Romanian Revolution of 1989

In the second half of December 1989, a protest in the western city of Timișoara grew within days into a nationwide uprising that toppled Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Communist leader of Romania since 1965. Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled Bucharest, were captured, and were shot on Christmas Day after a summary military trial. It was the last and the only violent overthrow of a Communist government in the Warsaw Pact during the Revolutions of 1989, and well over a thousand people may have died.

From 1981 Ceaușescu imposed harsh austerity in order to pay off Romania's foreign debt. Food, fuel and heating were rationed, and living standards fell sharply, even after the debt was cleared in 1989. The Securitate secret police kept the population under pervasive surveillance, and a personality cult surrounded the leader and his wife. Ceaușescu had won Western sympathy in 1968 by condemning the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, but at home he resisted the reforms Mikhail Gorbachev was urging. In November 1989, as Communist regimes fell elsewhere, he was re-elected party leader and the official press ignored the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On 16 December members of Timișoara's Hungarian community gathered to stop the eviction of László Tőkés, a Reformed Church pastor who had criticised the regime. Passers-by joined them, and by evening the crowd was chanting anti-Communist slogans. Over the next days security forces and the army used tear gas, water cannon and live fire, and many protesters were killed. Ceaușescu left for a visit to Iran, leaving others to deal with the unrest. By 20 December workers had flooded into the city and around 100,000 people filled the central square, while workers brought in by train to break up the protests instead joined them.

Back in Bucharest, Ceaușescu called a mass rally for 21 December to show that the country stood behind him. A minute or so into his speech from the balcony of the Central Committee building, shouting broke out in the crowd, and live television showed the leader faltering in confusion before the broadcast was cut. The rally turned into a revolt. That night protesters in the city centre were shot at, beaten and run over by armoured vehicles, and fighting went on into the early hours.

On the morning of 22 December the defence minister, Vasile Milea, died of a gunshot wound; an investigation in 2005 concluded it was suicide, though some disputed this. Many soldiers believed he had been killed for refusing to fire on crowds, and the army went over to the protesters. His successor, Victor Stănculescu, quietly sent troops back to barracks and persuaded Ceaușescu to leave. As crowds stormed the party headquarters, the couple escaped by helicopter from the roof. They were caught near Târgoviște that afternoon.

A new body, the National Salvation Front led by Ion Iliescu, took power. On 25 December an improvised military tribunal convicted the Ceaușescus of genocide and other crimes after a hearing of about two hours, and they were shot immediately; footage was broadcast around the world. Meanwhile confused street fighting raged in Bucharest and elsewhere, with troops and armed civilians firing at supposed Securitate "terrorists". Most of the deaths came after Ceaușescu's fall, but historians have found no evidence of an organised loyalist resistance, and much of the shooting seems to have been between forces on the same side.

Casualty figures vary: official counts give 689 dead, while another tally records 1,104 dead and about 3,350 wounded, most after 22 December. The Front won elections in May 1990, but its roots in the old party leadership and the violent suppression of protests by miners brought into Bucharest left lasting suspicion that the revolution had been hijacked. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007.

Our 1985 map shows Romania under Communist rule as part of the Soviet bloc, and the 1994 map shows the post-Communist state with the same borders.