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“I’m an officer, I have a gun with 12 bullets. I’ll leave one for myself. But doing my duty, I will have to shoot.” It is said that a young KGB officer uttered these words in front of an angry crowd ready to attack the headquarters of the Secret Service of the Soviet Union in Dresden, a German town which was then part of the GDR. The year was 1989 and it is not clear whether this anecdote is true or whether it is a story invented to fuel the myth around its protagonist, who – only 10 years later – would take command of what remained of the Soviet Empire. That young officer went by the name of Vladimir Putin and, true or not, this anecdote tells us something about the feelings of revenge that the future autocrat will have towards the West for what happened in those last dramatic weeks of 1989. The war in Ukraine , with all the rhetoric it is cloaked in, says a lot about it.
The Romanian revolution in a podcast
Recalling those days and the incredible domino effect triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall is therefore a useful exercise for understanding current events. Paolo Colombo, professor of Contemporary History at the Catholic University of Milan, did it in History Telling, the new series podcast made for Il Sole 24 Ore which debuts today on our site and on all audio streaming platforms. The first season of the podcast, entitled “Ceausescu, the communist monarch”, 6 episodes released weekly every Tuesday until April 30th, focuses in particular on the tragic events that occurred in Romania, the only regime of the communist bloc to have collapsed for effect of a bloody clash between revolutionary forces and forces loyal to the dictatorship. In “Ceausescu, the communist monarch”, the first season of the History Telling series, we retrace the 20th century history of a country, Romania, in many ways linked to Italy. For the presence of the large Romanian community in our country, for example. But also for the ancient common linguistic root (Latin) and for the more recent twentieth-century history: in fact, like Italy, Romania also sided with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. But from then on, the paths diverge. Because, for almost half a century, the two countries were separated by the Iron Curtain.
The communist monarch
Romania, a faithful ally of Moscow, was however unique among the countries of the communist bloc. Largely due to the personality of his “Conducător”. In “Ceausescu, the communist monarch” Paolo Colombo recounts the rise and fall of a standard-bearer of socialism, revered and praised throughout the world while he was at the height of his power but who, with the spotlights off, revealed himself to be a ruthless autocrat , a true absolute monarch, complete with a dynasty, court and Versailles-style palace, intent on accumulating power and wealth for himself and his close circle of relatives and loyalists. Only to then find yourself having to pay the bill all at once.
“This story – says Paolo Colombo, author of the podcast – has all the charm of a historical-political Horror: there is a monster that wanders inside it, moving among the darkest folds of its plot, and continually claims victims , without anyone being able to identify and stop him. And what is fantastic is that – when in the end everything seems to have been resolved and the country has been freed from the terror that gripped it – it turns out that nothing is true, that the monster was another and, perhaps, is still alive”.