cracking of a few heads would be sufficient to bring a return of order. However, these two aims were not necessarily com p l^ en tary, nor, as it turned out, strictly related, and, anyway, the numbers of troops initially deployed were to prove totally insufficient for the task in hand allowing the demonstrators to achieve a series of minor ‘victories’ which built their confidence for future confrontations.®® This oscillation between poficies of dialogue and repression meant that during th e first days of the revolution the security forces were m ostly reacting to the agenda set by the protesters, and their failure to take decisive action to prevent the disturbances spreading from the restricted confines of the area around Tôkés’ church to the centre of Timigoara allowed the situation to spiral out o f control.
During the night of 16 December Ceau§escu was constantly kept abreast of the situation — he seems to have telephoned Tudor Postelnicu, the Minister of the Interior, at least fifteen times — and ordered a vigorous dispersion of the demonstrations through a ‘show of strength’ policy in which the army with tanks would cow the protesters into submission. However, a rather bizarre military parade that passed through the centre of Timi§oara on the morning of 17 December with flags flying and bugles blowing, instead of demoralising the crowd, merely seems to have left most of the onlookers thoroughly bemused and, in fact, provided a pretext for the crowd to gather and solidify.*® The order for armoured vehicles to be deployed in the centre of the city was to prove a disastrous blunder, because manifestly unsuitable for operations in a constrained urban environment against fast moving stone throwing youths they only served to provoke the protesters. And, when some of the tanks fell into the hands of the crowd, it marked a sharp escalation of the crisis turning it from being a mere local disturbance to one that would convulse the very foundations of the regime.
In response to the situation developing in Timigoara a full m eeting of the PEC was convened around four in the afternoon of 17 December and this was followed, one hour later, by a teleconference of county Party heads and senior military offi cials. The transcripts of both meetings have survived and were published after the revolution, but contain little factual evidence. Instead, in the public carpeting of ministers and the ritualistic self-abasement of Postelnicu it is difficult not to see the whole PEC meeting as being a charade, a piece of political theatre, perhaps designed to strengthen any waverers within its ranks, but with little meaning ful content. It seems the real decisions were being made elsewhere.®^ Indeed, both transcripts confirm what had long been suspected, as Ceau§escu, occasion ally abetted by his wife, dominates proceedings and im patient demands for any
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The overthrow o f Nicolae Ceau§escu
questions are met by a deferential near silence, and, in many ways, these cele brated transcripts are m ost interesting for the insight they give into the mind of the Romanian leader.®®
At both meetings Ceau§escu started the proceedings by giving a short synopsis o f the events as he perceived them . Beginning with Tôkés and the problem of securing his removal Ceau§escu noted that the issue had been allowed to drag on too long and that mistakes had been made by the local authorities in Timi§oara, who should have moved more quickly. However, maintaining full commitment to the norms of ‘sod a list-leg a lity ’, even within such an intim ate gathering, he stressed that the eviction fell within the remit of the judicial process and was not directly the concern of the PEC. More pressing were other aspects of the case for
the actual violence in Timigoara was the work of a few ^déclassé^ elements and
Tôkés was a mere facade for more sinister forces: ‘ . . . we have the involvement of foreign circles, o f foreign spy agencies, beginning with Budapest because he [Tôkés] also gave an interview. Actually the facts are well known. Moreover, it is known that both in the East as well as in the West everyone is saying that things ought to change in Romania. Both East and West have decided to change things and they are using any means possible.’®® At an earlier PEC meeting, before the outbreak o f the demonstrations in Timi§oara, Ceau§escu had presented the situation in even starker terms: ^We are in a state of war. AU that has happened and is happening now in Germany, in Czechoslovakia, and in Bulgaria and, in the past, in Poland and Hungary, are things organised by the USSR with the support of the Americans
and the W e st what has happened in the last three countries — East Germany,
Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, they were coup d ’état organised. . . , with the riff-raff of society with foreign support. This is how these things should be understood’.^® Taken with his address to the nation of 20 December and his speech in Bucharest on the next day these statem ents confirm that Ceaugescu’s reading of the unfolding protests in Timi§oara was conditioned by his interpretation of events elsewhere in Eastern Europe.^^ He was convinced that Romania was under attack from external foes and that the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Treaty Organisation allies had joined forces with the West in planning his overthrow, infiltrating agents into the country in order to foment unrest and pave the way for a high level coup d ’état and, indeed, the soldiers leaving for Timi§oara seem to have been told that they were going to fight Hungarian insurgents.
The consequences for decision making of this interpretation of events were to be considerable, as the monolithic world-view, espoused by the centre, proved itself incapable of reacting flexibly to the reality of the periphery for, once the picture was formed and became received wisdom, it seems to have become immutable with
The overthrow o f Nicolae Ceau§escu
33
all available evidence being manipulated to fill it By seeing the unrest as the
work of a few foreign agents and domestic malcontents Ceau§escu seems to have been able to convince him self that the vast bulk o f the people could be relied upon to rally to his cause, once the situation was clearly explained to them , a need stressed in his teleconference with the county leadership. To a large extent his position was based on a mythologised view of 1968 when in a rousing rally in the centre of Bucharest he had condemned the Weirsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and made a stirring declaration of Romania’s national independence of action. At the tim e, this had won him great popular acclaim and, now, although he was aware that the situation was more serious than in 1968, he seems to have believed that the threat to Romania’s territorial sovereignty was such as to permit him to successfully play the same national card for a second tim e. He declared to his colleagues: *We will fight to the e n d . . . because independence and sovereignty is nurtured and defended by struggle, because if in 1968 we had not taken action, not been active and not gathered the people here, not armed the Patriotic Guard, they would have come over us as they did in Czechoslovakia, because both the
Soviets and the Bulgarians were at the border’.^® However, this tim e it was
Romania which was the bastion of unreconstructed neo-Stalinism , and all efforts to rally the population to Ceau§escu’s side were only to reveal the weakness of his position, most conspicuously during the calamitous rally in Bucharest on 21
December. The emphasis on foreign agents provocateurs was to lead to a non
recognition of the underlying causes of the revolution and an apparent inability to predict that large numbers of workers would join the protests. Indeed, the priority Ceau§escu placed on the non-disturbance of industrial production was to seriously undermine the efforts of the security forces to restore order. Perhaps, because in part he recognised the need to continue regular food deliveries and to preserve an air of normality, the message that signs of industrial unrest must be ruthlessly suppressed led to a direct raising of tension in Timi§oara, as troops were deployed outside and, later, inside factories. It also meant that the security forces could never exercise absolute control of the situation because there was no provision for the imposition of a total curfew — even after the official institution of a state of emergency in Timi§oara on 21 December the free passage of night-shift workers was allowed and, at the height of the violence on 17 December, the display of papers and a valid excuse seem to have been sufficient to pass any military cordon.
Ceau§escu’s fears of a coup d ’état seem to have fuelled his continuing suspi cions as to the loyalty of the security forces and at the PEC meeting he accused them of defeatism and capitulation. According to his analysis o f the disturbances, their inability to control events in Timisoara was rooted in the failure of the senior
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The overthrow o f Nicolae Ceau§escu
commanders in Bucharest to enact his commands and, during the PEC meeting, he repeatedly asserted that the orders he had given for all units to be armed with live ammunition and to move in firmly to crush the demonstrations had been ignored
by Tudor Postelnicu, General lulian Vlad, head of the Securitate and General
Vasile Milea, Minister o f Defence. Certainly, neither Vlad nor Milea appear to have ordered their respective forces to carry live ammunition that night, as there are no confirmed reports o f shooting at that tim e in the city, but whether this amounted to a calculated act o f disobedience on their part must be questioned. Ceau§escu him self seems to have had an unfounded confidence that in the face of a little more resolute action from the security forces the protesters would rapidly turn tail, at one point declaring that *Bad one of them fired they would have fled hke partridges’.^* This statem ent finds echo in a declaration made by the head
of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, in 1989 who, likewise, seems to have considered that
the protesters in East Germany were ‘cowardly dogs’ who at the sight o f dogs and truncheons would ‘run like rabbits’, and it would appear not impossible that the
leaders of the Securitate and the army from their elevated position above society
may have also come to share such b e l i e f s . T h e orders given by Ceau§escu also seem to have been somewhat vague and, perhaps as might be expected, Milea, Postelnicu and Vlad all allude to this in their responses to his hostile questioning at the PEC meeting. Indeed, at one stage, Ceau§escu even admits as much himself when he states his instructions had not carried all the details, and Elena Ceau§escu also implies the same when she asks them ‘if it was not clear why did you not ask ?’ It seems that Ceaugescu’s commands may have been open to selective interpre tation and the failure of senior officers to act decisively rather than being an act of wilful disobedience on their part may have reflected their own faulty analysis of the situation. It may be questioned, given the fluidity of the disturbances in Timi§oara, which appear to have left even the officers on tjbe ground uncertain as to the actual situation pertaining in the city, whether any clear appraisal was ever transm itted to the centre, and, certainly, at the PEC m eeting both Milea and Vlad were to state that they ‘had not thought things would reach such proportions’.^® In the virtual absence of trained riot control forces mihtary commanders may also have been reluctant to sanction the deployment of armed troops in the knowledge that, if the demonstrators did not heed warnings to disperse, they risked embroil ment in a massacre, and their apparent reluctance to follow Ceaugescu’s order to send tanks onto the streets may also be because they reahsed the inappropriate ness o f the tactics. The wide variety of forces the authorities could draw upon to counter the demonstrations and the varying command structures involved may also have led to problems of coordination. During the evening of 16 December