Background
In 1981 Ceaușescu began an
austerity programme designed to enable Romania to liquidate its entire national
debt ($10 billion). To achieve this, many basic goods—including gas, heat and
food—were rationed, which drastically reduced the standard of living and
increased malnutrition. The infant mortality rate also grew to be the highest
in Europe. The secret police,
Securitate, had become so omnipresent that it made Romania essentially a police
state. Free speech was limited and opinions that did not favour the Communist
Party were forbidden. The large numbers of Securitate informers made organized
dissent nearly impossible. The regime deliberately played on this sense that
everyone was being watched to make it easier to bend the people to the Party's
will. Even by Soviet Bloc standards, the Securitate was exceptionally
brutal. Ceaușescu created a cult of
personality, with weekly shows in stadiums or on streets in different cities
dedicated to him, his wife and the Communist Party. There were several
megalomaniac projects, such as the construction of the grandiose House of the
Republic (today the Palace of the Parliament)—the biggest palace in the
world—the adjacent Centrul Civic and a never-completed museum dedicated to
communism and Ceaușescu, today the Casa Radio. These and similar projects
drained the country's finances and aggravated the already dire economic
situation. Thousands of Bucharest residents were evicted from their homes,
which were subsequently demolished to make room for the huge structures. Unlike the other Warsaw Pact leaders,
Ceaușescu had not been slavishly pro-Soviet but rather had pursued an
"independent" foreign policy; Romanian forces did not join its Warsaw
Pact allies in putting an end to the Prague Spring—an invasion Ceaușescu openly
denounced—while Romanian athletes competed at the Soviet-boycotted 1984 Summer
Olympics in Los Angeles (receiving a standing ovation at the opening ceremonies
and proceeding to win 53 medals, trailing only the US and West Germany in the
overall count).[25][26] Conversely, while Soviet Communist Party General
Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of reform, Ceaușescu maintained a hard
political line and cult of personality.
The austerity programme started in 1981 and the widespread poverty it
introduced made the Communist regime very unpopular. The austerity programmes
were met with little resistance among Romanians and there were only a few
strikes and labour disputes, of which the Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977 and
the Brașov Rebellion of November 1987 at the truck manufacturer Steagul Roșu
were the most notable. In March 1989 several leading activists of the Romanian
Communist Party (PCR) criticised Ceaușescu's economic policies in a letter, but
shortly thereafter he achieved a significant political victory: Romania paid
off its external debt of about US $11 billion several months before the time
that even the Romanian dictator expected. However, in months following the
austerity program and a shortage of goods remained the same as before. It initially appeared that Ceaușescu would
weather the wave of revolution sweeping across Eastern Europe. He was formally
re-elected for another five-year term as General Secretary of the Romanian
Communist Party on 24 November at the party's XIV Congress. On the same day,
Ceaușescu's counterpart in Czechoslovakia, Miloš Jakeš, resigned along with the
entire Communist leadership, effectively ending Communist rule in
Czechoslovakia. On 11 November 1989, before the party congress, on Bucharest's
Brezoianu Street and Cogălniceanu Boulevard students from Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest
demonstrated with placards saying, "We want reforms against Ceaușescu
government." The students—including
Mihnea Paraschivescu, Grațian Vulpe and the economist Dan Căprariu-Schlachter
from Cluj—were detained and investigated by the Securitate at the Rahova
Penitentiary on suspicion of propaganda against the socialist society. They
were released on 22 December 1989 at 14:00. There were other letters and
attempts to draw attention to the economic, cultural and spiritual oppression
of Romanians, but they served only to intensify the activity of the police and
Securitate.
Timișoara uprising
On 16 December 1989 the Hungarian
minority in Timișoara held a public protest in response to an attempt by the
government to evict Hungarian Reformed church Pastor László Tőkés. In July of
that year Tőkés had criticised the regime's Systematisation policy[28] in an
interview with Hungarian television, and complained that Romanians did not even
know their human rights. As Tőkés described it later, the interview, which had
been seen in the border areas and was then spread all over Romania, had "a
shock effect upon the Romanians, the Securitate as well, on the people of
Romania. […] [I]t had an unexpected effect upon the public atmosphere in
Romania." The government then
alleged that Tőkés was inciting ethnic hatred.[citation needed] At the behest
of the government, his bishop removed him from his post, thereby depriving him
of the right to use the apartment to which he was entitled as a pastor, and
assigned him to be a pastor in the countryside. For some time his parishioners
gathered around his home to protect him from harassment and eviction. Many
passersby spontaneously joined in. As it became clear that the crowd would not
disperse, the mayor, Petre Moț, made remarks suggesting that he had overturned
the decision to evict Tőkés. Meanwhile, the crowd had grown impatient and, when
Moț declined to confirm his statement against the planned eviction in writing,
the crowd started to chant anti-communist slogans. Subsequently, police and
Securitate forces showed up at the scene. By 19:30 the protest had spread and
the original cause became largely irrelevant.
Some of the protesters attempted to burn down the building that housed
the district committee of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR). The Securitate
responded with tear gas and water jets, while police beat up rioters and
arrested many of them. Around 21:00 the rioters withdrew. They regrouped
eventually around the Romanian Orthodox Cathedral and started a protest march around
the city, but again they were confronted by the security forces.
Crackdown
(1989)
Riots and protests resumed the
following day, 17 December. The rioters broke into the district committee
building and threw party documents, propaganda brochures, Ceaușescu's writings
and other symbols of communist power out of the windows. The military were sent in to control the
riots because the situation was too large for the Securitate and conventional
police to handle. The significance of the army presence in the streets was an
ominous one: It meant that they had received their orders from the highest
level of the command chain, presumably from Ceaușescu himself. The army failed
to establish order; and chaos ensued including gunfire, fights, casualties and
burned cars. Transportor Amfibiu Blindat (TAB) armoured personnel carriers and
tanks were called in. After 20:00, from
Piața Libertății (Liberty Square) to the Opera there was wild shooting,
including the area of Decebal bridge, Calea Lipovei (Lipovei Avenue) and Calea
Girocului (Girocului Avenue). Tanks, trucks and TABs blocked the accesses into
the city while helicopters hovered overhead. After midnight the protests calmed
down. Ion Coman, Ilie Matei and Ștefan Gușă (Chief of the Romanian General
Staff) inspected the city. Some areas looked like the aftermath of a war:
destruction, rubble and blood. On the
morning of 18 December the centre was being guarded by soldiers and Securitate
agents in plainclothes. Mayor Moț ordered a party gathering to take place at
the university, with the purpose of condemning the "vandalism" of the
previous days. He also declared martial law, prohibiting people from going
about in groups of larger than two.
Defying the curfew, a group of 30 young men headed for the Orthodox
cathedral, where they stopped and waved a Romanian flag from which they had
removed the Romanian Communist coat of arms leaving a distinctive hole, in a
manner similar to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Expecting that they would
be fired upon, they started to sing "Deșteaptă-te, române!"
("Awaken thee, Romanian!"), an earlier patriotic song that had been
banned since 1947. They were, indeed, fired upon; some died and others were
seriously injured, while the lucky ones were able to escape. On 19 December Radu Bălan and Ștefan Gușă
visited workers in the city's factories, but failed to get them to resume work.
On 20 December massive columns of workers entered the city. About 100,000
protesters occupied Piața Operei (Opera Square – today Piața Victoriei, Victory
Square) and chanted anti-government slogans: "Noi suntem poporul!"
("We are the people!"), "Armata e cu noi!" ("The army
is on our side!"), "Nu vă fie frică, Ceaușescu pică!"
("Have no fear, Ceaușescu is falling!") Meanwhile, Emil Bobu
(Secretary to the Central Committee) and Prime Minister Constantin Dăscălescu
were sent by Elena Ceaușescu (Nicolae being at that time in Iran) to resolve
the situation. They met with a delegation of the protesters and agreed to free
the majority of the arrested protesters. However, they refused to comply with
the protesters' main demand (resignation of Ceaușescu) and the situation
remained essentially unchanged. The next
day trains loaded with workers from factories in Oltenia arrived in Timișoara.
The regime was attempting to use them to repress the mass protests, but after a
brief encounter they ended up joining the protests. One worker explained,
"Yesterday our factory boss and a party official rounded us up in the
yard, handed us wooden clubs and told us that Hungarians and 'hooligans' were
devastating Timișoara and that it is our duty to go there and help crush the
riots. But I realised that wasn't the truth." On 18 December Ceaușescu had departed for a
visit to Iran, leaving the duty of crushing the Timișoara revolt to his subordinates
and his wife. Upon his return on the evening of 20 December the situation
became even more tense, and he gave a televised speech from the TV studio
inside the Central Committee Building (CC Building) in which he spoke about the
events at Timișoara in terms of an "interference of foreign forces in
Romania's internal affairs" and an "external aggression on Romania's
sovereignty." The country, which
had no information about the Timișoara events from the national media, heard
about the Timișoara revolt from Western radio stations like Voice of America
and Radio Free Europe, and by word of mouth. A mass meeting was staged for the
next day, 21 December, which, according to the official media, was presented as
a "spontaneous movement of support for Ceaușescu," emulating the 1968
meeting in which Ceaușescu had spoken against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by
Warsaw Pact forces.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/romanian-revolution-pictures-1989/
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