Silviu Brucan, Requiescat in pace.

Citizen Brucan realized the truth before it was too late. Romania and the world owe him a debt of gratitude.

BUCHAREST - Silviu Brucan, Romania’s ambassador to the United States in the 1950’s and then one of the most outspoken opponents of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, died here on Wednesday. He was 90.

The cause was a heart attack, which occurred 10 days after he had stomach surgery, the Rompres agency reported, quoting a doctor at University Hospital.

Mr. Brucan ran the Communist daily newspaper Scanteia in 1944 and was chief of the public television station in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He was appointed Romania’s ambassador to Washington in 1955. From 1959 to 1962, he was ambassador to the United Nations.

In 1987, in the last years of Mr. Ceausescu’s rule, Mr. Brucan was placed under house arrest after he criticized the dictator’s regime. Mr. Ceausescu was ousted and executed in 1989.

In early 1989, Mr. Brucan was one of six Romanian dissidents to sign a letter criticizing Mr. Ceausescu. That document was considered one of the strongest public protests against the dictator.

After Communism ended, Mr. Brucan became one of the country’s most respected political analysts, and until recently had a weekly program called “Prophets About the Past.”

Mr. Brucan was born Saul Bruckner in Bucharest on Jan. 18, 1916, and later changed his name. As a Jew, he was denied a proper education, and his father’s profitable wool business failed in the 1929 crash.

Mr. Brucan turned to Communism, and defined himself as a man of the left even though he later supported Romania’s center-right government from 1996 to 2000, which he said was necessary to push through market reforms.

He gained notoriety when he said shortly after the 1989 anti-Communist revolt that it would take Romanians 20 years to learn democracy. As years passed, many Romanians came to agree with him, as the country struggled to demolish a mentality inherited from decades of harsh Communist rule.
After Mr. Brucan’s death, President Traian Basescu said Mr. Brucan had been right.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 1998, Mr. Brucan was outspoken and prescient about the continuing role of Mr. Ceausescu’s dreaded secret police, the Securitate, at a time when many still feared to speak openly. He said that former officers and informants held key positions in the media, Parliament and government and that their influence would not end until the country excluded former Securitate collaborators from holding office.

Eight years later, Romania has finally begun to open its Securitate files, and legislation has been drafted that would exclude Securitate informers and officers from holding office.

In 1998, Mr. Brucan published his biography, “From Capitalism to Socialism and Back Again.”

He is survived by his wife.