Petre Roman

Petre Roman is identified as prime minister under President Ion Iliescu during the June 1990 miners’ attacks on Bucharest. His brief appearance places him at the center of a sharp contradiction: an appeal to defend democracy accompanies the arrival of workers who use violence against the opposition and, increasingly, against people indiscriminately.

Role in the June 1990 crisis

Near the end of the narrator’s stay in Romania, Roman and Ion Iliescu called on workers to defend democracy against an alleged neofascist plot. The account immediately contrasts that public justification with the National Salvation Front’s concrete preparations: specially chartered buses and trains brought twenty thousand miners to Bucharest on June 14, 1990, and the miners were armed with iron bars.

The miners terrorized the city for two days. They first beat people suspected of belonging to the opposition, then widened their attacks to others, acting indiscriminately. Roman’s recorded role is the appeal made with Iliescu; the passage does not specify his individual part in arranging the transport or directing the attacks.

Narrative significance

Roman’s appearance is brief, but it anchors the account’s contrast between official language and events on the ground. The appeal framed the mobilization as a defense of democracy, while the violence that followed made that description deeply suspect. The narrator returned to Bucharest only as the spectacle was ending, after the miners had been congratulated by Iliescu, so Roman is presented through the political justification preceding the attacks rather than through a personal account of their aftermath.