I was lucky to find the Vladeasa, Cluj’s oldest hotel, long since demoted to a peasants’ and Gypsies’ hostelry. Only by chance did I notice an inconspicuous plaque by an old arched entrance two minutes’ walk from Liberty Square. Beyond the high wooden double door a vaulted passageway – wide enough for a horse and carriage – led to a quiet shrub-filled courtyard from which a curving stairway gave access to unsteady timber galleries. Off these were many small but comfortable bedrooms, each with a moody washbasin. Every evening savoury smells came from the Gypsies’ rooms, as suppers were cooked on home-made charcoal stoves.
It seemed tourists were then unknown in the Vladeasa; the tense young woman at Reception developed a nervous tic on seeing my passport. Anxiously she consulted a bearded ancient with only one visible tooth and a bad limp. He scrutinised my visa as though it were a suspect currency note, then nodded at the young woman and limped away, ignoring me. My last leu went on the hotel bill – £1.10 for bed minus breakfast – so I at once hastened out to change dollars.
Much of old Cluj is ‘neo-’ but seems none the worse for that. Irrelevant yet attractive flourishes of neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque enliven many Centru buildings and in Victory Square a neo-Byzantine (1930s) Orthodox cathedral faces a superb neo-Baroque (Helmer and Fellner) opera house. All around Liberty Square skittish spires and jolly cupolas overlook the mellow red-tiled roofs of stately three- or four-storeyed ex-Magyar mansions. The florid-elegant Continental Hotel at one corner is tentatively neo-Renaissance and in the midst of all this neo-ness stands St Michael’s genuinely Gothic Roman Catholic church – outwardly unexciting and not enhanced by a nineteenth-century north tower.
Frequently, when the traveller wants to change money, nobody else does – or can. Late in the afternoon I turned reluctantly towards the Transylvania Tourist Hotel, where dollars could certainly be sold. This domineering tumour on Cetatuia Hill can be seen from almost everywhere in Cluj and seems perfectly to symbolise forty-five years of Communist bullying. Hundreds of broken concrete steps ascend the steep slope – partially wooded, densely littered – and noisome fumes from the hotel garbage, slowly smouldering nearby, become increasingly apparent. Halfway up there is a visual assault, the sort of mindless, soulless ‘decoration’ (always concrete) for which I was fast developing a pathological hatred. Four Soviet coaches were parked outside the entrance. In one of them, Rumanian-made lavatory bowls occupied every seat – each labelled with its new owner’s name.
The enormous foyer’s violently-hued carpet was strewn with cigarette ends and soiled paper napkins. The staff looked predatory and sullen. The dollar-shop shelves were almost bare – evidence of the extra dollars in circulation post-revolution – and half-empty showcases loomed everywhere, displaying scandalously over-priced folk art. Shallow steps led down to a smoke-hazy coffee-bar the size of a football pitch; it was crowded with raucous Russian coach-tourists, swigging vodka from their own bottles, and with the Securitate-linked layer of local society. The decor was a frenzy of coloured glass, contorted metal, glossy varnished wood. Stalinist architects and interior decorators, intent on being ‘posh’ for the benefit of hard-currency tourists, attained a degree of ugliness far surpassing even the worst of their utilitarian constructions.
I had to share my low table – two seats on each side – with an unpleasant pair. The wheezy elderly man opposite me wore a fox-fur jacket and sat with his multi-ringed hands clapsing a gross pot belly. His younger swarthy companion – sitting beside me – had compressed lips and blood-shot eyes and carried an expensive camera. Both feigned to ignore me and as friendship seemed unlikely to burgeon I applied myself to note-taking – in between trying to catch and hold the waitress’s attention. Here was no over-manning and that solitary, sweating young woman had a forgivably anti-human glint in her eye.
Ten minutes later Swarthy turned abruptly and asked, ‘What is your purpose in Rumania? For how long do you stay in our country?’
Blandly I replied, ‘I’m writing a travel book so I’ll stay several months.’
Pot-belly leant forward to peer at my journal (that was an effort) and said accusingly, ‘You are writing in shorthand! Do you understand Rumanian?’
‘I am not writing in shorthand,’ I snapped. ‘And I don’t understand Rumanian.’
Swarthy demanded, ‘What is this kind of book, a travel book?’
‘It describes experiences in foreign countries.’
Pot-belly scowled. ‘Why do you describe Rumania? Why do you have money for this? Who pays you?’
‘No one, yet,’ I said. ‘But when the book is published the people who buy it pay.’
Both looked angrily disbelieving and Pot-belly almost shouted: ‘That is not possible – you say now, what government gave you money to write about us? Who is wanting to know what you see in Rumania?’
At last my coffee came. I gulped it and said, ‘In the Occident writers work alone – never for governments, always for themselves.’
Suddenly Swarthy looked at his watch and bellowed for the waitress who at once came running. His wallet was stuffed: dollars on one side, lei on the other. But, unlike the impoverished Sighet folk, he did not offer to pay for my coffee.
Some ten minutes later the waitress suggested a meeting in the toalet. There we did our deal and she confirmed my suspicion. Those nasties were indeed ‘retired’ Securitate officers, the only ones I am aware of having spoken to – though the waitress herself, like most tourist hotel staff, was almost certainly a professional informer.
On the summit of Cetatuia Hill I sat on a grassy slope, with my back to the hotel, and gazed over Cluj. To the Dacians and Romans it was Napoca, to the Saxons who founded the modern city Klausenburg, to the Magyars Kolozsvar. In 1974 Ceausescu decreed that it be known henceforth as Cluj-Napoca, to remind everyone that the Rumanians’ forefathers had been settled here a thousand years before the Magyars’ forefathers moved west from who-knows-where.
Frenetic industrialisation has transformed Cluj since 1970 and from Cetatuia Hill its ancient Centru seems a compact oasis of faded beauty, surrounded by mile after monotonous mile of Ceausescu-land. According to rumour, local Magyar and Rumanian Party officials united to defend the Centru from ‘systematisation’. I would like to believe that rumour. And perhaps shared loyalty to an historic city did indeed overcome inbred hostilities, despite the very different images of Kolozsvar/Cluj held by the two communities. To the Magyars (still about two-fifths of the population) Kolozsvar is their beloved capital, symbolising a millennia of achievement, in which for the past three humiliating decades they have been made to feel like second-class citizens. Even the present student generation think back compulsively to the days when Kolozsvar was famed for its opera and theatre, its urbane genial café society, its vigorous literary life, its illustrious university. In painful and dangerous contrast, the Rumanians think of Cluj as the city from which their ancestors were for centuries physically excluded as mere serfs, despised ‘Vlachs’ – a term of contempt equivalent to ‘nigger’ and still, tragically, in use. Among the Magyars, old attitudes die very hard.
Among the friends I was to make in Cluj were two Magyar university students, both charming young women – intelligent, witty, well-read, outgoing. When we discussed Northern Ireland I mentioned Corrymeela, where groups from both sides, including some ‘extremists’, regularly meet to consider each other’s point of view. Tentatively I suggested that similar meetings might be useful to counteract the fast-rising tension in post-revolution Transylvania. My companions stared at me, in astounded silence. Then together they exclaimed, ‘But the Rumanians have no point of view!’ That was a chilling moment. Even Northern Ireland’s Paisleyites do implicitly acknowledge their opponents’ point of view, much as they may detest and revile it. Here was a loud echo of Koloman Tisza’s retort when it was suggested, in the 1870s, that non-Magyar schoolchildren should be taught their national history. ‘Non-Magyars have no national history,’ declared Tisza. This leader of Hungary’s pseudo-Liberal Party – soon to be premier for fifteen years – was already infamous for having pronounced, ‘There is no Slovak nation’. Rumanians were not the only victims of the Magyars’ psychopathic arrogance.
Given the city’s history, it is not surprising that modern Cluj seems at one level a melancholy place – visibly a Magyar creation that has recently been made predominantly Rumanian through the crudest form of social engineering. Inevitably there is an undercurrent of unease, a taste of tears. Ten years after unification, Walter Starkie naïvely wrote: ‘Here are Hungarians, Rumanians, Saxons, Szekels, Jews and Gypsies, all of them conscious of their own individual qualities but living at peace with one another. The atmosphere of the city is calm and serene … The Rumanians of Cluj are as tolerant in their manner as they are in their laws and it is impossible not to be charmed by them.’ He foresaw a happy future for Cluj. But there was too much agonised resentment on the Magyar side, and too much understandable insecurity and regrettable vengefulness on the Rumanian side, for the atmosphere long to remain ‘calm and serene’.
At another level, however, I found Cluj more vibrant and enthusiastic than most Rumanian cities. To Walter Starkie it seemed ‘the Oxford of the East of Europe, with its students and its traditional buildings’. Now the enormous student population, including many foreigners, gives the Centru a curiously familiar flavour: the flavour found in Salamanca, Berkeley, Oxford, Benares, Galway or wherever else the intellectually effervescent young are numerous enough to dominate.
Back in Liberty Square – crowded now, as the cupolas and spires caught the last of the sunlight – I at once smelt politics. Outside the vast University Bookshop, tense-looking students and intellectuals were eagerly reading or vehemently debating the full text of the 4,000-word Timisoara Proclamation, newly posted on a long display board beside revolution-related press-cuttings and photographs from abroad.
Ioan and Bogdan, two twenty-year-olds, volunteered to translate the Proclamation’s most important points. Then we were joined by Toni, one of their philology lecturers, and withdrew to the dreary restaurant of the Central Hotel – diametrically across the Square from the Continental – where all the food had run out and there was nothing to drink but an anonymous ‘fruit juice’. Both students were ‘high’ on the Proclamation, describing it as the first coherent plan for Rumania’s future. After ridding the Front of Communists, they saw as the next most crucial need a truly independent television station prepared not only to report events objectively but to undertake the political education of the populace. The Front, they asserted, was now manipulating the media, both nationally and internationally (especially national television), much more subtly and effectively than Ceausescu had ever done. The previous Sunday’s formidable ‘Proclamation Demo’, proving the strength of anti-Front feeling in Timisoara, had been all week cleverly misrepresented on television as a demand for Banat autonomy, led by subversive agitators in the pay of ‘foreign fascists’. (Banat autonomy is not of course even a fringe issue.)
Ioan said, ‘Foreign reporters are happy because they can see we have a free press, with 200 new newspapers since the revolution – or maybe 300 by now. They write about “no more Communist censorship”. But if they could read Rumanian they would laugh at us – most of those papers are nonsense. And what percentage of the population reads any newspaper, compared with nearly one hundred per cent watching television every day? It is more cleverness to give this nice picture of a free press while still the only communication that counts is strongly controlled.’
Toni surprised me and exasperated his pupils by expressing admiration for the brainpower, sincerity and courage of Iliescu, Roman, Brucan and various other Front leaders. But he assured us that he wouldn’t vote for them. ‘They are too brainwashed to abandon Marxism and no one can blame them for that. Of course we must be on guard against their only half-hidden attitude that Communism is good, that it only failed in Rumania because Ceausescu was mad.’ His main worry was the Front’s refusal to commit itself to any definite policies – on land reform, the free market, trade union reform, education – before the elections. ‘Putting off such decisions contradicts democracy. We are being advised to give control of our country’s future to a government that won’t tell us its policies until we’ve elected it! In the Occident you must think Rumanians are a bad joke!’
Although Toni would not vote for the Front, on principle, he felt it might be best for Rumania if they received a clear mandate. No other party could hope for a majority and an incessantly fractious coalition of mutually antagonistic minor parties would be even less likely to ‘save’ the country. ‘I worry also that those parties won’t be able to work together in opposition,’ he said gloomily. ‘And without a strong opposition there is no democracy.’
‘But most of them will not be there after the elections,’ loan pointed out. ‘Only five or six are real – the Front made the rest to split the vote. They offered one million lei to anyone who wanted to start a new party. And some foreign reporters were impressed, thinking this was a real democracy – giving funds to the opposition!’
‘Everything in this city’ – enthused Walter Starkie – ‘predisposes the stranger in its favour.’ I would have agreed but for the lack of breakfast. None of the hotel restaurants opened before 11 a.m., when they began to serve early lunches to groups of slightly scruffy men who by then had been sitting for hours around bare tables, drinking a fizzy liquid. This was labelled ‘champagne’ and corked accordingly; otherwise it bore no resemblance to the wine of that name and the local surplus said it all. Every alimentara displayed thousands of dusty bottles and one enormous shop stocked nothing else.
Mercifully, good coffee was available from 7 a.m. in two cafes. One operated a Moscow-type double-queue system. The first long queue was for a blue plastic tiddly-winks counter with a hole in the middle. These were dispensed, in exchange for four lei, by a heavily moustached, treble-chinned woman suffering from splintered cerise nails. Some considerable time later, having reached the top of the second queue, you received a tiny cup of coffee in exchange for your disc which was then slipped onto a wire spoke standing upright on the counter. This lunatic procedure helps to explain the economic collapse of the Communist world. And it was matched in my favourite Liberty Square cafe, almost opposite a sculpture of Romulus and Remus imbibing from the she-wolf. There I thrice watched mega-queues being slowly served by one girl while her comrade thoroughly washed already clean windows. Every morning, before opening, cafés must be scoured inside and out. So if the staff arrive late, cleaning has to be given precedence over customers, though by 9 a.m. there would be no queue and ample time to scour.
Economic reform cannot happen until the mind-set of Rumania’s work-force has been changed. Some of my friends argued that the mere establishment of a free market would itself ensure change by showing the capitalist carrot. But this I doubt. When people have all their lives been trained not to use initiative or imagination, in response to varying situations, how can the free market be expected suddenly to revive those qualities? Workers may yearn for that carrot, but they won’t be able to reach it.
Every morning, after coffee, I visited St Michael’s Church for my shot of Gothic, just as the rising sun came slanting through a glorious stained-glass window – almost Chartres quality. Unfortunately those first rays precisely spotlit a regrettable (in that Gothic context) Baroque pulpit, half-way down the nave. Whoever commissioned this extravaganza in dark carved wood should have been struck dead by St Michael’s sword. But perhaps he liked the idea of being represented over the pulpit, dominating a brood of life-sized pirouetting cherubs and a row of seated bishops looking glum, threatening or just plain pious.
Outside the church – with his back to it, supervising the Square – King Matthias Corvinus sits on his charger, clad in full armour. Gathered below his lumpish plinth are warrior henchmen, dramatically offering battle standards or trampling the Ottomans’ Crescent banner. This stolid and stereotyped memorial seems unworthy of the man who ruled Hungary from 1458 to 1490 and is described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as ‘one of the greatest monarchs who ever reigned’. It belongs in spirit to the decade of its creation – the 1890s – rather than to the fifteenth century. Because King Matthias was born in Cluj, the son of a Hunedoara Rumanian noble family, Rumania now claims him as a national hero, which often baffles outsiders. His father, John Hunyadi, went over to Roman Catholicism – the religion of the Magyars – like many other ambitious Transylvanian nobles of that period. A little later, many Irish nobles abandoned Roman Catholicism and went over to Protestantism – the religion of the English conquerors. Ambition is corrosive, in all climates.
Unless one knew exactly when and where to look for what, the city’s shops offered only stale bread and frozen chickens imported from Bulgaria. These then formed the centre-piece of Cluj supper-parties and often tasted half-rotten. However, no one else seemed to notice; years of Ceausescu-fare must have atrophied the Rumanians’ tastebuds. When I asked why chickens were being imported, when Rumania pullulates with poultry, I was told the native birds are too thin to be worth killing.
In the desolate city market scores of empty stalls alternated with the usual pathetic piles of onions and a surplus of red chilli powder, just released. But the flower-sellers’ stalls at the entrance were a joy, each laden with and surrounded by masses of daffodils, red tulips, lily-of-the-valley, carnations red and white, freesias, primroses. Gazing avidly, I realised that I had been suffering from colour-starvation. The uniform drabness of most Rumanian towns and cities induces an odd form of visual depression; this must explain why even impoverished Rumanians are compulsive flower-buyers, gladly spending more on a bouquet than on a meal.
It always pleased me to find parallels between Walter Starkie’s Rumania and post-Ceausescu Rumania, and in Cluj our experiences were identical. He wrote: ‘Though I had arrived two days before at Cluj an unknown wanderer carrying a rucksack, today I was a member of the small cenacle of artists and intellectuals in the city.’ Within forty-eight hours I, too, had been ‘absorbed’ and half-a-dozen friends were urging me to move to their apartments. This avalanche of hospitality of course prevented my moving – how to choose one family without offending the rest? Instead, I lunched and dined all over the place and rarely got to bed before 1 a.m.
My Magyar invitations were to spacious though decaying flats in or near the Centru, or to ramshackle old family homes in tree-rich suburbs. Most of these residential suburbs have suffered grievously from systematisation but enough remain, often in the shadow of remorselessly proliferating blocs, to prove what a crime was the demolition of the rest. Numerous nervous breakdowns were provoked, sometimes followed by the suicides of elderly people for whom the razing of a family home, in which several generations had grown up, was the final, unendurable assault of a regime that had already reduced so many other areas of their lives to rubble.
In one Centru flat, alarmingly afflicted by dry rot, an octogenarian writer brought me close to tears. In 1986 his seventy-four-year-old widowed sister was compelled to move to a fifth-floor flat in a bloc from which she could see only other blocs. ‘There was no room for her grand piano, or her library, and she was not allowed to keep her small dog and two cats. And her garden – without that she could not live. It was only a little garden, but beautiful at all seasons. After one year she drank poison. No one blamed her – we only blamed ourselves. We wanted her to come here and we should have insisted more. But you see how it is – only three rooms and our son an invalid …’
My Rumanian invitations normally involved long trolley-bus journeys into Ceausescu-land. I soon learned to give myself an extra hour – having arrived at the bus stop – to pinpoint my friends’ apartments. This may sound neurotic but you do have a bone fide problem, especially after dark, when the address is something like this: Strada Tineretului Nr. 47, Blocul 8, Scara B, Etajul V, Apart. 32. To leap blithely off the bus on seeing ‘Strada Tineretului’ is rank folly; Nr. 47 may be two miles away. Having found it, your heart rises – but twenty minutes later has sunk to a new low because, though you have found Bloculs 2, 3 and 6, Blocul 8 seems not to exist. And you know that when/if it has been located, it will probably take another fifteen minutes to find Scara B, which may or may not be still legibly marked. Then, as likely as not, the lift will be broken, necessitating a long climb to Etajul V. Usually there is nobody around, after dark, of whom to ask the way; and the occasional bod who may appear knows only where his/her own bloc is. A pocket torch sheds little light on numbers a hundred feet up and the municipal lamps shed no light on any relevant area. More than once, in despair, I knocked on an apartment door, asked if I might use the telephone (in itself a time-consuming operation, even from one bloc to the next) and then waited to be collected. The Rumanians being as they are, my frayed nerves were usually tuica-repaired while I waited. It consoled me to find that my Rumanian friends have similar problems, even when seeking apartments previously visited. Ceausescu-land is not designed to facilitate human contacts.
After failing one such test, I had to be rescued by Calin, an elderly scientist who had spent his working life in a dead-end job, deprived of all the resources needed to make it worthwhile. In his bloc the lift sank a foot lower than it should have, on reaching ‘G’, and he had to fiddle with the buttons as though opening a combination lock before it rose to admit us. Wearily he commented, ‘You must laugh at us, to see how things are made here. We say, “In the Occident a manager keeps his rump on his chair and his eyes on production, in Rumania he turns his rump on production and keeps his eyes on his chair!” He only wants to hold his job by being a good Party boy – which is not changing, though now they tell us we have no Party!’
Calin believed Rumania would have been slow ‘to take the revolutionary path’ had Ceausescu not gone mad. ‘For most people, life was OK in the late ’60s and up to ’77 or so. We all had secure jobs – with small wages, but prices were low. Everyone had cheap housing and enough to eat and wear. They had no pressure on them, like Western workers have. Most knew nothing about liberty, democracy, holidays abroad. If they were clever, university degrees were free. The old middle class had mostly been got rid of – killed or imprisoned or fled into exile or terrorised into silence. And what did the rest know about anything better than Communism? Rumania’s peasants and workers were always exploited. When they were moved into blocs they had comforts they never saw before – hot water, bathrooms and WCs, gas cookers, central heating. Only when Ceausescu’s paranoid economies took those things away they turned against him. Then Iliescu gave them back and now they love him, though he is still a Communist!’
Calin’s wife Elena – an English teacher – saw it as the intellectuals’ pre-election duty to go forth and preach democracy to the simple people. ‘They need us,’ she said, ‘even if at first they don’t want to listen. Why criticise them for knowing nothing about liberty if we’re too afraid or lazy to teach them?’
I agreed, while suspecting that Elena would instinctively react undemocratically should the simple people, despite recognising the Front as Communists in disguise, persist in voting for them because they feared the Great Unknown – private enterprise. Even Rumania’s intellectuals have only a limited understanding of democracy. It bothers them that in free societies the will of the majority really does count, however ill-equipped that majority may be, in their view, to elect a government.
An embarrassing feature of many Rumanian discussions is the inability of intelligent people to think a problem through – or analyse an event – logically and consistently. Healthy saplings, planted in the wrong place, must adapt to constriction, and many good brains seem to have been alarmingly stunted. Every day I was becoming more aware of the gravity of Rumania’s long-term problems. Decades must pass before the country can be expected to recover from an educational system designed to paralyse independent thinking, an artistic and intellectual life warped by censorship, a legal system (if one can call it that) based on terrorism, an economic system based on the ambitions of a megalomaniac, a social life overshadowed by fear of informers, a domestic life dominated by the quest for food and medicines, a sex-life inhibited by bizarre restrictions. A few of my friends defined their country, in 1990, as a lunatic asylum, a land in which no one, including themselves, was quite sane.
At the end of another long evening my hyper-tense host – a middle-aged professor – demanded, ‘How could we be normal people, like you in the West? All my life has been spent under a regime dedicated to destroying the human soul, the individuality that is God’s gift to every baby born. We were so spiritually weakened before the 1980s that our sufferings then unbalanced most of us. Yet we have one of Europe’s richest countries – valuable forests, fertile soil, gold, tin, coal, oil. We have no droughts, floods, famines, epidemics. We have beautiful landscapes and a happy racial temperament. We are not doomed, like some places on other continents. We have all we need for contentment.’
Opposite me sat the professor’s cheerful seventy-four-year-old peasant mother, yet another example of the oldest generation having weathered the Communist storm more successfully than their children. She had a strong calm humorous face and the sadness behind her eyes was quite unlike that bitter grief – verging on despair – too often seen in younger faces. Yet Communism had re-moulded her life at the age of thirty.
When I remarked on this generation contrast her son said, ‘But my mother grew up free, she has always known another sort of life is possible. She had time to develop her individuality and then it could not be crushed, even by Stalinism. We had no such possibility and it is not true that what you never had you never miss. Freedom is natural for human beings. Even when the conscious mind is not complaining about the lack of it, the soul is in pain. Yet now we are afraid of it – even I am! Next academic year I must live in America with my family, as guest professor. This is a wonderful opportunity, something I have dreamed about all my life. But I worry and worry about the strange new domestic responsibilities in a capitalist country. Until now the state has looked after everything … If this is my reaction, how would our ignorant workers react to a market economy? It makes me sad that even my fourteen-year-old son is afraid of America. Then I think that for his group there is more hope, if they have grandparents to give them the courage to enjoy liberty.’
Mihai, the adored son – very tall, much too thin, incipiently handsome – showed all the signs of life-long protein and calcium deficiency. By early 1987 the food shortage had become so desperate that this family, like many others, sold their car (for an absurdly low price, there being no great demand during the petrol shortage) to enable them to cope with the black market. Black market dealing was against their principles – an unusual scruple in Rumania – but I heartily agreed that principles have to be abandoned when children are starving.
The professor’s wife Ana, a primary school teacher, explained that those not lucky enough to have something valuable to sell often chose to leave their children outside churches or police posts, rather than watch them becoming more and more debilitated – and then quickly dying if they picked up some trivial childhood disease. Hence Rumania’s over-crowded and now AIDS-stricken Children’s Homes, where babies were regularly given blood-transfusions to supplement their inadequate diet.
Two months after the revolution, Ana’s pupils – forty-eight nine-year-olds – were asked to make a list of three things they would immediately change ‘if they were wizards’. For twenty-eight their number one wish was ‘Not to have an empty home after school’. These were the unfortunates without a resident granny (or grandpa), whose parents had to work late. Sixteen put first ‘Somewhere to play’. Forty thousand people are squeezed into this area of Ceausescu-land, yet there is not one playground, the schools have no playing fields or sports facilities, and the nearest swimming-pool (Cluj has two) is an hour’s bus ride away and too crowded when you get there for anyone actually to swim. Moreover, every square metre of the meagre strips of soil between the blocs is cultivated by ‘private enterprise’ vegetable growers. So the children can play only on the streets, which are put out of bounds by most parents. The remaining four pupils gave priority to ‘More food’; Ana reckoned the majority couldn’t imagine even a wizard being able to conjure up edibles.
At 1.30 a.m. my taxi arrived, pre-arranged by the Professor. Very soon after the revolution, all over Rumania, independent taxi services had become the flagships of free enterprise.
During that week, water from a leaking pipe near my favourite cafe froze on the pavement every night. Yet by 9 a.m. the sun was warm and by noon people were sitting around Liberty Square in their shirt-sleeves, exclaiming that it felt like May! This was dangerously abnormal weather; no rain in March presaged a poor harvest.
I often joined the Liberty Square sun-worshippers to write up my notes and one afternoon an emaciated Gypsy girl, aged six or seven, came begging. Her face was dreadfully expressionless and her right hand deformed – lacking three fingers and reversed. She wore her alms pouch over that wrist as she walked slowly past us, staring straight ahead, the pouch extended but making no other effort to stimulate generosity. The only reaction to her presence was a twitch of disgust on some faces; she collected not even one coin from the three hundred or so citizens in the Square. I followed her down the Strada Petru Groza to the Orthodox cathedral, where she curled up on the steps and seemed at once to fall asleep like a weary puppy. Beggars do best outside the churches of all denominations, where they gather – both Gypsies and Rumanians – before every service.
Cluj’s large Gypsy population is as evident now as in Walter Starkie’s day, though not as ‘accepted’; the present attitude to Gypsies makes British racialism seem almost benign. Frequently I heard them denounced for a) making a fortune as racketeering smugglers and b) never working. It apparently occurred to no one that large-scale smuggling is a business requiring much harder work than the average Rumanian puts into his/her job. And, in a country where everyone survives by wheeling and dealing, moral objections to Gypsy free marketeering sounded downright hypocritical. I sometimes argued, ‘Why shouldn’t the Gypsies use this period of quasi-anarchy to amass capital? Why not be grateful to them for providing essential goods not otherwise available?’ Reactions to those remarks suggested much unconscious envy of Gypsy vigour, initiative and sheer impudence – two fingers to everyone’s rules and regulations. They at least have escaped being terrorised and standardised.
Admittedly, many Gypsies are now insolent and aggressive: a natural response to being despised. Early one morning, when a boy of about twelve entered my café and was hurrying towards the kitchen, an angry man stepped out of the queue and ordered him to leave the premises. The boy continued on his way, shouting defiance over his shoulder, whereupon he was pursued and clouted hard while everyone looked on approvingly. But he refused to be bullied. Eluding his attacker – I glimpsed a narrow brown face distorted with hate – he darted into the kitchen where he evidently had an important appointment. The man, flushed with rage, resumed his place in the queue and was soothed by his neighbours.
Two days later I saw a Gypsy trio who continue, irrationally, to haunt me. A boy of about five – his never-washed face covered in sores, his only garment a torn adult T-shirt – was leading his blind mother by the hand. Her eyes were sealed with scum, her face twisted with pain. She could hardly walk; a clumsy blood-soaked bandage covered her right leg from knee to ankle. Behind her, clinging to her short ragged skirt, a girl toddler – snotty-nosed and shit-defiled – was quietly sobbing: the terrible heaving sobs of toddlers who cannot understand their own misery. The boy was beseeching alms, desperately chanting the same phrase in an oddly adult yet high-pitched voice that could be heard a hundred yards away. His eyes were wild with fear and sorrow. I stood appalled, too shocked to think of taking out my purse. The trio moved along the crowded pavement very, very slowly. People altered course to avoid them; otherwise they were ignored. Then I overtook them and gave the boy all I had in my purse: three 100-lei notes and a jumble of coins. At once two young women and an elderly man surrounded me, protesting angrily – I presumed against this flahulach subsidising of good-for-nothing Gypsies. They apologised on realising my foreignness but still looked indignant.
In India one rapidly becomes insensitive to both extreme suffering and extreme callousness; in Europe no such adjustment is possible. Does this disparity entail a form of racialism? Or does the extent of Indian misery make numbness an inevitable self-protecting response?
When I described this incident to one of my new friends – a paediatrician – she reproved me for imputing callousness to her fellow citizens. ‘There is a reason for it,’ she said. ‘I will explain. Our beggar problem is very serious and it’s important to know about the three categories. First, a minority who like begging more than working. Second, the disabled who could do some job if they had a walking machine or false limb or even crutches. But they can’t afford those helps because they have no work so they can never get work … If you watch, you will see that we do give to such people. The third category is shameful. Children are found abandoned, or are kidnapped, then maimed – a limb cut off, or blinded, or deformed in some horrible way. Many babies and small children are stolen. Some years ago a two-year-old Cluj girl, playing with older children near her bloc, disappeared. Everything was done to find her, with publicity and police searches – then even her parents lost hope. But four years later, near a magazin door, the mother noticed a filthy skeleton beggar girl – one arm missing and the stump showing. She looked in the child’s eyes and was certain – “That’s our daughter!” Her husband thought her stupid but she insisted – “I know it is, I feel it!” They hurried to the police who sent plain-clothes men to watch. At sunset a man in a closed van took the girl away and collected seven more maimed children. The police followed to an old house in a big garden and arrested everyone – an elderly doctor had done all the maiming. He and three others got life imprisonment – I’d have shot them! A birth-mark proved the mother was right. Still the parents can’t leave that child alone or she gets hysterical – they love her so much it makes you weep to see it … But how can she ever recover? The others are unclaimed, in a Children’s Home, and if they survive must become adult beggars. So don’t blame Rumanians for not supporting this industry!’
On the following Sunday the Timisoara Proclamation was a week old and solidarity rallies were held all over Rumania. At noon the Professor collected me from the Vladeasa, having appointed himself my translator for the occasion; his English was near-perfect. At least one-third of the assembling marchers were elderly or old, respectable middle-class folk dressed in their Sunday best; many had just been to church. Under a cloudless sky scores of colourful banners and placards – roughly made, but verbally and pictorially witty – were converging on Liberty Square, coming mainly from the nearby university area. The collective mood was serious yet happy as we watched the organisers clambering around King Matthias’s plinth, struggling with an archaic public address system. Soon the huge square had overflowed, as more and more family groups arrived with babies in push-chairs, toddlers on paternal shoulders and schoolchildren waving homemade Rumanian flags. There wasn’t a policeman or a soldier in sight; but the Professor noticed several ‘retired’ Securitate officers sidling through the crowd.
After a devout recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, in which most people joined, came a minute’s silence in memory of the revolution’s victims. Then we were addressed by Calin Nemes, a frail-looking young actor who works in Cluj’s puppet theatre and was the first to defy the armed forces on 21 December, when he is said to have emerged from the crowd, knelt in front of the soldiers (some, it is believed, were disguised Securitate) and shouted, ‘Kill me if you will! Jos Ceausescu!’ A moment later Captain Dando Carp cocked his pistol and Calin was shot in the stomach. The following burst of automatic fire killed eight. Later the army alleged that Calin had just left a nearby bar and was drunk. The shooting was immediately investigated by Colonel Tit Liviu Domsa, who arrested two officers and sent a report to Bucharest – whereupon the officers were released and the Colonel was posted elsewhere. Subsequently the editor of the army newspaper, Colonel Gheorghe Vaduva, wrote an article alleging that ‘The army was provoked into shooting and a terrible tragedy ensued … They did not shoot at the people. They fired warning shots into the air, but the guns moved around in their hands.’ As the Professor remarked, this was yet another example of the impossibility of establishing the truth about any aspect of Rumania’s revolution.
The few brief opening speeches included urgent pleas for ‘No hooliganism’ and ‘Magyar–Rumanian unity’. Then we all moved off in an impressively orderly fashion, though without visible stewarding. After all those pleas for unity, the crowd’s enthusiastic singing of ‘Rumanians Awake!’ seemed a trifle tactless. It has not been forgotten that this ‘freedom hymn’, written by the nineteenth-century Transylvanian poet Muresianu, was banned by the Magyar rulers – as were all other Rumanian songs and all displays of the national colours.
During the two-mile march to Piata Mihai Viteazul my technique for observing marches necessitated a temporary separation from the Professor. I sped back and forth, joining different sections for a time, then standing aside to watch, then to-ing and fro-ing again – rather like a dog on a country walk. The pessimists who had forecast a poor turn-out were right; by current Rumanian standards, 10,000 or so in a city of 300,000 was a small crowd. Many individuals were obvious proles, but organised banner-carrying groups of workers were conspicuously absent. All over Rumania, the workers’ support for the Front was then hardening, as was the intellectuals’ opposition to it.
The marchers chanted non-stop. ‘Jos Iliescu! Jos Communismul!’ – but mostly, and most heart-feltedly, ‘Timi-soar-a! Timi-soar-a! Timi-soar-a!’ This last was the chant that brought tears even to the eyes of tough-looking young men. The atmosphere became strangely exalted. I sensed no ugly undercurrents of violence or hatred, despite the fervour with which thousands were passionately condemning Communism, and Iliescu as its agent. This felt like a pure celebration of freedom, a joyous exercise of the right to protest, rather than a demonstration channelling anger and hostility. Crowd-emotion always generates palpable energies and here all the energies were positive. When feeling depressed about Rumania’s immediate future, I reflect that throughout the country such minorities exist – a leaven which must surely, given time, transform the inert post-Ceausescu political mass.
Old photographs show Michael’s Square surrounded by the agreeably unpretentious town houses of the lesser Magyar nobility. Now it is an expanse of concrete dominated by a nine-storey intrusion from Ceausescu-land. Another new addition is Michael the Brave on his mettlesome charger – he who briefly united Rumania at the end of the sixteenth century and is therefore not a Magyar hero. Under his undoubtedly approving eye the serious speeches began, explaining the Timisoara Proclamation point by point. For two and a half hours everyone stood motionless and attentive, from schoolchildren to great-grandparents. The speakers included the elderly Mayor of Cluj, a young dissident who had been in exile in West Germany before the revolution (and who soon after was charged with ‘fascism’ and again had to flee) and Doina Cornea, Cluj’s very own special heroine who got the warmest applause of all – though her speech was far from being the most substantial. Meanwhile the babies and toddlers obligingly dozed off in the hot sun, causing me to marvel yet again at the docility and adaptability of the Rumanian (very) young. That climax was no less significant and moving than the march: a vast silent throng concentrating on real politics with the intensity of a people starved all their lives of open debate.
The Professor agreed with me that the Timisoara Proclamation had the potential (not since realised) to revive January’s spirit of hope, which had already evaporated by my return in early March. A reaction was of course inevitable, after that month of boundless euphoria during which an entire nation felt liberty-intoxicated. But it seemed the Rumanians had, in general, returned to earth with a very hard bump. There was a fast-growing distrust of the Front, among intellectuals; an amorphous but unsettling Iliescuprompted suspicion, among workers, of ‘foreign interference’; a general chagrin because nothing was changing as quickly as had been expected; a bleak conviction that in Rumania democracy was, and would remain for the foreseeable future, a chimera. Also, insidiously demoralising doubts about the genuineness of the revolution were gaining strength. Perhaps it had not been the glorious thing it seemed, which aroused the admiration of the world and helped to restore Rumania’s self-esteem? Perhaps it had been a cunning Iliescu coup d’état?
On 27 December 1989 even sober newspapers like the Irish Times had sensational headlines – ‘Estimated 70,000 Killed in Rumania’. At the time I wondered, ‘Estimated by whom?’ Overexcited media reporters, perhaps. But that didn’t then seem important; we were all merrily drinking to the liberated Rumanians and I was on Cloud Nine because at last I could afford to explore Transylvania. Yet even after several drinks nobody who paused to consider that figure could believe it. Rumania hadn’t had a civil war between armed factions, cities hadn’t been bombed or set ablaze. In a country with a population of twenty-three million it was inconceivable that 70,000 could have been killed in an uprising largely confined to two cities, with minor disturbances elsewhere.
Within days of the revolution, a few Bucharest observers were seeing it as a coup d’état. Behind the planned removal of the Ceausescus, staged as a media event to deceive the Rumanians and the world, Iliescu and his friends – it was argued – had slickly taken over under the guise of an interim government willing to organise ‘fair elections’. In Bucharest, in January, two of my casual acquaintances told me that on New Year’s Day they themselves had counted fifty-five truckloads of Soviet food arriving in the capital – despite formidable midwinter transport problems en route. Could the Soviets, they wondered, have achieved this feat without prior knowledge?
Certainly rumours of a plot had been circulating throughout the 1980s – and had been less improbable than most Rumanian rumours. In Cluj, a famously anti-Ceausescu city, the Ceausescus arrived one morning in the mid ’80s to attend a series of events – then left hastily after the first event, never again to return. A military assassination attempt, planned for that day, was to have begun with a massive attack on the Securitate bodyguard – or so most people believed. (Why was this solution to the Ceausescu problem not implemented years ago, somewhere in Rumania? The popular explanation is that the army were terrified of the Securitate’s incomparably superior weapons.) During the 1980s two ‘private enterprise’ assassination attempts threatened Ceausescu’s self-sculpted image – ‘the most beloved son of Rumania’ – but were successfully hushed up. These explain all his food and drink having to be pre-tasted, in the best medieval tradition, and various other neurotic security precautions.
In November 1987, after the eruption of ferocious anti-Ceausescu riots in Brasov, Silviu Brucan – then aged seventy-one and an ex-editor of the Communist Party newspaper – told the Western press: ‘The cup of privation is now full and our workers no longer accept that they can be treated like obedient servants.’ Ten months later he wrote a detailed and devastating critique on Ceausescu’s misrule and smuggled it abroad. After its publication, in early 1989, the Securitate kept him under house arrest for some months in a village near Bucharest.
According to a Romania Libera report, an anti-Ceausescu conspiracy had existed since 1971. (Romania Libera is Rumania’s nearest equivalent to the British Independent.) Its founder-leaders were four soldiers and two civilians; one of the latter was Mazilu, a senior Securitate officer, another was Iliescu. It may not be a coincidence that 1971 was the year of Iliescu’s mortifying demotion from Director of the Communist Youth organisation to Director of Rumania’s water resources programme. And in 1984 came a still more drastic demotion, to an insignificant job in a technical publishing house.
During the 1970s the conspiracy gradually expanded and by 1980 had the support of many anti-Ceausescu Securitate officers. But few yet realised how dangerous Ceausescu was becoming and a coup then would have been unpopular.
In 1980 General Militaru contacted Moscow and was assured of Soviet moral support (only) in the event of a coup d’état. He also contacted the Rumanian ambassador to Turkey (a peculiarly unsavoury character) and asked him to provide stun-gas grenades; the conspirators planned a bloodless take-over. The ambassador obliged but when the pro-Ceausescu Securitate detected his ‘treachery’ both he and his son were assassinated and the rest of the family gaoled. From 1983 onwards, Ceausescu regularly heard rumours of a plot to replace him with Iliescu, but uncertainty about their source remains. Had they been spread by the anti-Ceausescu wing of the Securitate to unnerve him, or by the ‘loyalists’ to warn him? By then he was so deranged that no one dared tell him the truth, bluntly, about his loss of popularity; that messenger would undoubtedly have been shot.
The Romania Libera report claimed that, after Mr Gorbachev’s coming to power, Iliescu, Brucan and other conspirators made many unofficial visits to Moscow and also occasionally visited London, when they were supposed to be elsewhere, for significant meetings. Meanwhile Stanislav Petukhov, then Pravda’s correspondent in Bucharest, was the link between Brucan and Moscow. The Romania Libera journalists were apparently allowed to read a thick file, recording conversations between Brucan and Petukhov, which proved that early in 1989 Moscow informed Rome and Paris that the Bucharest conspirators had Soviet support. Budapest also knew this and so the Hungarians were poised to begin a world-wide campaign, immediately after the revolution, demanding a fairer deal for Transylvania’s Magyars.
By then about half the Securitate had joined the conspirators. During the summer Brucan and Iliescu met irregularly in a Bucharest public park to discuss plans and Iliescu was also in touch with Petru Roman. The plans under discussion were probably Bucharest-centred. No one yet knew that a slow-burning revolutionary fuse had already been lit in Timisoara, where a Magyar Calvinist priest, the Cluj-born Laszlo Tokes, had recently moved onto the international stage. In relation to his own Ceausescu-controlled Church he was a maverick who since 1982 had been continuously harassed by the Securitate. The Bishop of Cluj, Gyula Nagy, treated him perfidiously – as did the Bishop of Oradea, Laszlo Papp, and various of his fellow-pastors.
In July 1989 Hungarian television recorded a hard-hitting political video interview with Tokes in his Timisoara manse. When this was broadcast on 24 July ‘the Tokes case’ immediately became a national cause in Hungary. The interview was given wide publicity by the BBC and Radio Free Europe – much of it emphasised the iniquity of razing Magyar villages – and Securitate harassment increased, directed against Tokes’s wife and child as well as himself. On 14 October he was dismissed by the intimidated elders of his Timisoara church and the authorities demanded that he should be appointed (exiled) to a remote village, north-east of Oradea. Bishop Papp, who had jurisdiction over the Banat, obliged; but Tokes refused to leave Timisoara and his congregation continued to support him – hence the revolutionary fuse.
Tokes defied a City Court eviction order for 20 October, despite increasing pressure from the Securitate, and by November the world was noticing him as no other Ceausescu-victim had ever been noticed. In Budapest the Rumanian ambassador was put on the mat; the European Parliament praised his courage, the World Calvinist Federation deplored his ill-treatment; the Hungarian National Assembly jointly nominated Tokes and Doina Cornea for the Nobel Peace Prize; the foreign media regularly reported details of ‘Lone Priest’s Brave Stand’.
On 28 November the City Court ordered Tokes to leave Timisoara within six days; the order was ignored. On 6 December the interim President of Hungary sent a plea to the Rumanian President; the plea was ignored. All the time Securitate pressure was being ostentatiously increased, yet no attempt was made forcibly to evict Tokes on the Court-appointed day. Then, on Sunday 10 December, Tokes told his congregation that the Court had set another date for eviction – 15 December – and added, ‘If anyone would like to see an illegal eviction, I invite him to come and watch.’
On the morning of 15 December about sixty people gathered around Tokes’s church; no police appeared, only a few plainclothes Securitate officers. By that evening, however, several hundred had assembled, the Magyar congregation being backed by Rumanians, Serbs, Swabians and Gypsies. This crowd remained ‘on guard’ throughout the night.
On 16 December – an unseasonably warm sunny Saturday – the crowd rapidly increased to a few thousand and the scene was set for the opening act of the revolution. But why was Tokes not arrested early on the morning of 15 December, in accordance with the Court order, before his defenders gathered? And why did he encourage his congregation, on 10 December, to rally around him on the fifteenth? Was this not an imprudent – even irresponsible – gesture? Had he been forcibly evicted or arrested on that date, some of the original small group of parishioners would undoubtedly have confronted the Securitate and been dealt with ruthlessly – leaving Rumania’s status quo unchanged. Was he acting independently, intuiting that, given the public mood of desperation, a major uprising could be provoked by his resolute defiance of the authorities? Or was he acting in collusion with people who had decided to take advantage of the burning fuse? Already he had caused an unprecedented amount of media attention to be focused from outside on Timisoara; thus it was an ideal location for the eruption of what could be made to seem like yet another Eastern European ‘People’s Power’ victory.
The few thousand gathered around Tokes’s church on 16 December were not enough to ignite ‘a popular revolution’. Vandalism then broke out, all over the city. Shop windows were smashed, though no shop contained anything worth looting, and there was much arbitrary stone throwing by gangs of youths. This utterly non-Rumanian behaviour was at first blamed on the Gypsies (who else!) but is now interpreted by some as part of a plot to create an anarchic atmosphere – an atmosphere in which it would at last seem psychologically possible to oppose the Ceausescu regime.
Tokes’s arrest, at dawn on 17 December, brought many more thousands onto the streets in protest. According to the Romania Libera report, Soviet provocateurs and some Rumanian soldiers killed most of the victims – though everyone, in Rumania and abroad, was misled to believe the Securitate responsible.
In Bucharest, on 17 December, Ceausescu feigned a willingness to resign and asked ‘Do you want Iliescu instead?’ Everyone reassured him; those thousands of tiresome youngsters who had been rampaging around Timisoara for two days, yelling ‘Jos Ceausescu!’ were mere hooligans. It was never hard to persuade Ceausescu that 99.9 per cent of Rumanians adored him and he at once sent a message (the transcript appeared in Romania Libera in mid January) to the Timisoara army commanders: ‘All who don’t submit to the soldiers – I’ve given the order to shoot. They’ll get a warning, and if they don’t submit, they’ll have to be shot. It was a mistake to turn the other cheek … In an hour, order should be re-established in Timisoara.’ Then, satisfied that he had coped effectively with a little local difficulty, Ceausescu departed for Iran on a three-day state visit, leaving Her in charge. (The Iranian ambassador to Bucharest, who on 17 December had assured Teheran ‘There’s no problem here’, was summoned home nine days later to be given a piece of Rafsanjani’s mind. More understandably, the Guardian Weekly also commented on 17 December: ‘In Rumania the leading role of the Party and of Nicolae Ceausescu does not appear under threat.’)
Immediately after the revolution, much was made of this Teheran visit. Many then erroneously believed that Iranians, Libyans, Iraqis and Syrians, chosen from among Rumania’s numerous foreign students, formed the elite corps of the Presidential bodyguard. So rumour had it that Ceausescu was trying to recruit more Iranians. Or he went to beg for chemical weapons … Or he had taken billions of dollars to Teheran for safe keeping … (I can think of safer places for my nest-egg.) In fact this was a routine state visit arranged months before, as such visits are, with Ceausescu acting as salesman for oil-drilling equipment – made to a high standard, ‘for export only’, in Rumania. He had by then been reduced, somewhat belatedly, to visiting Rafsanjani – also excluded from the World Club of Respectable Leaders – if he wished his people to see him on the international stage.
Ceausescu arrived home to a seething Bucharest; the grossly exaggerated Timisoara casualty figures – ‘4,000 dead!’ – were having their intended effect. The major tactical blunder of his last appearance on the Central Committee balcony – an attempt to rally a population that had totally rejected him – remains unexplained. Was this his own arrogance-cum-stupidity-cum-madness, or had he been deliberately ill-advised? Why did the Securitate not warn him of how the situation had been developing in his absence? When the crowd’s anger forced the Ceausescus to face reality and they fled by helicopter, the crowd invaded the Central Committee building. Why did none of the hundreds of nearby armed Securitate men try to stop them? Many thousands would indeed have been killed had those officers, highly trained in the use of sophisticated weapons, been united in an effort to put down the revolution.
All afternoon confused fighting seemed to continue around the Central Committee building but much of it may have been fake; firing simulators were certainly used near the television station to heighten the atmosphere of violence and danger.
Meanwhile Tokes had been released, on 22 December. Soon after, he was touring Europe and North America, tendentiously putting the case for the concessions being demanded, post-revolution, by Transylvania’s Magyars.
Someone quickly produced a list of ninety names – a ‘spontaneous committee’ – to govern pro tem. The suspicion that Rumania had experienced a coup rather than a revolution was immediately sparked off, in a few minds, by the rapidity with which this interim government was formed. It included at first some genuine idealists and brilliant minds (and spirits) – people like Ana Blandiana, Ion Caramitru and Doina Cornea, who soon quit in disgust as its disinclination to bring about real reforms became apparent.
While the Front was being born at the Central Committee building, Ion Iliescu and Petru Roman arrived by army jeep – after dark, at 5.45 p.m. All fighting ceased as their vehicle appeared and for forty-five minutes no shots were heard as they stood exposed on the balcony, confirming the flight and capture of the Ceausescus. Why, if the Securitate had really been fighting the army all afternoon in that area, did they then stop? How come it was safe for those two ‘arch-traitors to Ceausescu’ to stand, spot-lit, within range of Securitate sharp-shooters? Again, had the Securitate really wished to take control of the television station, they could easily have done so. But it seems they didn’t seriously try, though all around simulators gave the impression of fierce fighting and several nearby dwellings were shelled and set alight to increase the illusion of a desperate struggle between the gallant ‘People’s Army’ and the wicked ‘tyrant’s mercenaries’. So successfully was this illusion created that on 27 December the Guardian referred to ‘the tens of thousands of people who have died in more than a week of fighting between pro-Ceausescu security forces and the Romanian army’. Now, even the most melodramatically-minded Rumanians concede that there were comparatively few casualties of the revolution. The official figure, given months later – 689 – is incredible because so precise, yet is generally agreed to be ‘about right’. Rumanian cynics (or realists) also note that the ‘70,000’ briefly credited by the world’s media served the useful secondary purpose of arousing the sort of emotion abroad that fuels emergency aid convoys in vast numbers – aid vulnerable to the depredations of those ‘in control’.
I often heard it argued that had the conspirators not used the Timisoara fuse, a revolution would almost certainly have started somewhere quite soon – perhaps as an authentic popular uprising. This would have made it much more difficult, at the dawn of the post-Communist era, for Iliescu’s Front to take over. World opinion was certain to sympathise with the new regime if the Ceausescus’ overthrow were seen as another example of victorious ‘People Power’; a coup d’état by a rival group of Communists would have evoked a very different response. My Cluj friend, who translated the Romania Libera article, emphasised how confusing and humiliating it was for Rumanians to know that initially they, like the rest of the world, had been deceived – and that hundreds of innocents had been killed because the Front couldn’t think how else to get rid of the Ceausescus while retaining power for themselves. But did this, I wondered, give the conspirators more credit than they deserved for forward-planning?
Some of the details in the Romania Libera ‘Conspiracy Report’ are contradicted by apparently equally reliable evidence from other sources. Yet only a conspiracy of some sort can explain the many inconsistencies exposed, especially in relation to the behaviour of the Securitate. It is certain that an ineffectual but steadily growing anti-Ceausescu faction had long lurked in the Bucharest wings – it would be astonishing if this were not so – and the newspaper’s sources are significant; General Militaru and Nicolai Radu, old soldiers at the end of their careers, had no discernible motive for misleading the public. Probably they spoke out in an attempt to dissipate the foetid miasma of rumour by then surrounding the revolution; but for that purpose they did not say enough.
In my view, neither ‘revolution’ nor ‘coup d’état’ accurately describes the events of 15 to 25 December. Genuine revolutions have leaders and long-term plans. And a coup d’état suggests something more structured – not necessarily neatly planned in detail, but much more dependent on cool calculation than on the supple opportunism shown by the Front both during and after the overthrow of the Ceausescus. What really happened, and why it happened, is not merely of academic interest; the aforementioned miasma has further demoralised many Rumanians, if only because nobody likes to look foolish. Now it seems their shining January vision – a free Rumania sanctified by the blood of thousands of heroes – was an hallucination. The glorious new Romania Libera was not a phoenix but a stool-pigeon.
The saying ‘Truth Will Out’ does not apply in certain countries. Rumania’s escape from the Ceausescus is so enmeshed in allegation, speculation, accusation and deception that the whole truth seems unlikely ever to emerge. It may not be in the possession of any one individual; and those who possess fragments may not sufficiently trust each other to co-operate in putting the fragments together. Balkan history is littered with question marks; this is just the latest.