Romanian Revolution in the context of Secret police

Timișoara (UK: /ˌtɪmɪˈʃwɑːrə/, US: /ˌtiːmiː-/, Romanian: [timiˈʃo̯ara] ; see other names) is the capital city of Timiș County, Banat, and the main economic, social and cultural center in Western Romania. Located on the Bega River, Timișoara is considered the informal capital city of the historical Banat region. From 1848 to 1860 it was the capital of the Serbian Vojvodina and the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar. With 250,849 inhabitants at the 2021 census, Timișoara is the country's fifth most populous city. It is home to around 400,000 inhabitants in its metropolitan area, while the Timișoara–Arad metropolis concentrates more than 70% of the population of Timiș and Arad counties. Timișoara is a multicultural city, home to 21 ethnic groups and 18 religious denominations. Historically, the most numerous were the Swabian Germans, Jews and Hungarians, who still make up 6% of the population in Timișoara.

Conquered in 1716 by the Austrians from the Ottoman Turks, Timișoara developed in the following centuries behind the fortifications and in the urban nuclei located around them. During the second half of the 19th century, the fortress began to lose its usefulness, due to many developments in military technology. Former bastions and military spaces were demolished and replaced with new boulevards and neighborhoods. Timișoara was the first city in the Habsburg monarchy with street lighting (1760) and the first European city to be lit by electric street lamps in 1884. It opened the first public lending library in the Habsburg monarchy and built a municipal hospital 24 years ahead of Vienna. Also, in 1771 it published the first German newspaper in Southeast Europe (Temeswarer Nachrichten). In December 1989, Timișoara was the starting point of the Romanian Revolution.

The Romanian royal family (Romanian: Familia regală a României) constitutes the Romanian subbranch of the Swabian branch of the House of Hohenzollern (also known as the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen), and was the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of Romania, a constitutional monarchy in Central-Eastern Europe. The kingdom existed from 1881, when Carol I was proclaimed king, until 1947, when the last king, Michael I, was forced to abdicate and the Parliament proclaimed Romania a republic. Soon after, upon the establishment of the constitution of 13 April 1948, Romania became a people's republic, a state that lasted until the Romanian Revolution in 1989.

Current members of the former royal family include the daughters of the late, former King Michael of Romania. Some descendants have adopted the surname "of Romania". There are also descendants of Michael's older half-brother Carol Lambrino (also known as "Carol Hohenzollern" and "Carol Mircea Grigore of Romania" or, in Romanian, al României, on his amended, Romanian birth certificate), whose legitimacy was disputed and who were not recognised as royal during the reigns of Ferdinand, Carol II and Michael.

The union of Transylvania with Romania was declared on 1 December [O.S. 18 November] 1918 by the assembly of the delegates of ethnic Romanians held in Alba Iulia. The Great Union Day (also called Unification Day), celebrated on 1 December, is a national holiday in Romania that celebrates this event. The holiday was established after the Romanian Revolution, and celebrates the unification not only of Transylvania, but also of Bessarabia and Bukovina and parts of Banat, Crișana and Maramureș with the Romanian Kingdom. Bessarabia and Bukovina had joined with the Kingdom of Romania earlier in 1918.

The unification of Moldova and Romania is the idea that Moldova and Romania should become a single sovereign state and the political movement which seeks to bring it about. Beginning during the Revolutions of 1989 (including the Romanian Revolution and the independence of Moldova from the Soviet Union), the movement's basis is in the cultural similarity of the two countries, both being Romanian-speaking, and their history of unity as part of Greater Romania.

The question of reunification is recurrent in the public sphere of the two countries, often as a speculation, both as a goal and a danger. Though historically Romanian support for unification was high, a March 2022 survey following the Russian invasion of Ukraine indicated that only 11% of Romania's population supports an immediate union, while over 42% think it is not the right moment.

Elena Ceaușescu (Romanian pronunciation: [eˈlena tʃe̯a.uˈʃesku]; born Lenuța Petrescu; (7 January 1916 [O.S. 25 December 1915] – 25 December 1989) was a Romanian communist politician who was the wife of Nicolae Ceaușescu, General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party and leader of the Socialist Republic of Romania. She was also the Deputy Prime Minister of Romania. Following the Romanian Revolution in 1989, she was executed alongside her husband on 25 December.

The de-satellization of the Socialist Republic of Romania from the Soviet Union was the release of Romania from its Soviet satellite status in the 1960s. The Romanian leadership achieved the de-satellization partly by taking advantage of Nikita Khrushchev's errors and vulnerabilities. Romania's independence was tolerated by Moscow because its ruling party was not going to abandon communism. Although Romania remained a member of both the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, it was not to be a docile member of either.

Even before Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power, Romania was a genuinely independent country, as opposed to the rest of the Warsaw Pact. To some extent, it was even more independent than Cuba (a socialist state that was not a member of the Warsaw Pact). The Romanian regime was largely impervious to Soviet political influence, and Ceaușescu was the only declared opponent of glasnost and perestroika. Due to the conflictual relationship between Bucharest and Moscow, the West did not hold the Soviet Union responsible for the policies pursued by Romania, as it did for other countries in the region such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. At the start of 1990, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze implicitly confirmed the lack of Soviet influence over Ceaușescu's Romania. When asked whether it made sense for him to visit Romania less than two weeks after its revolution, Shevardnadze insisted that only by going in person to Romania could he figure out how to "restore Soviet influence".

László Tőkés (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈlaːsloː ˈtøːkeːʃ]; born 1 April 1952) is a Romanian pastor and politician of Hungarian descent. He was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2007 to 2019. Tőkés served as a Vice-President of the European Parliament from 2010 to 2012. Bishop of the Reformed Diocese of Királyhágómellék of the Romanian Reformed Church, he is also a former Honorary President of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania. An effort to transfer Tőkés from his position as assistant pastor in Timișoara and evict him from his parsonage helped spark the Romanian Revolution, which overthrew Nicolae Ceaușescu and marked the end of communism in Romania. Tőkés is the president of the Hungarian National Council of Transylvania, a civic organization representing Transylvanian Hungarians. He is closely associated with the Hungarian People's Party of Transylvania (PPMT), but not a member of it. He is a member of the Reconciliation of European Histories Group, and co-sponsored the European Parliament resolution of 2 April 2009 on European conscience and totalitarianism.

The national flag of Romania (Romanian: drapelul național al României) is a tricolour featuring three equal vertical bands colored blue (at the flagpole), yellow and red, with a width to length ratio of 2:3.

The current version was adopted in 1989 in the wake of the Romanian Revolution and is defined in the Constitution of Romania as well as by organic law 75/1994, plus several later clarifications. Starting in 2023, the law provides exact color shades for print and digital purposes.

The president of Romania (Romanian: Președintele României) is the head of state of Romania. The president is directly elected by a two-round system, and, following a modification to the Romanian Constitution in 2003, serves for five years. An individual may serve two terms that may be consecutive. During their term in office, the president may not be a formal member of a political party. The president of Romania is the supreme commander of the Romanian Armed Forces.

The office of president was created in 1974 when communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu elevated the presidency of the State Council to a fully fledged executive presidency. It took its current form in stages after the Romanian Revolution, culminating in adopting Romania's current constitution in 1991.

Timișoara (UK: /ˌtɪmɪˈʃwɑːrə/, US: /ˌtiːmiː-/, Romanian: [timiˈʃo̯ara] ; see other names), officially the Municipality of Timișoara, is the capital city of Timiș County, Banat, and the main economic, social and cultural center in western Romania. Located on the Bega River, Timișoara is considered the informal capital city of the historical Banat region. From 1848 to 1860 it was the capital of the Serbian Vojvodina and the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar. With 250,849 inhabitants at the 2021 census, Timișoara is the country's fifth most populous city. It is home to around 400,000 inhabitants in its metropolitan area, while the Timișoara–Arad metropolis concentrates more than 70% of the population of Timiș and Arad counties. Timișoara is a multicultural city, home to 21 ethnic groups and 18 religious denominations. Historically, the most numerous were the Swabian Germans, Jews and Hungarians, who still make up 6% of the population in Timișoara.

Conquered in 1716 by the Austrians from the Ottoman Turks, Timișoara developed in the following centuries behind the fortifications and in the urban nuclei located around them. During the second half of the 19th century, the fortress began to lose its usefulness, due to many developments in military technology. Former bastions and military spaces were demolished and replaced with new boulevards and neighborhoods. Timișoara was the first city in the Habsburg monarchy with street lighting (1760) and the first European city to be lit by electric street lamps in 1884. It opened the first public lending library in the Habsburg monarchy and built a municipal hospital 24 years ahead of Vienna. Also, in 1771 it published the first German newspaper in Southeast Europe (Temeswarer Nachrichten). In December 1989, Timișoara was the starting point of the Romanian Revolution.

The National Liberal Party (Romanian: Partidul Național Liberal, PNL) is a Christian democratic political party in Romania. As of mid 2025, it is the country's third largest political party overall. Re-founded in mid January 1990, shortly after the Revolution of 1989 which culminated in the fall of communism in Romania, it claims the legacy of the major political party of the same name, active between 1875 and 1947 in the Kingdom of Romania.

Based on this historical legacy, it often presents itself as the first formally constituted political party in the country and the oldest of its kind from the family of European liberal parties as well.

The Great National Assembly (Romanian: Marea Adunare Națională, MAN) was the supreme body of state power of the Socialist Republic of Romania. The Great National Assembly was the only branch of government in Romania, and per the principle of unified power, all state organs were subservient to it. After the overthrow of Communism in Romania in December 1989, the Great National Assembly was dissolved by decree of the National Salvation Front (FSN) and eventually replaced by the bicameral parliament, made up of the Assembly of Deputies and the Senate.

The Great National Assembly was elected every four years, and each individual member represented 60,000 citizens. The system was created to imitate the Soviet model.

The National Salvation Front (Romanian: Frontul Salvării Naționale, FSN) was the most important political organization formed during the Romanian Revolution in December 1989; it set up the interim governing body, the National Salvation Front Council of Romania, in the first weeks after the collapse of the communist regime. The FSN subsequently became a political party, the largest party in post-communist Romania, and won the 1990 election with 66% of the national vote. Ion Iliescu, co-leader of the FSN, won election as President of Romania with 85% of the vote.

Iliescu nominated the co-leader of the FSN, Petre Roman, who was serving as interim prime minister, as the prime minister of the first cabinet formed after Romania's first post-Ceaușescu free and fair elections. After the fourth mineriadă (September 1991), Roman was forced to resign on 1 October 1991. Tensions between Iliescu and Roman came to a head in April 1992, at the national congress of FSN, when the party split in two, forming the Democratic Front of National Salvation (FDSN), led by President Iliescu; and FSN, led by Petre Roman (in 1993, the FSN was the renamed as the Democratic Party (PD).

Victor Atanasie Stănculescu (10 May 1928 – 19 June 2016) was a Romanian general during the Communist era. He played a central role in the overthrow of the dictatorship by refusing to carry out the orders of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu during the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. His inaction allowed the citizens demonstrating in Bucharest against the government to seize control. In addition, as a defense minister on 25 December 1989, Stănculescu organized the trial and execution of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena Ceaușescu.

Following the revolution, Stănculescu served terms as Minister of National Economy and Minister of Defense until 1991.

The Romanian rural systematization program was a social engineering program undertaken by Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania primarily at the end of the 1980s. The legal framework for this program was established as early as 1974, but it only began in earnest in March 1988, after the Romanian authorities renounced most favoured nation status and the American human rights scrutiny which came with it. The declared aim of this program was to eliminate the differences between urban and rural, by the means of razing half of Romania's 13,000 villages and moving their residents into hundreds of new "agro-industrial centers" by 2000. The program gained notoriety in Europe, with protests from multiple countries – chiefly Hungary – as well as a Belgian-led initiative to save the Romanian villages by "adopting" them. Within a year, on 18 April 1989, the first batch of 23 new agro-industrial towns was completed. Only one new town was created between 1974 and 1988, as Ceaușescu focused his attention on other projects. Although cut short by the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, at least three more rural settlements in an advanced state of systematization were, ultimately, transformed into towns as well.

Școala Centrală National College (Romanian: Colegiul Național Școala Centrală; literally Central School, formerly Zoia Kosmodemianskaia or just Zoia) is an institution of pre-primary, primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary public education located at 3-5 Icoanei Street, Sector 2, Bucharest, Romania. It functioned along the passing of time under many other names, most notably Pensionatul Domnesc de Fete (i.e., 'The Royal Girls' Boarding School/Pension'). It serves schooling for the classes 0 to 12th grade, that is, from pre-primary school up to high school.

During the communist period, Școala Centrală was known as Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, a name which was ascribed to this educational institution for political reasons. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, more specifically in 1994, the school's name was changed to Școala Centrală and bilingual French education was introduced for the classes with both humanist and exact sciences profiles pertaining to high school.