“Preparing for the Fall”: Nicolae Ceausescu, the Securitate, and August-September 1989
(purely personal views, based on decades of researching and writing on the Romanian Revolution of December 1989)
The counter-invasion/occupation, counter-coup, and counter-revolutionary preparations of the Romanian Socialist Republic, in particular the Securitate, were of course under way long before the crucial events of the summer of 1989 (see, for example, https://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.com/2014/01/13/securitatea-lupta-de-rezistenta-in-cadrul-razboiului-de-aparare-a-patriei-particularitati-ale-participarii-unitatilor-centrale-si-teritoriale-de-securitate-la-organizarea-si-ducerea-luptei-de-rezi/ ). However, the events of the summer of 1989 gave the application of such plans a new urgency: the Polish elections of 4 and 18 June 1989, the reburial of Imre Nagy and others in Hungary on 16 June 1989, and in particular the bloody repression of Chinese demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on 3-4 June 1989 (for their impact, see for example, Michael Shafir’s 3 July 1989 article in RFERL, Eastern Europe’s “Rejectionists,”
https://catalog.osaarchivum.org/catalog/osa:587f824b-3ade-4eda-9727-3f4310520e0e#1 ). I submit below three data points to such an argument. Admittedly, drawing these three data points together is in the realm of speculation, but recent re-researching of the so-called radioelectronic war of December 1989 has spurred me to rethink the period August-September 1989.
- The appearance of false targets (“tinte false”) on the radars of the Romanian military preceded 22 December 1989. Various accounts report these during the week of anti-regime unrest during the week of 16-22 December and even back to the XIV Congress of the PCR in late November 1989. But perhaps the most intriguing and enlightening are the revelations of retired general Mircea Budiaci, in December 1989 in the command structure of the military aviation department. Budiaci says that December 1989 was not the first time they encountered these false targets, but that they had already started having to cope with them in August-September 1989 if in far fewer numbers and intensity, specifically in the Danube Delta, Buzau and Braila (my note: all to the east of Bucharest). I would argue this makes it likely that the source of these false targets in December 1989 would have been the same as in August-September 1989, and that the earlier ones were probably tests for such an eventuality. Indeed, when Madalin Hodor thought slightly differently (ahem) in late 2017, this is what he argued (accused Securitate General Iulian Vlad of) in the pages of 22. Below, both excerpts:
Mircea Budiaci: „Începând cu august 1989 apăreau ţinte la care normal se decola cu avioane din celula de comandă. Aşa-numită poliţie aeriană”. Primele ţinte au apărut în zona Deltei Dunării, povesteşte generalul. În mai puţin de 5 minute, avioanele de luptă româneşti decolau spere zona vizată. Mircea Budiaci: „Cazurile au fost în jur de 4, în zona Deltei Dunării. Piloţii decolau. Nu găseau nimic. Şi apăreau tot felul de justificări. Şi un stol de păsări putea să îţi dea semnal pe radar”. Doar că nu erau păsări. Radarele armatei semnalizau ţinte inamice din ce în ce mai des. În locuri diferite. Mircea Budiaci: „Au apărut în zona Buzăului, noaptea. Au decolat cei de la Borcea, nu au găsit nimic. În zona Brăilei şi s-a cam liniştit treaba. August-Septembrie au apărut aceste ţinte”. (https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/evenimente/misterul-tintelor-false-vazute-la-revolutie-636689 )
Simulările de ţinte aeriene s-au făcut cu ajutorul unor staţii montate pe camioane, care se găseau la detaşamentele de cercetare diversiune de pe lângă marile unităţi ale Armatei şi pe care le aveam de la aliaţii noştri ruşi. Poate vă aduceţi aminte că eram în Tratatul de la Varşovia şi că aveam tehnică de luptă de provenienţă sovietică. Da….Ştii bine că aţi şi testat tot scenariul în vara lui 1989, chiar în Dobrogea, ca să vedeţi reacţia CAAT-lui la un posibil atac de desant asupra litoralului. Atunci, Aviaţia s-a confruntat cu aceleaşi ţinte false pe radar, a ridicat (ca şi în decembrie) avioanele de vânătoare şi nu a găsit (iar ca în decembrie) nimic. Aţi văzut că merge. Singurii care v-au observat au fost tot ruşii, care v-au monitorizat comunicaţiile prin staţia lor de ascultare de lângă Chişinău. (https://revista22.ro/opinii/madalin-hodor/adio-btrne-asasin )
____________________________________________________________________________ - There is also the revelation–never apparently investigated and run to ground, despite specific details, places, and persons being included–in the 1992 Senatorial Report on December 1989, about the high level party request supervised by the Securitate for the production of dum-dum exploding bullets at the Sadu Gorj munitions factory. December 1989 is sadly littered with accounts from doctors, military officers, the wounded, and family members of the dead about the use of these destructive bullets (see among many posts on this page, for example, https://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.com/6-march-1990-a-day-that-could-have-made-a-difference/ ; https://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.com/former-securitate-whistleblowers-and-dum-dum-bullets-partial/)
Uzina Sadu-Gorj, august-septembrie 1989,comanda de fabricatie a gloantelor explozive DUM-DUM
Referitor la existenta cartuselor explozive si perforante, dupa unele informatii rezulta ca in perioada august-septembrie 1989 la uzinele Sadu-Gorj s-a primit o comanda de executare a unor asemenea cartuse explozive. Comanda a fost ordonata de Conducerea Superioara de partid si executata sub supravegherea stricta a unor ofiteri din fosta Securitate.
Asa cum s-a mai spus, asupra populatiei, dar si asupra militarilor MApN teroristii au folosit cartuse cu glont exploziv. Cartusele respective de fabricarea carora fostul director al uzinei Constantin Hoart–actualmente deputat PSM Gorj–si ing. Constantin Filip nu sunt straini, au fost realizate sub legenda, potrivit careia, acestea urmai a fi folosite de Nicolae Ceausescu in cadrul partidelor de vanatoare.
Consider ca lt. col. Gridan fost ofiter de Contrainformatii pentru Uzina Sadu–actualmente pensionar ar putea confirma fabricarea unor asemenea cartuse si probabil si unele indicii cu privire la beneficiar. Daca intr-adevar aceste cartuse au fost fabricate in Romania atunci este limpede ca o mare parte din teroristii din decembrie 1989 au fost autohtoni, iar organele de securitate nu sunt straine de acest lucru.
(Sergiu Nicolaescu, Cartea revolutiei romane. Decembrie ’89, 1999, p. 217.)
https://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.com/2009/12/15/uzina-sadu-gorj-august-septembrie-1989-comanda-de-fabricatie-a-gloantelor-explozive-dum-dum/
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3. Finally, there is the (geo)political context of August 1989. If the events in Hungary and Poland of June 1989 in particular had spooked Nicolae Ceausescu, and yet he had also been emboldened by the Chinese Communist crackdown beginning that same month–as were his fellow rejectionists in Czechoslovakia (Jakes), Bulgaria (Zhivkov), and East Germany (Honecker)–, the formation of a Solidarity lead government under Tadeusz Mazowiecki in August 1989, was positively frightening, as Mark Kramer has laid out in a number of well-researched publications, including here in response to what can only be characterized as the ridiculous revisionist claims of Larry Watts:
(for an assessment at the time, see: https://catalog.osaarchivum.org/catalog/osa:63ecacb3-af14-49a2-90d3-237a51d2816f#1 Michael Shafir East European Reactions to Polish Developments, RFERL, 16 October 1989)
Continuing Debate: Ceauşescu’s Appeal for Joint Warsaw Pact Action on 19 August 1989
List of Documents
Translated by Mark Kramer
Document 1
19 August 1989 – Soviet Ambassador to Romania E. M. Tyazhel’nikov, Record of a Conversation with N. Ceauşescu and Message for Gorbachev
Source: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (RGANI), Fond 5, Opis’ 102, Delo 80, Listy 107-110.
Document 2
21 August 1989 – Resolution of the CPSU CC Politburo 132, ‘Regarding the Appeal of Cde. Ceauşescu’
Source: RGANI, F. 3, Op. 103, D. 180, L. 63, and RGANI, F. 3, Op. 103, D. 181, Ll. 140-141.
Realities versus Obfuscations
Mark Kramer
In several articles I have published over the past 15-20 years I have cited declassified Polish and Hungarian documents from August 1989 indicating that the leader of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), Nicolae Ceauşescu, was so alarmed by the prospect of a Solidarity-led government in Poland that on 19 August 1989 he secretly urged the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries to embark on joint action against Poland, including military intervention if all other attempts to prevent the emergence of a Solidarity-led government proved of no avail.[1] In December 2010 I obtained crucial Soviet documents pertaining to the same topic and cited them in an article I published in 2011, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” which has since been republished in several anthologies.[2] The Soviet documents dispel any doubt that what Ceauşescu wanted on 19 August 1989 was joint Warsaw Pact action, including military intervention if other options failed, to keep the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) in power and prevent Solidarity from gaining control of the Polish government.
In late July 2014 I discovered, to my surprise, that a videotape of a lecture given by Larry Watts in Romanian at a conference in Bucharest in June 2014 had been posted on the youtube website under the title “Larry Watts explica de ce a fost impuscat Ceausescu la lansarea ‘Exorting [sic] Peace.’”[3] I was particularly intrigued to see that around 37 minutes into the lecture Watts insisted that Ceauşescu in August 1989 was not in fact calling for joint Warsaw Pact action vis-à-vis Poland. Watts cited me by name as someone who had supposedly been duped by Polish and Hungarian “disinformation.” Watts offered no evidence to back up his contention that the Polish and Hungarian documents were merely part of a Soviet-led disinformation campaign against Ceauşescu, nor did he evince any familiarity with the Soviet documents I cited in “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc.”
In e-Dossier No. 60 for the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), Watts provides translations of four Romanian documents, three of which have already been published. Two were published fifteen years ago in an anthology put out by two well-known Romanian scholars who, unlike Watts, believe that Ceauşescu was calling for joint Warsaw Pact intervention in Poland, including military intervention if necessary.[4] Another was published in 2005 on the website of the Parallel History Project, and an English translation of it (albeit a slightly earlier version) appeared in a book edited by Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne.[5] The only document translated by Watts that has not yet been published — the notes from a meeting of the RCP Executive Political Bureau on 21 August 1989 — has long been familiar to scholars who know Romanian. The document corroborates rather than refutes the notion that Ceauşescu on 19 August 1989 was calling for joint Warsaw Pact action in Poland to prevent a Solidarity-led government from taking power. Watts claims that his translations shed new light on the events of August 1989, but this is simply untrue. He presents no new evidence and is still unaware of the Soviet documents I used in “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc.” Hence, I am publishing my translations of the two most important of those Soviet documents here.
The first of these, a cable sent by the Soviet ambassador in Bucharest, Evgenii Tyazhel’nikov, to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Mikhail Gorbachev, late in the evening on 19 August 1989, reproduces Ceauşescu’s appeal to the USSR in full [Document 1]. Anyone who is familiar with the internal deliberations of Soviet and East European leaders before their invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 will quickly see the similarity of the phrasing used by Ceauşescu here with regard to Poland, including his mention of the Soviet military forces in Poland. In the appeal, Ceauşescu stresses the urgent need for joint Warsaw Pact action, including military intervention if other options prove futile, to keep Solidarity from gaining control of the Polish government. Speaking in “an extremely agitated state,” he warns that the advent of a Solidarity-led government will mean “the death of socialism in Poland” and will “deal a savage blow to the Warsaw Pact.” Such a development, he repeatedly emphasizes, will pose “a mortal danger to the entire cause of socialism” worldwide and be “an immense victory for the forces of reaction and imperialism,” thus “playing into the hands of the USA and NATO.” This impending “subversion of the Warsaw Pact from within,” he argues, compels the alliance’s other member-states to act:
At this moment of severe tribulation for the fate of socialism, the RCP, the fraternal parties of allied states, and all socialist countries cannot remain mere observers on the sidelines. What is happening in Poland is not just an internal matter for the Poles themselves (emphasis added).
Over and over, Ceauşescu calls for “vigorous joint measures [by the Warsaw Pact member-states] to prevent the ‘death of socialism’ in Poland and to prevent world socialism from being undermined.” He repeatedly conveys his “extraordinary alarm” about the “catastrophic deterioration of the situation” and warns that “‘history will not forgive’ the fraternal parties of allied states if the PZPR is wrenched from power and if socialism is destroyed in Poland.” He stakes all his hopes on the Soviet Union, which “bears enormous internationalist responsibility for the fate of socialism, including in Poland,” and “has its troops deployed in Poland.” Calling on Gorbachev to act immediately, Ceauşescu expresses his “firmest certainty that the CPSU and the USSR will take the most urgent measures possible to prevent the removal of the PZPR from power and the destruction of socialism in Poland.”
The second document I have translated here, a resolution of the CPSU Politburo from 21 August 1989, authorizes Ambassador Tyazhel’nikov to transmit a formal response to Ceauşescu’s appeal [Document 2]. The response pointedly turns down Ceauşescu’s calls for urgent action and warns that if the Romanian leader’s advice is heeded, it will “undoubtedly be exploited by ‘Solidarity’ and other opposition circles as grounds for depicting the PZPR as a force that represents the interests of foreign parties and states rather than the interests of Poland.” Rebuffing’s Ceauşescu’s desperate appeal for intervention in Poland, the CPSU Politburo emphasizes that it will not condone any measures that “are in violation of Poland’s sovereignty.” This response from the Soviet authorities was read aloud by Romanian Foreign Minister Ioan Totu at the meeting of the RCP Executive Political Bureau on 21 August. Even before the document was read out, Ceauşescu himself was obviously aware that his appeal had been rejected, and he was therefore trying his best to find a way of salvaging the situation and to keep from losing face completely.
These documents should put to rest the notion that Ceauşescu on 19 August 1989 was merely calling for a benign meeting to discuss general problems of socialism, as Watts would have us believe. At a session of the Warsaw Pact’s Political Consultative in July 1989, the Soviet Union and its allies had agreed to convene a meeting at some future date that would analyze “current issues of socialist construction.” In the response to Ceauşescu’s appeal, the Soviet authorities made clear that they were still willing to take part in such a meeting. But they realized that Ceauşescu on 19 August was referring to something entirely different. The Romanian leader was exhorting the Soviet Union to undertake “the most urgent measures possible to prevent the removal of the PZPR from power and the destruction of socialism in Poland.” Reversing his long-standing support of “non-interference in internal affairs,” Ceauşescu insisted that the makeup of the Polish government was “not just an internal matter for the Poles themselves” and had to be determined by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact member-states. In an ironic reversal of roles, Soviet leaders by this point had abandoned and buried the Brezhnev Doctrine, whereas Ceauşescu was trying urgently to resurrect and enforce it.
In short, the allegations made by the Polish authorities in August 1989 about Ceauşescu’s appeal were fully accurate, contrary to what Watts asserts. Watts expresses concern about the risk of “simply replacing one set of myths with another.” The greater risk, at least in his case, is in disregarding evidence and sticking to hoary myths.
Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
[1] See, for example, Mark Kramer, “Realism, Ideology, and the End of the Cold War,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (January 2001), pp. 119-130; Mark Kramer, “The Demise of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 1),” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 178-256; and Mark Kramer, “Gorbachev and the Demise of East European Communism,” in Silvio Pons and Federico Romero, eds., Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 179-200.
[2] Mark Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 83, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 788-854. Expanded versions of the essay were published in Vladimir Tismaneanu with Bogdan C. Iacob, eds., The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), pp. 171-255; Terry Cox, ed., Reflections on 1989 in Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 7-62; and Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, eds., Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945-1990 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), pp. 369-436.
[3] The video can be viewed online at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In0bocTGxvc>.
[4] Dumitru Preda and Mihai Retegan, eds., 1989 principiul dominoului: Prăbuşirea regimurilor comuniste europene (Bucharest: Fundaţia Culturală Română, 2000).
[5] Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds., A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005), pp. 600-601.
The Archive of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 