On the morning of November 10, Helmut Kohl flew from Warsaw to Berlin. That evening, returning to his residence in Bonn, he telephoned George Bush.
“I have just arrived from Berlin,” he told the president. “It has the atmosphere of a carnival! The frontiers are absolutely open. At certain points they are literally tearing down the Wall. At Checkpoint Charlie, thousands of people are crossing both ways!”
Everything depended on the new government of Egon Krenz. “If the people see a light at the end of the tunnel,” Kohl said, they will stay home. Otherwise East Germans will leave en masse—“a catastrophe for the GDR. They are doctors, lawyers, specialists, who cannot be replaced.” The country would implode.
The situation required delicate handling, both men agreed. Above all there should be no triumphant geopolitical crowing, no premature talk of a brave new world. “I want to see our people continue to avoid hot rhetoric that might by mistake cause a problem,” Bush said.
“Excellent,” replied Kohl. “Give my best to Barbara.”
Bush knew as well as Kohl that this was the endgame. From then on, they would work together for calm. The goal, as they would soon begin to discuss explicitly, was unification. Focused on Germany, they did not foresee how quickly the other dominoes of Eastern Europe would topple.
“Mike, I think you should be here.”
My Czech translator, Zdenka Gabalova, was calling from Prague. A “little gathering” would take place that evening in the old Vysehrad Cemetery, up in the hills overlooking the city. Fifty years ago, on November 17, 1939, nine Czech students were executed after demonstrations against the Nazi occupation. History, yes. But in the subtext of Czech dissidence, the commemoration would protest a more contemporary oppression. “It might be interesting for you,” Zdenka ventured.
But I was in Berlin, I protested. The Wall had just come down. Who knew what might happen next? I couldn’t leave now.
The “little gathering” grew into a demonstration of twenty thousand people, most of them students. They lit candles amid the terraced gardens and rising church spires of Vysehrad, the burial grounds of Smetana and Dvorak. They sang the national anthem, “Where Is My Homeland?” Poland, Hungary and now even East Germany had sloughed off bankrupt communist regimes. “We don’t want to be last!” shouted the young people again and again.
Down from the hills they came, their candles glimmering in the darkness along the embankment of the river Vltava. “Down with communism!” “Jakes out!” At the National Theater, lit up in gilt Hohenzollern splendor, they turned into the street whose name would within hours become known to the world, Narodni. Riot police blocked their way, three rows deep, white-helmeted with plastic shields and truncheons. Another phalanx closed in behind, trapping the vanguard of marchers. The crowds halted a few feet from the wall of police. Those in the front tried to hand them flowers, placed candles of peace on the pavement before them, raised their hands in a gesture of youthful innocence. Then, from behind, the security forces advanced, using armored bulldozers to squeeze the people—perhaps three thousand in all—more tightly into their trap. Police with megaphones ordered, “Disperse!” Yet they would not let anyone escape the ring of steel.
Martin Mejstrik, a twenty-three-year-old theater student, worked for a year to organize the rally. Faced with a potential Tiananmen, he telephoned the police commander who had authorized the gathering and promised not to interfere. “You assured us there would be no violence,” said Mejstrik.
“Don’t be afraid,” the man replied. “Nothing will happen.”
Shortly after 9 p.m., Martin returned to Narodni Street, just in time to see the police hurl themselves upon the crowds.
Ten years later, we walked the street where it happened. “People were pressed so closely together that they could hardly breathe, let alone run,” Martin recounted. “The police just beat them and beat them, swinging their clubs with all their force.” Here, in front of the chic new Café Louvre, the police stopped the march. Down there, not far from a recently opened outlet for Just Jeans, they sprang their trap. Just here, down this narrow side street, no wider than an alley, was the only way out. It became a gauntlet. Special antiterrorist units in distinctive red berets lined either side, separated by about six feet. People were clubbed and pummeled as they ran between them—men, women and children. Those who fell were hit and kicked where they lay.
One young girl, a drama student, told me at the time how a policeman kicked out her candles, then slapped her. “Do you really need to do this?” she asked him. At that, he grabbed her by the hair and banged her head several times against a building, knocking her unconscious. A bland official announcement on state television later declared that order had been restored and that thirty-eight people had been treated for “light injuries.”
Havel had predicted it. “Sooner or later,” he had said in June, “they will make a mistake, perhaps by beating up some people. Then forty thousand people will fill Wenceslas Square.” Black Friday, as the night of November 17 came to be known, was the spark that set Czechoslovakia alight. The challenge for Havel and his small band of dissident revolutionaries would be to fan that spark, stoke the fire and guide it.
How brilliantly they performed! Prague was Eastern Europe’s happiest revolution, a delirium of good feeling. It was also the fastest, a revolution of passionate compression. Once it got going, the communists almost ran from power. This gentle revolution, this “Velvet Revolution” as Havel dubbed it, was sheer theater, a geopolitical spectacular as masterfully choreographed as the playwright’s own absurdist comedies. It unfolded in vignettes, scenes and acts, with cameo appearances by famous faces from the past. Alexander Dubcek. Joan Baez. Dissidents just released from jail. Eminent émigrés suddenly returned home. The theme music was the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man.” The stage was the Magic Lantern, the underground theater that served as Havel’s headquarters. The backdrop was Prague, impossibly romantic, the city of a hundred spires, tawny ocher houses and churches, sifting late-afternoon light, moonlight on the Vltava. The cast changed constantly, an immensely colorful cavalcade of friends and oddly assorted comrades-in-arms: philosophers, academics, journalists, students, boiler stokers, engineers, ditchdiggers, drunks, poets, hangers-on, hangers-out, pretty girls, all caught up in an intoxicating swirl of revolution, excitement, passion, sex and intrigue.
The audience, of course, was the world. We watched it happen on TV. We saw the people, standing in the hundreds of thousands in Wenceslas Square. It was revolution as a street party, the climax of the story that was the Year of the Fall, a turning point in history: cliché transmuted into Truth. We knew our heroes would win. Everyone swept up by it felt young again, as though the world had suddenly, mysteriously, euphorically been made new.
This revolution was counted in days. Day One was the “massacre,” as everyone called it. Day Two was a call to arms. Martin Mejstrik and other student leaders at the theater academy of Charles University called for a general strike. By afternoon, the journalist faculty had joined them. Then the actors. Then the artists and musicians. Meeting at the Realistic Theater, not far from Charles Bridge in a neighborhood of twisting cobblestone streets and tilting medieval houses, these various groups combined forces and set a date: Monday, November 27, from noon to 2 p.m. Thus the Velvet Revolution began.
On Day Three, a Sunday, Vaclav Havel returned from his country house in northern Bohemia. He had chosen not to be in Prague the day of the Vysehrad march or the next, for fear of being arrested. In the early afternoon, a small group of dissidents met at his apartment overlooking the Vltava; the presidential palace, or Hrad, loomed in the distance. This was the time. They all knew it. They needed to create an organization, a Czech Solidarity. What to call it? A young dissident named Jan Urban—Rambo to his friends, in honor of his penchant for goading the police and leading them on chases across Prague’s rooftops—proposed Forum, after the New Forum in East Germany. Havel suggested Civic, for the democratic civil society they wished to create. “That was that,” Urban recalled. “Civic Forum was born.” Havel would lead it. Jan and his best friend, Ivan Gabal, my translator’s husband and a founder of a group called the Circle of Independent Intelligentsia, would be among the chief organizers.
They wasted little time. They demanded the resignation of communist leaders responsible for the Soviet invasion of 1968, most prominently President Gustav Husak and the boss of the communist party, Milos Jakes. They called for an investigation into the authorities’ handling of the Friday-night massacre and the resignation of the men in charge. They appealed to all Czechs to support the students’ strike. Then they disappeared into the night, hiding out in friends’ apartments and other secret places, waiting to see how the regime would react.
On Day Four, I arrived. Driving in from the airport late that Monday afternoon, my taxi took a circuitous route to avoid the main bridges into town. “Closed by tanks,” the driver explained. Shades of ’68. But at the central Wenceslas Square, a surprise awaited. It was teeming with people, bubbling with fun and good spirits—and not a policeman in sight. Over the weekend, thousands of students had begun gathering in the Square to protest Friday night’s beatings. Authorities did not intervene, and so the crowds grew. By Monday afternoon, they numbered in the tens of thousands, a mass of people already far too big for the police to easily disperse were they tempted to try. “I’ve never seen anything this big,” said a twenty-three-year-old art student named Renata. “We are ready to fight. We have had enough. We want to be free to speak our minds.” A well-dressed man with a briefcase told me that he had been a teenager in 1968. “I believe this is the end of the regime,” he predicted. “There will be no more violence. The police are afraid. Soon, they will start thinking about how to save themselves.” Besides, how could they resist this, he added, gesturing toward the people milling about us. There, a father with a child on his shoulders. Here, an elderly couple, he with a cane, she in a fur hat. A young woman said incredulously, “My mother is taking part. She used to say, ‘Don’t get involved. Stay away from all this.’ And tonight, here she is!”
This was revolution as a family outing. Exuberant crowds invented a new Czech national anthem. Anyone could play it. You just took your house keys out of your pocket and jingled them above your head. Tens of thousands were doing it, and the noise drowned out everything, like the ring of a thousand alarm clocks. Time to wake up. Your time is up. The din was deafening. “Jakes! Jakes! Jakes!” “Freedom!” “Democracy!” “Down with the government!” A spade was planted in a trampled municipal rose garden. Attached to it was a sign: WHO’S THIS FOR? The answer was already obvious.
The evening news was a revelation. The state-run media had changed sides. After years of shading events, anchors truthfully reported that students were on strike. Martin Mejstrik was given airtime. “Things have gone too far,” he declared on national TV. “There is no longer any room for talk, no other choice but to strike!” The chancellor of Charles University, a pillar of the communist elite, announced that he supported the movement. Students at universities across the country abandoned their classrooms, professors threw out their lecture notes. Theaters went dark as musicians, actors, sound technicians declared their support for the strike, as well. And all this on TV.
“They are finished,” said Zdenka, shaking her head when Jakes issued a gray communist statement: “We agree with measures taken to maintain public order.” Stupidly, he sided with the thugs of Friday night, for all to see. That night, I went to bed with my windows open, despite the cold, and fell asleep to the myriad jingling of keys from the streets below.
The Grand Hotel Europa, in the heart of Wenceslas Square, was built at the height of central Europe’s infatuation with art nouveau. A down-at-heel gem of old-world style, from the serpentine ironwork of its balconies to the smoky ambience of its renowned café, the Europa became my home away from home. Each morning I would stake out a table by the windows looking out on the square, order coffee and read the newspapers, meet with friends, conduct interviews and write up my notes on the previous day’s events. Each afternoon, a dapper man in threadbare tweeds and a bow tie would sit down at the grand piano and play lilting melodies from a Europe long gone. Everyone would take a break from overthrowing communism, come in for coffee or maybe a nice Becherova, a bitter Czech liquor, before heading back into the cold to deliver a next blow for freedom.
The morning of Day Five, all was confusion. Clutches of people stood outside, excitedly talking. The regime must go, all agreed. But who and what would follow? At the table, people debated what kind of society they wanted to live in. “Is capitalism good?” someone asked. In midafternoon, one of the leaders of the strike telephoned, frantic. “We have information from several sources that the army will crack down at three p.m.,” she reported. “Martial law will be declared.”
Outside in the square, there was no sign of trouble. A row of police vans was parked on a side street, but the men inside casually played cards. One passed a note through a window, drawing a puff on his cigarette: Are you trying to provoke us? it read. The cop laughed easily. Soon thereafter, the communist party’s most outspoken moderate, Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, went on television to announce there would be no violence. But it was a dangerous moment. The police were no longer prepared to act against the people, but elements of People’s Militia, a private army employed by factories and the party, had boarded buses and driven into Prague. Adamec issued direct orders barring them from the city center.
By late afternoon, some two hundred thousand had gathered in the square, shouting, “Down with communism” and “Out with this regime.” Every passing car honked in sympathy—a steady, unremitting blare. They carried on like this for two hours. Just before six, I made my way through the throngs to the third-floor offices of Svobodne Slovo, Prague’s main newspaper, where I was told I could find Havel and his crew. He gave a little nod of greeting, conferring with a dozen aides seated smoking in a circle of chairs before a pair of tall French doors. Then he stood up, wearing a turtleneck sweater and the same shabby army jacket he’d had on when we met in October, and went out onto the balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square. It was the first of what would become daily appearances, climactic moments in the drama he himself was writing.
A great roar went up, ceaseless and so loud that those of us behind Havel could hardly hear ourselves speak. “The prime minister has guaranteed there would be no use of force,” he told the people. He spoke forcefully, but briefly—how this was the moment, how solidarity coupled with restraint was key. “Thank you all for coming,” he concluded ever so politely. “And see you again tomorrow at four p.m.” A folksinger who had been banned from performing since 1968, Marta Kubisova, then sang. Another thunderous ovation, and everyone headed for home or a pub. “A very well-mannered revolution,” I wrote in my notebook.
Havel told me on the fly that he deliberately muted his speech, for fear of arousing the crowd. It’s a balancing act, he explained: to keep up the pressure without letting it get out of hand. He feared anything extreme, such as the possibility that inflamed radicals would do something stupid such as storm party headquarters, forcing the police or the military into what everyone called a “Chinese solution.” He also worried that party or police extremists could stage a provocation, a pretext for cracking down. So it was “gently, gently,” as Havel put it. I marveled at this man, who so shyly asked a colleague and me to escort him to the German embassy a few weeks ago. I wondered then whether he would have what it takes to lead a revolution, if and when it came. Watching him so confidently making decisions and uttering the words that would shape the future of his country, I no longer had any doubt.
So it went. Each day at 4 p.m. the people assembled. Students went about their general strike. The dissidents around Havel plotted and back-channeled with government officials, all but invisibly and always “gently, gently.” I filled my hours, and notebooks, going around town recording scenes of the revolution. One morning, I dropped by the Academy of Dramatic Art, a headquarters of the student opposition, press center, publishing house and hub for national resistance all rolled into one—and run entirely by kids. They dashed this way and that, shirttails out, hair unwashed after days of no sleep or bathing. Xerox machines burned with overuse. One room was the Department of Proclamations. Writers dashed them off with panache, not always getting it exactly right: “We call on all Czechs to join a one-hour general strike from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. on Monday, November 27.” I pointed out the obvious error. “Oh, well. Thousands have already gone out,” I was told, distributed by armies of volunteers. They covered every window, streetcar, lamppost and flat surface of Prague. For a time, police went around at night tearing them down. By now, they had given up.
I ran across Martin Mejstrik, who had just led a delegation to meet with Adamec. What a transformation. One day, this young man with his Yasir Arafat scarf, army boots and ponytail was organizing a rally at which he expected a few hundred people. A few days later, he was running a nationwide strike and meeting with the prime minister to negotiate the overthrow of a government.
Another day, I dropped by the Museum of the National Security Police in Ke Karlovu Street. An unsmiling apparatchikita handed me fuzzy bootees to put over my shoes, so as not to scuff the pristine marble floor of this monument to warped humanity. What a trove it was. There was a wall of guns, pointing menacingly outward, allegedly confiscated from 1948 counterrevolutionaries backed by foreign powers. Glass cases displayed hidden cameras, listening devices, secret poison pens and scuba gear taken from a Western spy caught trying to “penetrate” the country by swimming the Danube in 1951. There were “illegal” printing presses and their illicit fare—literature of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a hymnal—and pictures of secret police learning to shoot, snoop and body search. Most bizarre was the stuffed dog Brek, a “dog legend” who served along the border for twelve years. “His extraordinary abilities contributed to more than sixty arrests,” read the plaque on the plinth upon which he stood, teeth bared in an eternal snarl. A medal was impaled in his chest—a modest little postmortem wound, in contrast, say, to that which would be inflicted by the bronzed heroic worker, portrayed in a trashy tableau, poised to spring at his oppressive capitalist boss with a pickax.
By now, Prague had become America’s favorite revolution. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, the anchors of the big three U.S. networks, found themselves sitting together in first class on the same flight from New York. Meanwhile, hidden diplomacy took its course. One day Adamec flew to Moscow to consult with Gorbachev, as Jakes spoke threateningly of “restoring order.” Not a chance, Havel’s young foreign policy adviser told me. “The regime knows the Russians will not intervene. They also know that the people know. They’ve crossed a line.” Sure enough, the next day the Soviet ambassador, Viktor Lomakin, called on Jakes for a wholesale “review” of their relationship. Then he ceremoniously welcomed a delegation from Civic Forum to his embassy.
At the foot of Wenceslas Square, where it meets Narodni Street, stood the theater known as the Magic Lantern. Enter the heavy brass-and-glass doors. Descend a twisting marble stair. Pass through the Theater Club, a salon crowded with people rushing about, smoking, talking self-importantly. Go down another set of stairs and into the theater itself. There, onstage, was the set for Dürrenmatt’s Minotaurus, a great wall of papier-mâché rock with a cave for the Minotaur, a hole leading into the underworld. Duck your head, brave the darkness—and emerge into the inner sanctum.
There, in the backstage dressing rooms and lounges, Havel and an entourage of friends and advisers drafted and redrafted their ever-changing, always improvised script for the Velvet Revolution. In the early days, Havel would write little “tickets” for admission: a smiley face, or some other code for the day, signed by himself. One night, late, I stopped by for a little party in a narrow, dark room whose distinguishing feature was a series of wall-length mirrors reading SMOKING LOUNGE in different languages, with far too many people squeezed inside in a malodorous haze of cigarette smoke, sweat and beer. A grayish-haired man with a clipped mustache pressed me against a wall and introduced himself, in perfect English, as a great fan of Newsweek. This was Vaclav Klaus, an economist. Who do I think is the greatest living American? Milton Friedman, he answered for me. “I am our Milton Friedman.” For the better part of an hour he told me how Czechoslovakia would dismantle its communist-planned economy. Within months, he would become finance minister (and later prime minister) of the new Czech Republic.
As we spoke, a delegation from Civic Forum, not yet including Havel, was meeting with Adamec. Members of the Politburo were initiating contacts with the opposition. Leaders of the Central Committee had called an emergency session to demand the resignation of the party’s top leaders. “This puts all the pressure on them,” said my friend Jan Urban. “We can afford to wait.” All the while the numbers of people in Wenceslas Square kept growing, to half a million daily by the end of the revolution’s first week—Day Seven, if you were still counting. Havel was astounded. “Half of Prague is out there!” said someone in the little speaker’s room at Svobodne Slovo as Havel prepared for his nightly talk to the crowd. Their shouts made the windows vibrate: “Havel! Havel! Havel!”
It was intoxicating. Speaker after speaker stepped out upon the balcony and into a sea of … sheer energy. It was a palpable, physical, enveloping thing that you could literally feel and touch. A famous actor, Rudolf Hrusinsky, quoted a scrap of Neruda. The crowd went berserk. Jan Skoda, the publisher of Svobodne Slovo and head of the Socialist Party, spoke out for a democracy. The crowds screamed back, “Free elections! Free elections!” A renowned musician sang a protest song, and the people joined in. I remember looking out over the square, black with people chanting, dancing, waving, cheering. Who could possibly withstand this, who could not join in? Well, I thought, why not? So out on the balcony stepped I. It was only for a moment; just a big wave to the world. But what a moment. Half a million people cheered deliriously, as if I had pushed a button. “Holy shit!” I scuttled back inside.
That night was the tipping point. Over the past few days, Civic Forum had won promises of support from more than five hundred factories and workplaces. The roll call was read out each evening from the balcony: the Tatra engineering and defense group, the Skoda autoworks, the big CKD steelworks in Prague. To foreigners, these names meant little. To Czechs, they carried totemic power. CKD, especially, was not just any company. It was the General Motors and IBM of Czechoslovakia, the country’s largest employer and the absolute core of the communist party. It was significant enough that CKD had gone over to the opposition. But what happened when its name was read out? Precisely on cue, ten thousand of the plant’s workers came marching into Wenceslas Square. A place of honor had been cordoned off for them, right beneath the windows of Svobodne Slovo.
What exquisite choreography. Havel stood on the balcony to welcome them, his voice croaking with weariness. “We are at the crossroads of history—again. We are ready to talk but there is no way to return to the previous system of totalitarian government. Our leaders have brought our country to the point of moral, social and economic collapse. We want a democracy and a free Czechoslovakia. We want to rejoin Europe. Today!”
He closed with his answer to the regime’s threats: an appeal to the soldiers, police and People’s Militia to heed their own conscience, to think for themselves as individuals, to see what was happening around them and act independently of their officers, “first and foremost as human beings and citizens of Czechoslovakia.” It was uniquely Havelian, a call to choice, for personal responsibility, a plea to people as people to give voice to their conscience and act within their own power. This was the velvet in the Velvet Revolution, and it had brought Czechoslovakia to the brink of freedom. With that, he slipped out a back entrance and into a waiting car for the four-hour drive to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. There he would make another speech and prepare for the next day’s performance. It would be the climax of the entire drama.
On Day Eight—Friday, November 24—silence fell over Wenceslas Square as an aging figure emerged from Czechoslovak history. No one needed to ask who he was or what he represented. He looked much as he did in 1968: a bit older, a bit frail, his face more lined but wearing the same smile, at once ironic, tentative and touching. Alexander Dubcek stood on the balcony of Svobodne Slovo, bathed in television lights, and addressed his countrymen in their capital for the first time in twenty-one years. Quietly, he greeted them. Quietly, he called for democracy and freedom. Quietly, he urged them to throw off the Stalinist regime that had ruled since 1948. Perhaps six hundred thousand people stood for this man in his shapeless dark blue functionary’s coat and rumpled hat. His voice fell into the reverent silence like the snow filtering down from the sky. The silence lasted a few eloquent beats after he finished, then exploded into the most extraordinary single-throated roar I have ever heard. “Dubcek! Dubcek for president! Dubcek to the Hrad!”
Once again, I was lucky enough to watch all this from a few feet away, in the speakers’ room where Havel, smiling, and others awaited their turn. Dubcek waved, retreated, returned to the balcony to wave again. Surely, he could scarcely believe this was real. He had tried to give socialism a human face, was removed from office by Soviet troops, exiled to become a woodcutter and forester in his native Slovakia, probably thankful that he had not been jailed or worse. Did I see a tear in his eye, as he turned once again to acknowledge the crowd? The rally ended with the singing of the national anthem and that eerily spine-tingling music of half a million people jingling their keys.
An hour or so later, at the Magic Lantern, Havel and Dubcek emerged from the Minotaur’s hole for a press conference with an assembly of five hundred world journalists. Gone were the fanciful, little handwritten admission tickets. Lately, Havel was guarded, as if he were the diminutive quarterback on a football team of giants, by a phalanx of sturdy Czechs weighing several hundred pounds apiece. They charged in, deposited Dubcek and Havel in chairs onstage, then glowered as the pack of reporters loosed a barrage of shouted questions from every corner. Dubcek had just begun a disquisition on the future of socialism—“I have always stood for a renewal of socialism,” he said, already getting himself into trouble—when Jan Urban jumped up with startling news: Jakes has resigned! The Central Committee has tossed out the entire ruling Politburo!
Hubbub. Consternation. My notebooks record Czechs falling in the aisles, screaming, whooping, crying. “One question, sir,” a journalist shouted to Dubcek. “What now?” “It’s difficult to speak,” the great man replied uncertainly, then stood and fell into Havel’s arms. Urban magically produced a bottle of bubbly. “I think,” said Havel, “that it is time for champagne.”
When, precisely, was the Velvet Revolution won? Those swept up by the events often gave different answers. Martin Mejstrik thought it was the weekend it began, on Black Friday, when twenty thousand people turned up for his rally, rather than the expected few hundred. “I knew then that we had won,” he told me as we walked Narodni Street so many years later.
For Jan Urban, the moment of victory came at the press conference with the Politburo’s resignation. “That was it,” he would tell me afterward. At the Intercontinental Hotel, later that night, the nation’s new communist leaders held a press conference of their own. The new top commie was one Karel Urbanek, who sat flanked by his peers of the refurbished Politburo. I still remember his looks: gray suit, scared beady eyes, nervous demeanor, a safe provincial functionary from the Central Committee. Someone asked about their plans for resolving the political crisis. “We did not discuss future developments.” Have you read the declarations of Civic Forum? “I will as soon as possible.” Do you believe in democracy and free elections? “We will continue our cooperation with the parties of the National Front,” that is to say the tame parties that don’t challenge communist hegemony. In other words, no.
At this point, the international media abruptly dropped its pretense of neutrality. “You jerks,” shouted one Western reporter. Another called them “assholes” as someone else cried, “Get lost!” There are sides, and there are sides. Even journalists must sometimes choose. Urbanek and his minions began to twitch, then beat a hasty exit.
The resignation of the Politburo set in motion a kaleidoscopic chain of events, bewildering in their speed and complexity. Power changed hands, careers were made or lost, in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Already the bunch that had a few days before fled from the Intercontinental were gone. The moderate face of the communist party, Ladislav Adamec, yearned to take their place. Now he, too, was being set up for the fall, but so gently and so deftly.
On Day Eleven, Havel and his ascendant revolutionaries held a massive rally at the soccer stadium in Letna Park, in the hills above the city where a giant statue of Stalin once stood. Perhaps half a million people braved the cold and congealing winds, snapping flags and banners like whips. It might have looked like the usual gathering: people cheering, Havel and others exhorting. But it was not. Behind the scenes, the revolution entered a new phase. What began as a spontaneous outpouring of support had by then evolved into calculated political theater of the highest order.
That was evident in the meticulous stage management of the event. As thousands of people converged in streams upon Letna, student marshals directed them to their proper places. Sixty rock musicians had been working since early morning to set up an elaborate sound system. There were nursing stations and public-assistance booths. “A child is lost,” an announcer declared over the loudspeakers, and the multitudes stopped what they were doing until the kid was found.
Havel stepped forward, speaking from the spot at the stadium where Jakes and other communist party bosses usually stood to watch their annual May Day parades. “If anyone had told me a year ago that I would see this, I would have laughed,” he said, to guffaws from the crowds. Of course, a year ago he was in prison. With that, he turned the microphone over to none other than Ladislav Adamec.
What was Havel doing, giving this forum to a member of the ruling communists, one of them? Behind the scenes, Adamec had asked for Civic Forum’s support. He calculated that with the opposition behind him, he could persuade the Central Committee to appoint him general secretary, a man acceptable to both camps who could unify the country and take Czechoslovakia down the path to reform. Havel was pretending to go along, an aide whispered as we watched this final act in the drama unfold only a few meters away. He at best considered Adamec to be a man of the minute, rather than the hour. By giving him his chance, Havel calculated that he could destroy the communists’ last best hope.
And he was right. Adamec blew it, spectacularly. At Havel’s behest, the crowds welcomed him. “Adamec! Adamec!” But then he opened his mouth. The first word out, incredibly, was “Comrades!” He called for discipline, an end to the strikes, economic rather than political change. Pausing for what he expected would be cheers, he realized he was undone. “No,” the crowds shouted back, amid a mounting chorus of jeers and boos. Adamec struggled manfully to continue, all but drowned out by angry shouts: “Resign! Resign!” It was like watching a man being drawn and quartered. Weirdly, a spade materialized from somewhere in the crowd and was passed forward, shaken aloft by every passing hand.
So came the end, “gently, gently.” Havel called for a moment of silence for those “fallen in the fight for freedom.” Snow began to filter down, lightly at first and then more thickly. A horse-drawn cart left the park, decked out with banners and the wings of angels, and the people began to follow. One by one, the half million at Letna joined hands and in single file began to walk toward Wenceslas Square, more than a mile and a half away, scarcely saying a word in the gently falling snow.
For me, this was the moment. To this day, I can hardly remember it without tears. The rickety old cart with its angel wings, the bells on the horses. The people following, always hand in hand. It was so gentle, so strong and irresistible. Of course I followed, too. The procession slowly wound its way through the paths and woodlands of the park, now covered in white. It snaked down the medieval streets behind the castle and then into the square in front of the darkened presidential palace. There were no chants, no cheers, no hints of confrontation. Just the unbroken line of people passing silently in the white darkness, the line looping back and forth upon itself outside the forbidding gates. The snow muffled their footfalls. There was no sound but their soft shuffling, broken only now and again by a gentle shaking of keys.
For hours the procession passed. Half of Prague joined the human chain. From the castle it wound down the steep hills into Mala Strana, past the great baroque cathedral, its ornate spires lit in the snowy night, across the shimmering Vltava at Charles Bridge with its four-hundred-year-old statues of Czech kings and religious saviors, through the narrow streets of Old Town and finally into Narodni Street, where lit candles marked the savagery of November 17.
I watched three uniformed policemen join the procession, their caps set at jaunty angles, dancing along in tall black leather boots. What was it that Havel had said, back in October? At the moment of truth, our masks would fall, perhaps revealing intelligent and very human faces. And still the procession came, everyone swinging their arms, skipping, happy, joyous. The first of the marchers had reached Wenceslas Square, a pandemonium of honking horns, trolleys jingling their bells and the cheers of multitudes, while the last still waited patiently at Letna, high in the snowy hills. Hand in hand, they bisected the city. Hand in hand, they drew a line. Here, on one side, stood the people, on the other their oppressors. This was the moment. Everyone had to choose.
From above the city, I looked out at Prague, lighted and luminous in the snow, its people dancing. O silent night. O holy night. Never in my life have I seen anything so beautiful. I doubt I ever will again.
If only Eastern Europe’s subsequent revolutions were so light of spirit, or so painless.
A few hours after the Berlin Wall fell, so did Bulgaria’s communist leader of thirty-five years, Todor Zhivkov—notorious for so many nefarious geopolitical plots, from the poisoned-umbrella slaying of a Bulgarian dissident in London to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. This was no uplifting revolution by would-be democrats. It was a coup d’état that kept the old regime in place.
Darker still was the final act in the epic year. On the night of December 16, news broke of an uprising in the Romanian city of Timisoara, across the border from Hungary. Security forces fired on demonstrators, according to reports that were impossible to confirm. In the supercharged climate of revolutionary expectation, the wildest fictions were quickly accepted as fact: ten thousand dead in Timisoara, sixty thousand in other cities. Global TV networks aired lurid tales of Romanian secret police machine-gunning people from helicopters, executing soldiers who refused to shoot civilians, burying thousands of dead in mass graves or burning their corpses to destroy evidence of their massacres.
Christmas Day found me glued to the television, trying to figure out what was happening and how to get into Romania. A colleague from the Associated Press was shot in the arm attempting to drive through one crossing post. Another from the New York Times reached Timisoara, only to be shot through the back as his car inched along a darkened street. He would have died then and there had he not been directly outside the city hospital. That evening a friend from the German foreign ministry called to say that a military relief plane would leave from Cologne the next morning. Would I like to be on it?
Dusk was falling at Otopeni airport. Army troops lay prone on the concourse, snapping off rifle shots through shattered windows at enemies, real or imagined. Tanks were dug in along the runways.
I flew in with two German journalists aboard the Luftwaffe military transport. Officially, it carried supplies for the Romanian Red Cross; unofficially, it was delivering weaponry and commandos to reinforce the West German embassy, under fire downtown. A man from the local Red Cross greeted us as the plane lurched to a stop outside the terminal. “You’re journalists? Fourteen of you were killed today!” The West German military attaché said four hundred people had been massacred in a subway little more than an hour ago. Neither report turned out to be true, but it was an unnerving welcome.
The center of Bucharest was afire. Tanks and armored cars blocked the boulevards near the university and the presidential palace. The National Library was a smoking hulk. The front doors of the Intercontinental Hotel had been shot out. A bullet had gouged itself into the ceiling of my room. At the reception desk, phones rang unanswered. The staff gathered around a television in the dark and unheated lobby. Nicolae Ceausescu, the Great Dictator, had reportedly been caught and executed on the afternoon of Christmas Day, along with his wife, Elena, the equally fearsome Dictatoresse. Was it true? No one dared hope, for that would mean three decades of terror were over.
The TV screen flickered, blinked to life. The cavernous lobby filled with hisses: there he was, Ceausescu, dressed in the rumpled dark overcoat and scarf he wore as he fled four days ago. Those he’d tyrannized saw him, now, in a different light. Instead of standing loftily before them, surrounded by flags and aides and the ceremony of state, he sat at a bare table in a squalid little room facing an unseen panel of judges. “You are in front of the People’s Tribunal, the new legal body of the country,” an invisible voice intoned. The People’s justice was about to be delivered.
The farce that followed was dark as Mamet. The hidden inquisitors barked questions, lashed Ceausescu with disdainful accusations that the dictator, equally contemptuously, refused to answer.
“Do you understand the charges against you,” asked the prosecutor peremptorily.
“I am the commander in chief!” Ceausescu replied. “I do not answer to you!”
“You starved Romania!”
“Nonsense,” the dictator heatedly replied. “Never in Romania’s history has there been such progress.”
Elena spat vitriol against the “worms” who presumed to challenge them, dismissing their claims as “lies” and “provocations.” Ceausescu denounced the “plot” against them as an ill-disguised “coup” instigated “by traitors right here in this room.” Occasionally the old couple patted each other on the arm, as if reassuring themselves. Within an hour, the court entered its verdict: guilty. The couple’s “defense” lawyer was shown on camera, smiling as the sentence of death was read out.
Thereupon the film broke, to recommence, startlingly, in a rubble-strewn outdoor courtyard. Two bundles of what appeared to be rags lay on the paving stones. The camera closed in: Ceausescu, lying on his back, head tilted up toward a wall behind him, eyes open and staring. For nearly a minute, it seemed, we gazed upon him, the crowd in the lobby stunned. “The Antichrist is dead,” whispered someone, as if this were the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Then the screen went black, with the words FREE ROMANIA TELEVISION.
When Ceausescu was alive, he liked to hunt bear. With his retinue, he would retreat to a lodge in the mountains of Transylvania, then sally forth, guns locked and loaded. He was accustomed to good fortune, for his huntsmen took precautions. They would chain some poor beast to a tree, drug it to keep it still and conceal themselves around the blind from which the Great Man would shoot. One day they did their job haphazardly. Ceausescu took aim, then fell backward in fright when the bear, inadequately sedated, reared on its hind legs as if to attack. His shot flew into the tree-tops, even as three bullets entered the bear’s heart from the snipers whose job it was to guaranty his marksmanship. This day, I was told by a forester who claimed to have witnessed the incident, Ceausescu did not acknowledge the applause of his retainers.
That could be the story of the Romanian revolution. The bear is the people. They rise up from slumber. The emperor, alarmed, fires wildly and misses his mark. The sharpshooters hidden in the forest take aim and shoot, only this time their target is not the bear but Ceausescu himself.
Romania’s revolution was unlike any other. Elsewhere, it seemed as if communist regimes were racing to dismantle themselves. New leaders arose overnight. Old regimes collapsed and disappeared, scarcely leaving a ripple. People danced and celebrated largely painless victories. Not so in Romania. There, the struggle was written in blood. Communist masters ordered the police to fire on their citizens. They obeyed. A civil war was fought, albeit briefly. Revolution transmuted into a crypto-coup.
That it should have begun in Timisoara, a depressing industrial city of about three hundred thousand, begrimed with soot and human misery, was a matter of happenstance, a local issue of negligible importance to Ceausescu. A young but popular pastor named Laszlo Tokes was told by his bishop that he would be transferred to another parish. His outspoken sermons criticizing the regime, coupled with his support for the large Hungarian nationality living in Romania, were causing trouble. When Tokes resisted, parishioners stood vigil outside his door. The crowd of a few hundred grew to several thousand, many of them high school and university students not altogether happy with life in the Epoch of Light.
At first, they sought only to protect Tokes, who was regularly beaten and harassed by the police. But the gathering soon turned into a more general protest. There were shouts for freedom, for bread, for an end to the regime. Singing the outlawed national anthem—“Awake Ye, Romanian!”—a group numbering more than a thousand marched into the center of town, tearing down posters of the Leader and stoning the headquarters of the communist party. Police responded with water cannon and tear gas.
This took place on December 16. The next day, a Sunday, Romania’s revolution began in earnest. Early that morning, around 3 a.m., Securitate and local police burst into Tokes’s house and, after a beating, forced him to sign a blank paper resigning his post. Meanwhile, army and Securitate reinforcements poured in. Stupidly, they made a show of it, parading through the city with banners flying and bugles blowing. Ten thousand demonstrators came roiling out of nowhere to pelt them with rocks, bottles and jeers.
If communist leaders elsewhere seemed paralyzed amid crisis, Ceausescu was not among them. How could they allow a simple protest outside a pastor’s church to escalate into a riot? he asked his defense minister, General Vasile Milea, according to the minutes of an emergency meeting held that afternoon: “I gave orders for a show of force, with tanks, and you organize a parade!” Where were his troops last night? “Why didn’t they fire? You don’t put an enemy down with sermons. You have to burn him!”
Then Ceausescu turned on General Iulian Vlad, commander of the Securitate. “Don’t you know what a state of emergency means?” Ceausescu complained that he had stayed up all night, talking to the two men every ten minutes. “Why were not my orders carried out?” At this point, bloody Elena chimed in. “You should have fired on them. They would have fled like partridges. And had they fallen, you should have taken them and shoved them into a cellar. Weren’t you told that? Not one of them should have gotten out!”
Wrathfully, Ceausescu threatened to dismiss both men and take command of the army and security forces himself. He accused them of treason, suggesting they should go before a firing squad. Abjectly, they pledged their fealty and promised to justify his faith in them. “Good,” said Ceausescu. “Shall we try once more, comrades?” Sometime after 5 p.m., back in Timisoara, Generals Vlad and Milea executed their orders. Troops and Securitate fired into the crowds of demonstrators, many of them women and children. One hundred people were killed. Between three hundred and four hundred were wounded.
If Ceausescu had no illusions about the threat in Timisoara, he did have a blind spot: himself. He treated his people as slaves—“worms,” in Elena’s phrase. He lied to them, stole from them, robbed them of life and liberty and happiness. Yet in the end he genuinely seems to have believed they loved him. In this delusion, he made a fatal decision. He would deal with the challenge to his rule by going to the People, live on TV and in the flesh. Of course, there would be the usual props. A crowd of loyal supporters was rounded up from Bucharest’s factories and party bureaucracies. Banners and placards bore his likeness. “Long live Ceausescu,” his subjects would shout. He would wave, deliver a fiery speech and all would be well in the kingdom.
And so, on the morning of December 21, Nicolae Ceausescu stepped before the microphones and cameras set up on the balcony of the Central Committee on Palace Square. In his dark blue overcoat and fur hat, he shouted out to the one hundred thousand subjects in the square below. He told them that the reports of uprisings and killings in Timisoara were false, that they were efforts by foreign powers to corrupt and disinform the people. He counted on the mass of tame functionaries, beholden to him and his rule, to applaud and cheer on cue. Instead, from the fringe of the square, some students not part of the select assembly started shouting, “Ti-mi-soara! Ti-mi-soara!”
Never had he heard anything like it. Never had he been so brazenly challenged. Then other cries, faint but loud enough to be heard on camera: “Killer! Murderer! Down with Ceausescu!” There were loud popping sounds. Guns? It was later determined to be the sound of exploding tear-gas canisters fired by police, but it was enough to unsettle Ceausescu.
Flustered, he stopped speaking. His face lost its confidence, sagged in sudden timid bewilderment, abruptly looking old and weak. He waved his hands to calm the crowd. Yet they were the flailing motions of a man in trouble, not unlike the moment Ceausescu tottered on his dock in Snagov, flapping his arms in danger of toppling into the depths. This moment of truth lasted only seconds, but it was enough. Everyone watching in the square and on national television saw his weakness. The emperor had no clothes.
The rest is well-known history. Security guards bustled Ceausescu off the balcony. Crowds stormed the Central Committee building. Ceausescu and his wife boarded a white helicopter and escaped from the roof. Fighting erupted throughout the city between the army, siding with the people, and the Securitate, loyal to Ceausescu. The Securitate sniped from rooftops or mingled with crowds of demonstrators, pulling weapons from beneath their coats and mowing down those around them. Tanks fired away in squares and boulevards; the city center blazed with flames and smoke. After a three-day chase, on Christmas Day, the dictator and his wife were captured, tried and summarily convicted by a kangaroo people’s court.
Revolutions are probably never as they seem. They are admixtures of myth, idealism, opportunism, politics, intrigue, exploitation. Good and bad, the noble and the ignoble, the pure and the impure become so entangled as to be almost indistinguishable. Nowhere was this more true than in Bucharest. For at the moment of Ceausescu’s speech, the revolution in Romania became two revolutions. One was public: the people rising up to throw off the hated dictator, seen on TV. The other was far more private: a behind-the-scenes struggle for power among elites amounting to a coup.
I would understand this better in later years, after further research. But even at the time I sensed something suspect about this revolution—happenings that simply did not fit the public picture.
Shortly after I arrived on December 26, a stocky man with a mustache approached me in the lobby of the Intercontinental. “Hello, remember me?” Actually, no, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. “Good, I did my job well,” he said, introducing himself as Andrei. He was one of my invisible “tenders” last August. Whom he worked for now wasn’t exactly clear, either to him or to me. If anyone was in charge, it was a revolutionary council calling itself the National Salvation Front, headquartered at the Bucharest television station. He offered to take me over.
Out on the streets, I instinctively ducked at the crack of sudden gunfire. Andrei, however, seemed unfazed. At the television station, surrounded by trucks and army troops nervously guarding against an attack, he had no trouble passing through their lines. Inside, desks and chairs were piled into makeshift barricades, guarded by more troops and armed volunteers. As recently as last night, he told me, one floor of the building had been occupied by Securitate, shooting at soldiers occupying other floors. Oddly, there was no sign of blood, or bullet holes, aside from a few broken windows.
A few other reporters had gotten to the TV station as well, and we had an impromptu press conference with a man identified as Romania’s new vice president, Dumitru Mazilu, a human rights activist who had only just been freed from years of house arrest. “The situation is extremely grave, extremely fluid,” he said, confirming reports that Ceausescu had been executed. Mazilu added that, by now, the army had allied itself firmly with the people and the new government. The shooting outside came not from the main ranks of Securitate, numbering perhaps forty thousand, but from a specially trained Fifth Directorate of presidential guards, whose assignment was to sow terror and wage war on those revolting against Ceausescu for as long as he was alive. Mazilu put the strength of these “terrorists” at no more than two thousand, if that, working in teams of three and four men.
Wandering down a hallway, I ran into the foreign ministry official who’d arranged my trip in August. “Hello, Mr. Meyer,” he said buoyantly. “What lies I told you!” The man was never at a loss for words. “That’s okay,” I replied. “I didn’t believe anything you said anyway.” It was a strange camaraderie, all the more so for the question he answered only with a smile: “What are you doing here?” He filled me in on the National Salvation Front, an odd mélange of poets, writers, students, dissidents and allegedly disaffected former government officials that was meeting in a crowded conference room nearby. I could understand why Laszlo Tokes, the priest from Timisoara, would be there, as well as dissident writers such as Doina Cornea and Mircea Dinescu. But General Stefan Guse, the army chief of staff who commanded the troops in Timisoara? Ion Iliescu, the self-appointed new president? Not too many years ago, he had been Ceausescu’s chief propagandist.
Perhaps the most incongruous presence was that of General Victor Stanculescu, appointed acting defense minister only a few hours before Ceausescu fled from the roof of Central Committee headquarters. He had been a favorite of Elena’s, the man she would have sent to quell the unrest in Timisoara, if she’d had her druthers. Stanculescu had organized the Ceausescus’ evacuation from the Central Committee building, I would subsequently learn, and Elena had cried out to him as she boarded the helicopter, “Victor, protect the children!” By that, she meant the hundreds and hundreds of orphans recruited into the Securitate as a special guard, the “terrorists” who were now indiscriminately firing on the people in defense of their adoptive “mother” and “father,” Elena and Nicolae. It would later emerge that Stanculescu had also arranged the Ceausescus’ trial, according to Richard Hall in “Rewriting the Revolution,” among others, and had personally chosen their prosecutors, helped select their place of execution and organized the firing squad—even before the legal proceedings began.
One evening, I again ran into Andrei at my hotel. Once again, he offered to show me something interesting. We drove to a walled compound in the diplomatic quarter. As before, a heavily guarded security gate slide magically open for him. A light snow lay on the gardens and pathways of the palace where Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu had lived and last slept.
For the dictator and his lady, home was a pink stucco neo-Italianate mansion in northwest Bucharest. Scrawled on one of the arched windows flanking the grand entryway, in bloodred paint, or perhaps lipstick, was the word Victorie! Wine bottles rolled on the floor of the gold-filigreed vestibule, beneath a sparkling crystal chandelier, amid scatterings of cigarette butts. A gas mask lay incongruously on a brocade chair. According to Andrei, “the people” stormed the palace in the late afternoon of December 22, after Ceausescu fled. But it didn’t feel right. Here and there, expensive vases lay on their sides, as though carefully placed so as not to be broken. Small objects of art, mostly cheap china figures, had been trampled underfoot, along with family photos of the Ceausescus and their children. But there were no muddied rugs, no footprints in the snow outside, no broken doors or windows or smudgy handprints on the walls and white sofas. In fact, there was no evidence of damage of any kind, let alone the looting you would expect from an angry and unruly mob. Instead, it looked as if a bunch of teenagers had the run of the house while their parents were away and found the key to the liquor cabinet. The palace had been secured, it seemed to me, not liberated.
As Andrei promised, however, it was interesting. “Mike, you knew Ceausescu,” he called to me as I sat at the dictator’s damask-covered dining room table writing up my notes. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” To him, as to most Romanians, the luxury was inconceivable. The Ceausescus lived like princes of the French empire, or at least the more egregious of Hollywood moguls. Rich tapestries covered the walls. Silver and bronze statues and candelabra stood next to ornate Louis XVI clocks on extravagantly scrolled tables. Everything was gilt, mirrors and brocaded wallpaper—glitter without style, coherence or taste. There were no books. The paintings were of reclining nudes and cherubs, milkmaids frisking with lambs and little children.
Upstairs, empty boxes of perfume and cosmetics littered the floor of Elena’s boudoir: Arpège, Nina Ricci, Mystère de Rochas. A can of Woolite rolled in a corner. Boxes of Palmolive hemorrhoidal balm crunched underfoot. Despite the closets full of haute-couture gowns, Elena Ceausescu seems to have preferred heavy woolen suits and metallic, stub-nosed shoes with square, no-nonsense heels. There were hundreds of pairs. Gauntly thin, she appears to have obsessed about her weight. Her pink-and-gold bath had four scales. A man in white athletic shoes and a leather jacket rummaged in the drawers of her nightstand. Finding a photo of the Ceausescus with their children, he balled it up and threw it into her rose-tinted bidet. Another gestured toward a pile of mink and sable coats laid out on a bed, his cigarette dripping ash on the coverlet.
An adjoining suite was His. Perhaps a hundred identical gray suits hung in his closet, all new and shrouded in hygenic plastic. Under each: a black pair of leather shoes, none ever worn, custom-made for a slightly clubfooted man. I sorted through Ceausescu’s ties: a massive assembly of swirling, weird colors, specially made by the world’s better haberdashers, all seven inches wide and never worn. Oh, ho, what’s this? A pair of Swiss-made Jockey shorts, which I held up to my waist. They were hopelessly large even on me, over six feet tall. How must they have hung on such a small dictator. Did he hike them almost to his shoulders? On the floor, a photo of Elena in her forties, wearing a yellow raincoat and picking a flower, lay amid broken fragments of glass. It was the only faintly personal thing I saw.
A final bizarre touch awaited in the royal couple’s bedroom. Papers and documents were strewn across the marital bed, presumably Ceausescu’s reading the last night he was here. Among them was a study prepared for “Comrade Elena Ceausescu,” dated November 26 and typed in the extralarge characters that her husband preferred for his reading. It was an analysis of the events leading up to the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and the popular political climate of the time. To this day, I don’t know whether it was genuine, suggesting that the Ceausescus were far more aware of the mood of the country than often supposed, or whether it was planted there for journalists like me. Its purpose? Perhaps a red herring, meant to suggest that Romania’s revolution was indeed spontaneous and unplanned, rather than a plot by insiders. After all, the “people” stormed this palace, did they not?
The days and weeks following Ceausescu’s death brought more intimations of conspiracy. From Timisoara came reports that, in the initial days of the unrest, a gang of Securitate went around deliberately smashing store windows and trying to provoke townspeople into fighting. Corpses laid out for photographers, alleged victims of the regime’s massacres, turned out to have been dug out of paupers’ cemeteries or borrowed from the local morgue. There were the extravagantly inflated casualty figures. “What genocide?” Elena Ceausescu had not unreasonably replied at the trial. The Ceausescus were charged with killing tens of thousands of people. But the official toll turned out to be closer to one thousand, with most in Bucharest and other cities after the dictator had fled. Why were the Ceausescus killed off so quickly, people began to ask. As for the new government, why all those familiar faces?
Not surprisingly, this led to subsequent speculation about the true nature of the revolution. Some suggested it was a plot from start to finish, masterminded by leaders of the army and Securitate to despose Ceausescu and replace him with one of their own. But the truth is more prosaic. The revolution began in Timisoara, just as it appeared, with a popular explosion of anger and frustration and the widespread sense, shared elsewhere in Eastern Europe, of having had enough. Amid the muddle of events, people made choices, quickly and irrevocably, sometimes out of courage, other times out of cowardice or expedience. Laszlo Tokes wouldn’t leave his house. The people rose up and did not back down. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the conspirators against Ceausescu seized their chance.
It was a near thing. After Ceausescu lifted off in that helicopter, he tried to make his way to a friendly army base, where he could mobilize his forces to retake control. He was caught, partly because Hungarian intelligence helped his captors to find him using electronic surveillance. Ceausescu’s hasty execution was intended to stop the fighting. As long as he lived, the revolution was not won, a former president of Romania, Emil Constantinescu, told me a long time later. “They murdered him.”
Scarcely seven minutes elapsed, approximately, between the time the sentence was read out and the firing squad did its work. The judge, also a member of the conspiracy, who would later become deputy prime minister, barely had time to gather up his papers before soldiers tied their victims’ hands and hustled them down a hallway and out to the courtyard. During the rush, the electric cord powering the video camera was yanked from the wall. By the time the cameraman caught up, soldiers were already shooting. Some did not even wait for the official order to fire. Elena Ceausescu fainted and was shot where she lay.