mosphere of confusion and doubt that Radu Balan appears to have been asked by some of the protesters to join the leadership. In general, he seems to have been not unpopular in the city and he was applauded when he first spoke from the Opera House balcony. His return may have been partly accepted because o f the growing chaos in Timigoara and the pressing need to normalise the situation, to ensure a return to work and the regular supply of foodstuffs, but it may also have been a deliberate ploy by some of the rivals of Fortuna to undercut his power base.^^® By the morning of 22 December events in Timi§oara had followed a course which Bucharest was soon to emulate as young and inexperienced demonstrators tried to come to terms with ‘untainted’ representatives of the old regime.
The revolution outside Timi§oara
By 21 December the authorities were facing a sharply escalating crisis, as the dis turbances spread from Timi§oara, first, to other towns in the Banat and Cri§ana and, then, into Transylvania. Although the regime had moved quickly to seal the borders o f Romania to prevent news of the unrest reaching the outside world, it apparently initially did little to disrupt domestic communications, and, so, tid ings of the events rapidly spread across the country by telephone and sometimes through the stories of travellers, as the railways also continued to run on sched ule throughout the disturbances. This survey can only offer a tentative picture, but, broadly, during 21 December it seems that m ost of the towns in the county of Timi§, such as Buzia§ and Lugoj, experienced dem onstrations, as did those of neighbouring counties, including Re§i^a in Cara§ Severin, Oradea in Bihor and Arad.^^® Further afield the most serious incidents seem to have occurred in the big Transylvanian cities of Cluj, Sibiu and Bra§ov as well as in the capital, Bucharest, and, in the morning of the next day, the disturbances spread from these cities to encompass many other urban centres, including Tirgu Mure§, where the authori ties opened fire and killed a number of demonstrators, Bistrii^a, Sfintu Gheorghe, Fagara§, Or§ova and Ploie§ti, with the only areas apparently remaining quiet dur ing this period being the southern and eastern extrem ities of the country.^®®
The patterns of protest within these urban centres broadly seem to have corre sponded to the forms already encountered in Timi§oara, with street confrontations between loose groups of mostly young protesters and the security forces being fol lowed by larger mass demonstrations. However, a division can be m ade between those cities which experienced conflict and those that did not, with the the fine fine between the two being largely drawn not by the protesters but by th e ac tions of the security forces. Amongst the cities which experienced violence during
46
The overthrow o f Nicolae Ceau§escu
this period some of the m ost telling images emanated from Cluj, where in the early afternoon of 21 December a mixed crowd seems to have spontaneously gath ered in the centre of the city, in Pia^a Liberta^ii outside the Catholic Cathedral, and started to chant anti-Ceau§escu slogans. When armed troops appeared the crowd began to jeer and a young actor, Calin Neme§, stepped forward taunting the soldiers to fire if they dared. Quickly he was joined by two others but their brave challenge was only to be m et by bullets, which left one o f the three, Lucian Mathias, dead and Neme§ w o u n d e d . F o l l o w i n g this incident, which occurred m id -aftem oon, shooting was to continue all night as demonstrators constantly re grouped to challenge the security forces, leaving by the morning several dead and many wounded.
However, the dynamics that lay behind the protests and the overall pattern of events in those cities which experienced violence at this time can best be seen through a closer scrutiny of the revolution in Sibiu. Here, in keeping with the rest of the country the security forces seem to have been placed on alert from 17 December w ith Nicu Ceau§escu, who was First Secretary of the county, apparently following his father’s lead and declaring that the nation was in a state of war and that all demonstrations should be vigorously dispersed by whatever means n e c e s s a r y . L e a d i n g Party officials were dispatched to all the main centres in the county and an attem pt made to buy the quiescence of the population by distributing extra food supplies with strenuous efforts also being made to ensure that power supplies were not disrupted. In fact, Sibiu was to remain quiet for several days more, although news of the events in the Banat circulated freely, and before demonstrations broke out on 21 December it was apparently widely known that the previous day, instead of firing on the crowd, the army in Timisoara had withdrawn from the city. During the evening of 20 December leaflets seem to have circulated calling for a dem onstration in support of Timisoara and, early the next morning, a mixed bunch of between twenty and fifty, by all accounts rather nervous protesters, including a m an from Timi§oara itself, gathered in Pia^a Unirii shouting
‘Timiçoara !’ and singing a ragged chorus of D e§teapta-te Romane This display
o f dissent quickly drew the security forces to the scene and they dispersed the demonstration arresting some of those involved. But apparently undaunted the protesters, now swollen in numbers by the inclusion o f some workers, even though they had been forbidden to leave their factories, regrouped under the ‘eyes’ of the old Saxon houses in Pia^a Mare. Some carried a make shift banner emblazoned
with the single word ‘Liberty’ whilst others linked arms and danced the Horia
Unirii but, before long, the security forces arrived again and commenced to break up the protest and arrest the demonstrators. However, this tim e, emboldened