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Romania since the Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Mark Almond
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Extract

THE VIOLENCE WHICH MARKED THE OVERTHROW OF Nicolae Ceaugescu's regime at Christmas 1989, and the recurrent disorders, especially in Bucharest, which have punctuated developments over the last nine months, have made Romania's experience of anti-Communist revolution strikingly different from that of its neighbours to the north and to the west. Whatever the political and social tensions emerging in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland (and whatever may be the GDR's legacy to a reunified Germany), it is unlikely that the charge of neo-communism will be central to their political debate. It is precisely that charge levelled against the government party (National Salvation Front/FSN) and against the person of Ion Ilescu by various opposition groups, and former prominent dissidents under Ceaugescu, which remains the most emotive issue in Romanian politics. The question of whether the revolution which overthrew Nicolae Ceauyescu and led to the dissolution of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) was the result of a popular uprising or a coup d'état planned by Party members has haunted Romanian politics through the first nine months of the post-Ceauqescu period.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1990 , pp. 484 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1990

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References

1 For all their disputes, no one in Romania denies that popular feeling at the revolution was completely opposed to the Communist Party and all that it represented.

2 To the south, whatever its political turmoil, Bulgaria has not yet witnessed comparable civil strife to the events of 13–15 June in Bucharest.

3 Of course, the charge of having been either an enthusiastic Communist or an informer for the security apparatus is likely to remain frequently used against political opponents in Central European politics in the future as it has been already in the months since the collapse of Communist rule, especially in the GDR and Czechoslovakia.

4 This article will hope to illustrate how the other major issues are related to the central question of whether Ion Iliescu and the National Salvation Front are the grave-diggers or the reincarnation of communism à la roumaine.

5 Even as this article was being written, the issue was dramatically revived by statements of two former leaders of the revolution and FSN, Silviu Brucan and General Nicolae Militaru, published in Adevarul, 23 August 1990, admitting for their part to a conspiracy to overthrow the old regime.

6 See note 5 above.

7 For an English text of ‘The Timisoara Proclamation’, see East European Reporter, IV, 2, Spring/Summer, 1990, pp. 32–35.

8 For instance, a photograph of Iliescu playing hoopla with Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in 1976 was widely distributed in Bucharest at least. It was reproduced in Le Figaro, 4 January 1990.

9 To judge from an amateur video film of the confused events.

10 For the idea of ‘simulation’ as a key to understanding Romanian, not only RCP, politics, see Shafir, Michael, Romania, Politics, Economics and Society: Political Stagnation and Simulated Change, London, 1985, esp. pp. 54–63 Google Scholar, but the theme of the regime’s manipulation of participation and the subordinates’ pretence of loyal acceptance is recurrent.

11 That was my impression during visits in April and May. See below for my criticism of the opposition parties’ belief in the vital efficacy of television and radio to electioneering in Romania. As early as 30 January, the pro-Front demonstrators in Bucharest chanted: ‘We won’t sell our factories or our country’. (See Le Monde 31 January 1990.)

12 See Der Spiegel, 6 November 1986.

13 Ion Iliescu has repeatedly used terms like ‘original democracy’, ‘third way’ and, perhaps no less vague, ‘Swedish model’ to describe his goals for Romanian development.

14 See The Times, 25 August 1990.

15 For instance, Iliescu gave his opposition to Ceaugescu’s enthusiasm for what he had seen in China and North Korea in 1971 as the cause of their dispute to both the electoral observers assembled in the Foreign Ministry on the morning of 18 May and repeated it that afternoon in a debate with Ion Ratiu before the US observers in the Grand National Assembly building, Bucharest.

16 Quoted in Le Monde, 31 January 1990.

17 See The Independent, 21 June 1990, for extensive quotation from the speech on 15 June.

18 See my report, ‘Romania’s Miners: No Regrets’ in The Independent Magazine, 7 July 1990, pp. 24–33.