Thank you for posting. Your post reminded me that I wanted to post something “Suejeanne” posted as a comment to a piece on CTH. It is about the fall of Ceausescu. I had heard, but forgotten, the catalyst had to do with moves he was making against a popular religious figure. I didn’t realize all the seeming “miraculous” occurrences that resulted in justice being done to him.
Anyway, here it is
I look at the story of the bring-down of the Ceausescu regime during Christmas in 1989 and it needs to be revisited.
The people of Romania had really been beaten down for years under the Ceausescu regime.
They had gotten to the point though that they were just not going to cower in fear and silence over the impending arrest of a pastor who was going to be taken away. They stood in lines around his apartment block, defying the police to make the arrest. It was as if they had read Solzhenitsyn’s words about “how we burned in the camps, later”.
Ceasescu had been out of town, visiting in Iran . . . when he returned to see this situation of the people refusing to cooperate with the police and keeping the police from arresting the pastor, Ceausescu gave a speech . . . talked in a jolly way about how we all need to go back home to our families and be busy preparing the Christmas feast.
Feast?
Feast! We barely have enough oil to heat our food, we hardly have any food at all, WHAT feast!?
Then things really ramped up and kept going until the Ceasescus decided they had better get out of Dodge . . . do you remember the white hankerchief being waved to the helicopter pilot from the window opening onto a terrace? Then the Ceasescus being half-carried to the helicopter – they were so terrified, the blood had drained from their faces, they were so white . . . I remember seeing how white they looked. They got hoisted up into the helicopter which flew for a while but then had to land in a field. The Ceausescus then had to try to wave down, commandeer a car . . . finally someone came along . . . but then he had car trouble. Then another car and the driver knew a good place at an agricultural college where he could take them to hide for a while until they could sort things out and get help. The driver took the Ceasescus to a building at the college where they could hide . . . he showed them in there where they could rest quietly. Then the driver left, locking the Ceausescus in the room.
Then the trial of the Ceausescus and the execution. In Beijing, their friends were especially horrified at what happened. Why didn’t the Ceausescus use the tunnels? They could have escaped!
So that all “went down” as we used to say, without cell phones, Satellite phones, internet, social media . . . it was a miraculous coalescing that just kept going.
The Last Straw, that’s what the Romanian people had.
I worked with a lady from there for a time. She was a Geologist (Emil Constantinescu, the second leader after Ceausescu, was one of her professors). She was a Major in the Romanian Army reserve. The State had a “Praetorian Guard” so to speak composed of orphans who only knew the State for a parent and were absolute fanatics. They and islamic militants Romania trained had to be rooted out to nearly the last during that period. She related to me of patrolling the streets during the day with her AK, and sleeping on top of her daughter at night with bullets popping through house windows.
This woman was the sweetest of diminutive grandmotherly types you’d ever meet. One day I was listening to the local talk radio host who had an occasional caller they would tolerate for chuckles because he was a dyed in the wool communism lover. My coworker got an earful of this guy and launched into one of the most profound streams of profanity laced invective I’ve EVER heard. It was amazing. I thought I loathed communists, but I am a mere piker compared to this woman who’d existed under one of it’s worst expressions from birth.
I had never seen that part of the Ceaușescu story. Thanks for posting it.