Word: bucharest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like more than half the traffic lights in Bucharest, this one on the busy corner of Boulevard Nicolae Balcescu is dead. In the freezing fog, sputtering Rumanian-made Dacia sedans are lurching every which way, horns honking. On the sidewalk, pedestrians slog through ankle-deep mud and slush past an armored personnel carrier, guarded by shivering young soldiers fingering the triggers of their Kalishnikov rifles. At a kiosk nearby, 50 customers jostle for the meager pile of Romania Libera newspapers. Two doors away, a line of more than 100 shoppers shuffles toward a butcher's counter offering only hamburger...
...good. They revel in their traffic jams; Ceausescu all but banned cars to save fuel for export. After 24 years of state-sponsored terror, martial law by young soldiers who defeated the Securitate thugs in the Christmas revolution is a relief. "I like waiting for a newspaper," Ion, a Bucharest undergraduate, said last week. "For the first time here, there's news worth reading." And food lines? At least the queues are for food, say Rumanians, savoring their first beefburgers in memory. Ceausescu drove his subjects to fisticuffs over rations of offal and chicken feet...
Food and freedom have in many ways restored the soul to Bucharest, whose soot-covered older buildings and hideous concrete towers bear witness to how hard Ceausescu tried to kill the city's spirit. The dimly lit cafes in which couples two months ago whispered fearfully over mugs of ersatz tea now ring with gossip over cups of real coffee. Rumanians who once shied in terror from contact with foreigners besiege me as soon as I open my notebook. In the vast plaza of Piata Unirii, crowds that would once have been swiftly dispersed by Securitate goons argue the merits...
...border towns are already uniting the two Germanys through efforts both large and small. -- Though Gorbachev wants to keep his title as party chief, he aims to strengthen the presidency. -- South African President de Klerk announces that Mandela can go free. But when? -- Traffic jams and pilfered caviar in Bucharest...
That, says Bucharest lawyer Nicu Teodorescu, 57, is not quite how it happened. Teodorescu, who claims he was called in at the last minute to defend the Ceausescus, told the London Times last week that the end was considerably less dramatic, if no tidier. After the trial, during which they refused to cooperate (Teodorescu tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to plead mental instability), the Ceausescus were taken into the courtyard. "It was a mere quarter-hour or so after the death sentence was pronounced," he says. "They thought they were walking to a cell, when suddenly there was a huge...