A Ceauşescu Christmas

Among the many signs that the Romanian revolutionaries of 1989 were not thinking of the future was their choice of Christmas day, December 25, for the mediatized execution of the deposed president Nicolae Ceauşescu, along with his wife and controller Elena. One consequence is that now, every year, Romanians get to re-watch, on their ubiquitous televisions, alongside the traditional carols and the kitsch revue shows with teenaged girls in sequined leotards and Santa hats, the wrenching military trial and the bloody execution that quickly followed it. This year, the 20th anniversary of the execution, the Romanian television producers are particularly concerned to show the more gruesome parts. The version I saw 'live', as an adolescent, on NBC nightly news, from within the gates of a Palm Springs country club, was highly censored to suit American sensibilities. The reality is that the Romanian revolution of 1989 did not at all ride that wave of 'velvet' transitions of power, of which the Czechoslovak version, with the media-friendly Vaclav Havel at its helm, will always serve as paradigm.

To Lenin we owe the idea, of which Žižek, Badiou, and others have recently made much, that in the course of human affairs there occasionally comes what may be called a true 'revolutionary moment', a moment that changes everything, when, due to circumstances entirely beyond the will of any individual, the perception of the place of authority shifts, and the legitimacy of the old power structure simply evaporates. There is a new tendency to treat these moments as though their happening were a sort of law of nature, and so today many people are wondering why one failed to happen in Iran recently, why, in spite of the anger of the youth and the total delegitimization of the mullahs in the eyes of the rest of the world, the mullahs themselves went right on as smugly convinced of their own legitimacy as ever.

Anyway, the revolutionary moment in Romania came not with the un-velvety execution on Christmas day, but rather in the middle of a speech, Ceauşescu's last, delivered four days earlier. (Arguably, it was in fact the suppression of the Timişoara miners' strike five days earlier than that, on December 16, but it is probably only at the Bucharest speech on the 21st that we first see the shift taking place in Nicolae's very face.)  I post here a clip --from the crypto-fascist Romanian equivalent of Fox News, regrettably: it was the only one available on YouTube-- of the part of the speech in which the revolutionary moment arrives. It arrives, to be exact, at 2 minutes, 35 seconds into the clip, when a noise starts to swell in the crowd, as Nicolae is simply taking care of the mundane business of thanking the organizers. By 3'12'' the buzz in the crowd has become deafening, and Nicolae shouts 'Allo!' and taps on the microphone: he seems to believe that there is a technical problem, that the people are unable to hear him, and that that is why they are so upset. At 3'43'' or so Elena intervenes, shouting Linişte! [Calm down!]. At 4'58'' an aide seems to say, "This was provoked," i.e., that 'counter-revolutionary' elements must have roused the rabble, since the people on their own would never come up with such an insolent response to the leader's words. At 5'19'' Nicolae meekly begins his signature  wave, the wave of an officially beloved leader, which he has no doubt practiced in front of the mirror for however many hours it is Malcolm Gladwell thinks you need to do something in order to be good at it. At 5'36'' Elena asserts her authority, the true authority, telling her little man to "start talking!" With her help, they start to take control of the event back at around 6'10'', and by now, no doubt, the Securitate agents are swarming through the crowds, trying to figure out who started it, who is to be punished. But although Nicolae managed to finish his speech, the old order would never be regained, and he and his wife would be dead within four days.

Comments

[The Necromancer]

This is absolutely stunning footage. It almost seems to serve as anthropological and political template. Truly bizarre. I was sadly quite ignorant of the "real" details of the Romanian revolution. Of course most of us were subconsciously aware that in all the political turmoil of 1989, this was were it was the worst.

[Kai Matthews]

My dad would find this especially fascinating - I was a frontline Cold War baby, born in Munich because he worked for the Free Europe Press section of Radio Free Europe, and his entire life was spent going back and forth to Eastern Europe, for a long time as an academic exchange coordinator and then as a trade consultant. I knew early on from his reports that Romania was an especially bad autocracy, with little or no evidence apparent of the ameliorative Mitteleuropan cultural history that characterized Hungary (his favorite country), Poland or the then Czechoslovakia. Even Bulgaria was a more hospitable place to visit back then.