this might be a unique historical case, if I am not mistaken. People went into the streets, calling not just for the downfall of the president then, but for the change of the political regime, and that is what we call a revolution. This revolution triumphed, because today we have neither communism, nor even neocommunism with a human face. The European Union would not have accepted a communist state among its ranks. The organizers of the coup d'etat foresaw only the replacement of the dictator and the maintenance of a communist/neocommunist system, in which they did not succeed, although there are those who still hope that it would have succeeded. Some talk about the stealing of the revolution, but the reality is that we live in capitalism, even if what we have experienced in these years has been more an attempt at 17 capitalism, orchestrated by an oligarchy with diverse interests...

This is indeed the great and perhaps tragic irony of what happened in December 1989 in Romania: 18 without the Revolution, the Coup might well have failed, but without the Coup, neither would the Revolution have succeeded. The latter is particularly difficult for the rigidly ideological and politically partisan to accept; yet it is more than merely a talking point and legitimating alibi of the second-rung 19 nomenklatura who seized power (although it is that too). The very atomization of Romanian society that had been fueled and exploited by the Ceausescu regime explained why Romania came last in the wave of Fall 1989, but also why it was and would have been virtually impossible for genuine representatives of society - led by dissidents and protesters - to form an alternative governing body on 22 December whose decisions would have been accepted as sufficiently authoritative to be respected and implemented by the rump party-state bureaucracy, especially the armed forces and security and police structures . The chaos that would have ensued - with likely multiple alternative power centers, including geographically - would have likely led to a far greater death toll and could have enabled those still betting on the return of the Ceausescus to after a time reconquer power or seriously impede the functioning of any new government for an extended period. The fact that the Revolution enabled the coup plotters to seize power, and that the coup enabled the Revolution to triumph should be identified as yet another version - one particular to the idiosyncracies of the Romanian communist regime - of what Linz and Stepan have identified as the costs or compromises of the transition from authoritarian rule. In Poland, for example, this meant that 65 percent of the Sejm was elected in non-competitive elections, but given co-equal authority with the Senate implying that 'a body with nondemocratic origins was given an important role in the drafting of a democratic constitution'; in fact, Poland's first completely competitive elections to both houses of Parliament occurred only in October 1991, fully two years after the formation of the first Solidarity 20 government in August 1989. In Romania, this meant that second-rung nomenklaturists - a displaced generation of elites eager to finally have their day in the sun - who to a large extent still harbored only Gorbachevian perestroikist views of the changes in the system as being necessary, were able to consolidate power following the elimination of the ruling Ceausescu couple. The self-description by senior Front officials (Ion Iliescu) and media promoters (such as Darie Novaceanu in Adevarul ) of the FSN (National Salvation Front) as the 'emanation of the Revolution' does not seem 21 justified. It seems directly tied to two late January 1990 events -the decision of the Front's leaders to run as a political party in the first post-Ceausescu elections and the contestation from the street of