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In the capital and other parts of the country, several days of heavy fighting between the army and holdout members of the Securitate, Ceausescu's omnipresent secret police, were followed by sporadic sniping and skirmishing. In front of the all-seeing television cameras at Bucharest's national TV studio, where tanks and troops had beaten back several determined Securitate assaults, a self-appointed 60-member National Salvation Front took charge of the country and named a transitional government until free elections, promised for April, could be held. In short order, demonstrators stormed back into the streets to oppose the inclusion of former senior party and government officials in the administration. "No more communists," they chanted, "no more Ceausescus."
New political parties -- the first rivals to communism in 45 years -- were being formed. The caretaker government set out to erase the most despised features of Ceausescu's Big Brother regime, but the only cohesive organization left to enforce the new decrees seemed to be the army, whose turning against Ceausescu and his Securitate had rescued the revolution from failure.
Even before the Ceausescus were executed, civilians had moved to assert authority over the army as well as the country. Television, which once beamed | out only the glory of Ceausescu, then helped topple him, became the heart and voice of the new government. The National Salvation Front gathered at the studio to announce that the revolution had triumphed -- and set about trying to steer it into calmer channels. The Front ordered all those who had seized or been issued firearms to turn them in and instructed revolutionary committees that had sprung up around the country to be "immediately subordinated" to it.
Two days later, a 37-member provisional government threw out some of the most odious of Ceausescu's laws. It abolished the Securitate and canceled the so-called systematization in the countryside, under which thousands of villages were to be destroyed in the name of progress and peasants forced to move into high-rise apartment complexes. It legalized abortion, which had been prohibited by Ceausescu in an effort to increase the labor force in a country that now has a population of 23 million. It ended food rationing, provided enough power to allow citizens to turn up the heat in their houses and apartments, and made it illegal to refuse medical treatment to the elderly, a policy Ceausescu had enforced to keep the population young. No total overhaul of the economy would be undertaken until after elections, but the caretakers canceled food exports and took steps to improve distribution and relieve widespread shortages.
Rumania is potentially a prosperous country, but Ceausescu's compulsion to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt led him to sell most of the country's oil and food production abroad and ration everything at home. Last week supplies his regime had hoarded for export -- and for the old communist elite -- were rushed into empty stores, and shoppers were dazzled to find meat, oranges, coffee and chocolate, the kind of goods that had not been available to them for years.