Ceausescu - Corrupt Dictator of Communist Romania Documentary

The man known to history as Nicolae Ceausescu was born on the 26th of January 1918 in the small town of Scornicesti in the south of the Kingdom of Romania. He was effectively born on the frontlines of the First World War, as Scornicesti lay near the border with Bulgaria, one of the Central Powers in the conflict and an enemy of Romania, though the Romanian government was already in the middle of negotiations to accept peace terms from Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria in early 1918, Russia’s imminent withdrawal from the war having left Romania surrounded by its enemies. Nicolae’s father

was Andruta Ceausescu. He came from a very modest family background of sheep farmers in southern Romania. He was a politically active individual who during Nicolae’s youth supported the Peasant’s Party, an agrarian socialist movement. Nicolae would absorb many of his father’s political views, though it was a relationship fraught with difficulty in other ways. Common report from those who knew the Ceausescu family in Scornicesti during Nicolae’s youth was that his father was an alcoholic and physically violent towards his wife and children. Nicolae’s mother was Alexandrina Ceausescu, née Militaru. She came from a modest family as well, one

with a history of having served in the Romanian revolutionary forces back in the days when Romanian nationalists were attempting to free themselves from Ottoman Turkish rule during the nineteenth century. Nicolae was her and Andruta’s third child, two daughters, Niculina and Marin, having been born in 1914 and 1916. There would be six further children, four boys and two girls, the youngest Ion born in 1932. Somewhat infamously one of Nicolae’s younger brothers was also named Nicolae, legend having it that their father had drunkenly given him the wrong name when he was being officially registered. Later the younger

Nicolae adopted the name Andruta as his middle name to distinguish himself from his older brother. Nicolae would grow up during a period of mixed fortunes in the history of Romania. The regions of Moldavia and Wallachia which make up much of Romania and Moldova today had gradually obtained more independence from the declining Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century. Then in the late 1870s, at the end of one of the most consequential of the many Russo-Turkish Wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Romania and Serbia both acquired full independence from the Turks. Three years later, in 1881,

Romania became the third European country of the nineteenth century, after Belgium and Greece a half a century earlier, to invite a German prince to become king of their country. King Carol I was a scion of the House of Hohenzollern. He would rule for nearly three and half decades and was succeeded by his nephew, Ferdinand I, who was on the throne when Nicolae was born. Although the treaty that the Central Powers had imposed in 1918 was punitive, it was soon renounced by Romania, which entered the war again in the dying days of it. Thus, through the

newly negotiated Treaty of Trianon of 1920 Romania regained the territory it had ceded two years earlier and gained a large portion of Hungary. This meant that unlike in many other European countries, the monarchy in Romania survived the First World War and remained popular. When King Ferdinand died in 1927 it ushered in a period of growing crisis, as his son and heir, Carol, had previously entered a problematic marriage which saw him bypassed in the succession in favour of his infant son. King Michael I was just five years old when he became ruler of Romania. He would

be deposed by his own father three years later who became King Carol II. Compounding all of this was the onset of the Great Depression late in 1929 after the Wall Street Crash in the US. Matters were not helped by the personality of the new king, who in line with the growing extremism of European politics sought to establish a kind of royal dictatorship. One key element of his repressive regime which would impact on the Ceausescus was the crackdown on socialist movements by Carol II and his government in the 1930s. More broadly, ethnic tensions remained in the

Balkans as Hungary and Romania still viewed each other as having lands which rightfully belonged to either a Greater Romania or Greater Hungary, while Bucharest also viewed Moldavia and parts of the border region of what had become the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR as rightfully being parts of Greater Romania. All of these things would influence the course of Romanian politics in some important ways which would shape Nicolae’s life. Nicolae had a tumultuous youth in the Kingdom of Romania. He attended Scornicesti Primary School in the second half of the 1920s, but in 1929 at the

age of 11 he fled from home to escape his abusive and alcoholic father. Young Nicolae headed for Bucharest, where he went to live with his eldest sister Niculina. She was just 15, but had already relocated to the capital to find work and escape the chaos of the Ceausescu family home. In the capital young Nicolae soon obtained a position as an apprentice to a shoemaker. His employer, Alexandru Sandulescu, was a member of the Romanian Communist Party, a movement which had emerged in 1921 from the Social-Democratic Party as a radical faction, inspired by the Russian Revolution of

1917 and the successes it was achieving in the Russian Civil War by the beginning of the 1920s. The Communists were effectively an illegal movement within Romania, as the government had determined that they would act as a fifth column of the neighbouring Soviet Union. Romania was also not an industrialised country and the Communist movement remained small in the 1920s and 1930s. Nicolae soon joined the movement under the guidance of Sandulescu around 1932. Over the next several years he worked as a shoemaker and had frequent brushes with the law, both as a Communist agitator and more broadly

for various acts of petty crime in Bucharest. In the summer of 1936, after making numerous appearances before the courts over the years, and now being deemed old enough to be fully tried as an adult, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for his activities as a Communist agitator. He spent these, for the most part, in the Doftana Prison, a prison fortress referred to as the Romanian Bastille that had been built in the late nineteenth century. Ceuasescu’s fortunes and the course of his life would be profoundly impacted on by the events of

the late 1930s and early 1940s across Europe. In September 1939 the Second World War commenced when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war on Germany in response. At this juncture Romania was not allied to Germany and had maintained its close relations with Britain and France, fostered during the First World War when it had fought alongside those nations. However, Germany’s subsequent conquest of France in the summer of 1940 created new political pressures in Romania and in September 1940 a military coup in Bucharest brought Ion Antonescu to power as the dictator of Romania. The

monarchy was retained, although King Carol II was deposed and his son Michael, who by now was a young adult, was restored to the throne as a puppet ruler. Thereafter Romania became one of the staunchest allies of Nazi Germany, particularly so during the invasion of the Soviet Union from the summer of 1941 onwards, an action which Romania hoped to benefit from by acquiring lands in Bessarabia and further north into what is now Ukraine. Of all its allies, even Italy, Romania would commit more troops to the Eastern Front than any other Axis power beyond the Germans themselves,

particularly along the southern front in Ukraine and the Black Sea region eastwards towards Stalingrad. Antonescu’s military regime was also extreme in its repressive and genocidal policies, not only persecuting the substantial Romanian Jewish population along Nazi lines, but also largely driving the concomitant genocide of the Romani and Sinti minorities. When the Second World War broke out Ceausescu was not long out of jail in Romania. He would not be free for long. In the months that followed he was still being observed by the state as a Communist agitator. This took on additional significance in the context of

Soviet expansion into the Moldavia region and the fear that Moscow intended to encroach further into Romania during the general crisis that was gripping Europe. The more hardline government under Antonescu began detaining Communist suspects and Ceausescu would spend much of the years between 1940 and 1944 imprisoned by the right-wing military regime. This was in various detention facilities, many of them effectively concentration camps. One was especially important. In 1943 Nicolae was sent to Targu Jiu internment camp and was imprisoned there in a cell alongside a certain Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a senior member of the Romanian Communist movement. Gheorghiu-Dej

would be the Communist ruler of Romania within a few years. Had Ceausescu not been imprisoned with him, he would not have become his close political ally and the world would probably have never heard of Nicolae Ceausescu. Thus, while Nicolae spent much of the war in various detention centres, he left it with close ties to the future leadership of the country. In the end Communist agitators in Romania were not freed through events in the country but as a result of the general progress of the war in Eastern Europe. After a period of immense success in the

summer and autumn of 1941 the combined German, Romanian and Italian invasion of the Soviet Union had stalled in the winter of 1941. Stalemate ensued in 1942. Then, with victory for the Russians at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Soviets began a massive counteroffensive. By 1944 they were progressing across a huge front in Belarus and Ukraine. Initial efforts were made to launch forays into Romania as early as March 1944 through the Black Sea. However, it was not until mid-August 1944 that the major Soviet offensive into Romania began. By then German resources were stretched thin

as fronts had been established by the Allies all over Europe and within days of the Russian incursion the regime began to collapse. King Michael, who had been little more than a puppet ruler under Antonescu, led a coup on the 23rd of August and a few days later the Soviets began to occupy most of the major cities and towns. Sporadic fighting would continue for several weeks, but by late August 1944 the country was effectively under Soviet occupation. As this occurred the Communists of the country, who had always been a limited movement in a largely agricultural society,

suddenly found themselves in a position of unprecedented power and leverage. A transitional period followed in which the monarchy was retained and elections were held as the country was rebuilt after the war, but in the final days of 1947 the monarchy was brought to an end and the Socialist Republic of Romania was brought into being as a Communist regime within the Soviet bloc. Ceausescu’s personal life changed in the immediate aftermath of the war in ways which would impact on Romanian life too. Back in 1939, during his brief hiatus from being in prison around the start of

the Second World War, Nicolae had begun a relationship with a woman by the name of Elena Petrescu, a woman from a peasant family who like him had moved to Bucharest at a young age and found work as an assistant in a laboratory there. She joined the Communist Party in the late 1930s and it was through mutual connections that they met. Their relationship survived through infrequent meetings during the times Nicolae was free over the next half a decade. On the 23rd of December 1946 they finally married. They would have three children, two sons and two daughters,

Valentin born in 1948, Zoia in 1949 and Nicu in 1951. Elena would become heavily involved in Romanian politics after her husband’s ascent, as did many members of Nicolae’s extended family, including his many siblings. Over time the Ceausescu’s regime would come to be viewed as something of a family kleptocracy. Ceausescu’s political career immediately began to take off in the post-war years. Although the Communist seizure of power was transitional during the Soviet occupation of the country from the autumn of 1944 onwards, when the Socialist Republic was formed after the abolition of the monarchy in late 1947, the

first head of state was Constantin Ion Parhon, but real power rested in the hands of Ceausescu’s mentor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, as General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party. Gheorghiu-Dej would hold that position until 1965 and Ceausescu would ascend under his rule accordingly. This was generally a period in which dividing lines were drawn within Romanian Communism, with two different factions emerging, the Muscovites and Anti-Muscovites as they were known in Romania. This refers to those who favoured a strong alliance with the Soviet Union and those who believed Romania should seek a more independent path in the way Josip

Broz Tito was moving, as head of Communist Yugoslavia. The Muscovite-Anti-Muscovite split would be a feature of Romanian Communism for decades to come and would be a major issue during the first years of Ceausescu’s time as leader of the country. Ceausescu enjoyed a rapid ascent through the ranks of the Communist movement in Romania in the 1940s and early 1950s. Early on after the war he served as the head of the Union of Communist Youth, a branch of the Romanian movement designed to inculcate many Romanians into Communism in the aftermath of the war. This, along with his

close relationship with Gheorghiu-Dej, acted as a springboard to his selection as a member of the Great National Assembly, the new legislative body created in 1948 following the establishment of full Communist rule and which had over 350 members. While this indicated a growing perception of him as an up and coming member of the party, the National Assembly had limited practical power. Instead real authority rested with the Central Committee and individual government ministers. Consequently, it was a major step forward when he was appointed as a secretary to the Minister of Agriculture, followed by the post of Deputy

Minister within the same department in 1949. Then in the early 1950s he was transferred over to the Defence Ministry and finally in 1952 was made a member of the Central Committee. All of this was a result of the purging of other party members as the Anti-Muscovite faction led by Gheorghiu-Dej won out over the Muscovite faction. Two years later Ceausescu was made a full member of the Politburo, making him at 36 years of age part of the governing body of a dozen or so individuals who controlled the Romanian state. The former apprentice shoemaker had come a

long way from his humble beginnings. One major policy which Ceausescu played a substantial role in during these years in his positions within the ministries of Agriculture and Defence was the collectivization of agriculture. Collectivization was a policy which had been pioneered in the Soviet Union back in the 1920s. The idea was to create large collective farms that would be run by the state. In theory this would create more efficient farms which would require less labour, and workers would then be freed up to move into cities and towns and begin working in the factories which the Romanian

government was looking to establish. Nearly everywhere it was put into practice collectivization led to resistance, as small farmers were reluctant to essentially have their smallholdings subsumed into large state-run collective farms. In his role as secretary and deputy minister within the Agriculture department in the late 1940s, Ceausescu was involved in planning the collectivization strategy, which was eventually launched in 1949. Then in the 1950s in his role within the security services and as a member of the Politburo he oversaw its often violent implementation, particularly so in the late 1950s at which time the government had to resort

to mass arrests of tens of thousands of peasants to get them to accept the radical changes that were being insisted on. Collectivization was successfully achieved by the mid-1960s and increased industrialisation followed but at a price in terms of the violence it engendered in Romanian society. Ceausescu’s career and life were nearly cut short on the 4th of November 1957. That day he and several other senior Romanian Communist officials were travelling on board a small Russian Ilyushin plane to Moscow as a delegation for their country to the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution of 1917 when

the plane crashed near the runway at Vnukovo Airport in the Russian capital. Ceausescu and several others escaped with some serious injuries, while one member of the Romanian delegation was killed. It is important in assessing Ceausescu’s later approach to the Soviet Union that few people at the time believed this crash to be entirely accidental. Gheorghiu-Dej had already begun to take a more independent line from Moscow by 1957 and he was supposed to have been on the plane, only pulling out at the last minute. To many it appeared as though the Soviets had planned the accident to

get rid of the Romanian leader. Although he survived this incident, within a few years Gheorghiu-Dej was suffering from lung cancer. He died on the 19th of March 1965. By that time Ceausescu had risen to a high position within the regime, but he was far from being considered the clear successor to his former mentor. Instead a power struggle ensued in which figures like Gheorghe Apostol, the Vice-President of the Council of Ministers, vied for control of the government. In the end Ceausescu emerged as the new General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, almost as much because he

was a compromise candidate amongst the rival factions as owing to his own support base. Ceausescu had risen to become the head of the Communist state in Romania by the late spring of 1965 as General Secretary of the party. Still, it remained to be seen exactly what kind of leader he would be. Not all Communist leaders between the 1940s and 1980s across Eastern and Central Europe were autocratic dictators where one man ran the state. There were many cases where considerable collegiality between a group of politicians prevailed. Ceuasescu’s own predecessor, Gheorghiu-Dej, was a powerful figure, though not

all-powerful, while the post-Stalin era in Russia had seen the development of considerable collegiality and sharing of power within the Politburo in Moscow. Ceausescu took things in a different direction by consolidating his control over the Romanian Communist Party after 1965. In December 1967, for instance, he assumed the position of President of the State Council in addition to that of General Secretary. As we will see, his moves to split away from the Soviet Union in 1968 further consolidated his grip over Romania as a Stalinist-style dictatorship. Finally, in 1974 Ceausescu took office as the first incumbent of the

newly created office of President of Romania. There were few if any challengers to his power from within the party for the next decade and a half. A central feature of Ceausescu’s monopolisation of power in Romania in the late 1960s was the manner in which he split from the Soviet Union. In the post-war era most Eastern European countries had become satellite states of the Soviet Union and while individuals like Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, the two men who headed the government of East Germany from 1950 down to 1989, were nominally independent, they never exercised untrammelled power

free of Moscow’s oversight. The debate on Romanian Communism’s relationship to Moscow, as we have seen, was a constant one in Bucharest through the 1940s and 1950s. Ceausescu took the most decisive decision in the long history of Soviet-Romanian relations in 1968 when he firmly split from Moscow. The event which brought matters to a head was the Prague Spring of 1968 when the Czechoslovak government under Alexander Dubcek attempted to liberalize the country’s Communist regime only for the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies to invade and force the administration to backtrack. For Ceausescu in Bucharest these events in

Czechoslovakia were an opportunity to push forward his desire to remove Romania from the Soviet sphere of influence. On the 21st of August 1968 Ceausecu delivered a speech before a crowd of an estimated 100,000 people in Palace Square in Bucharest in which he denounced the actions of the Soviet government and the Warsaw Pact allies. The speech was a calculated measure to formally split from Moscow and continued the de-satellization of Romania from the Soviet Union which went back to the mid-1950s. Further developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s saw Romania disentangle itself fully from Russia economically.

By 1974 Bucharest was refusing to allow the Soviets to build a railway through Romania running from Odessa in Ukraine to Varna in Bulgaria, while Ceausescu’s regime also condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the final days of 1979. In the midst of the crises of 1968, as the Prague Spring was being brutally crushed by the Soviet government of Leonid Brezhnev, Ceausescu calculated that he could use the opportunity to complete the split from Moscow and withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. He did not do this without serious calculation though. If Romania was to split from Russia, it

needed allies elsewhere. Luckily for the regime in Bucharest, there had been a growing divergence ever since the death of Stalin a decade and a half earlier between the Soviet Union and China. Thus, even as relations with Moscow thawed considerably, Ceaucescu was cozying up to Mao Zedong and the government of the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, it may well have been that Romania’s growing alliance with China was the reason why Brezhnev and the rest of the Politburo in Moscow did not decide on military action against Romania as well in 1968. All of this was clearly attested

to on the 3rd of June 1971 when Ceausescu was on a state visit to Beijing. In a carefully stage-managed conference between Ceausescu, Mao Zedong and one of Mao’s most senior allies, Zhou Enlai, the conversation constantly alluded to the dictatorial approach of Moscow to international Communism. In the midst of this Ceausescu declared in reference to the Prague Spring, quote, “We were in Czechoslovakia a few days before the invasion, and we met with the party leadership, with the working class, there was no danger to socialism.” This was all part of the de-satellization process of the 1960s and

1970s. An additional component was the manner in which Ceausescu followed China’s lead in beginning to normalize diplomatic relations with the United States from 1971 onwards. A somewhat unexpected element of this from the early 1970s onwards is that Ceausescu began to emerge as a fairly prominent figure within the Non-Aligned Movement. This had emerged in 1956 through the initiative of numerous countries like India and Tito’s Yugoslavia, the goal being to create a third grouping within the Cold War world of neutral countries that were not aligned with either the US and NATO or the Soviet Union and the

Warsaw Pact. Although Ceausescu did not make Romania a major member country of the NLA, he did follow many of its precepts from 1965 onwards and drove forward numerous initiatives which it had spearheaded. For instance, he was anxious to normalise relations between the various countries of the Balkans and to try to put aside the ethnic tensions which had characterised the region since the Ottoman Empire began to decline in the late eighteenth century. He also steered an independent path on Israel, maintaining relations even after the Six-Day War in 1967 led to the occupation of the West Bank,

the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Bucharest became notorious too for maintaining cordial relations with right-wing strongmen, notably the regime of Joseph Mobutu in Zaire and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Finally, when most Communist countries refused to participate in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in retaliation for the US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Romania did not join them and sent a full delegation to LA. While there might have been a more open approach towards foreign relations and Ceausescu seemed to signal his support for liberalisation in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the reality at home in

Romania was one of growing censorship, illiberal politics and limited press freedom under his regime. Under the auspices of the General Directorate for Press and Print the national media was heavily managed to present the official line on almost every issue of public and social policy. Even after 1977, when the Directorate was shut down, censorship simply became slightly less visible, while remaining just as intense. For instance, plays that were performed at the theatres in Bucharest and other cities had to be subjected to a process called vizionare before they were performed publicly. This involved government censors witnessing performances

of the plays to make sure that there was no criticism of the government, either directly or using allegory, a common method expressing criticism in a cloaked manner within twentieth-century authoritarian states. Elsewhere Ceausescu made a concerted effort to undermine and criticise Radio Free Europe, a radio station established under US patronage back in 1949. Based out of Munich and designed to deliver uncensored western media to Communist Europe over the airwaves, it reached 55% of the Romanian population who wanted to receive it through transistor radios. Romania became a major object of criticism for Radio Free Europe in the

1970s and 1980s, something which led to Ceausescu’s regime launching a general campaign against the radio media in response. There were very few areas of Romanian public life that did not experience censorship of one kind or another. This was not simply a concerted policy of stifling opposition voices. It was backed up with coercive instruments of the state. During the Ceausescu era this was spearheaded by the Securitate. The Departmental Securitatii Statului or Department State Security had been founded as a state secret police force in Romania in 1948 not long after the Communists claimed complete control over the

country. By the early 1950s the size of the Securitate had increased to over 20,000 staff, with many being individuals embedded in large factories and informers within local communities. Thus, the institution was already very sizeable and powerful long before Ceausescu came to power, but under the new dictator from 1965 it became one of the most Orwellian secret police forces in modern history. Ceausescu used it for all manner of activities, with different branches being established as paramilitary units, censorship units, conventional military and policing units, and to oversee everything from the issuance of passports to collecting intelligence on

any foreign visitors to Romania. At its height in the 1980s, there were half a million people working for the Securitate in one form of another, whether as staff or local informants. Hence, if you walked down the streets of Bucharest in 1985, on average one out of every 40 people that you passed was working for Securitate in some fashion. While Securitate was not responsible for committing Stalin-era crimes of the kind which the NKVD did in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, it still functioned in many ways which would classify Romania as a police state.

It also engaged in frequent efforts to undermine Radio Free Europe and was probably behind the bombing of their offices in Munich in 1981. The Securitate was hardly an organisation that was above reproach in its purity when it came to official conduct within Romania itself. Many senior members of the Securitate were highly corrupt. Indeed, the entire Ceausescu regime was. It embedded institutional corruption and bribery into Romanian public life in a way which many observers claim is still impacting on Romania’s political culture three and a half decades later. Romania recently scored less than 2.5 out of 10

on an international evaluation of how effective its anti-corruption measures are. Ceausescu and his extended family were front and centre to the process of purloining money from the state in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps the most unusual incident in all of this was the revelation back in 2014 with the declassification of official records from the 1980s that six-figure sums of money had been regularly paid to Securitate officers in Romania using the Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA as a means of laundering the money internationally before sending it back to Romania into the hands of Ceausescu’s many henchmen within

the secret police. Towering above all this press censorship, secret police repression and corruption was the other obligatory element of life for any twentieth-century strongman or dictator: a cult of personality. By the time Ceausescu came to power in the second half of the 1960s there were no shortage of totalitarian leadership cults across the Communist world for him to take inspiration from, be it Stalin, Mao in China, Kim Il Sung in North Korea or his friend Mobutu in Zaire. Ceausescu copied all of these. Statues of him soon adorned public places in Bucharest and other cities, his face

greeted Romanians on the stamps they used to post letters, while in schools children learned about the life story of their leader and his accomplishments, with Nicolae often being referred to in quasi-celestial ways as a ‘saint’, ‘genius’ or ‘demiurge’, a gnostic term for the creator of the world. Unusually this cult of leadership also began to extend to Ceausescu’s wife Elena as the regime went on, something rarely found to the same extent in other twentieth-century leadership cults. Another element of Ceausescu’s growing cult of personality was hugely influenced by the Cultural Revolution which Mao Zedong, leader of Communist

China, had unleashed in the late 1960s in an effort to shore up his flagging power there after the disastrous Great Leap Forward policies of the late 1950s and early 1960s had led to the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese people through a man-made famine. Notwithstanding the waves of violence unleashed across China by the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, Ceausescu sought to emulate Mao to some extent, delivering his July Theses, as they are known, in a speech before the Communist Party in July 1971. These were expanded and published the following November. Through them Ceausescu

sought to introduce a more rigorous form of Romanian Communism and a purer ideology in the vein of the rhetoric Mao had been using for several years in China. Romanian intellectuals were to be challenged and cultural output was to be re-orientated towards greater emphasis on Communist values. One of the major consequences of this was a heightened form of Dacianism in the 1970s and 1980s, a movement which tried to emphasise the strength and power of the Kingdom of Dacia that had existed in Romania prior to the conquest of it by the Romans. This Dacianism became a feature

of Romanian literature and culture during Ceausescu’s era, though thankfully his efforts to mirror the Chinese Cultural Revolution in terms of the violence it evoked did not occur, as scholars estimated between one and two million people were killed in China as a result of the programme. As with the Cultural Revolution, Romania had long sought to emulate other Communist countries when it came to its economic policies. In terms of its economic approach, Nicolae had been involved in a central component of this, the collectivisation of agriculture in the 1950s. These pre-Ceausescu years were successful ones for Communist Romania

in their economic goals. The country experienced industrial growth that surpassed most other countries across the entire continent of Europe. Industrial production increased by over 600% between 1950 and 1964. It all slowed though during Ceausescu’s time as ruler of the country, reflecting the general stagnation of the Communist economies of Eastern and Central Europe in the 1970s and 1980s after immense growth in the 1950s and 1960s. In Romania, after a honeymoon period in the mid-1970s when the country’s position as a major refiner of oil benefited the economy in the context of the 1973 Oil Crisis, the rate

of GDP growth fell to around 3% by 1980, down from average growth rates of 10% in the 1960s. Despite efforts to boost the economy through the development of an electronics industry, a move which was proving successful in countries like South Korea and Taiwan in the Far East, Romania’s economic progress continued to be poor in the second half of Ceausescu’s time as dictator of the country. At the beginning of the 1980s, in response to the country’s flagging economic performance, Ceausescu decided on a new economic policy which did untold damage to the country and the lives of

ordinary Romanians. After heavy borrowing to invest in industrial expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, Romania’s national debt had grown to over $10 billion by the early 1980s, a figure which might seem small by today’s standards, but which was very considerable half a century ago. In 1981, after Romania had been forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a loan, Ceausescu announced that Romania would aim to clear this debt over the next decade or so. The resulting austerity programme unleashed huge depravation across Romanian society. Large price increases were imposed on basic goods and utilities like

common foodstuffs, electricity and petrol. This in turn created inflation even as wages stagnated. In tandem with this, the agricultural sector was already in trouble owing to a lack of labour due to decades of enforced industrialisation, creating wide-ranging food shortages by the mid-1980s. Several years into the austerity programme, people had become used to subsisting on basic foodstuffs like bread, sugar and milk, while meat had become something of a rare luxury for many families across the country. Rationing eventually followed, with calorie intakes limited at around 2800 calories per day, a reasonably high level, especially by twenty-first century

standards, but hardly an abundance in a time when people were more active, with many working in factories and on farms. Moreover, many people had to walk large distances every day to and from work as petrol rationing was also introduced in the mid-1980s. The radical austerity programme was effective in the end, with Romania’s national debt being quickly paid off through the 1980s, but it created enormous resentment towards the regime. Ceausescu’s efforts to pay off the national debt were indicative of one of the key ways in which his regime became so oppressive. In theory it was developed

as a benign policy approach. What country, after all, wouldn’t want to have its national debt eliminated? But in seeking to achieve this he inflicted much suffering on the Romanian people. The same was true of Ceausescu’s approach towards the demography of Romania. Early on in his time as leader of the country, he became determined to increase the population of Romania. In fairness to him, Romania was and still is a relatively thinly populated European country. When he came to power in the mid-1960s, for example, the country’s population was just around 19 million. Additionally, the rate of natural

increase was declining year on year. Compare this with the fact that the population of Britain, the island which is almost exactly the same size as Romania, was 54 million in 1965. Many other countries like Germany and Poland had comparably higher populations than Romania too. Accordingly, Ceausescu determined that the best way to advance Romania as a major European country was to grow the population. To that end in 1967 Decree 770 had been passed. This was a harsh and almost total ban on both abortion and contraception, though exceptions were made in cases of a woman falling pregnant

through rape or where the pregnancy threatened the mother’s life. The Decree had the intended effect, with a very substantial increase in the birth rate in Romania. The population rose towards 23 million people by the late 1980s. Yet longitudinal studies have pointed towards the immense social damage caused by it, whether in terms of the proliferation of illegal and dangerous abortion services in the country or the profusion of orphanages to address the growing problem of Romanian babies simply being abandoned by their parents in the 1970s and 1980s. Photos of malnourished and abandoned children in crowded orphanages in

the 1980s were one of the gravest indictments of Ceausescu’s regime. Another point of growing contention in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s was the regime’s approach towards the substantial Hungarian minority within the country. The Treaty of Trianon back in 1920 had seen Romania acquire lands in the west from Hungary. While these could legitimately have been claimed to constitute part of a Greater Romania, there was still a substantial Hungarian or ethnic Magyar minority in the region and this ensured that Hungarians have made up 6% or 7% of Romania’s population for the last century. Furthermore, these are

concentrated in the west of the country in Transylvania, where they form a very substantial minority. Ceausescu’s regime decided on a repressive approach to the Hungarian community. Hungarian was largely prohibited as a minority language and Hungarian cultural institutions were repressed. More aggressively, there were efforts to break up some of the areas in the west with large Hungarian communities and to disperse these to other regions, while also moving ethnic Romanians into Transylvania. Finally, in some limited instances there was a persecutory campaign launched against Hungarian intellectuals and academics living within Romania. Today, a half a century later, Romanian-Hungarian

relations have recovered to some extent, but major damage was done to them in the course of Ceausescu’s time as ruler of Romania. A key element of Ceausescu’s time as dictator in the 1980s was the construction of the Palace of the Parliament. This was an absolutely enormous building project which the regime undertook to construct a new parliament and set of government buildings. It would sit astride the Dealul Spirii hill in the centre of Bucharest and the building would be a testament to Ceausescu’s regime. There is no doubting it was impressive. The Palace still dominates the skyline

of this section of the Romanian capital. It is one of the heaviest buildings in the world, standing over 270 foot high and with a floor area of nearly four million square foot across twelve floors. The weight of it is over four million metric tonnes and it is the second largest administrative building in the world, trumped only by the Pentagon in the United States. Construction work began in 1984 and it involved hundreds of architects and thousands of workers in the years that followed. Ultimately the Palace of the Parliament would only be half completed in Ceausescu’s time.

It would not be finished until 1997 and cost an estimated five billion US dollars if price and currency are adjusted. It was an ambitious project and is still a testament to that ambition in the city of Bucharest today, but it was pure folly in 1980s Romania, a country that needed investment into basic services and economic growth, not ostentatious new offices for the members of the government and regime. Ceausescu’s country had become something of an insulated state in the course of his time as ruler of it, however even as work was being carried out on the

Palace of the Parliament in the 1980s the world was changing around Romania in ways which would soon impact on the country and bring Nicolae’s time as dictator there to an end. The decade had begun, ironically enough, with an intensification of the Cold War as Ronald Reagan became President of the United States and adopted a hardline approach to the Soviet Union, most notably through a reigniting of the Space Race. However, this intense period of the Cold War, one fraught with more danger than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, was just as swiftly followed by

a cooling off of tensions as Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union in 1985. Gorbachev was determined to reform the Soviet Union after two decades of economic stagnation through policies like Glasnost and Perestroika whereby western ideas would be discussed in a more open framework. Unwittingly he brought about the destruction of the USSR as the late 1980s saw Communism as an ideology being questioned all over Eastern and Central Europe. By 1988 and 1989 there were opposition movements emerging to the established Communist regimes in many countries and in the autumn and winter months of 1989 a

series of events in Central Europe would lead to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. These forces of reform and change soon entered Romania. By the late 1980s the economic situation was not good. Ceausescu’s efforts to pay off Romania’s national debt, combined with the closed nature of its economy, had damaged domestic growth. This happened at the same time that enormous sums of money were either being corruptly stolen by the regime or else squandered on the Palace of the Parliament. Hence, when political change swept across Europe in the late 1980s, Romania was primed for unrest. A revolt

of sorts had already occurred in November 1987 when upwards of 20,000 workers went on strike and violence erupted in the city of Brasov. It was suppressed eventually, but pointed towards the discontent which was spreading across the country. Through 1988 and 1989 there was an unprecedented level of criticism of Ceausescu, both amongst opposition groups and within the Communist movement itself. Therefore, while the Romanian Revolution is often depicted as having broken out as a sudden surge of violence in December 1989, there was a growing tide of anti-Ceausescu sentiment and agitation across the country in the years leading

up to it. The Romanian Revolution began on the 16th of December 1989 when mass protests began in the city of Timisaora against Ceausescu and his government. By the end of the day control of the city was slipping into the hands of the insurrectionists, leading Ceausescu to send in the military the following day. The heavy-handed crackdown on the 17th of December at first seemed to have curbed the unrest, so much so that Ceausescu flew out of Romania on the 18th to undertake a planned visit to Iran. When he returned two days later the situation had declined.

Approximately 100,000 workers in Timisaora were now effectively in charge of the city. Moreover, while news of the revolt there had been suppressed by the official media, international news outlets like Radio Free Europe were managing to disseminate news around Romania about what was unfolding in Timisaora. Consequently, when Nicolae gave a speech at a mass event in Bucharest on the 21st in which he tried to re-establish confidence in the regime, it descended into chaos as the crowds interrupted his speech and drowned him out with shouts of protest. In the hours that followed chaos swept across Bucharest and

Romania, with huge numbers of people spilling out around the city and shouting slogans like “Down with the dictator” and “Death to Ceausescu” in Romanian. As violence erupted between the security forces and the swelling number of revolutionaries in the city streets on the night of the 21st of December, Ceausescu tried to impose a brutal crackdown by declaring martial law and ordering tanks into the streets of Bucharest. The Minister of Defence, Vasile Milea, was declared to have committed suicide on the morning of the 22nd after he had been removed from his position for committing treason. What this

revealed was that Ceausescu was losing control of the military, the death knell of any dictator. He should have fled from Bucharest on the night of the 21st. Instead he remained in the city and tried to cling to power. By the following morning he realised that this had been a mistake and ordered helicopters to prepare to airlift him, his wife Elena and others out of the capital. They managed to get to Târgoviște, but by then word was coming through that the helicopters would be shot down if they tried to carry on further. A final effort to

escape by car followed, but they were detained by Romanian police around 3.30 that afternoon. The revolutionaries did not waste any time in placing their former dictator on trial. A military tribunal of senior security officers who just days earlier had been taking orders from Ceausescu placed the fallen dictator on trial on the 25th of December at Târgoviște. He was charged with a wide range of crimes, including genocide. Ceausescu refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court and he was quickly found guilty that same day. He and his wife Elena were immediately executed by firing squad just

nine days after the Romanian Revolution had begun as a localised rebellion in Timisaora. Nicolae and his wife’s remains were hastily and somewhat secretively buried as soon as the execution had been carried out. Doubts that their alleged grave was actually where they were buried led to their remains being exhumed in 2010, at which time it was confirmed that they were authentic through DNA tests. They were subsequently reburied at Bucharest’s Ghencea cemetery. The former dictator’s burial was hastily arranged as those who were driving the Romanian Revolution by that time had other matters on their mind, specifically the

formation of a new government and the transition to democracy for the first time in over half a century. Ion Iliescu was voted in as the first post-Communist President of Romania, initially on an interim basis and then for a full term which would ultimately last down to November 1996. He oversaw the move to democracy, but the first stages of it were enormously tumultuous, not because of Romania’s internal politics, but because the fall of communist regimes all over Eastern and Central Europe was leading to a reorientation of politics all over the continent. This is especially the case

for Romania where its two most significant neighbours, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, began fragmenting in the early 1990s into several countries. In the quarter of a century since Ceausescu’s time Romania has had mixed fortunes. It has successfully moved into the camp of democratic states within Europe, but it is far from perfect either. In particular the culture of official corruption which became so rife under Ceausescu has remained a feature of Romanian politics and society and even in recent years the European Union has scolded Bucharest for continuous backsliding on reforming this. The country’s politics and officialdom remain

problematic in a number of other ways, but then this is common for most post-communist states in Europe where illiberalism and political problems are common. On the other hand, Romania successfully applied for membership of the European Union following Ceausescu’s fall and joined along with Bulgaria in 2007. This has led to considerable economic improvement in the country which has averaged annual GDP growth of 5% for much of the twenty-first century. Conversely, EU membership also opened up the gates to mass emigration from Romania to other parts of Europe and where the country’s population had reached a historic peak

of 23 million right at the end of Ceausescu’s reign, it has fallen to below 19 million today, a considerable fall in a country which is one of the least densely populated countries in the entire continent, especially so for one with such a mild climate and large amounts of productive land. Nicolae Ceausescu was unusual amongst the dictatorial rulers of Eastern and Central Europe towards the end of the Cold War in that he was not just removed from power, but was placed on trial and quickly found guilty and executed, along with his wife. We might ask why

this happened: the leaders of other countries like East Germany, Poland and Hungary during the Cold War generally escaped with very little or no punishment at all in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the regimes they had led or worked for collapsed. Some even transitioned into successful political careers in the emerging democracies of the 1990s. This was not the case with Ceausescu. Yet when we evaluate all the evidence there is a clear reason why this was so. There was enormous resentment towards the Ceausescu regime in Romania by the late 1980s. While the economy had been

doing well prior to his ascent to power and had continued to do ok into the 1970s, the 1980s were a period of suffering for the Romanian people, as the economy stagnated and an unhealthy obsession with wiping out the Romanian national debt created immense economic problems for ordinary citizens. All of this occurred against the backdrop of censorship, rampant official corruption and the exorbitant expense of building the Palace of the Parliament, a vanity project which contrasted so sharply with the suffering of the ordinary people of Bucharest who watched it being built from 1984 onwards. In the end

Ceausescu’s dictatorship was something of a textbook example of how a dictator should go about alienating the entire population of the country he rules to such an extent that they rise up and overthrow him. He had nobody but himself to blame. What do you think of Nicolae Ceausescu? Was he the worst of the Cold War dictators to still be ruling a European country towards the end of the 1980s or was his punishment in 1989 perhaps excessive when we consider what happened elsewhere as Communism came to an end? Please let us know in the comment section, and

in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.