Romania Journal
by Peter Rashkin
July 17, 1999
Only three weeks before we go to Romania, and it's practically all I think about. I'm reading my third Ceausescu-era memoir, THE RETURN by Petru Popescu. And a couple of days ago I spent a few hours with UCLA Prof. Olga Lazin, who grew up in Ceausescu's Romania and spent a year in prison for trying to escape. Actually, she did escape, crossing the Danube with two college associates, under fire, but they made it to Yugoslavia. Only to be returned to Romania for a wagon load of salt and some other trade goods.
The Ceausescu era fascinates me. A few years ago, if you called my house and got my answering machine, you would have heard my cute little message: "Thank you for calling the California Thought Police. If you have been thinking and want to confess, please do so at the tone." I thought I was being cute. "Thought police, hahahaha." In Romania, they had the thought police, Securitate. Big Brother WAS watching. And listening. Having opinions was dangerous. One person in three or four was an informant. They did it for money, revenge, self-protection or advancement.
And Nicolae Ceausescu was the worst kind of dictator, a petty, narrow man with delusions of grandeur and unlimited power. He got worse and worse. In the end, he was building the largest palace in the world, lit up by thousands and thousands of light bulbs, while the secret police and their informants were authorized to enter any house to be sure that no more than the allowable maximum--one 40-watt bulb--was lit in any house or apartment. He starved the people, and refused to supply heat even in the dead of winter. People froze to death while he and his wife Elena lived in opulent luxury. Elena was Nicolae's perfect counterpart and partner. She called the Romanian people "worms."
In 1989, there was a revolution, or the appearance of a revolution. It broke out in the western city of Timisoara in what looked like and maybe was an heroic and spontaneous outbreak in defense of a dissident priest. There were confrontations. Hundreds were killed. Popular demonstrations broke out in other cities. This was a month after the Berlin Wall came down. Gorbachev was promoting glastnost. Eastern Europe was changing. Even in Romania, probably the most oppressive country in the region, the most controlled, people still heard Radio Free Europe (although if you got caught listening to it you could be in trouble), people must have had a sense that change was imminent.
In Bucharest there were massive student demonstrations. Ceausescu addressed the crowd from the balcony; instead of cheers he got booed. The royal couple fled, were caught and executed. "Students" took over the tv station and broadcast the revolution. There was a bunch of fighting and more people were killed than in the largely peaceful transitions in the other Warsaw Pact countries, but who was fighting whom?
Everyone I've read so far seems to think it was a stage play, with a bunch of civilian corpses as props. When the dust cleared, the National Salvation Party emerged as the saviors of the revolution, but they were largely the same party hacks that had served under Ceausescu. The dread Securitate was dissolved. The same guys were in the same offices, but now they were called something else. And I guess they stopped arresting people for having opinions.
Here are a couple of disturbing things I've read:
1. There was a team of reporters from TASS in Timisoara at the time of the outbreak. They'd been there for twelve days.
2. At the big demo where Ceausescu was booed, the cries of "Remember Timisoara" came from Securitate men in the crowd.
In other words, the whole thing was somehow staged. At this point, I can't say that I fully accept this interpretation.
"Time had stood still in Romania. Until recently. A revolution did take place in December (1989) and then in June. It was not the revolution that we saw on television and that was most likely a play scripted by the KGB and acted by the Army and Securitate with the innocent help of a cast of millions. It was a revolution in people's souls when they suddenly felt no more fear. This revolution is going on still. Whoever let the tiger out of its cage is in no position to put it back again."
--Andrei Codrescu, The Hole In the Flag
| |
