What if the Romanian Revolution of 1989 failed?

[Hunyadi Mátyás]

A North Korean-style dictatorship under Ceausescu? Or what?

[Vanoi]

You would get better input from a Romanian member here, but if it did fell i see a violent rebellion happening similar to the Lybian Civil War except the fact that most of the population will support the rebels. I doubt Ceausescu could have been able to hold on to his country anymore.

[Hunyadi Mátyás]

Can it be like the Libya thing going on?

[NotYetRegistered]

Í'm sure the west would've dealt the death blow to his rule.

[Carpathian Wolf]

It pretty much did fail. This shouldn't be in alternate history.

[Londinium]

Sod all and a lot of it. Romania would just be a pariah nation in Europe like Belarus is now if Ceausescu managed to hang on.

[Miroslav Klose]

I doubt the West would have intervened in Romania...

[Prince of Darkness]

Another one would succeed. The fall of communism and dictatorship is inevitable.

[Don in the North]

if it failed then all the romanians would be flame-arguing about how great the soviet union is, instead of romania.

[diegis]

if it failed then all the romanians would be flame-arguing about how great the soviet union is, instead of romania.

Hmm, may i ask why would romanians do that?

[Carpathian Wolf]

if it failed then all the romanians would be flame-arguing about how great the soviet union is, instead of romania.

Yeah actually nobody liked the USSR or any communist ruler. The people who did were the ones who lined their pockets.

[Angrychris]

typical of most rulers

[RO Citizen]

The Revolution just couldn't fail, because there was an agreement, at Malta, that Communism will fall. So even if it would've failed in December '89, Romania would've still become capitalist soon. The anti-communist feel was all around, and people started truly hating Ceausescu since his "reforms" from the '80s.

[florin87]

i see a lot of poorly informed people around here. the foreign powers would not have intervened had it failed, there would have been no second revolution. the first one was caused by the western powers in the first place. but that is another subject.

also the revolution practically failed from the romanian point of view. the man everyone tried to keep from getting into power actually became president. all the old communists got into positions of even more power plus they became filthy rich by robbing the state. now they also control the all the media. everything that could have gone bad, did just so.

however had ceausescu stayed in power the situation would have been a lot better. all foreign debt was payed (at the time of the revolution romania was the only country with 0 foreign debt) by novermber 1989. so the food, electricity and heat rationing would been stopped. the new world bank was ready to be opened in bucharest, everything was set up only the papers needed signing. even the participating members were all in complete agreement. this bank was aimed at the third world countries and anti-soviet communists (meaning yugoslavia).
withing 2-3 years ceausescu would have died, he was 79 at the time of the revolution, and his more enlightened, progressive and popular son, valentin, would have come to power (instead of the scum that rule today). under his guidance romania would have become like china today, minus the censorship. communist but not quite.

[Dromikaites]

The 1989 Revolution could have failed easily. Ceausescu's mistake was he escalated it by getting the army involved. Similar protests in 1971 and 1987 were left to fizzle out. The protesters cooled off after trashing the local headquarters of the communist party, went home for the night and the next day nobody showed up for another day of protests. The would have happened in Timisoara as well had Ceausescu acted in his usual way.

The reason the things escalated was Ceausescu was in Iran on a state visit and the government headed by his wife was caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand they needed to show they're worthy of Ceausescu's trust (which meant to keep the situation under control the usual, non-escalating way) and on the other hand they had the recent experience of the collapse of communism everywhere around Romania due to popular protests.

If Ceausescu would have decided to "lose face" by postponing his visit to Iran and staying at home to oversee the protest in Timisoara, it's quite likely he (who had nothing to prove to anybody - unlike the government) would have acted just like he did before, in 1971 and 1987. The protests would have fizzled out with no civilian deaths and no large-scale repression (in the previous incidents the leaders were arrested, received light sentences without imprisonment and were simply relocated to a distant city, far away from their associates).

With nobody dead and no spectacular repressions the international public opinion would have largely ignored the event. Most likely the evolution would have been like florin87 says: a communist regime in name only, like the one in China. The chaos of the breaking up of Yugoslavia and of the Soviet Union and the economic hardships the East European countries went through in the '90s would have legitimized the communist government. The commies would have been the ones who kept things peaceful while in the same time rapidly developing the economy and rising the standards of living.

In the late '60s and during all the '70 Romania had made a huge leap forward in terms of economic development and standards of living, thanks to the foreign loans and technological transfer. The problem was the economy had been planned according to the ideas from before the oil crisis of 1973. The consequences of setting up an energy-intensive heavy industry showed during the '80s. Ceausescu made the things even worse by insisting an inefficient economy should repay the foreign debt before the deadlines.

It takes 30 days to ship a container from China to Rotterdam compared to 4 days to get something by truck from Romania to Ireland, Scotland, Norway or Portugal (the European destinations the furthest away). With new funding available since the country was debt-free and with a "smaller China" (= a stable country of highly educated people working for low wages) right at the EEC/EU's doorstep it's easy to imagine a "Chinese trajectory" for Romania in the event of a failed 1989 Revolution.

[EmperorDan]

What people fail to understand is that to a certain extent, the revolution failed. The comunist regime was dying. Florin pointed out what realy needed to be pointed out: with or without the revolution, Romania's regime would have changed fairly rapidly in a matter of years or even months.

Instead, we got this revolution on our heads, which only made things worse. All the comunists who would have gone away when the regime crashed, stayed and made a fortune robbing the state. Our history is full of persons who went from raggs to riches in the early '90s. In two years, they would get huge areas of fertile land or buildings "given back" with false acts. It was chaos; it did more harm than a peaceful transfer of power would have done.

[bushbush]

It takes 30 days to ship a container from China to Rotterdam compared to 4 days to get something by truck from Romania to Ireland, Scotland, Norway or Portugal (the European destinations the furthest away). With new funding available since the country was debt-free and with a "smaller China" (= a stable country of highly educated people working for low wages) right at the EEC/EU's doorstep it's easy to imagine a "Chinese trajectory" for Romania in the event of a failed 1989 Revolution.

not to mention romania's education, workers' trainings, healthcare and other areas were far ahead of china at late 1980s, I don't think romania can do badly even if the revolution failed.