Christmas revolution of 1989 has yet to run its course
Twenty-five years after the fall of Romania’s communist rulers the Ceausescus, their crimes remain unatoned for, says BenMacintyre.
TWENTY-FIVE years ago this week – and 25 years after he came to power – the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were ousted, captured, hastily tried and then executed.
The grainy footage of the killing of Romania’s once allpowerful first couple, on Christmas Day 1989, is still as shocking as it was then: the Ceausescus are initially defiant as the death sentence is read out by a military court, then querulous, then bewildered and furious as Romanian paratroopers bind their hands, the camera zooming in pointedly on Elena’s expensive bracelet. Moments later machine guns crackle and they lie crumpled in a courtyard.
Their fall was astonishingly rapid. Only four days earlier the despot had stood on a balcony overlooking the Palace Square in Bucharest, haranguing the crowd on the virtues of the socialist revolution. He was a monstrous megalomaniac: capricious, blind and brutal. A look of incredulity crossed his face as the restive crowd began to jeer; fear rising, he tried to placate them by promising a pay rise. Finally he made a dash for the helicopter on the roof.
The Romanian revolution ended 42 years of state-imposed misery. While Ceausescu built himself gaudy palaces, he ground the country into unspeakable poverty, imposing obedience through his ruthless secret police, the Securitate. Like all uprisings, from the French Revolution to the Arab Spring, this one promised much more than it could deliver. Yet from the moment Ceausescu died, his brutalised country looked West rather than East and has never looked back. Romania joined Nato in 2004 and the EU in 2007. It enjoyed impressive growth until the recession, and standards of living have improved beyond recognition; the images of Romanian orphans chained to their cots will never be repeated. Romania’s new president, Klaus Iohannis, a member of the country’s small German-speaking minority, has promised closer links with the West, and a campaign against corruption.
Iohannis has been hailed as the very antithesis of the Ceausescu regime, proof that the ideals of 1989 have finally come to fruition. Yet there is a hole in Romania’s history, a wound in the collective memory that has been left untreated for 25 years, ensuring that the revolution remains unfinished, its roots unexplored.
The crimes of the Ceausescu era have never been fully investigated; the perpetrators never brought to justice and the victims never properly recognised or compensated. From Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa, from Chile to Northern Ireland, nations have struggled to understand and atone for the horrors of the 20th century; but Romania has never gone through such a national catharsis.
Of about 617,000 people locked up as opponents of the communist state, 120,000 are thought to have died in jail. The secret police tortured and systematically persecuted perceived enemies of the state. At least 1000 dissidents were killed. Yet apart from the Ceausescus and a few aides, no officials have been prosecuted. The key archives of the justice ministry, interior ministry and the Securitate remain closed.
A younger generation is in danger of forgetting the censorship, oppression and surveillance of the past, because they were never encouraged to remember. Romanian school textbooks do not dwell on the iniquities of life under Ceausescu. Nearly 40 per cent of Romanian teenagers believe that things were better under communist rule.
The images of the Romanian revolution remain indelible for anyone who witnessed them unfolding on television – ordinary people armed only with rocks and righteousness storming the tacky citadels of communist rule, the murmur of revolution spreading across Palace Square, and the grim slaying of the Ceausescus. But the long, crushing tyranny that came before, and its architects, are drifting away from memory, and from justice.
In the words of one Romanian memorial: ‘‘Communism’s great victory was the creation of a people without a memory.’’
Iohannis has promised to end Romania’s collective amnesia by investigating what happened before, during and immediately after the collapse of Ceausescus dictatorship. ‘‘We have never had a reckoning,’’ he says. He may yet complete the revolution of 1989 and seize the future by confronting the past.