Commitment of Youth Key to East Europe Upheaval

In the Palace Square, construction cranes tug at the wreckage left by the battle that attended dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s flight from power. At midday, crowds of people, in from the countryside, walk slowly through the square, looking open-mouthed at the charred and bullet-chipped masonry, appreciating for the first time the ferocity of the fight that took place here.

Then they stop by the rows of candles set out before the heaps of dirty snow piled at the edges of the square. These are the shrines to the dead, and the candles have been burning solidly for two weeks now. The elderly women, pausing to gaze at the puddles of molten wax and the sputtering wicks of the candles, often begin to cry. They cry, they say, for the youth, “the youth who saved us.”

There are a dozen such places in Bucharest, and possibly hundreds in other cities across the country. On two of the main traffic circles in Bucharest, University Plaza and the Plaza Romania, great wooden crosses are surrounded by a sea of flickering candles and thousands of wilted flowers, marking the places where hundreds were cut down by sniper fire from the dictator’s elite security force.

As all Romanians readily acknowledge, the overwhelming majority of those who died to sweep the Ceausescu regime from power were young people. The courage of the Romanian youth, braving bullets to win freedom, was unique in a year of sweeping change in Eastern Europe.

But the special determination of the Romanian young people was, in fact, a forceful reminder of the role played throughout the East Bloc by a new generation whose bravery, desperation and impatience became a vital catalytic force in the political revolution that is now changing the face of Europe.

What happened in Romania and the other countries of Eastern Europe in the last year amounts to a sharp generational break between youth and a parental generation that came to maturity in the Communist world at a time either when there was greater hope for communism as a workable system or when the coercive forces of the state brooked no opposition.

Where parents, by and large, made their uneasy truce with life under communism and got on with life as best they could, a new generation saw only falsehood and hopelessness and decided it had nothing to lose.

“We were raised on a mountain of lies,” said Stefan Ghencea, 22, the son of a veterinarian, now helping to organize a student union at Bucharest Polytechnic. “There was a fantastic difference between the things they told us and the things we saw. They published incredible statistics on agriculture production, and in the shops there was nothing to eat. On paper, we had freedom of expression, but any time anyone said anything, members of the Communist Party told us to keep our mouths shut.”

The mountains of lies and oceans of doublespeak were as obvious to adults as to youth, of course; but youth, as youth does, saw it all in simpler terms.

“My father had a lot to lose,” said Ghencea. “He had a job. He had a family. He had to take care of me. They could do nothing to me as a student. They could shoot me, of course, but when you are in a crowd, you lose your fear.”

Ghencea, like hundreds of thousands of other youths across the East Bloc in the last 12 months, had never faced bullets before. In Poland and Czechoslovakia and East Germany, they had periodically faced the clubs of riot police, but there were no reports of live ammunition being used. Unlike their parents, they did not remember the horrors of the Stalinist era in Eastern Europe, when resistance to communism was punished with prison, labor camps or even death at the hands of secret police inquisitors.

In Poland in 1988, it was a band of young strikers--too young to have participated in the strikes that gave birth to Solidarity in 1980--whose action led directly to the legalization of Solidarity and the ultimate formation of a government led by the free trade union movement. Lech Walesa, the veteran leader of the union, told the young strikers in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk in 1988 that their effort would probably fail. By last August, those same strikers could be credited with establishing the first non-Communist government in the East Bloc.

The upheaval in East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall were triggered by an exodus of youth--predominantly East Germans in their late teens and early twenties--who had simply had enough of waiting and of empty promises. The thousands of East German refugees who piled into makeshift encampments, first in Hungary and then in Prague, resembled, like a kind of time warp, the 1968 youth of Woodstock, the fuse of a political explosion.

It was also youth who set off the 10 tumultuous days of demonstrations in Prague that brought down the hard-line Czechoslovak regime. There, when truncheon-wielding police waded into a crowd of students, brutally beating scores of them, the action galvanized the public. A demonstration by 15,000 students led to crowds of 300,000 filling Wenceslas Square on a daily basis until the Communist government fell.

“It happened because we created a different conception about life,” said Sorin Ciobanu, 22, another student union organizer at the Bucharest Polytechnic. “We did not get stuck as our parents did. Our parents know much better than we did the system of the secret police, the information system of the Communist Party. They knew they could lose their jobs, that their family could suffer.

My parents are teachers. They were party members. They did not agree (with the system), but they could not change it. They knew about their colleagues who, within two days of speaking out in some way, were fired from their jobs and could not work again as teachers. So they were careful. We understand this.

“But it was different with us. It is true that we had much less to lose. We had only ourselves. Our parents had families and children to think of.”

Now the youth of Bucharest, like much of the rest of the country, are wrestling with new-found freedom, trying to organize associations and clubs to press their demands and concerns. They want a revised education system, youth organizations free of the old Communist concerns. They want to travel, to establish contacts with the outside world. They see themselves, in their recent past, as “the most oppressed” of all Romanians.

“The youth were under an absurd yoke,” said Ion Manea, who is helping to organize the newly formed Assn. of Romanian Youth. “In the schools, the students had no books. The classrooms were dark and unheated. And they could not express the smallest complaint. If young people wanted to go to college, they had to be a member of the party.”

Some now feel that the revolution, not yet a month old, has already been stolen from them. Dumitru Coriban, 23, a factory worker from Timisoara, the Transylvanian city where the revolution began on Dec. 16, fears that the old Establishment, trying to shed its Communist skin, is clinging to power however it can. There is a danger, he said, that the youth will be cut out of the Romanian revolution.

“The youth did not face the bullets to have flowers laid on our heads,” Coriban said. “We did it for change, and we want to see change.”

The courage of the streets, the youths said, now has to be transformed into organization, into developing political skills. It is not easy to be faced with this challenge overnight.

“In the first days, we faced terrorists with arms,” said Vilutza Virtejanu, a 19-year-old student. “Now we are faced with terrorists with ideas, and they are much more dangerous. They are more adept than we are. They are from the old order, they feel the ground being cut from under them. It is happening everywhere now. The farther you get from Bucharest, the more acute the struggle. It is in every factory, every institution.

“The truth is, we are in a new age. It is as though we have been in a cage. Now the door to the cage is open, and we are free to fly, but we don’t yet know how to do it. We don’t yet know how to fly. We don’t know how to use the freedom we have won. We need people to be close to us and to help us, and we always need to remember why we did this.”