Thirty years on The brutal Christmas Day downfall of Romania’s dictator
Thirty years after Romania’s communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu was executed, Tim Stanley looks back at his rise and fall
Most of the communist regimes in East Europe fell peacefully. One did not. The dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu, would not go without a fight – he had to be forced from power by popular revolt.
His flight from Bucharest was blackly comic; his capture and execution, 30 years ago on Christmas Day 1989, was brutal. It was also exactly what he deserved. The story of Ceauşescu’s fall is a reminder of just how ghastly communism was, especially when in the hands of a true believer.
The USSR imposed communism on Romania after the Second World War, and the Soviet Union was keen to turn the country into a giant breadbasket. Ceauşescu, a peasant’s son who came to power in 1965 at the age of 47, was the head of a faction who wanted greater independence for their country. Their goal was to assert themselves as engineers of an industrialised, socialist society.
Ceauşescu got his chance to shine in 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring. He denounced the invasion from the balcony of the Central Committee building in Bucharest, and his speech made him so popular that it was said that if Romania had held elections that year, Ceauşescu would have won.
The West looked upon him as a dissident, a man they could work with, and for the next two decades they
When Ceauşescu visited Paris, he stole anything that wasn’t nailed down
showered him with accolades and invitations to dine. In 1978, Nicolae and his wife Elena visited Buckingham Palace, a trip that betrayed his criminal nature. Valéry Giscard d’estaing, president of France, rang ahead to warn the British that when Ceauşescu visited Paris, he had stolen anything that wasn’t nailed down, including lamps, vases, ashtrays, even bathroom fittings (the palace hid several pinchable items just in case).
It was also made clear by the Romanians that Elena would like to be given some academic degrees from British universities: a woman with only a basic education was passing herself off as a prize-winning chemist.
The trip was a humiliation for the UK, but at least it stood to get an aerospace deal out of it. Imagine the disappointment of Her Majesty’s government when Nicolae asked if he could make part of the payment in ice cream, yogurt and strawberries.
The irony was that while the West thought Ceauşescu was a moderate, Ceauşescu was convinced it was the Soviet Union who had gone soft and betrayed socialism. He was trying to build pure Stalinism with a command economy and a cult of personality.
The party organised massparticipation games at which the people were compelled to perform lavish, hyper-camp dances in honour of the first family. Ceauşescu wanted a baby boom, so he restricted contraception and abortion; women were required to undergo regular examinations in scenes reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale.
When the money ran out in the late Seventies, rather than reforming as the Soviet Union did, he doubleddown on a harsh austerity programme; hospitals lost power and emaciated orphans shivered in their cots.
At the same time he poured cash into rebuilding the centre of Bucharest along neoclassical lines and, in a bizarre twist, he permitted the broadcast of the US TV show Dallas to illustrate to Romanians the decadence of capitalism.
Expressing incredulity at this madness was impossible. Bugging the phones and spying on workplaces was the Securitate, the most ubiquitous secret police in Eastern Europe. They even patrolled gynaecological wards to make sure women weren’t avoiding their national duty to churn out babies.
Ceauşescu’s rule seemed total
– until the regime picked a fight with a Hungarian pastor in the city of Timişoara. The cleric was an outspoken critic of communism and, in
an attempt to silence him, the state had him sacked and kicked out of his flat.
On December 15/16 1989, a crowd gathered to protest against the eviction and things swelled out of control: the people were calling for bread and freedom. The Securitate could do nothing. The regime sent in workers armed with clubs but the workers switched sides; Timisoara became a city in open revolt.
Ceauşescu, now a frail 71-year-old with diabetes, nevertheless retained a passionate belief in his own popularity – and so, in an attempt to repeat the trick of 1968, he decided to give a speech from the balcony of the Central Committee building. It was broadcast live on TV on December 21.
A few minutes in, the crowd turned nasty. There were whistles and jeers. Chants of “Tim-i-şoara! Tim-i-şoara!” Ceauşescu, looking confused, raised his hand as if to swat them away. The camera feed cut. Cue patriotic music.
Vicious fighting broke out in Bucharest between protesters and the security forces: by the end of the revolution, roughly 1,000 were dead and 3,000 injured.
If Ceauşescu had taken that moment to resign, he could have gone into exile and lived, but instead he attempted to mount a stiff repression from the central committee building, just as the state apparatus, realising he was isolated and deranged, turned against him.
Ceauşescu went back on to the balcony with a loud hailer and tried to persuade his citizens to go home. They threw sticks and pieces of wood at him. The people charged the building. Things turned to farce. Nicolae and Elena decided to flee via a helicopter and were bundled into a lift to take them to where it was waiting. This being communist
Romania, however, the lift broke down – the Securitate had to force open the doors and hoist the pair on to the roof.
They flew to one of the Ceauşescu’s vulgar palaces at Snagov where the old man telephoned the army for support only to be told he was on his own; the army had joined the revolution. The fugitives packed cases with bread and blankets and took off again with two bodyguards.
The pilot, realising that he was now carrying a wanted man, found an excuse to land the helicopter and get rid of them. One of the bodyguards ran away. Their remaining muscle flagged down the car of a local doctor who almost had kittens when he recognised his passengers: after a few miles, he faked car trouble and stopped.
The bodyguard compelled a man who was washing his car to drive them on; Elena held a gun to his head. The bodyguard got out to ask for directions. He never returned. Now abandoned by everyone, even the hired help, the old couple knocked at the door of a nunnery and asked for refuge; they were refused.
A porter at a party hotel said there was no room at the inn. Finally, the car washer abandoned them at an agricultural institute. The Ceauşescus accepted arrest by two policemen and spent the night in a barracks. They complained about the food.
It’s often been regretted that the show trial of the Ceauşescus was shambolic and unjust, but that was how they’d treated their own people and, in an odd way, they gave as good as they got. Over an hour, the kangaroo court accused them of genocide, theft and incompetence.
Why did the Ceauşescus order the destruction of peasant villages? Why did they export all the food? Was it true, as the TV cameras revealed, that they ate imported food off golden plates in their villa?
Nonsense, said Elena, they lived in a humble flat “like everybody else”. Nicolae refused to be interrogated: he only recognised the national assembly, he said. This was a coup, he shouted; he knew the men behind it and they’d helped him run the country for years, so why were they suddenly condemning him?
“Liars!” screamed Elena. “Have you not seen how the people cheered when I went into the factories?” asked Nicolae. The court told them
Ceauşescu, a frail 71- year-old, retained a passionate belief in his own popularity
to stand up. They refused: “We are human beings,” said Elena.
The court found them guilty and there would be no appeal; a soldier tried to tie Elena’s hands and she panicked, shouting: “What are you doing?” They were taken outside and shot. It was Christmas Day.
One of the first TV shows broadcasted in liberated Romania was the pilot of Dallas, with a previously censored sex scene spliced back in.
The question is, why did communism end more violently in Romania than elsewhere? One answer is the uniquely despotic, even mentally ill, personalities of Nicolae and Elena; a classic example of violent co-dependence.
Another is their pure, even childish devotion to Stalinism. Most East European regimes were already liberalising before 1989, because they realised the economics didn’t work and, when the velvet revolution broke out, nationalism – freedom from Soviet influence – quickly identified itself with capitalism and democracy.
Ceauşescu was as patriotic as anyone, yet his perverse measure of national success was building a state that was more socialist than the USSR, more hermetically sealed than North Korea, more fanatical than Maoist China.
It’s often said that real communism has never been tried. Nicolae Ceauşescu gave it his best shot.