Gheorghiu-Dej succeeded in persuading the
Kremlin to withdraw the Red Army from Roman-
ian soil in 1958, and thereafter his country was a
nominal member of the Warsaw Pact rather than
a loyal, subservient ally. In the Kremlin the
Romanians’ uncomfortable stance was accepted,
because there was never any doubt about their
communist credentials.
Ceaus ̧escu succeeded Gheorghiu-Dej after his
death in 1965. He eliminated all his political
rivals, courted mass popularity by playing the
anti-Soviet card and during his early years manip-
ulated public attitudes by permitting considerable
cultural freedom. He also followed an independ-
ent foreign policy, allowing openings to the West.
Admiration for the ‘strong leader’ and fear of
Soviet intervention buttressed his support at
home. It also earned him far too uncritical
support in the West – knighted in Britain, he was
host to President Nixon in Bucharest in 1969. In
1983, Vice-President George Bush was suffi-
ciently misled to describe him as ‘one of Europe’s
good communists’. The Cold War blinkered
sound judgement.
During the 1970s Western credits helped him
to pursue his vision of turning Romania into a
modern industrial nation, but in the 1980s his
grandiose economic plans ended in disaster.
There was no new investment, as the dictator
squeezed everything productive for export to
repay the international debts. He was not willing
to be dependent on Western creditors either.
With his wife Elena, Ceaus ̧escu in the end lost all
touch with reality and built up a personality cult
without parallel. His family exploited and pillaged
Romania’s scant resources for their own luxurious
lifestyles. They lived like potentates. Among his
final acts of economic madness was his urbanisa-
tion programme, which would have involved
simply bulldozing half of Romania’s villages and
building soulless blocks of flats in their place. A
beginning was made, and at last the West was
shocked.
The secret police, the Securitate, made sure
that any opposition from the cowed people was
extinguished; in Romania even the Church
leaders made their own peace with the regime.
For Ceaus ̧escu the right path to follow during the
years of communism’s crisis at the end of the
1980s was that of the Chinese leadership in
Tiananmen Square, not the Kremlin’s glasnost
and perestroika. Until the outbreak of the spon-
taneous revolution in December 1989, Romania
appeared to be as securely in the grip of its leader
as Albania. Wishing to stand well with the West,
Ceaus ̧escu’s solution for the small, brave intellec-
tual opposition was to force them to leave the
country. In the 1980s the Securitate behaved
more ruthlessly against lesser-known critics of the
regime; an unknown number were murdered.
A curtain-raiser for the revolution two years
later was the 1987 revolt by the workers of
Kronstadt. Some 5,000 stormed the party head-
quarters and shouted ‘Down with Ceaus ̧escu!’
Their lives had become intolerable. The Securitate
put down the rebellion with murderous brutality.
Just a few brave individuals continued to protest
and demonstrate. Among them was Pastor Laszlo
Tokes in Timis ̧oara, who looked after his Hungar-
ian ethnic flock. Timis ̧oara lay in a region in west-
ern Romania that had been part of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire before 1918; since then it
had remained in Romania. The Securitate harassed
the pastor, and his bishop, under state pressure,
ordered his removal to another parish. On 15
December 1989, his congregation, Hungarians
and Romanians, surrounded his house to protect
him and his family from deportation. Once again,
as so often in history, this particular dissent, small
and apparently inconsequential, was the spark that
started a revolution. The protest spread to the
mixed Romanian and Hungarian population of
Timis ̧oara. On 17 December 1989, the army
moved in. Bloody clashes ensued, and the unequal
fight soon ended with many dead. The news
spread through Romania and the world. Ceaus ̧escu
was losing control.
On 21 December Ceaus ̧escu arranged for the
usual adulation to greet him when he addressed
a crowd of 100,000 in Bucharest’s University
Square from the balcony of the Communist Party
Central Committee Building. Well-rehearsed
expressions of approval arose from the front of
the crowd, but from behind followed catcalls and
shouts of ‘Murderers of Timis ̧oara!’ Ceaus ̧escu,
bewildered, was hustled back into the building896 GLOBAL CHANGE: FROM THE 20th TO THE 21st CENTURY