Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It now seems so inevitable – how could the Communist regime have survived in Romania? But they discovered then how brittle the regime in fact was. It was like a windscreen that can be shattered by one small stone, and that stone was Pastor Tokes. He was the spark that lit the fuse that turned into a bloody revolution with over 1,000 dead, including, of course, Ceausescu himself.
Your next book is the autobiography of Pastor Tokes.
This is a small volume, written in the aftermath of 1989. Pastor Tokes was an ethnic Hungarian priest in Timisoara, and he describes here the experience of being a lone dissenting voice in Ceausescu’s Romania. They didn’t dare kill him, as they had other priests and dissenters, but he was actually sent to Timisoara to be kept under the watchful eye of a pro-regime priest who wouldn’t delegate any duties to Tokes and eventually died of overwork. Then suddenly he was told by the secret police that he was going to be expelled from his parish and from his home the following Friday. Tokes says he asked his congregation to be there and peacefully witness his expulsion, in the early Christian tradition of bearing witness. In fact, Tokes got worried when he saw them and asked them to go home. It now seems so inevitable – how could the Communist regime have survived? But people discovered then how brittle the regime in fact was. It was like a windscreen that can be shattered by one small stone, and that stone was Pastor Tokes.
I arrived ten days later for the BBC and I interviewed the people who had been there, the ethnic Hungarian members of the congregation and the Romanians who had joined them. At first the congregation, who had come holding candles, were suspicious of the Romanians, assuming they were agent provocateurs. But the Romanians had just had enough and had come to support the priest. They ended up marching on the Party Headquarters and smashing the windows. Pastor Tokes was the spark that lit the fuse that turned into a bloody revolution with over 1,000 dead, including, of course, Ceausescu himself.
There is a tendency to think that these revolutions were conspiracies led by a few dissidents or the military, but I have always maintained that they were genuine uprisings. Perhaps in Romania the uprising got hijacked, but these began as genuine revolutions led by the people.
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Nick Thorpe lives in Budapest with his wife and five children and began reporting in February 1986 as the first western journalist to be based there. He is the only British journalist to have covered Eastern Europe from the inside for over 20 consecutive years. He witnessed the collapse of Yugoslavia, popular uprisings in Bulgaria and Serbia, and the transformation of non-violent to violent resistance in Kosovo. As the BBC’s Central Europe correspondent he continues to report the successes and the failures of a revolution which never quite reaches its goal.
