Overview
Of the six Eastern Bloc governments that fell in 1989, five went without significant bloodshed. Romania's did not. Around 1,100 people died, the great majority of them after Nicolae Ceaușescu had already lost control and fled Bucharest. He and his wife Elena were tried by a military tribunal on 25 December and shot the same afternoon, in a proceeding that lasted under two hours.
Almost every element of that week has been contested since, and much of the contesting has been done by Romanian prosecutors rather than by outsiders.
The Numbers
The revolution began in Timișoara on 16 December, after the authorities moved to evict László Tőkés, a Hungarian Reformed pastor who had criticised the regime. Security forces fired on crowds over the following days.
What the world was then told about Timișoara was wrong by two orders of magnitude. Figures of sixty thousand and even eighty thousand dead were broadcast, and photographs of exhumed bodies were presented as evidence of a massacre. The actual death toll in Timișoara was in the low hundreds. The bodies in the photographs had been taken from a paupers' cemetery. Doubts were raised in the international press before the end of December.
The inflated figures were not a detail. They were the justification, at the time, for the speed of everything that followed — including the trial.
The Terrorists Who Were Never Found
After Ceaușescu fled on 22 December, the killing increased. State television, now controlled by the National Salvation Front, reported that loyalist "terrorists" were fighting on. Army units and civilian volunteers fought running battles in Bucharest against an enemy that was never captured in numbers, never tried, and never satisfactorily identified. A large share of the revolution's deaths occurred in this phase, many of them from soldiers firing on one another in the confusion.
Later investigation established that false orders and fabricated warnings had been circulated through the broadcast system, producing what Romanian researchers have described as a general psychosis. Who circulated them, and to what end, is the central unresolved question.
The Theory
The theory holds that the revolution was captured, and possibly initiated, by a faction within the Communist Party and the Securitate that wanted Ceaușescu gone and itself in power. On this account the terrorist scare was manufactured to justify the emergency, to legitimise the National Salvation Front as the force that had saved the country, and to make a summary execution look necessary rather than convenient. Variants add Soviet involvement, pointing to the unusual density of Soviet "tourists" in the country that December.
Ceaușescu himself made the foreign-agents claim on 17 December, before any of it, and ordered tourist entry stopped. His version and his opponents' versions ended up sharing a premise.
The Official Position
In December 2017 Romanian military prosecutors concluded, in a case file opened against Ion Iliescu — the Front's leader and later president — and others, that the events after 22 December had been orchestrated, with the diversionary terrorist campaign serving to consolidate the new leadership's power. The case has moved slowly through the courts and has been returned and reopened more than once. No one has been convicted for the deaths of that week.
What It Established
Two facts are settled and are not in dispute among Romanian historians: the Timișoara figures broadcast to the world were false by a factor of several hundred, and most of those who died did so after the dictator had already fallen, killed by forces never identified. Whatever else is argued, a revolution in which those two things are true has never been able to describe itself simply.