[In the following review, Stepan states that the chief merit of Codrescu's The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution is its documentation of how myths are replaced by counter-myths.]

What do the current presidential and parliamentary elections in Romania tell us about the nature of its "transition" from communism, or, indeed, about the "revolution" of 1989?

To get a feeling of the elation, fear, confusion, uncertainty and disillusionment that surrounded the fall of Ceausescu in the winter of 1989, one couldn't do better than read the account by the poet Andrei Codrescu of his return to Romania at the time, after a twenty-five year exile in the United States. One of his best chapters, entitled "Seize the Means of Projection", describes the young activists, peasants and former officials in front of the television cameras, urgently presenting their views of what was happening to an electrified country and to the world. Securitate terrorists were still believed to be a counter-revolutionary threat. Rumours of deliberately poisoned water supplies, of 10,000, 60,000, even 100,000 dead, filled the news channels and the streets. Codrescu even then had his doubts about the sincerity of many of the new converts to revolution from the old regime, but he, like everyone else, was swept up in the events.

Six months later, on a return visit, Codrescu's euphoria turned to despair. The old communists, now the neo-communists organized in a National Salvation Front, had "captured the revolution"—the government itself, led by Iliescu and his former communist allies, but also the words and the meanings of the revolution. President Iliescu had called out vigilante miners to smash the students (who represented to Codrescu the most authentic part of the revolution in Bucharest). Codrescu was distressed to find that many of his friends hailed Iliescu for thanking the miners publicly for their patriotic and disciplined rampage. Then, too, the body count at Timisoara had apparently been inflated by digging up bodies from nearby paupers' graves. Codrescu was thoroughly disillusioned and disorientated. It seemed to him the whole revolution had been a fake, a film scripted by the Romanian communists, with a "beautifully orchestrated piece of Kremlin music conducted by Maestro Gorbachev".

Codrescu's difficulty in knowing what happened is ours too. We do know that the number of people killed in the collapse of Ceausescu's regime was probably closer to 2,000 than 60,000. We also know that Codrescu is probably right in thinking there was an element of a staged counter-revolution, even to the extent of simulated gunfire, and that disinformation played an important role in the events. To this day, rumours are encountered more in Bucharest than in any other Eastern European capital. On recent trips, I find myself using "archaeological" sources for information on the recent past. If, during the uprising, Iliescu's supporters in the Central Committee Building in Bucharest's main square were under siege by Securitate loyalists, why are the surrounding buildings destroyed, and the Central Committee Building virtually unscarred by bullets?

The Rise and Fall of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu by Mark Almond and Romania in Turmoil by Martyn Rady lack the immediacy of Codrescu's account, but their broader historical scope provides better balance. Almond's biography is the best we now have. It is particularly astute about the physical (and ideological) architecture of the final years of Ceausescu's regime, such as the schematization plan to eliminate rural-urban distinctions by the forced relocation of peasants into multi-storey buildings, and the razing of many of Bucharest's historic churches in the Old Town, to make way for the approaches to the most brutal building project in Eastern Europe, the House of the Republic. Finally, Almond deals well with the international dimensions of Ceausescu's fall, especially the impact of the collapse of hardline communists in other parts of Eastern Europe in making Ceausescu seem more isolated and vulnerable. Rady has three chapters on the pre-Ceausescu period, followed by five on post-Ceausescu developments, and for most readers his book is perhaps the single most useful introduction available to present-day Romania.

Codrescu's idea of a "scripted" revolution, implying a sinister plot written in advance, whose enactment allowed its authors to "capture" the revolution, is still probably the most widely accepted framework for analysing the events in the country. But of all the transitions from communism that occurred in Eastern Europe, Romania's is the one where we are least able to know "what really happened"; and of all the narratives, that of a scripted revolution allows for the fewest ambiguities and contradictions. The value of The Hole in the Flag, then, lies not in its account of connected events as they occurred, but as a document of how myths are replaced by counter-myths. For Romania, more than for any other transition in Eastern Europe, any primarily narrative approach is inherently unsatisfying; what we need, rather, are studies of the dynamics of myth-creation and the functions of disinformation—a deconstruction of revolution itself. The best effort along these lines is the piece by Katherine Verdery and Gail Kligman, in Eastern Europe in Revolution, edited by Ivo Banac. They too, have sifted through the supposed facts and evidence, they know all the literature, but their concern is with the very terms by which the events in Romania were experienced, described and understood: "the miners", "the demonstrators", "the front", "the revolution", "neo-communism". This makes for a lot of quotation marks, but is illuminating.

Another way to approach the Romanian transition is to think more deeply about the nature of the Ceausescu regime and to place Romanian politics in comparative perspective. Of the Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe, Romania had the weakest organized opposition and the bloodiest transition. It is the only one where nothing remotely close to a round table took place and the only one where high Communist Party officials from the previous regime currently run the country. Civil society is so weak that many members of the two most innovative centre-left organizations, the Civic Alliance and the Group for Social Dialogue, want the monarchy back, in order, they say, to give civil society a chance to develop. Middle Eastern associations of the term are unfortunate, because regimes as geographically diverse as Kim II Sung's in North Korea, Bokassa's in the Central African Empire, and Somoza's in Nicaragua all approximate Weber's sultanistic ideal type. Understanding the combination of sultanistic and totalitarian tendencies in Ceausescu's Romania clarifies much that is distinctive in Romania's past, present and foreseeable future. It was precisely the sultanistic quality of Ceausescu's regime that enabled Iliescu to present Ceausescu as the embodiment of the system, and to imply that he, Iliescu, had changed the political and economic system completely by "decapitating the hydra-headed monster". In no other Warsaw-pact country would this rhetorical trick have had such weight.

Where do we stand now in our understanding of presentday Romania? To answer this question we have to go beyond the conceptual framework provided by the "script", "revolution", the "captured revolution" or "neo-communism". To speak of scripted uprisings in Timisoara and Bucharest is to underestimate the critical importance of the "movements of rage" (to use Ken Jowitt's memorable phrase) in undermining Ceausescu's coercive power. "Revolution" over-estimates the degree to which these movements of rage represented organized opposition groups with their own leaders and programmes. "Captured revolution" misses the extemporaneous opportunism and weaknesses of Iliescu. "Neo-communism" overstates the principled cohesion of the government that followed Ceausescu's downfall, and in particular does not take into account the profound divisions within the National Salvation Front that emerged in 1991. In fact, in the last twelve months the anti-Iliescu wing of the NSF, faced with a crisis of governance in September 1991, formed a coalition government that included some of the traditional liberals, supported Prime Minister Stolojan's courtship of the IMF and, in late March 1992, won control of the party label.

But as the current elections show, sultanistic rule has still left behind a flattened political and social landscape. Civil society remains incipient, the rule of law fragile, political coalitions turbulent, most political tendencies compromised. In this context, the Romanian opposition was not able to mount a Chilean-style, principled and united democratic campaign, led by a prominent political figure, and carry its message into every corner of the country. The weakness of the opposition, as much as the strength of Iliescu, explains why Iliescu will no doubt win the presidential run-off on October 11. But since no clear pro-Iliescu or anti-Iliescu group of parties has emerged with a majority in parliament, the outcome could well be a series of unstable coalitions, whose explanation will take us even further beyond the framework of "captured revolution" or "neo-communism", but not, unfortunately, beyond the framework of sultanistic legacies.