The Man They Killed on Christmas Day

I did find this book interesting but as others have already mentioned, it tended to skim over the surface and we really needed more in depth details of social life, services etc. for the population at that period in time. I did note that there are Romanians now wishing they had the security they had during that period, housing, jobs food on the table and I have heard similar reports from other Eastern block countries. I also thought that it jumped about too much from different periods and would have been easier perhaps to understand this period better if the each chapter in the book had related to a period in time from his rise to power to Christmas Day.Living in Greece for 35 years has brought home to me just how closely related we in the Balkan countries are compared to Northern Europeans. I have found here that same sheep like attitude of following a leader that tells his people what they want to hear rather than the plain truth. Here in Greece it has always been the aim of the vast majority of Greeks to find a position in the public services rather than persue a career in private enterprise or even their own venture. Is this due to history, the instability in the respective countries that citizens seek security rather than to be adventurous and work to achieve a goal in life.Of course total power does corrupt and this is exactly the problems we have here in Greece and why we are living in a bankrupt country relying on loans. When there is only one House of Parliament and the Presidency is stripped of all power then of course the leaches are there to benefit themselves. The longer in power of any totalitarian leader, the more will gather to feed from the trough. These governments hand out positions to the faithful that keep them in power. This is why Democracy is so precious.Thanks Catalin, I do consider this book worth a read.

I was 12 years old back in december 1989 when Revolution burst out.Christmas lost its magic.The riot in the street and the sound of fireguns shots replaced the magic with terror.Still, unvoiced joy made its way through adults'eyes, while an anxious silence grabbed everybody.Unlike adults, I experienced some kind of a paradoxal feeling of regret for the dethroned dictator. In school I was thaught to respect him. He was some kind of hero turning the very idea of justice into something touchable.All of a sudden the handsome, smiling man whose neverfailing portrait throned on every school classroom wall was caught. Strangely, on TV I saw he was old and helpless. I felt sorry for him.I wondered how was it possible for such old helpless man to have control over a country of people who hated him?? How was it still possible for us, the young ones to like him, though??Reading Catalin Gruia's book I came to get the whole picture and the explanations I needed to solve out the paradox.Catalin has the power to synthetise and restore a complicated long story by emphasizing the key moments and to equally provide the reader with the detailed and juicy insights to keep him / her on the edge of the seat.He has a great capacity to sense out the essential and combine journalistic objective narration with interesting reflections and surprising details.For instance, he draws attention on the enactment of a law replacing the term Mr./Mrs/MS with Comrade/Citizen or the law that limited the circulation of cars on Sunday by odd/vs/even plate numbers every other week.These may look like fiction stories, but were actually enacted and experienced in real life, less than 30 years ago.I found this book very useful and easy to read.I was answered questions I have asked myself and I have also found essential information hard to dig for and select on my own.

I have lived in Ceausescu's world for only 4 years before The Revolution came. I do have vague memories about a life lived in black and white shades smoothed out by my loving family: singing songs during evenings with power cuts when no light and no TV were available, having the weekly bath when hot water was allowed into our homes for a few hours, receiving gifts at kindergarden from a disguised Santa that we called "Santa Frost", beind made "hawk of the homeland" which made me a young communist in the making.Then The Revolution happened and I remember my family not knowing what was happening, being concerned for my grandfather who was then a colonel in the navy, hearing fire arms being shot in the streets and a vague joy that somebody called Ceausescu had died. We were tearing the pages that contained Ceausescu's face off every book, magazine and newspaper. It was a defiance towards something I didn't understand but something that my parents used to fear.It is not yet clear for my generation who Ceausescu was and this book helps fill in some gaps that the history books taught in schools fail to. I do fear the submissive, cowardly nature of my people that does not know how to defend democracy. I feel ashamed that my people did not judge the murderers of Ceausescu like they should have and that instead they allowed all the people behind the communist regime to survive in a masked democracy under the presidency of Iliescu and his kind. This is why today we still suffer from corruption and bad government and this is why my generation preffers to educate itself and work outside the country.

This is another kind of Christmas story: 30 years ago this Christmas, some of the most striking images of the tumultuous changes taking place in Eastern Europe, after the slightly earlier sight of East Germans climbing and sitting atop the Berlin Wall, were the incomprehension on the face of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu when a crowd booed him, followed by shots of him and his wife Elena at their "trial" and summary execution on Christmas day itself. This is a brief account by a Romanian journalist and writer of the life, rule and fall of the man alternately feted by the West as a relatively liberal bulwark against the Soviet Union, while ruling his own country with a tight Stalinist grip and being surrounded by a personality cult strongly redolent of those surrounding Stalin and Mao. There is relatively little in here that is new to anyone who has read books on the subject, and indeed this account reads more like an assemblage of articles, some very short, rather than a coherent analysis.

It was an excellent account I can partly relate to. Being brought up in a totalitarian regime I experienced some similarities, although it wasn't as bad as in Romania. I have read several books about these 2 terrible dictators and the bad legacy they left behind. The suffering, the sickness including Cholera in some remote part, AIDS and disability due to the enforced population exposure program. My only negative comment about this book is, that I wish it was longer. For the sake of future generations, it is important to revive the past in books and it is a good learning curve for them not to make the same mistakes in the future.

I stumbled upon this book whilst trawling through the kindle store and I'm glad I did. I was interested to read this account of the events of Christmas 1989 because during the summer of that year, I visited Romania as a tourist. Whilst touring this beautiful country, I had no clue as to what would happen there a mere 4 months later. Although this account is very sparse, (it's written by a journalist in a very journalistic style) it gives a very good outline and has made me seek out more titles on the subject. Also, it can easily be read in one sitting! A good place to start research

While it's a truism that all of the people can't be fooled all of the time this account proves they can be fooled for 25years. All the failures were put at the feet of one man. The sycophants around him panicked and shot him before their role was revealed.

This was a very disappointing purchase. Much too short, it reads as if written by somebody who did very basic research and no more. Catalin Gruia has nothing of note to contribute to the Ceausescu story. I'm at a loss to know how this book was considered worth publishing.