Romanian Revolution through British Eyes/Dennis Deletant: ‘Revisiting the 1989 Romanian Revolution: Some Personal Reflections’ (chapter I)

‘The Romanian revolution was for me, my own personal revolution. It brought me – to use Andy Warhol’s expression – my ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ for it catapulted me and Romanian studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University of London, into the public eye. On 16 December 1989, I was watching television news coverage at home featuring protests in Timişoara, when the telephone rang. It was a call from John Simpson, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent of BBC Television, inviting me to come down to the news centre in Wood Lane to discuss the situation in Romania. Earlier in the year, in May, John had asked me to suggest contacts in Romania for a documentary which he was fronting on Ceauşescu’s draconian austerity measures and his plans to ‘phase out’ i.e. destroy, up to half of Romania’s 14,000 villages.

John had wanted me to accompany him on that visit but I was unable to do so since I had been declared persona non grata in the previous December by the Romanian authorities for my ‘hostile comments in the British media on the Romanian regime.’[1]  Now, a car was sent to pick me up and I brought John up to date with Ceauşescu’s attempts to shore up his regime by ever-increasing appeals to national unity and stage-managed displays of ‘support’ for his policies, culminating in his address to the Fourteenth Party Conference on 20 November 1989 for which he received more than thirty standing ovations.[2]

On 20 December, after Ceauşescu’s televised address to his people which was monitored by the BBC, John put me on the spot by asking, ‘Well, Dennis, is this the end for Ceauşescu or not ?’ Until Timişoara I had been confident that Ceauşescu would buck the trend for change in Central Europe but his appearance on television flanked by his stony-faced gerontocratic wife, and an almost fossilized Politburo, instilled in me a conviction that this moment marked the beginning of the end of his regime and I replied, ‘Yes.’ ‘Right, then I’m off to Romania but I want you to be my anchor here in my office while I am away’, was his response. And so began a week of virtually uninterrupted work for me in Wood Lane – I did not return home for two nights but slept in an office at the BBC. As ‘anchor’ in London I had access to the reports from the major international news agencies as they came through on a teleprinter, as well as to television ‘feeds’ from camera crews from thirty-six international TV companies dispersed around Romania.

On 26 December, John, who had entered Romania with a camera-crew by road from Yugoslavia since Bucharest’s Otopeni airport had been closed after a serious friendly-fire incident, called me from the Romanian capital with an invitation to join him with a second crew on the assumption that with Ceauşescu’s execution the previous day, the ban on my entry to the country would no longer be applied. On 29 December, I flew to Warsaw with two BBC camera crews and reporters, and after a four-hour wait we caught a Balkan airlines flight to Sofia.[3] Upon arrival we slept fitfully on the floor of the airport until we secured cars for the journey overland to Bucharest. The cars were two dark-blue Mercedes hired from Hertz, and a black jeep, the latter driven by a Bulgarian who was accompanied by what we took to a security officer, in mufti. We drove gingerly through deep snow up to the Danube at Ruse where, barely awake after our previous sleepless the night, we decided to rest before crossing into Romania. At dinner in our hotel we met up with a couple of British reporters who had just come out of Romania en route to the UK. In my state of exhaustion their graphic accounts of shooting in Bucharest failed to move me in any way but did make enough of impact for the two news producers, who had clearly come well-prepared for signalling our affiliation, to unfurl two large Union Jacks and secure them over the bonnets of each of the Mercedes.

At daybreak on the next morning, 31 December, we drove in our lone convoy of three vehicles across the Danube bridge to the Romanian frontier at Giurgiu. As the only speaker of Romanian in our group I acted as spokesperson, explaining to the duty passport officer that we were joining another BBC team already in Bucharest, and without much ado, and payment of forty dollars for each of the visas, which he stamped into our passports, he wished us well, warning us that there had been sporadic shooting in some of the villages on our route to Bucharest. In fact, in every village through which we passed during our sixty-kilometre journey, the inhabitants, men, women and children, applauded us, giving the Churchillian V- for-Victory sign, in recognition perhaps both of our flag as well as their own victory over oppression. We reached Bucharest at midday and joined John Simpson at the Intercontinental Hotel. Two of the windows in my room, on the eleventh floor, had bullet holes. John advised me not to stray in front of them, to pull the curtains at night, and use only the table lamps because snipers were still active.

Fear of snipers certainly kept Bucharesters off the streets at nightfall, a state that I soon became acutely aware of that very evening since John asked me to accompany him by car to a district in the south of the city to interview the widow of a young man who had been shot on the evening of 22 December during anti-Ceauşescu protests. Occasional gun-shots could be heard as the car, driven by our cameraman, made its way slowly through several inches of snow. At one point the tyres lost their grip and we were stuck, a lone vehicle under the light of a single street-lamp, at the foot of the half-completed Casa Republicii, Ceauşescu’s gigantic palace, the largest building in Europe, shrouded in darkness. As further cracks of gun-fire rang out close by, John turned to me, sitting in the back seat beside Wendy, red-head Welsh producer, and said, ‘Well, Dennis, you’re expendable, please get out and give us a push.’ He then smiled, got out of the car with me, and we together we lost no time in putting our combined weight behind the boot. To our relief, the wheels gripped immediately and we smartly resumed our seats.

But was not the last of our hitches. Without a street map, and in a virtual blackout – the product of Ceauşescu’s energy-saving measures – we could not locate the widow’s address which I was aware was close to an army barracks. Anxious to get directions, I wound down my window and called out to a woman trudging through the snow carrying two bulging plastic bags. When I asked for her help, she dropped the bags and screamed, ‘Securitate, securitate’. Immediately people rushed from their houses and surrounded our car. I got out and produced my passport, hoping that the woman would realize from my accent and physiognomy that I was not Romanian, but in her hysteria she shrieked, ‘We know you Securitate people’ and pointing to our Mercedes (no longer with its Union Jack), ‘you use dark cars with special number plates (we had Bulgarian plates), and fake identity.’ I then asked Wendy to get out of the car and said calmly to the woman, ‘Look, do you really think that this lady is Securitate, no, she is from the BBC, we are all from the BBC.’

In the front rank of the crowd was an elderly man who had been following this exchange intently. He now stepped forward, put his hand on the lady’s arm to calm her down, and then, with a smile, said, ‘I believe you, you must understand that our desire to see the end of Ceauşescu has created a sense of paranoia in many. How can we help ?’ I translated his words for our team. His trust in us satisfied the crowd which quickly dispersed. In fact, we happened to be only a street away from the widow’s home. The elderly man knew her and walked alongside the car until we reached her house. His presence seemed to reassure the widow, who with a young child holding her hand, invited us in. After the interview John discretely gave her a wad of banknotes and we returned to our car, and to the hotel.[4]’ To be continued

BY  Dennis Deletant

Historian, University College London

[1] John and his camera crew were detained by the Securitate in Cluj for several hours and their video-tape ‘wiped’ and returned to them. What the Securitate did not know was that the BBC had the technology to restore ‘wiped’ tapes and upon John’s return he asked me to translate interviews recorded with Romanians.

[2] After the meeting with John I was driven to the World Service studios at Bush House where I gave what was to become an almost daily series of interviews on events in Romania until 29 December when I left for the country to join John.

[3] One crew, reporter, and director worked for BBC 2, the second for BBC Breakfast News.

[4] The interview was included in one of John’s pieces from Bucharest and after it was shown, elicited a number of donations from viewers which were sent to the BBC – including a particularly generous one from a lady in Belgium. On a subsequent visit to Bucharest, a couple of months later, I went to the widow’s home to hand over the monies, but she had moved away without leaving a forwarding address with her neighbours. I returned the Belgian lady’s donation to her, and the other sums to the BBC.

Disclaimer: This account does not represent the view of the Her Majesty’s British Government, but is a personal recollection of the December 1989 events in Romania.