Nicolae Ceauşescu

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Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceauşescu
General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party
In office
March 22, 1965 – December 22, 1989
Preceded by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej
7th President of Romania
In office
December 9, 1967 – December 22, 1989
Preceded by Chivu Stoica
Succeeded by Ion Iliescu
Born January 26, 1918(1918-01-26)
Scorniceşti, Olt, Romania
Died December 25, 1989 (aged 71)
Târgovişte, Dâmboviţa, Romania
Nationality Romanian
Political party Communist Party of Romania
Spouse Elena Ceauşescu
Children Valentin Ceauşescu, Zoia Ceauşescu, Nicu Ceauşescu
Religion None (Atheist)

Nicolae Ceauşescu (pronounced [nikoˈlaje tʃauˈʃesku]) (January 26, 1918 – December 25, 1989) was the President of Romania from 1965 until 1989. His iron fisted rule was marked by an increasingly eratic personality cult and a foreign policy which deviated from that of the other Warsaw Pact states during the Cold War. Ultimately his downfall came with Romanian Revolution of 1989 where he was deposed, tried and executed.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Early life and career
* 2 Leadership of Romania
o 2.1 The 1966 decree
o 2.2 July Theses
o 2.3 Pacepa defection
o 2.4 Foreign debt
o 2.5 Tensions
* 3 Revolution and collapse
o 3.1 Revolution
o 3.2 Overthrow
o 3.3 Allegations of foreign intervention
o 3.4 Execution
* 4 Personality cult and authoritarianism
o 4.1 Statesmanship
o 4.2 Weaknesses
* 5 Other
* 6 "Ceauşism"
* 7 Relationship with the United States
* 8 Selected published works
* 9 Notes
* 10 References
* 11 External links

[edit] Early life and career

Born in the village of Scorniceşti, Olt County, 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.[1]

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).[1]

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.[1]

[edit] 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 change the name of the party to The Romanian Communist Party, and declare the country 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 three Communist-ruled countries (the others being the People's Republic of China, and Yugoslavia) to take part in the American-organized 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 reshape the country's capital completely. 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 Palace of the Parliament, is the world's second largest administrative 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.

[edit] The 1966 decree

In 1966, the Ceauşescu regime reversed the 1957 Communist Party decree permitting all abortion, and introduced other policies to increase the very low 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. The inability to procreate due to medical reasons did not make a difference. 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 by the Romanian State; few women ever sought this status, the average Romanian family during the communist era having two to three children (see Demographics of Romania).[2] Furthermore, a considerable number of women either died or were maimed during clandestine abortions.[3]

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 (See Cighid) 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.[4]

[edit] 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, 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.

[edit] Pacepa defection
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Ceauşescu with U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Bucharest, 1978

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 Eastern Bloc in the history of the Cold War. 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), claims to expose details of Ceauşescu's regime, such as collaboration with Arab terrorists, massive espionage on American industry and elaborate efforts to rally Western political support. After Pacepa's defection, the country became more isolated and economic growth faltered. 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 reorganizations in a bid to get rid of old collaborators of Pacepa, but to no avail.

Former president Ion Iliescu deemed Pacepa "a confused man," who gathered illegal properties in Romania by using his influential position, according to an official declaration made when Pacepa asked for the return of his properties and rank. The Romanian Supreme Court disagreed (Decision No. 41/1999,) overturning Pacepa's death sentences, restoring his military rank, and ordering the restoration of his properties.

[edit] Foreign debt
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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 became the rule. Between 1980 and 1989, there was a steady decrease in the living standard, especially the availability and quality of food and general goods in stores. 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, but heavy exports continued until the revolution, which took place in December.

[edit] Tensions
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By 1989, Ceauşescu was showing signs of complete denial of reality. While the country was going through extremely difficult times with long bread queues in front of empty food shops, he was often shown on state TV entering stores filled with food supplies, visiting large food and arts festivals where people would serve him mouthwatering food 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. Whether or not Ceauşescu ever read any of them will probably remain unknown. According to rumours of the time,[who?] 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.

[edit] Revolution and collapse

[edit] Revolution
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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 the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) saw Ceauşescu, now aged 71, re-elected for another 5 years as leader of the PCR. Demonstrations in the city of Timişoara were triggered by the government-sponsored attempt to evict László Tőkés, an ethnic Hungarian pastor, 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 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 defence 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 Central Committee building, but this desperate move was rejected by the rioters, who forced open the doors of the building, by now left unprotected. The Ceauşescus fled by helicopter as the result of a maybe poorly advised decision (since they would maybe have had safer refuge using existing underground tunnels) [see Dumitru Burlan].

[edit] Overthrow
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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 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 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, precisely who was 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.

On December 22 the army found itself without a leader: Ceauşescu (the official commander-in-chief of the army) had been sent by his (possibly conspiring) adviser Stănculescu to the countryside, and the defence minister Vasile Milea was dead. Initially some claimed that Milea was assassinated on behalf of Ceauşescu. Another possibility is that he might have refused to join the coup and been killed on that account. The still official story is that he committed suicide. Confused, the army leaders in Bucharest decided to avoid conflict 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 reports of several similar events.

[edit] Allegations of foreign intervention

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."

[edit] Execution
Grave in Ghencea cemetery

Ceauşescu and his wife Elena fled the capital with Emil Bobu and Manea Mănescu and headed, by helicopter, for Ceauşescu's Snagov residence, from where they fled again, this time for Târgovişte. Near Târgovişte, they abandoned the helicopter, having been ordered to land by the army, which by that time had restricted flying in Romania's air space. The Ceauşescus were held by the police, while the policemen listened to the radio. The police eventually turned over the couple to the army. On December 25, the two were sentenced to death by a military court on charges ranging from illegal gathering of wealth to genocide, and were executed in Târgovişte. The film crew recording the events missed the execution since the firing began too quickly.[5]

The Ceauşescus were executed by a firing squad consisting of elite paratroop regiment soldiers Ionel Boeru, Dorin Carlan and Octavian Gheorghiu who shot them with AK-47 assault rifles. After the shooting had stopped, the bodies were covered with canvas. The hasty trial and the images of the dead Ceausescus were videotaped and the footage promptly released in numerous western countries. Footage of their trial and pictures of their corpses (but not of the execution itself) were shown the same day on television for the Romanian public.[6][7]

The Ceauşescu couple's graves are located in Ghencea cemetery in Bucharest. Nicolae and Elena are buried 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 allege that the graves do not, in reality, contain their bodies. As of April 2007, their son Valentin has lost a lawsuit asking for investigation of the matter. The elder son Nicu Ceauşescu, died in 1996, and is buried close by in the same cemetery. According to Jurnalul Naţional,[8] 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 government.

[edit] Personality cult and authoritarianism
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Ceauşescu created a pervasive personality cult, giving himself the titles of "Conducător" ("Leader") and "Geniul din Carpaţi" ("The Genius of the Carpathians"), with help from Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) poets such as Adrian Păunescu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and even had 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.

[edit] Statesmanship

Under Ceauşescu, Romania was Europe's fourth biggest exporter of weapons. He made 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'. First-hand sources reveal that his paid subservient literates wrote a quatren that was falsely attributed to him --although every Romanian knew of his inability to write even a short speech, not to mention any form of poetry--which his propaganda then included in every literature manuals they could. This quatren 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.

Neither Ceauşescu nor his wife had any specific knowledge whatsoever of the contents of the Bible, and thus could not possibly 'paraphrase' Isaiah, or any other prophet from the Bible, as they never read the Bible, as further detailed next. From first hand sources, it is also known that, in the same style, her so-called science thesis on the chemistry of hydrocarbons was arranged to be written by a certain Moldavian chemistry professor who soon afterwards was promoted and also received substantial amounts of money for his 'personal services' to Elena; on one such copy of the 'thesis' in question attributed to Elena Ceauşescu, printed on very high quality paper, there is a brief, five words, handwritten acknowledgment of thanks to the actual author, and also to the intermediary who arranged this 'transaction'. There are however serious doubts that it was indeed her handwriting, although her name 'Elena' is indeed 'signed on this thesis' copy, because she was reported to have been illiterate by several chemistry specialists that were forced at that time to work for her in the ministry for chemistry in Bucharest. Ceauşescu also tried to play a role of influence and guidance to African countries. He was a close ally and personal friend of dictator President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaïre. 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" Zaïre in 1990.[9] Also, France granted Ceauşescu the Legion of Honour and in 1978 he became an Honorary British Knight[10] (GCB, removed) in the UK, whereas the illiterate Elena Ceauşescu was arranged to be 'elected' to membersip of a Science Academy in the USA; all of these, and more, were arranged by the Ceauşescus as a propaganda ploy through the consular cultural attaches of Romanian embassies in the countries involved.

Ceauşescu's Romania was the only Warsaw Pact country that did not sever diplomatic relations with Chile after Augusto Pinochet's coup.[11]

[edit] Weaknesses

Ceauşescu's 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 worker's demonstrations.

Throughout 1989, Ceauşescu became ever 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 closest comrades, GDR leader Eric Honecker resigned, and 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.

[edit] Other

Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu had two sons, nuclear physicist Valentin Ceauşescu who was adopted as a part of RWP Campaign to adopt war orphans in the late 1940's, Nicu Ceauşescu (1951 - 1996) also a physicist, and a daughter Zoia Ceauşescu (1950 - 2006), who was a mathematician. After the death of his parents, Nicolae 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 younger 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).[citation needed]

Despite his relatively low salary for an average world leader at the time, Ceauşescu was known for his luxurious lifestyle spending vast amounts of money borrowed from the west on his own lifestyle while his people were left to reap the effects of his disastrous policies. He owned over 15 luxury palaces around Romania including a riverside villa at Snagov, a lakeside resort at Cernavodă, and a mountainside lodge at Braşov. The Primaverii Palace at Bucharest (the palace was later looted and transformed into a NATO headquarters after the revolution) had whole rooms filled with trappings of wealth.[14] One such room was devoted to Elena's vast collections of fur coats and another room was filled with Ceauşescu's bespoke suits, tuxedos and hunting uniforms (many of which were never even worn). The palaces were no less equipped either as they were filled with priceless silk, porcelain, marble (some valuing over $1,000 per square metre), silverware, chandeliers, and carpets. The collections of wealth found outside the palaces equalled what was inside, such as a vast collection of cars including a Buick Electra given to him as a gift by U.S. President Richard Nixon, a Mercedes Benz Limousine from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the last Shah of Iran, several Ferraris, Lamborghinis, BMWs, a Rolls Royce from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, and a custom-built Trabant from East German leader Eric Honecker. The palaces also contained large guards comparable to the ones at the Palace of Versailles, Ceauşescu's collection of 'Rocket' speedboats and large yachts such as the Snagov I and Snagov II.

Ceauşescu's security detail was relatively small, 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. According to Burlan, 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 likewise stripped of his honorary GCB (Knight, Grand Cross of the Bath) by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom on the day before his execution. Queen Elizabeth also returned the Romanian Order Ceauşescu had bestowed upon her.[15]

On his 70th birthday in 1988 Ceauşescu was decorated with the Karl-Marx-Orden by then Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) chief Erich Honecker; through this he was honoured for his rejection of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms.

In a similar way to some EU countries, praising the crimes of totalitarian regimes and denigrating their victims is forbidden by law in Romania; this includes the Ceauşescu regime. Dinel Staicu received a 25,000 lei (approximately 9,000 United States dollars) fine for praising Ceauşescu and displaying his pictures on his private television channel (3TV Oltenia).[16]

Ceauşescu's last days in power were dramatized in a stage musical, The Fall of Ceauşescu, written and composed by Ron Conner. It premiered at the Los Angeles Theater Center in September 1995 and was attended by Ion Iliescu, the then president of Romania who had been visiting Los Angeles at the time.

[edit] "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".[17]

The main trait observed was a form of Romanian nationalism,[18] 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:[19] for example, the Gheorghiu-Dej regime had overseen the withdrawal of the Red Army in 1958.

As well, 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,[20] 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.[21]

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. In 1971, the Party, which had already been completely purged of internal opposition (with the possible exception of Gheorghe Gaston Marin),[19] 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.[22] 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).[23]

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 rhetorics. 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,[24] 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 (except Albania, which left the Warsaw Pact in 1968) 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.

[edit] Relationship with the United States

Some authors allege that Ceauşescu was supported either overtly or covertly by the United States throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1975 Romania gained Most favoured nation trading status; that was six years after President Richard Nixon visited the country.[25] According to Noam Chomsky, it was partially due to Ceauşescu's divergent views on policy (such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and other ideological breaks with the Soviet Union) that Ceauşescu garnered warmer relations with some western countries.[26]. This support, it is argued, was a major obstacle to the overthrow of Ceauşescu.

Because Romania was a Communist state, this support is frequently used by some figures to argue against conventional understandings of the Cold War. For example, in response to Robert Kaplan's allegation that Chomsky makes no distinctions between US-backed dictators and Russian-backed dictators, using the example of Ceauşescu, Chomsky argues that America backed Ceauşescu.[27]