The military supported Ion Iliescu to take over the country. He saw the writing on the wall, and switched gears, implementing shock therapy and privatizing everything, to suck up to the US and NATO.
The whole “revolution” bit was just the military allowing a bit of chaos to make people think they’ve “freed” themselves.
That being said, Ceaușescu was a pretty shit leader, who made some terrible economic and social decisions. The fact that he tried to centralize power around him certainly didn’t help.
It was a combination of military coup and color revolution planned by American and British intelligence services and organized out of Hungary.
You can find a number of contemporary articles on the counter-revolutions in Romania and the rest of Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 on marxists.org, in particular those written by Sam Marcy for Workers World. It is important to understand this history:
The military supported Ion Iliescu to take over the country. He saw the writing on the wall, and switched gears, implementing shock therapy and privatizing everything, to suck up to the US and NATO.
The whole “revolution” bit was just the military allowing a bit of chaos to make people think they’ve “freed” themselves.
That being said, Ceaușescu was a pretty shit leader, who made some terrible economic and social decisions. The fact that he tried to centralize power around him certainly didn’t help.
This, it was a military coup, Ceaușescu pales in comparison to Tito and yet capitalism is so terrible that most Romanians miss those times
It was a combination of military coup and color revolution planned by American and British intelligence services and organized out of Hungary.
You can find a number of contemporary articles on the counter-revolutions in Romania and the rest of Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 on marxists.org, in particular those written by Sam Marcy for Workers World. It is important to understand this history:
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900104.html https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900111.html
And this one compares how differently things went in China where the counter-revolution was crushed:
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900125.html