I don't know whether the Securitate wanted to get rid of him or simply got with the program. With the Russians and the West firmly against Ceauşescu, there was no way to win. Stănculescu did somewhat poorly, and ended up in prison for having fired on the Timisoara protesters on December 16, 1989. He tried to compensate for that by betraying and killing Ceauşescu, but it did him no good in the end. He was stripped of his rank and his wife jumped from a window in despair.Azrael wrote:So Securitate wanted to get rid of him. Likewise, perhaps the KGB wanted to get rid of Gorbi. They and their partners in crime did quite well financially under Yeltsin.
]Has Stănculescu done well financially since then? It seems that he didn't start to feel the heat for his previous actions against protesters until 1999.
Perhaps he was told that the helicopter was the only option. Perhaps he was told that the Blue Arrow had been sabotaged.
Many Securitate people did very well. They are Romania's business elite today.
I was talking about Ceauşescu's decision with a member of the older generation who had worked for one of Securitate's financial audit divisions. He told me that Ceauşescu was a simple country boy (with a knack for a certain type of politics) who didn't understand things such as bunkers and fortresses. Ceauşescu went to his death in Târgovişte like a Communist revolutionary, singing The International and lines from "Awaken, Romanian!".