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All that was popular, but not enough to win universal support for the narrowly based provisional government. Rumanians are troubled by some of the men who assumed control. Several of the leading figures are communists -- dissident and reformist communists of the Gorbachev variety, to be sure, but still tainted by membership at one point or another in Ceausescu's machine. The President, Ion Iliescu, 59, is a former Central Committee Secretary who was demoted in the early 1970s after complaining to Ceausescu about nepotism in the party. Vice President Dumitru Mazilu is also a lifelong communist whose career ground to a halt after he clashed with the dictator. ^ The same is true of General Nikolai Militaru, the Defense Minister. Should old bosses, even if disgraced under Ceausescu, run the country's affairs?
Student demonstrators, who triggered the revolution, said no -- and emphatically so. They poured into Palace Square only hours after the caretaker government was announced. In the shadow of the burned-out, bullet-pocked presidential palace and Communist Party Central Committee building, they marched over the refuse of the struggle, crunching through broken glass, lost shoes, burned wood and ash. "We are not leaving!" they yelled. One young man in the crowd told Western correspondents, "We don't want more communists. We want freedom." Valentin Gabrielescu, a 68-year-old lathe operator standing at the edge of the demonstration, agreed. "I do not believe in good or bad communists, just communists. They are all crooks," he said.
Most Rumanians associate communism with tyranny and deprivation, and are not likely to trust even its reformers for long. Like Gorbachev, some of the postrevolution leaders hope to rebuild the Communist Party, not abolish it. Others are uncertain. Newly appointed Prime Minister Petre Roman, for example, admitted last week that the party might not have a future. "I don't know if it will survive," he said. Vice President Mazilu went further. "Rumania is no longer a communist country," he said. "Rumania is a free land, and we will create a real democracy."
Yet even if the party is destined for the trash heap, not all its members -- 3.8 million before the revolution -- can be ruled out of public life, and some may in time prove their worth. In any case, practicality demands that the government retain at least part of the old bureaucracy in the interest of survival. "What can we do?" asked Corneliu Bogdan, the Deputy Foreign Minister. "There is no question of vengeance." But, he added, "we hope gradually to weed out all the top officials who supported Ceausescu." That kind of compromise made many newly liberated Rumanians uneasy about a potential alliance between the army and the bureaucracy -- and a possible new dictatorship in the making. Said Doina Cornea, a longtime dissident and a founder of the National Christian Peasant Party: "We don't need central control anymore."