Nicolae Ceauşescu

Nicolae Ceauşescu is presented through the last half-hour of his life: an unseen tribunal accuses him while cameras hold on him and Elena Ceauşescu, and the scene ends with their execution. The episode gives their mutual gestures a stark intimacy without making them innocent, and exposes the gap between a performance intended to justify killing and the dignity the narration sees in the accused.

The tribunal on camera

The footage offers almost no surrounding context. Nicolae and Elena sit at the right angle of two brown Formica tables, their backs to a blank wall; his sheepskin chapka rests in front of him. They look, the narration observes, like a retired couple. The camera shifts without apparent order but stays on them, never showing the people facing them or the person delivering the accusations. The room might be a classroom, a mess hall, or an administrative office; the framing leaves the tribunal’s setting and its accusers largely unseen.

The accusations describe the couple as living in unbridled luxury, causing children to starve, and committing genocide in Timişoara. After each salvo, Nicolae is invited to respond. Fingering his chapka, he says he does not recognize the tribunal’s legitimacy. Elena sometimes loses her temper and argues; he places a hand on hers to calm her. He also looks at his watch repeatedly. Viewers took this as a sign that he was waiting for troops to rescue them, but no troops arrive.

Execution and the failed performance

After half an hour, the broadcast cuts away. The next image shows the couple’s bloody corpses on the pavement of a street or courtyard, with the precise location impossible to tell. The abrupt cut makes the execution the scene’s conclusion, while withholding the visible process that connects tribunal to death. The recording, filmed by Romanian television, was broadcast across France on the evening of December 26, 1989.

The footage was meant to justify the killing of the Romanian head of state. Yet its staging, as the narrator sees it, fails: instead of establishing the accused’s guilt, it presents a hunted couple helping each other face death. The man’s refusal to recognize the tribunal and his quiet gesture toward Elena sit uneasily beside the accusations, and the watch-checking invites a hope that the scene itself extinguishes when no rescuers appear.

Guilt, dignity, and the narrator’s response

Eduard Limonov responded to the broadcast by writing of the couple as lovers journeying together toward eternity, comparing their final scene to Greek tragedy. His account acknowledges that a national leader cannot be entirely innocent: even a ruler who committed no other crime, it suggests, would have signed a shameful decree or failed to pardon someone. But Limonov’s lyrical emphasis falls on the couple’s tenderness and composure.

The narrator resists that exonerating emphasis. The Ceauşescus, in the narrator’s view, were not guilty merely of unavoidable mistakes made in office. At the same time, their criminality does not make the tribunal or summary execution just. The narrator recalls feeling deeply uncomfortable with what he calls a parody of justice, including its supposedly exemplary staging: in this instance, dignity belonged to the accused, however criminal they were. The distinction is central to the episode. Recognizing dignity at the moment of death is not the same as denying responsibility for what preceded it.

Afterlife of the footage

The execution closes what the narration calls an enchanted year in which nonviolent revolutions had brought humanists such as Václav Havel to power; the broadcast leaves that year ending on a sour note. In the months that followed, reports from Romania claimed that thousands had been massacred by the dying regime. Accounts of mass graves at Timişoara escalated from thousands of victims to a television claim of seventy thousand, accompanied by images of exhumed bodies. The bodies had in fact been dug up for the deception, and numbered only a few dozen at most.

Against that later false account, the trial footage occupies a different but related place in the book’s scrutiny of political images: the execution was real, while its televised tribunal was supposed to make the killing appear legitimate. The scene’s lasting force comes from the discrepancy between that intended justification and what the camera inadvertently records—two condemned people, accusation without a visible accuser, and a gesture of care that neither cancels guilt nor makes the killing lawful.