On December 22, 1989, at 2:35 pm local time, a man stepped in front of the camera in studio 4 of Romanian state television TVR and addressed the viewers as “Dear comrades.” It was Ion Iliescu, then 59, taking the reins as the overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was being broadcast live.
Shortly before, Ceausescu had fled the capital, Bucharest, in a helicopter, driven out by an angry and determined crowd. The uprising against the national-Stalinist dictatorship had triumphed, and the “end of the tyrant” was announced from the television studio.
When Iliescu appeared, most Romanians knew only vaguely who he was. In party circles, however, he was known as a functionary who Ceausescu had once sidelined. Iliescu made an emotional speech, accusing the “confused Ceausescu clique” of having “plunged Romania into chaos and disorder.” He also called on the population to exercise “social discipline.”
Hours later, he made a second appearance. This time in a wooden tone, Iliescu announced that a “Front of National Salvation” had taken power and decided on measures to democratize Romania. High-ranking functionaries of the recently overthrown dictatorship surrounded him with applause.
Iliescu appeared as the provisional Romanian leader — and as the head of an uprising in which he hadn’t even participated. At that moment, no one questioned his legitimacy. In one of his famous self-mythologizations, Iliescu himself later said that he had been an “emanation,” that the revolution had “brought him forth” as a leader.
Iliescu was later elected three times, leaving a legacy in post-communist Romania unlike any other politician in the country. During the only bloody upheaval in Eastern Europe in 1989, he seized power, convinced that only he could save Romania. Under his leadership, Romania became the only former Eastern Bloc state in which the communists continued to rule for seven years after the fall of the dictatorship, albeit under a different name.
He created what he called an “original democracy” and deceptive stability and calm, the price of which Romanian society still pays. Although his most fervent dream was “national unity,” he stood at the beginning of divisions that still affect Romania today.
Humble beginnings
Born in 1930 in the Danube port town of Oltenita, southeast of Bucharest, Iliescu grew up poor in a broken family. His biological mother abandoned him a year after his birth, and his father was an illegal communist activist who lived for years in the Soviet Union and died in 1945.
Raised by his stepmother, after World War II, he made a career in the Romanian Communist Party, initially as a student functionary, and later as the person responsible for propaganda in the Central Committee and as Minister of Youth. He was also a pupil of Ceausescu, and at times, he was even regarded as his crown prince.
When the dictator initiated a neo-Stalinist turn in 1971, he demoted Iliescu to district party leader for “intellectualism.” After 1990, in another moment of self-mythologization, Iliescu claimed that he had been a “symbol of opposition to Ceausescu,” representing social democratic ideals since the early 1970s. In fact, he was a quiet, belated reformist socialist who had spent the last years of the dictatorship marginalized as director of a technical publishing house in Bucharest.
Popular uprising or coup?
Whether and how Iliescu conspired against Ceausescu remains unclear. But he was certainly obsessed with the dictator, helping to order the secret execution of the Ceausescu couple on December 25, 1989. In conversations, he often became highly emotional when Ceausescu came up. During an election campaign debate, he also referred to an opponent by the dictator’s name.
The question of whether the fall of Ceausescu and Iliescu’s subsequent seizure of power was a popular uprising or a coup was eventually answered: it was a mixture of both. The topic still unsettles Romanian society today. After Ceausescu was ousted from power, 862 people died in chaotic street battles allegedly carried out by “terrorists” loyal to Ceausescu. As it later turned out, Iliescu and his supporters had staged the fights to stabilize their provisional power in the turmoil, regardless of knowing that people would die.
‘President of calm’
Soon afterward, in May 1990, Iliescu was formally elected by a large majority under the slogan that he was a “president of calm.” But this calm was false: Iliescu repeatedly had thousands of miners brought to Bucharest from the Schiltal valley in western Romania to bludgeon opposition politicians and regime critics.
The worst of these so-called “mineriads” took place in June 1990, when a student protest camp on Bucharest University Square was “eliminated” and miners beat student leader Marian Munteanu nearly to death. Afterward, Iliescu thanked them for their “high civic consciousness.”
As head of state, he successfully transformed the “National Salvation Front,” which had taken over governing after the fall of Ceausescu, into a rallying point for former Communist Party functionaries, secret service collaborators, Ceausescu henchmen and former company directors under the label of the Social Democratic Party (PSD).
However, Iliescu could not prevent Romanian society from slowly democratizing against him. At the end of 1996, he and his party were voted out of power, the first truly free and democratically legitimized regime change in Romanian history. Iliescu resigned himself to the inevitable and did not call for violence after he was voted out of power.
Romania’s late savior
Later, in 2000, he made a comeback and saved Romania from the fascist Greater Romania ideologue Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a poet and former employee of the notorious Securitate secret service, in a run-off election for the presidency. Iliescu won, though many of his critics voted for him only to avoid civil war and a new dictatorship. Thus, Ion Iliescu’s great longing for “national reconciliation” was weakly fulfilled, at least for a short time.
Iliescu would have liked to go down in history as a symbol of this reconciliation, but it was not to be. Those who perished after Ceausescu’s escape, as well as the victims of the mineriads instigated by Iliescu, remained a shadow over any contributions for which he might have been honored.
Commissions and public prosecutors investigated him for over three decades — an odyssey for the bereaved and those affected. In the end, Iliescu was never compelled to appear in court. And while the public also never stopped asking him questions, he did not show any real remorse. Ion Iliescu died on August 5 at the age of 95.
This article was originally written in German.
