Nicolae Ceauşescu

For other people named "Ceauşescu", see Ceauşescu (disambiguation).

Nicolae Ceauşescu (IPA /ni.ko.ˈla.je ʧaʊ.ˈʃes.ku/, in English, normally (and erroneously) /ʧaʊ.ˈʧes.kju/) (January 26, 1918 - December 25,1989) was the leader of Communist Romania from 1965 until shortly before his execution. On December 25, 1989, he was executed together with his wife after being charged in a show trial^[1][2][3] and convicted for crimes against the state, genocide, and "undermining the national economy."^[4]

Early life and career

Born in the village of Scorniceşti, Olt County (in the informal region of Oltenia), Ceauşescu moved to Bucharest at the age of 11 to become a shoemaker's apprentice. (See Ceauşescu family for descriptions of his parents and siblings.)

He joined the then-illegal Communist Party of Romania in early 1932 and was first arrested, in 1933, for agitating during a strike. He was arrested again, in 1934, first for collecting signatures on a petition protesting the trial of railway workers and twice more for other similar activities. These arrests earned him the description "dangerous communist agitator" and "active distributor of communist and anti-fascist propaganda" on his police record. He then went underground, but was captured and imprisoned in 1936 for two years at Doftana Prison for anti-fascist activities.

While out of jail in 1939, he met Elena Petrescu (they married in 1946)—she would play an increasing role in his political life over the decades. He was arrested and imprisoned again in 1940. In 1943, he was transferred to Târgu Jiu internment camp where he shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, becoming his protégé. After World War II, when Romania was beginning to fall under Soviet influence, he served as secretary of the Union of Communist Youth (1944–1945).

After the Communists seized power in Romania in 1947, he headed the ministry of agriculture, then served as deputy minister of the armed forces under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's Stalinist reign. In 1952, Gheorghiu-Dej brought him onto the Central Committee months after the party's "Muscovite faction" led by Ana Pauker had been purged. In 1954, he became a full member of the Politburo and eventually rose to occupy the second-highest position in the party hierarchy.

Leadership of Romania

Three days after the death of Gheorghiu-Dej in March 1965, Ceauşescu became first secretary of the Romanian Workers' Party. One of his first acts was to rename the party, the Romanian Communist Party, and declare that the country was now the Socialist Republic of Romania rather than a People's Republic. In 1967, he consolidated his power by becoming president of the State Council.

Initially, Ceauşescu was a popular figure in Romania, due to his independent foreign policy, challenging the supremacy of the Soviet Union in Romania. In the 1960s, he ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact (though Romania formally remained a member); he refused to take part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, and actively and openly condemned that action. Although the Soviet Union largely tolerated Ceauşescu's recalcitrance, his seeming independence from Moscow earned Romania maverick status within the Eastern Bloc.

In 1974, Ceauşescu added "President of Romania" to his titles, further consolidating his power. He followed an independent policy in foreign relations—for example, in 1984, Romania was one of only four Communist-ruled countries (the others being the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and Yugoslavia) to take part in the American-organised 1984 Summer Olympics. Also, the country was the first of the Eastern Bloc to have official relations with the European Community: an agreement including Romania in the Community's Generalised System of Preferences was signed in 1974 and an Agreement on Industrial Products was signed in 1980. However, Ceauşescu refused to implement any liberal reforms. The evolution of his regime followed the Stalinist path already traced by Gheorghiu-Dej. Their opposition to Soviet control was mainly determined by the unwillingness to proceed to de-Stalinization. The secret police (Securitate) maintained firm control over speech and the media, and tolerated no internal opposition.

Beginning in 1972, Ceauşescu instituted a program of systematisation. Promoted as a way to build a "multilaterally developed socialist society", the program of demolition, resettlement, and construction began in the countryside, but culminated with an attempt to completely reshape the country's capital. Over one fifth of central Bucharest, including churches and historic buildings, was demolished in the 1980s, in order to rebuild the city in his own style. The People's House ("Casa Poporului") in Bucharest, now the Parliament House, is the world's second largest building, after The Pentagon. Ceauşescu also planned to bulldoze many villages in order to move the peasants into blocks of flats in the cities, as part of his "urbanisation" and "industrialisation" programs. An NGO project called "Sister Villages" that created bonds between European and Romanian communities may have played a role in thwarting these plans.

The 1966 decree

In 1966, the regime decreed a ban on contraception and abortion, and introduced other policies to increase birth rate and fertility rate - including a special tax amounting to between ten and twenty percent on the incomes of men and women who remained childless after the age of twenty-five, whether married or single. Abortion was permitted only in cases where the woman in question was over forty-two, or already the mother of four (later five) children. Mothers of at least five children would be entitled to significant benefits, while mothers of at least ten children were declared heroine mothers receiving a gold medal, a free car, free transportation on trains, etc.; few women ever sought this status, the average Romanian family having two to three children (see Demographics of Romania).^[5] Furthermore, a considerable number of women either died or were maimed during clandestine abortions.^[6]

The government also targeted rising divorce rates and made divorce much more difficult - it was decreed that a marriage could be dissolved only in exceptional cases. By the late 1960s, the population began to swell, accompanied by rising poverty and increased homelessness (street children) in the urban areas. In turn, a new problem was created by uncontrollable child abandonment, which swelled the orphanage population and facilitated a rampant AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s - created by the regime's refusal to acknowledge the existence of the disease, and its unwillingness to allow for any HIV test to be carried out.^{[citation needed]}

The July Theses

Main article: July Theses

Ceauşescu visited the People's Republic of China, North Korea and North Vietnam in 1971 and was inspired by the hardline model he found there. He took great interest in the idea of total national transformation as embodied in the programs of the Korean Workers' Party and China's Cultural Revolution. Shortly after returning home, he began to emulate North Korea's system, influenced by the Juche philosophy of North Korean President Kim Il Sung. Korean books on Juche were translated into Romanian and widely distributed in the country. On July 6, 1971, he delivered a speech before the Executive Committee of the PCR. This quasi-Maoist speech, which came to be known as the July Theses, contained seventeen proposals. Among these were: continuous growth in the "leading role" of the Party; improvement of Party education and of mass political action; youth participation on large construction projects as part of their "patriotic work"; an intensification of political-ideological education in schools and universities, as well as in children's, youth and student organisations; and an expansion of political propaganda, orienting radio and television shows to this end, as well as publishing houses, theatres and cinemas, opera, ballet, artists' unions, etc., promoting a "militant, revolutionary" character in artistic productions. The liberalisation of 1965 was condemned, and an Index of banned books and authors was re-established.

The Theses heralded the beginning of a "mini cultural revolution" in Romania, launching a Neo-Stalinist offensive against cultural autonomy, reaffirming an ideological basis for literature that, in theory, the Party had hardly abandoned. Although presented in terms of "Socialist Humanism", the Theses in fact marked a return to the strict guidelines of Socialist Realism, and attacks on non-compliant intellectuals. Strict ideological conformity in the humanities and social sciences was demanded. Competence and aesthetics were to be replaced by ideology; professionals were to be replaced by agitators; and culture was once again to become an instrument for political-ideological propaganda.

The Pacepa defection

In 1978, Ion Mihai Pacepa, a senior member of the Romanian political police (Securitate), defected to the United States. A 2-star general, he was the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc in the history of the Cold War.^[7] His defection was a powerful blow against the regime, forcing Ceauşescu to overhaul the architecture of the Securitate. Pacepa's 1986 book, Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (ISBN 0895265702), reveals details of Ceauşescu's regime, such as his collaboration with Arab terrorists, his massive espionage on American industry and his elaborate efforts to rally Western political support. After Pacepa's defection, the country became more isolated and the economic growth stopped. Ceauşescu's intelligence agency became subject to heavy infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies and he started to lose control of the country. He tried several reorganisations in a bid to get rid of old collaborators of Pacepa, but to no avail. According to the official declaration made by president Ion Iliescu when Pacepa asked for the return of his properties and position, Pacepa was "a confused man" who gathered illegal properties in Romania by using his influential position. The Romanian Supreme Court disagreed (Decision No. 41/1999) cancelling his death sentences, restoring his military rank, and ordering the restoration of his properties.

Foreign debt

Despite his increasingly totalitarian rule, Ceauşescu's political independence from the Soviet Union and his protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 drew the interest of Western powers, who briefly believed he was an anti-Soviet maverick, and hoped to create a schism in the Warsaw Pact by funding him. Ceauşescu did not realise that the funding was not always very favourable. Ceauşescu was able to borrow heavily (more than $13 billion) from the West to finance economic development programs, but these loans ultimately devastated the country's financial situation. In an attempt to correct this situation, Ceauşescu decided to eradicate Romania's foreign debts. He organised a referendum and managed to change the constitution, adding a clause that barred Romania from taking foreign debts in the future. The referendum yielded a nearly unanimous "yes" vote.

In the 1980s, Ceauşescu ordered the export of much of the country's agricultural and industrial production in order to repay its debts. The resulting domestic shortages made the everyday life of Romanian citizens a fight for survival as food rationing was introduced and heating, gas and electricity black-outs were becoming the rule. There was a steady decrease in the living standard (and especially the availability of food and general goods in stores) between 1980 and 1989. The official explanation was that the country was paying its debts, and people accepted the suffering, believing it to be for a short time only and for the ultimate good.

The debt was fully paid in summer 1989, shortly before Ceauşescu was overthrown.

Tensions grow

By 1989, Ceauşescu was showing signs of complete denial of reality. While the country was going through extremely difficult times with long bread lines in front of empty food stores, he was often shown on state TV entering stores filled with food supplies and praising the "high living standard" achieved under his rule. In late 1989, daily TV broadcasts showed lists of CAPs (kolkhozes) with alleged record harvests, in blatant contradiction with the shortages experienced by the average Romanian at the time.

Some people, believing that Ceauşescu was not aware of what was going on in the country, attempted to hand him petitions and complaint letters during his many visits around the country. However, each time he got a letter, he would immediately pass it on to members of his security detail. Whether or not Ceauşescu ever read any of them will probably remain unknown. According to rumours of the time,^{[attribution needed]} people attempting to hand letters directly to Ceauşescu risked adverse consequences, courtesy of the secret police Securitate. People were strongly discouraged from addressing him and there was a general sense that things had reached an overall low.

Revolution and collapse

Revolution

Main article: Romanian Revolution of 1989

Ceauşescu's regime collapsed after a series of violent events in Timişoara and Bucharest in December 1989.

In November 1989 the XIVth Congress of PCR (Romanian Communist Party) saw Ceauşescu, now aged 71, reelected for another 5 years as leader of PCR.

Demonstrations in the city of Timişoara were triggered by the government-sponsored attempt to evict László Tőkés, an ethnic Hungarian church minister, accused by the government of inciting ethnic hatred. Members of his ethnic Hungarian congregation surrounded his apartment in a show of support. Romanian students spontaneously joined the demonstration, which soon lost nearly all connection to its initial cause and became a more general anti-government demonstration. Regular military forces, police and Securitate fired on demonstrators on December 17, 1989.

On December 18, 1989, Ceauşescu departed for a visit to Iran, leaving the duty of crushing the Timişoara revolt to his subordinates and his wife. Upon his return on the evening of December 20, the situation became even more tense, and he gave a televised speech from the TV studio inside Central Committee Building (CC Building), in which he spoke about the events at Timişoara in terms of an "interference of foreign forces in Romania's internal affairs" and an "external aggression on Romania's sovereignty". The country, which had no information of the Timişoara events from the national media, heard about the Timişoara revolt from western radio stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and by word of mouth. A mass meeting was staged for the next day, December 21, which, according to the official media, was presented as a "spontaneous movement of support for Ceauşescu", emulating the 1968 meeting in which Ceauşescu had spoken against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact forces.

On December 21, the mass meeting, held in what is now Revolution Square, degenerated into chaos. The image of Ceauşescu's uncomprehending expression as the crowd began to boo him remains one of the defining moments of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. The stunned couple (the dictator had been joined by his wife), failing to control the crowds, finally took cover inside the CC Building, where they remained until the next day. The rest of the day saw a revolt of the Bucharest population, which had assembled in University Square and confronted the police and the army on barricades. These initial events are regarded to this day as the genuine revolution. However, the unarmed rioters were no match for the military apparatus concentrated in Bucharest, which cleared the streets by midnight and arrested hundreds of people in the process.

Although the broadcast of the "support meeting" and the subsequent events on national television had been interrupted the previous day, Ceauşescu's senile reaction to the events had already become part of the country's collective memory. By the morning of December 22, the rebellion had already spread to all major cities. The suspicious death of Vasile Milea, the defense minister, was announced by the media. Immediately thereafter, Ceauşescu presided over the CPEX meeting and assumed the leadership of the army. He made an attempt to address the crowd gathered in front of the CC, but this desperate move was rejected by the rioters, who forced open the doors of the building, by now left unprotected by the army, police and Securitate. The Ceauşescu couple fled by helicopter from the top of the CC building in a poorly advised decision (since they would have had safer refuge using existing underground tunnels) [see Dumitru Burlan].

Overthrow

The events of December 1989 remain controversial. Many, including Filip Teodorescu, a high-ranking Securitate officer at the time, allege that a group of conspiring generals in the Securitate took advantage of this opportunity to launch a coup in Bucharest. Some have made more specific claims about the nature of the conspiracy. Colonel Burlan asserts that the coup had been prepared since 1982, and was originally planned to take place during the New Year celebrations, but it was spontaneously adapted to the new developments. It remains a matter of controversy whether there had been any advance conspiracy to stage a coup, and, if so, who was precisely involved. The two main alternative possibilities are that these events were simply a combination of genuine revolutionary drive and inherent confusion, or that various figures in the military simply took opportunistic advantage of public protests, in an effort to capture power for themselves or for others whom they supported.

According to Burlan, the plot leaders were generals Stănculescu and Neagoe, Ceauşescu's closest security advisors; Burlan claims that they convinced him to hold the first mass rally in the Square by the Central Committee building, and that it was prepared in advance with remotely controlled automatic guns. During Ceauşescu's speech, the remotely controlled guns were set to fire randomly over the crowd and agitators started to cry anti-Ceauşescu slogans through loudspeakers. Scared by these developments, the people first tried to run away. However, given the loudspeaker messages stating that they were being shot at by Ceauşescu's forces and that a "revolution" was underway, the people were compelled to join the "revolution". The rally turned into a protest demonstration. The machine-gun fire and the messages over the loudspeakers appear to be universally acknowledged^{[citation needed]}; the other aspects of this remain controversial.

On December 22 the army found itself without a leader: Ceauşescu (the official commander-in-chief of the army) had vanished, being sent by his (possibly conspiring) advisor Stănculescu to the countryside, and defense minister Vasile Milea was dead. (Initially the "revolutionary" leaders claimed that Milea was assassinated on behalf of Ceauşescu. This is possible, but other possibilities abound, notably that he might have refused to join them and been killed on that account. The (still) official account that he committed suicide has almost no credibility.) Confused, the army leadership in Bucharest decided to avoid conflicts and ordered their troops to fraternise with the demonstrators.

Fierce fighting occurred at that time at Bucharest Otopeni International Airport between troops sent one against another under claims that they were going to meet terrorists. There are various reports of other similar events. Filip Teodorescu claims that a number of instigators—possibly a small number, and probably Russians—started various incidents (including the violence in Timişoara); he also alleges that the level of violence was greatly exacerbated by elements within the military who propagated a myth of "securist-terrorists". According to Colonel Dumitru Burlan's book, the generals who were part of the conspiracy (led by general Victor Stănculescu) did their best to create such terrorist stories in order to induce fear and to draw the army on the conspirators' side. Generally, there is a consensus that there were some people instigating terror, and that others effectively caused incidents out of confusion. The relative magnitude of the two factors is not agreed upon, and no individual has ever been charged with or convicted of participating in deliberate acts of terror.

There are any number of popular theories about the motivation of the coup. Some point out that the first law passed by the incoming leadership abolished (without any referendum or legal basis) the constitution article that forbade external debts. At that time, the debts had been fully paid, and there are various allegations about the intended beneficiaries of these new desired debts: corrupt politicians, or international banks. There is no question that some individuals who were active in the December events greatly profited in terms of money and power (especially in the form of ownership in privatised industries), fame, advancement in rank, or merely the settling of personal grievances; it is also possible that any number of foreign interests may have been involved, possibly including the KGB and/or other Soviet interests.

The end of Ceauşescu

Ceauşescu and his wife Elena fled the capital by helicopter together with Emil Bobu and Manea Mănescu. They headed for Ceauşescu's Snagov residence, from where they fled again, this time for Târgovişte. The presidential couple kept moving through the countryside more or less aimlessly. Near Târgovişte, they abandoned the helicopter, having been ordered to land by the army, which by that time had already declared Romania to be restricted air space. The flight included grotesque episodes: a car chase to evade citizens attempting an arrest, leaving their aides behind, a short stay in a school. The Ceauşescus were finally held in a police car for several hours, while the policemen listened to the radio, presumably in an attempt to get a clue as to which political faction was about to win. Police eventually turned over the presidential couple to the army. On Christmas Day, the two were condemned to death by a military kangaroo court on charges ranging from illegal gathering of wealth to genocide, and were executed in Târgovişte. Before they were shot dead, Ceauşescu sang part of "The Internationale" and proclaimed that history would judge him well. His wife was screaming at everyone to go to hell.^[8]

The Ceauşescus were executed by Captain Ionel Boeru and two fellow officers who shot them with AK-47 assault rifles.

The "trial" and execution were videotaped. The footage was promptly released in France and other western countries. Several days later, footage of their trial and pictures of their corpses (but not of the execution itself) was released on television for the Romanian public. Since then, it has been regularly re-shown on the national television station each Christmas.

The Ceauşescu couple's graves are in Ghencea cemetery in Bucharest. Nicolae and Elena are not buried together, but are on opposite sides of a path. The graves themselves are unassuming, but they tend to be covered in flowers and symbols of their regime. Some Romanians believe the graves do not, in reality, contain the assassinated couple's bodies. Nicu Ceauşescu, who died in 1996, is buried close by in the same cemetery but has a more substantial grave. According to Jurnalul Naţional,^[9] requests were made by their daughter and supporters of their political views to move them to mausoleums or churches built for the purpose of housing their remains, but such requests were denied by the Romanian state.

Personality and leadership

Personality cult and authoritarianism

Ceauşescu created a pervasive personality cult, giving himself the titles of "Conducător" ("Leader") and "Geniul din Carpaţi" ("Genius of the Carpathians"), with help from Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) poets such as Adrian Păunescu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and even having a king-like sceptre made for himself. Such excesses prompted the painter Salvador Dalí to send a congratulatory telegram to the "Conducător." The Communist Party daily Scînteia published the message, unaware that Dalí had written it with tongue firmly in cheek. To avoid new treasons after Pacepa's defection, Ceauşescu also invested his wife Elena and other members of his family with important positions in the government.

Ceauşescu's statesmanship

Under Ceauşescu, Romania was Europe's fourth biggest exporter of weapons. Nevertheless, several of Ceauşescu's actions suggest that one of his ambitions was to win a Nobel Peace Prize. In pursuing this goal, he made considerable efforts to act as a mediator between the PLO and Israel. He organised a successful referendum for reducing the size of the Romanian Army by 5%. He held large rallies for peace and wrote a poem that was part of each literature manual. His poem paraphrased Isaiah 2:4 and was (in a word for word translation):

Let us make from cannons tractors

From atom lights and sources

From nuclear missiles

Plows to labour fields.

Ceauşescu also tried to play the role of father to poor African countries. He was a close ally and personal friend of Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. Relations were in fact not just state-to-state, but party-to-party between the MPR and the Romanian Communist Party. Many believe that Ceauşescu's death played a role in influencing Mobutu to "democratize" Zaire in 1990.^[10] Also, France granted Ceauşescu the Legion of Honour and in 1978 he became a Honorary British Knight^[11] (GCB, removed) in the UK.

Leadership weaknesses

Ceauşescu's Stalinist control of every aspect of religious, educational, commercial, social, and civic life^[12] further aggravated the situation. In 1987, an attempted strike at Braşov failed: the army occupied the factories and crushed the workers' demonstrations.

Throughout 1989, Ceauşescu became even more isolated in the Communist world: in August 1989, he proposed a summit to discuss the problems of Eastern European Communism and "defend socialism" in these countries, but his proposal was turned down by the Warsaw Pact states and the People's Republic of China. Even after the Berlin Wall fell and Ceauşescu's southern comrade, Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov, was replaced in November 1989, Ceauşescu ignored the threat to his position as the last old-style Communist leader in Eastern Europe.

Other

The Ceauşescus had one adopted son, Valentin Ceauşescu (he was adopted in order to give a personal example of how people should take care of orphans, a big problem in Romania), a daughter Zoia Ceauşescu (1950 - 2006), who was a mathematician, and a younger son, Nicu Ceauşescu (1951 - 1996). For the death of his parents, Ceauşescu ordered the construction of an Orthodox church, the walls of which are decorated with portraits of his parents.^[13]

Ceauşescu's official annual salary was 18,000 lei (equivalent to US$3,000 at the official exchange rate). Of this, some 5,000 lei was deposited in a bank every month for the use of his children. Nevertheless, he used to receive presents (e.g., a golden plated door handle) from countries and organisations that he was visiting, the misappropriation of which was one of the accusations against him at his trial. While he tried to keep account of his finances, his biological son Nicu was much less restrained and rumours abounded that he paid a gambling debt incurred in Las Vegas with a herd of horses belonging to the Communist Party (the herd of Jegalia, formerly administered by the Romanian Royal Cavalry).

Ceauşescu's security detail was relatively small compared to that of the current Romanian government, numbering only 40 people for his residences and for his whole family. His security chief was Col. Dumitru Burlan who claims that his troops had only two guns (insufficient for any serious defense). Col. Burlan claims that Ceauşescu was overconfident that the Romanian people loved him, and believed that he did not need protection. This explains much of the ease with which Ceauşescu was deposed and captured.

Ceauşescu is the only recipient of the Danish Order of the Elephant ever to have it revoked. This happened on December 23, 1989, when HM Queen Margrethe II ordered the insignia to be returned to Denmark, and for Ceauşescu's name to be deleted from the official records.

Ceauşescu was stripped of his honorary GCB by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, on the day before his execution. Elizabeth also returned the Romanian Order Ceauşescu had bestowed upon her.^[14]

Ever since his death, the Romanian perception of Ceauşescu has improved. Mari Români, a popular television show, conducted a poll among Romanians that revealed Ceauşescu to be perceived as the eleventh greatest Romanian of all time.

However, praise of Nicolae Ceauşescu in the media is forbidden by law. Dinel Staicu received a 250 million lei (approx. 9,000 United States dollars) fine for praising Ceauşescu and displaying his pictures on his private television channel (3TV Oltenia).^[15]

In an episode of American television sitcom Seinfeld (entitled "The Gymnast", original airdate November 3, 1994), Jerry starts dating a Romanian gymnast. Because he and she had very little in common, the only common ground he tried to use to make conversation was bringing up Ceauşescu's history.

A rough sketch of "Ceauşism"

While the term Ceauşism became widely used inside Romania, usually as a pejorative, it never achieved status in academia. This feature can be explained taking in view the largely crude and syncretic character of the dogma.

Ceauşescu attempted the inclusion of his views in mainstream Marxist theory, to which he added his belief in a "multilaterally developed socialist society" as a necessary stage between the Marxist concepts of Socialist and Communist societies (a critical view reveals that the main reason for the interval is the disappearance of the State and Party structures in Communism). A Romanian Encyclopedic Dictionary entry in 1978 underlines the concept as "a new, superior, stage in the socialist development of Romania [...] begun by the 1971-1975 [sic] Five-Year Plan, prolonged over several [succeeding and projected] Five-Year Plans".^[16]

The main trait observed was a form of Romanian nationalism,^[17] one which arguably propelled Ceauşescu to power in 1965, and probably accounted for the Party leadership that was gathered around Ion Gheorghe Maurer choosing him over the more orthodox Gheorghe Apostol. Although he had previously been a careful supporter of the official lines, Ceauşescu came to embody Romanian society's wish for independence after what were broadly considered to have been years of Soviet directives and purges, during and after the SovRom fiasco. He carried this nationalist option inside the Party, manipulating it against the nominated successor Apostol. This nationalist policy was not without more timid precedent:^[18] for example, the Gheorghiu-Dej regime had overseen the withdrawal of the Red Army in 1958, and it had engineered the publishing of several works that were subversive of the Russian and Soviet image, such as the final volumes of the official History of Romania, no longer glossing over the traditional points of tension with Russia and the Soviet Union (even alluding to an unlawful Soviet presence in Bessarabia). In the final years of Gheorghiu-Dej's rule more problems were brought out in the open, with the publication of a collection of Karl Marx texts that dealt with Romanian topics, showing Marx's previously-censored, politically uncomfortable views of Russia.

However, Ceauşescu was prepared to take a more decisive step in questioning Soviet policies. In the early years of his rule, he generally relaxed political pressures inside Romanian society,^[19] which led to the late 1960s and early 1970s being the most liberal decade in Communist Romania. Gaining the public's confidence, Ceauşescu took a clear stand against the 1968 crushing of the Prague Spring by Leonid Brezhnev. After a visit paid by Charles de Gaulle earlier in the same year (during which the French President gave recognition to the incipient maverick), Ceauşescu's public speech in August deeply impressed the population, not only through its themes, but also by the unique fact that it was unscripted. He immediately attracted Western sympathies and backing, which lasted, out of inertia, beyond the liberal phase of his regime; at the same time, the period brought forward the threat of armed Soviet invasion: significantly, many young men inside Romania joined the Patriotic Guards created on the spur of the moment, in order to meet the perceived threat.^[20]

Alexander Dubček's version of Socialism with a human face was never suited to Romanian communist goals. Ceauşescu found himself briefly aligned with Dubček's Czechoslovakia and Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The latter friendship was to last well into the 1980s, with Ceauşescu adapting the Titoist doctrine of "independent socialist development" to suit his own objectives. Romania proclaimed itself a "Socialist" (in place of "People's") Republic to show that it was fulfilling Marxist goals without Moscow's overseeing.

The system exacerbated its nationalist traits, which it progressively blended with Juche and Maoist ideals, a synthesis that may find a parallel in Hoxhaism. In 1971, the Party, which had already been completely purged of internal opposition (with the possible exception of Gheorghe Gaston Marin),^[21] approved the July Theses, expressing Ceauşescu's disdain of Western models as a whole, and the reevaluation of the recent liberalisation as bourgeois. The 1974 11th Congress tightened the grip on Romanian culture, guiding it towards Ceauşescu's nationalist principles:^[22] notably, Romanian historians were demanded to refer to Dacians as having "an unorganised State [sic]", part of a political continuum that culminated in the Socialist Republic.^[23] The regime continued its cultural dialogue with ancient forms, with Ceauşescu connecting his cult of personality to figures such as Mircea cel Bătrân (whom he styled Mircea the Great) and Mihai Viteazul; it also started adding Dacian or Roman versions to the names of cities and towns (Drobeta to Turnu Severin, Napoca to Cluj).^[24]

A new generation of committed supporters on the outside confirmed the regime's character. Ceauşescu probably never gave importance to the fact that his policies constituted a paradigm for theorists of National Bolshevism such as Jean-François Thiriart, but there was a publicised connection between him and Iosif Constantin Drăgan, an Iron Guardist Romanian-Italian émigré millionaire (Drăgan was already committed to a Dacian Protochronism that largely echoed the official cultural policy).

Nicolae Ceauşescu had a major influence on modern-day Romanian populist rhetoric. In his final years, he had begun to rehabilitate the image of pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu. Although Antonescu's was never a fully official myth in Ceauşescu's time, today's xenophobic politicians such as Corneliu Vadim Tudor have coupled the images of the two leaders into their versions of a national Pantheon. The conflict with Hungary over the treatment of the Magyar minority in Romania had several unusual aspects: not only was it a vitriolic argument between two officially Socialist states (as Hungary had not yet officially embarked on the course to a free market economy), it also marked the moment when Hungary, a state behind the Iron Curtain, appealed to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe for sanctions to be taken against Romania. This meant that the later 1980s were marked by a pronounced anti-Hungarian discourse, which owed more to nationalist tradition than Marxism,^[25] and the ultimate isolation of Romania on the World stage.

Nicolae Ceauşescu championed a version of the virtually defunct Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s. While the regime was sought after as mediator of several conflicts between the Arab world and Israel throughout the decade, it moved towards supporting only the Palestine Liberation Organisation and, gradually, showing interest in an alliance with Islamism. As such, Romania was the only Socialist state to openly condemn the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

The strong opposition of his regime to all forms of perestroika and glasnost placed Ceauşescu at odds with Mikhail Gorbachev. In a dramatic twist, Ceauşescu demanded that the Soviet leadership return to its previous stance, even asking for a Soviet crackdown on all Eastern Bloc liberation movements in the second half of 1989.

In November 1989, at the XIVth and last congress of the PCR, Ceauşescu condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and asked for the annulment of its consequences. In effect, this amounted to claiming back Bessarabia (most of which was then a Soviet republic and since 1991 has been an independent state) and northern Bukovina, both of which had been occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 and again at the end of World War II.

Selected published works

• Report during the joint solemn session of the CC of the Romanian Communist Party, the National Council of the Socialist Unity Front and the Grand National Assembly: Marking the 60th anniversary of the creation of a Unitary Romanian National State, 1978
• Major problems of our time: Eliminating underdevelopment, bridging gaps between states, building a new international economic order, 1980
• The solving of the national question in Romania (Socio-political thought of Romania's President), 1980
• Ceauşescu: Builder of Modern Romania and International Statesman , 1983
• The nation and co-habiting nationalities in the contemporary epoch (Philosophical thought of Romania's president), 1983
• Istoria poporului Român în concepţia preşedintelui, 1988

Notes

References

• Mic Dicţionar Enciclopedic ("Small encyclopedic dictionary"), 1978
• Edward Behr, Kiss the Hand you Cannot Bite, ISBN 0679401288
• Dumitru Burlan, Dupa 14 ani - Sosia lui Ceauşescu se destăinuie ("After 14 Years - The Double of Ceauşescu confesses"). Editura Ergorom. July 31, 2003 (in Romanian).
• Juliana Geran Pilon, The Bloody Flag. Post-Communist Nationalism in Eastern Europe. Spotlight on Romania, ISBN 1-56000-062-7; ISBN 1-56000-620-X
• Marian Oprea, "Au trecut 15 ani -- Conspiraţia Securităţii" ("After 15 years -- the conspiracy of Securitate"), in Lumea Magazin Nr 10, 2004: (in Romanian; link leads to table of contents, verifying that the article exists, but the article itself is not online).
• Viorel Patrichi, "Eu am fost sosia lui Nicolae Ceauşescu" ("I was Ceauşescu's double"), Lumea Magazin Nr 12, 2001 (in Romanian)
• Stevens W. Sowards, Twenty-Five Lectures on Modern Balkan History (The Balkans in the Age of Nationalism), 1996, in particular Lecture 24: The failure of Balkan Communism and the causes of the Revolutions of 1989
• Victor Stănculescu, "Nu vă fie milă, au 2 miliarde de lei în cont" ("Do not have mercy, they hold 2 billion lei [33 million dollars] in their account[s]"), in Jurnalul Naţional, Nov 22, 2004
• John Sweeney, The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceauşescu, ISBN 0091746728
• Stelian Tănase, "Societatea civilă românească şi violenţa" ("Romanian Civil Society and Violence"), in Agora, issue 3/IV, July-September 1991
• Filip Teodorescu, et.al., Extracts from the minutes of a Romanian senate hearing, 14 December 1994, featuring the remarks of Filip Teodorescu.

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