to have been sufficient to force the protesters to search for further reinforcements with groups heading towards the lorry works and the ‘Tractorul’ factory. Outside the lorry works the chanting crowd called upon the workers trapped inside to come and join them and, eventually, some seem to have forced the doors and exited out onto the street to join the demonstration. By just after midday an estim ated 80,000 people were packed into the square in front of the Party headquarters. Facing them was a cordon of troops, which included students from the local military academy, and, soon, the familiar pattern of fraternisation between soldiers and civilians began with the passing of cigarettes and food. The crowd again insisted that the authorities opened negotiations and this tim e an ad hoc com m ittee of tw enty-three protesters was allowed to enter the building to present a list of demands, the first of which was apparently the resignation of Ceaugescu. They were received by Petre Preoteasa, the First Secretary of the county, and the rather desultory negotiations which followed, eventually, ended with a promise that their demands would be forwarded to Bucharest. Meanwhile, outside, the demonstrations continued into the early evening, although by then the crowd had thinned considerably, and, as an air of tension built in the square, the military at one point fired warning shots into the air and unleashed water cannons on the protesters. The next morning brought further huge demonstrations with perhaps 100,000 gathering again in the centre of the city, outside the County Council building. The demonstrators chanting and burning pictures of Ceau§escu remained peacefully outside the building, until hearing the news of his fiight from Bucharest they surged inside.^*®
It seems that similar demonstrations, usually peaceful in nature, occurred in a host of other smaller centres throughout Romania, w ith a typical example of the pattern of unrest, perhaps, being the events in Fagara§, near Bra§ov, where, following a demonstration on 21 December, large crowds again gathered on the morning of the next day when protesters marched on the factories urging the workers to come and join them . Some supervisors seem to have allowed their staff to join the protests, but factory security guards at others, including the lUC works, tried to prevent their exit by posting notices warning the workers of the serious consequences that would follow. Apparently unconcerned by these threats, the posters were torn down, as the workers poured onto the street, joining those of the Chemical Combine as they marched to the Party headquarters in the town. After an hour, the crowd broke in and, as elsewhere, ransacked the premises throwing portraits of Ceau§escu and copies of his work out of the w i n d o w . H o w e v e r , there were exceptions to this general rule of peaceful protest in the small centres, one case being Cisnadie where on 21 December a crowd gathered outside the local
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The overthrow o f Nicolae Ceau§escu
militia station, apparently, in the belief that some of those arrested in nearby Sibiu were being held inside. Some members of the crowd seem to have tried to force a passage through the blocked entrance of the building with a bulldozer and, as the militia trapped inside opened Are, two civilians were killed. The crowd reacted by wreaking havoc across the town setting fire to the council building, smashing shop windows and ransacking the office of the local textile factory.^*®
The revolution in Bucharest
Simultaneously, as the revolution was spreading like a bushfire through towns and cities across much o f Romania, demonstrations also broke out in the capital and this was now to be the main seat of the disturbances. On 20 December Ceaugescu had arrived back in Romania at 15.00 in the afternoon — apparently three hours earlier than scheduled — before, in the evening, making the defiant broadcast to the nation which effectively scuttled the negotiations then taking place in Timi§oara. After the broadcast, workplace meetings were convened at factories across Romania to mobilise support for the regime and to denounce the events in Timisoara. These were probably arranged at short notice and, noticeably, those in Bucharest seem to have been addressed only by union and works Party officials not by any major political figures.^®® At the same tim e, at a session of the permanent bureau o f the PEC the decision was being taken to mount a similar spectacle on a far greater scale the next morning in Pia^a Palatului, in the heart of Bucharest. This huge mass m eeting, to be covered five on national television and radio, was intended to display to the Romanian public the widespread popular support the regime continued to enjoy and, thereby, legitim ise the repression of the demonstrations in Timi§oara. Given the rising tensions it was a high risk strategy which, in hindsight, Postelnicu was to say ‘made little sen se \ but Ceaugescu seems not to have seen it in that l i g h t . H e appears to have held an abiding belief that he still enjoyed the broad support of the mass of the population and th at, once it was realised, the very independence and territorial sovereignty of the country was under attack from ‘reactionary, imperialist, irredentist, chauvinist circles and foreign espionage services’, then, the spirit of 1968 would once more be resurrected allowing him to maintain his hold on power.
The organisation for the m eeting seems to have been entrusted to Barbu Pe- trescu and the Party apparatus in Bucharest, principally, the municipal committees and First Secretaries of the sectors of the c a p i t a l . N e w s of the m eeting seems to have been circulating around Bucharest from late on the evening of 20 Decem ber becoming more widely known on the next morning, as the Party organisation within the factories sprung into life to mobilise the w o r k e r s . S e l e c t e d by unit