Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  At first, said Secu, ‘Ceausescu behaved as though he was still the Commander-in-Chief. His first words were: “Well what’s the situation? Give me your report.” I said “We are here to protect you from the mob, but we must obey the authorities in Bucharest.” This enraged him and he launched into a long tirade against the traitors who had engineered this plot against him. Only gradually did he adjust to the fact that he was the prisoner.’ His mood alternated between bouts of deep, silent depression and intense excitability when he would rant about ‘traitors’. The commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Mares, was worried above all about security. There were 500 soldiers and forty civilians on the base. They had to be restricted from leaving in case news of the Ceauescus’ presence became known.

  Sometimes Ceauescu was wheedling. One of his twenty-four-hour guards said: ‘He came up to me . . . he put his hand out and said “I’ll give you a million American dollars and any rank in the army you like if you help to get us out of here.” But it never occurred to me to believe the offer was genuine. I thought that instead of a million dollars I would just get a bullet in the back of the neck. So I said to him “nothing doing”.’

  From Elena there were three days of nagging. ‘She complained all the time,’ her guard said. ‘She was scared, but in a state of constant fury and her rage was terrifying. Because he was diabetic, Ceauescu had to make frequent visits to the foul-smelling lavatory at the end of the corridor. She refused to use the lavatory so we had to bring her a chamber pot. Whenever I addressed him she snapped at me “How dare you talk to the Commander-in-Chief like that?” ’

  That first night, recalled Secu, they shared a single bed, huddled together - two old people in each other’s arms. ‘They talked in whispers and though they kept hugging each other they kept bickering softly. At one point Nicolae said, “If you’d only told me what was going on I could have got rid of that Iliescu. I could have finished him off last summer. But you didn’t let me.” And she whispered at one point: “It’s all your fault; we shouldn’t have come here in the first place. That was your responsibility.” ’

  They refused to eat anything but bread and apples and drank only unsweetened tea. Meals were brought to them from the officers’ mess. But they were left untouched as though they feared the food was poisoned. On their first morning, officers tried to put them in army clothes - to make them more difficult to find should the barracks be stormed. Ceauescu was told to take off his dark overcoat and fur hat and wear an army uniform. Elena refused. Guards removed her fur-collared coat by force, placed an army greatcoat around her and thrust an army cap on her head.

  That night Ceauescu made another attempt to talk his way out of his predicament, according to Major Secu. ‘He saw me dozing off. Elena was watching everything from her bed, wide awake and attentive. He said to me “Are you tired? You have every right to be tired.” He then asked about my family. I told him I was married with one child and lived in a small apartment. “That’s tough,” he said. “You deserve something better than that. Listen, I could get you a villa in Kiseleff [a fashionable district of Bucharest]. Seven or eight rooms, more if you like, and a garage. And the car inside the garage needn’t be an ordinary Dacia” . . . I didn’t reply and he began again. “You wouldn’t be risking your life for nothing. If you get me out of here and take me to the TV station where I can address the people, I would see that you got one million, no, two million dollars.” ’17

  On Christmas Eve the Securitate troops finally worked out where they were held and took up positions outside the building. Soon after midnight they opened fire, but were forced back. An hour earlier, the Ceauescus had been told to put on their greatcoats, were hurried into an armoured car parked in a sheltered place outside the building and told to lie face-down on the floor. They remained there for the next five hours until the firing died down. They were then taken back to their room in the barracks. It was there that they spent their last night.

  The new government needed to assert its authority. By late afternoon on Christmas Eve fighting in Bucharest, and in large towns like Sibiu and Braov, was less ferocious, but there were still sporadic battles and mounting casualties. The more moderate of the revolutionaries hated the name National Salvation Front. It sounded too Stalinist. But Iliescu and the other long-time Communists in the new regime thought it had a patriotic ring. They met at around 5 p.m. on the 24th to reach a decision on the fate of the Ceauescus. It was a sombre, bad-tempered occasion. They had hesitated for two days. But now the soldiers wanted a swift execution. They felt sure that would immediately halt the shooting. If Ceauescu was dead there would be no rallying point, nothing to fight for. Iliescu was at first doubtful. He did not want blood on his hands. When Militaru suggested with heavy sarcasm that ‘Yes, that might look like a bad start to your reign,’ Iliescu angrily replied, ‘What do you mean, my reign? This is not a reign.’ Some voices suggested that holding a kangaroo court in a rush, without proper evidence, would cause derision internationally. But the generals were adamant, and Brucan supported them. He said Romania needed to be assured that the Ceauescu dictatorship was dead and gone and there was no better way ‘than to show them the body’. Iliescu, finally, was convinced. ‘It would be better to have a proper trial and allow all the evidence to be presented,’ he said. ‘But circumstances don’t allow it. Let’s proceed with a trial tomorrow.’ The sentence was decided by a handful of people after that meeting and nothing was put down on paper. But Iliescu, Brucan, Militaru, Voican-Voiculescu and Stnculescu all decided on a firing squad immediately after the trial.18

  There was hardly a murmur of protest. The poet Anna Blandiana objected. In the first euphoric hours of the revolution she had been given a position within the Front to show that it was a ‘government of all the talents’. But she had not been informed of the decision to execute Ceauescu and she was appalled by it. She resigned immediately he was shot. It was the first of many open splits in the movement that emerged later. One of the few voices from outside the country against the execution came from Eduard Shevardnadze. He said he understood the circumstances. ‘But still it left a bad taste in the mouth.’ Many Romanians are convinced the Soviets inspired and took part in a coup against the dictator. The evidence, it is said, was the presence of the éminence grise Silviu Brucan in Moscow in November. But there is no evidence. Brucan frequently visited Moscow to see contacts and he often asked the Russians if they could intervene, but they declined. He always denied there was a plot - ‘In the circumstances in Romania it was simply impossible to organise anything like that. We complained to each other and hoped for his death. The whole nation longed for his death. But we didn’t do anything,’ he said.19

  Gorbachev had decreed that there should be no direct Soviet involvement in Romania, and the evidence is that he was obeyed. ‘We knew something would happen there,’ said one of Gorbachev’s key foreign policy advisers, Valentin Falin. ‘We knew there would be victims . . . something was inevitable because the regime was not only rotten but intransigent. Even then we didn’t foresee the bloody bacchanalia that came to pass. Romania had no other way out. We therefore . . . watched.’20

  The dénouement in Bucharest was full of irony. At the height of the fighting, the Americans became seriously alarmed that violence might spread in the Balkans. Lawrence Eagleburger, the Assistant Secretary of State, told his boss, James Baker, that he was worried the Romanians might turn their weapons on ethnic Hungarians and wondered if the Soviets should intervene to stop it. US objections to the Brezhnev Doctrine should not apply in this case. On Christmas Eve Baker formally suggested ‘that the Soviets have the incentive and the capability to do something to stop the bloodshed’. He said the US would not object ‘if the Warsaw Pact felt it necessary to intervene’ in Romania. This was almost exactly the tenth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It seemed an extraordinary suggestion for an American Secretary of State to make. He told the American Ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock, to sound out the Soviets, who reacted wi
th mirth. Shevardnadze said the idea was not sinister ‘but merely stupid’. He was ‘categorically opposed’ to any outside intervention. The Romanian Revolution was ‘their business’. Any kind of Soviet intervention might ‘make a martyr out of Ceauescu’. Besides, the fighting stopped immediately after he was executed.

  Late on 24 December, Matlock had an uncomfortable meeting in Moscow with one of Shevardnadze’s officials, Ivan Aboimov, who repeated that the USSR would not intervene. The Americans, he pointed out, had just a few weeks earlier invaded Panama to remove a hated dictator, Manuel Noriega, from power there. He was brutalising his people and involved in a drugs-running cartel that smuggled cocaine into the US. ‘We’ll leave that sort of intervention to you,’ said Aboimov. ‘You mentioned the Brezhnev Doctrine. From our side, we will give you the Brezhnev Doctrine as a gift.’21

  FINALE

  Vatican City, Friday 1 December 1989

  The motorcade of twenty black vehicles, with motor-cycle outriders, had created havoc in the congested streets of Rome for the previous day and a half. Wherever Mikhail Gorbachev went, outside the USSR, he attracted vast and enthusiastic crowds. This was no exception, though the occasion was unique. At about 10.30 a.m. the Soviet entourage reached the Gate of Bells at the side of St Peter’s Basilica and turned right down a narrow cul-de-sac. Gorbachev’s Zil limousine halted at the entrance to the papal apartments in the courtyard of St Damasus, one of the secret gems inside the Vatican closed to the public. He was greeted with a halberd salute from a detachment of Swiss Guards in their maroon- and mustard-coloured uniforms and by a group of senior Curia officials, including a clutch of four cardinals. Both delegations stood in sombre silence for a few minutes to savour a historic and bizarre scene. The Vatican band played the Internationale - and by all accounts, despite their unfamiliarity with the tune, played it beautifully - followed by the Papal Hymn. The first meeting was about to take place between a leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the head of the Roman Catholic Church.u The representatives from both sides were profoundly aware how pregnant with symbolism was the encounter.

  Raisa Gorbachev caused a minor sensation. According to Vatican protocol, women at formal papal audiences are supposed to wear black. Raisa had been aware of this for several weeks. It was her husband who had desperately sought the Vatican visit, which was sandwiched between a formal state visit to Italy and the summit due to begin the next day in Malta with President Bush. According to his advisers, the Pope had originally been doubtful, thinking the Russian leader might receive too much favourable publicity, and approved the meeting with the utmost reluctance. But since then a Catholic intellectual had become Prime Minister in his own homeland, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Czech regime had collapsed. The Pope felt vindicated - and thought Gorbachev deserved the publicity.

  When Mrs Gorbachev turned up in a bright red trouser suit flattering enough to demonstrate that at fifty-six she was still an attractive woman, Vatican officials showed only the briefest hint of surprise, continuing as though nothing unconventional had happened. She was given a tour of the art treasures of the Vatican while her husband was ushered into the Pope’s private library, where the two spoke for seventy-five minutes with just their interpreters present. This was a room that had been bugged by the KG B when one of Gorbachev’s chief mentors, Yuri Andropov, had been the Soviets’ main spymaster. It had been Andropov who had predicted eleven years earlier that Pope John Paul’s election could foreshadow disaster for the Soviet empire. He had been prescient. Gorbachev was an exceptionally confident man, though he admitted he was ‘very nervous’ as he was preparing to meet the Pope. He did not often use irony, but - though he repeatedly denied it - he must have smiled inwardly at his presence in a Bishop of Rome’s chambers. The meaning of his comment afterwards - that if it had not been for Pope John Paul none of the transformations in Europe would have happened - was open to several interpretations. The conversation between them at the Vatican rambled into generalities and nothing of significance was agreed. But the important thing was not what they talked about, but that these two men spoke to each other at all. It showed the world how profoundly things had changed.

  Similarly, little of significance was agreed at the summit in Malta two days later. Bizarrely, it took place at sea - or just outside Valetta harbour - jointly on a pair of American and Soviet naval vessels during one of the worst winter storms in the Mediterranean for several years. Many of the participants, including some key aides of both George H.W. Bush and Gorbachev, were so violently seasick that they could barely take their place at the talks, let alone at any of the formal dinners and receptions that had been scheduled over two days.v

  Bush had proposed the summit in a private note to Gorbachev in the early spring. His intention had been to hold as informal a meeting as possible, with only a few aides and minimal media attention. The idea was to discuss a range of East/West issues, disarmament and, most particularly, Eastern Europe. By the time the summit took place the map of Europe had been transformed and, as both of the main players recognised, there was far less to talk about. Both agreed the Cold War was over. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s senior adviser on Eastern Europe, was in the room at the most dramatic point in the summit, when she realised that ‘the world had changed, utterly . . . It was when Gorbachev said something I never imagined I would hear from a Soviet leader. He said matter of factly, without a hint of rancour, that he regarded the United States as a European power, and as a partner. That, for us, was a revolutionary change.’1

  On New Year’s Day 1990, three days after he was elected President of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of a quarter of a million people outside Prague Castle. It was a polished performance from a man who had little experience of appearing at great public gatherings. When he mounted the podium the shout ‘Havel - Havel’ rang throughout the city. He began, typically, in his measured, well-constructed, closely argued way, still the philosopher as much as a practising politician. He was cheered when he said that among the principal faults of the Communist regime was ‘the way that, armed with an arrogant and intolerant ideology, it reduced Man and nature to mere tools of production . . . to nuts and bolts in a monstrously huge and stinking machine’. Then, halfway through his text the mood of his audience began to change and Havel noticed that some people were beginning to shift uncomfortably. He even heard the odd catcall as he warmed to his theme, that Czechs had lived in ‘a contaminated moral atmosphere. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact. This helped to perpetuate it . . . We are all - though clearly to different extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are its co-creators.’2

  Havel was being honest as usual. But few of his listeners in Prague, or elsewhere in the newly liberated lands of Central Europe, appeared to share his angst - yet. Disillusion might come, but not now. People seemed to want less introspection and more celebration, before the work of creating a new future began. Epic parties continued throughout December in the capitals of countries where for decades citizens had seen little hope or cheer. After the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin - symbol of German nationhood - reopened on 23 December, celebrations went on for three days and nights. For ten days in Bucharest a ‘revolutionary committee’ occupied the suite of offices formerly used by the Ceausescus. On New Year’s Eve the late dictator’s possessions were divided in a ceremony that combined wild joy with pure greed. Everyone knew there remained plenty of unfinished business: Romanians and Bulgarians would quickly discover that their revolutions were half-complete; the momentum for German reunification was unstoppable, despite early efforts by Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand to halt the process. And what should be done with leading figures in the old regimes?

  In Prague towards midday on 1 January the playwright-turned-president was finishing his speech. The crowd was now back on his side a
fter he spoke about optimism rather than guilt. As Poland had done two days earlier, Czechoslovakia would immediately drop the ‘People’s Republic’ label and in a new constitution would simply be called a Republic. ‘People,’ Havel declared: ‘Your Government has returned to you.’

  REFERENCES

  APRF - Russian Presidential Archives, Moscow

  BA SPMO- Bundesarchiv, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR

  CPCD - Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documents, Moscow

  CWIHP-Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC

  GF - Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Moscow

  LHCMA - Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London

  OHCW - Oral History of the Cold War, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow

  USNSA - US National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington DC

  For titles referred to by the author’s name only, see Bibliography

  PROLOGUE1 Victor Stanculescu, ‘Nu V Fie Mila, au 2 miliarde lei in cont’ (‘Show no mercy, they have 2 billion lei in the bank’), Jurnalul National, Bucharest, 22 November 1990

  2 John Sweeney, The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceauescu (Hutchinson, London, 1991), pp. 157-8

  3 Trial transcript, Romania Libera, Bucharest, 25 January 1990

  4 Ibid.

  5 Jurnalul National, Bucharest, 18 December 2006

  ONE: THE WORKERS’ STATE1 Heins, The Wall Falls, pp. 114-20

  2 Ibid.

  3 Volkogonov, pp. 166-72

  4 Davies, Europe: A History; Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (Macmillan, London, 2003) and Toraska all have penetrating analyses of the Soviet system