On Christmas Day in 1989, the people of Romania held a long-awaited ceremony that was more joyous than any Nativity had been in decades. They held a spontaneous trial of President Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, found them guilty of capital crimes against the Romanian people, and sentenced them to death. There was no shortage of volunteers for the firing squad, and those lucky enough to be chosen didn’t wait for the order to fire: they riddled the Ceaușescu’s bodies with more than one hundred bullets.
The story of how the dictatorial couple met their end has important lessons for those wondering about the fate of today’s Iranian Islamic Revolutionary government. What caused the Ceaușescu regime to collapse and how did the people overcome the power of the dictatorship?
In 1989, the Soviet sphere of influence was in total upheaval. The people of East Germany tore down the Berlin Wall, the people of Poland defied their Communist government, and the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine that had held the Soviet Union had the right to use military force to keep Warsaw Pact nations communist. Instead, he asserted, “Any interference in domestic affairs and any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states -- friends, allies or any others -- are inadmissible.” This became known as the Sinatra Doctrine, because now each Eastern Bloc state could run things “my way.”
One of the triggers for this period of upheaval was the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Beyond the economic cost of containment and decontamination, estimated at US$18 billion in 1986 dollars, the event also punctured the Soviet Union’s façade of technological superiority. This blow to Soviet prestige was compounded by the withdrawal in defeat from Afghanistan, confirming the hollowness of Soviet military doctrine.
While Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet system with perestroika (economic liberalization) and glasnost (openness) in hopes of a soft landing for Communism, Ceaușescu harbored no such sentiments. Since the 1970s, he had ruthlessly used his secret police, the Securitate, to suppress all outward expressions of dissent.
One of the main duties of the Securitate was “pacifying” Romania’s ethnic minorities. Romania’s western provinces are home to a large population of ethnic Hungarians who ended up on the wrong side of redrawn borders after the many territorial shifts during World War II. The Ceaușescu regime regarded them and other ethnic minorities as potential sources of opposition to his rule and thus a threat to the State.
Ceaușescu’s use of the Securitate to repress and terrorize his population was necessary because his economic policies were dreadful, even by the standards of Eastern European Communism. The country’s per capita GDP was one-tenth that of West Germany and lower than Russia’s or even Bulgaria’s. Rather than investing in the prosperity of his people, Ceaușescu pursued bizarre vanity projects like razing much of historic Bucharest to build a massive government building, erecting Presidential palaces, and constructing an oil refinery complex that was never completed. The refinery scheme was funded with foreign loans, and when these came due before the refineries could produce income, Ceaușescu imposed a severe austerity program to repay the foreign creditors by squeezing the domestic economy.
As the Eastern Bloc countries were roiled by unrest and demands for an end to repressive regimes, most of their leaders either chose to or were forced to keep their military and security forces in check. However, in December 1989, when protests broke out in Timișoara, the capital of a western province of Romania, Ceaușescu showed no such restraint. On December 17, Romanian security forces fired on the protesters. Ceaușescu must have believed that because the area had a Hungarian-majority population, this brutality would prove popular in the rest of the country.
On the strength of that belief, Ceaușescu organized a large public rally in Bucharest on Dec. 21. The crowd arrayed before him dutifully held signs of support and pictures of him and his wife -- that is, until some in the crowd began to boo and insult the President. Despite his order, then plea, for the crowd to keep calm, the shouting intensified and drowned out the dictator, who soon had to seek shelter in the Communist Party’s Central Committee headquarters.
By the next day, the entire country rose up in protest, and when Ceaușescu tried to speak again to the crowd that had gathered outside the Party headquarters, they greeted him by throwing stones and storming the building. The Ceaușescus escaped to a helicopter on the roof and fled Bucharest.
At this critical juncture, as the Securitate used deadly force to try to reimpose order, the army decided to side with the people and fought against the police and Securitate. Days of fighting cost almost 1,000 Romanians their lives.
By Christmas Day, the Ceaușescus were in custody. By the end of that day, they were dead. After more than two decades of bloody repression by a seemingly unassailable dictatorship, the Romanian people were free. One of their first decisions was abolition of the death penalty, motivated by a desire to avoid any cycle of deadly reprisals during the reconstruction of civilian government.
Now look at the current situation facing the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran. The people of Iran have experienced over four decades of repression under a regime all too willing to use beatings, torture, and executions to impose its will. The regime’s pursuit of a bizarre vanity project has destroyed the domestic economy and impoverished the population. All the components of that project -- the proxy armies of Hamas, Hezb’allah, and the Houthis, the militias of Iraq and Syria, the puppet dictatorship of Bashar al Assad, and the doomsday ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs, representing trillions of dollars of investment -- lie in smoldering ruins. Ethnic minorities in the far-flung provinces of the country remain restive and resentful of the repression of the security forces and now see that those forces are far weaker than they ever imagined. Moreover, the minorities in aggregate outnumber ethnic Persians, who only make up 40% of the population.
Do not expect the threat to the regime to originate in the streets of Tehran. The regime’s power is concentrated there and many of the people there are dependent on the regime.
Instead, watch for protests to break out among the Azeris and Kurds in the northwest, the Arabs in the South, and the Baloch in the east. When they demonstrate that their fear of the regime no longer outweighs their desire for freedom, even if the regime brutally puts down their protests, their willingness to stand up for hope may inspire the Persian plurality. If that comes to pass, the people of Iran may work as one to throw off the oppressive medieval theocracy and claim their country’s birthright as a democratic and pluralistic society, open to trade goods and ideas with the rest of the world.
Image: National Archives