The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  On Day Eleven, Havel and his ascendant revolutionaries held a massive rally at the soccer stadium in Letna Park, in the hills above the city where a giant statue of Stalin once stood. Perhaps half a million people braved the cold and congealing winds, snapping flags and banners like whips. It might have looked like the usual gathering: people cheering, Havel and others exhorting. But it was not. Behind the scenes, the revolution entered a new phase. What began as a spontaneous outpouring of support had by then evolved into calculated political theater of the highest order.

  That was evident in the meticulous stage management of the event. As thousands of people converged in streams upon Letna, student marshals directed them to their proper places. Sixty rock musicians had been working since early morning to set up an elaborate sound system. There were nursing stations and public-assistance booths. “A child is lost,” an announcer declared over the loudspeakers, and the multitudes stopped what they were doing until the kid was found.

  Havel stepped forward, speaking from the spot at the stadium where Jakes and other communist party bosses usually stood to watch their annual May Day parades. “If anyone had told me a year ago that I would see this, I would have laughed,” he said, to guffaws from the crowds. Of course, a year ago he was in prison. With that, he turned the microphone over to none other than Ladislav Adamec.

  What was Havel doing, giving this forum to a member of the ruling communists, one of them? Behind the scenes, Adamec had asked for Civic Forum’s support. He calculated that with the opposition behind him, he could persuade the Central Committee to appoint him general secretary, a man acceptable to both camps who could unify the country and take Czechoslovakia down the path to reform. Havel was pretending to go along, an aide whispered as we watched this final act in the drama unfold only a few meters away. He at best considered Adamec to be a man of the minute, rather than the hour. By giving him his chance, Havel calculated that he could destroy the communists’ last best hope.

  And he was right. Adamec blew it, spectacularly. At Havel’s behest, the crowds welcomed him. “Adamec! Adamec!” But then he opened his mouth. The first word out, incredibly, was “Comrades!” He called for discipline, an end to the strikes, economic rather than political change. Pausing for what he expected would be cheers, he realized he was undone. “No,” the crowds shouted back, amid a mounting chorus of jeers and boos. Adamec struggled manfully to continue, all but drowned out by angry shouts: “Resign! Resign!” It was like watching a man being drawn and quartered. Weirdly, a spade materialized from somewhere in the crowd and was passed forward, shaken aloft by every passing hand.

  So came the end, “gently, gently.” Havel called for a moment of silence for those “fallen in the fight for freedom.” Snow began to filter down, lightly at first and then more thickly. A horse-drawn cart left the park, decked out with banners and the wings of angels, and the people began to follow. One by one, the half million at Letna joined hands and in single file began to walk toward Wenceslas Square, more than a mile and a half away, scarcely saying a word in the gently falling snow.

  For me, this was the moment. To this day, I can hardly remember it without tears. The rickety old cart with its angel wings, the bells on the horses. The people following, always hand in hand. It was so gentle, so strong and irresistible. Of course I followed, too. The procession slowly wound its way through the paths and woodlands of the park, now covered in white. It snaked down the medieval streets behind the castle and then into the square in front of the darkened presidential palace. There were no chants, no cheers, no hints of confrontation. Just the unbroken line of people passing silently in the white darkness, the line looping back and forth upon itself outside the forbidding gates. The snow muffled their footfalls. There was no sound but their soft shuffling, broken only now and again by a gentle shaking of keys.

  For hours the procession passed. Half of Prague joined the human chain. From the castle it wound down the steep hills into Mala Strana, past the great baroque cathedral, its ornate spires lit in the snowy night, across the shimmering Vltava at Charles Bridge with its four-hundred-year-old statues of Czech kings and religious saviors, through the narrow streets of Old Town and finally into Narodni Street, where lit candles marked the savagery of November 17.

  I watched three uniformed policemen join the procession, their caps set at jaunty angles, dancing along in tall black leather boots. What was it that Havel had said, back in October? At the moment of truth, our masks would fall, perhaps revealing intelligent and very human faces. And still the procession came, everyone swinging their arms, skipping, happy, joyous. The first of the marchers had reached Wenceslas Square, a pandemonium of honking horns, trolleys jingling their bells and the cheers of multitudes, while the last still waited patiently at Letna, high in the snowy hills. Hand in hand, they bisected the city. Hand in hand, they drew a line. Here, on one side, stood the people, on the other their oppressors. This was the moment. Everyone had to choose.

  From above the city, I looked out at Prague, lighted and luminous in the snow, its people dancing. O silent night. O holy night. Never in my life have I seen anything so beautiful. I doubt I ever will again.

  If only Eastern Europe’s subsequent revolutions were so light of spirit, or so painless.

  A few hours after the Berlin Wall fell, so did Bulgaria’s communist leader of thirty-five years, Todor Zhivkov—notorious for so many nefarious geopolitical plots, from the poisoned-umbrella slaying of a Bulgarian dissident in London to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. This was no uplifting revolution by would-be democrats. It was a coup d’état that kept the old regime in place.

  Darker still was the final act in the epic year. On the night of December 16, news broke of an uprising in the Romanian city of Timisoara, across the border from Hungary. Security forces fired on demonstrators, according to reports that were impossible to confirm. In the supercharged climate of revolutionary expectation, the wildest fictions were quickly accepted as fact: ten thousand dead in Timisoara, sixty thousand in other cities. Global TV networks aired lurid tales of Romanian secret police machine-gunning people from helicopters, executing soldiers who refused to shoot civilians, burying thousands of dead in mass graves or burning their corpses to destroy evidence of their massacres.

  Christmas Day found me glued to the television, trying to figure out what was happening and how to get into Romania. A colleague from the Associated Press was shot in the arm attempting to drive through one crossing post. Another from the New York Times reached Timisoara, only to be shot through the back as his car inched along a darkened street. He would have died then and there had he not been directly outside the city hospital. That evening a friend from the German foreign ministry called to say that a military relief plane would leave from Cologne the next morning. Would I like to be on it?

  Dusk was falling at Otopeni airport. Army troops lay prone on the concourse, snapping off rifle shots through shattered windows at enemies, real or imagined. Tanks were dug in along the runways.

  I flew in with two German journalists aboard the Luftwaffe military transport. Officially, it carried supplies for the Romanian Red Cross; unofficially, it was delivering weaponry and commandos to reinforce the West German embassy, under fire downtown. A man from the local Red Cross greeted us as the plane lurched to a stop outside the terminal. “You’re journalists? Fourteen of you were killed today!” The West German military attaché said four hundred people had been massacred in a subway little more than an hour ago. Neither report turned out to be true, but it was an unnerving welcome.

  The center of Bucharest was afire. Tanks and armored cars blocked the boulevards near the university and the presidential palace. The National Library was a smoking hulk. The front doors of the Intercontinental Hotel had been shot out. A bullet had gouged itself into the ceiling of my room. At the reception desk, phones rang unanswered. The staff gathered around a television in the dark and unheated lobby. Nicolae Ceausescu, the Great Dictator, had repor
tedly been caught and executed on the afternoon of Christmas Day, along with his wife, Elena, the equally fearsome Dictatoresse. Was it true? No one dared hope, for that would mean three decades of terror were over.

  The TV screen flickered, blinked to life. The cavernous lobby filled with hisses: there he was, Ceausescu, dressed in the rumpled dark overcoat and scarf he wore as he fled four days ago. Those he’d tyrannized saw him, now, in a different light. Instead of standing loftily before them, surrounded by flags and aides and the ceremony of state, he sat at a bare table in a squalid little room facing an unseen panel of judges. “You are in front of the People’s Tribunal, the new legal body of the country,” an invisible voice intoned. The People’s justice was about to be delivered.

  The farce that followed was dark as Mamet. The hidden inquisitors barked questions, lashed Ceausescu with disdainful accusations that the dictator, equally contemptuously, refused to answer.

  “Do you understand the charges against you,” asked the prosecutor peremptorily.

  “I am the commander in chief!” Ceausescu replied. “I do not answer to you!”

  “You starved Romania!”

  “Nonsense,” the dictator heatedly replied. “Never in Romania’s history has there been such progress.”

  Elena spat vitriol against the “worms” who presumed to challenge them, dismissing their claims as “lies” and “provocations.” Ceausescu denounced the “plot” against them as an ill-disguised “coup” instigated “by traitors right here in this room.” Occasionally the old couple patted each other on the arm, as if reassuring themselves. Within an hour, the court entered its verdict: guilty. The couple’s “defense” lawyer was shown on camera, smiling as the sentence of death was read out.

  Thereupon the film broke, to recommence, startlingly, in a rubble-strewn outdoor courtyard. Two bundles of what appeared to be rags lay on the paving stones. The camera closed in: Ceausescu, lying on his back, head tilted up toward a wall behind him, eyes open and staring. For nearly a minute, it seemed, we gazed upon him, the crowd in the lobby stunned. “The Antichrist is dead,” whispered someone, as if this were the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Then the screen went black, with the words FREE ROMANIA TELEVISION.

  When Ceausescu was alive, he liked to hunt bear. With his retinue, he would retreat to a lodge in the mountains of Transylvania, then sally forth, guns locked and loaded. He was accustomed to good fortune, for his huntsmen took precautions. They would chain some poor beast to a tree, drug it to keep it still and conceal themselves around the blind from which the Great Man would shoot. One day they did their job haphazardly. Ceausescu took aim, then fell backward in fright when the bear, inadequately sedated, reared on its hind legs as if to attack. His shot flew into the tree-tops, even as three bullets entered the bear’s heart from the snipers whose job it was to guaranty his marksmanship. This day, I was told by a forester who claimed to have witnessed the incident, Ceausescu did not acknowledge the applause of his retainers.

  That could be the story of the Romanian revolution. The bear is the people. They rise up from slumber. The emperor, alarmed, fires wildly and misses his mark. The sharpshooters hidden in the forest take aim and shoot, only this time their target is not the bear but Ceausescu himself.

  Romania’s revolution was unlike any other. Elsewhere, it seemed as if communist regimes were racing to dismantle themselves. New leaders arose overnight. Old regimes collapsed and disappeared, scarcely leaving a ripple. People danced and celebrated largely painless victories. Not so in Romania. There, the struggle was written in blood. Communist masters ordered the police to fire on their citizens. They obeyed. A civil war was fought, albeit briefly. Revolution transmuted into a crypto-coup.

  That it should have begun in Timisoara, a depressing industrial city of about three hundred thousand, begrimed with soot and human misery, was a matter of happenstance, a local issue of negligible importance to Ceausescu. A young but popular pastor named Laszlo Tokes was told by his bishop that he would be transferred to another parish. His outspoken sermons criticizing the regime, coupled with his support for the large Hungarian nationality living in Romania, were causing trouble. When Tokes resisted, parishioners stood vigil outside his door. The crowd of a few hundred grew to several thousand, many of them high school and university students not altogether happy with life in the Epoch of Light.

  At first, they sought only to protect Tokes, who was regularly beaten and harassed by the police. But the gathering soon turned into a more general protest. There were shouts for freedom, for bread, for an end to the regime. Singing the outlawed national anthem—“Awake Ye, Romanian!”—a group numbering more than a thousand marched into the center of town, tearing down posters of the Leader and stoning the headquarters of the communist party. Police responded with water cannon and tear gas.

  This took place on December 16. The next day, a Sunday, Romania’s revolution began in earnest. Early that morning, around 3 a.m., Securitate and local police burst into Tokes’s house and, after a beating, forced him to sign a blank paper resigning his post. Meanwhile, army and Securitate reinforcements poured in. Stupidly, they made a show of it, parading through the city with banners flying and bugles blowing. Ten thousand demonstrators came roiling out of nowhere to pelt them with rocks, bottles and jeers.

  If communist leaders elsewhere seemed paralyzed amid crisis, Ceausescu was not among them. How could they allow a simple protest outside a pastor’s church to escalate into a riot? he asked his defense minister, General Vasile Milea, according to the minutes of an emergency meeting held that afternoon: “I gave orders for a show of force, with tanks, and you organize a parade!” Where were his troops last night? “Why didn’t they fire? You don’t put an enemy down with sermons. You have to burn him!”

  Then Ceausescu turned on General Iulian Vlad, commander of the Securitate. “Don’t you know what a state of emergency means?” Ceausescu complained that he had stayed up all night, talking to the two men every ten minutes. “Why were not my orders carried out?” At this point, bloody Elena chimed in. “You should have fired on them. They would have fled like partridges. And had they fallen, you should have taken them and shoved them into a cellar. Weren’t you told that? Not one of them should have gotten out!”

  Wrathfully, Ceausescu threatened to dismiss both men and take command of the army and security forces himself. He accused them of treason, suggesting they should go before a firing squad. Abjectly, they pledged their fealty and promised to justify his faith in them. “Good,” said Ceausescu. “Shall we try once more, comrades?” Sometime after 5 p.m., back in Timisoara, Generals Vlad and Milea executed their orders. Troops and Securitate fired into the crowds of demonstrators, many of them women and children. One hundred people were killed. Between three hundred and four hundred were wounded.

  If Ceausescu had no illusions about the threat in Timisoara, he did have a blind spot: himself. He treated his people as slaves—“worms,” in Elena’s phrase. He lied to them, stole from them, robbed them of life and liberty and happiness. Yet in the end he genuinely seems to have believed they loved him. In this delusion, he made a fatal decision. He would deal with the challenge to his rule by going to the People, live on TV and in the flesh. Of course, there would be the usual props. A crowd of loyal supporters was rounded up from Bucharest’s factories and party bureaucracies. Banners and placards bore his likeness. “Long live Ceausescu,” his subjects would shout. He would wave, deliver a fiery speech and all would be well in the kingdom.

  And so, on the morning of December 21, Nicolae Ceausescu stepped before the microphones and cameras set up on the balcony of the Central Committee on Palace Square. In his dark blue overcoat and fur hat, he shouted out to the one hundred thousand subjects in the square below. He told them that the reports of uprisings and killings in Timisoara were false, that they were efforts by foreign powers to corrupt and disinform the people. He counted on the mass of tame functionaries, beholden to him and his rule, to applaud and c
heer on cue. Instead, from the fringe of the square, some students not part of the select assembly started shouting, “Ti-mi-soara! Ti-mi-soara!”

  Never had he heard anything like it. Never had he been so brazenly challenged. Then other cries, faint but loud enough to be heard on camera: “Killer! Murderer! Down with Ceausescu!” There were loud popping sounds. Guns? It was later determined to be the sound of exploding tear-gas canisters fired by police, but it was enough to unsettle Ceausescu.

  Flustered, he stopped speaking. His face lost its confidence, sagged in sudden timid bewilderment, abruptly looking old and weak. He waved his hands to calm the crowd. Yet they were the flailing motions of a man in trouble, not unlike the moment Ceausescu tottered on his dock in Snagov, flapping his arms in danger of toppling into the depths. This moment of truth lasted only seconds, but it was enough. Everyone watching in the square and on national television saw his weakness. The emperor had no clothes.

  The rest is well-known history. Security guards bustled Ceausescu off the balcony. Crowds stormed the Central Committee building. Ceausescu and his wife boarded a white helicopter and escaped from the roof. Fighting erupted throughout the city between the army, siding with the people, and the Securitate, loyal to Ceausescu. The Securitate sniped from rooftops or mingled with crowds of demonstrators, pulling weapons from beneath their coats and mowing down those around them. Tanks fired away in squares and boulevards; the city center blazed with flames and smoke. After a three-day chase, on Christmas Day, the dictator and his wife were captured, tried and summarily convicted by a kangaroo people’s court.

  Revolutions are probably never as they seem. They are admixtures of myth, idealism, opportunism, politics, intrigue, exploitation. Good and bad, the noble and the ignoble, the pure and the impure become so entangled as to be almost indistinguishable. Nowhere was this more true than in Bucharest. For at the moment of Ceausescu’s speech, the revolution in Romania became two revolutions. One was public: the people rising up to throw off the hated dictator, seen on TV. The other was far more private: a behind-the-scenes struggle for power among elites amounting to a coup.