[H]ow many of us know the story of Laszlo Tokes, a Protestant pastor who in December 1989 stood up to the Romanian communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu and sparked a people’s revolution that freed Romania from a tyranny the equal of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin?

In the spring of 1989, while other Soviet satellites were challenging their communist leaders, Romania remained in the iron grip of the totalitarian Ceausescu regime. Few dared to speak out against “President” Ceausescu and his Stalinist secret police, the Securitate.

A notable exception was 37-year-old Laszlo Tokes, the assistant pastor of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the Transylvanian town of Timisoara. The theme of his sermons was simple but arresting: “We do not have to support the dictatorship and the dictator Ceausescu.” No one had dared utter such a public challenge.

Ordered to stop preaching, Tokes refused. Directed to leave the apartment in which he and his family were living and move to a distant isolated town, he refused. In November, attackers armed with knives broke into his church apartment, but Tokes and friends fought them off. In mid-December when an eviction order was issued, members of Tokes’s congregation began a vigil outside his lodging, and a human chain formed around the block. . .

Two days later, on direct orders from Ceausescu, communist troops fired on a large crowd gathered in the town center of Timisoara, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocents. This cowardly bloody act was the catalyst for a spontaneous people’s revolt that quickly spread across the country and to the capital city of Bucharest.

Read more about how this preacher brought down a dictator HERE.