Through the looking glass

National Review, Nov 4, 1991 by Florin Bican, Noel Malcolm

Rumania's experience shows that the most thorough revolutions are not the quickest ones.

THE RED QUEEN would feel strangely at home in Rumania, a place where distortion has become the accepted order of things. And only Lewis Carroll, surely, could have thought up the events of the last week of September, when the miners returned to the streets of Bucharest.

In June of last year, these same miners were channeled into Bucharest to crack down on the anti-government demonstration that had been going on for seven weeks in University Square. Rumania's fragile" democracy, to use President Iliescu's term of endearment, was restored with not so fragile clubs and iron bars. During those days the miners were supplied with food and shelter by the government, and at the end they were publicly thanked by the president. Then, as soon as they were gone, the government denied having had anything to do with them, and commissioned an official inquiry which declared that the opposition parties had "provoked" the miners' rampage (which had included smashing up the opposition parties' headquarters). In the government media, the president avoided all blame and the opposition evaded all sympathy.

That was a curious state of affairs; but this September's return visit by the miners was curiouser and curiouser. This time it was the government-at least, the prime minister and his council of ministers-that the miners were trying to destroy, while members of the opposition stood (a little timidly) on the sidelines and applauded. The government media denounced these "grave disorders," referring not, as they had done last year, to "the workers," but to "aggressive groups in society." The state-run television carried long, sympathetic interviews in hospitals with people whose noses had been broken by the miners, showing a good deal more interest in such reportage than they had done in June 1990. And the government itself, having first of all denounced the miners as unreconstructed Communists, changed its mind after a day or two and blamed their visit on-yes, you've guessed-the opposition.

The Cheshire Cat

AS FOR President Iliescu's precise political position, the only thing you could still be sure of was his grin. For the miners' actions brought to a climax (whether by chance or by design) a long-running power struggle between him and his prime minister, Petre Roman. Rumor had it that Roman was planning to oust two of Iliescu's most trusty henchmen, the speakers of the Senate (Birladenau) and the Chamber of Deputies (Martsian). He was also apparently planning to eject Iliescu's right-hand man, Virgil Magureanu, from his position as head of the new Securitate, the so-called "Rumanian Information Service." Thanks to the miners, it was Roman who found himself ejected. No one could claim that the miners were under Iliescu's direct control this time (they called for his dismissal too), but in a curiously familiar fashion he seemed to end up with all of the advantage and none of the blame. But Roman, an intensely ambitious politician, is fighting back already, and may be the real gainer in the long run. In fact the only real loser is the democratic opposition, who have yet to realize that being sidelined is much more damaging in politics than being hit over the head.

How has this strange state of affairs come about? Again, one needs a Carrollian sense of logic. The reason why Rumania's plight is so much worse than that of neighboring countries such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia is that she, unlike they, had a revolution. In countries where power slipped gradually out of the Communists' hands, everyone could see who were the Communists and who were the forces of democratic reform. But in Rumania the change happened almost overnight: that is why so little changed. The same apparatchiks could come to work the next day, sit behind the same desks, and carry on in the same powerful but repressive non-jobs; the only difference was that now they were wearing revolutionary armbands and telling everyone, Yes, we are with the revolution." It is difficult to kick out people who have been proclaiming themselves supporters of the revolution for just as long as you have-i.e., since last Friday.

President Iliescu, a former protege and volleyball partner of Ceausescu, knew exactly how and when to sport his own revolutionary armband. On December 22, 1989, while Bucharest and many of the country's major cities were raked by gunfire, he announced that a "power vacuum" had occurred. His next step was to ease himself into the vacuum" in the reliable company of his friends, and-hey, presto!-we have the first vacuum-packed government in history.

Vacuum-packing is a method for preserving things; and the status quo was preserved more thoroughly in Rumania than anywhere else. Only the names have been changed a little: instead of Communists we have "neoCommunists" or "reformed Communists"-a phrase uncomfortably reminiscent of reformed criminals. Reform of the latter is usually a laborious process taking a significant amount of time. And even so, the reformed criminals are not usually invited to run the prisons. Rumanian ex-Communists, still running the show by popular demand, certainly did not undergo such a process. On December 22, the very day of the so-called revolution, Iliescu sat in a TV studio and announced that Communism was a good thing spoiled by bad people. Later, the recording of this program was barred from being broadcast on the grounds that it would play into the hands of the opposition.