Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion and Utopia

Betrayed Promises: Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Romanian Communist Party, and the Crisis of 1968

Vladimir Tismaneanu and BoGdan iacoB Betrayed Promises Nicolae Ceauşescu, the romanian Communist Party, and the Crisis of 1968 There are moments in history that indelibly mark the memories of their contemporaries. The balcony scene on August 21, 1968, when Nicolae Ceauşescu, general secretary of the rCP, addressed a crowd of over 100,000 from the Central Committee building in one of Bucharest’s main squares and vehemently condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia a few hours after the Warsaw Pact intervention, a scene that became a national-communist legend, was eulogized by many as a gesture of heroic proportions: the romanian David valiantly defying the soviet Goliath. it was in fact nothing but a skillful masquerade , but it worked: a power-obsessed neo-stalinist leader without the slightest democratic inclinations succeeded overnight in awakening popular enthusiasm and gaining enthusiastic credit from a population convinced that romania would follow the line of liberalization and rapprochement with the West.1 ironically, it was precisely from the same fateful balcony that Ceauşescu delivered his last speech to the romanians, on December 21, 1989, when he portrayed the revolutionaries in Timişoara and Bucharest as “counter-revolutionary hoodlums ” on the payroll of foreign intelligence services and other sworn enemies of the cause of socialism. This time, however, the old trick did not work: Ceauşescu was angrily booed and had to leave the building by helicopter to an unknown destination together with his wife elena.2 1 see Vladimir Tismaneanu’s chapter “iluzia utopiei şi promisunile trădate: semnificaţile anului 1968” in his Naufragiul utopiei: Anul revoluţionar 1989 (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2009). 2 Dennis Deletant recently presented, on the basis of declassified archival material , the transition undergone by Ceauşescu’s attitude within the Warsaw Pact, from opposing intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to advocati4 Promises.indb 257 2010.10.18. 14:31 258 Promises of 1968 They were both executed on Christmas Day under hyperbolic charges (genocide, huge foreign bank accounts, etc.). Twenty years earlier, nobody could have predicted this bloody dénouement. At that moment, Ceauşescu was regarded as a maverick communist, a true reformer, and a courageous peer of marshal Tito’s in the resistance to soviet hegemonism. Bucharest was one of eastern europe’s capitals courted both by Western officials (Charles de Gaulle visited romania in April 1968, richard Nixon in 1969) and leaders of increasingly autonomous Communist parties (Luigi Longo, enrico Berlinguer, and Giancarlo Pajetta from italy, Waldeck rochet and Jean Kanapa from france, mitsos Partsalidis, Panayotis Dimitriou, and Zisis Zografos from the Greek Communist Party–interior, franz muhri and franz marek of Austria and most frequently santiago Carrillo, Dolores ibarruri, and manuel Azcarate of spain).3 for Ceauşescu and his associates, the Prague spring’s failure served to justify the dogma of the indefectible unity of party, leader, and nation. The party’s leader was simultaneously the main author of doctrine, the visionary genius, and the “architect of the national destiny.” The slogan “Partidul, Ceauşescu, romania” was ubiquitous at the time and would be deployed extensively until the very end. Ceauşescu’s August 21 speech therefore emphasized first and foremost the unity of the party leadership and the symbiotic relationship between party and people. But it also reassured the party old Guard ing military action against solidarność in the summer of 1989. see Dennis Deletant, “‘Taunting the Bear’: romania and the Warsaw Pact, 1963–89,” Cold War History 7, no. 4 (2007), 495–507. for an account of the anticlimax of Ceauşescu’s post-1968 rule, see Pavel Câmpeanu, Ceauşescu: The Countdown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 3 in January 1968, at the Twelfth Central Committee Plenum, the Greek Communist Party split between the pro-soviet Kostas Kollyannis faction and the exponents of an anti-stalinist platform. The latter had close relations with militants jailed by the colonels’ dictatorship (the best known was Leonidas Kyrkos). in 1969, the KKe (interior) was represented at the Tenth rCP Congress by former eDA (Union of Democratic Left) leaders Haralambos Drakopoulos and Antonis Brillakis. The person in charge of Greek and spanish communist affairs within the romanian Central Committee was Ghizela Vass, a party veteran and head for more than twenty years of the party’s international department. Her deputy was stefan Andrei, later to serve as Ceauşescu’s foreign minister. i4 Promises.indb 258 2010.10.18. 14:31 [3.21.97.61] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 02...