Jos Tiranul Dragos Popescu
It was another cold December in 1989, the people once again unable to heat their homes from the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s strict rationing. In the city of Timișoara, many protests were being held - and the dictator, in București, held a speech, taking many from the streets and giving them banners, for the speech would be televised. Of course, the crowd began to boo and jeer at Ceausescu, and many across the nation began to realize how weak he truly was. Later that week, a revolution deposed the dictator and threw off the shackles of the old government. Those living in first world countries in the modern day often forget what true oppression is, ergo leaving them vulnerable for the next force that attacks them, either with charisma or threats. With the old despots gone and their regimes collapsed, what lessons can truly be learned from these events? It is important to realize that the Romanian people, despite all of the surveillance and monitoring, were still able to rise up given a large enough spark. One could argue that it shows no matter how oppressed the people are, they can always rise up against the nation. Indeed, it is not the people who are at the mercy of their oppressors; it is the oppressors who are at the mercy of their people. These lessons can best be learned by hearing the stories of those who lived through such times.
Alina and Catalin Popescu are currently a married couple living in the United States, but both were around 18 at the time of the revolution and living in the city of Bucuresti, or Bucharest. Their story paints an accurate and grim picture of the nation. As Catalin puts it, “You couldn’t say anything, you were restricted in information. Many things were not really available in terms of commercial goods. There’s things that were hard to come by.”
When asked about life before the revolution, there was one consistent statement: what the party didn’t want you to do, and what the party didn’t want you to know. “To get some news, people were listening on radio waves for Voice of America or Radio Free Europe,” Catalin said, reminiscing about life during Ceausescu’s reign. “[The] kind of free stations that were broadcasted on the short frequencies, that were illegal to listen to.” Meanwhile, Alina thought more about physical restrictions, saying “We students were told not to walk in groups of more than a few people. They didn’t want people to gather together […] when we went from the college building to our dorms we had to split into 2-3 person groups.”
Indeed, it seems that the Soviet strategy was simply control of movement, control of goods, control of the people. According to Harvard Law School’s Jeff Neal, “The Federal Republic of Germany was created in 1948 and 1949 from the three zones occupied by the U.S., Great Britain, and France. In 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin which, though free from Russian control, lay within its occupation zone. Truman gambled that he could keep Berlin alive with a heroic airlift — and won.” Indeed, this view of the Soviet domestic strategy is consistent with the description of conditions within Romania under the Eastern Bloc. However, these conditions did not last forever, and a revolution broke out - and that was when everything changed for the two. They were both students in college, so they were out of the country during the time of the revolution itself, which happened around Christmas in 1989 - the freedom being the greatest gift to the people. Alina states, after being asked about the revolution: “We had our finals just a few days before the revolution. So it was just a few days before the break started, and I went to spend the holidays with the parents and everyone went that way. We couldn’t imagine this would happen.”
But it did, as fighting broke out in the streets of Bucharest, with the brief yet bloody conflict ending right on Christmas, and the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu detained along with his wife Elena Ceausescu. According to The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 by Peter Siani-Davies, the trial was little more than a show trial that “was a shouting match of mutual incomprehension,” (Page 139) with Catalin noting regrets about how a more proper trial could not have been organized. However at the time of the revolution, the mood was jubilant. Eventually, the rest of the Eastern Bloc would fall and give way to new democracies, demonstrating how the people were able to rise up and become free, despite nearly a century of oppression by different powers. The most obvious challenge to the revolution was the difficult communication and lack of information, something that most today have access to in great abundance. But many recent events, such as the January 6th Capitol Riots, show that misinformation and division are what threaten us now in these times. As noted by Elizabeth Culliford in their Reuters article ‘Online Misinformation That Led to Capitol Siege Is radicalization,’ she states “Online misinformation that led to violent unrest at the Capitol last week has gone beyond false claims and has reached the point of radicalization,” and indeed, it becomes clear that the main communication issue nowadays isn’t just having access to
