My revolution — looking back to 22nd December 1989

[30 years ago when Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania fell to pieces, I was a kid. This is my personal recollection of that day.]

I’m sitting in my room, the corner room of our house, peeking out the window. Vacation has started a few days ago, yet the street I’m seeing is almost abandoned, only some derelict trams pass along the road every few minutes.

The lack of people on the street is slightly menacing. We have been hearing on the television for days that there is “a situation” at Timisoara/Temesvár, yet as an eleven years old, I only have some vague idea about what is really going on. The television, in our particular case, is an old, black-and-white “Opera H2” box, which takes ages to warm up. Living close to the Hungarian border and being ethnic Hungarians, we watch Hungarian television, and not the local Romanian one, which broadcasts only a few hours a day. I do not know anyone in the town who does otherwise and my only personal experience with Romanian television at this point comes from my holidays at my grandparents’ place, a village in the middle of the country, near Tg. Mures/Marosvásárhely. Over there only Romanian television is accessible, so when I’m there I watch the “Miaunel and Bălănel” cartoons on Sundays for a short period. Back in Oradea/Nagyvárad, where I live, the program of the Hungarian channel is multiplied and distributed every week by someone at my Dad’s workplace on a typewriter. (How that “someone” gets this information, retrospectively is an interesting question, yet at that point this is the norm.)

I’m home alone reading a book, Mum and Dad are at work. They are supposed to come home for lunch. My grandma lives in the other side of the house — we live in the same house, but she inhabits different rooms. She is more like an aristocratic neighbour, who drops by from time to time. All the stranger that she suddenly shows up in my room. She seems slightly worried and asks if I heard the news — obviously not. “The tyrant escaped”, she says, using the Romanian term for tyrant, most likely because she just heard the news in a Romanian language radio. But she is worried for my dad, her son, who complained to her a few days ago that he can not take it anymore, can not live like this for long.

(Many years later, when I have the chance to read the thick and heavy dossier compiled about my father by the feared Communist secret service, the Securitate, it will become obvious that my grandma was worried for good reason. Yet, after witnessing a couple of perquisitions and weird “click” sounds coming from the telephone whenever we use it, by this time it is obvious even to an eleven year old, that the regime is interested in us.)

Grandma leaves my room, leaving me also worried, but on cue my dad appears around the corner. He is running with his old leather suitcase in his hands. He stops only briefly, explains me hastily things that I don’t really understand and leaves. The main point is that I should wait for my mum. Shortly she arrives as well, tells me to dress up, so she can show me “how a nation wins back its freedom”.

We go to City Hall and as we get closer we see streams of people converging there. The square in front of City Hall is packed as is the bridge closeby. The trams have been stopped and people are standing on top the trams waving red-yellow-blue flags with the hole in the middle (where the communist insignia used to be). At the corner of the bridge there is a simmering bonfire of books supposedly written by Ceaușescu — occasionally passersby throw more books on top. Someone is speaking from the balcony of City Hall, but the sound is terrible and I can not understand a word. People are chanting “Jos Securitatea!” (Down with the Securite), and my mother joins the choir. This makes me extremely uneasy, as I’ve never seen her chanting in public, so I squeeze her hand. (Later we walk with the crowd to the local headquarters of the Securitate, and by the time we get there I get used to the yelling and chanting.)

This is the moment when I realize that something extremely important is happening. This is approximately the moment captured on this picture as well — we are standing with Mum somewhere in the back of the crowd. This is the most memorable moment for me from that day thirty years ago. That day, and I do not think this is a hyperbole, is the most consequential day of my life. That day made possible everything I did later on, everything I became — in some ways still defines my life. On 21st December 1989 it was inconceivable that within a dozen years I will walk into the campus of a large American university as a PhD student. The next day made this possible, if not inevitable.

This historic day of thirty years ago received a lot of footnotes later. There are still debates raging about the extent of the influence the old communist elite (and especially the hated Securitate) had over Romanian politics in the following years. Yet, there and then the joy was real, the euphory palpable. There and then, all of us, Romanians and Hungarians, individually insignificant elements of the oppressive regime realized that such a system is built not only on the politics of fear, but also on the common illusion that there is nothing you can do against it. If suddenly there were enough people who refused to believe this, this psychosis vanished just as fast as the magic of Oz.

After the falter of communism there came a decade of grace. During this period it was conceivable that perhaps we really got a step closer to “the end of History” (per Fukuyama). One could convince himself that while the road was winding (the infamous interethnic conflict of Tg. Mureș/Marosvásárhely during the March of 1990 served as a reminder for this), the vector of the change pointed to the right direction.

Thirty years later, looking around the world and thinking back to that day, one cannot escape the idea that the direction of that vector has changed dramatically. History most definitely did not come to an end, but it might be repeating itself.

(Photo source: Oradea Mea)