Word: ion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...narrowly based provisional government. Rumanians are troubled by some of the men who assumed control. Several of the leading figures are communists -- dissident and reformist communists of the Gorbachev variety, to be sure, but still tainted by membership at one point or another in Ceausescu's machine. The President, Ion Iliescu, 59, is a former Central Committee Secretary who was demoted in the early 1970s after complaining to Ceausescu about nepotism in the party. Vice President Dumitru Mazilu is also a lifelong communist whose career ground to a halt after he clashed with the dictator. ^ The same is true...
According to Ion Pacepa, a Rumanian lieutenant general who defected to the U.S. in 1978, the Securitate under Ceausescu had various functions. One was to serve as a kind of Praetorian Guard for members of the Communist Party's Central Committee and specifically the Ceausescu family. Many of the 75,000 or so troops were recruited from orphanages and raised to regard their job with a loyalty bordering on fanaticism. Other uniformed crack troops, equipped with armored vehicles and helicopter gunships, were assigned to supervise the country's border patrol and guard the political prisons. A particularly brutish department known...
...head of the Communist Party is Ion Iliescu, 59, who studied at a technical institute in Moscow in the early 1950s and became a close friend of Gorbachev's. As a regional party secretary, he earned a reputation as an idealistic communist reformer. Since both Manescu and Iliescu held high posts in the now discredited party, however, they are likely to be transitional figures...