The 1980s came to an end in what seemed like a magic act, performed on a world historical stage. Trapdoors flew open, and whole regimes vanished. The shell of an old world cracked, and something new, alive, exploded into the air in a flurry of white wings.

The transformation had a giddy, hallucinatory quality, its surprises tumbling out night after night. The wall that divided Berlin and sealed an international order crumbled into souvenirs. The cold war was peacefully deconstructing before the world's eyes.

After the years of numb changelessness, the communist world has come alive with an energy and turmoil that have taken on a bracing, potentially anarchic life of their own. Not even Romania was immune. The magician who set loose these forces is a career party functionary, a charismatic politician and an impresario of calculated disorder named Mikhail Gorbachev.