The year 1989 had brought about the dramatic protests and the fall of communism across Central and Eastern Europe, and in 1990 Romania was one of the countries I was most looking forward to re-visiting in the aftermath of those events. I hadn’t been back in nearly a decade – since a long-distance, spring-break road-trip I’d taken as a student through Romania from Luxembourg that I wrote about earlier on this blog. That trip had created a soft spot in my heart for Romania that remains to this day. It opened my eyes both to the country’s cultural diversity and natural beauty. Like everyone else, I had been relieved to see the repressive Nicolae Ceaușescu regime collapse the previous December, but I was also shocked and sickened by the violence of the political overthrow. More than 1,000 people died on the streets of Bucharest that December during the fighting that pushed Ceaușescu and his wife from power and then came a hastily arranged military tribunal and the grisly, Christmas-day, firing-squad executions of both of them.
The country’s revolution – in contrast to Czechoslovakia’s -- had been anything but “velvet.” Bloody revolutions, like the one in Romania, tended to be inherently more fragile; the passions and hatreds only fuel more fighting. Czechoslovakia’s own transfer of power, instead, looked so durable precisely because it had been so peaceful. In retrospect, I suppose Delia and I should have been savvier than we were of the dangers that we -- and Romania -- faced.
Our Bucharest trip wouldn’t be a traditional reporting assignment, but rather more of a classic city break, a chance to get away from the office for a few days and enjoy the sights. Very few tourists, at the time, were travelling to Romania, and both of us had been excited by the prospect of seeing how the country was rebuilding in the aftermath of its anticommunist revolution. Besides, we figured, Bucharest must be especially pretty in springtime. We chose the dates of June 13-17 for the trip and purchased return tickets from Vienna to Bucharest on Romania’s national carrier, TAROM. We splurged on the hotel, booking a room at the city’s luxury, high-rise Intercontinental.
We realized something was wrong the moment our plane touched down at Bucharest’s Otopeni airport on the evening of June 13. The arrivals hall was dimly lit and looked to be nearly abandoned. We were practically the only non-Romanians on the flight, and the airport’s customs agent flashed us a worried look as he paged through our passports. He handed the documents back to us and then quietly inquired where we would be staying.
That question immediately struck us as unusual. I was well accustomed, by then, to nosy Eastern European border guards asking personal questions, like hotel details, but I had thought this was simply a relic of the communist past. We first assumed the guy was fishing for a bribe. He might tell us under his breath that for a little extra cash he could find us a much better place to stay. You never knew what kinds of games the border agents would try. We answered, truthfully, that we had booked at the Intercontinental and had no intention of changing. His reaction told us this wasn’t any kind of bribe or game. The dialogue went like this:
Customs officer: The Intercontinental? You cannot go there.
Us: Why not? We have reservations there.
Customs: They are shooting there.
Us: Shooting there?
Customs: Shooting there.
That short exchange marked the start of a strange and sobering adventure that would eventually take us overland in a rental car across the country and on to Belgrade and the relative safety of Yugoslavia, before we finally returned, exhausted, to our desks back home in Vienna. It was certainly not the restful excursion we’d planned on.
It was clear from the border guard’s words that some kind of armed insurrection was underway in central Bucharest, though neither Delia nor I had any idea what was happening. We quickly arranged for alternate accommodation at a different hotel, outside the center. Over the next few days, we would come to discover that we had flown into what Romanians call the “Mineriadă,” a deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that was led by the government and elements of the former regime. The word “mine” that appears in the name “Mineriadă” refers to thousands of coal miners from the faraway Jiu Valley whom the government called in to beat up the protesters and re-assert control over the situation. Romania’s revolution, it appeared, was just getting started. (The start of the video embed below shows just how crazy things got.)
I’ll try not to go too deeply here into Romanian politics, but to better understand what was happening, allow me briefly to recap the main developments that had taken place in the six months between the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime and the day we arrived at Bucharest airport. Similar to what occurred in Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution with Civic Forum, Romanians also initially formed their own pro-democracy umbrella political group, the “National Salvation Front (FSN).” Just as with Civic Forum, the FSN was intended to represent a broad spectrum of political interests and lay the groundwork for the transition to democratic rule. Unlike Civic Forum, though, which pointedly excluded communists from power, Romania’s FSN was actually headed by a former high-ranking communist, an old-school politician named Ion Iliescu. The FSN, in fact, was dominated by members of the old nomenklatura and individuals who had enjoyed key positions of power within the Ceaușescu regime.
In May 1990, just a few weeks before our Bucharest trip, Romania held its first democratic parliamentary elections since the 1930s. In that vote, the FSN won the backing of 66% of Romania’s shell-shocked electorate, still scarred from decades of political repression. Iliescu was affirmed in office as the country’s first post-revolutionary president. That outcome came as a big disappointment to the thousands of pro-democracy protesters, especially young people, who were demanding that the country make a clean break with its corrupt past. One of the protesters’ key demands was for the government to pass a “lustration” law that would ban former high-ranking communists, including Iliescu himself, from political office for a period of five years. Unsurprisingly, Iliescu had no intention of ever passing such a law.
Earlier on the same day that Delia and I arrived in Bucharest, a group of pro-democracy protesters had allegedly attacked the Romanian Interior Ministry and set fire to a number of buses. This was the “shooting” incident that the official at the airport warned us about. In a page straight out of the old communist playbook, though, those attacks very likely weren’t the work of the protesters at all, but rather of clandestine elements within the government itself. The Romanian-language service of the US-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe later credibly reported that high-ranking officials themselves very probably staged the violence, which in turn gave Iliescu a convenient pretext to launch his bloody crackdown*. Whatever the real story, Iliescu ordered thousands of coal miners, loyal to the government, to come to the capital, disperse the protesters and crack open a few skulls in the process.
Just as Delia and I were standing at the airport baggage belt that first evening collecting our suitcases and figuring out our next move, thousands of scruffy-looking, pipe-wielding miners, many still clad in their work smocks and helmets, were already making their way to Bucharest in specially laid-on trucks, buses and trains. We later discovered that surviving elements of the secret service had infiltrated the ranks of the miners and would coordinate many of the most vicious assaults. To this day, the alleged involvement of the Securitate remains disputed by some. I can assure you, though, this part of the story is true. I saw evidence of this with my own eyes.
During that springtime spasm of violence, nearly half a year after the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime, several people would die and hundreds more would be wounded on the streets of the capital city. In all of my years of traveling around and reporting in Central and Eastern Europe, I had never before witnessed violence that felt so raw, personal and random.
Delia and I woke up on our first morning in Bucharest still feeling nervous from the previous night but also excited to be in the city at such a dramatic moment. We had little idea what was happening and made plans that day to walk into the center to get as close to the action as we could. We lucked out with our last-minute hotel switch from the Intercontinental and found a room at the Park Hotel (or maybe it was the 'Flora Hotel' -- my memory is a little fuzzy on this detail). True to its name, the hotel was hidden amid some pretty greenery and oversized, early-20th-century villas with big, pointed roofs and colorful façades of intricately carved wood. For over a century, this neighborhood, due north of the center, had been home to Bucharest’s wealthiest residents. Under the communists, the area was favored by the party nomenklatura and heads of the military and security services. It’s still attractive today, and when Romanians refer to their capital as the “Paris of the East,” this is the part of the city they are talking about.
Interestingly, this neighborhood was spared the worst of Ceaușescu’s grandiose redevelopment schemes in the 1980s, when he attempted to refashion Bucharest in the image of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. During that decade, Ceaușescu ordered large swathes of southern Bucharest to be bulldozed to make way for his gargantuan “Palace of the People,” the world’s second-largest administrative building after the Pentagon. Ceaușescu, of course, hadn’t chosen to live anywhere near his grotesque new palace, with its mix of Socialist-Realist and peasant motifs. Instead, he preferred to reside in one of the city’s more-traditional, bourgeois villas, not far in fact from the hotel we were staying in.
After Delia and I finished breakfast, we asked a woman at the reception desk for directions to the part of the city, near the main university buildings, about two miles to the south, where the previous day’s violence had taken place. Ironically, she told us to orient ourselves by looking out for the distinctive, jagged-looking, 25-story tower of the Intercontinental Hotel, which just happened to be located at the center of the fighting (the same hotel we had booked originally).
As we walked toward the center, the attractive tree-lined boulevards and mansions of the northern part of the city retreated, and the streets became progressively grimmer and grimier. Bucharest had obviously suffered badly under the self-imposed austerity of the Ceaușescu regime. In contrast to the joyous expressions I saw on faces in Prague in February of 1990, the people here appeared to be wary and exhausted. The relentless summer heat over the years had warped the cheap asphalt on the streets and sidewalks, fashioning massive troughs in the roads that made driving, and even walking, treacherous. Dark soot from car exhaust and a ring of factories built up around the city in the 1960s and ‘70s covered the mix of ornate older buildings that stood alongside cheaper-looking newer ones. Many buildings still showed cracks from a tragic 1977 earthquake that killed some 1400 people. On top of the grime, neglect and earthquake damage, we spotted ominous signs of a more-recent carnage: hundreds of bullet holes still etched into the walls from street battles the previous December.
Delia and I approached the university area and noticed large crowds of people lining a perimeter the police had set up to keep onlookers from getting too close. We loitered around the cordon for a few minutes and watched as officers would periodically open the barrier to allow access to groups of miners who turned up in packs of ten or twenty at a time. At one point, we decided to test our luck and walk in alongside the miners. To our surprise, the police opened the gate and allowed us to pass. We had made it inside.
That’s when we first saw the bloodshed for ourselves and the reality of what we stumbled into began to sink in. As we walked around the bloodstained streets and sidewalks, we saw countless violent confrontations between miners and demonstrators. The miners would randomly approach groups of protesters, usually without reason or warning, and begin beating them with lead pipes and clubs. The miners split skulls, broke bones and left bodies lying all over the ground. The fact that the violence appeared to be so unpredictable made the situation more ominous. Neither Delia nor I was yet 30 years old and we both looked a lot like the demonstrators ourselves. We were more than a little worried the miners might mistake us for protesters and begin bashing our heads in too. We quickly pushed our way back outside of the police perimeter, though by that time the miners were swarming everywhere around the city and no place felt entirely safe.
Before we had left Vienna, Delia had made plans to visit an acquaintance of hers who lived in Bucharest – a frail, refined-looking woman, somewhere in her 50s, who worked as a performer in the national opera or theater. Sadly, I no longer recall the woman’s name, but she had apparently helped Delia to research a Fodor's guidebook on Romania the year before and in doing so had risked the wrath of the secret police for making contact with a foreigner.
The woman's apartment was located near the center, not far from the police perimeter. Though she and Delia hadn’t agreed on a fixed time to meet, we decided to walk over and see if we might catch her at home. We were in luck. Like many people that day, she was sitting idly in her apartment and hiding from the miners. She opened the door cautiously at first, but after seeing who we were, warmly invited us in for coffee.
She spoke excitedly about all the changes going on in the theater, as if to put us at ease. I noticed, though, that her hands shook as she placed cups of coffee on the table in front of us. While we chatted, she casually pointed over her shoulder to a gaping hole in her living room wall. During the December fighting, someone had sprayed the place with bullets; thankfully, she herself hadn’t been struck.
The conversation momentarily took our minds off the violence, but our unease returned not long after we stepped back outside. We resumed our city stroll and tried as best we could to avoid the roaming mobs of miners. We would occasionally approach groups of students to ask about the latest news. The rumor circulating at the moment was that officials would soon cut off all access to Bucharest and cancel flights in and out of the city. We still had our return tickets to Vienna for the coming Sunday, three days away, but it wasn’t at all clear the flight would leave as scheduled.
The two of us stopped to ponder our options, which appeared to boil down to two: we could continue our break as planned and risk not being able to fly back; or cut the trip short and find some other way out.
At this point, we must have also briefly considered a third possibility: staying in town to report on the violence ourselves. After all, we were both working journalists. Like me, Delia also wrote for Business International and other news outlets. I’ve gone back to my notes, but I can’t find any reference to this third option. Neither of us had any special expertise on Romania and, besides, we were much more concerned with not getting caught up in the crossfire ourselves. Earlier in the day, we had spied reporters from the big international news agencies, like Reuters and AFP, as they took up positions on the upper floors of the Intercontinental. From there, they could freely observe the chaos taking place on the streets without risking the wrath of the miners themselves. Word about Iliescu and the appalling violence would get out whatever the two of us decided.
At this point, we realized the only sensible choice would be to leave as soon as we could. The big question, though, was how.
(Click this link to read how things worked out.)
* https://romania.europalibera.org/a/actualitatea-rom%C3%A2neasc%C4%83-demascarea-vine-pe-band%C4%83-de-magnetofon/30579165.html
Did you like the story and want to add your own experiences? Or maybe help me to correct something I didn’t get right? Write me at bakermark@fastmail.fm.
