Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
This autumn marks a quarter-century since the demise of the
Communist dictatorships in central and eastern Europe. It all began on Sept. 11,
1989, when Hungary, which had opened its border with Austria four months
earlier, gave permission for thousands of East Germans who had arrived on
“vacations” to leave the country, in order to head for West Germany.
It was the first time one of the Warsaw Pact nations broke
from the practice of blocking citizens of Communist nations from going to the
West. Suddenly, the Iron Curtain had been breached.
This quickly had a domino effect, and one after another of
these regimes would collapse over the next few months.
Most of the transitions were bloodless, with one terrible
exception – Romania. (The dissolution of Yugoslavia and its subsequent descent
into civil war and ethnic cleansing was a different matter, and happened in the
post-Communist period.)
Why was the Romanian case so different? Because the
country’s long-time despot, Nicolae Ceausescu, in power since 1965, had
cultivated an image of himself as a great leader and came to believe it.
Unlike the other, relatively drab, Communist satraps in the
region, Ceausescu had developed a “cult of personality” that rivaled those of Joseph
Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, and Kim Il-sung in North
Korea.
The future “genius of the Carpathians,” as he called
himself, was born in 1918 to a peasant family in what was, before the Second
World War, a backward Balkan kingdom. A Communist, he spent many of his
formative years in prison.
While in prison, Ceausescu had met
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, an influential revolutionary who was installed as ruler
of the country by the Soviets when they occupied Romania after the war. Just
before Gheorghiu-Dej died of cancer in 1965, he tapped Ceausescu as his
successor.
As he consolidated his power, Ceausescu
became ever more enamoured of himself. He and his wife Elena – always referred
to as “Comrade Academician Doctor Engineer Elena Ceausescu” – began to treat
themselves as demigods.
Elena promoted her own fraudulent
reputation as a great scientist, and, though barely educated, made sure
that the University of Bucharest awarded her a PhD in chemistry. The contents
of her many scientific papers were penned by others.
Meanwhile her husband by the 1980s had
become the “torchbearer among torchbearers,” a leader as “unique as a mountain
peak,” and a man of legendary brilliance. The Communist Party was placed in the
hands of sycophants chosen for their abject loyalty to their leader, who was the
very epitome of the Romanian spirit.
While the country was increasingly
mismanaged, with impoverished ordinary Romanians going without proper food or
shelter, there was little overt opposition to Ceausescu, partly because of the atmosphere
of fear created by the dreaded secret police, the Securitate, which had spies
and informers everywhere.
By 1985 it employed some 11,000
agents and had half a million informers in a country of 22 million people.
Any criticism was ruthlessly crushed;
even typewriters had to be registered with the government, to prevent
circulation of anti-regime pamphlets. This was a truly totalitarian state.
Giving full vent to his megalomania, in 1984 Ceausescu razed
scores of buildings in the historic centre of Bucharest to begin construction of
his massive House of the Republic, a huge palace that would serve as a monument
to himself and his wife. The largest administrative building in the world, at 3.7
million square feet, it today houses the Romanian parliament.
But the winds of change sweeping through eastern Europe did
not spare Romania. The country’s Hungarian minority in Transylvania,
increasingly persecuted by Ceausescu, erupted into open revolt in December
1989. Dissent soon spread, the Romanian army turned against its master, and
Ceausescu’s regime disintegrated with amazing swiftness.
Having been out of touch with reality for decades, Nicolae
and Elena were totally unprepared for their political downfall. On Dec. 21,
addressing a mass rally in Bucharest, they were astonished when the crowd booed
and called for their removal.
Though the Securitate remained loyal to the Ceausescus and
fought the army, they could not prevail. The couple’s ignominious end came on December
25, 1989, three days after they tried to escape the country. They were
captured, tried, sentenced to death, shot by a firing squad, and quickly buried,
all within a few hours.
Ion Ilescu emerged as leader of the anti-Communist National
Front. He would serve as the first democratically elected president of Romania
from 1990 until 1996, and again from 2000 until 2004.
Ilescu admitted in 2009 that the trial was “quite shameful,
but necessary” in order to end the state of near-anarchy that had gripped the
country.
Romanians may never see their likes again – and that’s a
good thing.
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