I wish I could believe that but... I don't know all that much about the Romanian Revolution, but I've read (and seen, and heard) a fair bit about the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in November 1989.
Did you know that Václav Havel, the hero of the Velvet Revolution, the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, and a supposedly persecuted dissident, lived at a highly desirable address in Prague and owned a Mercedes in the 80s when most people were on years-long waiting lists to buy a fucking Škoda 120? Did you know his wife was actually happy when he got put in jail, because she hoped they'd stop him from drinking for a while?
Believe me, it was nothing like people think it was, and that leads me to believe the Romanian one wasn't what people think it was, either. Don't trust history books.
I'm well aware that liberalization protests against communism were additionally stimulated by American and Western intelligence agencies to break the Communist governments... but the Communists never did themselves any favors, and constantly contributed to the collapse of their states by genuinely outraging swathes of the population. In some cases, like in Estonia, you had nationalists and liberals working together to unseat what they saw as a Russian Communist occupation.
We know that the CIA was absolutely desperate to kill Castro for decades, and they never did, and Cuba is still Communist. The reason that the rest of the Communist world collapsed is because the Soviet System collapsed, and routinely de-legitimized itself with it's own people and subjects.
I wish I could believe that but... I don't know all that much about the Romanian Revolution, but I've read (and seen, and heard) a fair bit about the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in November 1989.
Did you know that Václav Havel, the hero of the Velvet Revolution, the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, and a supposedly persecuted dissident, lived at a highly desirable address in Prague and owned a Mercedes in the 80s when most people were on years-long waiting lists to buy a fucking Škoda 120? Did you know his wife was actually happy when he got put in jail, because she hoped they'd stop him from drinking for a while?
Believe me, it was nothing like people think it was, and that leads me to believe the Romanian one wasn't what people think it was, either. Don't trust history books.
I'm not, I'm watching the crowd.
I'm well aware that liberalization protests against communism were additionally stimulated by American and Western intelligence agencies to break the Communist governments... but the Communists never did themselves any favors, and constantly contributed to the collapse of their states by genuinely outraging swathes of the population. In some cases, like in Estonia, you had nationalists and liberals working together to unseat what they saw as a Russian Communist occupation.
We know that the CIA was absolutely desperate to kill Castro for decades, and they never did, and Cuba is still Communist. The reason that the rest of the Communist world collapsed is because the Soviet System collapsed, and routinely de-legitimized itself with it's own people and subjects.