## Romania, December 1989: a Revolution, a Coup d'etat, AND a Counter-Revolution

This December marks twenty years since the implosion of the communist regimeof Dictator Nicolae 10 Ceausescu. It is well-known, but bears repeating: Romania not only came late in the wave of communist regime collapse in the East European members of the Warsaw Pact in the fall of 1989 11 (Poland, Hungary, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria), it came last - and inevitably that was significant. Despite the more highly personalist (vs. corporate) nature of the Ceausescu regime, the higher level of fear and deprivation that characterized society, and the comparative insulation from the rest of the East European Warsaw Pact states, Romania could not escape the implications of the collapse of the other 12 communist party-states. Despite the differences, there simply were too many institutional and ideological similarities, or as is often most importantly the case, that is how members of both the state and society interpreted matters. 'Going last' [in turn, in show] almost inevitably implies that the 13 14 opportunities for mimicry, for opportunism, for simulation on the one hand and dissimulation on the other, are greater than for the predecessors …and, indeed, one can argue that some of what we saw in Romania in December 1989 reflects this. Much of the debate about what happened in December 1989 has revolved around how to define those 15 events…and their consequences . [These can be analytically distinct categories and depending on how one defines things, solely by focusing on the events themselves or the consequences, or some combination thereof, will inevitably shape the answer one gets]. The primary fulcrum or axis of the definitional debate has been between whether December 1989 and its aftermath were/have been a revolution or a coup d'etat . But Romanian citizens and foreign observers have long since improvised linguistically to capture the hybrid and unclear nature of the events and their consequences. Perhaps the most neutral, cynical, and fatalistic is the common 'evenimentele din decembrie 1989'- the events of December 1989 - but it should also be pointed out that the former Securitate and Ceausescu nostalgics have also embraced, incorporated and promoted, such terminology. More innovative are terms such as rivolutie (an apparent invocation of or allusion to the famous Romanian satirist Ion Luca 16 Caragiale's 1880 play Conu Leonida fata cu reactiunea , where he used the older colloquial spelling revulutie ) or lovilutie (a term apparently coined by the humorists at Academia Catavencu , and combining the Romanian for coup d'etat, lovitura de stat , and the Romanian for revolution, revolutie ). The following characterization of what happened in December 1989 comes from an online poster, Florentin, who was stationed at the Targoviste barracks - the exact location where Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu would be summarily tried and executed on 25 December 1989. Although his definitions may be too economically-based for my taste - authoritarianism/dictatorship vs. democracy would be preferable -and the picture he presents may be oversimplified at points, the poster's characterization shows that sometimes the unadorned straighttalk of the plainspoken citizen can cut to the chase better than many an academic tome:

I did my military service, in Targoviste, in fact in the barracks at which the Ceausescu couple were executed…It appears that a coup d'etat was organized and executed to its final step, the proof being how the President of the R.S.R. (Romanian Socialist Republic) died, but in parallel a revolution took place. Out of this situation has transpired all the confusion. As far as I know