Ion Iliescu

Ion Iliescu emerges in the book as the new president of Romania after the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime and as the public face of a political transition marked by striking continuities. His most consequential appearance comes in June 1990, when he and Prime Minister Petre Roman called on workers to defend democracy and Iliescu later congratulated miners who had arrived in Bucharest and attacked people across the city.

Political Position After the Revolution

The account places Iliescu at the head of the National Salvation Front, the party of the new president. Although the Communist Party had been banned and charged with an array of crimes, the narrator describes it as having survived by changing its name and leader. In the March 1990 elections, the Front won a sizable majority. The political break with the old regime was therefore less complete than its new vocabulary suggested: the former ruling party’s personnel and power remained present within the institutions of the new order.

The book also sets Iliescu’s presidency against the volatile aftermath of the revolution. Reports that thousands had been killed at Timișoara helped shape public understanding of the regime’s final days, but the supposed mass graves proved to have been staged for television: the bodies, a few dozen at most, had died natural deaths. The narrator presents this exposure alongside the survival of the old Communist political structure, making the new government’s claims to legitimacy part of a wider atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust. The account does not establish that Iliescu directed the cemetery deception; its emphasis is on the political landscape in which he became president.

The Miners in Bucharest

Near the end of the narrator’s spring reporting trip, Iliescu and Roman called on workers to defend democracy against what the narrator characterizes as an imaginary neofascist plot. The mobilization that followed was concrete: the National Salvation Front arranged buses and trains to bring 20,000 miners to Bucharest on June 14, 1990. The miners arrived armed with iron bars and, after being stirred up by what the account calls frenetic brainwashing, spent two days terrorizing the city.

Their violence first targeted people suspected of belonging to the opposition. When those targets proved too few, the miners attacked people indiscriminately. The narrator returned from the Carpathian Mountains only in time for the end of the episode. By then, Iliescu had congratulated the miners, while journalists were converging on the Hotel Intercontinental. The sequence places the president’s public endorsement beside the attacks themselves: a defense of democracy was invoked to justify a show of force that struck far beyond the opposition it purported to confront.

Narrative Significance

Iliescu’s role is defined less through private characterization than through the contrast between political language and political consequence. The Front invoked democratic defense while organizing the miners’ transport; Iliescu’s congratulations followed two days of intimidation and assault. That contradiction gives his brief appearances their force in the narrative.

His presidency also belongs to the book’s account of a revolution whose apparent rupture did not erase the institutions and political actors of the previous system. The Communist Party’s renaming, the Front’s electoral victory, and the miners’ intervention form a progression from formal change to continued control and coercion. Iliescu stands at the center of that progression—not as the subject of a detailed personal portrait, but as the president whose government’s actions expose the unsettled meaning of Romania’s new democracy.