by scythe and sickle. This was something truly new: all socialist systems depended upon the centralized control of systemically induced shortages, but in Romania an economy based on overinvestment in unwanted industrial hardware was successfully switched into one based on pre-industrial agrarian subsistence.
Ceausescu’s policies had a certain ghoulish logic. Romania did indeed pay off its international creditors, albeit at the cost of reducing its population to penury. But there was more to Ceausescu’s rule, in his last years, than just crazy economics. The better to control the country’s rural population—and increase still further the pressure on peasant farmers to produce food for export—the regime inaugurated a proposed ‘systematization’ of the Romanian countryside. Half of the country’s 13,000 villages (disproportionately selected from minority communities) were to be forcibly razed, their residents transferred into 558 ‘agro-towns’, Had Ceausescu been granted the time to carry through this project it would utterly have destroyed what little remained of the country’s social fabric.
The rural ‘systemization’ project was driven forward by the Romanian dictator’s mounting megalomania. Under Ceausescu the Leninist impulse to control, centralize and plan every detail of daily life graduated into an obsession with homogeneity and grandeur surpassing even the ambitions of Stalin himself. The enduring physical incarnation of this monomaniacal urge was to be the country’s capital, scheduled for an imperial make-over on a scale unprecedented since Nero. This project for the ‘renovation’ of Bucharest was to be aborted by the coup of December 1989; but enough was done for Ceausescu’s ambition to be indelibly etched into the fabric of the contemporary city. A historic district of central Bucharest the size of Venice was completely flattened. Forty thousand buildings and dozens of churches and other monuments were razed to make space for a new ‘House of the People’ and the five-kilometer-long, 150-meter-wide Victory of Socialism Boulevard.
The whole undertaking was mere facade. Behind the gleaming white frontages of the boulevard were run up the familiar dirty, grim, pre-cast concrete blocks. But the facade itself was aggressively, humiliatingly, unrelentingly uniform, a visual encapsulation of totalitarian rule. The House of the People, designed by a twenty- five-year-old architect (Anca Petrescu) as Ceausescu’s personal palace, was indescribably and uniquely ugly even by the standards of its genre. Grotesque, cruel and tasteless it was above all
Romanian Communism in its last years sat uneasily athwart the intersection of brutality and parody. Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself (though not perhaps North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, with whom the Romanian leader was sometimes compared). A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceausescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.
What Ceausescu’s sycophantic colleagues really thought of all this they were not saying. But it is clear that by November 1989—when, after sixty-seven standing ovations, he was re-elected Secretary General of the Party and proudly declared that there were to be no reforms—a number of them had begun to regard him as a liability: remote and out of touch not just with the mood of the times but with the rising level of desperation among his own subjects. But so long as he had the backing of the secret police, the Securitate, Ceausescu appeared untouchable.
Appropriately enough, then, it was the Securitate who precipitated the regime’s fall when, in December 1989, they tried to remove a popular Hungarian Protestant pastor, Lazslo Tokes, in the western city of Timisoara. The Hungarian minority, a special object of prejudice and repression under Ceausescu’s rule, had been encouraged by developments just across the border in Hungary and were all the more resentful at the continuing abuses to which they were subject at home. Tokes became a symbol and focus for their frustrations and, when the regime targeted him on December 15th, the church in which he had taken refuge was surrounded by parishioners holding an all-night vigil in his support.
The following day, as the vigil turned unexpectedly into a demonstration against the regime, the police and the army were brought out to shoot into the crowd. Exaggerated reports of the ‘massacre’ were carried on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and spread around the country. To quell the unprecedented protests, which had now spread from Timisoara to Bucharest itself, Ceausescu returned from an official visit to Iran. On December 21st he appeared on a balcony at Party headquarters with the intention of making a speech denouncing the ‘minority’ of ‘troublemakers’—and was heckled into shocked and stunned silence. The following day, after making a second unsuccessful attempt to address the gathering crowds, Ceausescu and his wife fled from the roof of the Party building in a helicopter.
At this point the balance of power swung sharply away from the regime. At first the army had appeared to back the dictator, occupying the streets of the capital and firing on demonstrators who tried to seize the national television studios. But from December 22nd the soldiers, now directed by a ‘National Salvation Front’ (NSF) that took over the television building, switched sides and found themselves pitted against heavily armed
The NSF converted itself into a provisional ruling council and—after renaming the country simply ‘Romania’—appointed its own leader Ion Iliescu as President. Iliescu, like his colleagues in the Front, was a former Communist who had broken with Ceausescu some years before and who could claim some slight credibility as a ‘reformer’ if only by virtue of his student acquaintance with the young Mikhail Gorbachev. But Iliescu’s real qualification to lead a post-Ceausescu Romania was his ability to control the armed forces, especially the Securitate, whose last hold-outs abandoned their struggle on December 27th. Indeed, beyond authorizing on January 3rd 1990 the re-establishment of political parties, the new President did very little to dismantle the institutions of the old regime.
As later events would show, the apparatus that had ruled under Ceausescu remained remarkably intact, shedding only the Ceausescu family itself and their more egregiously incriminated associates. Rumours of thousands killed during the protests and battles of December proved exaggerated—the figure was closer to one hundred—and it became clear that for all the courage and enthusiasm of the huge crowds in Timisoara, Bucharest and other cities the real struggle had been between the ‘realists’ around Iliescu and the old guard in Ceausescu’s entourage. The victory of the former ensured for Romania a smooth—indeed suspiciously smooth—exit out of Communism.
The absurdities of late-era Ceausescu were swept away, but the police, the bureaucracy and much of the Party remained intact and in place. The names were changed—the Securitate was officially abolished—but not their ingrained assumptions and practices: Iliescu did nothing to prevent riots in Tirgu Mures on March 19th, where eight people were killed and some three hundred wounded in orchestrated attacks on the local Hungarian minority. Moreover, after his National Salvation Front won an overwhelming majority in the elections of May 1990 (having earlier promised not to contest them), and he himself was formally re-elected President, Iliescu did not hesitate in June to bus miners in to Bucharest to beat up student protesters: twenty-one demonstrators were killed and some 650 injured. Romania still had a very long road to travel.
The ‘palace coup’ quality of Romania’s revolution was even more in evidence to the south, where the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party unceremoniously ejected Todor Zhivkov from power at the advanced age of 78. The longest-serving leader in the Communist bloc—he had risen to the head of the Party in 1954—Zhivkov had done his best, in characteristic Bulgarian style, to hew closely to the Russian model: in the early Eighties he instituted a ‘New Economic Mechanism’ to improve production, and in March 1987, following Moscow’s lead, he promised an end to ‘bureaucratic’ control of the economy, assuring the world that Bulgaria could now point to a
But the continuing failures of the Bulgarian economy, and the Communist leadership’s growing insecurity as the new shape of affairs in Moscow became clear, led Zhivkov to seek out an alternative source of domestic legitimacy: ethnic nationalism. The significant Turkish minority in Bulgaria (some 900,000 in a population of fewer than nine million) was a tempting target: not only was it ethnically distinct and of a different religion but it was also the unfortunate heir and symbol of an era of hated Ottoman rule only now passing from direct memory. As in
