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.’
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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 employed 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.
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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.
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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.
’
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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 Militaru, 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.’
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