Prime Minister Mazowiecki, a man certainly more popular than his ministers, engaged only halfheartedly in a battle with the energetic and still charismatic Walesa. During the elections in December 1990 Walesa won only 40 percent in the first round and 70 percent in the second runoff. After the first run Mazowiecki withdrew, letting Walesa confront Stanislaw Tyminski, a previously unknown emigré businessman from Canada and Peru, who had pledged to improve Poland’s economic situation within a month, and who drew more votes than the incumbent Premier. To the surprise of Polish observers and to the dismay of all the democratic parties, the newcomer with no qualifications for becoming President other than his self-serving and often suspicious braggadoccio, managed even to win about 25 percent of the vote in the runoff election. It was clear that conflict between the two Solidarity factions, with their verbal fireworks and mutual indictments, had contributed to general confusion and widespread disappointment among the voters. Reporting from Warsaw a few days after the first round of the presidential elections in Poland, an Italian journalist who had specialized in East European affairs wrote:
The atmosphere in Warsaw is now so saturated with hysteria that an outsider might think that the city was recently declared an ecological disaster zone, or that it is in fact a vast insane asylum, an asylum in which each inmate accuses his neighbors of insanity in an effort to appear sane himself. The term “psychopath,” by the way, frequently pops up in the statements of intellectuals and politicians here.36
This was a alarming sign to both ROAD and the Center Alliance, which realized that popular discontent was smoldering and that unless an improvement in the economic performance happened soon, there was potential for new explosions of social unrest. To achieve such an improvement, Walesa worked to promote national reconciliation and reappointed Leszek Balcerowicz, the Minister of Economy responsible for the shock therapy to the same position in the new government now headed by thirty-nine-year-old Jan Krisztof Bielecki, a Parliament member from Gdansk and an economist turned businessman and politician.
The composition of the new government, as well as Walesa’s reassuring stances, confirmed that the flamboyant Solidarity activist actually was able to understand the imperatives of a realistic policy. In an illuminating portrayal of Walesa, Piotr Wierzbicki, one of Poland’s most influential journalists, analyzed the plethora of myths surrounding the former Gdansk electrician and demonstrated their fallacy. Wierzbicki concluded:
Walesa may seem a chameleon because he is an extreme pragmatist. Apart from his rejection of force, his attachment to the Polish Catholic Church, his complete insusceptibility to anti-Semitism, and his avoidance of Solidarityspeak (“ethos,” “subjectivity,” and so on), Walesa nurtures no doctrinal attachment of any kind. When he says that Solidarity is neither left-wing nor right-wing, he speaks primarily about himself. He is not interested in formulas or concepts. He’s interested in what people have to eat and what they say about Solidarity. He’s interested in society’s mood of which he is an unerring register. He knows that if he fails to stay in touch with the attitudes and feelings of the common people, he’d be nobody. As far as he is concerned, every peaceful road that leads as quickly as possible to a truly free Poland is good.37
The breakup of Solidarity and the formation of the two new major parties has contributed to a healthy process of political differentiation. In a democratic society there is no need for a monolithic esprit de corps among those who make up the political class. As long as all parties share the same ultimate values, their competition is an indication of social dynamism and contributes to the further development of a civic culture that can prevent the transformation of a strong presidency into a dictatorial experiment.
Fear and Frustration in Romania
In its original platform, Romania’s National Salvation Front claimed that it represented the spirit of the anticommunist December revolution. But it took Romanians less than a month to start realizing that the new government was reluctant to engage in a sweeping dissolution of the old institutions. In January 1990 the NSF organized a massive workers’ demonstration against the opposition parties accused of serving foreign interests. Populist slogans were chanted by the Front’s supporters, and Iliescu, the NSF chairman, was acclaimed as a providential man. In February the NSF renounced its suprapartisan pretense and announced its intention to field candidates for the forthcoming elections. From that moment on, it started to lose credibility among the youth and the intellectuals—precisely the groups that had been most active in the anticommunist uprising. One of the country’s influential columnists, Octavian Paler, wrote in Romania Libera, the most important independent national daily, that the NSF’s ambition was to take advantage of its revolutionary image in order to neutralize the opposition and ensure its victory in the parliamentary and presidential elections due in the spring.
Well before the spring of 1990, at the onset of the Romanian Revolution of 1989, there were many people who held suspicions that the new leaders had known each other before the collapse of the Ceausescu regime and that they had conspired to take power at the moment the dictator was overthrown by a popular insurrection. In other words, far from being a spontaneous emanation of the revolution from below, the NSF was the institutional expression of a conspiracy from above. Because the dissident movement in communist Romania was weak and its political culture backward, then, the revolutionary upheaval failed to result in the formation of a revolutionary government. What happened was actually the abduction of the revolution by a group of seasoned apparatchiks, well versed in palace intrigues and behind-the-scenes maneuvers. It was also likely that their actions had the blessing of the Soviet leadership, who had every reason to favor Ceausescu’s replacement with an “enlightened autocrat” in the Gorbachev mold instead of the uncompromising and unpredictable anticommunist forces already manifest in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
To put it bluntly, the NSF sounded quite convincing when it proclaimed its willingness to break with the past. But that intention was merely a rhetorical device. Certainly the Securitate was officially abolished, but in March 1990 it resurfaced under the name the Romanian Service of Information. Not a single individual, of those who organized the savage massacre in Bucharest after Ceausescu’s flight on December 22, 1989, was brought to trial, and the progovernment media embarked on vicious campaigns to besmirch the opposition and all those who dared to raise the slightest question with regard to the NSF’s legitimacy. Actually, the principal source of instability in postrevolutionary Romania has been the attempt of the reform communists to preserve political and economic power in the hands of the same nomenklatura class that had administered and ruined the country for more than four decades. As the independent civic groups and media came to recognize the colossal hoax of the NSF as the “emanation” of the revolution, the political spectrum grew increasingly polarized. On the one end was the Front, headed by Ion Iliescu, a personality whose communist convictions were universally known. On the other were the opposition parties, dominated by the three “new old parties” (the National Liberals, the National Peasants, and the Social Democrats). In the meantime, the NSF had created a large number of satellite parties, ready to endorse its policies in hopes of a share in power. During the May 1990 elections more than eighty political parties presented candidates. Out of them, the critics of the NSF argued, about forty were sympathetic to the Front. The opposition had little time to organize, and its political discourse was not accessible to the population because of the obstacles created by the Front-run government. Prime Minister Petre Roman, the son of a top communist ideologue who had spent the war years in Moscow as a Comintern official, had no record as a dissident during the Ceausescu regime. The NSF’s Secretary, Dan Martian, had served in the 1970s as the First Secretary of the Communist Youth Union and the Minister for Youth Affairs. As for Iliescu, he never fully and unambiguously abjured his communist past, including his role as a chief ideologue in the late 1960s. Although the NSF was far from a real politic
al party, its often decried neo-Bolshevism was rather a survivalist strategy on the part of the beleaguered nomenklatura and an attempt to contain the anticommunist tidal wave from below. More an umbrella movement than an ideologically constituted party, the NSF played upon and stirred fears of instability and chaos. The NSF had to admit its own debility in February, when it invited the other parties to join a peculiar miniparliament called the Provisional Council of National Unity. By coopting representatives of the opposition into this fragile body, the NSF aimed to put an end to public unrest.
But discontent in Romania had deep social roots and could not be easily mitigated. The Front’s indulgence in half-truths and aggressive warnings only further irritated the revolutionary and civic forces. It was perhaps Iliescu’s foremost illusion that a Romanian version of perestroika would satisfy the population. To his dismay, the NSF leader saw that instead of decreasing, the radical ferment continued to gather momentum. The widespread sentiment that the NSF’s hidden agenda consisted of the preservation of an authoritarian regime was not groundless. Romanians knew that the dreaded Securitate continued to exist in spite of official denials. A few of Ceausescu’s henchmen were brought to trial, but only for their participation in the December 16-22 slaughter, not for the role they had played in the functioning of one of Europe’s most vicious despotisms since Stalin’s death. Instead of purging the administrative apparatus of the servants of the old regime, the NSF appointed them to key positions. It was indeed a peculiar Romanian way of simulating the exit from totalitarianism. In all the other former communist countries the opposition either came to power or at least managed to mount a serious challenge to reconstructed Leninist elites. In Romania, however, the former collaborators usurped the revolutionary mantle and rhetoric and unleashed a vicious campaign against the true democrats. Instead of the roundtable approach, which was based on the possibility of a dialogue between the reform communists and the opposition, the “Bucharest syndrome” amounted to the impersonation by party bureaucrats and sycophantic hacks from the old regime of pristine anticommunist revolutionaries and the simultaneous denial of those anticommunist credentials to the people really committed to a political and economic breakthrough.38 Iliescu and Roman talked about pluralism and marketization, but they did not initiate any genuine reform that would have diminished the power of the state bureaucracy. Private initiative continued to be stifled by countless government decrees and regulations, and foreign investment was discouraged by such Front slogans as “We don’t sell our country to Western multinationals.” Inflation spiraled and only black-marketeers and government bureaucrats were able to benefit from the liberalized prices.
As conceived by unrepentant Leninists, the NSF strategy backfired. It did so because it neglected the dynamism of society’s self-organization, the impetus of collective passions for freedom, and the infectious effect of the democratic advances in the other East European countries. In March 1990 the NSF was challenged by the publication of the “Timisoara Proclamation,” a political statement written by several young intellectuals in Timisoara, the first city to rise up and challenge Ceausescu’s rule during the revolutionary year of 1989. Article 7 of the “Proclamation” questioned the revolutionary bona fides of those who had emerged as the beneficiaries of the upheaval: “Timisoara started the revolution against the entire Communist regime and its entire nomenklatura, and certainly not in order to give an opportunity to a group of anti-Ceausescu dissidents within the RCP to take over the reins of political power. Their presence at the head of the country makes the death of our heroes senseless.”39 Of utmost significance in this veritable charter of the Romanian revolution was Article 8, which called for a modification of the electoral law in order to prevent former communist activists and Securitate officers from holding government jobs and running for parliamentary seats. Even more emphatically, the document opposed the right of those who had served the communist regime to stand for the office of President. The Proclamation hit its target: The offended nomenklatura reacted with its traditional weapons, including slander, innuendo, and intimidation.
The Proclamation’s goals were espoused by hundreds of independent groups and associations, including the Group for Social Dialogue, a community of prominent intellectuals well known for their refusal to collaborate in the past with the Ceausescu regime. At the end of April thousands of students, workers, and intellectuals seized University Square in Bucharest, where they proceeded to organize a sit-in to protest the government’s refusal to meet the demands formulated in the Proclamation. Although the NSF government sent in police troops to disband the demonstrators camped in the square, the marathon demonstration continued day and night. Confronted with this unwavering defiance, Iliescu lost his temper and called the protesters golani, or hoodlums. That proved to be a very costly mistake, as the term was ominously reminiscent of Ceausescu’s outbursts against the “hooligans” in Timisoara during the first days of the revolution.
In May 1990 the NSF won the majority of seats in Romania’s bicameral parliament, and Iliescu, the Front’s presidential candiate, triumphed with more than 85 percent of the national vote. In comparison with other former communist countries, Romania was exceptional. The secret of the NSF’s landslide lay in the systematically entertained ambiguities about its true attitude toward communism as well as in the opposition’s fragmenation and lack of organization. Clinging to the memory of their bygone splendor, the “historical parties” failed to tap responsive chords among many middle-aged Romanians. Another element in the NSF’s victory was its continuous intimidation and harassment of the opposition. For many Romanians, voting for the NSF seemed the only alternative to a slide into anarchy.40
Conceding defeat after the May elections, the chief organizers of the University Square sit-in decided to withdraw. By mid-June the dwindling number of protesters, including several hunger strikers, were asking for little more than the establishment of one independent television station. Iliescu need only have waited a bit longer, and the flickering anarchist fire in the heart of Bucharest would have extinguished by itself. But on June 13 the police seized the square and dismantled the tents of the hunger strikers and the platform that the demonstrators had erected for speeches. Protesters were beaten up and forcibly removed during what was the first stage of a massive campaign by the regime to suppress the opposition completely. The police action was followed by a series of provocations, including attacks on the buildings of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and central television. Those explosions of violence were the pretext Iliescu needed to bring in an extralegal force, the coal miners, and give them his presidential blessing to exert unbounded terror in Bucharest on June 14 and 15. The miners rampaged through the headquarters of the most active independent associations, ransacked the headquarters of the opposition parties, and attacked and mutilated hundreds of university and high school students. It was an explosion of reactionary populism, indeed a Stalinist-fascist orgy of hatred and violence.41 The international outrage resulting from the miners’ rampage forced Iliescu and his associates to renounce their initial plan, which aimed at the complete annihilation of Romania’s emerging civil society. As for the opposition, despite the traumatic effect of the June crackdown it continued to organize. In September representatives of the most dynamic independent groups participated in a meeting of the Romanian Resistance.42 In November the Civic Alliance was formed as an expression of the need to bring together the dispersed forms of extraparliamentary opposition. Led by well-known cultural and political figures, the Alliance announced its commitment to building up a democratic political culture in Romania by means of education and dialogue. Although it did not identify itself as a political formation, the Alliance found a source of inspiration in the Czechoslovak Civic Forum. In July 1991 the Civic Alliance held its National Convention. A core of prominent activists decided to form the Civic Alliance Party as its political branch to field candidates for the forthcoming elections. The proposal to create the party was overwhelmingly su
pported by the delegates. Among those who appeared as key figures in the new political party were such prestigious intellectuals as the literary critic Nicolae Manolescu, the political columnist Stelian Tanase, the Timisoara civic activist and editor Vasile Popovici, and George Navon, a trade union leader from Constanta.
Unable and unwilling to initiate more than cosmetic reforms, the NSF regime resorted to chauvinist campaigns and appealed to the patriotic sentiments of Romanians against an imaginary international scenario intent on destabilizing the country. In that operation, the regime mobilized former communist activists, Securitate officers, and xenophobic intellectuals ready to spearhead the government’s increasingly egregious anti-Hungarian propaganda. The extremist organization Vatra Romaneasca took the lead in this exceptionally vicious campaign, which even outdid the xenophobic efforts of Ceausescu. Because the economic situation in Romania continued to deteriorate, the NSF was losing its mass base, so chauvinism in its most unsavory form became the last demagogic resource for the rulers. Romania’s unfinished revolution failed to create a state of law, and the former communists, dressed up as born-again democrats, established a political regime that can be described as a “totalitarian democracy” or “a dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm.”43
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