1. For a thoughtful analysis of Romania's post-Communist political tremors, see Katherine Verdery and Gail Kligman, “Romania after Ceauşescu: Post-Communist Communism?” in Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca, 1992), pp. 117-47. I share with the two authors the dissatisfaction with the ideological use of the term “neo-communism” in discussing the Iliescu regime and the National Salvation Front search for hegemony. Indeed, for neo-communism to exist, doctrinaire zeal and strong organizational commitment are required as a vicarious source of legitimacy. Or, as it has appeared clearly during the three years after the December uprising, the new regime is anything but millennial in its pronouncements: Ion Iliescu's populist rhetoric is closer to Andreas Papandreou's anti-capitalist, “third-road”-like stances than to any Leninist or neo-Leninist creed. Moreover, neo-communism assumes an offensive restorative strategy, but one is struck by the consistent denial of such objectives among the NSF supporters. I prefer therefore a concept like authoritarian democracy that highlights the weakness of the checks and balances in Romania's political system, as well as the anemia of solid counter-majoritarian institutions and civic initiatives. For the climate of anguish and deception under the Iliescu regime, see William McPherson's perceptive article “Intrigue, Illusion and Iliescu: Reaching for Reality in Romania,”The Washington Post, September 13, 1992.

2. See the interview with Tudor Mohora, the PSM's secretary in charge of propaganda, Flacăra, No. 91, September 1-7, 1992. In the early 1980s, Mohora served as president of the Union of Communist Students' Associations.

3. For instance, Păunescu published interviews with former ideological boss Dumitru Popescu and with nonagenarian former Dej and Ceauşescu premier Ion Gheorghe Maurer (b. 1902). The latter, surprisingly, refused to endorse Păunescu's claim that Ceauşescu should not have been executed. As for the jailed former Political Executive Committee members, they share the view that the December 1989 events had been instigated by foreign agencies and sustain the paranoid scenario of a Soviet-American collusion determined to topple Ceauşescu and destroy Romania. Among the most offensive versions of this revisionist approach were former foreign minister Ion Totu's notes from prison (since then he has committed suicide). A manifesto of national Stalinism, imbued with anti-Semitism and nostalgia for Ceauşescu's days, Totu's text opposed his background (as a the son of poor ethnic Romanian peasants) to that of ex-premier Petre Roman, referred to as the privileged offspring of “the Cominternist Valter Neuländer.” See “Mesaje de dincolo de mormînt,” in România Mare, May 15, 1992.

4. This is the case with one of Romania's boldest weeklies, Cuvîntul, that has serialized a secret party report prepared in 1967-68 for the rehabilitation of former Politburo member and justice minister Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, executed after a pseudo-trial in April 1954. The lay reader is simply lost in the abundance of names and data, and the editors have not provided the needed background information to assess their meaning. The same can be said about the independent daily România liberă series on “procesul comunismului” (the trial of communism), where testimonies of victims were published without any attempt to document the institutional and sociological foundations of political repression.

5. Of course, nobody could indicate Drăghici's whereabouts, and the inexhaustible Bucharest rumor mill had him in Hungary (a hypothesis immediately denied by Hungarian authorities).

6. The bureaucracy's status metamorphosis is characteristic of the post-Communist transition in other countries as well. See Lev Timofeyev, Russia's Secret Rulers: How the Government and Criminal Mafia Exercise Their Power (New York, 1992).

7. For a brief but convincing analysis of the post-1989 developments in Romania, see Richard Wagner, Sonderweg Rumänien: Bericht aus einem Entwicklungsland (Berlin, 1991).

8. For the “fraud claim” and the dissatisfaction of Romania's cultural elite with the election results, see 22, No. 40, October 9-15, 1992.

9. See Andrei Cornea, “Mizeria ideologiilor,”22, No. 42, October 22-28, 1992, p. 4.

10. See Edmund Mokrzycki, “The Vicious Circle of Utopias in Eastern Europe.” (Paper presented at the conference “Utopian Revisions: Nationalism and Civil Society in Eastern Europe,” Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, October 29-30, 1992).

11. That Ceauşescu was personally an admirer of Stalin's model of socialism appeared clearly in his off-the-record statements to Ken Auchincloss of Newsweek in 1988. See Gail Kligman, “The Politics of Reproduction in Ceauşescu's Romania,”Eastern European Politics and Societies 6:3 (Fall 1992), pp. 364-418.

12. An outstanding exploration of the cultural reverberations of Ceauşescuism is Catherine Verdery's National Ideology Under Socialism (Berkeley, 1991). For analyses of Romania's political system under Ceauşescu, see Mary Ellen Fischer, Nicolae Ceauşescu: A Study in Political Leadership (Boulder, 1989); Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economics, and Society (Boulder, 1985); and Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Personal Power and Political Crisis in Romania,”Government and Opposition (London) 24 (Spring 1989), pp. 177-98.

13. For analyses of the Dej period, see Kenneth Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania (Berkeley, 1971) and Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism,” in Eastern European Politics and Societies 3:2 (Spring 1989), pp. 329-76. I discussed the nature of political struggles within the Romanian Communist elite in my book Arheologia terorii (The Archeology of Terror), forthcoming in Romanian from the Eminescu Publishing House in Bucharest.

14. Quoted by Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (Rocklin, Calif., 1992), p. 156.

15. Significantly, Goma still lives in French exile, although most of his books were published in Romania after December 1989. Other former critics of the Ceauşescu regime who did not move back to Romania after the collapse of the dictatorship were Dorin Tudoran (editor of the cultural-political quarterly Agora, published in the United States), Mihai Botez, Liviu Cangeopol, Ion Negoitescu, and Ion Vianu.

16. See Harry G. Barnes, Jr., “Impressions on Romania,” David Funderburk, “Relations Between the United States and Romania during the First Half of the 1980s,” and Nestor Ratesh, “The Rise and Fall of a Special Relationship,” in Paul D. Quinlan, ed., The United States and Romania: American-Romanian Relations during the Twentieth Century (Woodland Hills, Calif., 1988).

17. See Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Václav Havel et al., eds., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (Armonk, N.Y., 1990), pp. 23-96.

18. The most active publications of the “brown left” (or “red right” as this trend is often described), are the weeklies România Mare (run by Eugen Barbu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor), Europa (run by former party apparatchik Ilie Neacşu, an outspoken militant for the rehabilitation of the Securitate), and Totuşi iubirea (directed by Adrian Păunescu). For an examination of the extreme nationalist ideology of these publications, see Vladimir Tismaneanu and Mircea Mihăieş, “Infamy Restored,”East European Reporter 5:1 (January-February 1992), pp. 25-27.

19. One of the best analyses of the moral predicament of the Romanian intelligentsia in the 1980s is dissident writer Dorin Tudoran's essay Frig sau frică: Reflecţii asupra condiţiei intelectualului român, translated into English as Frost or Fear: Reflections on the Condition of the Romanian Intellectual (Daphne, Ala., 1988). For a remarkable collection of the Romanian dissident texts and testimonials, see the special issue of the monthly Transilvania, Nos. 1-2, 1992.

20. For the nature of the post-Ceauşescu political power in Romania, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, “New Marks, Old Faces: The Romanian Junta's Familiar Look,”The New Republic, February 5, 1990, pp. 17-21; and, “Between Revolutions: Vying for the Spoils of the Christmas Uprising,”The New Republic, April 23, 1990, pp. 23-25.

21. The principal architect of this cult was the party ideologue Dumitru Popescu who, in 1969, proclaimed Ceauşescu a “shepherd of the Romanian nation,” equal in historical achievements to Pericles, Cromwell, Lincoln, and Lenin. Following the December 1989 uprising, Popescu tried to join the new leadership but he was arrested together with the other Political Executive Committee members. From his jail he continued to send articles published by the radical nationalist press, particularly Păunescu's Totuşi iubirea. In the fall of 1991, Popescu was released from prison together with most of Ceauşescu's former close associates.

22. See Adrian Păunescu's series of interviews with Ion Gheorghe Maurer, in Totuşi iubirea, Nos. 18-20, May 1992.

23. After the 1989 revolution, Bobu was tried and received a life sentence for his “participation in the genocide of the Romanian nation.”

24. The essay first appeared in Agora (Philadelphia) 3:1 (1990) and then in Romania. See Dan Petrescu and Liviu Cangeopol, Ce-ar mai fi de spus: Convorbiri libere into ţară ocupată (Bucharest, 1990). After the 1989 revolution, Dan Petrescu served shortly as a deputy minister of culture before his resignation to protest the NSF anti-democratic procedures and the chauvinist campaigns encouraged by prime minister Petre Roman. As a member of the Group for Social Dialogue, Petrescu continued to express his views in the pages of the weekly 22, as well as in other independent magazines like Acum and Contrapunct.

25. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Tremors in Romania,”New York Times, December 30, 1987, and Mark Almond, Decline Without Fall: Romania under Ceauşescu (London, 1988).

26. See Michael Shafir, “Eastern Europe's `Rejectionists',”Radio Free Europe Research, RAD Background Report/121, July 3, 1989, pp. 1-6.

27. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Rebellion of the Old Guard” and the full text of the “Letter of the Six” in East European Reporter 3:4 (Spring/Summer 1989), pp. 23-25.

28. Personal interviews with participants in the revolutionary uprising conducted by the author during his visits to Romania in February-March and June 1990.

29. See Nicolae Ceauşescu's report presented at the Fourteenth RCP Congress, Scinteia, November 21, 1989 (English translation in FBIS-Eastern Europe, November 22, 1989, pp. 59-84). For the antireformist direction of the Congress, see Alan Riding, “Romanian Leader Refuses Change,”New York Times, November 21, 1989, and “In Romania, Fear Still Outweighs Hope,” ibid., November 24, 1989.

30. Symptomatically, Ceauşescu's conspiratorial delusions about the Malta pact between the two super-powers to get rid of him have become the leitmotif of the nationalist revision of Romania's recent history. According to Stalino-Fascist magazines like România Mare and Europa, the Timişoara uprising was the outcome of a well-prepared plan to destabilize Romania. It would be fascinating to read the reports the Securitate was preparing for Ceauşescu during the last weeks of his rule in order to weigh the quantity of disinformation deliberately served to make him act in a most aggressive way. After all, the Securitate was the institution that had the best picture of the overall disaster and it may well have been that its leaders wanted to accelerate Ceauşescu's downfall. What they did not anticipate, however, was the people's capacity for self-organization and the resolute anti-Communist sentiment that was to flare up in December. If the Securitate had a favored scenario, this must have been one linked to a gradual relaxation, a transition stage during which its members would convert their political power into economic dominance. The post-revolutionary turbulence in Romania is, in this interpretation, the result of the clash between the plans of the nomenklatura-Securitate establishment and the spontaneous self-construction of Romania's civil society. To prevent (or at least to postpone) the rapid and irreversible pluralization of the public space, the nationalist card was played without any scruple or remorse.

31. See Matei Calinescu and Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The 1989 Revolution and Romania's Future,”Problems of Communism (January-April 1991), pp. 42-59. Theories abound about the various conspiracies that, in one way or another, prompted the end of Ceauşescu's dictatorship. So far, however, the only certain elements are that the Securitate and the army switched allegiances and abandoned Ceauşescu during the early hours of December 22, 1989; that generals Stănculescu, Guşe, and Vlad acted like traditional praetorian guard chieftains in that they abandoned the losing tyrant and played a crucial role in the selection of his successor (the palace coup); that there was a well-established plan to create panic and deter the revolutionaries from fulfilling their anti-Communist objectives; that Ion Iliescu, Petre Roman, and their supporters in the NSF represented those segments of the government bureaucracy that tried to preserve an authoritarian structure of power and privilege; and that the new leaders were utterly opposed to any disclosures regarding the secret negotiations with the army and the secret police that resulted in the creation of the new institutions.

32. For a sober assessment of the events in December 1989 and their aftermath, see Nestor Ratesh, Romania: The Entangled Revolution (Washington, 1991).

33. See Olivier Weber, “La révolution confisquée,”Le Point (Paris), April 30, 1990, pp. 46-47.

34. For the moral and philosophical aspects of political justice in post-totalitarian societies, see György Bence, Political Justice in Post-Communist Societies: The Case of Hungary (Washington: Wilson Center, Occasional Paper no. 27, April 1991), with comments by Jeri Laber and Vladimir Tismaneanu.

35. See Alexandre Paléologue with M. Sémo and C. Tréan, Souvenirs merveilleux d'un ambassadeur des golans (Paris, 1990), especially pp. 219-28 and Edward Behr, Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of the Ceauşescus (New York, 1991).

36. See Jean-François Revel, “Roumanie: flagrant délit,”Le Point (Paris), March 12, 1990, p. 87.

37. For Iliescu's biography and his role in the anti-student repression in the fifties, see 22, October 9-15, 1992, p. 16.

38. See David Binder, “An Aristocrat Among the Revolutionaries,”New York Times, December 27, 1989. As director of Editura politică, Valter Roman was responsible for the publication of Nicolae Ceauşescu's multi-volume series of collected works. On the other hand, he was instrumental in publishing Idei Contemporane, one of the finest collections of original and translated social science books. Roman's prominence in the party ideological apparatus was primarily linked to his personal connections with foreign Communist dignitaries, especially Italian and Spanish ones. It was thus widely known that he maintained friendly relations with Santiago Carrillo, the general secretary of the Spanish Communist party and with Giancarlo Pajetta, the head of the International Department of the Italian Communist party.

39. The principal author of the NSF first proclamation to the country, Mazilu broke with the NSF in January 1990 and wrote an interesting memoir serialized throughout 1991 in the Romanian emigré weekly Lumea liberă (New York). According to him, it appeared very clear that Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman had a common agenda of stifling the spontaneous revolutionary ardor of the masses. Mazilu's criticism of the NSF resulted in a systematic besmirching campaign waged against him by the pro-government media. One element used by this campaign was Mazilu's past, including a short-lived tenure in the late 1960s as director of the Securitate school in Băneasa, a Bucharest suburb. It seems that Mazilu's former colleagues could not accept his genuine conversion to anti-communism and went out of their way to compromise him. One should also note that Mazilu was the victim of a thuggish attack while in Switzerland in the spring of 1991. On that occasion the Romanian-speaking masked aggressors stole the manuscript of his memoir.

40. Later, România liberă would withdraw its charges against Mazilu.

41. For the destruction of the Romanian democratic parties during the years of unbounded Stalinism, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, Condamnati la fericire: Experimentul comunist in Romania (Braşov, 1991).

42. See Gail Kligman, “Reclaiming the Public: A Reflection on Creating Civil Society in Romania,”East European Politics and Societies 4:3 (Fall 1990), pp. 393-439.

43. On Noica and his disciples, see Matei Calinescu's interventions in Romania: A Case of Dynastic Communism (New York, 1989) and Katherine Verdery's National Ideology under Socialism. For the controversial impact of Noica's urging that Romanian intellectuals should stay away from politics, see Gerhart Csejka, “Pustiit este spiritul Vestului,” and Gabriela Adameşteanu, “Constantin Noica—Parintele adoptiv al intelectualilor români?” in 22, No. 1, January 10-17, 1992, pp. 10-11. Csejka's article was initially published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 3, 1991, and consisted of a questioning of Noica's strategy of “resistance through culture.” An interesting contribution to this discussion can be found in the series of articles “Dosarul Constantin Noica,” published by Adrian Marino in 22, particularly No. 45, November 12-18, 1992, p. 13.

44. Personal interviews with Călin Anastasiu, Gabriel Andreescu, Sorin Antohi, Petru Creţia, Radu Filipescu, Gabriel Liiceanu, Dan Oprescu, Dan Petrescu, Mihai Şora, Stelian Tănase, Alin Teodorescu, and other members of the Group.

45. For Pavel Câmpeanu's views, see his “The Revolt of the Romanians,”New York Review of Books, February 1, 1990, as well as the response signed by Matei Calinescu et al., in New York Review of Books, April 4, 1990.

46. See Octavian Paler's articles, “Cauze si efecte,”România liberă (Bucharest), February 23, 1990, and “Nevoia de clam,” March 1, 1990.

47. For the evolution of hdur views and its main political and social goals, see “Impreună, spre democraţie,” an interview with Géza Domokos, România liberă, December 12, 1991.

48. See “Proclamaţia de la Timişoara,”România liberă, March 20, 1990 (English translation, FBIS—Eastern Europe, April 4, 1990, pp. 60-63).

49. For an in-depth examination of the nationalities conflict in Transylvania, see Vladimir Socor, “Forces of Old Resurface in Romania: The Ethnic Clashes in Tîrgu-Mureş,”Report on Eastern Europe, no. 15, April 13, 1990, pp. 36-43.

50. Virgil Măgureanu graduated from the University of Bucharest with a degree in philosophy in the late 1960s and received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1978 with a thesis on political power. See Virgil Măgureanu, Puterea politică (Bucharest, 1979), a book published under the imprint of the “Ştefan Gheorghiu” party academy. It is noteworthy that many of the top NSF leaders and less visible advisers were recruited from among the lecturers at the RCP's principal ideological institution. With regard to Măgureanu, it seems that after his graduation he served for some time in a special Securitate unit preparing syntheses from foreign publications for the Communist leaders.

51. See “Un entretien avec Ion Iliescu: Le large sourire du `père de la nation,' ”Le Monde (Paris), May 17, 1990.

52. One of these revolutionary adventurers seems to be former NSF senator Gelu Voican-Voiculescu, a former geologist and self-styled mystic, who participated in the storming of the Central Committee building on December 22, 1989, and was crucially involved in Ceauşescu's pseudo-trial and execution three days later. In the spring of 1991, Voican initiated a virulent attack on the xenophobic weeklies România Mare and Europa and became the target of their vicious counter-strike as an “enemy of the Romanian nation.” Between December 1989 and May 1990, Voican served as deputy prime minister in Petre Roman's government. According to reliable sources, he played an essential role in bringing the miners to Bucharest to smash the opposition both in January and in June 1990. An extremely controversial figure, Gelu Voican's lightning political career is emblematic of the mysterious personal metamorphoses that revolutions tend to generate: marginal and self-enclosed individuals become overnight radical prophets, military leaders, or consummate diplomats.

53. Soon thereafter, Munteanu resigned from the Civic Alliance and in 1991 he formed his own party, called “Mişcarea pentru România” (Movement for Romania). Formally a fidesz-like generational party, Munteanu's formation turned out to be close in both style and intellectual choices to Romania's interwar extreme right. The movement's weekly, named Mişcarea, published its first issue in 1992 with a green frame on the front page, thereby indicating its sympathy for the Iron Guard Green Shirts. As if this had not been enough, half of the page contained a poem by Iron Guard poet Radu Gyr, written during his detention in Communist jails and entitled “We will return.” Although Munteanu has often said that he does not try to rehabilitate the Legionnaire Movement and he strongly opposes violence, he did not hide his admiration for the prophets of Romanian nationalism in its most extreme versions. Munteanu's movement is a disturbing phenomenon of political despair and moral confusion among Eastern Europe's youth: a combination of religious mysticism and political radicalism, it may turn into one of those “movements of rage” mentioned by Ken Jowitt in his New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, 1992).

54. For the issue of constitutional continuity in Romania, see the interview with King Michael, “Romania Past and Future,”East European Reporter 4:4 (Spring/Summer 1991), pp. 81-83.

55. For Nicolae Manolescu's political views, see his articles “How We Have to Destroy Communism,”East European Reporter 4:4 (Spring-Summer 1991), pp. 79-80 and his book Dreptul la normalitate: Discursul politic şi realitatea (Bucharest, 1991).

56. For details about this episode in the ongoing struggle among the initial allies within the NSF, see Michael Shafir, “ `War of the Roses' in Romania's National Salvation Front,”RFE/RL Research Report, vol. 1, no. 4, January 24, 1992, pp. 15-22.

57. Ironically, Caius Dragomir, the NSF's presidential candidate for the presidential elections in the fall of 1992, tried to gain electoral capital by announcing that he had been a signatory of the “Timişoara Proclamation.”

58. See The Economist, October 3, 1992, p. 56.

The Quasi-revolution and its Discontents: Emerging Political Pluralism in Post-ceauşescu Romania

Abstract

Get full access to this article