In Romania: Between Euphoria and Rage

...At this critical juncture, with an overcharged political atmosphere and with only a precariously legitimate government, one cannot rule out the danger of a military coup...

...Correspondence is still censored and telephone conversations are reportedly tapped...

...and the defense ministergeneral, Ion Ionita, were marginalized or sacked...

...former Securitate officers were suddenly released from prison without explanation...

...The only criterion for political success in Ceausescu's Romania was unconditional loyalty to the president...

...In the same vein, with all his sins, Erich Honecker was only the primus inter pares within a Mafia-like Politburo in East Germany...

...Like Stalin, Ceausescu managed to annihilate the party by converting it into a passive body of almost four million members whose sole duty was to worship him...

...With . Ceausescu dead and most of his main acolytes in jail waiting for open trials, the question now is how deeply the process of uprooting his regime will reach...

...A permanent encomiastic deluge was engineered by agitprop hacks: making Ceausescu's name synonymous with communism, the sycophants heaped hagiographic epithets on him...

...Mass meetings have been organized to protest what many Romanians perceive as the hijacking of their revolution...

...criticism of communism (and not only of Ceausescuism) was toned down...

...Presumably anti-Stalinist, he is far from being anticommunist...

...In the meantime, taking advantage of the new laws on associations, political parties have started to form...

...Did it also mean the end of communism in any form...

...In an attempt to ensure his political immortality, he promoted his youngest son, Nicu, to high party positions...

...For Brucan, as for Iliescu, terms like socialism, communism, Marxism, Leninism, capitalism, and fascism have lost any sense...

...L the conflict between Iliescu and Mazilu a simple clash of ambitions...

...Not only the party, but all sources of independent social life were suppressed...

...He climbed the career ladder within the Romanian Communist party (RCP) under the protection of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the party's general secretary between 1944 and 1965...

...Under these circumstances, it is understandable that Ceausescu could not be removed so easily as the other East European leaders...

...Ironically, when Nicolae Ceausescu took power in March 1965, it appeared he would de-Stalinize the party...

...Things changed quickly: the NSF announced that it would field its own candidates in the forthcoming elections...

...The former terrorized not only the whole of society but also his closest collaborators...

...He was the product of Romanian Communist political culture, and his extravaganzas did nothing but carry to an extreme its never-abandoned Stalinist features...

...Some historical background is indispensable here...

...It had never passed through the process of moving from the absolute rule of one man to the (slightly less absolute) rule of a Communist Politburo...

...He appears then to have considered the possibility of importing into Romania the methods of indoctrination used during the Cultural Revolution...

...What followed was a radical re-Stalinization and the emergence of an unprecedented cult of personality surrounding, first, himself and then, after 1974, his "evil genius" wife, Elena...

...As a tyrant, Ceausescu had to be removed by tyrannicide— a method with a long and honorable tradition...

...It resulted not only in the replacement of a despised ruling family but in the dissolution of all party and government structures...

...Bereft of power and authority, the Communist party simply collapsed, ingloriously...

...The party had essentially disappeared the moment Ceausescu and his wife fled from the roof of the Central Committee building in Bucharest's Palace Square on December 22, 1989...

...It is not at all clear why the leaders of the National Salvation Front (NSF)—the ruling body that emerged immediately after the revolution claiming to be a spontaneous popular organization—organized Ceausescu's trial in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of Stalinist frame-ups...

...At the same time, the general secretary continued to de-Sovietize through his independent line in foreign policy—he distanced his country from the Soviet Union by maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel after 1967 and by vehemently condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968...

...Prominent intellectual dissidents were forced into either external or internal exile...

...The Romanian Communists, who before the arrival of the Soviet troops in August 1944 numbered no more than one thousand members, preserved an uncompromising commitment to hard-line Stalinism...

...How can one save a spontaneous revolution from below from being co-opted by those adept in the Leninist techniques of manipulation...

...Those who organized his execution are themselves former Communists...

...In this he was echoing not only Gorbachev's opposition to a multiparty system, but also the political philosophy of the NSF's principal ideologue, communist veteran Silviu Brucan...

...To date, the NSF Council has failed to establish its democratic bona fides...

...After all, without their sacrifices, Ceausescu might have retained power...

...The autocrat enters with impunity upon the most erratic actions...

...In August 1969, Richard Nixon went to Bucharest, where he was triumphantly received by an increasingly self-enamored Ceausescu...

...Several thousand people in Romania—the hard core of followers—came to believe the myth that Ceausescu was the demiurge of national dignity and sovereignty...

...It was glasnost avant la lettre, with Ceausescu championing a self-styled version of reform communism...

...In April 1968, he rehabilitated Lucretiu Patrascanu, a former Politburo member and Marxist thinker executed in 1954 under trumped-up charges of espionage...

...SPRING • 1990 • 223...

...Because the Romanian revolution was a violent one, it is also likely to be thoroughgoing: with its martyrs, it also has its momentum...

...During the first stage of the upheaval, the people showed remarkable moderation as the Securitate murdered and tortured thousands of unarmed civilians...

...A Politburo, even one made up of cruel individuals, provides a moderating check against the worst depravities of any one member...

...In 1977, when coal workers in the Jiu Valley organized a massive strike, their leaders were captured by the Securitate and made to disappear...

...Although intellectuals may succumb to a state of resigned malaise, students will not capitulate as easily...

...To Westerners the distinction between these two forms of oppression may seem irrelevant, but it is very large to people who live under them...

...This stance won Ceausescu plaudits and even aid from Western governments...

...Even the national intelligentsia, viscerally anticommunist, was ready to credit the party leadership for the break with Moscow...

...They will not accept the spilling of their blood to see the replacement of a clique of illiterate Stalinists with one of neo-Bolshevik reformers...

...The dictator dreamed of leaving his imprint on the Romanian soul...

...In 1987 he smuggled out of Romania a report on human rights violations there...

...In April 1968, Charles de Gaulle visited Romania and congratulated Ceausescu for his alleged independence...

...It has committed a number of immense blunders and alienated many of those who could have fostered its authority...

...Her influence catalyzed Nicolae's Hitlerian personality, expunging the impulses that had prompted his regime's early promises of liberalization...

...How can one explain both the tremendous amplitude of the Romanian revolution and also its failure to engender political forms that would guarantee a break with the past...

...Harassed by the Securitate, Mazilu refused to recant and reemerged on December 22, 1989 as one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement...

...Its principal underpinning, and sole explanation for its longevity, was the Securitate...

...Obsessed with Hitler, while believing passionately in orthodox Stalinism, Ceausescu merged these two horrifying legacies into a personalized tyranny that ranked with any of this century...

...He is the author of the concept that the recent Romanian revolution is so original that its aftermath must essentially be different from those of other countries...

...There was no possibility of engaging in anything similar to Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 or Poland's Committee for Workers' Defense...

...the prime minister, Ion Gheorghe Maurer...

...Romania's civil society was almost completely paralyzed...

...Learning the democratic process will be difficult in a country with very few democratic traditions...

...A single absolute ruler, in the mold of Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, Castro, or Ceausescu, means a rule unchecked and unmoderated in its arbitrariness, ignorance, and cruelty...

...His model is Gorbachev and his ideal a reformed version of the one-party system...

...If they fail, frustrated ardor and betrayed ideals may beget a state of collective despair, which, in turn, could generate new waves of popular rage...

...This is only one of the many mysteries surrounding Romania's new government...

...Ten years later, in November 1987, when street demonstrations took place in Brasov, the Securitate intervened, order was restored, and the organizers vanished...

...But there are also some encouraging signals: the students, who spearheaded the overthrow of the dictatorship, have created a Student League, which may become a rallying point for Romania's democratic youth...

...The degree of hatred oppressed people feel toward their masters is bound to be quite different in the two cases...

...The Council of the NSF was initially led by a foursome made up of old Communists...

...He presided over the bulldozing of old Bucharest and imposed the building of a giant palace, an apogee of "socialist realist" kitsch...

...Above all, the myth was believed by Elena, who after 1979 was his second-in-command...

...Many of Ceausescu's initial supporters, party apparatchiks like Virgil Trofin, Ion Iliescu, 220 • DISSENT Romania and Janos Fazekas...

...He submitted Romanians to incredible humiliations by forcing them to simulate joy in times of utter poverty and despondency...

...Both under Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu, the party suffered a painful inferiority complex: since its leaders were perfectly aware that their coming to power was the result of the Soviet diktat, they could not arrive at a genuine source of legitimacy...

...But the drastic nature of these events is sadly consistent...

...The fourth member of the initial ruling quartet, Dumitru Mazilu, resigned on January 26, 1990 in protest against the "Stalinist methods of the new leadership...

...Its chairman, Ion Iliescu, studied in Moscow in the early 1950s and was Ceausescu's protege until 1971, when he fell in disgrace for "intellectualism...

...On the contrary, in a conversation with student leaders on January 21, 1990, Iliescu described political pluralism as "an obsolete ideology of the nineteenth century...

...Did it usher in full-fledged pluralism...

...More ominously, instead of disbanding the hated Securitate, the NSF decided to subordinate it to the Ministry of Defense...

...Thus in June 1971 he published his "proposal for the improvement of ideological activity," a monument of Zhdanovist obscurantism...

...Furthermore, there are indications that former leaders of the Securitate were among the first to lend their support to the new authorities...

...To prevent such an outcome, independent social forces will have to coordinate their actions in a broad democratic movement...

...Instead of de-Stalinizing Romania, Dej de-Sovietized her...

...The myth of the maverick diplomat, the super-negotiator and the only trustworthy communist leader, was naively bought by many Western analysts, who glossed over Ceausescu's growing dictatorial propensities...

...Romania was different from the others because it had never undergone de-Stalinization...

...During the first days of the revolution, Romanians engaged in romantic dreams of national redemption...

...The dictator's flight signified the end of more than four decades of brutal Stalinism...

...Possessed by an overweening hubris, hypnotized by a self-image magnified to grotesque proportions by the corrupt scribes of the presidential court, Ceausescu completely lost touch with reality...

...Since his advent to power, Iliescu has not kept these convictions secret...

...Or are we witnessing an obscure struggle between two groups that secretly conspired to take over power on the day Ceausescu would be deposed...

...The latter returned to the alleged "Leninist norms of party life" precisely because the party bureaucracy could no longer tolerate Stalinist methods of intimidation and persecution...

...Critical intellectuals of various persuasions have organized a Group for Social Dialogue, whose tasks are to reflect on the country's problems, monitor the government's observance of democratic procedures, and, most important, help the development of a civil society in Romania...

...Their handicap, however, is that there is little constituency for a group that is in any way responsible for the historical tragedy of the last forty years...

...In the light of this outlook, there is no need for other parties to exist and compete for power with the "truly national exponent," that is, the NSF ruled by Iliescu, Brucan and Prime Minister Petre Roman...

...An all-pervasive police terror thwarted any attempt to launch democratic initiatives from below...

...This was indeed their Achilles' heel: a total alienation from the Romanian nation...

...With surprising candor, Brucan has expressed his deep contempt for Western-type democracy...

...For the time being, the Communists have refrained from trying to reestablish their party, but it is likely that some of their activists will try to emulate the Hungarian strategy and propose the formation of a "Socialist party...

...Students and intellectuals were ready to trust the new leaders' pledges of commitment to pluralism...

...A victim of the mechanism he had created, Ceausescu himself came to believe in his providential role as the "savior of the nation," the "hero of peace," and the "most brilliant revolutionary thinker of all times...

...There was no institution that could ensure a nonviolent transition from this terrorist dictatorship to a softer version of communism...

...Ceausescu not only monopolized power, he also dynasticized the Romanian party by appointing members of his clan to top party and government positions...

...This image also strengthened Ceausescu by allowing him to portray dissidents as traitors...

...It was SPRING • 1990 • 219 Romania Gheorghiu-Dej who avoided the de-Stalinization process initiated by Khrushchev in 1956...

...Compare, for example, Stalin's rule to that of Khrushchev...

...The president's Stalinist inclinations were catalyzed by a trip he made in May 1971 to China and North Korea...

...He was also trying to consolidate his personal power and get rid of those in the apparatus who might have nourished dreams of "socialism with a human face...

...He also reinstated into the party many victims of Gheorghiu-Dej's terror and proclaimed the need to write a true history of both the party and the country...

...This was not just a matter of personal preference: Ceausescu was trying to contain the liberalization movement in Romania, curb intellectual unrest, and deter students from emulating their rebellious peers in other communist states...

...But by the end of his life, Romania had the potential to become a second Yugoslavia: an impressive economic growth and encouraging links with the West could have been used for a gradual dissolution of Stalinism...

...So far, the signals from Bucharest are mixed...

...Among them, one can identify such "parties of nostalgia" linked to Romania's fragile interwar democracy as the National Peasant party and the Liberal party...

...Nicolae Ceausescu did not emerge out of the blue...

...But if the NSF continues to trample the democratic aspi222 • DISSENT Romania rations of the population, and if the logic of postrevolutionary bureaucracy prevails over that of a genuine renewal, then one can expect more turmoil...

...As for the Romanian Social Democrats, they have formed their own party, and it is probable that they will attract votes among blue-collar workers...

...The magnitude of the collective decompression has been directly proportional to the amount of repression accumulated in more than forty years of "proletarian dictatorship...

...They consider the NSF to be a supra-ideological body, a mass party movement, a corporation of diverging but not necessarily incompatible interests...

...In his speech, which was not published in the still SPRING • 1990 • 221 state-controlled Romanian media but publicized by the Soviet press agency TASS, Iliescu claimed that the NSF advocated a "democratic model without pluralism...

...Mazilu knows something about Stalinism: a former Securitate colonel, he taught international law at the University of Bucharest and served as a government-appointed United Nations expert on human rights...

...Scared by Khrushchev's anti-Stalin campaign, Dej simulated Romanian patriotism and defied Moscow's plans for economic integration within the COMECON...

...He condemned the holding of political prisoners, deplored the abuses of the past, and instructed the Securitate (secret police) to abide by the law...

...Ceausescu, who became a Politburo member in 1954, helped Gheorghiu-Dej to forcibly collectivize agriculture and organize repeated antiintellectual witchhunts...