I am not sure now which of the two of us came up with the plan, but it turned out to be a stroke of genius in retrospect. Facing the possibility that our flights would be cancelled and the lingering uncertainty over whether any trains and buses out of town would still be running, we decided to try to rent a car and drive it out of the city.
We wouldn’t attempt to drive the entire 700 miles all the way back to Vienna – that would be too long. Instead, we’d take the car about half-way, to the western Romanian city of Timişoara. We’d drop off the vehicle there and then hop the border over to Yugoslavia and on to Belgrade, which was relatively close by. We weren’t entirely sure how we would get from Timişoara to Belgrade, but we figured there must be a train or bus connection.
From Belgrade, we knew the final leg up to Vienna would be relatively easy. If everything went according to plan – a big if – we’d be back at our desks in the office by Monday morning. Once we settled on that plan, we flagged down a taxi and told the driver to take us to the nearest car-rental agency. Any car-rental place would do.
I wrote in Part 1 of this post that the question of whether Romania’s infamous, communist-era Securitate had infiltrated the miners remains disputed (by some) to this day. What happened next, though, after Delia and I finally flagged down the taxi to search for a car-rental company, has convinced me that this was in fact the case.
Once we found a cab to pick us up, we had only traveled a few hundred yards, when a group of miners – dressed up convincingly in greasepaint and holding lead pipes – surrounded our vehicle at a roundabout. One of the miners stepped forward and demanded that we all show identification.
The taxi driver told the head miner that he was carrying two foreigners in the back of the car and that we were leaving the scene. The miner then poked his head into the car, turned to us, and asked – in perfect English – to see our passports. This “miner” clearly knew what he was doing and was very likely not a miner at all. With little choice in the matter, Delia and I nervously handed over our documents. The guy closely examined our passports – taking far more time than we thought necessary – and gave them back to us. We were good to go.
What were the chances that a real miner would speak perfect English and know how to examine a passport – or even have the wits to do this in the first place? Nothing against miners – but it’s not very likely.
The rest of the trip unfolded as a frantic race against the clock. The next morning, on Friday, June 15, we set out in our newly hired “Dacia 1310” sedan, on our way to Timişoara, about 300 miles to the west. The attendant at the rental agency gave me a quick, 10-minute course on how to start the car and shift the gears. For the next day and a half, we pressed on, through alternating periods of sun and pouring rain, over difficult, pock-marked back roads. We stopped somewhere around the midway point for dinner and a few hours of sleep in the car before finally arriving in Timişoara on Saturday afternoon.
Once in town, we discovered that Romania’s national rail service, thankfully, did indeed offer one daily train to Belgrade, departing at around 5am the next morning. We rented a room at a hostel near the station, dumped our things in the room, and then left the car, keys inside, parked outside an address the Bucharest rental agency had given us. I don’t think I ever received a bill for the drop-off fee, though it must have been considerable.
Neither of us had been to Timişoara before, and we decided to take advantage of our last hours in the city, and country, to look around. This, after all, was the same place that had ignited the Romanian revolution the previous December, when an ethnic-Hungarian pastor, László Tőkés, chose to openly defy the authorities. We wanted to see where it all went down.
Romanian officials at the time had been seeking to evict Tőkés, whom the regime considered to be a troublemaker, but the pastor’s small congregation rallied in his defense. Within a couple of days, the protests spread to the rest of the city and country. In a little over a week, Ceaușescu himself was forced to flee the angry mobs by helicopter from the rooftop of the Communist Party Central Committee headquarters in Bucharest. The process from Tőkés’s relatively modest act of defiance to the dictator’s own execution, incredibly, took fewer than 10 days.
Romania had one last trick up its sleeve for us on that trip. After Delia and I walked over to Reverend Tőkés’s church to see where the revolution began, we wandered around the center of the city. These days, Timişoara is an attractive regional capital, with loads of eye-catching Art Nouveau architecture and an energetic student population that fuels an active club scene. Back then, though, the city looked as gray and neglected as Bucharest. The streets felt eerily quiet for a Saturday night. We were relieved not to see any angry miners sauntering around, but we were also puzzled by the fact that no one else seemed to be out that night either.
Sometime after 8pm or so, just as dusk was starting to settle over the city, we spotted a man lying face-down on the ground in the middle of a large, empty public square (I can’t recall which square at the moment). It was difficult at first to tell whether the guy was drunk and merely sleeping it off, or if he was the victim of some type of violence himself. After what we’d witnessed in Bucharest, neither of us wanted to leave without first checking if he was okay. I slowly approached the figure and looked for signs of life (or spatters of blood). All of a sudden, a young kid jumped out of the shadows near to where I was standing and screamed (in English) at the top of his lungs: “He’s dead! He’s dead!” It was truly surreal.
Maybe it was because the city had appeared so empty or maybe our nerves were still jangled from that unsettling miner business back in Bucharest, but the boy’s unexpected warning shocked us both to the bone. I saw the man’s arm move slightly and figured he’d probably be okay. Who knows what the kid had been up to, but it felt in that moment as if the entire country had lost its mind. It was time for us to get out of there.
On Sunday morning, Delia and I woke before dawn, hustled over to the station and boarded a decrepit-looking locomotive that ferried us across the border to a small Yugoslav junction. From there we caught an onward connection to Belgrade. The stars were in alignment on that leg of the journey. The terrible series of wars that would eventually splinter Yugoslavia were still a year or so in the future, and Belgrade presented itself as a shining gateway to the West. Once we arrived at the station, we found an express train to Vienna that was leaving in a couple of hours. We cobbled together our last remaining dollars and Austrian shillings and splurged on burgers at the station’s McDonald’s.
I can’t remember ever feeling so excited to return to boring, bourgeois Vienna as our train pulled into the old Südbahnhof that Sunday evening. Back in my office at Business International, where I worked as an editor, the next day, I poured over the front page of the Financial Times and read all about the violence taking place in faraway Bucharest.
That trip to Romania taught me a lot about the post-communist transformation process, though it wasn’t immediately clear how much of that new-found knowledge could be attributed to Romania’s own peculiar politics and how much could be applied, more broadly, to the entire region. It was sobering to witness, up close, how quickly and easily members of the former ruling elite, like Iliescu himself, could co-opt the mechanisms of democracy and re-introduce the repressive structures of the old regime. Romania, of course, had been different from the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The changes there were more violent, and the new leadership, from the start, had lacked legitimacy. There was no towering moral authority in Bucharest, like a Václav Havel or a Lech Wałęsa, who could assure a skeptical population that the revolution was, in fact, genuine.
In a sense, though, what took place in Romania was simply a more brazen, corrupt version of the same process going on everywhere at the time in the former Eastern bloc – even in countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland – as elements of the old guard tried to claw back their lost wealth and influence. The revolutions in these countries had appeared more peaceful on the surface, but that placid exterior nevertheless masked a profound transfer of power and property from the old regimes to the new democratic forces. No one could automatically assume, anywhere, that the old guard would go away quietly or that the future would unfold – like a fairy tale – happily ever after.
More than three decades later, I now find a new significance in the violence. What in fact happened during the Mineriada, at its essence, was an authoritarian government cracking down on a democratic protest that threatened its power. Something, sadly, that now feels more widely applicable everywhere – and not just in Bucharest.
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.
