12th December 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
‘December 21st – 10.30 am on Palace Square, Bucharest “Please move back “, said the tall Securitate official. Three diplomats moved back a few steps onto the now empty square. “I asked you to move – please move back “, he ordered again – in surprisingly refined and clear English. He was wearing a long […]
Read more on Romanian Revolution through British Eyes/ Bernard Marshall: ‘Two days of the Romanian Christmas Revolution in December 1989’ (Chapter I) | Reply
11th December 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
The calm before December 1989 is as memorable to me as experiencing the revolution itself. Roll back a year to November 1988 and my arrival in a city blanketed by ice, snow and grey slush. More horse and carts on the airport road than cars and an introduction to faded and frozen communist grandeur through […]
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10th December 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
September 17th 1989 Teresa and I arrived in Bucharest to take up our appointment in the Defence Section. November The 14th party congress of the Romanian Communist Party was held during a bitterly cold period. Some cynically said that if that weather had continued through December there would not have been a revolution. 15th to […]
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10th December 2014
Bucharest, Romania
The Santa Marta Conference – organised jointly by the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police Service and the Bishops Conference – brought together stakeholders, civil society, national law enforcement authorities from both supply and demand countries and leaders of religious congregations, to look at practical ways to join up in the work against modern slavery and […]
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9th December 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
‘Although I spent four months in Romania covering the revolution from early January 1990 through until world attention faded, my reasons for being there – I was officially Middle East Correspondent of the Times based in Cairo – bore more resemblance to Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious satire, Scoop, than any hard-nosed, tale of derring-do. For personal […]
Read more on Romanian Revolution through British Eyes/Christopher Walker: ‘Scoop with real bullets’ | Reply
8th December 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
‘Romania’s “televised revolution” was the most exciting event of 1989, that momentous year when country after country fell out of the crushing embrace of the Soviet Union. The fall of the Berlin Wall provided the main drama of that year and the revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the other central European countries were smooth […]
Read more on Romanian Revolution through British Eyes/Rupert Wolfe Murray: ‘ROMANIA: Memories of a Revolution’ | Reply
5th December 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
Continued from 04 December ‘I have recounted this incident in an effort to give some sense of the atmosphere reigning in Bucharest in the immediate aftermath of Ceauşescu’s overthrow. Paranoia, mistrust, uncertainty about the future, a glut of firearms in circulation, some in the hands of young men fired by machismo, who had little idea […]
Read more on Romanian Revolution through British Eyes/Dennis Deletant: ‘Revisiting the 1989 Romanian Revolution: Some Personal Reflections’ (chapter II) | Reply (1)
4th December 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
‘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 […]
Read more on Romanian Revolution through British Eyes/Dennis Deletant: ‘Revisiting the 1989 Romanian Revolution: Some Personal Reflections’ (chapter I) | Reply
3rd December 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
‘I had already made the flight from Cluj to Bucharest on a number of occasions and it was rarely, if ever, a joyful occasion. The trip on 21st December 1989 was no exception as there was tension amongst the passengers, the airport staff and the flight crew. Even my Securitate-sponsored minder, technically a colleague in […]
Read more on Romanian Revolution through British Eyes/Nigel Townson: ‘Remember, remember, that distant December’ | Reply
18th November 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
It was a privilege for me to lay a wreath last Sunday at the Bucharest War Cemetery in Tâncăbeşti, on behalf of the British Government, in a ceremony honouring the British and Commonwealth servicemen and women killed in the First World War and more recent conflicts, as well as those from other countries who gave […]
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