Down with Big Brother (52 page)

Over the next three days the Ceauşescus could hear gunfire around the army barracks where they were being held. In Tîrgovişte, as in other Romanian towns, Securitate sharpshooters were conducting a furious last-ditch stand. Their strategy was to create an atmosphere of total confusion and panic by taking potshots at civilians and attempting to storm key government buildings. The sound of shooting encouraged Ceauşescu to believe
that a civil war was raging in Romania and it was only a matter of time before he was rescued.

In fact Ceauşescu’s supporters were fighting a losing battle. A new transitional government, known as the National Liberation Front, was gradually imposing its authority. By Christmas Eve the new rulers had had enough. In order to deprive the Securitate of a rallying point, they decided to rid Romania of the Ceauşescus once and for all.

The “trial” took place on the afternoon of Christmas Day in a small schoolroom that had been transformed into an improvised courtroom. The proceedings lasted for fifty-five minutes and were as grotesque a parody of the “rule of law” as anything that had occurred under Ceauşescu himself. No attempt was made to prove the charges, which included “murder of more than sixty thousand people,” “subversion of the national economy,” and “depositing more than one billion dollars in foreign banks.” The military judge acted as one of the prosecutors. After failing to persuade the Ceauşescus to plead diminished responsibility through insanity, the court-appointed defense counsel conceded at the end of the trial that his clients were guilty as charged.

Still dressed in the same dark overcoat that he had worn in Bucharest, the fallen
conducător
stubbornly refused to acknowledge the court’s authority or answer its questions. Over and over again he insisted that only his own rubber-stamp parliament, the Grand National Assembly, had the right to put him on trial. When Elena screamed at the court, he patted her on the hand, as if to say that it was not worth arguing with such insignificant people. From time to time he gazed impatiently at his watch, rolling his eyes at the ceiling at the impudence of those who presumed to judge him.

“I am president of the country and supreme commander of the army. I do not recognize you,” he snarled. “I do not answer the questions of a gang which carried out a coup.”
¹⁰⁸

After the court delivered the preordained verdict—capital punishment—Ceauşescu maintained a sullen dignity. According to the official account, as he was led away, he hummed the opening bars of the “Internationale.” Elena was more shrill, screaming at the soldiers who took her away that she had been “like a mother” to them. “We want to die together,” she insisted at one point. When one of the soldiers bumped into her, she turned on him furiously. “Go fuck your mother,” she yelled.

The soldiers led the Ceauşescus out into an adjoining courtyard and placed them against a whitewashed wall. A firing squad was waiting. The four executioners opened up with automatic rifles, firing more than thirty
rounds apiece. The bodies of the “beloved father and mother” of the Romanian people crumpled to the ground.

M
ANY OF THE OFFICIAL
charges against the Ceauşescus turned out to be wildly exaggerated. The new National Salvation government later acknowledged the total number of those killed during the “revolution” was more like one thousand than forty thousand.
¹⁰⁹
No hard evidence was ever found to support allegations that the dictator had stashed away millions of dollars in Swiss banks. On the other hand, the economic, social, and psychological devastation wrought on Romania by Ceauşescu during his twenty-four-year rule was incalculable. It will probably take the country many generations to recover from the effects of his megalomania. Hailed by Communist propagandists as the path to national grandeur, Ceauşescu’s policies had turned Romania into the most impoverished and backward country in Eastern Europe, with the possible exception of Albania. The so-called Golden Era was an age of unrelenting economic hardship and brutal political repression.

Hardly any of Ceauşescu’s grandiose schemes ever came to fruition, but the cost of attempting to implement them was enormous. Determined to boost the population of Romania from twenty-two million to thirty million by the year 2000, the tyrant virtually outlawed abortion and contraception. The result was a surge in the number of unwanted children, a jump in the infant mortality rate, and the deaths of thousands of women who attempted illegal abortions every year. Intent on creating a modern industrialized state, he poured money into prestige projects, such as a vastly expanded oil-refining industry, which worked at only 10 percent of capacity. The country’s once-prosperous agricultural sector was ruined. To build a capital city that would be worthy of him, Ceauşescu tore up some of the oldest sections of Bucharest to make way for a vast and hideous “People’s Palace,” with more than a thousand rooms, decorated with five-ton chandeliers and acres of white marble. At the same time, he ordered hundreds of villages razed to the ground in the name of “systematization” and “civilization.” To pay for his visionary ideas, he deprived ordinary Romanians of heat, food, and electricity.

Reporting from Romania in the aftermath of Ceauşescu’s overthrow was like reporting from a country just liberated after a devastating war. The difference was that Romanians were being freed not from a foreign occupier but from their own domestic tyrant. It was as if a huge weight had been lifted from the national psyche. People seemed dazed by their experiences.
There was a kind of stunned relief among Romanians that they had survived the experiment in “scientific socialism.” Wherever one went—factories, schools, hospitals, orphanages—people shouted out stories that they had scarcely dared whisper to trusted intimates a few days before. The story that caught the world’s attention, because it best summed up the biological and psychological degradation of the nation, was the plight of Romania’s orphaned and abandoned children.
¹¹⁰

O
RPHANAGE-
S
CHOOL
N
O
. 6 on the outskirts of Bucharest, home to 226 shivering, undernourished children, was typical of hundreds of other Dickensian establishments scattered around Romania. Although the children suffered from a wide variety of ailments, including AIDS, rickets, and tuberculosis, the most common sickness was frostbite. In winter the temperature in the orphanage, a three-story concrete barracks, frequently fell below freezing because of severe energy cuts ordered by Ceauşescu. Children wore knitted caps and mittens to keep warm, even while indoors. They received lukewarm baths on Wednesdays and Saturdays. They lived in rooms of ten beds each, off long, gloomy corridors that were permanently dark because of a shortage of lightbulbs. The curriculum was dominated by lessons in blind adulation for the dictator who tormented them. “The people, Ceauşescu, Romania, the party,” they would chant whenever a visitor came into the room, lit only by a forty-watt lightbulb, the maximum permitted. The children were taught politically uplifting songs that mocked the cold and dark reality of their surroundings.

How beautiful, how beautiful is my life
,

I can become what I want
.

I am a patriotic hawk of the fatherland
.

Today the country is taking care of my childhood
.

How beautiful, how beautiful is my life
.

For my country, one day
,

I will sacrifice everything
.

When news of Ceauşescu’s overthrow reached the orphanage, staff and children went from room to room, tearing down his portraits. Some girls even gouged his eyes out. Within a week the orphanage director was telling the children lurid tales about how the dictator had turned former orphans into Securitate killers. Everybody recalled how the orphanage had previously been housed in much more lavish accommodations in the center of
Bucharest that had been demolished to make way for one of Ceauşescu’s pet projects. “You saw what Ceauşescu did,” shouted Titza Batezatu. “He killed children; he shot children. He only pretended to love you, but in fact he shot you.”

“Ceauşescu was a criminal,” said Rodica Bruiso, a look of hatred crossing her twelve-year-old face.

“That’s right,” piped up eighteen-year-old Mikhaila Baiban. “He had dozens of palaces built for himself, while the people starved.”

The scene in the orphanage was the direct result of the bizarre social policies pursued by the “Genius of the Carpathians.” In 1966, a year after Ceauşescu came to power, Romania adopted legislation providing for prison terms of up to five years for illegal abortions. An abortion was permitted only if a woman had already had five children. In 1986 the law was tightened further to ban abortions for any woman under the age of forty-five unless her life was endangered. There were severe penalties for doctors carrying out illegal abortions. These draconian restrictions were combined with a failure to create suitable living conditions for raising large families. Many women who were unable to face the prospect of having more children, and were too poor to bribe doctors for illegal abortions, attempted to self-abort. Others had the children only to abandon them later.

Under Ceauşescu the Bucharest Municipal Hospital dealt with an average of three thousand failed abortions every year, including two hundred women who required major surgery. Many other women were too frightened to report to the hospital. The head of the hospital’s gynecological section estimated that well over a thousand women died in Bucharest every year as a result of bungled abortions. Gangrene of the uterus and permanent sterility were frequent complications.

Unlike many Western leaders, ordinary Romanians were not taken in by Ceauşescu. Not far from Orphanage-School No. 6 was a former children’s playground that had been hastily converted into a “cemetery of heroes.” Hundreds of candles flickered in memory of demonstrators killed by Securitate snipers or crushed by tanks during the final death throes of the Ceauşescu regime. Adorning the grave of fourteen-year-old Marian Mulescu, shot by security police beneath the dictator’s balcony in Palace Square, was a placard recording his last conversation with his mother as he lay dying in the hospital.

“Why did you go down to the square, my son?”

“I went there for freedom.”

KATYN
April 14, 1990

A
FTER DECADES OF LIES
the time had come to tell the truth about the thousands of Polish officers massacred in the forest of Katyn by the Soviet secret police. By a quirk of history, this task had been assigned to Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last Communist ruler and president of the first post-Communist republic. The man who had devoted the better part of his life to keeping Poland part of the Soviet bloc was eager to prove he could be an equally devoted servant of the new order.

Dressed in the uniform of a four-star general, Jaruzelski stepped forward to lay a wreath on the grave of the murdered officers. As he straightened himself up, a volley of rifle shots disturbed the quietness of the birch grove. A military chaplain led the crowd in prayers. Hundreds of tiny flags, bearing inscriptions such as “To my beloved husband, murdered in Katyn” and “To our father, killed on the orders of Stalin and Beria,” fluttered in the breeze.

“They fought for a free Poland, and they were slaughtered as innocents,” Jaruzelski wrote in the remembrance book. “Far from their homes and their native land, they remained faithful to Poland and their soldiers’ honor until the last moment. To the Polish officer, and the victim of Stalinist crimes, is due eternal honor.”

A few months earlier such a ceremony would have been impossible. Even though there was overwhelming evidence implicating the Soviet secret police in the murder of the Polish officers, Kremlin propagandists had always insisted that the Nazis were responsible. Like his Communist predecessors, Jaruzelski had accepted the Russian version of events, prohibiting the Polish press from any discussion of Katyn. It was only after Communist rule had begun to unravel in Poland that he shifted his position. After the Solidarity election victory in June 1989 Jaruzelski urged Gorbachev to acknowledge Soviet responsibility for the tragedy on the ground that it was impeding the development of normal relations between the Soviet Union and Poland.

The Polish obsession with Katyn was part of a frenzied reexamination of history all over the former Soviet empire. The Balts wanted to know the truth about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which had permitted Stalin to crush their independence at the outset of World War II. Czechs and Slovaks insisted on being told the names of the Politburo traitors who had requested “fraternal assistance” from the Soviet Union in 1968 to suppress the Prague Spring. Hungarians demanded political rehabilitation for the leaders of the 1956 Budapest uprising against the Communist dictatorship. East Germans combed through Stasi records to discover which of their friends and neighbors had been spying on them.

Exactly half a century earlier, in April 1940, the spot where Jaruzelski now stood had been a killing field. The NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, brought the Polish officers here in prison vans known as Black Ravens. The officers were frisked for valuables and forced to kneel alongside a line of deep pits. It was easy to see why the NKVD had chosen the clearing in the forest as a suitable execution site. It was a quiet and secluded place where they could work undisturbed. It was also convenient, right next to a summer vacation home for NKVD employees and only a thirty-minute drive from the main Moscow-Minsk railway line.