December 20, 2003
On the Eve of Destruction
December 20, 1989 was a relatively quiet day in Romania. It would be the last quiet day Romania would have for a while.
Quiet doesn't mean calm, of course. In Timisoara, the Army was still in the streets, though not shooting anyone. The protestors -- rebels, now, really -- were talking to government representatives who had been sent from Bucharest. The rebels were asking for Ceausescu's resignation and free elections. The government representatives had orders to keep talking, and to stall for a day or two.
There were small demonstrations in a few other cities, but the uprising hadn't really spread nationwide yet.
(Most Romanians had a vague idea that something was going on. "Suddenly we were told that we could not gather outdoors in groups of larger than three people," said a woman who was living in Ploesti then. "People said there were tanks outside the city, and we could see that the police and militia were very excited and nervous. But we didn't really know yet what it was all about.")
In Bucharest, Ceausescu was ordering Securitate and Army units into place to crush the Timisoara rebels. The great counteroffensive would begin on the next day. But first, Ceausescu wanted to address the nation, to warn them about the threat they were facing.
He went on television on the evening of the 20th, and made a lot of vague but alarming statements about the threat of "terrorist fascists" and "foreign agents". (I've looked for a transcript of this speech, but I've only been able to find fragments. If anyone knows of a complete record, I'd be very interested.) The mention of foreigners was a continuing theme. Ceausescu constantly appealed to Romanian nationalism, and tried to play on the old distrust between Romanians and Hungarians.
Hungary had once owned all of Transylvania -- about a third of modern Romania -- and had taken it back again for several years during World War Two. And there still was (still is) a large Hungarian minority in Transylvania and the Banat; in 1989 the Hungarians were about an eighth of Romania's population. So when Ceausescu started talking about "foreign elements" trying to "endanger the territorial integrity of the nation", everyone knew what he meant. But would it work?
Ceausescu seems to have thought that it would. But he didn't seem to think that just going on television was enough. So he ordered that a crowd be assembled. He would make a publicly televised speech to thousands of people gathered in the center of Bucharest. He would rally the people against the foreign elements, the counterrevolutionaries, the terrorist fascists. And then the great crackdown would begin.
Posted by douglas at December 20, 2003 08:37 PMPlease check this journal about Iraq. (http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/) It is written by somebody who lives in Bagdad. Somebody gave me the address when the war in Iraq started. For a few days, during the masive bombing in Badgad, everyone thought that the blog owner died, because he did not write for many days. The problem actually was that some bombs distroyed the telecomunication center, so he couldn't acces the internet.
Internet came in Romania 10 years ago. It would have been very interestig if we would have internet during the revolution. Don't you think?
Many, many people knew what was happening. Because in those days there *was* a reliable (as reliable as circumstances allowed it to be) source of information: Radio Free Europe, which was kind of an illegal household name, really.
The question was: how to react at the news? I suppose we missed the whole mindset necessary to process what we were hearing. Especially in the small and not-so-cosmopolite towns.
It is very hard to imagine what it was like in those days. It makes almost no sense when we write about this things today. It was another world.
Cristian Paul
Radio Free Europe reliable? I am sure it was not reliable. What I am sure about is that the people speaking there was AGAINST Ceausescu, but this does not make them reliable at all. A reporter should be fairness. Not to hate the subjects of his news.
I am watching TV now, Antena 1. It's a TV show called Black box. First story was about the balcony episode (romanian revolution, 21st december). More details soon. (sorry.. it is in romanian :)
Maybe I am wrong, but I remember there was no radio or TV station, Romanian or otherwise, within receiving distance (no satellite dishes those days) everybody could understand (broadcasting news in Romanian language) and trust.
Except Radio Free Europe. Maybe there were others as well. But I cannot remember them.
They hated Ceausescu? I bet! It was hard not not hate that man and his family if you were Romanian. But they covered news nobody else was covering, day by day, in Romanian language. So we could know.
But then again: I was eighteen then. My views were different from those of a forty or sixty years old person. What the forty or sixty years old person voted for in the following days and years is a different story altogether...
Cristian Paul
Okay, Urban Legend Check...
I was told, during this turbulent time in the late 1980's, that the fax machine was of critical importance to revolutionary activists. I'm -- 15 years later --wondering if that were ever true.
The claim asserted that (1) faxes gave people inside the totalitarian box (East Germany, China, Romania) a way to get news from the West. Faxes (2) similarly allowed them to get news OUT to sympathetic Western journalists. But (3) the traditional "wire tap" listening/recording techniques were insufficient to keep up with the exchanges -- a tape recording of a high-pitched bit-stream "squeal" being rather uninformative --so that would-be revolutionaries could more safely plot meetings and demonstrations by fax than they might have, a few years earlier, by phone. Feature (4) was reproduction! One message could be sent and re-sent -- minutes after the idea was drafted dozens of rebellious fax-machine owners each had a copy -- and the secret police still hadn't!
Subcomponent (3-a) of this premise was that even totalitarian economies recognized the cost-saving advantages of sending documents -- so that say trucking/dispatching hubs might have faxes to exchange freight bills with similarly equipped factories and warehouses. While businesses justified the (relatively) expensive purchase of imported fax machines, individual workers USED the devices for non-business, and sometime political, purposes. The secret police were, I was told, facing more and more budget constraints -- so only a very few of the many tapped phone lines being monitored were ever provided with a "decoding" fax. The net effect was as if many would-be revolutionaries had been handed "Enigma" class encryption devices...
A decade later the price of fax machines had fallen so far, and the price of failure-to-tap fax lines was so obviously so high to totalitarianism, that even secret police agencies had all made the necessary investments.
A decade after that, we have anonymous internet blogging ...
I honestly don't know how much technological "committees of correspondence" have to contribution to successful liberation movements. But it'd be interesting to hear from insiders of the process circa '85-'95 to hear what, from their perspective, had changed.
Posted by: Pouncer at December 22, 2003 03:45 PMThis is off-topic, but are we on for the 29th? My e-mails seem to be disappearing into the void.
Pouncer: I have heard the same thing about faxes, but so far I have been unable to corroborate it here in Romania. Most Romanians that I talked to had only vague ideas of what was going on, until the lid blew off on December 21-22. The one person who did have some idea got her news from a friend who was listening to Radio Free Europe (which was jammed, but could be picked up if you were technically competent and really worked at it.)
As for faxing information to and from foreign journalists, I don't think direct dial international calls (without operator assistance) were widely available in Romania in 1989.
The group in Romanian society that was best equipped with faxes and other up-to-date methods of communication was, of course, the Securitate. So if anyone was using faxes to organize effectively, well...
So while I don't say the "revolutionary fax" scenario was out of the question, I'm tentatively inclined to consider it a charming but specious urban legend, at least with regard to Romania.
Doug M.