The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  I would understand this better in later years, after further research. But even at the time I sensed something suspect about this revolution—happenings that simply did not fit the public picture.

  Shortly after I arrived on December 26, a stocky man with a mustache approached me in the lobby of the Intercontinental. “Hello, remember me?” Actually, no, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. “Good, I did my job well,” he said, introducing himself as Andrei. He was one of my invisible “tenders” last August. Whom he worked for now wasn’t exactly clear, either to him or to me. If anyone was in charge, it was a revolutionary council calling itself the National Salvation Front, headquartered at the Bucharest television station. He offered to take me over.

  Out on the streets, I instinctively ducked at the crack of sudden gunfire. Andrei, however, seemed unfazed. At the television station, surrounded by trucks and army troops nervously guarding against an attack, he had no trouble passing through their lines. Inside, desks and chairs were piled into makeshift barricades, guarded by more troops and armed volunteers. As recently as last night, he told me, one floor of the building had been occupied by Securitate, shooting at soldiers occupying other floors. Oddly, there was no sign of blood, or bullet holes, aside from a few broken windows.

  A few other reporters had gotten to the TV station as well, and we had an impromptu press conference with a man identified as Romania’s new vice president, Dumitru Mazilu, a human rights activist who had only just been freed from years of house arrest. “The situation is extremely grave, extremely fluid,” he said, confirming reports that Ceausescu had been executed. Mazilu added that, by now, the army had allied itself firmly with the people and the new government. The shooting outside came not from the main ranks of Securitate, numbering perhaps forty thousand, but from a specially trained Fifth Directorate of presidential guards, whose assignment was to sow terror and wage war on those revolting against Ceausescu for as long as he was alive. Mazilu put the strength of these “terrorists” at no more than two thousand, if that, working in teams of three and four men.

  Wandering down a hallway, I ran into the foreign ministry official who’d arranged my trip in August. “Hello, Mr. Meyer,” he said buoyantly. “What lies I told you!” The man was never at a loss for words. “That’s okay,” I replied. “I didn’t believe anything you said anyway.” It was a strange camaraderie, all the more so for the question he answered only with a smile: “What are you doing here?” He filled me in on the National Salvation Front, an odd mélange of poets, writers, students, dissidents and allegedly disaffected former government officials that was meeting in a crowded conference room nearby. I could understand why Laszlo Tokes, the priest from Timisoara, would be there, as well as dissident writers such as Doina Cornea and Mircea Dinescu. But General Stefan Guse, the army chief of staff who commanded the troops in Timisoara? Ion Iliescu, the self-appointed new president? Not too many years ago, he had been Ceausescu’s chief propagandist.

  Perhaps the most incongruous presence was that of General Victor Stanculescu, appointed acting defense minister only a few hours before Ceausescu fled from the roof of Central Committee headquarters. He had been a favorite of Elena’s, the man she would have sent to quell the unrest in Timisoara, if she’d had her druthers. Stanculescu had organized the Ceausescus’ evacuation from the Central Committee building, I would subsequently learn, and Elena had cried out to him as she boarded the helicopter, “Victor, protect the children!” By that, she meant the hundreds and hundreds of orphans recruited into the Securitate as a special guard, the “terrorists” who were now indiscriminately firing on the people in defense of their adoptive “mother” and “father,” Elena and Nicolae. It would later emerge that Stanculescu had also arranged the Ceausescus’ trial, according to Richard Hall in “Rewriting the Revolution,” among others, and had personally chosen their prosecutors, helped select their place of execution and organized the firing squad—even before the legal proceedings began.

  One evening, I again ran into Andrei at my hotel. Once again, he offered to show me something interesting. We drove to a walled compound in the diplomatic quarter. As before, a heavily guarded security gate slide magically open for him. A light snow lay on the gardens and pathways of the palace where Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu had lived and last slept.

  For the dictator and his lady, home was a pink stucco neo-Italianate mansion in northwest Bucharest. Scrawled on one of the arched windows flanking the grand entryway, in bloodred paint, or perhaps lipstick, was the word Victorie! Wine bottles rolled on the floor of the gold-filigreed vestibule, beneath a sparkling crystal chandelier, amid scatterings of cigarette butts. A gas mask lay incongruously on a brocade chair. According to Andrei, “the people” stormed the palace in the late afternoon of December 22, after Ceausescu fled. But it didn’t feel right. Here and there, expensive vases lay on their sides, as though carefully placed so as not to be broken. Small objects of art, mostly cheap china figures, had been trampled underfoot, along with family photos of the Ceausescus and their children. But there were no muddied rugs, no footprints in the snow outside, no broken doors or windows or smudgy handprints on the walls and white sofas. In fact, there was no evidence of damage of any kind, let alone the looting you would expect from an angry and unruly mob. Instead, it looked as if a bunch of teenagers had the run of the house while their parents were away and found the key to the liquor cabinet. The palace had been secured, it seemed to me, not liberated.

  As Andrei promised, however, it was interesting. “Mike, you knew Ceausescu,” he called to me as I sat at the dictator’s damask-covered dining room table writing up my notes. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” To him, as to most Romanians, the luxury was inconceivable. The Ceausescus lived like princes of the French empire, or at least the more egregious of Hollywood moguls. Rich tapestries covered the walls. Silver and bronze statues and candelabra stood next to ornate Louis XVI clocks on extravagantly scrolled tables. Everything was gilt, mirrors and brocaded wallpaper—glitter without style, coherence or taste. There were no books. The paintings were of reclining nudes and cherubs, milkmaids frisking with lambs and little children.

  Upstairs, empty boxes of perfume and cosmetics littered the floor of Elena’s boudoir: Arpège, Nina Ricci, Mystère de Rochas. A can of Woolite rolled in a corner. Boxes of Palmolive hemorrhoidal balm crunched underfoot. Despite the closets full of haute-couture gowns, Elena Ceausescu seems to have preferred heavy woolen suits and metallic, stub-nosed shoes with square, no-nonsense heels. There were hundreds of pairs. Gauntly thin, she appears to have obsessed about her weight. Her pink-and-gold bath had four scales. A man in white athletic shoes and a leather jacket rummaged in the drawers of her nightstand. Finding a photo of the Ceausescus with their children, he balled it up and threw it into her rose-tinted bidet. Another gestured toward a pile of mink and sable coats laid out on a bed, his cigarette dripping ash on the coverlet.

  An adjoining suite was His. Perhaps a hundred identical gray suits hung in his closet, all new and shrouded in hygenic plastic. Under each: a black pair of leather shoes, none ever worn, custom-made for a slightly clubfooted man. I sorted through Ceausescu’s ties: a massive assembly of swirling, weird colors, specially made by the world’s better haberdashers, all seven inches wide and never worn. Oh, ho, what’s this? A pair of Swiss-made Jockey shorts, which I held up to my waist. They were hopelessly large even on me, over six feet tall. How must they have hung on such a small dictator. Did he hike them almost to his shoulders? On the floor, a photo of Elena in her forties, wearing a yellow raincoat and picking a flower, lay amid broken fragments of glass. It was the only faintly personal thing I saw.

  A final bizarre touch awaited in the royal couple’s bedroom. Papers and documents were strewn across the marital bed, presumably Ceausescu’s reading the last night he was here. Among them was a study prepared for “Comrade Elena Ceausescu,” dated November 26 and typed in the extralarge characters that her husband preferred f
or his reading. It was an analysis of the events leading up to the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and the popular political climate of the time. To this day, I don’t know whether it was genuine, suggesting that the Ceausescus were far more aware of the mood of the country than often supposed, or whether it was planted there for journalists like me. Its purpose? Perhaps a red herring, meant to suggest that Romania’s revolution was indeed spontaneous and unplanned, rather than a plot by insiders. After all, the “people” stormed this palace, did they not?

  The days and weeks following Ceausescu’s death brought more intimations of conspiracy. From Timisoara came reports that, in the initial days of the unrest, a gang of Securitate went around deliberately smashing store windows and trying to provoke townspeople into fighting. Corpses laid out for photographers, alleged victims of the regime’s massacres, turned out to have been dug out of paupers’ cemeteries or borrowed from the local morgue. There were the extravagantly inflated casualty figures. “What genocide?” Elena Ceausescu had not unreasonably replied at the trial. The Ceausescus were charged with killing tens of thousands of people. But the official toll turned out to be closer to one thousand, with most in Bucharest and other cities after the dictator had fled. Why were the Ceausescus killed off so quickly, people began to ask. As for the new government, why all those familiar faces?

  Not surprisingly, this led to subsequent speculation about the true nature of the revolution. Some suggested it was a plot from start to finish, masterminded by leaders of the army and Securitate to despose Ceausescu and replace him with one of their own. But the truth is more prosaic. The revolution began in Timisoara, just as it appeared, with a popular explosion of anger and frustration and the widespread sense, shared elsewhere in Eastern Europe, of having had enough. Amid the muddle of events, people made choices, quickly and irrevocably, sometimes out of courage, other times out of cowardice or expedience. Laszlo Tokes wouldn’t leave his house. The people rose up and did not back down. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the conspirators against Ceausescu seized their chance.

  It was a near thing. After Ceausescu lifted off in that helicopter, he tried to make his way to a friendly army base, where he could mobilize his forces to retake control. He was caught, partly because Hungarian intelligence helped his captors to find him using electronic surveillance. Ceausescu’s hasty execution was intended to stop the fighting. As long as he lived, the revolution was not won, a former president of Romania, Emil Constantinescu, told me a long time later. “They murdered him.”

  Scarcely seven minutes elapsed, approximately, between the time the sentence was read out and the firing squad did its work. The judge, also a member of the conspiracy, who would later become deputy prime minister, barely had time to gather up his papers before soldiers tied their victims’ hands and hustled them down a hallway and out to the courtyard. During the rush, the electric cord powering the video camera was yanked from the wall. By the time the cameraman caught up, soldiers were already shooting. Some did not even wait for the official order to fire. Elena Ceausescu fainted and was shot where she lay.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Denouement

  On a bleak afternoon on the next to the last night of the year, I felt an abrupt and overwhelming need to be out of Romania, out of Eastern Europe, before the New Year rolled in. Perhaps it was a visit to Bucharest’s main cemetery. A light snow covered mounds of earth from hundreds of fresh graves, open and gaping in long straight rows. “Here are the fallen,” a solemn priest intoned across the field of dead as four men placed a wooden coffin before him on a wobbly trestle. Jacob Stetincu, shot by a sniper while crossing the street, lay wrapped in a thin white cotton sheet, wearing a worn blue beret, snowflakes catching in his mustache. After a hurried sacrament the men nailed shut the lid, carried him to the nearest grave, his widow struggling to keep up, and shoveled in the heavy earth. A few feet away, others hacked at the frozen ground. The priest, working in shifts with a dozen of his brethren, was already shaking holy water on the next victim of Ceausescu’s reign.

  “Revolution overload,” one friend called it. Too much, too fast, too intimately. The faded Orient Express left late that night. When it stopped the next afternoon in the switching yards of Budapest’s main station, for a three-hour layover, I climbed out a window, schlepped my gear a mile down the tracks and hailed a taxi for Vienna, several hours away. A flight to Frankfurt. Another two-hour taxi to Bonn. A few minutes after midnight, twenty-seven hours after leaving Bucharest, I walked into my house with a party of friends and neighbors singing “Auld Lang Syne,” just as they were in Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Budapest.

  For the people living in these newly free cities, it was a time of joy. In Berlin, so-called Mauer-peckers whittled the Wall away with hammers and chisels. On Christmas Day, Leonard Bernstein conducted the philharmonic at the newly opened Brandenburg Gate, playing Beethoven’s Ninth (“Ode to Joy”) with the word joy changed to freedom. Less than a year later, on October 3, 1990, Germany reunited.

  The Wall began a long slow fade into historical imagination. Much of it was quickly knocked down. A 260-foot stretch stands today, as a tourist destination, near the old Gestapo headquarters in central Berlin, midway between Potsdamer Platz and Checkpoint Charlie. Another stretch runs along the river Spree near the Oberbaumbrücke, dubbed the East Side Gallery for its graffiti-covered face (all painted post-Fall). Still more chunks have been exported around the world—mainly to the capitals of the perceived victors in the Cold War: London, New York, Washington. They stand here and there, vaguely incongruous, providing shade for lunching bankers or secretaries, oblivious to their once ominous portent.

  Mikhail Gorbachev deserves enormous credit. He was the geopolitical demiurge, the prime mover that set all else in motion. Without him, the history of Eastern Europe and the end of communism would have been vastly different. His reward for services to humanity was to be unceremoniously ousted, after an attempted coup, when the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

  Egon Krenz tried to claim credit. In an interview the summer after the Wall came down, he told me that he had “instructed border officials to open the frontiers,” sometime around 9:15 p.m. But that simply doesn’t jibe with the facts. He was thrown out as the GDR’s last communist head of state on December 7, 1989, by a party desperate to change its image. In 1997, he was sentenced to six and a half years in jail for crimes against humanity, specifically manslaughter of Germans attempting to escape over the Berlin Wall.

  Erich Honecker fled to Moscow after the collapse of the GDR, to be extradited in 1992, tried for treason and jailed in the Federal Republic. He died in exile in Chile on May 29, 1994, of cancer, unrepentant.

  Gunter Schabowski would be one of the few top leaders to repudiate communism. I met him in early 1999, just after his seventieth birthday. He was helping a local newspaper in little Rotenberg am Fulda with their graphic design. Photoshop! Quark! “Are you a computer freak?” he asked disarmingly when I arrived to spend half a day with him. He chatted about his Macintosh and lamented its lack of processing power. Only 160 RAM! And it took so long to download digital photos. Even then the resolution was poor, he said, muttering about pixel counts. At the close of our interview, he took a picture of the two of us and processed it through his computer. “Just so you’ll remember meeting this old toad,” he said.

  In Warsaw, Lech Walesa went on to become Poland’s president, replacing General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1990. Jaruzelski subsequently faced charges for murder during the period of martial law and was defended by former leaders of Solidarity. In 2005, he apologized for his role in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, calling it a great “political and moral mistake.”

  On Sunday, December 10, 1989, International Human Rights Day, President Gustav Husak swore in Czechoslovakia’s first noncommunist government since World War II. Then he himself resigned. Who would replace him? Jan Urban, tired but jubi
lant, wore the answer on his lapel, a little campaign button reading HAVEL FOR PRESIDENT. He was sworn in on December 29, 1989. The celebrations on Wenceslas Square went on all night.

  We had one last conversation. Outwardly, Havel looked the same as ever, down to his faded green army jacket. But he seemed distracted, even evasive. The revolution was over and we both had the odd feeling that, for the moment at least, everything had been said. We spoke a bit about the whimsy of fortune, from jail to the presidency in six months. “Yes, a lot has happened,” Havel said. “I learned in prison that everything is possible, so I should not be amazed. But I am amazed.”

  Then he told a story I’ve often heard repeated: “For a long time, I thought that all this might just have been a colorful dream, and that I would wake up in my cell and tell my fellow inmates about this dream. ‘Oh, Havel,’ they would tell me, ‘you are becoming bigheaded about being an important dissident.’ So from time to time during these days—we must still decide what to call these events—I would ask my friends if we were dreaming. They would say, ‘No,’ but it was not until yesterday that I really felt that it was so. I took a stroll through Pruhonice Park, outside Prague. It was the first time in a month that I could spend some time in the open air and feel the heavens above me, and for the first time I felt that from now on I could live in a different way, less dependent on messages of encouragement from, say, the Dalai Lama!”