TV REVIEW : Koppel Reports on Dictator’s Fall

When is a revolution not a revolution? When the revolution gets fooled into believing that it won. “Death of a Dictator,” the latest edition of “The Koppel Report” (tonight at 10 p.m., Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), strongly suggests that the overthrow of Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu was a strange mixture of genuine People Power and internecine subterfuge.

Ted Koppel’s look inside the bloody December, 1989 days ultimately raises more questions than it answers. But there is also the nagging suspicion--unavoidable with viewers made skeptical by network TV’s less-than-glittering track record for reporting world events--that Koppel is assuming too much, even dismissing much of Ceausescu’s Draconian abilities as a dictator.

Koppel, for instance, walks into the central listening station of the ruthless Securitate security force and expresses surprise at its rudimentary technology, likening it to what Dorothy saw when Toto pulled back the Wizard of Oz’s curtain. Very clever, but is it true?

Home-video footage fills this report, particularly when it traces the hour-by-hour events leading to Ceausescu’s escape, overthrow, execution and the Securitate’s fierce attempts at counter-revolution. Some of the footage, according to the report, has never been seen, even within Romania, and its dramatic behind-the-scenes quality, plus Koppel’s superb narration, makes for great television.

This video offers evidence, as well, that the sparks of the revolution came out of exaggerated claims, such as a massacre of children in Timisoara that never happened. Or unearthed bodies, laid out as revolutionary martyrs, that were apparently dug up from a paupers’ cemetery. Truth becomes elusive: The citizens feared a dictator as if he were invincible; he feared them beyond all reason.

Paranoia created what Koppel terms “a madhouse,” and now, with the dictator and his wife gone, paranoia breeds suspicion that the powers behind Ceausescu remain where they were before.

Can we believe the current defense minister, Gen. Victor Stanculescu, and his claim that less than 2,000 died in the revolution (far below the initial estimate of more than 60,000), when Stanculescu himself was Ceausescu’s own liaison between the army and the Securitate? Is there a decent source of sound information inside today’s Romania?

This “Koppel Report” makes you wonder who the real Wizard of Oz is in this story.