December 22, 1989 or the First Day
December 22, 1989 was the First Day of Freedom, and everything had to be rebuilt
Steliu Lambru, 22.12.2025, 12:25
After about a week of large-scale protests, which started on the evening of December 15, 1989, on December 22 the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime no longer existed. Just minutes after noon, the dictator, his wife, and a few close associates fled from the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee building, the seat of power for 45 years, by helicopter.
The ousting of the Ceaușescu regime had made around 1,200 casualties throughout the country. It also left behind a society struggling to make sense of what had happened to it for decades and what it had to do next. December 22, 1989 was the First Day of Freedom, and everything had to be rebuilt: economy, society, state, laws, culture, education.
It was an extremely difficult task, and the hardest part was facing the past and the path to follow in building the present and the future. An immense amount of social energy was spent in the 36 years that have passed since Day One, the traces of which are still visible today.
The philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu tried to answer the question of why confronting the past was so complicated. Why did Romanians have to go through this ordeal, to look within themselves, to assess their choices, and the choices of the generations before them?
Gabriel Liiceanu: “Why is it necessary to confront the past? This is a complicated and delicate question, because it requires nuances and because it’s been 35 years already. It’s important to face the past because, of the three dimensions of time, past, present and future, in my opinion the past is the most important. This is because it is when any being, any human individual and any nation is founded. So it is completely impossible to try to understand the present and build a future by forgetting, ignoring what has been laid in your being as a previous foundation. If we talk about the life of each of us, I would say that each of us is the layers of time that life has stored in our neurons to constitute our self. We drag behind us the years of our childhood, adolescence, youth, everything we lived during those years, our experience up to this day. We are, permanently, what we have been. The past is not something that has gone and no longer has any importance. The past does not pass, it is the dimension that remains and not the one that passes, and it is the dimension that founds us.”
Many Romanians tried to run away from the past. The pressure was too great, and resorting to history did not clarify what had to be done in the future; on the contrary, history complicated the choices even more.
Gabriel Liiceanu: “The totality of the layers that have been placed one on top of the other, throughout history, is the key to our history, to the present and to our desire to build a future. We, Romanians, in our textbooks, have at times reinvented our history as it suited us. It has been subjected to distortions that were favourable to one political regime or another. In any case, communism was a master at dressing up the past and remaking the face of the past as it suited a leader, a party secretary or another. We have not come to know our past, we have always renamed it depending on circumstances, we have known it wrong or have simply ignored it. And, by not knowing it, we risk returning to its ugliest forms.”
Looking back at ourselves is always a good approach. And confronting the past brings more clarity to thinking and explains why society had to go through what it did.
Gabriel Liiceanu: “If we think about confronting the past, then the old communist phrase ‘the heavy legacy’ says a lot. It was the heavy legacy that the bourgeoisie had left us, and we, the communist regime, will have to fight this heavy legacy, to get rid of it and to replace something horrifying with splendour, happiness, a bright future. ‘The heavy legacy’ was the most hypocritical phrase ever. The splendour is that after 1990 we did have a heavy legacy. Because what we received from those who crossed over to the other side of history, Iliescu with all the communist party members with whom he crossed over to the other side, with all the administrative, political and repressive structures from Ceaușescu’s time, was the heaviest legacy—specifically, the repressive, abusive, arbitrary structure of what the communist regime had meant. He simply took over to the other side all the vices and bad habits of the previous regime. Under these circumstances, confronting the past was impossible, because it is hard to ask those who replicate the communist past, dressing it up in new clothes, to judge themselves. We did not experience this lustration and this confrontation with the past, because criminals do not judge and condemn themselves as criminals in this world.”
December 22, 1989 or the First Day is part of both the old Romania and the new Romania. It is the end of decisions made by past generations, and a foundational moment for the choices of the generations to come. (AMP)
