Romania Had Its Rebirth in a Television Studio : Rebellion: Place where rebel leaders announced that Ceausescu had fled stands as symbol of medium’s power.

The birth of the new Romanian nation took place at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 22, in Studio No. 4 of the National Television building here.

That was when the rebel leaders went on the air to announce that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, under siege in the Communist Party headquarters in central Bucharest, had fled for his life.

One week later, the squat, two-story studio building in a residential neighborhood of Bucharest has become both the unofficial seat of government and a pilgrimage point for thousands of Romanians who want to exercise their long-silenced freedom of speech.

Even more, it stands as a bullet-riddled symbol of the amazing power of television as a vehicle for lightning-fast revolutionary change.

“This is the heart of our revolution,” Mihai Isaila, 40, a program director at the station, who was brimming with pride Friday as he talked with a reporter in the control room of Studio No. 4. “Our new life was born in this television studio.”

Until last weekend, television here was restricted to three hours of black-and-white broadcasting, mostly showing continuous footage of Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, as they dedicated new buildings or launched hydroelectric projects.

One of the few exceptions each year was Ceausescu’s birthday, Jan. 26, when the dictator ordered the station to broadcast sentimental folk music until midnight to entertain his birthday party guests.

More than any other European leader, Ceausescu feared and hated television. Eighteen years ago, Romania had two channels and many hours of programming. As part of his notorious austerity program, however, Ceausescu reduced the broadcasts to the three hours of aggrandizement, with occasional innocuous movies. But even the movies were personally monitored by the dictator.

One recent example came when most of the world’s television networks were broadcasting the dramatic moments of the opening the Berlin Wall.

“That night we were showing a German film about the life of (composer) Richard Strauss,” recalled Isaila. “Ceausescu called up the studio in a rage. He said ‘How dare you show a German movie in times like this!’ ”

As a result of his paranoid restrictions, Romanian television became the joke of Europe, seldom watched by anyone but Ceausescu’s family. People here turned instead to the two channels in neighboring Bulgaria or to a channel in the Soviet Union.

Copies of Bulgarian television schedules were hot items on the black market here. The most popular children’s show was a Bulgarian cartoon program. Parents worried that their children were not learning proper Romanian.

Some ingenious Romanians built their own satellite dishes. Others depended on their videocassette recorders for news of the outside world. Romania is said to have one of the highest per capita concentrations of VCRs in Europe.

All of this gave television an even greater influence during the critical hours of the recent uprising here. In an odd way, it was as though Ceausescu had a premonition that television would lead to his downfall.

He spent so much time attempting to restrict the impact of television that in the end, his efforts only accentuated the significance of the events in the streets of Romania.

The final irony came Thursday night when National Television broadcast the Charlie Chaplin classic, “The Great Dictator,” a savage satire about a Hitler-style dictator of a country named “Tomonia.”

But in the lobby of the Inter-Continental Hotel here, hotel staff gazed solemnly at the screen. To them, Chaplin was not Hitler, but Ceausescu. When the Chaplin character ordered food shortages in the imaginary land, there were nervous titters among the hotel staff.

Television station managers found “The Great Dictator” in the station’s archives, where it had gathered dust for the 24 years of the Ceausescu rule.

During the recent revolutionary times here, television sets were turned on continuously. Periodically, a poet or another famous character banned under Ceausescu, would appear on the screen of Free Romanian Television.

In one moving incident, a man in the western city of Timisoara wept when he saw flutist Georghe Zamfir, who played a Pan-like instrument with great flair. Zamfir, an internationally known musician, had been banned from Romanian television for eight years.

Clearly, television has played a central role in the dramatic changes that have swept Eastern European countries in recent months. In Czechoslovakia, for example, a see-saw, four-day struggle took place for control of news broadcasts.

But in Romania, the National Television complex in Bucharest was even more central to the remarkable events that drove a dictator from power. All at the same time, the television facility here was the main battleground, rebel headquarters, rumor control center, and meeting site for the formation of a new provisional government, the National Salvation Front.

While technicians crouched to avoid bullets in Studio No. 5, which had windows exposed to gunfire from Ceausescu’s secret police units, a gathering of poets, actors, dissident Communist Party members, workers and musicians were meeting in Studio No. 4 to decide what they would name the new leadership.

In the process, Ion Iliescu, a former senior Communist Party leader who had been demoted under the Ceausescu regime, emerged as the country’s new leader. His selection as provisional president of the national council was announced at the studio Tuesday.

The people in the countryside, from the Danube delta to the Transylvanian Alps, had a ringside seat on a revolution--bullets and all--on their television screens.

When the television cameras captured Ceausescu being booed during a rally he had called on Thursday, Dec. 21, the silence of repression had been broken. On television, they were able to see the diminutive, hawk-faced man in a fur cap flail his arms in confusion.

When actor Ion Caramitru, one of the early supporters of the revolt, first took the microphone at 2:30 p.m. Friday, the people learned that the dictator had fallen.

The Romanian National Television complex is located in a stately residential neighborhood of embassies and villas in north Bucharest.

On one side of the complex, the 13-story Radio-Television Administration building is severely damaged, its blood-stained corridors covered with a blanket of fresh snow.

The two-story television studio annex is next door, flanked on one side by a grove of hardwood trees.

Outside the annex Friday, hundreds of Romanians stood patiently in a blizzard, waiting for their turn to have a say on the liberated airwaves.

“I will speak first in Romanian, then in German,” said Gunther Ambrosi, 57. Ambrosi, pastor of a small German Lutheran church in Bucharest, said his denomination suffered great persecution under the Ceausescu regime, which conducted a systematic campaign against the German minority population.

“I will tell the people,” said Ambrosi, in a black religious smock with silver breastplates, “we are now finally free from this terrible period of Hitler, Stalin and Ceausescu. It is over.”

A few hours later, he was in the studio telling interviewer Georghe Marinesco exactly the same thing he had voiced in the snow outside.

Next to the control room, an orderly line of television pilgrims--revolutionary army generals from Timisoara, bearded ecologists from Constance on the Black Sea, Hungarian-speaking students from Cluj in the Carpathian Mountains--waited patiently.

The people came here as though beckoned by an evangelist, calling them forward to be saved. As a result, the crowded studios brimmed with emotion and pride. There are more than enough technicians to man the controls, but no one wants to leave.

Program director Isaila was taken to the hospital Monday when he collapsed on the floor of the studio with cramps. He came back the next day.

“It is very difficult to leave this place,” he said. “It feels like a crime not to be here.”