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The Central Committee Building is an unlikely time machine. With its seven storeys and two wings of offices, it seems too huge to slip between the fabric of the centuries and with its stark Soviet-brutalist stylings, it feels rather more Cold-War thriller than sci-fi movie.

And yet, unchanged by the three decades that have flowed behind it, it also looks like a teleportation device with the coordinates locked on to December 1989 the month when the people of Bucharest booed and hissed on its steps. Standing in front of it on what is now called Piata Revolutiei (Revolution Square), I am 14 years old again, watching agog at the demise of Communism in Romania on a TV in suburban Birmingham.

Romanias self-severing from the Eastern Bloc was the violent footnote to what history has come to regard as the euphoric game of dominoes that played out across Europe 30 years ago. Polands emergence from political suffocation was a triumph of collective will and Solidarity, Czechoslovakias pulling down of the Iron Curtain was a (largely) peaceful process that earned the tag-line Velvet Revolution, and the events that made Berlin a party zone need no explanation. But there were no hands across fractured walls in Romania; no mass singalongs on hated barriers. There was despair, fury and, in the end, in footage which summarised the speed of events, presidential blood on the concrete.

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30 years after the Romanian Revolution, has Bucharest shaken off the ghost of its communist dictator? - Telegraph.co.uk