In Romania, he gave peace a chant

Ioan Savu, says he joined the revolts against Nicolae Ceaucescu because otherwise, ‘my children would later ask me why I hadn’t been there.’

One moment, Ioan Savu was a factory worker, cowering from bullets in a seething crowd of desperate and angry people. The next, he had been thrust by that crowd onto the balcony usually reserved for the dictator, at the head of 1989's fastest, bloodiest and least likely revolution.

This shy, bearded man suddenly found himself addressing a crowd of 100,000 of his fellow townsfolk in the western Romanian city of Timisoara shortly after tanks and soldiers fired on them. The words seemed to appear by magic on his tongue: The dictator had to go. The bullets would not stop the people.

Less than a day later, on Dec. 21, he was proven correct, and the dictator fled and was killed, all because of what began in this city.

Before it was over, Mr. Savu would melt back into the crowd, return to his detergent factory job, and after democracy was won, quietly took up his current position as an insurance agent.

“It was the cleanest and purest moment of my life, and I wanted to keep it that way," he said the other day as he strolled through Opera Square, beneath the balcony from which he had urged people to bravely face the bullets.

“I knew a guy like me was likely to be killed," he said. “Everything was ready in my mind. I told my wife: Look, you know, what if I did not go out into that crowd – my children would later ask me why I hadn't been there."

Unlike anywhere else in communist Europe, Romania didn't have anything resembling a resistance or an opposition, nor a regime with even the vaguest thoughts of reform. As the waves of democracy and resistance swept out from Berlin, Warsaw and Prague that winter, hapless and inexperienced people such as Mr. Savu – briefly and quickly – took the reins of history.

Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's heavy-handed Stalinist regime had insured that no news of the 1989 democratic revolutions, in print or broadcast media or via telephone, was available within its borders. And the regime had severely restricted electricity and heating-fuel supplies to a few hours a day, cutting households off during the key news (and cooking) hours between 6 and 9 p.m.

Timisoara was different, though. Its people were multiethnic, speaking several European languages. And they lived near the borders of Hungary and Yugoslavia, close enough to tune in to TV signals from over the border.

Late at night, Mr. Savu would watch the Belgrade channels, which after midnight broadcast tapes of CNN coverage.

“Living in Timisoara it was like a window open into the world," he said. “I could see on Serbian TV the strikes led by Lech Walesa, the fall of the Berlin Wall – somehow we alone among Romanians were connected to the planetary realities."

Perhaps for that reason, Mr. Savu found it natural to take to the streets, despite having never done so before. The cause was a minor protest by a few dozen seniors over the bureaucracy's sacking of a Hungarian Calvinist pastor at a downtown church.

First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people were attracted to the large downtown square, and soon the original cause was forgotten and the Ceausescu regime itself became the cause.

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