Timișoara, 35 years ago
It’s been 35 years since the start of the Romanian anti-communist Revolution.
Bogdan Matei, 16.12.2024, 14:00
It’s been 35 years since the start of the Romanian anti-communist Revolution.
Installed at the end of WW2 by the Soviet occupation troops, the communist dictatorship in Bucharest seemed unshakable. In November 1989, the congress of the single ruling party unanimously re-elected Nicolae Ceaușescu as secretary general, a position he had held for almost a quarter of a century. The fact that he was already in his seventies did not prevent him from making plans for the so-called socialist development of Romania by the year 2000. His ambition to pay off, ahead of schedule, the foreign debts that he had contracted, was only a burden for ordinary Romanians, not for their leaders. Almost everything that was being produced locally, was exported. In the country, food was rationed, apartment blocks were unheated and electricity was cut off unexpectedly, for hours. In addition to hunger and cold, fear also reigned.
The regime’s political police, the Securitate, had created the myth of knowing everything about everybody, so people were afraid to protest. In an absurd game, the regime’s propaganda system – that included, the public Tv and radio stations and and the newspapers – were painting a parallel reality in which Ceaușescu was a genius, his wife, Elena (a functional illiterate), was a world-famous scientist and a loving mother to the entire people and the Romanians lived in the best of all worlds.
In Romania’s neighboring countries, encouraged by the policies of the last Soviet leader, the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, huge street protests had overthrown communist dictatorships. Warsaw, Prague, East Berlin, Budapest, Sofia were already experiencing freedom after almost half a century of tyranny. Historians say that it was no coincidence that the spark of the Romanian Revolution occurred in Timisoara, the largest city in the west of the country, a cosmopolitan and multiethnic city, where TV signal from Hungary and the former Yugoslavia were easily received.
On December 16, 1989, the solidarity of several parish members with the Protestant, ethnic Hungarian pastor, Laszlo Tokes, whom the Securitate wanted to deport from Timisoara, was the snowball that turned into an avalanche. More and more people gathered around the parish house, who ended up openly protesting on the streets of the city. The repression system reacted immediately and opened fire. Unarmed people were killed until December 20, when the army fraternized with the protestors and returned to the barracks. On that day, Timisoara became the first city in Romania free from communism. The revolution spread rapidly throughout the country and culminated, in Bucharest, on December 22, with Ceaușescu’s escape in a helicopter from the headquarters of the communist party’s central committee, besieged by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Captured and hastily tried by an improvised court, the Ceaușescus were executed on December 25th. Over a thousand people died during the 1989 Revolution. Romania was the only country behind the former Iron Curtain where liberation from communism occurred with bloodshed.
