Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (125 page)

The setting for this national tragedy was an economy that was deliberately turned backward, from subsistence into destitution. In the early Eighties, Ceauşescu decided to enhance his country’s international standing still further by paying down Romania’s huge foreign debts. The agencies of international capitalism—starting with the International Monetary Fund—were delighted and could not praise the Romanian dictator enough. Bucharest was granted a complete rescheduling of its external debt. To pay off his Western creditors, Ceauşescu applied unrelenting and unprecedented pressure upon domestic consumption.

In contrast to Communist rulers elsewhere, unrestrainedly borrowing abroad to bribe their subjects with well-stocked shelves, the Romanian
Conducator
set about exporting every available domestically-produced commodity. Romanians were forced to use 40-watt bulbs at home (when electricity was available) so that energy could be exported to Italy and Germany. Meat, sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and much more were strictly rationed. To ratchet up productivity, fixed quotas were introduced for obligatory public labour on Sundays and holidays (the
corvée
, as it was known in
ancien régime
France).

Petrol usage was cut to the minimum: in 1986 a program of horse-breeding to substitute for motorized vehicles was introduced. Horse-drawn carts became the main means of transport and the harvest was brought in by scythe and sickle. This was something truly new: all socialist systems depended upon the centralized control of systemically induced shortages, but in Romania an economy based on overinvestment in unwanted industrial hardware was successfully switched into one based on pre-industrial agrarian subsistence.

Ceauşescu’s policies had a certain ghoulish logic. Romania did indeed pay off its international creditors, albeit at the cost of reducing its population to penury. But there was more to Ceauşescu’s rule, in his last years, than just crazy economics. The better to control the country’s rural population—and increase still further the pressure on peasant farmers to produce food for export—the regime inaugurated a proposed ‘systematization’ of the Romanian countryside. Half of the country’s 13,000 villages (disproportionately selected from minority communities) were to be forcibly razed, their residents transferred into 558 ‘agro-towns’, Had Ceauşescu been granted the time to carry through this project it would utterly have destroyed what little remained of the country’s social fabric.

The rural ‘systemization’ project was driven forward by the Romanian dictator’s mounting megalomania. Under Ceauşescu the Leninist impulse to control, centralize and plan every detail of daily life graduated into an obsession with homogeneity and grandeur surpassing even the ambitions of Stalin himself. The enduring physical incarnation of this monomaniacal urge was to be the country’s capital, scheduled for an imperial make-over on a scale unprecedented since Nero. This project for the ‘renovation’ of Bucharest was to be aborted by the coup of December 1989; but enough was done for Ceauşescu’s ambition to be indelibly etched into the fabric of the contemporary city. A historic district of central Bucharest the size of Venice was completely flattened. Forty thousand buildings and dozens of churches and other monuments were razed to make space for a new ‘House of the People’ and the five-kilometer-long, 150-meter-wide Victory of Socialism Boulevard.

The whole undertaking was mere façade. Behind the gleaming white frontages of the boulevard were run up the familiar dirty, grim, pre-cast concrete blocks. But the façade itself was aggressively, humiliatingly, unrelentingly uniform, a visual encapsulation of totalitarian rule. The House of the People, designed by a twenty-five-year-old architect (Anca Petrescu) as Ceauşescu’s personal palace, was indescribably and uniquely ugly even by the standards of its genre. Grotesque, cruel and tasteless it was above all
big
(three times the size of the Palace of Versailles . . . ). Fronted by a vast hemicycle space that can hold half a million people, its reception area the size of a football pitch, Ceauşescu’s palace was (and remains) a monstrous lapidary metaphor for unconstrained tyranny, Romania’s very own contribution to totalitarian urbanism.

Romanian Communism in its last years sat uneasily athwart the intersection of brutality and parody. Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself (though not perhaps North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, with whom the Romanian leader was sometimes compared). A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceauşescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.

What Ceauşescu’s sycophantic colleagues really thought of all this they were not saying. But it is clear that by November 1989—when, after sixty-seven standing ovations, he was re-elected Secretary General of the Party and proudly declared that there were to be no reforms—a number of them had begun to regard him as a liability: remote and out of touch not just with the mood of the times but with the rising level of desperation among his own subjects. But so long as he had the backing of the secret police, the Securitate, Ceauşescu appeared untouchable.

Appropriately enough, then, it was the Securitate who precipitated the regime’s fall when, in December 1989, they tried to remove a popular Hungarian Protestant pastor, Lázslo Tökés, in the western city of Timisoara. The Hungarian minority, a special object of prejudice and repression under Ceauşescu’s rule, had been encouraged by developments just across the border in Hungary and were all the more resentful at the continuing abuses to which they were subject at home. Tökés became a symbol and focus for their frustrations and, when the regime targeted him on December 15th, the church in which he had taken refuge was surrounded by parishioners holding an all-night vigil in his support.

The following day, as the vigil turned unexpectedly into a demonstration against the regime, the police and the army were brought out to shoot into the crowd. Exaggerated reports of the ‘massacre’ were carried on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and spread around the country. To quell the unprecedented protests, which had now spread from Timisoara to Bucharest itself, Ceauşescu returned from an official visit to Iran. On December 21st he appeared on a balcony at Party headquarters with the intention of making a speech denouncing the ‘minority’ of ‘troublemakers’—and was heckled into shocked and stunned silence. The following day, after making a second unsuccessful attempt to address the gathering crowds, Ceauşescu and his wife fled from the roof of the Party building in a helicopter.

At this point the balance of power swung sharply away from the regime. At first the army had appeared to back the dictator, occupying the streets of the capital and firing on demonstrators who tried to seize the national television studios. But from December 22nd the soldiers, now directed by a ‘National Salvation Front’ (NSF) that took over the television building, switched sides and found themselves pitted against heavily armed
Securitate
troops. Meanwhile the Ceauşescus were caught, arrested and summarily tried. Found guilty of ‘crimes against the state’ they were hastily executed on Christmas Day, 1989.
²⁹⁷

The NSF converted itself into a provisional ruling council and—after renaming the country simply ‘Romania’—appointed its own leader Ion Iliescu as President. Iliescu, like his colleagues in the Front, was a former Communist who had broken with Ceauşescu some years before and who could claim some slight credibility as a ‘reformer’ if only by virtue of his student acquaintance with the young Mikhail Gorbachev. But Iliescu’s real qualification to lead a post-Ceauşescu Romania was his ability to control the armed forces, especially the Securitate, whose last hold-outs abandoned their struggle on December 27th. Indeed, beyond authorizing on January 3rd 1990 the re-establishment of political parties, the new President did very little to dismantle the institutions of the old regime.

As later events would show, the apparatus that had ruled under Ceauşescu remained remarkably intact, shedding only the Ceauşescu family itself and their more egregiously incriminated associates. Rumours of thousands killed during the protests and battles of December proved exaggerated—the figure was closer to one hundred—and it became clear that for all the courage and enthusiasm of the huge crowds in Timisoara, Bucharest and other cities the real struggle had been between the ‘realists’ around Iliescu and the old guard in Ceauşescu’s entourage. The victory of the former ensured for Romania a smooth—indeed suspiciously smooth—exit out of Communism.

The absurdities of late-era Ceauşescu were swept away, but the police, the bureaucracy and much of the Party remained intact and in place. The names were changed—the Securitate was officially abolished—but not their ingrained assumptions and practices: Iliescu did nothing to prevent riots in Tirgu Mures on March 19th, where eight people were killed and some three hundred wounded in orchestrated attacks on the local Hungarian minority. Moreover, after his National Salvation Front won an overwhelming majority in the elections of May 1990 (having earlier promised not to contest them), and he himself was formally re-elected President, Iliescu did not hesitate in June to bus miners in to Bucharest to beat up student protesters: twenty-one demonstrators were killed and some 650 injured. Romania still had a very long road to travel.

The ‘palace coup’ quality of Romania’s revolution was even more in evidence to the south, where the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party unceremoniously ejected Todor Zhivkov from power at the advanced age of 78. The longest-serving leader in the Communist bloc—he had risen to the head of the Party in 1954—Zhivkov had done his best, in characteristic Bulgarian style, to hew closely to the Russian model: in the early Eighties he instituted a ‘New Economic Mechanism’ to improve production, and in March 1987, following Moscow’s lead, he promised an end to ‘bureaucratic’ control of the economy, assuring the world that Bulgaria could now point to a
perestroika
of its own.

But the continuing failures of the Bulgarian economy, and the Communist leadership’s growing insecurity as the new shape of affairs in Moscow became clear, led Zhivkov to seek out an alternative source of domestic legitimacy: ethnic nationalism. The significant Turkish minority in Bulgaria (some 900,000 in a population of fewer than nine million) was a tempting target: not only was it ethnically distinct and of a different religion but it was also the unfortunate heir and symbol of an era of hated Ottoman rule only now passing from direct memory. As in neighboring Yugoslavia, so in Bulgaria: a tottering Party autocracy turned the full fury of ethnic prejudice upon a helpless domestic victim.

In 1984 it was officially announced that the Turks of Bulgaria were not ‘Turks’ at all but forcibly-converted Bulgarians who would now be restored to their true identity. Muslim rites (such as circumcision) were restricted and criminalized; the use of the Turkish language in broadcasting, publications and education was proscribed; and in a particularly offensive (and angrily resented) move, all Bulgarian citizens with Turkish names were instructed henceforth to assume properly ‘Bulgarian’ ones instead. The outcome was a disaster. There was considerable Turkish resistance—which in turn aroused some opposition among Bulgarian intellectuals. The international community protested loudly; Bulgaria was condemned at the UN and in the European Court of Justice.

Meanwhile Zhivkov’s fellow Communist oligarchs abroad took their distance from him. By 1989 the Bulgarian Communists were more isolated than ever and not a little perturbed at the course of events next door in Yugoslavia, where the Party seemed to be losing control. Things were brought to a head by the exodus to Turkey, during the summer of 1989, of an estimated 300,000 ethnic Turks—another public relations calamity for the regime, and an economic one too, as the country began to run short of manual laborers.
²⁹⁸
When the police over-reacted on October 26th to a small gathering of environmentalists in a Sofia park—arresting and beating activists from the
Ecoglasnost
group for circulating a petition—party reformers led by foreign minister Petar Mladenov decided to act. On November 10th (not coincidentally the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall) they ousted the hapless Zhivkov.

There followed the by-now familiar sequence of events: the release of political prisoners; sanctioning of political parties; removal from the constitution of the Communists’ ‘leading role’; a ‘round table’ to plan for free elections; a change in the name of the old party, now dubbed the ‘Bulgarian Socialist Party’; and in due course the elections themselves, which—as in Romania—the former Communists easily won (there were widespread allegations of electoral fraud).

In Bulgaria the political ‘opposition’ had emerged largely after the fact and as in Romania there were suggestions that it was in some measure fabricated for their own purposes by dissident Communist factions. But the changes were nonetheless real. At the very least, Bulgaria successfully avoided the catastrophe awaiting Yugoslavia: on December 29th, in the face of angry nationalist protests, Muslims and Turks were granted full and equal rights. By 1991, a mainly Turkish party, the Movement for Rights and Freedom, had secured enough electoral backing to hold the balance of seats in the country’s national Assembly.

Why did Communism collapse so precipitously in 1989? We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism, however seductive. Even if Communism was doomed by its inherent absurdities, few predicted the timing and the manner of its going. To be sure, the ease with which the illusion of Communist power was punctured revealed that these regimes were even weaker than anyone supposed, and this casts their earlier history in a new light. But illusory or no, Communism lasted a long time. Why did it not last longer?