal blunder: On December 20 he addressed the nation on radio and television, blaming the events in Timisoara on “hooligans,” “fascists,” and instigators from abroad. “On the basis of data available so far,” he stated, “one can say with full conviction that these actions of a terrorist nature were organized and unleashed in close connection with reactionary, imperialist, irredentist, chauvinist circles, and foreign espionage circles in various countries.”72 The General Secretary praised the army and the Securitate for their “utmost forbearance” before having taken action, and in so speaking, he took personal responsibility—as supreme commander of the Romanian armed forces—for the savage massacre. His stern warning that demonstrators in other places would be fired on was seen as both a confirmation of the horrifying news about the Timisoara bloodbath and a humiliating challenge to a restless, edgy, deeply frustrated population. That was perhaps the magic moment when, in the consciousness of many Romanians, the threshold of fear was crossed: Revulsion, moral indignation, outrage, and contempt suddenly became stronger than fear.73 Romania’s revolution was born out of absolute desperation: The youths who took to the streets knew that they would be murdered, but they refused to accept the prolongation of oppression.
Ceausescu’s second, even more astonishing blunder was his decision to organize a huge demonstration of popular support for his rule similar to the one staged only a month before, after the carefully orchestrated pageants of the Fourteenth RCP Congress. The tens of thousands of people herded by the Securitate and assorted party bosses into the Palace Square on the morning of December 21 were a highly volatile crowd, people on the brink of rebellion. Romanian television, and soon world television, captured the tyrant’s incredulity and anger as the cheering multitude suddenly began to boo him, and ritual chants of “Ceausescu si poporul!” (Ceausescu and the people!) changed to“Ceausescu dictatorul!” (Ceausescu the dictator!). Whether, as some later would claim, the switch from simulated praise to sincere and contagious abuse was triggered by members of the Securitate acting under instructions from their superiors, who had secretly decided to get rid of Ceausescu, we may never know. At any rate, millions of viewers witnessed large numbers of people screaming against the dictator on live TV. The skillfully constructed edifice of allegedly impregnable and immutable power fell apart with that spontaneous outburst of popular hatred. The image of the dictator waving his arms in bewilderment was then extinguished—though Elena Ceausescu’s voice could still be heard for a few seconds, urging her husband to stay calm—and the broadcast was interrupted for three long minutes. When live transmission resumed, Ceausescu was seen making demagogic promises—such as a rise in the minimum wage—in a last attempt to calm the furious crowd. But power had already slipped from the balcony of the Central Committee building to the street.
A sequence of revolutionary events followed: a string of
student demonstrations in University Square, which went through December 22, in spite of bloody repression; spontaneous anti-Ceausescu marches through the streets of Bucharest, in which hundreds of thousands participated; the seizure of the TV station with the help of the army, which had switched sides and was supporting the popular uprising. As the party headquarters were attacked by the demonstrators, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife fled the building by helicopter, but they soon were captured by the army, which kept them incommunicado in a secret location. The same day a National Salvation Front Council was formed. It proclaimed its commitment to political pluralism and abolished all the institutions of the old regime. The Romanian Communist Party seemed to disappear as if it had never existed. The resistance put up by isolated units of the secret police between December 22 and Christmas Day, when Ceausescu and his wife were executed, provided a dramatic backdrop to the popular euphoria and did not essentially affect the near-universal sense of relief, enthusiasm, and hope sweeping the country. Despite the violence—less widespread than at first thought—the revolutionary feast lasted well into the first days of 1990, when disappointment in the new government, the self-appointed National Salvation Front (NSF), started to set in.