In all the countries of the communist satellite states of the Warsaw Pact, Romania was believed to be the most friendly nation to Western powers. Ironically, Nicolae Ceausescu ran Romania lile a maximum security prison. His nation was also the most repressive one behind the Iron Curtain. All this happened while he presented his nation as a model society calling it Communism With a Human Face. Did America and its Western Allies turn a blind eye to Romania’s human rights abuses or were they simply unaware of them? Did the Soviet Union pretend to tolerate Ceausescu’s eccentricities or did they encourage them? While these questions may never be answered, it is obvious that the life and career of Nicolae Ceausescu resulted in one of the great human tragedies of the modern era.
    At the time of World War II, the former Ottoman voivodate of Romania was faced with some difficult decisions. The Germanophile king and prime minister of the Balkan state had been given Transylvania, with its largely ethnic Hungarian population,  as a gift from the Nazis in exchange for support for the Axis cause. Later in the war, it became obvious that the Axis could not win and the fascist Romanians switched sides and lent military support to the USSR. The Western Allied powers thought of Romania as small fry and cared little which side they belonged to. Caught in a double bind between domination from the two totalitarian powers of fascism and communism, the modern state of Romania was born in blood, fire, and ambiguity.
    When the war ended in victory for the Allies, including Soviet Russia, the Romanian Communist Party, led by First Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, took command of the country, becoming one of Stalin’s puppet Eastern Bloc nations. Gheorghiu-Dej ruled Romania with force the way Stalin ruled the Soviet Union; he soon died and his loyal messenger boy Nicolae Ceausescu was tapped by the RCP’s Central Committee to step up and take his place.
    Why Ceasusescu was chosen to be Conducator of Romania remains a mystery. Most scholars believe it was because he was young, naive, and easy to manipulate. By any standard of judgment, he was an odd choice. Born into a large family of farmers with a violent, abusive alcoholic of a father, little Nicolae was an unremarkable student. He spoke with a severe stutter, had no sense of humor, and most people avoided him because of his short temper and penchant for street brawling. When he got older, he moved to Bucharest and joind the Communist Party. He went in and out of jail for participating in communist activities; it was there that he met Gheorghiu-Dej and started memorizing Karl Marx’s doctrines by rote. People say he put blind faith in Marxism, never really thinking critically about what it meant, how it applied to the real world, or what its shortcomings might be.
    Nicolae Ceausescu spent most of World War II in prison. After his release, he met his soon to be wife, Elena, said by many to be the Lady Macbeth behind Ceausescu’s throne. Elena was also an unremarkable person. Said to be pretty in her youth but not beautiful, she dropped out of high school at the age of 14 due to failing most of her classes. By the time of her death she was known for being greedy, cruel, manipulative, petty, vindictive, and mean. After Ceausescu’s ascent to power, her greatest achievement was obtaining a Ph.D in chemistry by plagiarizing her research and cheating on her exams while exasperated professors allowed this to happen for fear of being sentenced to jail for tangling with the First Lady of communist Romania. And all this without ever having finished high school or earning any other higher education degrees.
    The Romanian people hailed Ceausescu after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death. Ceausescu renounced his mentor as a brutal imitator of Stalin and proceeded to demote, fire, imprison or publicly humiliate all of his cabinet members. Ceausescu himself filled his own cabinet with sycophants, yes-men, family members, and ass-kissers interested in nothing but a chance to get ahead. Anybody who disagreed with the Conducator or gave him negative information was soon sent packing. Ceausescu won accolades from Western leaders and media by publicly expressing his support for Dubcek’s Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and denouncing the Soviet invasion of that country. Ceausescu’s warm welcome in the West soon led to an influx of finances from bankers and businessmen hoping to cash-in on the supposedly freest nation behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps they thought communism would soon fall and they would gain mountains of gold for having been there before the collapse.
    Ceausescu did not spend this money wisely. He invested heavily in steel mills and heavy industry, over-producing goods that could not be sold due to excessive production. Iron and steel products from Romania were made by low-skilled workers on cheap machinery and soon became unwanted commodities because of their poor quality. Food also became scarce. Once considered the most fertile part of Eastern Europe with its abundance of high quality fruits and vegetables, Romania became a starving nation as most produce was exported to pay off the Balkan nation’s foreign debts. Food was minutely rationed and Romanian citizens waited hours in long lines just to get meager supplies that barely kept them alive. Meanwhile, the Ceausescu’s spent millions of dollars to satisfy their lust for luxury items. For them it was a daily smorgasbord of diamonds and champagne while their people suffered from malnutrition and this in an economic system that promised equality and abundance for all.
    While the outside world celebrated the apparent freedoms of the RCP, Ceausescu was busy building up the Securitate, Romania’s secret police equivalent to the KGB. Many members of this organization were thugs recruited from the fascist Iron Guard political party. Most Romanian citizens were put in touch with a Securitate officer who they could report any suspicious activity or language to. Neighbors were encouraged to spy on neighbors and turning in another person was a good strategy for staying on the Securitate’s good side. Romanians learned to fear one another and the long term result was a nation of people who trusted no one and spoke very little. Citizens were also forced to participate in parades and festivals to satisfy Ceausescu’s love of  pageantry. Passions in these events ran high since people were scared that showing too little enthusiasm would result in a beating by Securitate forces. Harassment of scientists and intellectuals was also a routine part of the Securitate’s job. Scholars and writers who did not find a way to make their works celebrate the greatness of their leader could never get published. Any scientific papers written by researchers had to mention Elena Ceausescu as the head of the project. Failure to do so would lead to harassment, intimidation, and public humiliation. The Securitate spied on people excessively. The Romanian telephone system was the most heavily bugged in the world. There were so many wire taps in the country that Romanians often refused to answer the phone out of fear of being secretly listened to. Ironically, Ceausescu was paranoid about spies and was constantly having his premises, offices, and phones searched for evidence of espionage.
    Perhaps the most long lasting part of Ceausescu’s legacy is the architecture. Anyone who has been to Romania will know that this statement is not a compliment. In 1971, Ceausescu made state visits to China and North Korea. Overcome with a sense of awe at the orderliness of row after row of grey concrete apartment blocks, Ceausescu returned to Romania with a vision. He quickly made plans to bulldoze vast sections of Bucharest containing historic buildings and charming cottages to erect vast tracts of soulless, monolithic housing blocks that, without color or character, resembled prisons. He went on to do the same with all the farming villages throughout the country. Soon Romania was a strange contrast between majestic Carpathian mountains, peasants working the fields, and cinder-block monstrosities housing the hapless citizens. The other side of this architectural project was the construction of Ceausescu’s lavish private summer palaces all over the country, most of which he never even bothered to visit. To top it all off, he oversaw the construction of the world’s second largest building, the Casa Poporului or Peoples’ House, in central Bucharest. Its awkwardly extravagant interior is overpowered by its plain exterior, resembling a pile of oblong kleenex boxes. This multi-million dollar architectural project went on as the Romanian people struggled financially and psychologically to survive.
    By 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu had almost completely lost touch with reality. Paranoid, delusional, erratic, violent, and senile, his psychological state probably resulted from years of being pandered to by yes-men who never let any negative information reach his ears. He sincerely believed he had achieved the impossible dream of creating a communist utopia on Earth. In December 1989, anti-government riots started in Timisoara and rapidly spread across the country and into the capital Bucharest. Nicolae and Elena were whisked away in a helicopter by Securitate conspirators and imprisoned in an army barracks, forced to sleep on military cots, using a filthy public toilet, and eating the same beans and bread the military was being fed. On Christmas day of 1989, the Ceausescu’s were taken to a schoolhouse and convicted of crimes against the state in a rather simple and ridiculous kangaroo court. After losing their case, they were abruptly taken out to a wall and shot by a firing squad. The execution was filmed and broadcast on Romanian national television. The coup was carried out by a secretive group of Securitate officers; they had been planning since 1971 to overthrow Ceausescu because they thought he was straying too far from pure communism. 18 years later, Nicolae Ceausescu was done in by the men closest to him.
    After the revolution of 1989, RCP Central Committee members expressed regret for having placed Ceausescu in power. One has to image that in another time and place, Nicolae and Elena would have been nobodies, persona non grata, hacks, and non-entities shuffling through life with no other purpose than mere survival.
Behr, Edward. Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall Of the          Ceausescus. Villard Books, 1991.