Romania had to kill its tyrant and his supporters to make room for democracy because it had no legal route to oust him
Irina D. Manta at The UnPopulist:
Martina Navratilova is “pissed off as hell.” She fled totalitarian Czechoslovakia for the United States only to watch too many Americans now give up on freedom without a fight. She is speaking up as part of an ad campaign for an organization that shares the stories of those harmed by Donald Trump. My family and I fled Romania for the West. The contrast between our two countries, during the twilight of communism and in its aftermath, offers a stark lesson for Americans confronting threats to democratic norms today. In Czechoslovakia, a resilient (albeit repressed) legal framework and brave legal advocates created space for peaceful resistance. In Romania, the complete destruction of legal institutions left violence and chaos. One path led toward the Velvet Revolution; the other toward summary execution of its leader after thousands of civilian deaths and injuries. The difference should remind Americans why safeguarding our legal system must be everyone’s priority.
Czechoslovakia: When Legal Infrastructure Survives
In 1975, an unlikely document became the foundation for democratic resistance in Eastern Europe. Seeking international legitimacy, Soviet bloc countries signed the Helsinki Final Act, committing to respect some basic rights. The “Third Basket” of the act dealt with human rights principles. To the dismay of the Soviet Union, many in Warsaw Pact countries expected that these provisions would actually be enforced. They began organizing. In Czechoslovakia, dissidents succeeded in having the provisions enshrined into the country’s legal system just a year later. For the first time, human rights principles became binding on a communist government. In the following year, 1977, activists drafted Charter 77, a manifesto that criticized the Czech government for failing to implement a variety of human rights provisions to which it had agreed. Among its drafters was playwright (and later Czech president) Václav Havel.
Charter 77 was effective because it focused on law. The manifesto challenged the Czech government to follow existing laws, which included allowing democratic protest. Rather than calling for revolution, Charter 77 put the lie to communist propaganda and sought to hold the government accountable to its own supposed commitments. Step by step, this allowed activists to make progress. In 1978, Charter 77 signatories established the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS), which helped those facing persecution to secure legal representation and financial assistance. Despite VONS members at times being unjustly arrested and even imprisoned for years (including Havel himself), the organization persisted. Czechoslovakia’s regime never fully destroyed the country’s legal infrastructure. Courts still operated, albeit in a compromised fashion. Lawyers could still represent clients, with limitations. To be clear: the regime routinely bent the law to its needs. Charter 77 signatories did not simply win court cases or force policy changes via legal pressure.
What mattered was that the legal framework was suppressed rather than downright annihilated—a distinction traceable to Czechoslovakia’s unique 20-year history (1918-1938) as a functioning parliamentary democracy largely under founding President Tomáš Masaryk. As a result, lawyers maintained professional identities and standards. Legal procedures continued to exist, even when manipulated. Most importantly, the preserved infrastructure meant that when mass demonstrations erupted in November 1989, there existed both the institutional framework and trained personnel capable of managing a peaceful transition. The Communist Party capitulated, and Havel was quickly elected interim president and ultimately, president.
Romania: When Legal Infrastructure Dies
Unlike Czechoslovakia, Romania had no Charter 77, no VONS or committee to help the unjustly prosecuted, no meaningful legal framework that dissidents could invoke. As one scholar put it:
[T]he beginning of democratization in Romania was substantiated by philosophers, writers, and even journalists, as opposed to Romania’s prominent legal scholars who had been thoroughly selected and censored so as to echo only the party policy and to perpetrate an atmosphere of terror and oppression.
Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s dictator, had systematically destroyed the country’s rule of law. Detainees could be held for 60 days without the right to seek judicial review, to confer with an attorney, or even to have family notified. The legal profession existed only to support the regime. There was no legal mechanism for resistance or any substantive change.
Because peaceful transition was impossible, regime change came by violence in December 1989. More than 1,000 people died and thousands more were injured. Indeed, Romania was the only Eastern Bloc country that violently overthrew its regime and killed its leader. On Christmas Day, 1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were court-martialed. “Based on summary and abusive procedures,” one scholar notes, their trial “lasted only 55 minutes and ended with a death sentence which had been already ... decided by the [National Salvation Front] political leaders. It is considered by most experts to have been a masquerade of justice.” In December 2018, an indictment charging several participants in the Romanian revolution with war crimes described the “mockery of a trial” that produced the Ceaușescus’ conviction and execution. Dramatically, the Ceaușescus’ assigned lawyer ultimately joined with the prosecutor during the show trial, accusing them of capital crimes instead of defending them. The dictator who had spent decades destroying the rule of law discovered that there was no law left to protect him.
More than three decades after these countries’ revolutions, as of 2024, the Czech Republic ranked 20th globally on the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index and Romania ranked 41st, a gap that reflects the enduring cost of destroying legal institutions versus preserving them even under repression. This gap has had consequences. Both countries joined the European Union in 2004, but the Czech Republic has generally enjoyed peaceful democratic governance while Romania has suffered large-scale corruption and government collapses, judicial reform difficulties noted by E.U. monitors, and much lower GDP per capita. From freedom of expression to property rights—even all this time after the fall of communism—the Czech Republic still consistently scores higher than Romania on many significant metrics of civil rights and democratic governance. The contrast between the experiences of Czechoslovakia and Romania offers vital lessons for Americans today. We face sustained challenges to our legal institutions: attacks on judicial independence, threats to prosecute political opponents, efforts to delegitimize courts, and rhetoric that treats legal process as mere obstacle rather than foundational protection.
[...] Czechoslovakia’s path required courage: Charter 77 signatories faced harassment, imprisonment, and exile. But that path also called for something more mundane: the preservation of legal forms, the maintenance of professional standards, the insistence that law matters even when power seems to render it irrelevant. Charter 77’s approach—demanding that the government follow its own laws—provided the framework that made peaceful transition possible. Romania’s collapse teaches us what happens when that framework dies. Ceaușescu destroyed the legal profession’s independence, subordinated courts entirely to political power, and eliminated any room for legal challenge. This total destruction was possible because Romania lacked what Czechoslovakia possessed: an established legal system forged during 20 years of parliamentary democracy. Without entrenched institutions or professional norms to overcome, Ceaușescu could build a legal apparatus designed from the ground up to serve the regime. When his regime fell, there was no mechanism for peaceful accountability; all that remained was a show trial and firing squad. He destroyed the rule of law and victimized millions during his reign, leaving the country without the institutional capacity for justice—requiring a revolution to get justice.
The lesson taught in Czechoslovakia (now Czechia/Czech Republic) under communist times is that lawyers are key to defeating the Trump Regime’s authoritarian regime… peacefully.
