Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  He found himself in deeper trouble in September 1988 when he publicly supported a letter written by a congregant to the Bishop of Arad, László Papp, one of the most senior men in the Reformed Church’s hierarchy. The letter criticised the regime’s systemisation policy, which it was rumoured would destroy hundreds of Tran- sylvanian villages. Tökés was arrested and interrogated by the Securitate and told to stay out of politics. The final straw as far as the bishops were concerned was when Tökés proposed to hold a joint, ecumenical Reformed Church/Catholic service in Timioara for young people from both faiths.

  In March 1989 Bishop Papp started legal proceedings to fire the pastor from his living and evict him from his home. But he defended himself through the courts, which turned into a long process that was starting to receive some coverage in the religious press, the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe. One night in late November, just a few days before his final appeal was scheduled to be heard, four masked men armed with clubs and knives broke into his house. Pastor Tökés was beaten, while his three-year-old son, Mate, looked on. His pregnant wife, Edit, shouted for help from the uniformed police outside, who had been keeping the family under surveillance for months. But they did nothing while the men inside, clearly Securitate officers, performed their duties. He lost the legal appeal on 7 December and in his last sermon on Sunday 10th he asked his congregation to witness his eviction from home the following Friday, 15 December.2

  The church and attached parsonage was a nondescript slab-grey late-nineteenth-century building close to the centre of town. It was in a small square, but easily visible from the main road and within a few metres of a tram stop. At first around thirty-five of Tökes’s congregation stood outside, while the Tökés family remained in the church. Then an unprecedented thing happened. As word spread throughout the city about a demonstration, they were joined by ever-increasing numbers. ‘At the beginning, it was only members of our parish,’ Tökés said. ‘But then, hour by hour, people joined from the whole of Timipara, whether they were Hungarian, Romanian, Orthodox, Baptist or whatever religion. People from all communities joined together. They forgot the original reason for their resistance and in general terms just opposed the regime itself.’

  As the numbers swelled, local Party bosses were unsure how to react. The Mayor, Petre Mot, sought instructions from Bucharest and was initially told to play for time and to negotiate in the expectation that the crowds would disperse. They did not. The weather was extraordinarily mild for mid-December, still above freezing. Many Romanians have said that it was the warm weather that made the revolution. They were not entirely joking. It is unlikely that the crowd around Pastor Tökés’s church would have grown overnight if it had been much colder. During most of Saturday there was an uneasy stand-off. The Mayor returned in an attempt to disperse the protesters. He promised to reinstate the pastor, but when he refused to put the pledge in writing the crowd booed and catcalled him. They were now no longer calling for bread or meat or in support of László Tökés. They began repeating ‘Down with Ceausescu’ and ‘Down with tyranny’, ‘We are the People’ and ‘Freedom now’. By mid-afternoon, the police and Securitate formed a line on the boulevard within sight of the square. But after an hour or so they left. ‘That was the first time we felt we had power,’ said one of the demonstrators, Lajos Várga. ‘We had driven the Securitate away. It was like living a wild dream, a forbidden fantasy.’3

  Ceausescu himself had given the orders to let the demonstration go ahead. He thought it would run out of steam. Now the orders were reversed. The next morning, Sunday, the police and Securitate began to make some arrests, on the fringe of the crowd. The mood turned uglier and angrier. There were at least 2,500 protesters by now in a country where spontaneous demonstrations had been practically unheard-of for a generation. Most of them left the church and marched to the centre of the city, along one of the main boulevards towards the Opera House and the headquarters of the Communist Party, the seat of the tyrant’s power. There they were met with a line of troops, riot police and a fire engine. They turned water cannon on the crowd but the protesters rushed the building, forcing the security forces to withdraw. They ransacked the ground floor, throwing as much Party property as they could on to a fire. For the next several hours the demonstrators were in control of the centre of Timisoara, but they had no plan of action. They looted bookshops and burned the works of Nicolae Ceausescu. They threw petrol bombs at official-looking cars. They set fire to the town hall and destroyed thousands of official files.

  After most of the demonstrators had left the Hungarian Reformed Church, the Securitate seized the pastor, seven-months-pregnant Edit Tökés and their son. The pastor was badly beaten around the body and face. With a split lip and black eye he was taken to Ion Cumpanasu, head of the Department of Religious Denominations, and threatened with violence against his wife unless he signed a blank piece of paper which effectively accepted his dismissal and eviction. They were taken in separate cars to Minev, an isolated village in Slaj County, which had been designated his residence.t

  When the Ceauescus were told that a riotous mob had taken over the centre of Timioara, they were incandescent. Late on the Sunday afternoon, 17 December, the President summoned into his presence the heads of his various security services. Interior Minister Tudor Postelnicu, Iulian Vlad, head of the Securitate, General Vasile Milea, head of the army, and the Defence Minister. While Communists throughout the rest of Eastern Europe were negotiating with their opponents, this extraordinary meeting shows that Ceauescu was determined to shoot them. He would offer no quarter - and nor would his wife.

  CEAUSESCU: I think the foreign groups outside are involved in the organisation [protecting Pastor Tökés]. It is known that both East and West have said that things in Romania must change. Some elements have come together and caused disorder. The police and army have done a very poor job. I talked to comrades in Timioara and told them to put on a show of power with tank units in the centre of the city. My impression is that the units of the Interior Ministry, the regular police and the Securitate were unarmed.

  POSTELNICU: Except for those who were border guards, the rest were unarmed.

  CEAUESCU: Why? I told you that all had to be armed. Why did you send them unarmed, who has given them this order? When I understand that the Securitate troops are going somewhere it is clear to me that they are going armed. You sent them to beat people with fists. What kind of interior units are they? And the militia [police] have to be armed. That’s the law.

  POSTELNICU: Comrade General Secretary, the militia is armed.

  CEAUSESCU: If it is armed, it has to shoot, not let people attack it. How is such a situation [ransacking of Party HQ in Timioara] pos sible? What did your officers do, Milea? Why didn’t they intervene? Why didn’t they shoot?

  MILEA: I didn’t give them ammunition.

  CEAUESCU: Why didn’t you give them ammunition? If you don’t give them ammunition you might as well send them home. What kind of a Defence Minister are you? What kind of an Interior Minister are you, Postelnicu?

  ELENA: The situation is very grave . . . The Minister of Defence and the Minister of the Interior did not act properly.

  CEAUSESCU: Some few hooligans want to destroy socialism and you are making it child’s play for them. Fidel Castro is right. You do not quieten your enemy by talking to him like a priest, but by burning him.

  ELENA: They are cowards.

  CEAUESCU: They are more than cowards. As supreme commander, I consider that you have committed treason against the country’s interests and against the people’s interests and against the interests of socialism. In this moment . . . we are dismissing the Defence Minister, the Interior [Minister] and the chief of the Securitate troops. From this moment, I’ll take command of the army. Prepare the decree to take force this evening. They’ve got to kill the hooligans, not beat them. [To the three officials] Do you know what I’m going to do with you? Send you to the firing squad. I have realised now that you ca
nnot create order with batons. I will give right now the order that all will have guns and ammunition.

  ELENA: You should shoot them so they fall and put them in Securitate basements. Not one of them should see the light of day again. We’ve got to take radical measures. We can’t be indulgent.

  CEAUSESCU: We’ll fight to the last.

  VLAD: We thought it was a limited problem and we could solve it without ammunition.

  CEAUSESCU: I didn’t think that we should shoot with blanks. Those who entered the Party building should not leave the building alive.

  All of them grovelled and accepted they were in the wrong and pledged to act more decisively in future. ‘I assure you . . . that such a situation does not occur again,’ said Postelnicu. ‘Please place this trust in me.’ Milea pleaded, ‘I did not appreciate the danger from the beginning. ’ Vlad assured his leader that from now on ‘I will proceed in such a way as to merit your faith.’ Grudgingly, Ceauescu reinstated them to their jobs but continued with his sarcasm and abuse. ‘Very well then . . . So shall we try once more, comrades?’4

  Later that evening army units with live ammunition took control of the streets of Timioara, shooting at civilians mercilessly. The Sec uritate made more than 700 arrests. The next morning Ceauescu went on a long-planned visit to Iran, one of the few countries that would now accept him as a visitor. But he did not leave before being told from his army high command and the Securitate that Timioara was quiet. As usual, he left his wife in charge of Romania while he was away. Around sixty civilians died that night in Timioara. It was the single bloodiest protest against communism there had yet been in Romania. But rumour spread fast that a horrendous massacre had taken place. Radio Free Europe, widely trusted among covert listeners in the country, put the death toll at anything between 4,000 and 20,000. Of course, the official media had not mentioned anything about Timi oara, so Romanians believed what they heard on foreign radio broadcasts and from the grapevine. ‘We all believed that a terrible genocide had happened in Transylvania,’ said teacher Alex Serban. ‘It aroused a kind of desperation we had not felt before. It took us out of complete torpor, but still we needed more of a push before we could do anything.’5

  Nicolae Ceauescu arrived back in Bucharest from Iran at about 3 p.m. on Wednesday 20 December. From the moment he returned he made a series of critical misjudgements. The first was his hasty decision to hold a giant rally in the centre of Bucharest the following day that would show the world that he was still the beloved leader of his people. He remained convinced of his popularity to the end. All he needed to do was to speak to Romanians as their leader, demonstrate his power and authority over them, and they would listen, applaud and obey as always. Neither he nor his wife had a clue how detested they were. The bootlickers and flunkeys surrounding him had an idea of the truth. But nobody dared to contradict him or even to suggest that perhaps a big public appearance along traditional lines was not the wisest course.

  The Bucharest Party worked overnight to ensure a huge, adoring crowd for the appearance of the Conduator in Palace Square. The organisation for these occasions was a well-oiled machine to force the attendance of a loyal crowd. Early in the morning of Wednesday 21 December Party officials in factories and offices mobilised workers. They selected participants by work units. Anybody who refused to go faced the sack. They were bussed to downtown Bucharest where they were issued with red flags, placards of Ceauescu’s picture and banners in praise of socialism. Then they marched in a column to Palace Square. On arrival they were usually screened to weed out any potentially disruptive elements. On this occasion, though, many passers-by along one of Bucharest’s main streets, the adjoining Calea Victorei, were press-ganged into turning up in order to swell the numbers. The hardcore loyalists carrying photos of the leader and banners were at the front. Ordinary people were at the back. There was a big Securitate presence, but widely spread out amidst a crowd of 110,000 people.

  The mood was subdued when at noon, in bright winter sunshine, the warm-up speakers, little-known Party apparatchiks, began. The dictator appeared on the balcony of the Party headquarters at 12.31 p.m. with Elena at his side, and a bank of four microphones in front of him. At first everything went as usual. Ceauescu was cheered and rhythmic applause regulated his mundane utterances. But then, eight minutes into his speech, something unheard-of happened. From the rear of the crowd there were unmistakable sounds of booing and catcalls and the low chant TI-MI-OA-RA. It started faintly at first, then grew louder and more confident. Ceauescu looked nonplussed for a second or two, and tried to continue reading from his script about ‘fascist agitators who want to endanger socialism’. But the boos continued, now accompanied by whistles. Romanian TV had been ordered to screen the rally live and continued filming. The great leader froze, his mouth open. It was the moment of fatal weakness and the crowd sensed it.

  People began shouting ‘Ceauescu, we are the People’ and ‘Down with the killer’. He put up his right hand in a gesture of irritation. That incensed the crowd further. Elena urged him loudly, but off-microphone: ‘Speak to them. Offer them something.’ Ceauescu looked panicked as he announced pension and family allowance increases of 2,000 lei (around two US$ 2 a month). Then he dried up completely. The catcalls grew louder. The director of TV made an executive decision and halted transmission. The picture went blank, apart from a caption that read ‘Live transmission’. Ceauescu’s burly personal bodyguard, General Marin Neagoe, bustled the leader from the balcony. Many have claimed credit as the first to jeer the dictator. For some years it was thought to have been student Nica Leon, but his claims have since been doubted. One of the first barrackers was certainly a taxi driver, Adrian Donea, who said: ‘We could see he was scared. At that moment we realised our force, that we had strength.’ The first to chant ‘Timioara’ were workers from the Turbomecanica power plant outside Bucharest.6

  Most popular revolutions are characterised by confusion. The crowd in Palace Square had seriously wounded the dictator, without firing a shot. But now they had no idea what to do. If the Securitate had attacked in strength at that point and forced the protesters from the streets of Bucharest, the course of the Romanian Revolution might have been entirely different. But they did not. Soon the demonstrators were joined by thousands of people who had watched Ceauescu on television transform himself in an instant from an omnipotent tyrant into a weak old man. Others had heard what had happened and rushed on to the streets to see if it was true. Was Ceauescu seriously being challenged? Rioting erupted that afternoon at three main points in the centre of Bucharest: at University Square, dominated by the Intercontinental Hotel, where foreign journalists did not need to travel far to see the disturbances; at Palace Square and at the Romanian TV station in the north of the city. For a few hours Ceauescu’s formidable security forces did nothing. They let the demonstrators run riot. Pavel Câmpeanu, the aged Communist who had once shared a prison cell with Ceauescu but broke with him decades earlier, said: ‘At this point, even then, he could have chosen to talk - to the students and the dissidents and to the reform-minded Communists. But . . . he would have had to leave his familiar world, which he was unable to do.’7

  Instead, he chose to fight and to use the same tactics as in Timioara a few days earlier. From about six in the evening Securitate troops and police units began firing indiscriminately at demonstrators, whose only defence was Molotov cocktails, stones and makeshift shields provided by cars overturned on the main boulevards. ‘There was uproar everywhere, pandemonium,’ said one of the revolutionaries. ‘But our determination was to stay on the streets that night, to show defiance at least that long, and then to see what happened.’ No regular soldiers had taken part in any of the fighting. They had stayed in barracks. The few who had been sent out on duty, mostly young conscripts, were not sure at whom they should be shooting.

  Inside the Communist Party headquarters on Palace Square, Ceau escu was making his second big mistake. He was a man so conscious of his security that he em
ployed a praetorian guard of eighty highly trained Securitate troops, pampered and well paid to be ultra-loyal. There was a network of underground passages which linked this building to many of his other Bucharest residences. He could easily have made a getaway from the city and tried to muster his supporters elsewhere. Nobody knows for sure why he did not make the attempt. Throughout the afternoon and evening Ceauescu was holed up with his aides and officials. Once he told his entourage of courtiers that ‘I’ll stay and fight . . . I won’t be forced to run away, and my wife agrees.’ Nobody tried to talk him round. Some had already turned coat and had plans to save themselves. Others stayed silent from habitual fear.8

  The people held the streets overnight. There had been sporadic fighting, around thirty-five people had been killed, but the Securitate and the riot police had disappeared before dawn. A vast but peaceful crowd occupied Palace Square. ‘We were expecting something, but we didn’t know what,’ Alex Serban recalls. Romanian TV was on air again and broadcasting the demonstrations live. Nobody had given an order not to film, but it still required bravery to keep the cameras running.9

  Inside, at around 9 a.m., the dictator made the decision that turned the army against him and ensured his defeat. Someone had to be blamed for the riots in the city. Ceauescu chose the Defence Minister, General Vasile Milea. He said it was ‘treachery’ that Milea had not ordered the soldiers to fire on the demonstrators and sacked him. What happened next is still uncertain. According to Milea’s family, friends and some of his junior officers, shortly before 10 a.m., on Ceauescu’s orders, a Securitate detail took the General upstairs to his own office and shot him. Another account, backed up by a different group of officers, is that Milea was escorted to his office and killed himself. An official broadcast at 11 a.m. said that ‘General Milea was a traitor and has committed suicide’. Either way, the news had a profound effect. A huge resounding boo echoed around Palace Square when it was announced. A paunchy sixty-two-year-old, Milea had for years been one of Ceauescu’s most serpentine of sycophants. He had commanded some respect from his senior officers, but the lower ranks had thought little of him. Instantly he was turned into a martyr of the revolution. The commanders of all three services gave up Ceauescu as a lost cause, and their men eagerly joined the side of the rebels. Soldiers took the magazines from their guns and waved them at the crowds. A few tanks had been dispatched on to the city’s main boulevards early that morning. Their turrets opened and soldiers stood up, waving at passers-by. The resounding cry went up in Palace Square and throughout the city: ‘The army - with us.’10