A Palace Revolt in a Revolutionary Sauce, the Romanian Way
1965 – Nicolae Ceauşescu comes to power and establishes his personal dictatorship
17 December 1989 – The army shoots at demonstrators in Timişoara; in a few days the uprising spreads to other cities.
22 December 1989 – Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu flee from Bucharest by helicopter but get caught; they are executed on 25 December.
The revolution in Romania was in many ways special. This was the only state, in which the leader did his utmost to save Communism. Nicolae Ceauşescu had created a dictatorship, which could be destroyed only through an extensive blood bath. For this he paid with his life.
Nowhere was the “real socialism” as grotesquely inhuman and absurd as in Romania. Ceauşescu's dictatorship was cruel, the Securitate, his security force, kept society and the state apparatus in constant fear. Despite this Ceauşescu was the favourite of the Western world – this he managed to achieve by shrewdly distancing himself from Moscow.
Romania stood out as the country, which decided to repay all of its foreign debt, which by 1981 had grown to $10 billion. Export was the only means to earn cash but, unfortunately, Romania had only such goods to offer, which had little value on the world market or which it could not even produce in sufficient quantities for domestic needs. But Ceauşescu decided that export was more important, and the interests of the Romanians could be sacrificed. Gorbachev noted, with good reason: “The Romanian economy looks more and more like an old horse being mercilessly whipped and driven by a cruel rider”.
For saving energy, for example, there was a ban on the use of private cars of Sundays. More valuable pieces of meat were exported. Romanians could only buy offal, such as the heads of pigs or chicken, or chicken wings. But Ceauşescu added insult to malnutrition, declaring that the Romanian people were eating too much.
The revolution started in December 1989 from spontaneous protests in the town of Timişoara. Ceauşescu gave the army the orders to shoot, but the killings could not suppress the popular uprising. On 21 December, the revolt spread to Bucharest. Ceauşescu appeared on the balcony of a government building, but a chorus of boos suddenly interrupted the speech of an astonished dictator. The images of a leader losing control, shown live on TV, constituted a signal for rebellion. The next day a mass of workers moved from the suburbs to the city centre; army units stopped shooting and started to fraternise with the people. Elena and Nicolae Ceauşescu escaped from the government building by helicopter but their absurd odyssey ended quickly: no one offered them help on the flight.
At the same time an anonymous wave of terror got under way in Bucharest. To this day it is not known who shot at innocent people from the rooftops and windows, killing a thousand. To stop the terror the new leaders decided to execute the Ceauşescus quickly. On 25 December 1989, after a hasty show trial behind closed doors, the couple were mown down with a machine gun. Their place was taken by people formerly close to the regime; the construction of democracy was more difficult in Romania than it was elsewhere in the former Eastern Bloc.