Over and over, as if to exorcise the evil of Nicolae Ceausescu's ironfisted 24-year reign, national television last week replayed the taped record of his final ignominious hours. Haggard, wrapped in a fur-lined overcoat, his hair in tangles, he sat with his wife Elena behind two folding tables pushed together to form a makeshift dock.
He had been so confident of his power: only a week earlier, he had ordered his security forces to fire on demonstrators in the city of Timisoara, near the border with Yugoslavia, as he flew off for an official visit to Iran. Now, under arrest and facing a military tribunal, he did not seem to understand or accept his defeat. He raged at his judges, who were not shown on the tape, insisted that he would answer only to the "working class" and refused to address the prosecutor's charges that he had destroyed Rumania. Within a bare two hours, the Ceausescus were found guilty of genocide, with "more than 60,000 victims," and of gross abuse of the power of the state.
At dusk on Christmas Day, wearing their overcoats, he and Elena, the second most powerful figure in the country, were executed, without blindfolds, before a barracks wall at the Boteni army camp outside Bucharest. There had been 300 volunteers for the three-man firing squad, a military spokesman who had been present said later, and the actual execution was not filmed because some of the soldiers began shooting as soon as they faced the Ceausescus.
The ashen face of the dictator, eyes open, blood oozing from his head, leaped almost instantly onto TV screens in Rumania and around the world. Many Rumanians wept or cheered in relief. Soviet viewers saw parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution and the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family. In Paris editorial writers recalled the French Revolution and suggested it was 1789 in Rumania -- with some of the same ambiguities of that upheaval.
Others were chilled. In China the Rumanian revolution was read as a cautionary tale of what could have happened in Beijing last year had the army not crushed the pro-democracy movement -- and what might still come to pass. Communist Party officials in Beijing put out a directive telling their cadres how to interpret the revolution that swept across Eastern Europe last year, the result of the subversion of socialism by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In the Arab world several newspapers pointedly reminded oppressive regimes that tyranny could not be maintained forever and that strongmen in the region should take heed.
Comparisons with 1789 and 1917 are not out of place. The old order in Rumania has passed, but the bloodshed is not over, and the shape of a new order is not yet discernible. Euphoria collides with the reality of post- Ceausescu life: unrelenting poverty, political confusion, ethnic tension. Rumanians may be jubilant, but they are also fearful of the uncharted world into which they have been pitched. Ceausescu is gone, but the real revolution is just beginning.