Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  At around 11.30 a.m. a white helicopter landed on the roof of the Communist Party headquarters, to the jeers of the people below. Ceau escu tried one last time to talk to the crowd but it was a fiasco. He stepped out on to the first-floor balcony, where he had spoken the previous day. People began hurling stones and anything they could lay hands on in his direction. His guards bundled him and Elena away and into a lift. One group of protesters had managed to break down the great steel doors of the building, overpower the guards and take their weapons. They ran up the stairs, where Ceauescu’s bodyguards put up some resistance, but after a fierce fight for a few minutes they surrendered. The insurgents rushed through Ceauescu’s office and on to the balcony, where thousands of people cheered from the square below, hailing them.

  None of the rebels realised that at this point they were standing just a few metres from the loathed ruler. He was stuck in a lift and escaped only by luck. His Securitate detail had decided against going to the basement, where the presidential party could have used the network of underground passageways to make their getaway. They went to the roof, but the electricity failed during the fighting and the lift halted just before it reached the top floor. After a struggle of several minutes, the bodyguards managed to force open the lift doors and the President and his wife, breathless and agitated, clambered up on to the roof. They were accompanied by two of the dictator’s most loyal henchmen, the Prime Minister, Emil Bobu, and a Deputy Premier, Manea Mnescu, one of Ceauescu’s many brothers-in-law. The rotor blades of the French-built Ecureuil helicopter were turning - and decisions had to be made quickly. They were met by the burly, forty-six-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Vasile Maluan, the Ceauescus’ personal pilot for the last eight years, who had not wanted this assignment. ‘I was sent to the roof of the building to wait,’ he said. ‘Originally there had been four helicopters, three to pick up the government. But the mission of the other three helicopters was cancelled. I toyed with the idea of flying away . . . without picking anyone up. But I could see some Securitate sharpshooters on adjacent rooftops and feared that if they saw me taking off empty they might try to shoot me down. I radioed my base: “Do I stay here?” The answer came back: “Yes, stay and wait.” ’

  Maluan knew what was happening below - his base was providing him with a running commentary of what Romanians were seeing for themselves live on television. When he saw the size of the entourage Maluan said: ‘There are far too many of you.’ But by then some demonstrators were already on the roof and could have rushed the helicopter in seconds. The pilot was ignored and his passengers climbed up to the helicopter. When he took off, the helicopter was barely able to clear the roof. ‘Had we been on the ground I don’t think we would have been able to make it,’ he said. It was 12.10 p.m. There were nine people inside the aircraft, including three crew. It was so packed that one of the crew had to sit on a guard’s knee. Elena was in floods of tears. Ceauescu looked crestfallen. After a few moments in the air Maluan turned to Ceauescu and asked, ‘Where to?’ He was not sure. He and Elena argued briefly and finally Ceauescu said, ‘To Snagov,’ 60 kilometres north-west of Bucharest, where the Ceauescus had a lakeside palace.11

  Joy erupted in Palace Square when the presidential helicopter was spotted heading away from the capital. Everywhere, Romanian tricolour flags of red, blue and yellow appeared with a hole in the centre; the hammer and sickle emblem had been removed. Singing began, most often to the tune of a football chant heard everywhere soccer is played:Ole Ole, Ole, Ole

  Ceausescu unde é?

  (Where’s Ceauescu?)

  Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole

  Ceausescu nu mai e!

  (There’s no more Ceauescu)

  Hundreds of insurgents occupied the Party HQ, ordinary people who believed that as they had forced their way into the building, it was they who had brought down the dictator. It was a disparate group that had come together only because they had been there at the right time. They were factory workers, taxi drivers, office clerks, teachers. One of the first into the central lobby had been a ‘bar hostess’ at the tourist hotel, the Intercontinental. In the enormous office on the first floor that used to be occupied by Ceauescu there were hours of talk, but no organisation. None of them had any experience of government, or of opposition. Everybody had an opinion. Nobody had power.

  Amidst the confusion, power lay elsewhere. Television played a vital role in the Romanian Revolution. But it was not foreign broadcasts that made the difference. In the first chaotic day after Ceauescu fled, the Romanian broadcasting studios became a seat of government. As Gelu Voican-Voiculescu, who became one of the first post-Ceauescu leaders, admitted: ‘Our success lay in the successful exploitation of television.’12

  From the morning of 22 December, anybody in Bucharest with influence, or who thought they had influence, went to the headquarters of Romanian TV, an ugly modern concrete building on one of the city’s main boulevards. Ion Iliescu, known in Communist Party circles as a cautious opponent of Ceauescu, noticed that around mid- morning the Securitate tail who had been following him for years had disappeared. He went straight to the TV studio. General Victor Stnculescu, who had been made Defence Minister that morning to succeed the late General Milea, and who had advised Ceauescu to flee by helicopter, went to the TV studio, accompanied by other senior officers. The dissident poet Mircea Dinescu had been under house arrest at his home in Bucharest for the last six months after he gave an interview to the French newspaper Libération. He went straight to the TV studio, by a method typical of the Romanian Revolution. ‘On that Friday morning, 22 December, a neighbour called to tell me the armed Securitate men who had always been outside my door weren’t there any more,’ he said. ‘I went outside to look and walked around a little. It was true. I wandered into town. Then a crowd of people came up to me and lifted me into the air. I was put on an armoured vehicle and people said to the soldiers “This is Dinescu, take him to the TV station.” It was like a bad film about a revolution.’

  The National Theatre actor Ion Caramitru, one of the most popular artists in the country, was taken to the studio on the top of a tank. For an hour after Ceauescu fled, amidst the confusion and unsure what to do, the management halted broadcasts. But from 1 p.m. live transmission started again and the first people viewers saw were the poet and the actor beaming and happy. ‘The dictator has fled,’ Dinescu announced. By the end of the day the poet would be a government minister. For millions of Romanians outside Bucharest this was the first news they had heard of a revolution in Bucharest. Silviu Brucan, the dissident intellectual, opponent of Ceauescu and tireless gossip, went to the studio. ‘The sense of liberation and of excitement after all these years was intoxicating,’ said Caramitru. ‘But we were innocents. How were we going to form a government? I am an actor. I didn’t have any conception of myself as a President or anything like that.’13

  There were those who understood better the nature of power. Ion Iliescu and his accomplices saw the opportunity to take control of the revolution - and they seized it. When he arrived at the TV station there was chaos. ‘All kinds of people were there talking, showing enthusiasm,’ said Iliescu. ‘But I felt something had to be put in order, because just enthusiasm and general sentiment could lead to anarchy.’ He and a few Communist officials passed over for promotion by the Ceauescus, a large number of generals and a few dissident academics established a government from the ruins of the Ceauescu dictatorship. It is an enduring myth that there was a well-organised plot to take power. It is widely believed in Romania and elsewhere. The appearance in the future government of so many unreconstructed Communists, and the country’s difficult transition towards democracy afterwards, seem to give the various stories credibility. But there is no documentary proof. The conspiracy theories are so heavily dependent on a mass uprising and a fleeing dictator, unpredictable circumstances, that an elaborate and carefully calculated plan prepared months in advance sounds implausible.

  Yet some others, including General Nicolae Milit
aru, who became Defence Minister in the new government, insist that there was much pre-planning. He said there had been a plot to overthrow Ceauescu scheduled for February 1990. Ceauescu would be taken prisoner while he was away from Bucharest and put out of action by tranquilliser guns, while the army and members of the apparat declared a coup. The guns would not be delivered until the middle of January, though, so the revolution overtook the conspirators. The new government would call itself the National Salvation Front and be led by Ion Iliescu.

  It is denied by Iliescu and other leading figures of the post-Ceauescu administration. ‘Many people discussed things about the future, ways out of the disaster we were in,’ Iliescu said. ‘I spoke with military men. But were we prepared to implicate ourselves in action which could eliminate the Ceauescu regime? To have a plan you need to have the conditions to put it into action. We discussed what could be done, but . . . it became clear - from people inside the army and other institutions - that it was not possible to organise anything.’14

  When Iliescu spoke on television that afternoon he looked like a figure of power and authority as he promised to bring the man who had inflicted such misery on Romanians ‘to the reckoning before the public’. He said that the immediate task was to restore order. It was not yet certain that Ceausescu would not fight back. And he called on all ‘responsible people’ to form a Committee of National Salvation. By 6 p.m. that evening the army had effectively installed Iliescu as leader of a new government, shaky, weak, born amidst uncertainty and confusion. It had one urgent primary task: to fight a civil war.

  The shooting began at 7 p.m. Small groups of Securitate officers loyal to Ceausescu started firing indiscriminately on the streets at people celebrating liberation. It went on ferociously for a day and two nights and sporadically for another day after that. Often it was difficult to know who was shooting at whom or for what. Much of the violence seemed entirely wanton, like the deliberate shelling of the beautiful neo-classical National Library when nobody was inside the building. Hundreds of ancient and irreplaceable volumes were destroyed. The Securitate operated under an order - number 2600 - which was supposed to deal with a foreign invasion or a serious uprising. It is unclear who activated the order as the most senior Securitate officers, including General Vlad, had gone over to the revolution. The tactics did not seem to have a military purpose, but were designed to sow as much terror in the civilian population as possible. The army was unsure how to respond. The soldiers were mostly raw conscripts, barely trained, who had never before fired a shot in anger. Differentiating friend or foe was hard, made even more so as thousands of civilians were handed weapons by soldiers at military barracks. Often the Securitate ‘ter rorists’ would wear civilian clothes, or army uniforms. In small groups, they used the underground passageways and sewers to move around Bucharest, attack army units or civilian targets, and then just as suddenly disappear.

  At 9 p.m. on 22 December they attacked the TV station, but not in a serious attempt to take over the building, which by then was ringed with tanks. The defending troops had received less than two months’ training and wore heavy armour better-suited to the open battlefield than to fighting guerrilla actions in the streets of a city. Fighting raged for about an hour and sixty-two people were killed, mostly civilians caught in the crossfire. The studios were attacked several more times over the next few days. Rumours spread that the casualty figures were in their thousands and Bucharest had turned into a bloodbath. Fighting was intense. Throughout Romania the death toll was 1,104, of whom 493 died in Bucharest and about a third were Securitate ‘terrorists’. There were 3,352 wounded, 2,200 of them in the capital. The worst single incident was a case of ‘friendly fire’. Early in the morning of Saturday 23 December, troops guarding Otopeni, Bucharest’s airport, fired at a truck bringing fresh reinforcements to join their own side.

  According to Valentin Gabrielescu, chairman of the Senate inquiry that later looked at the fighting in the revolution, most of the deaths were civilians, ‘innocents caught in the crossfire between panic-stricken soldiers and civilians firing at terrorists’. He concluded: ‘As well as the army and the police, thousands of civilians were armed and under the stress of false rumours and false dangers . . . everyone fired at everyone else. It was chaos.’15

  The Ceausescus’ getaway attempt was tragicomic. By mid-afternoon the couple were left abandoned, on their own and under arrest. After escaping in the nick of time from the rooftop at Party headquarters, they reached their forty-room villa in Snagov within twenty minutes. But they did not stay long. Ceausescu made a series of phone calls to local Communist Party secretaries to see if there was any region willing to take him in. They ruled out trying to flee the country. He frowned as he was told the revolution had spread everywhere. They went up to their apartment on the first floor. There they searched through all the cupboards, emptied the drawers and turned over the mattresses. They put everything into blue bags, including two loaves of bread.

  Within fifteen minutes, at around 1.20, they hurried back to the waiting helicopter. They sent their two unwanted passengers, Prime Minister Bobu and his deputy Manescu, off by car to fend for them selves. As they left, Manescu knelt and kissed the President’s hand. Now the Ceausescus were accompanied only by their two bodyguards, Lieutenants Florian Rat and Marian Rusu. The helicopter pilot was desperate to offload the President and his party, but the guards kept pointing their guns at him and told him to do as he was instructed by the President. Malutan said: ‘When they were all back on board Ceausescu asked me, “Whose side are you on? Where are we going?” I answered “You give the orders.” We took off at 13.30 hours. The bodyguards were very nervous. They kept their machine pistols pointed at me. On my headphones I could hear my commanding officer saying to me “Vasile, listen to the radio - this is the revolution.” After that, Ceausescu ordered me to cut all radio contact with my base. I wanted to persuade him to let us land . . . but I was on my own, cut off from the world.’16

  He was told to head for Pitesti, in the south-west of the country, and he deliberately flew high ‘so we could be seen by radar’. But one of the guards spotted the manoeuvre and said, ‘Vasile, what are you up to?’ The pilot answered Ceausescu himself. ‘We’ve been spotted by radar,’ he said. Both of the Ceausescus looked terrified and Nicolae barked ‘Let’s go down, land near the road.’ The pilot put the helicopter down in a field, four kilometres from Titu, outside a village called Salcuta. It was 1.45 p.m. Marian Rusu hailed two passing cars. The Ceausescus and Florian Rat got in one. Rusu, who had been Elena’s personal bodyguard for many years, got in the other, promising to follow close behind. But he deserted them immediately.

  The Ceausescus were in a red Dacia driven by Doctor Nicolae Deca. He realised immediately who was in his car and he tried to get rid of his passengers as soon as possible. He said he was running out of petrol, which was a lie, but plausible in Romania at the time. Rat hijacked another driver, thirty-five-year-old Nicolae Petrisor, outside the front door of his house. Ceausescu told him to drive to Târgoviste, where there was a showcase Potemkin village-type factory which he had visited several times with foreign dignitaries. They were privileged workers, loyal Communists, surely they would be welcome there, he told Elena. She looked doubtful.

  When they arrived in Târgoviste the town was in uproar, celebrating the news of the revolution. They abandoned Rat on the outskirts. Fearful of being recognised, they kept their heads down as far as they could. Petrisor was ordered to drive to an agricultural plant which they had also visited many times. The director, Victor Seinescu, let them in, but at around 2.45 p.m. called the local militia to inform them of the identity of his guests. The Ceausescus were taken away by two uniformed militiamen, but it was not until three hours later that they were handed over to the army, even though the barracks were only 450 metres away. Like so many senior officials that afternoon Seinescu was deciding whose side to be on. Eventually he chose to hand them over and just before 6 p.m. they were taken to th
e barracks at Târgoviste, where an anti-aircraft artillery regiment was based. It was difficult getting the couple to the barracks without anyone seeing who they were. The Ceausescus were bundled into an armoured personnel carrier, shielded from the public’s gaze, and taken by a roundabout route to the barracks. The drive took five minutes or so. When they arrived they were taken to their last living quarters. An office had been transformed into two cubicles, separated by standard-issue desks. Two army beds were placed in the corners of the room, with blankets but no sheets. There was a large porcelain stove in another corner and a cold-water-tap washbasin next to it. This ground-floor section of the barracks was placed off-limits for all but a few hand-picked officers and NCOs. Major Ion Secu spent the next two and a half days with the couple.