Mircea Cărtărescu on the fall of the Romanian dictatorship in 1989

In the Romanian daily Evenimentul Zilei writer Mircea Cărtărescu looks back on the fall of the communist dictatorship in 1989 and is not too pleased with the results: "The revolution took us by surprise and we believed in it. When you're surrounded by a million people hugging and crying with joy, you don't ask who called on them to attend this gathering, or why. Some 1,000 of them were shot down [by security forces]. Then [the communist head of state Nicolae] Ceauşescu, whom we had thought immortal, was shot too. All this was shown on television. … And although everything was so obvious, the effect so simple and the stage so cheap … we believed with open eyes in this dream. The revolution was a telenovela, our sweet illusion. … In 1990 we arrived in a free world and a democracy. But we didn't know what freedom and democracy were. After 50 years of fascist and communist dictatorship we weren't even a nation or even a society any more. We were a herd. We were lied to then, and we are lied to now. We were poor then, and now we're even poorer."

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