article by Ion Vianu

Viewpoint from Ion Vianu printed in Nine O'Clock:

1989-2009: from tyranny to oligarchy

published in issue 4588 page 4 at 2009-12-29

On December 22, 1989, Ceausescu relinquished the power he had held on to so tightly for twenty-four years and an illegal regime of more than four decades came to an end. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, the tyrant-dictator was executed following a sentence passed by an exceptional tribunal. A typically communist show-trial, a basic denial of justice. Even Ceausescu summed it all up: ‘You could have shot us without this masquerade.’ Yet, he was the author of his own undoing.

Still, we are not morally entitled to condemn the sinister farce at Targoviste, as we wanted it to happen that way, and not without reason: at the time the Ceausescus were being executed, blood continued to be shed in the streets of Bucharest. Power was notably absent. State authority vanished. This exceptional situation called for exceptional justice. Throughout history, there have been times for gaps – and beginnings. The communist regime ended the way it was born and lived – in denial of legality, and Romanians were nurturing hope.

If the new Romania had been the opposite of the former one, had it become a just country, the scrupulous democracy its citizens began to hope of in that early January, when ‘Down with Communism’ inscriptions could be read on walls, then, we could have gotten over the ‘masquerade’ at Targoviste. Yet, it wasn’t meant to be. Neither in the wake of the events back then, nor to this day has it been established who fired on the people that December. The horrible suspicion, namely that the dead of the Revolution were the victims yet of another large scale ‘deception’ remains the true founding document of post-communist Romania. And in the twentieth year since the Revolution, the dossier of this affair was closed, while this country is sentenced by international courts of law.

The foundation of contemporary Romania is built on shifting sand: the lie about the events in December 21-15, 1989. Time has buried the deeds deeper and deeper, and with it, the chance of historical truth being restored.

It is on this shaky ground that today’s Romania has been constructed. Its founders, the former communists, who saw us as a middle ground between a weakened Soviet Union and a charitable Europe, had to gradually get used to the idea our collective destiny is part of the Old Continent. By a gradual process, Romania has become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and, later on, the European Union.

A gangster who visits an elite society does not automatically become a gentleman. Similarly, the access to European institutions has not made the Romanian oligarchy more civilized. During those first days of freedom, the atmosphere of conspiracy and betrayal consolidated the network of influences and complicities for a very long time that stood at the root of power in new society. Then, the dictatorship turned to tyranny. Ceausescu’s megalomanic projects, whose implementation had personal glory as the sole purpose, stand testimony to this. Along with the wish for freedom and ‘normality’ of an oppressed nation, a voracious appetite was also born of a power and wealth thirsty nomenklatura under pressure from a fierce master of whom they wished to be rid at any cost. It is this interplay between the wish to escape misery, to express oneself free, to recover a nation’s lost pride and the egotistical drive for possession of an increasingly prosperous oligarchy against which the drama of these past twenty years has been played.

The outcome of this dialectics is Romanian society of today. Society suffers a great deal because the best of its children emigrate - a society where the state is weak, unable to oppose the selfish interests of an oligarchy built on the pattern of the former nomenklatura. The features of this weak state are as follows: an inefficient justice system, decaying public infrastructure (health, education, transport), lack of coherent national development programs. Growth is anarchical, and aimed at satisfying egotistical oligarchs, while the public welfare is neglected. As for expressing one’s opinion, it appears that the safest wording ‘shut up!’ was replaced by the derisory permission: ‘You can say as much as you want, it doesn’t matter anyway.’

A summing-up twenty years after the events that marked Romania’s destiny gives us no reason for being triumphant, nor desperate either: the confrontation is in full swing. The recent presidential election showed it could be won by a candidate who fought against the impressive propaganda apparatus of the ‘mogul’ press and television (though it is just as true he was also helped by the incredible blunders of a childish opponent out of the control of a mediocre campaign staff). The debate, no matter how violent and passionate, had more than showed what the hottest topic was discussed: the reform of the state, of the rule of law first and foremost. Observance of the principle of separation of powers, trampled underfoot by a cynical law allowing Parliament to rule over the core of accusations leveled against a deputy or senator; the reform of education, health, maintenance and development of the transport network; food sufficiency.

The communist state was excessive, an excess egotistically and willingly distorted over time by the ruling nomenklatura. Today’s state is too weak, almost on its knees by an oligarchy which is the direct descendant of the communist nomenklatura. This is where the main battle is waged, this is where the hope in victory lies. Nothing warrants it, yet nothing rules it out. Twenty years after the anti-communist revolution, we are still tilting between a post-Soviet oligarchy and a Western-type of democracy.

by Ion Vianu