Halfway down the Danube

Ceausescu in Teheran

The anniversary of the Romanian Revolution is coming, so I think I'll do a post or two commenting on it. The official anniversary is December 21; but the protests started on the 12th, and they didn't shoot the Ceausescus until the 25th.

The protests? Well, that's a long story. Short version: there were some minor protests in the city of Timisoara (in western Romania, near where Romania, Serbia and Hungary come together). Some ineffective attempts to suppress these proved worse than useless, because they sparked off much more massive protests, city-wide. The city was closed and the Army was ordered in; but some Army units refused to fire on their own people.

Only some. Some went right ahead and started shooting. But in a Communist military, even this half-hearted and partial mutiny was cause for serious concern. "Why didn't they shoot?" cried Ceausescu when he heard about it.

So the dreaded secret police, the Securitate, were sent in to do the job. On December 17, 1989, as the largest and most violent protests yet broke out, the Securitate began gunning people down in the streets of Timisoara.

It was then that Ceausescu flew off for a visit to Teheran, Iran.

This was a remarkably foolish thing to do. At that very moment, his regime was teetering on the brink of destruction. The secret police were beginning to kill people in Timisoara, but the first round of killing hadn't yet broken the people's spirit. The Army was still dithering and clearly unreliable. And rumours of Timisoara were spreading to the rest of the country.

But Ceausescu seems to have believed that the situation was under control; whether through ego, or belief in his own invincibility, or simply inertia, he wasn't going to change his plans for a rabble of protestors. So off to Teheran he went.

What made this not just stupid but fatal was that Ceausescu's inner circle, who he seems to have considered as absolutely loyal, were nothing of the sort.

Most of them were smart enough to realize that a great change was coming; some of them were also bold and ruthless enough to try to speed things along; and a few of them may have been quietly plotting against him for years. Ceausescu's departure gave all of them the perfect opportunity to put their heads together.

I haven't been able to find any articles or records of just what Ceausescu did in Teheran. Presumably he met with the Iranian President, made a speech or two, perhaps went on a tour. When he got back on the plane to fly home, he had just under a week to live.

Fourteen years later, I asked a Romanian friend: wasn't it stupid of Ceausescu to fly off to Iran at just this moment?

"No," she said. "But it was very stupid of him to come back."

Posted by douglas at December 18, 2003 09:18 PM