the Front's leaders' legitimacy to rule and to run in those elections. It also seems difficult to defend objectively as a legitimate description, since even according to their own accounts, senior Front officials had been in contact with one another and discussed overthrowing the Ceausescus prior to the Revolution, since there had existed no real competing non-Ceausescu regime alternative on 22 December 1989 (an argument they themselves make), and since they had clearly not been elected to office. Moreover, when senior former Front officials, Iliescu among them, point to their winning of two- thirds of the votes for the new parliament in May 1990 and Iliescu's 85 percent vote for the presidency, the numbers in and of themselves - even beyond the by now pretty obvious and substantiated manipulation, surveillance, and intimidation of opposition parties, candidates, movements and civil society/non-governmental organizations that characterized the election campaign - are a red flag to the tainted and only partly free and fair character of those founding elections. But if the FSN and Ion Iliescu cannot be accurately and legitimately described as the 'emanation of the 22 Revolution,' it also seems reasonable to suggest that the term 'stolen revolution' is somewhat unfair. The term 'stolen revolution' inevitably suggests a central, identifiable, and sufficiently coherent ideological character of the revolution and the presence of an alternative non-Ceausescu, non-Front leadership that could have ensured the retreat of Ceausescu forces and been able to govern and administer the country in the days and weeks that followed. The absence of the latter was pretty clear on 22 December 1989 - Iasi, Timisoara, and Arad among others, had local, authentic nuclei leading local movements (for example, the FDR, Frontul Democrat Roman), but no direct presence in Bucharest - and the so-called Dide and Verdet '22 minute' alternative governments were even more heavily compromised by former high-ranking communist dignitary inclusion than the FSN was (the one with the least, headed by Dumitru Mazilu, was rapidly overtaken and incorporated into the FSN). As to the question of the ideological character of the revolt against Ceausescu, it is once again instructive to turn to what a direct participant, in this case in the Timisoara protests, has to say about it. 23 Marius Mioc , who participated in the defense of Pastor Tokes' residence and in the street th demonstrations that grew out of it, was arrested, interrogated, and beaten from the 16 until his nd release with other detainees on the 22 and who has written with longstanding hostility toward former Securitate and party officials, IIiescu, the FSN, and their successors, gives a refreshingly honest account of those demonstrations that is in stark contrast to the often hyperpoliticized, post-facto interpretations of December 1989 prefered by ideologues:

I don't know if the 1989 revolution was as solidly anticommunist as is the fashion to say today. Among the declarations from the balcony of the Opera in Timisoara were some such as 'we don't want capitalism, we want democratic socialism , ' and at the same time the names of some local PCR [communist] dignitaries were shouted. These things shouldn't be generalized, they could have been tactical declarations, and there existed at the same time the slogans 'Down with communism!' and flags with the [communist] emblem cut out, which implicitly signified a break from communism. [But] the Revolution did not have a clear ideological orientation, but 24 rather demanded free elections and the right to free speech.