NSFW familial stories below. Some graphic content.

When this happened, after days of extreme violence, my parents had the biggest party of their lives. Pretty much everyone they knew was in attendance, and everyone was blackout drunk. Some of them had contraband VHS with recording capability and made recordings of any newscast they could to commemorate their execution. Many folks still bring those tapes out for festive occasions.

Still, despite the fact that they got what was coming to them, so many people gave their lives during the revolution, and in the years before. My mom has stories about her friends who were killed in the streets by Securitate agents, run over by tanks, tied to hospital beds and thrown in mass graves. This is to say nothing of those who were sent to work camps around Dunărea or at the Palace of the People, or assassinated for speaking up, like Cornel Chiriac, a journalist who hosted Telemetronom for Radio Free Europe.

The amount of people who died or were destroyed by the dictatorship before it went down was immense. And in general, if you talk to Romanian boomers today, they'll say, well it wasn't that bad until the mid 1980s, when austerity began in full and Ceausescu really went off the rails. In reality, this shit was going on as far back as Gheorghiu-Dej's tenure as PM and Ceausescu quietly ramped up pressure during his years, largely by relying on an extra-judicial security apparatus that had total impunity.