Today, 15th December, marks the 32nd anniversary of the Romanian Revolution, when the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown and executed.

22 comments

  1. Waiting for all the hardcore communist Reddit-militants to put down their social studies books and comment here why Romania was doing better under communist rule.

  2. I think this was the one that I was most fearful about at the time, the one that looked like it might end in substantial conflict and bloodshed. The summary execution of the Ceausescus was unpleasant, but in the wider view it was a massive relief that nothing worse happened.

  5. I’ve never understood the thinking behind the Mineriad.

    Did the Miners just see a bunch of hippies and think let’s have a crack, Iliescu says its cool brah?

    Romania had a chance…

  7. I think (if wikipedia is correct) he was executed on Christmas Day 1989. I was in Austria and saw all the news clips. His wife was also shot in the courtyard alongside him.

  11. December 1989 in Romania was really impressive. There’s an interesting museum about that period in Timisoara.

  17. Thanks to a Hungarian. Without him there may still be a soviet Rumania.

    On 16 December 1989, the Hungarian minority in Temesvár held a public protest in response to an attempt by the government to evict Hungarian Reformed church Pastor László Tőkés. In July of that year, in an interview with Hungarian television, Tőkés had criticised the regime’s Systematisation policy and complained that Romanians did not even know their human rights. As Tőkés described it later, the interview, which had been seen in the border areas and was then spread all over Romania, had “a shock effect upon the Romanians, the Securitate as well, on the people of Romania. […] [I]t had an unexpected effect upon the public atmosphere in Romania.”

    The government then alleged that Tőkés was inciting ethnic hatred. At the behest of the government, his bishop removed him from his post, thereby depriving him of the right to use the apartment to which he was entitled as a pastor, and assigned him to be a pastor in the countryside. For some time his parishioners gathered around his home to protect him from harassment and eviction. Many passersby spontaneously joined in. As it became clear that the crowd would not disperse, the mayor, Petre Moț, made remarks suggesting that he had overturned the decision to evict Tőkés. Meanwhile, the crowd had grown impatient and, when Moț declined to confirm his statement against the planned eviction in writing, the crowd started to chant anti-communist slogans. Subsequently, police and Securitate forces showed up at the scene. By 19:30 the protest had spread and the original cause became largely irrelevant.

    “The second uprising started by Hungarians against the soviets. But this time it was succesful.”

  18. I wish you would’ve used a picture of the revolution from Timisoara since that is where the revolution started on December 15th and arguably the city that saw the most gruesome aspects of the regime’s brutality.

  21. I remember a friend told me how he masturbated at the video in which they executed his wife and him as her knickers were showing when she fell to the ground.

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